Yesterday I wrote about Legislative Situational Awareness using the Progressive Congress News system.
Today I'll provide a bit of advice for those new to Twitter who want to become quickly and deeply involved in monitoring and influencing the legislative process. TweetDeck is the premier tool for adept Twitter users and the information provided here will get you off to a running start and in touch with the movers and shakers among the Progressive Twitterati.
(UPDATE: The next installment, Progressive Congress News & You, has been posted.)
I encouraged people to try TweetDeck in this post last July.
I personally preferred to use the plain ol' web interface above all else, at least until the #NewTwitter abomination made the experience unpleasant. My reasons for this were twofold. I'm the architect of Progressive Congress News and as such I want a 'low level' view of what's happening on Twitter rather than someone else's abstraction. I'm also a mildly autistic adult (Asperger's Syndrome). Imagine that all five of your senses have a volume control - yours are set to to a three or four, while mine are chronically at eight or nine, and a visually 'busy' interface like TweetDeck is challenging for me.
The recent decline in interface quality at Twitter has pushed me into TweetDeck usage and set me to thinking about attention conservation. Today we'll address the basics - we'll assume you're brand new to Twitter, but you've downloaded and installed TweetDeck, and you want to be able to watch what is happening in the federal legislative process.
The Progressive Congress News is basically a publicly available amalgam of what is found on the desktop of adept Twitter users interested in the selected policy areas. You can get the live feed of this information by doing the following:
1. Create a TweetDeck column based on my list of Progressive Congress News Twitter feeds. You can find the list through this link: @StrandedWind/pcnf. That format, with the username, a slash, and the list name is shorthand used in most Twitter applications - use it instead of the full URL.
- Create a TweetDeck column based on my list of Progressive Congress News editors. You can find the list through this link: @StrandedWind/pcnfeditors. Again, use the text I provided for the link as the shorthand for the list rather than the full URL.
- Create a TweetDeck column based on my list of House & Senate committees. You can find the list through this link: @StrandedWind/committees. As with the others, @StrandedWind/committees is the shorthand most Twitter applications will expect.
- I'm very active on Twitter and I make it a point to punch through the electronica and get into phone contact with fellow activists. I have direct relationships with maybe fifty or sixty of the top Progressive Twitterati and about a dozen of them I interact with on a daily basis. They're the right most of my first four columns in TweetDeck and I can call on them for quick answers, longer research projects, or outbound messaging. If you're going to do more than just watch things you should be developing a list like this for yourself.
Now you can see the messages that will lead to the daily news for Congressional staff, the back channel discussion that goes into making those decisions, what various Congressional committees are doing, and you've got a place for your own personal influencers and their back channel discussion.
Those four columns are what I see as soon as I get into TweetDeck, ahead of all else. If you get more columns that fit on the screen you get a big slide bar at the bottom. If keep another set of four key columns at that end of the slider:
- Direct messages
- current mentions and RTs of me
- a private list I keep of everyone who has ever mentioned or RT'd me
- My overall following list, now 1,200+ people
Between legislation and general Twitter access I have other columns for things I'm monitoring. This changes weekly as new issues arise and old ones pass from public discussion.
Right now I have four columns in the middle that are election related. Once 11/2/2010 is out of our hair this will get turned to watching hashtags associated with specific legislation. So I have my very specific stuff for monitoring and influencing legislation on the left end of the slider, no pun intended. The middle is the topic of the moment based on hashtags. The right side is personal contact, my public presence, a broader, lower affinity network of possible supporters, and then finally the 1,200+ people that I believe to be the core of the Progressive Twitterati.
If you go looking one of the things you'll notice about that core is that many of the rock stars of the blogosphere are pointedly not present. Some of them have large, low affinity networks, basically an extension of the virtual podium blogging already affords them. The blogosphere is rightly criticized for having produced many self promoting prima donnas and attendant with these inflamed, tender egos are all the usual problems one finds in organizations driven by personality rather than principle.
Twitter's open, egalitarian environment doesn't really lend itself to the sort of aggregation, control, and self aggrandizement the blogosphere displays. I arrived late to the Twitter party, set up a pro bono tech support operation for those who appeared to be doing useful things, and I've displaced many of those who were viewed as leaders a year ago. While I was first to say and do these things, the important thing to understand here is that my day job involves business continuity planning - we document what we're doing, we back up our systems, we cross train people, and we act more like a disciplined startup than a garage band that just got its big break.
The culture of the Progressive twitteverse is fundamentally different than that of the blogosphere, despite the large amount of overlap seen. If you're one of frustrated professional masses that aren't getting a lot of traction by blogging you may well find a sweet spot with Progressive Congress News or one of the other brewing social media based organizing efforts. You can easily find me on Twitter as @StrandedWind and I'd be happy to talk with you about your particular interests, then make some introductions ...