Change to Event Page Management on Collective Action

Posted at Tue 19 July 2011 03:16PM

by Rosie Williams

Brenton has been working very hard to bring us more features at Collective Action and there has been a change in how events are added to the system. In the past, events could be added by anyone as there was no membership system in place but only I had the authority to edit them once added to the system.

Now that we have a membership system we have tied event submission to being a member. This means that if you want to add an event to the Collective Action database you need to signup for a Membership. You get your own Profile page where you can save searches and events to it and sign up for Twitter reminders from @colactreminders.

All of this is free so nothing has changed in that regard. It is just that now you can manage your own event rather than trying to do it through me. You add an event by clicking on the 'Add Event' link on your Profile page. It goes to me for approval (to stop bots/spammers) and the event is then listed on your profile page so that you always know where to find it. You can then edit it any number of times if circumstances change and you need to update it.

Membership also allows you to set your search of the site in your own timezone as every event is now specific to the timezone of a state capital and you can also set your location to only retrieve events close to your chosen location.

Bringing in all these changes has caused a few glitches now and then such as having to re-geocode every single location based event in order to add the weather widget to the event show pages. This has given Google Maps the latitude (pardon the pun) to play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey with some of our events, which I'm slowly but surely correcting over time. Adding timezones also meant I had to go through and manually change all 650+ events to individual timezones so there have been lots of repetitive mundane tasks for me in supporting these upgrades!

Please take the time to add your favourite events to the system but do yourself the favour of checking first to ensure the event has not already been added. If you want to take over an event previously added by someone else then let me know at collective_action hotmail.com or @collectiveact and when your event comes through I can delete the existing entry.

  

Twitter reminders added to Collective Action

Posted at Sun 26 June 2011 06:27PM

by Rosie Williams

Now that we have the option of signing people up for their own customisable Member/Profile pages on Collective Action we have begun adding new features.

You can use your profile page to set a timezone that you want events to display in when you are signed in and search Collective Action. You can also set a location that you want to use to filter results.

We have introduced the option to save searches to your Member/Profile page so that you don’t have to keep doing the same search whenever you vist the site. You can also save specific events to your personal page.

If you have a Twitter account you can enter your Twitter username in the box provided on the Profile edit page and you will receive a reminder to your Twitter account an hour prior to each saved event.

You can change your Profile information at any time to alter your timezone or location filters and you can delete saved searches and saved events at any time.

Hopefully Brenton our busy developer will find time to pretty up the Profile pages soon. We are also looking forward to introducing an interface between Collective Action and our users so that you can give feedback/get support and make suggestions or feature requests. This interaction will be a focal point of Collective Action where we believe users should have a say in how the site is developed and direct access to our developer.

Personal Time Zone Option added to Collective Action

Posted at Fri 17 June 2011 03:51PM

By Rosie Williams

Over coming weeks we are rolling out a raft of extra features on Collective Action set to make the site much more useful to members and non-members alike. Our new time zone feature will get its first real run this weekend with the End Live Export Rallies on Saturday 18 June and the End Mandatory Detention Rallies on Sunday 19th.

As can be seen from the End Live Export Rallies, all rallies around Australia are set to begin at mid day. The new time zone feature added to Collective Action provides for the issues raised for events which occur across different time zones. In reality 12 midday in Perth is 2pm in the Eastern states with Adelaide & Darwin half an hour behind AEST. Collective Action is now set up to deal with these time differences from wherever you are viewing our site.

There are two options for time display on Collective Action events, one is the version you see if you are not a 'member' of Collective Action. The other is the 'logged-in' version which allows you to set the time zone you wish to view events in.

If you are a member you can also set a location which will filter your future searches of Collective Action database to those occuring at that location however non-members can also filter searches manually using the interface.

For non-members/logged-out users, Collective Action events are listed in their local time zone and also Canberra/Australian Eastern Standard Time which is particularly useful with global events. You can watch a Perth event from Sydney in real time because the system shows you the time in AEST(Canberra time) as well.

 

  

People who sign-up with Collective Action are able to set the time zone in which they want to view events so that events are shown 'in your local time'- the time zone of your choosing. This zone can be changed at any time.

  

 

Our site statistics show that people really enjoy watching evens happen through live tweeting so the added information giving time zone differences makes it just that much easier to keep your finger on the pulse!

