ToDoing

I’m organizing a job action.  What’s required?

There’s the organizing part.  That requires a means of communicating to everyone who wants to be organized.  Everyone needs to have some idea of just how many other people are involved as well.  If all I wanted were some means of blast communicating to others, an opt-in service like twitter would do the trick.  However, a certain level of confidence needs to be nurtured that a fair number of people are in this with you, and are taking it as seriously as you.

Because the actions we’ll be taking will be entirely above-board, and because publicity is our friend, our communications need not be secured.  Information should be visible to the outside world.  Accomplishing our aims does not require secrecy because our means do not involve surprise.

Then there’s the job action itself.  Most likely, there will be multiple options, multiple ways people can participate.  Some actions will be scheduled.  Others will be triggered by external events.  The triggered actions should be proportionate to the severity of the trigger.  The results of the actions should be measurable.  For some types of action, the key metrics will be indirect, related to increasing visibility, getting more people involved and invested.  But ultimately, the results should be measured in the amount of money that government was unable to get its hands on.  The triggers and metrics need to be defined.

There’s an entire PR angle that I’m not intimately familiar with, although I am close to a few folks who know a bit about it.  There’s time to work on that.

This is enough to start to think about.  I’ll do another post like this, a ToDoing II, before putting out an actual To Do page.  But before that, just throwing this information up in a post has really gotten my mind’s gears churning, and I’ve got at least two posts in the hopper now about guiding principles for the site.  Here’s a teaser for the first: A very strict “Do Not Feed The Trolls” policy.  I see it as the 21st Century version of non-violent protest, and I’ll tell ya why in my next post.