Dan Brister, Project Director of the Buffalo Field Campaign, talks about how he hopes Salsa will mobilize grassroots support around the protection of Yellowstone's last wild buffalo.

The NY office of DIA is putting together a client training for September 8th. Come join us! There'll be four different sessions (you can pick two), presented by April Pedersen (E. Director), Chris Lundberg (CTO), Jon Wheeler (Managing Director), and myself.

And of course, there's a Happy Hour at a nearby bar to follow.

Click here for more info

Wish you could be in Denver for the DNC? I know, I know, me too.

Your next best option is to stay tuned via The Big Tent

The Big Tent is the place to be for new media journalists, bloggers, and non-profit leaders covering the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

The quadrennial -- or biennial, now that the summer and winter games are staggered -- hypocrisy irony of the "Olympic Movement" formulation from the mouthpieces of global capital is probably not actually any more finely described by Beijing's turn on the stage than by any other ruthless global hegemon's. Hey, Mary Lou Retton was sticking vaults and selling breakfast cereal while Central America was crawling with death squads.

But China has brought renewed hand-wringing from the guardians of right-thinking about the wrongness of bringing politics into a "Movement" so palpably political from the get-go, and so explicitly marked in its most memorable moments -- Jesse Owens in Berlin, the Blood in the Water match -- by political valences.

And then, of course, there's this:

"Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are." -Bertold Brecht

It's now been three and a half years since DemocracyInAction and I got together -- three and a half years of change and growth and learning on the fly.

We got to thinking ... why not try out a long-distance thing?

So I'm excited -- and, yeah, a little nervous -- to announce that next week, yours truly will shake the Beltway dust off his heels and open up DemocracyInAction Midwest. (That name could be a little snappier. Suggestions?)

DIA Midwest will be based out of lovely Bloomington, Indiana, conveniently located where someone smarter than I can study something I don't understand while I do stuff like this:

(And of course, the ol' hobby blog.)

What does this mean for Salsa users in the Midwest?

If you're particularly engaged on the net neutrality issue -- or if you're not at all, but interested in new models for online deliberation -- the National Science Foundation-funded Deliberative E-Rulemaking Project (DeER) at the University at Albany (SUNY) and Texas Tech is "test[ing] a new model for citizen input on proposed rules and regulations by federal agencies. We are recruiting people to participate in an online message board discussion on a possible FCC network neutrality regulation."

The project is supposed to begin in late August, but you can sign up for it right now. » read more | Jason Z.'s blog | login or register to post comments

And for a moment, all is right in the world.

Drop her a note if you feel so inclined.

Kansas State anthropology professor Michael Wesch apparently recorded this stunning presentation on culture, life, modernity in the YouTube community mere blocks from DIA world headquarters.

(You might remember him from such video phenomena as this, whose virality he discusses here.)

This is 55 minutes long, but you won't notice the length one bit. Here's the project's blog.

A must-read piece of investigative journalism for any nonprofit: Mother Jones' "There's Something About Mary: Unmasking a Gun Lobby Mole" -- which mole infiltrated gun control organizations for the best part of a decade, culling in the guise of volunteer activist turned board member "what the grassroots of the gun violence prevention movement intended; where our priorities are shifting; which legislation we would be promoting or fighting against and what sort of effort we would be putting into that; who our targeted legislators would be; what states and districts we deemed important enough to put an effort into; our messaging, what our messaging would be before we put it out there."

Shocked to learn that [Mary Sapone, aka Mary] McFate was a spy, gun control advocates have pondered the obvious questions: How did she manage to fool everyone for so long? How much money did she earn for being a mole? To whom in the gun lobby did she report? The NRA? The firearms manufacturing industry? Did her covert effort extend beyond mere intelligence gathering? Did she manage to shape the decisions and actions of anti-gun groups to the gun lobby's liking? And was she the only one?