Not a Tar-pot in sight but plenty of red balloons!

Posted at Wed 08 June 2011 04:51PM

My Day at the Equal Pay Day Rally Canberra

by Rosie Williams

It was a cold but sunny day on June 8 in Canberra for the National Action Day for Equal Pay. I was exhausted from all the latest but thought the sun might make it a nice day out to do my bit for equal pay for government community workers, a predominantly female sector.

Melbournians tweeted live at here and the Canberra page was shared here and trended locally.

Having recently put together this Wikipedia article on the contributions of Broken Hill women to the union battles of the late 1800's, particularly the 1892 Broken Hill Miners' Strike which I also contributed, I was particularly keen to find out if Australia would also support our women workers in their fight for equal pay.

I decided it might be a nice day for a walk so parked at the National Library Australia to walk across Commonwealth Avenue bridge to the Legislative Assembly on the other side of Lake Burley Griffin. I lost some of my momentum as I approached the bridge in bitingly cold wind so I hunkered down and tried to let the freezing wind blow over my head and turned my iPod up to distract me from the fact that I felt like I was growing icicles on my nose!

I got to the Legislative Assembly quite early so headed across to Maccas for a hot coffee. Hot was the word. It was so hot that I took one sip and nearly spat it across the room as it nearly burned the taste right out of my mouth!

A couple of hardy campaigners spotted on the way to the rally.

Wanting to delay my return to the winter cold, I spent some minutes trying on various hats and settled on a hippy looking knitted beany and headed back across the road. By now the rally had begun and I was pleased to see a very colourful crowd on such a cold Canberra day.

After some brief but well received speeches we were given our marching orders and the crowd turned tail and began the short march across London Circuit to the mall chanting 'What do we want?' Equal Pay! 'When do we want it?' Now!

My favourite part of the rally was marching through the Canberra Centre chanting to the astonishment (and support) of shoppers and the bemusement of their security. Motorists did get a bit toey at the crossing on Bunda St as the rally went through and tried to push through the end of the rally. I guess some people don't quite understand the concept of a public march.

We rallied in front of Senator Humphrey's office on Bunda St despite having been informed earlier that the representative of the people would be absent for our visit. The protest leaders did have their letter and supporting material accepted at the office to murmers of 'lucky us!' from the assembled crowd.

Haven't had so much fun for ages despite latest Bureau of Meterology observations informing me that the apparent temperature this afternoon in Canberra as 3 degrees below zero!

What is Collective Action?

Posted at Sun 05 June 2011 03:02PM

by Rosie Williams

I thought I'd give a bit of background to what Collective Action is and is not in the Australian political landscape.

Collective Action is a new web site which lists Australian political, community and cultural events which can be submitted by anyone free of charge. Collective Action is supported by the Twitter account @CollectiveAct and to date, most of the promotion of the events listed with Collective Action has been done using Twitter. (This may be expanding soon to other sources).

Collective Action is not a walled garden like so many of the Facebook campaign pages that I come across - everyone on the net can see Collective Action events pages and read the live tweets on each issue without being a member of any social networking group.

It is important to understand what Collective Action is not. Collective Action is not in and of itself a political or lobby group like GetUp! GetUp! is well known for choosing issues its members submit and by raising funds from their membership base to run mass media campaigns to advocate these causes. We all know how successful GetUp! has been and I doubt any of us would want to return to the pre GetUp! days.

I expect that due to the investment in each GetUp! campaign, they must select a small number of issues to support at any one moment. You can see how this contrasts with the hundreds of issues and events listed at Collective Action.

Simon Sheikh is a well known Australian face taking on the issues selected by GetUp! and advocating for them. In doing so, for the sake of credibility GetUp! can only stand on one side of an issue.

Collective Action does not take this approach. While the vast majority of events listed with Collective Action may be described as progressive, there is no rule about what side of the issue an event must take in order to be included on Collective Action. Collective Action does take care not to support anything likely to put the entire database at risk legally and not to support corporate interests.

However our guiding principle here must be respect for freedom of speech and strengthening democracy and as such is in a position to support events from completly opposing views at times. I believe everyone is entitled to support in their efforts to be heard and I see my job as magnifying people's voices, whether or not they reflect my personal opinion. Having said this, most events would be described as progressive and ethical because this reflects the values of most activists and have become increasingly mainstreamed to the point where I believe that Collective Action does represent mainstream thinking rather than any radical fringe.

