The last 3 months have been a whilrwind, helping the TckTckTck global climate
campaign get ready for, and do some serious movement building, in Copenhagen.
After working a lot of 20 hour days during December, I'm still finding my feet again and hope to do some writing about what we learned together in what is probably the most diverse movement the world has ever seen.
In the meantime, there were a few good articles published about the work we did in Copenhagen, that tell parts of the story better than I can.
First from Katherine Goldstein, the green editor of Huffington Post, "Standing on the edge of the future", talks about how new media is changing all media:
When I think of what it means to be a new media journalist today, I think about the Fresh Air Center in downtown Copenhagen. It was set up during the UN climate summit by TckTckTck, a non-profit umbrella group committed bringing people together from all
backgrounds around the climate talks. The actual conference was held in a huge conference center, which eventually kicked out many NGOs and had lines up to eight hours long for people to get in even with accreditation.
The Bella Center was the monolithic representation of The Old Way — slow, unresponsive and bureaucratic. TckTckTck made space available to bloggers, journalists and NGOs and provided high speed Internet access, live streaming briefings, video editing set-up, drop-in talks by people like Kumi Naidoo, the head of Greenpeace, panels with Naomi Klein, Andrew Revkin and George Monbiot, Happy Hour sponsored by the UN Foundation, and patient, tirelessly helpful support team. It was where the cool Internet kids were working, I joked. Movers and shakers wanted to stop by and reach that audience.
What was most amazing about the experience was not just the fantastic journalists and activists I met, but also the spirit of cooperation and camaraderie that was fostered in this environment. Unequivocally, it's the backbone to where new media is going.
The full article has some other great insights into the future of media, from someone who knows a thing or two about that!
This next post, also from the Huffington Post, "Activism 2.0, Creating Casablanca in Copenhagen", also heaps praise on the Fresh Air Center also how what we did there may point to where activism is heading.
10 minutes away from the…cluttered convention center, a much smaller, conversational, and action-driven citizens platform was produced, The Fresh Air Center. This downtown physical space, founded out of the ethos of the we-powered people movement of media makers and activists, stepped up and demonstrated more courage and leadership in organizing for climate change than our president.
Fresh Air Center grassroots field and technology-driven organizing methods accomplished a number of transformative and inspiring exchanges. What makes the Fresh Air Center worth drilling into is that it wasn't a typical sponsored media center or a blogger tent.
Instead, the Fresh Air Center blurred traditional lines first by bringing grassroots activists and leading media mavens together to produce content, and second by carefully constructing a physical space with shared technology and social
media. They created what can best be described as a not as a press club, but rather a nightclub. One organizer, Beka Economopoulous, jokingly referred to the experience as a cultural, social, and political operation that felt akin only to Humphrey Bogart's bar-based brokering in Casablanca.
When heads of state arrived and sequestered themselves in the Bella Center, kicking most of the NGOs out, the Fresh Air Center built on momentum and continued to thrive with authentic interaction and activity. It was the pulse of where the main messaging out of Copenhagen was taking place. Bloggers and activists worked shoulder-to-shoulder, drinking coffee, cocktails, and beer, smoking and brokering content shares, their hard-drives humming away.
As we experiment with the advanced applications that power grassroots activism online, the success of the Fresh Air Center is about the people as the media and the message, pushing politics and rhetoric
aside and organize people where they already are. In Copenhagen, a bar as familiar as any neighborhood pub with a few more wired bells and whistles transformed into media's main nerve center. Many more effective transactions occurred in Copenhagen over a half-priced beer or coffee at the Fresh Air Center than on the bargaining floor of the Bella Center before the many heads of state.
Well we're certainly flattered! The rest of the article is also fun, talking about the future of activism and how digital innovations are driving change. It's worth a full read, but here are my top 4 points that talk about the open, collaborative, convening role we played all year:
10 Lessons Learned From TckTckTck's Fresh Air Center, Applying Activism 2.0
1. Leverage a List-Serv "Climate Insider Rapid Response List"
Communities aren't spontaneously formed. They require careful staging and planning. The Fresh Air Center began to build its community with a piece of technology that wasn't Twitter or Facebook. Rather, the Fresh Air Center relied namely on a curated approval-only listserv. Fresh Air Center's listserv topped at 450 members, whose membership was vetted through an application process over two months of planning and discovery. The listserv's community included people unable to attend the conference, but still on the front-lines of creating content around the issues and stories.
2. Distribute the Brand
TckTckTck wasn't owned by any one organization, which is what made it powerful and persuasive. Creating a distributed brand is to craft an emblem that conveys that "We're in it together."
Individual brands will still have their impact through word-of-mouth ambassadors and exchanges. Keep the rhetoric simple, and focus on the authentic purpose, compete only in the sense that there's a shared goal. Media makers will remember who bought them beer and broadband and fed them content, and they'll be far more capable of creating content when they aren't laboring under competing brands.
3. Bring Beer
In a city where everything costs twice as much, half priced drinks sponsored by the UN Foundation made a huge difference for organizers, activists, journalists, and bloggers looking for a place to park themselves, work, and connect.
4. Close Down Shop, But Don't COP Out
When it became clear that Copenhagen was not going to produce an actionable agreement, TckTckTck quickly assembled an immediate takeaway called, "Not done yet." This campaign rests on top of the home pages of TckTckTck partner websites, ensuring that the takeaway from the COP is that the movement needs to continue and to grow.
At this point I'd be remiss in not recognizing the incredible team that helped us pull all this magic together. Firstly to my boss at TckTckTck, Andrew Male, who provided resources, ideas, and connections while tirelessly removing obstacles in our way, to our incredible Fresh Air team of Steve Rio and Beka Economopoulos, who were crazy enough to say yes to this project and smart enough to actually pull it off, to Michael Pereira and my team Darrell and Jordan at Communicopia for their tireless technical and design support for our complex and always changing website.
Copenhagen was quite the wild ride – not one I'm sure I have the energy to do again it took a lot out of us. But despite the lack of a strong political agreement from the talks (that none of us really believed would happen yet), we are extremely proud and excited by the movement we were a part of building.
Where will TckTckTck go next? We don't really know, but with over 225 global NGO partners, and 15 million people from nearly every country in the world standing with us, you know it's going to be good.
