Brainstorming post

[sathari]

In addition to the master post of ideas and suggestions, on the encouragement of one of our wonderful mods tassosss, I'm offering up a brainstorming post for batting ideas back and forth--- things we've done that seem to be effective, ideas we have, especially for making activism easier in general... and, because of the fannish spirit of this comm, any ideas for activism/tools/etc. that you've gotten from fiction and other media? Or for that matter any stories/art/music/other creations that inspire and support your activism that you want to share?

Comments

Re: Activist tools idea from the Vorkosigan Saga

[teaotter]

This sounds like the sort of project that would work well in GIS software -- something that's made to take a giant database of data and create maps with different colors based on that data.

I don't know where you'd get the data from, though I assume that someone out there has it. I guess you could base it on voting records...

Re: Activist tools idea from the Vorkosigan Saga

[sathari]

Oh, wow, that's AWESOME. And this is just the kind of brainstorming I was hoping for!

And, voting records, definitely, though frankly, I've just been going to my various reps' websites and looking at what they say about their stances on various issues, at least in a general way--- the pleasant surprise of finding out that I have a Republican Senator who's pro-Medicare/SS was what got me thinking, "hey, what about a map of where all our reps claim to stand so we can see where the outliers/potential aisle-crossers are?". So if we all did that for our own people and reported back, it would be a start, maybe. Again, a bit of an undertaking, but at this point it's probably a good idea to check our reps' websites on where they've taken stands on various issues--- even if, say, they don't mention something particular, the absence itself possibly suggests that they're staying quiet on that issue because they're not sure what their constituents want (so then let's tell them, shall we?). It might not help with narrowly targeted issues or specific votes, but with broad topics--- gun control, health care (and its various substrates--- someone might support Medicare but not the ACA generally), immigration, voting rights, abortion/birth control, privacy rights, etc.--- we could probably get a general idea of where the ones who deviate from party lines in our favor are?

Re: Activist tools idea from the Vorkosigan Saga

[tanaqui]

We did a post a while back on FiveThityEight's analysis of which senators are most likely to cross party lines, and the FiveThirtyEight post links to OntheIssues.org, a site which tracks candidates' positions. You'd have to dig a bit, but it looks like the data is out there for a lot of major issues.

Re: Activist tools idea from the Vorkosigan Saga

[sathari]

Oooh, thanks! OnTheIssues is very close to what I described (minus the graphical element, but that's okay) so, yay! And sorry I missed THAT post! You two are so on the ball.