Anyone can start a campaign here at Collective Action just by becoming a member at this page. Once signed up and logged in you will find the 'Add Event' link on your Member Profile page. This takes you to a form where you add your event url, detail, location, time/date and a search term or Twitter hashtag for the display window. You can edit these details at any time.

Once you click 'Update Event' at the foot of this form your page is create and you can see it immediately to check for errors. From here your event is then approved by Collective Action and enters the database. You can update it as necessary from your Member Profile page where it will be listed. There is no limit on the number of events you can add to the system but each will be individually approved by Administration.

Our aim is to provide support in the early stages before a web site is up etc which can be very important with overnight events such as natural or political disasters! Our pages are also popular during rallies when people are live tweeting from events. Our current rank in Sydney is #1499 which is not far behind GetUp and our Google Analytics tell us that in the past six months we've had over 22,000 page views from 10,000 unique visitors to the site with with about 2000 of these coming from the recent SlutWalk rallies. We've arrived!

We aim to introduce some important new features to the site over coming weeks which will make the site much more useful still as we struggle to keep up with the huge number rallies expected around Australia in coming weeks.

If you can't get to a rally, but care enough to do something don't forget the list of activism meetings around Australia that you can search by issue, location & date.

Congrats to organisers of SlutWalk & National Day of Climate Action rallies for getting Australia moving!

Colder weather brings out the fire in the belly of Australian democracy

Posted at Sun 29 May 2011 04:41PM

by Rosie Williams

The weather might be cooling down but the political climate in Australia is heating up with rallies on so many different issues. May saw the Child Beauty Paegant and Stop HRL rallies as well as the beginnings of the SlutWalk phenomenon in Australia.

SlutWalk has been a big event here at Collective Action with the SlutWalk event pages becoming the most highly shared on the site to date and the SMH linking into our page for the Melbourne event (see article by-line).

You may have noticed our new feature of embedded Twitter feeds based on the relevant hashtag/search term so that people can view live tweets from the rallies in real time without being logged into Twitter.

One note I have for campaign organisers is that many of the Facebook campaign pages that are passed to me on the internet are unable to be viewed by anyone who is not a logged-in Facebook member. This is the message that I often get when I click on campaign pages which are listed on Facebook.

It seems to me that when recruiting the public for campaign actions it is helpful for everyone to be able to see the information. This is one of the reasons events are added to Collective Action - so that the information is available to everyone and not just Facebook members.

The month of June brings us more SlutWalk marches at Canberra, Adelaide and Sydney; the National Day of Climate Action rallies on June 5, the Equal Pay rallies across Australia and the Melbourne rally to End Mandatory Detention.

If that is not exciting enough, I'm looking forward to the addition of some long-awaited features to our site including membership log-in so that we can save the event search results to our own individual page here on Collective Action as well as a raft of other upgrades and new features.

I look forward to all of this and congratulate everyone on their respective campaigns and rallies. If you can't get to a rally don't forget you can find a regular meeting to attend by searching for your issue and location here at Collective Action. Also don't miss the regular Twitter chats that are a great way to meet new friends and contacts.

Collective Action - What a fortnight!

Posted at Tue 18 January 2011 04:45PM

by Rosie Williams

I thought I'd write a wrap up of Collective Actions first couple of weeks and what a fortnight it has been! We decided to launch in January as the logical time for an events database. There had been recent floods but the tragedy that unfolded in the first weeks of 2011 provided me with some great lessons in the potential of social media and also the role of Collective Action in this mix.

Having spent the weeks prior to launch choosing a diverse range of people & organisations to follow, with the unfolding of the QLD flooding I found I had chosen well when I saw it all come together.

My following of disability advocate organisations meant I was able to deduce why we were seeing Auslan interpreters at press conferences, having heard from disability organisations I follow on Twitter that their National Relay Headquarters had interrupted service due to the flood.

My recent following of animal rights/welfare groups had made me realise there would be pets, livestock and wildlife also in need of rescue services so I added the RSPCA Fundraiser to the Fundraiser/Rescue category on Collective Action which includes info/links to animal rescue. The effects of the flood on animals also brought to mind the many wildlife survey info pages hosted on Collective Action including the recent ABC experiment with crowdsourcing, the ABC Feral Month & the Victorian Wildlife Health Events Survey, both of which seem useful in the current context.

