DRAFT: Currently just a thought experiment.

89.17% of our members on myBO have unsubscribed to the email list, so we don't have an easy way of getting in touch with them to tell them what's going on -- meetups, the ad campaign, the new forums on getFISAright.net and so much more. We also don't have any easy way of asking them to sign up for a new, "much lower volume, we promise" announcement list. It's also time to start growing again: there are 23,000 members in our group who want to get FISA right; there are probably at least another million or more people on myBO who oppose telecom immunity and support the constitution, and we want to reach them too.

So it's time to roll up our sleeves and get to work, and do it the old-fashioned way (one-to-one contact) combined with a social networky technology (an event). We can probably get at least a couple hundred people to help to start, and that should be enough if we take advantage of the network structure. Here's an initial proposal, based on ideas and feedback from Manny, Aviva, and Sarah. Thoughts?

To start with, we're going to create an event, with a date two weeks or so out: "housewarming party/platform meeting", with the location jointly on getFISAright.net and myBO; the event's text will ask them to join us ongetFISAright.net (and also on Facebook and MySpace). We'll post the event in the myBO group, and then ask each of the people who are helping out to do one or more of three things each day:

I'd prefer a better 'hook'. The ideal would be an anti-McCain FISA ad, something to kick off an anti-McCain campaign. Another option, given that myBO does have some geographical searches (really not sure how easy or effective they are) , and that there are primaries coming up in highly populated states (FL, NY, NJ) , would be to connect to those primaries and get out word about the candidates.

Aviva

1) search for themselves in the myBO group directory, and send a message to the three closest people geographically to them on the "results" page they haven't sent a message to yet. the message will saying something like "hi, I'm from the Get FISA Right group", telling them briefly what's up, and inviting them turn their email settings back on (at least to digest) because we've switched to announce mode; mentioning the ad and asking them to check it out; and then asking them for help in this. members can send messages directly to their friends; otherwise, they can enclose the message as part of a friend invite. we'll provide example messages; hopefully most people will take the time to use your own language, rather than just cutting and pasting.

Question: how do we cut down on reinvitations? Without any control mechanism in place, a lot of the invitations go to people who have already accepted ... will the event help here?

2) forward the invite, or send a message, to three of their friends -- or people in their neighborhood

3) post the invite and send a message to one of the other groups they're in on myBO

We're giving three different options because different people are likely to want to go with different ones. Some people prefer not to send friend invites to strangers but love to talk to their friends; some people don't have a lot of friends or aren't in a lot of groups. This will also help make the outreach more effective by reaching a broader audience. There are 23,000 members in our group who want to get FISA right; there are probably at least another million or more people on myBO who oppose telecom immunity and support the constitution, so we want to reach them too.

We'll also ask people to give feedback daily using polls on getfisaright.net. This'll be an easy way for us -- and everybody else -- to understand what is/isn't working, and better model the likely results. [As a side effect, it'll also encourage people to participate in the discussion forums. A two-fer!] If people are logged into the dicussion forums, this is basically a three-click operation (follow the link to the poll, select choice, and submit), so with luck we'll get a decent response rate ... if not, oh well, no harm done.

Assumptions

1) the initial couple hundred people come from the message boards, the organizers' GFR google group, the myBO announce list, the new discussion list on google, the wiki, the list on getfisaright.net, and Facebook. we can reach at least 5000; our last call for digging got at least 500 people to help
2) we send out daily update with our progress, and possibly also with changed instructions as we learn; so for example, we might change the criteria in #1 to "the people above and below you on the page" instead of geographically
3) while the position on pages in myBO isn't randomly distributed, in practice it's got enough randomness for this to work

Network growth model (in progress)

four key factors are

• what percentage of people act by sending invitations each day. the original group is highly motiviated, and there are several easy ways to act, so we expect this to start as high as 50% Each individual person's only likely to do it a few times; then again, new members who decide to help are likely to help out a couple of times as well, so it probably stabilizes somewhere in the 20-25% area
• what percentage of people respond and how quickly. our invitation to sign the open letter right after the vote got a roughly 20% response rate in the first few days, and maybe another 5% or so after that so let's use that as a baseline: 10% respond the first day, 10% respond the second, 5% respond the third
• the reinforcements we get from new people discovering us as we start circulating the ad virally on YouTube and Facebook. some percentage of these sign up as members on myBO, getFISAright, MySpace, Facebook; some percentage of the new members decide to help.
  
• how many people get multiple reinvitations. is there a way to cut this down?

Hmm, this really should go in a spreadsheet ...