Several of the MOMocrats enjoyed a rare reunion in San Diego last week, at the sixth annual BlogHer conference. We recapped some of what we heard on yesterday's edition of MOMochat. And our own Joanne Bamberger (Pundit Mom), was interviewed by GenConnect's Randi Zucker:
Joanne Bamberger is the author of "Mothers of Intention: How Women and Social Media Are Revolutionizing Politics in America."
The latest suicide of a young person who was bullied about his sexuality by his classmates and acquaintances has me shaken up. Tyler Clementi's is the fourth such reported death in less than a month. And yet we continue to hear of more such suicides.
I'm stunned and horrified that two Rutgers students thought it would be "funny" to livestream schoolmate Clementi's sexual activity over the internet without his permission or knowledge, directly contradicting Clementi's request for privacy.
As a parent, I'm devastated by the Clementis' terrible loss of their beautiful, gifted son. There is nothing so heart-wrenching as parents forced to bury their child; a situation so profoundly unjust and sorrowful it goes against everything parents attempt in the simple, hopeful act of nurturing children. People of all ages recognize this grief; you need not be a parent to understand it. But I think parents feel a particular pain knowing that in some cases, their vast love and acceptance, like Wendy Walsh's for her now-dead son Seth, was not enough to counter the hate. When he came out to his mother, Wendy Walsh told Seth, "It's okay, sweetheart, I love you no matter what." I'm heartbroken that despite her abiding love, her son couldn't endure torment from his schoolmates and the deafening, indifferent silence of teachers and staff.
Ellen DeGeneres immediately made a moving and urgent plea to suicidal young LGBT people to "stick around." Be around for the changes, because society is changing--unevenly, slowly, in pockets here and there. But it is changing for the better.
Dan Savage, the popular sex-positive advice columnist, started "It Gets Better," a similar movement to reassure and encourage LGBT youth that they will find love, that with luck and perserverance and the warm support of friends and allies they will find their niche in the world.
National Coming Out Day is October 11, 2010--seven days from now. And October is Anti-Bullying Month.
I'm starting up a Blog Action that I hope everyone will join, from the parenting blogosphere, to LGBT bloggers who have already written and vlogged so movingly about homophobic bullying and the courage to come out. I know caring educators will have something to say, as will activists in the youth and feminist movements. I think we allies need to find one another.
If you've blogged a memorial about the suicides of of kids tormented because of their sexual orientation, if you have a hopeful coming out story to share, if you have resources to help people who witness bullying become the ones to stop it, please add your blog post link to the Simply Linked below. For the next seven days until National Coming Out Day, October 11, let's demonstrate that there's more love, compassion, and acceptance out there than there is cruelty and hate.
Continue reading "Stop the Bullying--Blog Action for National Coming Out Day, October 11, 2010" »
In light of our abysmal maternal health statistics -- we're 39th in the world, behind Canada, tiny Malta, Croatia, Serbia, and the United Arab Emirates -- the U.S. needs to make every effort to promote and improve maternal health. Knowing that 1.5 trillion text messages were sent in the U.S. in 2008, several groups have teamed up to create text4baby, a mobile messaging service to promote the health of pregnant women, new moms, and
their babies.
Yesterday I attended a briefing sponsored by Women’s Policy, Inc., the Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues, the Office on Women’s Health, and the National Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies (HMHB) Coalition to promote this terrific new initiative.
Text4baby is a free service that provides thrice-weekly messages to pregnant women and new moms during the first year of their child’s life. The messages focus on health and safety – everything from where to find tobacco cessation services, to appointment reminders, to breastfeeding education, WIC eligibility, safe sleeping, and child care.
Among HMHB's many partners is the Department of Defense Military Health System (yahoo for not overlooking our military families!) and MTV, which is featuring the service on 16 and Pregnant.
If you want to sign up (FREE!) just text “BABY” to 511411 (“BEBE” for Spanish).
Or at least, there will be an iPad-compatible mobile application for that, in May, according to Project Vote, which has collaborated with Echo Interaction Group to create software that would help voter registration organizations register applicants to vote over a mobile phone or computer.
Only four U.S. states currently support fully automated online voter registration - Arizona, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington. Project Vote appears to be banking on optimism that more states will soon follow their lead.