We played our role in getting the message out about registering with Volunteering Qld which I had incidentally already been following and was able to swap to their alternative url when the load got too heavy on their server. When the local politerati decided to host a fundraiser for the flood victims I was able to offer a hasty event page for #wonksforqld host Jason Wilson (@jason_a_w). Unsurprisingly, the flood related events in the system have been the most highly shared in our first fortnight of existence- events which literally sprang up overnight.

This is just what I had in mind when I created Collective Action so it is somewhat eery to see the point of this events database put into practice with such incredible speed. It has been an exhausting time for everyone involved in the floods and an emotionally exhausting time for the whole country as we watched floods sweep across three states even while a bushfire destroyed homes on the other side of the country, hot on the heels of the refugee disaster occurring off Christmas Island.

During the week I had the privilege to join Twitter chats on the topic of Using media in disaster/crisis situations, a global mental health chat and am looking forward to tonight's agchatoz which will focus on the floods.

I launched the site with the blog post about food security, drought, flood and farming. Two weeks and many more devastating floods later, having seen people in Australia isolated from food sources, harvests destroyed or stuck in convoys on flooded roads it shows that the idea that even Australians can suffer food shortages and that food security is an issue we are going to have to face sooner or later. Perhaps we should use this as a wake-up call?

    

Image is by Wayne Eddy & is in the public domain at http://lgam.wikidot.com/flooding-photo-no-1

Developing Collective Action - the project

Posted at Sat 08 January 2011 02:51PM

Today I wanted to post generally about the development experience of putting together Collective Action which was done over a 3 month period. Brenton (my son & developer for Coupa Corporation) did the development of the site in his spare time which meant that development was done in short bursts every other weekend. Despite us getting out of step with each other, I was surprised with how efficient the development was. However we did have many disputes over usability & design questions.

I originally considered putting together a directory of Australian lobby groups. I looked at old hard-copy books and thought a database would solve a lot of the problems found in books getting quickly out of date but I soon realised that the number of lobby groups is an infinite question considering that anything with a web page can be considered a lobby effort. There was no useful way to distinguish between what was or was not a lobby 'group' since the advent of the internet and the sheer number of potential groups struck me as an impossible task to create or maintain.

I was particularly concerned with pages becoming out of date as I often came across what appeared to be abandoned pages put up by people that did not seem to have been updated for many years. I also felt it would be a fairly static type of web site that did not provide much interaction so I settled instead on the idea of an events database aimed at the 'conscious consumer' demographic, that is, people who are politically aware and involved in community - or who would like to be.

To clarify what we bring to the project, I did a course in CSS/XHTML scraping in a HD with Curtin University some years ago (after my original BA in Sociology & Welfare Certificate) and am more of a 'big-picture' person whereas Brenton, who scored almost 100% in every programming unit he did at uni (then at the tender age of 12-15) is a lot more precise and tends to focus on the details. Thus Brenton and I compliment one another but this comes with the obvious rider that we will often come at a problem from different angles!

Brenton decided to develop the database in Ruby on Rails using an agile methodology and opted not to use test-driven development due to time constraints. The agile process did have it's benefits in that I was able to create schemas for the data while entering the data into the database so that the structure could be changed during development to reflect the needs of the data rather than forcing the data to conform to our preconceived notions.

The kinds of questions we had to answer to create the database were how to create a search interface that could handle the many axes I decided were helpful. Search by category was fairly straight-forward (eg Consultations, Meetings) although we ended up conflating many categories to shorten the list.

I found this usability guide in my Twitter feed (sorry can't recall the Tweep) and really liked the tagged entries that allow you to search by related terms/phrases.

I decided to apply this idea to our database to tag our events according to the type of issue eg indigenous, business-industry, debate-discuss. I felt the benefit of this system is that it brings out the relationships between different issues. A user can do a search on 'globalisation' and see the relationships with free-fair trade, consumerism-shop, the environment, health and so on. From a sociological and political perspective I feel these relationships are paramount to our understanding of social isssues and our solutions to them.

