Moving the Overton Window | Daylight Atheism When I tell people that I'm an atheist, I'm often asked if I think that fiery rhetoric and sharp critiques of religion, like the kind found in the writing of trailblazers like Richard Dawkins, is harming the cause by offending believers who might otherwise have been sympathetic. The implication is that, if we focus our attacks only on the worst fundamentalists, we'll gain public support and approval, but if we criticize faith in general, we'll never get anywhere. I don't believe this is true, and to explain why, I usually invoke the concept of the Overton window. This is an idea first conceived by the political scientist (who else) Joseph Overton, which holds that, for any political issue, there's a range of socially acceptable positions that's narrower than the range of possible positions. Positions within the Overton window are seen as mainstream and uncontroversial, while those outside it are viewed as shocking, upsetting, and dangerously radical. Image credit: Luiza Leite
NationBuilder - the Community Organizing System The Overton Window Special essays that can be e-mailed to you! “Civil Society: Moral Arguments for Limiting Government”: The Overton Window model suggests that the key to changing government policy lies in changing the views of the public. This, however, takes more than facts and logic. As Mackinac Center President Joseph G. Lehman argues in this essay, winning the battle for people’s hearts and minds through “economic analysis alone is like bringing a knife to a gun fight.” E-mail me free copies of this and the other special essays! “The Inspiring Story of Thomas Clarkson”: There may be no greater example of shifting the Overton Window than the story of the man most responsible for ending slavery in the British Empire: Thomas Clarkson. “Government, Poverty and Self-Reliance”: The Overton Window model tells us that when society unites behind sound principles, its political servants will too. “Investing in Ideas”: If the views of society shift the Overton Window, then what shifts the views of society?
How to Build a Collaborative Organization Building a collaborative organization is not easy. Collaboration is not a rule you can set, it is a organizational culture that is embraced by its members. But where do you start? 1. In order to succeed in the collaboration world, you cannot just think of yourself as a content provider. In the networked age, organizations can now develop their own performance. If people are going to hack your products anyway, then you mind as well get ahead of the game and include them into your process instead of suing them. Make your products modular, re-configurable and editable. Finally, don’t expect a free ride. 2. All organizations should abandon their fortress mentality and open up by sharing some of their assets within their business networks or even beyond. What Knowledge Work Should You Outsource, HBR If so, keep that work in-house and make sure that those responsible for the work are freed from lower-value tasks that others could accomplish. 3. 4. photo credit: Werkheim via photopin cc
George Lakoff - Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision 1. The Issue Trap. We hear it said all the time: Progressives won’t unite behind any set of ideas. We all have different ideas and care about different issues. The truth is that progressives do agree at the level of values and that there is a real basis for progressive unity. Progressive values cut across issues. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. A common mistaken ideology has convinced many progressives that they must “move to the right” to get more votes. 8. Progressives also paint conservative leaders as incompetent and not very smart, based on a misunderstanding of the conservative agenda. 9. 10. Spin, on the other hand, is the dishonest use of surface linguistic frames to hide the truth. 11. 12.
Work Together: 60+ Collaborative Tools for Groups With businesses and families spread out more and more, we've dug up 60+ sites that will help everyone be on the same page. Business Productivity 37Signals.com - Maker of collaboration tools including Basecamp (others listed below). 8apps.com - A mixture of social network and productivity applications. BlueTie.com - Online collaboration directed towards small and medium sized businesses. Businessitonline.com - Centralized cash flow, documents, calendars and more for a team or small business. CentralDesktop.com - A full work suite for project teams including spreadsheets, file sharing, calendar and more. Colligo.com - Allows you to work on projects off-line and then sync them when you can login. ConceptShare.com - Share concept designs and allow invited workers to mark-up, comment, and give feedback. Confluence - An enterprise-class wiki with features such as PDF exporting. ContactOffice.com - Allows groups to share documents, calandars, contacts, and files. Creative Collaboration Mindmapping
Why You're Stuck in a Narrative For some reason the narrative fallacy does not seem to get as much play as the other major cognitive fallacies. Apart from discussions of "The Black Swan", I never see it mentioned anywhere. Perhaps this is because it's not considered a "real" bias, or because it's an amalgamation of several lower-level biases, or because it's difficult to do controlled studies for. Regardless, I feel it's one of the more pernicious and damaging fallacies, and as such deserves an internet-indexable discussion. From Taleb's "The Black Swan" The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship upon them. Essentially, the narrative fallacy is our tendency to turn everything we see into a story - a linear chain of cause and effect, with a beginning and an end. You can see the results of this 'good enough' solution in the design and function of our brain.
Green Memes This post is an excerpted chapter from “The Most Amazing Online Organizing Guide Ever" This chapter is by Megan Kelley & Joe Solomon. Facebook is as much a tool for promoting social change as it is a puzzle. How do you figure out how to use the arsenal of tools Facebook offers (and often changes on a whim) to break through the noise, reach the most people, and sometimes inspire folks to do stuff. Below are 11 well- worn tips online organizers use to do all those things. 1) Create a sudden burst of community recruitment There’s no reason your campaign should have a small Facebook page—or if you already have a few hundred or a few thousand fans, why you can’t grow significantly. These days, anyone can access the feature to invite friends to “like” a page. Bigger communities don’t just let you reach more people, they let your current supporters see they’re part of something much bigger. 2) Focus on photos. Photos can also play a special role when communicating progressive victories.
