Key takeaways from Sept 15 organizing call

[Harry Waisbren]

Another great conference call and online chat! You can read through the transcript over on our meeting page, or look to the key takeaways below:

• Lots of discussion on Sen. Feingold’s campaign, and the importance of him personally and the example he sets for civil libertarians of all stripes. We discussed and shared Glenn Greenwald’s interview of him, where he cites December as the next point when he imagines the Patriot Act will be brought up. There was group agreement that this is a campaign we should become more involved in…
• Jon brought up how Patriot Act reauthorization has to happen by around February, and there may be attempts to get it through in a lame duck session. If it turns into a route against Democrats in the midterms, a lame duck session may be better for civil libertarians, but regardless we should be preparing for a fight in December.
• We discussed different tools that we can use for online activism. Jon mentioned a new platform called if we ran the world, that he wrote about over on Tales from the Net. I brought up Jim Gilliam’s upcoming update to the exceedingly useful act.ly Twitter tool, which will be entitled pro.act.ly. Jim tweeted to me that it will be ready with a public beta in about 6 weeks, and I for one am waiting with baited breath!
• Broad discussion occurred about our group at large, both in terms of definitionally whether we can still call ourselves a group of Obama supporters, or fall into Jim’s suggested term of ‘current and former Obama supporters’. Furthermore, we went into the potential for increased coordination with or connection to BORDC, and what that might mean to our group—particularly in terms of pursuing an avenue where we would be falling under C3 status and would be unable to endorse and support candidates.

Thanks to Jon, Sally, and Jim for joining the call, and special thanks (and best wishes) to Mark for providing his detailed thoughts beforehand! Another great call, and more to come as actions reverberate from it.

---Harry

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Harry Waisbren

Community Manager for Qworky
http://www.qworky.com/

Get FISA Right organizer
http://getfisaright.wordpress.com/