[Grassroots-l] Grassroots building: learning from other campaigns

[Samuel Klein]

The best parts of that report are

1. the focus on education as a way of building infrastructure.  We
talk *about* education, but we may not spend enough time educating one
another, or educating new people; at least at some levels.   it is
wonderful to see how much time and love goes into bringing specific
new people into the fold as developers or support members; we spend
less time teaching people how to be great mentors and code reviewers.

2. the recognition of the short-term cost, and the long-term surprise
for everyone when it works, of this sort of layered plan.  In the case
of this campaign's ground teams, this is perhaps the third election
cycle in a row in which something like this has been tried, so that
the organizers and veterans of the first efforts are able to set
top-level metrics and priorities.

What metrics should we be focused on to determine whether we are
achieving success
  * with G1G1 {diversity, scope, visibility} this year?
  * with followups with existing contributors, donors, and creators?
  * with interface, design, and child-focused groups?
  * with schools, students, and teachers in a deployment?
  * with data and feedback from users and schools?

3. The other fascinating point in that post is how meticulously data
and feedback were gathered.  Outreach sessions were intentionally kept
short so that every person had time to provide a thorough report
without haste, and for it to be processed immediately.

For our part, we have the capacity to gather and anonymize automatic
data at a tremendous scale.  And there have been a number of potential
researchers who have talked to me recently asking what they could do
to help get better data out of OLPC schools, or to help further our
educational mission with their research.   Yet our research list
remains quiet...  What metrics should we attend to, and how can we
improve this?

SJ
--
6175294266     sj at laptop.org     one laptop per child   amazon.com/xo
--

On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 7:22 PM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com> wrote:
> +1 for organization.
>
> On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 4:28 PM, Mel Chua <mel at melchua.com> wrote:
>> Okay. How can we learn from this? (Ignore, if you like, who and what the
>> campaign is for - my point is that we should learn from their tactics
>> whether or not we agree with their cause.)
>>
>> http://oxdown.firedoglake.com/diary/546
>>
>> "We decided in terms of timeline that [our organizers] would not be
>> measured by the amount of voter contacts they made in the summer—but
>> instead by the number of volunteers that they were recruiting, training
>> and testing. It was much more an infrastructure focus. So there would be
>> no calls from Chicago saying, 'Why haven't you made more calls?!'
>> Instead there would be calls saying, 'Where are your neighborhood team
>> volunteers?' Or, if the numbers seemed high, 'Are they real?' It was a
>> whole shift in mentality that was really, really good."
>>
>> Also, see:
>>
>>     "Rather than say we have X leadership roles to fill, we're creating
>> leadership roles for as many leaders as we have. So we have people in
>> charge of whatever they ARE.
>
> Exactly.
>
>> We are saying, 'What's your social
>> network?'

> I'm getting ready for a trip to Ghana and Uganda to get computers into
> schools and set up community businesses in conjunction with local
> organizations.

Nice -- when are you travelling?