Binding Words: Conscience and Rhetoric in Hobbes, Hegel, and Heidegger This short but provocative book should be of interest to quite a range of philosophers and scholars, ranging from specialists in Hobbes, Hegel or Heidegger to philosophers of language and literary theorists, and even to moral theorists. The thematic questions of the book are exciting and fresh: (1) how are rhetoric and metaphor essential to the textual presentations of the topic of conscience in these philosophers and (2) how are rhetoric and metaphor essential to the very nature of conscience itself? The philosophical orientation that guides Feldman's work is largely derived from Derrida; the work, however, does not rely on Derrida, but is a series of independent studies of the thought -- and the texts -- of Hobbes, Hegel and Heidegger. The interpretations are in each case well-grounded in the original texts and reflect familiarity with a good deal of contemporary English, German and French scholarship on those figures, as well as on the topics of conscience and rhetoric in general.
Collective Action Toolkit Is it possible to inspire design thinking outside of the design world? The practice has helped countless organizations innovate new products and services, but has infrequently been made available to a broad audience. frog set out to prove the practice is universal by creating the Collective Action Toolkit, a set of resources and activities to help people accomplish tangible outcomes through a set of guided, non-linear collaboration activities. The goal: to help communities generate solutions, connect to resources, and pool knowledge to solve a wide range of challenges and create real change. CAT got its start with the Nike Foundation, in which frog was asked to help empower girls to solve local community problems. The frog team explored the value of connections for adolescent girls living in extreme poverty in the developing world, and collectively devised solutions to the problems they faced. The project prompted frog to standardize and simplify the language around design thinking.
Reading :: Emergence of Noopolitik The Emergence of Noopolitik: Toward an American Information StrategyBy John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt This RAND report is an earlier, longer version of Arquilla and Ronfeldt's FirstMonday article "The Promise of Noopolitik." Like that later article, this report argues that strategists need to shift the US' grand strategy away from realpolitik and toward noopolitik: "the form of statecraft that we argue will come to be associated with the noosphere, the broadest informational realm of the mind" (p.x). Arquilla and Ronfeldt go on to carefully discuss these ideas, acknowledging that realpolitik and noopolitik will coexist for decades (p.5), but also pointing out that "realpolitik, which stresses the hard, material dimensions of power and treats states as the determinants of world order," makes less sense in a world in which states are not dominant (p.29).
Asset Mapping For The Long Haul: A Strategy For Occupy Movements The Occupy movement has spread to 2,512 cities worldwide, and its support networks stretch far beyond physical occupations. That it has grown so quickly without specific demands or hierarchical leadership is testament to the creative genius of its organisers. They understand a key lesson from web platform development of the past 10 years: provide an overarching framework yet let users define how they engage; in an era of collective individualism disinterest often arises from over-engineered outcomes. For Occupy, this has meant a ‘horizontal’ approach to leadership and the provision of a largely blank canvas for people to air grievances within a framework of broader discontent with ‘the 1%’. Understandably though, a contemporary return to ‘big fix’ thinking compounded by media frustration with ‘supposedly leaderless structures’, has seen increasing calls for Occupiers to present alternatives. Facilitating Asset Mapping 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. - Heart: ‘I am passionate about…’ 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Undoing Power Undoing Power Klaus Krippendorff The Annenberg School for Communication University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia From: Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12, 2: 101-132, 1995 "Liberation is a way of talking about power." --- Bruce A. "Philosophers merely interpreted the world ... the point is to change it." --- Karl Marx, 1845 (1978, p.7) This essay speaks into power -- not about what the powerless lack or what the powerful have too much of and in terms of which empowerment would mean appropriating it from Others. As the deliberately ambiguous title, "undoing power," suggests, this essay not only explores the undoability of power, it also shows, to the extend that a written paper can, the power to "undo" such phenomena, whether as critical social scientists or in everyday life. In pursuit of these aims, I will start with an experiment in perception. Doing Ordinary Languaging Frankly, I much prefer talking to writing. Eskimo-indian Some Discourses on Power "Power" is first of all a word.
Toolkit Overview « 350.org Workshops Welcome to the 350 Workshops Toolkit. A few years ago, when we started running climate leadership workshops around the world, we realized that there are so many passionate, energized ordinary people out there, who, with a little bit of practice, could become a powerful corps of leaders driving change. You are one of those people; This climate workshops toolkit is for you. We’re really excited to provide what we think is one of the best collection of documents, notes, tips and ideas on climate organizing. We can’t claim to know everything about leadership and organizing, and we encourage you to take these materials and adapt them to your own style and context (just make sure to credit 350.org and our friends who helped develop these guides!) So, how do I use this toolkit? We anticipate climate organizers using this toolkit in a number of ways. Pre-readingGandhi’s Salt Satyagraha Acknowledgements Continue to session 1.