Introduction + Advocacy Activity Streams

[Gregory Foster]

Hello there,
I've been on the list for the past month, so I wanted to introduce
myself and relay some information. I'm Gregory Foster, a Web
Developer with Consumers Union, the non-profit publisher of Consumer
Reports. I work in the Advocacy and Public Policy division helping
facilitate online outreach and activism. I was introduced to Activity
Streams at the ReadWriteWeb Realtime Web Summit in October during the
session led by Monica Keller and Kevin Marks with Joseph Smarr and
John Panzer in attendance in the packed room. Later that day, I
convened a session called "The (R)Evolution of Online Activism -or-
Email Action Alerts Suck!" [ http://bit.ly/rww-realtime_activism ]
during which we had the idea to represent online activist actions as
Activity Streams (for example, "gregoryfoster /sent an email action/
'save the coral reefs' {to his legislator} [on Convio]"). You can see
the notes I drew up on the session here: [ http://bit.ly/44D651 ].

Since that time I have been researching and catching up on Activity
Streams. This past weekend, I convened a session on Activity Streams
at the Austin Nonprofit Camp [ http://npocamp.net/ #NPOCamp ]. I
decided to take the opportunity to compile all of my notes into a
primer on Activity Streams. You can find that here: [
http://bit.ly/npocamp-activitystreams ]. Please take a look because I
think it condenses a lot of valuable information. I apologize in
advance for omissions and am happy to continue refining this document
in collaboration with the community.

This past week, I attended Convio's client summit here in Austin.
Convio [ http://convio.com/ ] is one of the biggest software vendors
in the non-profit sector, and we use them as our database of record
for CRM, for email blasts to our activists and to ensure
deliverability of constituent email actions to legislators. I
introduced myself to the CTO Dave Hart (a real geek's CTO I must say)
and spent 15 minutes showing him Activity Streams. He was very
interested. I've indicated I'd like to give him time to determine if
Activity Streams is a fit for their platform, and to begin crafting a
strategy for implementation. It's unknown how much transparency I'll
have into that process as a client, but I explained what I've been
able to glean of the community process for introducing extensions.
I've passed along my notes, and will periodically ping them.

So I wanted to let you know you have a fan and evangelist here in
Austin :) Thanks for doing what you're doing and I look forward to
seeing Activity Streams everywhere.

gf
t: @gregoryfoster