Wednesday October 26, 2022; 11:43 AM EDT
- In yesterday's post, I offered some notes about one of many workflow pathways to be found in the FeedLand RSS software.#
- One idea I mentioned was to take advantage of putting the writing/web publishing tools near the RSS reading tools. With its clickable link-blog icon, FeedLand already offers this opportunity. You read something good, you're gonna write about it. Just click, friend!#
- Another idea was to put the "get involved" tools nearby as well.#
- Getting good content on an issue, thinking and writing, finding kindred spirits, building alliances and trying out some activism together, reporting back the results. That's a work flow for activism. The closer the tools for the early steps are to the tools for the middle and later steps, the better chance we have for success. Keep all the tools together, we're going to need them.#
- As a tiny demonstration of that second concept -- putting the "get involved" tools near the RSS reading tools -- I edited the subtitle in the header of my RSS Feeds from Outer Space public news product. I included a link to a web page there that would, in this model, offer a list of ways to learn more and get involved in the issue or topic of the news product.#
- So: ways to get involved linked right there in the header space of the news reading tool.#
- Postscript. An issue of a newsletter came to the house. Big cover story claims success in getting older people cheaper prescriptions. Fourth bullet point on the cover: "And we'll tell you how we did it!" In other words, how did they make their activism work? The article will answer that question.#
- That's a great question. You rarely see it discussed. Op-eds call for this or that, and they even call for getting involved in activism. But they rarely say how. They rarely say what kind of activism has a chance of working, or why. Almost nobody's helping us educate ourselves on activism that has a chance.#
- Most news outlets and op-ed writers leave activism to the imagination of the reader. But as I think most of us realize, citizens don't come equipped with a good understanding of activism and what gives it a chance to succeed. So leaving that out of 98% of op-eds and policy articles is bad practice. (Yes, I just made up the statistic. What number would you guess?)#