No man is an island, entire of itself. Human beings do not thrive when isolated from others. Those words, once written by John Donne in the 17th Century, have been embraced by the folks at UniteBlue, a new (and free) service that interacts with twitter to make it easier to find real, progressive people organizing for collective action in local communities. It's pretty neat.
The site uses a set of advanced heuristics and artificial intelligence techniques to scan the Twittersphere for the most politically active accounts on the left. It then ranks the accounts based on a sophisticated algorithm involving account statistics, following and tweeting patterns, and words used in account descriptions. And to make sure that each account represents a real person, UniteBlue verifies each person's authenticity by hand. Pretty cool stuff, if you ask me. And, it works like a charm.
In the few weeks that I've been on UniteBlue, I've been able to connect with over 1700 politically active "tweeple," all of whom have very diverse backgrounds and skill sets. This is fantastic. The internet, and twitter specifically, make it super easy to find national voices, television personalities, etc.; however, I've found that when I need to meet real, everyday people who are actively looking to work on progressive projects, it's not nearly as easy. And that's the problem that UniteBlue is designed to solve. You can even sort accounts by geographic location.
Most recently, UniteBlue launched a new community blog, designed to be a centralized location where people can share new projects, updates, and other items of interest that require a bit more than 140 characters. Through this blog and a few other avenues, UniteBlue has been able to organize several successful "twitter bombs," which have garnered attention from the President, Vice President, and many other leaders in government. It's all pretty cool.
It might not be for you, but it's worth checking out. As Simon Cowart, one of the UniteBlue community bloggers, aptly put it, "Political organizing, especially on the left, is often compared to the old Democratic pastime of herding cats. We all have our primary issues that drive us and feed our passions." You might not like, or want to work with, everyone you meet at UniteBlue, but I promise you'll be surprised by the amount of awesome, hardworking progressive people who you never knew were just one click away.
Cheers! -DueDueProcess (formerly HLD)
note: HawksLoveDoves is an active member of the UniteBlue community.