Think about what is sketched above: does contributing here feel like the most effective place, hour per hour or dollar per dollar, that you can help our country's political system?
I wrote Cognitive Politics (the current host website) and have spent the last four years frankly burning myself out trying to get progressive activists to care about communication techniques or progressive communication experts to care about scaling. I think I've learned from the #fail and decided to commit to organizing what I've learned and setting it in motion enough that
I'm taking every shortcut I can because this project is too big for me: aiming to fill out enough sample content that you can imagine what it is, hosting it on my already-running website, seeking to do sample-size quantities of content, but aiming to get the skeleton good enough that we can begin having a conversation with more voices about what it would mean to integrate the silos of progressive communication expertise, scale them up, train everyone out there who wants to learn, eventually pressure politicians and organizations on "our side" that generate fear to get contributions or clicks even when it is counter-productive, and I hope find ways to measure success and failure.
I love volunteer projects and have avoided the cycle of putting time into fundraising. For Scaling Progressive Communications to work, it is going to have to avoid competing with the teachers and promoters who start cooperating on messaging.
Metrics
I'm very interested in developing metrics around how well this works, and it is far beyond my capacity. I believe that simple metrics are dangerous: a lot of the Democratic politicians who use polling data are able to measure how communications work within the current framing. But most of the real work, in my hypothesis, involves changing frames. Using word-choices that pander to people's current frames ... always comes across as pandering. If you'd like to explore what we should be measuring rather than what is easy to measure, let's start talking.
Fundraising
Never been my thing. Numbers, technology, functionality: that I can do. Talking to teens who smoke about why they might want to stop, and getting through: love it. Fancy presentations to people with money: we need a hero to step up here or this project will fade out.
