Communications
From Operation Cat Herder
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Contents |
Communications
OK - first build a really smoky fire and get a blanket...
You've probably heard of the old military acronym C3 - It stands for Command, Control and Communications. That's old school. We are a bottom up organization. While we take our lead from a very charismatic leader, who's ideas resonate with us and who we would like to make happy, we command ourselves. So much for command. We command ourselves. If anything, it's been replaced with networking. Control - well, we are out of control - and we like it that way. Communications is still a key element, and so this chapter. We need to coordinate with each other, and that takes communications.
How to Contact Everyone
Well, our supporters...
How To Contact Everybody We've been working on this for a long time.
First off, 3 organizer Meetups are bridged and have 456 members together. and Meetup Alliance has 433 Members, for a total of 889 potential Meetups, however there is some overlap and sometimes more than one organizer from a meetup have joined, so the number of meetups reached is actually less.
There are currently between 1,450 and 1,500 Meetups, so between these two potentially half the Meetups are reached. There are a bit over 100,000 supporters in the Meetups with quite a bit of overlap, most of it in groups that have close physical proximity or various national project or interest groups.
We also have a mailing list of over 800 organizer e-mails, some not in the above groups that will not be used often.
While these are not intended to be announcement lists, there are sometimes used for that purpose.
We are actively trying to contact and get the meetup organizers in the half the groups we don't have in the loop to subscribe to one of the organizers groups or the alliance to open up communications movement wide. If you want to help with this, we are going to be doing batches again shortly to contact them. If you want to help, e-mail operationcatherder (at) gmail.com
The suggestion to contact the organizer of a group you don't belong to on a per-message basis does not work, as meetup will only let you contact 25 in a 30 day period. It would take 80+ people to do this from scratch, every time. That's why we are contacting them and getting them to join the organizers groups / Alliance. Though it should be noted that Alliance if very limited, traffic is slow and it does not appear that most of the 433 are reading it regularly.
Likewise, joining tons of groups and posting to their mailing lists does not work, because Meetup will cut you off after 3 messages.
One of our programmers was working on a tool that would accept announcement type material, post it on a web site of some sort and send out a digest type e-mail periodically - once a day to once a week with the subject, first 2-3 lines of each announcement and a link to the full text. Unfortunately, he seems to have gotten sidetracked, and I need to check back with him on the status of this tool.
Now, not all our supporters on members of Meetup. Generally, to really get a message out there I post to the organizers bridge (3 groups), Meetup alliance (again organizers only), and then:
560 Meetup
ronpaulforums
dailypaul
meetup ronpaul domain wide message board
main forum on Facebook - students for ron paul + bulletin
the 2 main forums on MySpace + bulletins
ronpaul2008 on yahoo
ronpaulgrassrootsaction on yahoo
If I'm looking for extra deep saturation, I post to a private forum on yahoo of the state moderators for yahoo groups and I've got a mailing list of some other fairly popular blogs and web sites - but I rarely do that anymore as the above tends to get good saturation of ron paul space.
We've also been working on tracking existing and encouraging the formation of state wide meetups or other forums both for organizers in a state and for supporters, so that a redundant communication pathway could be established and messages sent to these 50 groups could also propagate on a state by state basis. This isn't completely established and is in the TODO queue to make more complete and functional.
How can *YOU* help? - get your organizer and assistant organizer to join one of the organizers groups and or alliance and make sure they provide their e-mail address!
help with the batch contact project to contact 25 organizers of groups you do not belong to.
if you know a programmer that would be interested in taking over the digest-an-announcement mail project, let us know.
Anyway, that's how you get a message out to the majority of ron paul supporters.
-n
Telcom
POTS
Cellular
VoIP/Skype
Asterik
Online P2P Chat
Online Video Conferencing
Radio
Radios are generally useful for events and when doing field activities. Most people will use cell phones, but in rural areas coverage may be spotty.
You can also talk to everyone on your channel instead of just one or two people.
Walki Talkies
GMRS
Short Wave
scratchpad
Re: Free Conference Calling
those "free" conference calls are not free. Everyone pays LD charges.
we do have a teamspeak VoIP server that will conference up to 100 people and is really free. You do need either, ideally a headset or at least a mic and speakers and obviously a sound card, but those are standard with computers now a days. A headset will run $15-20 if you don't have one, so should pay for itself after the first call vs LD rates.
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