There are, of course, a few voter fraud prevention issues posed by online voter registration that must be overcome.
Many states currently allow voters to fill out voter registration forms online, but still require eligible citizens to complete the registration process by printing out the completed forms, signing them by hand, and then mailing them or hand-delivering them to a local voter registration office, in order to ensure that a valid signature is on file for comparison in case the voter's identity ever needs to be verified.
Continue reading "Need Help Registering Voters Online? There's an iPad App for That. " »
Guest poster Tracy Viselli (aka @myrnatheminx on Twitter, and an online political strategist at Reno Fabulous Media) shares a new tool progressives can use. See how and why to use it. You'll find many of the MOMocrats on TweetProgress. Come on in, the water's fine. And you can tweet via web on your laptop or from your mobile phone.
As a social media professional, I find myself constantly trying to explain the power to Twitter. And the way I frequently do this is by citing well known examples of parent bloggers using Twitter to influence the media and brands--examples like the Motrin baby wearing debacle and the more recent incident in which Dooce used Twitter to ultimately get Bosch to donate a free washer and dryer to a Salt Lake City homeless shelter. Parents bloggers understand the power of Twitter well enough, as do many political bloggers like the Momocrats, but not enough progressives online understand the activist potential of Twitter yet and that needs to change. TweetProgress is a Twitter activist project I launched with partners Jim Gilliam, Jon Pincus, and Gina Cooper. TweetProgress is a directory of progressives on Twitter meant to provide the basic infrastructure for social action on Twitter. TweetProgress aims to:
And there is already evidence that TweetProgress is growing the progressive community on Twitter. In the first 48 hours, more than 2,000 progressives added themselves to TweetProgress including Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Vice President Al Gore, MSNBC and Air American host Rachel Maddow, and Ohio Secretary of State and Senate candidate Jennifer Brunner among others. And in the first week, many directory members saw significant follower increases. For example, since the launch of TweetProgress, I gained more than 100 followers and the ACLU organizational Twitter account gained several hundred new followers which speaks well for how important it is for progressive organizations to add themselves to TweetProgress. While there aren't a lot of tools built specifically for activism yet, there is no doubt there will be in the near future if the hundreds of applications already created to work with Twitter are any clue. One existing activism tool for Twitter is Act.ly, a petition tool that many people have already used successfully to target workers rights in Florida, Pizza Hut sponsorship of Ringling Brothers Circus, and sexism in tech conference scheduling.
Continue reading "TweetProgress: Building Progressive Infrastructure on Twitter" »
Who else is sitting home late on a Friday night, twittering, but a mom of a small kid? I'd like to say I was out doing something tragically hip, or even out somewhere, but... this past weekend, I was at home and swapping quips on the nightly carnivalesque Burning Man For Shut-Ins called Twitter.
Half a world away, Iranians were turning out in record numbers to vote for their new president. Very rapidly, tweets among my lefty-liberalish friends began to highlight Iranian sources of news for the results of the election. (The #tcot people, or Top Conservatives on Twitter, seemed not as attuned to what was happening. Some speculations why here.)
Light chitchat turned to concern as many of the people I follow and I realized that many Iranians found serious anomalies in the way votes were counted. Very quickly, it seemed that the most helpful thing one could do as a westerner sympathetic to the goals of Iranians demanding a free and fair election, with a re-vote if necessary, was to retweet the as-it-happens tweets of Iranians, which could be viewed under the hashtag #iranelections.
At 12:01pm Eastern time, as promised, the whitehouse.gov domain flipped over and we received our first glimpse of what's to come over the next four years. Take a look!
Whitehouse.gov did actually receive a facelift near the end of the Bush administration; no longer was the blog neglected and the site flat. Although it had held videos and audio feeds for a while, finally it seemed like a website worthy of 2008. But when the switch was flipped to by the Obama administration, it took on a whole new look. Welcome to open source government and a new era of government engagement online.
Goals and features of the new site are outlined here by Macon Phillips, Director of New Media for the White House. Core themes: communication, transparency and participation. So far, the site contains largely static content, aside from the blog, but we look forward to the coming days and weeks where they launch new participatory initiatives.
Congratulations to tech President Barack Obama.
Cross posted from the Personal Democracy Forum and techPresident.com.
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