EchoDitto

In honor of Earth Day today, we at EchoDitto are joining with individuals around the world who are committing to do something to combat climate change. Most of us already walk, bike, or take public transportation to work; we're adamant recyclers; and we use environmentally-friendly cleaning products from Seventh Generation. But today we're especially proud to contribute to the fight against global warming with the relaunch of 1Sky.org.

1Sky was created in 2007 with one primary objective: to harness the power of the millions of Americans who are concerned about climate change in order to pass federal legislation by 2010 that can reverse global warming. Since its founding, 1Sky has built a platform of specific solutions, partnered with organizations and allies around the country, and activated a network of over 50,000 citizens who are actively lobbying for policy change and garnering support for the 1Sky solutions in meetings with their members of Congress.

I have to admit that the idea of an “unconference” made me a little uncomfortable. No set agenda? No prepared presentations? No experts? What was there to prevent the entire thing from dissolving into chit chat about the best Woot items and JLo’s babies? The answer, I discovered, is a good-sized group of smart, thoughtful people with a variety of experience, who are willing to share new projects, discuss best practices, and admit to not knowing all of the answers.

So what did those smart people say? Here are 5 insights--one per session.

As many of you know, EchoDitto recently returned from New Orleans, LA, the site of this year's company retreat. We spent an amazing four days enjoying the grandeur of the Buckner Mansion, gorging ourselves on gumbo, jambalaya, po' boys and bread pudding, and of course, laying the groundwork for an exceptional year ahead. We come back to our offices in New York, Washington and Boston feeling smarter, stronger and excited to share our learnings with our incredible clients.

During my spare time, I serve on two very small Boards—one is the Board of my co-op, and the other is the Board of a tiny local abortion fund. Unsurprisingly, I am the tech person/online groups admin/email troubleshooter/”why isn’t this file uploading” contact on both boards, so I’m always looking for ways to make our lives easier through technology. For the abortion fund, we’ve used a YahooGroup and for the co-op Board, I tried something new and started a GoogleGroup.

My experience in both groups is inspiring, satisfying, and frustrating in pretty equal measure. But the frustrating part at both meetings maybe isn’t what you’d expect. It’s not lack of snacks, any deficiencies in my fellow members, or the political climate. Nope, it’s the sense that there are probably a hundred groups out there dealing with the same issues at the same time.

I recently assumed the mantle of Chicago Bears event coordinator for my local (well, sorta) pub, The Gael, which meant that, with the season quickly approaching, I needed a system easy to rapidly deploy for getting the word out to Bears fans in New York. After the (amazing, fantastic) NFC Championship game back in January, one of the pub's owners passed around an email signup sheet (wonderful forethought on his part!) and invited anyone interested to give us their email address.

Yesterday, following a week of advocacy training, 200 student activists came together on Capitol Hill in DC to put Congress on the "hot seat" about global warming.

Change it '07, a project of Seventh Generation and Greenpeace, is a week-long training designed to educate and empower dedicated students to become the next generation of leaders in the global movement for environmental change -- definitely not your average summer school. The students were, by no means, average students either - check out the participant profiles.

My friend Mooki's son Toby is three years old. He's a beautiful child, with big brown eyes, and soft curls. We did a photo shoot together a few years ago, and I didn't want to let him out of my arms.

Tomorrow morning, Toby is having surgery at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. About two months ago, he was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a rare type of cancer that mainly affects children. Almost immediately after his diagnosis, Toby's friends and family rallied to his side. An email from Mooki's brother to 25 friends and coworkers inspired a friend to start a blog: http://tobypannone.blogspot.com, which has become the centerpiece of Mooki and her family's communication with loved ones.

For me and my friends, Summer 2007 seems to be the season for weddings. In addition to my own August nupituals, I've got six weddings on the calendar this summer. Yikes! All those weddings mean six showers and six bachelorette parties. Doesn't leave much time for catching up on old episodes of 24.

That being said, the most challenging part of attending so many events is figuring times that work for most, if not all invited guests. I can't even begin to count how many group emails I've read and responded to in the past 2 months with the subject line: "Bachelorette Party Dates." What a pain to keep going back and forth, listening to people's family obligations, travel schedules, and roster of out of town visitors. It's enough to make me want to curl up in front of the DVD player and sit it all out.

Remember when Facebook first hit the scene? I sure do. I had heard about the MySpaces, and had in fact set up a profile, but I was peeved with not only the overall quality of the pages, but also the length of time required to get profile pages to load. This, kids, is what happens when people with no HTML skills try to use spyware-laden tools to be creative.

And then, there was Facebook. And it was good: MySpace, with its heavy-handed marketing focus, was the annoying, belligerent 13-year-old screaming at everything and everyone that walked past, begging for attention. Facebook was the 20-year-old wunderkind waiting patiently to meet the King of Sweden.

The theme for this year’s Personal Democracy Forum was “The Flattening of Politics” but the agenda was anything but flat. I was thrilled to attend and really excited EchoDitto was a sponsor. The whole day was full of excellent speakers and really interesting applications of technology to the political world. By lunchtime, we’d already heard from Larry Lessig, Thomas Friedman, Eric Schmidt, and a host of other key actors in the conversation about the role of technology in flattening the political conversation. (Seth Godin was fantastic speaker. Very engaging and certainly the best person to slot in before lunch!)