Families USA: Talking about technology

      By: Jennifer Powers  |  January 30, 2006

      Mike and I had the pleasure recently of speaking on a panel at the Health Action 2006 Conference, sponsored by Families USA and moderated by Luis Hestres. Instead of talking at the audience (which always make me fall asleep) and handing out a stack of papers (which I am never sure where to file once a conference is over), we decided to do our whole session in question-and-answer format and to do a follow-up blog post afterward with the information we talked about, so attendees could access and refer to the information easily.

      So here is the wrap-up blog post for our workshop entitled "The Cutting Edge: New Technologies for Online Advocacy". Our plan here is to present some of what we discussed as well as provide links to many of the sites and blogs we referenced during the presentation.

      The basic gist of the conversation was around why advocacy groups should get active on the internet and what technology is out there that they can use to their advantage. Our main points, which we mentioned at the conclusion of the panel but which I'll reiterate here, are that this stuff may seem tricky but it's easy once you get the hang of it. In fact, if done right, the technology will be something you don't even think about even as it enables you to have a two-way, authentic conversation online.

      We talked mostly about the nuts and bolts of a few technologies - blogs, syndication (RSS), and podcasting. We could have spent the whole day talking about the tools that are out there and the best ways to use them to build community, but we had to get back to the office to write this blog post.

      Blogs — A regularly updated online journal, that generally allows comments from readers. Blogs are written in a much more informal tone than press releases or issue papers, and usually include links to other blogs or references. Comments can be moderated to be sure they are appropriate and on-topic.
      Blogging software:

      Blogs and sites we mentioned:

      • Purple Ocean - for an example of community building
      • Daily Kos - one of the most highly read liberal political blogs
      • Technorati - to find online discussions about issues that are important to you

      RSS and Syndication - RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a way of sharing and distributing web content. So instead of having to go out and check all of your favorite blogs and websites for new posts, you can have them come right to you. By subscribing to CNN's "Top Stories" RSS feed for example, a user will have all the top stories from CNN delivered to their RSS reader as soon as they are published. In order to be able to subscribe to RSS feeds, you'll need an RSS reader that grabs and displays all of your RSS subscriptions for you. There are also web-based RSS readers like My Yahoo.

      Good examples of RSS at work:

      RSS Readers for Mac:

      RSS Readers for Windows:

      Web-based RSS Readers:

      Podcasting - A podcast is any digital audio file that users can download to their iPod or computer (despite the name, they do not have to be listened to on portable iPods). Podcasts come in many different formats and lengths — from one speaker to many, from 30 seconds to an hour — and can focus on any topic. The attraction of podcasts is that they can be recorded and posted anytime. After subscribing to a feed using an application like Apple's iTunes or the Odeo website, any new podcasts will be downloaded automatically and a listener can listen whenever they have the time.

      Some interesting podcasts:

      To download and listen to podcasts:

      To produce a podcast:

      Best Practices - As a company dedicated to using technology to build online communities, empower individuals and advance progressive causes, EchoDitto has put together quite a list of dos and don'ts. And since we're also dedicated to being part of an open source community, we've put together some of our best practices in the documents listed below. Please take a look at them as a good place to start, and if you've got any questions that are still unanswered, feel free to contact us any time.

       

      Legacy Comments

      Luis Hestres (not verified) — Mon, 01/30/2006 - 14:59

      This is a great summary of the workshop--very comprehensive and useful. We'll post a link to it ASAP on our site. Thanks again for your participation and for the handy blog post. I've already received lots of great feedback about the workshop and your presentations...not to mention the moderator ;)