I started off using synonyms but it became obvious that using multiple tags meaning the same thing would produce too many terms to be effective. Instead I created a schema of terms which were inclusive of all the likely topics I anticipated would be entered into the database. This list was still very long so I conflated related terms such as censorship-free speech or abuse-bullying rather than have them function as separate tags.

Now with 800 events the set of issue-tags seems to be working without me having to add new tags. Issue tags can be added together to search for example, for mental health + youth and can also be filtered by all other criterium: category, date, location & on/offline.

This gives the database great flexibility in finding results, however it does make for a complex interface. The site is in beta with more functionality anticipated in the future so all feedback is of interest to us. We hope to expand accessiblity with future releases as we simply did not have the time for that pre January 1 launch.

Developers might be interested in how we solved the question of Geo-coding the states. We also decided to include full-text search using Thinking Sphinx. Issues with deployment led Brenton to provide 2 patches to Thinking Sphinx.

Farmers Markets- the big effect of small choices

Posted at Mon 27 December 2010 06:00PM

As Australian shoppers become more concerned with avoiding climate change, an awareness of 'food miles' has renewed interest in local growers markets. The first study into food miles was carried out by CERES 2008 in Melbourne who estimated that a basket of 29 items had travelled in excess of 70,000km to reach our plates. This has obvious implications for climate change.

Our local growers markets are seen as one solution to this problem where we can buy produce fresh from our local farmers, much like people did in the past and still do in developing countries. But how do we know that it is our local produce that is for sale at the market? How can we know that this produce is genuinely local and not imported?

This is where the Victorian Farmers' Markets Association (VFMA) accreditation scheme comes into play. According to Choice Magazine, the lack of legislation defining a 'Farmers Market' means that up to this point, produce sold at markets has been regulated through the voluntary adoption of 'best practice guidelines' promoted by the Australian Farmers' Markets Association (AFMA), backed by a 'dob in' policy against wrongdoers. This is about to change, at least for Victorian consumers.

The Victorian Farmers' Markets Association (VFMA) recently received government funding to implement an official accreditation system across Victoria. The first markets were accredited in late 2010 with many more to follow as the scheme is rolled out. To achieve accreditation, farmers markets in metropolitan areas must have at least 90% of their stall holders accredited with VFMA with the requirement for regional farmers markets being 75%. To date 400+ producers and 16 markets have so far been accredited. You can find out more information about the accreditation scheme at VFMA Accreditation page.

It should be noted that organic produce is not always sourced locally due to its limited availability and this is why organic food markets are not always accredited.

The farmers markets listed on Collective Action fall into the following categories:

• -those endorsed by the Australian Farmers' Markets Association only;
• -those both endorsed by AFMA and VFMA but not yet officially accredited by VFMA;
• -those endorsed by AFMA & officially accredited by VFMA.
• -markets with organic produce

Please find your local market but for the coming weeks check that the market website or VFMA to ensure trading hours are not changed due to holidays or flood.

Tomorrow When the Famine Began

Posted at Sun 26 December 2010 10:18AM

Food Security - The Big Picture

by Rosie Williams

'Civilization and anarchy are only seven meals apart.'

(Spanish proverb in Cribb 2010)

John Marsden's Tomorrow When the War Began tells the tale of an invasion of Australia by unnamed forces and the ethical questions faced by a group of teenagers forced overnight to become soldiers. A more precient story might ask what might bring invaders to the shores of Australia and what are the implications for each of us as we face decisions that might one day lead to just such a scenario?

The Australian government recently released a report into food production which details the many problems faced by our farming sector and the likely impact of these on our future food security. With widespread destruction from recent floods across much of Australia, the issue of food security and its relationship with climate change has never been more pertinent.

The QLD floods have pushed up meat prices, while ex-tropical Cyclone Tasha has caused an expected $1 billion damage bill and More than $3 billion is now estimated to be scratched off the value of the wheat, barley and canola harvest... The Australian (10 Dec). So just what is food security and what should be done about it?

Food security centers on rising populations and decreasing arable land as it is degraded by overuse, climate change or put to competing uses. Food security is a more immediate problem in poorer countries where there have been riots over the sharp rise in food costs and even regime change over the sale of agricultural land to foreign interests who are also struggling to meet their own needs (Life Matters 2010).

Australia is the world's second largest producer of red meat and feeds approximately 3 times our current population with the food we produce. The demand for red meat exports is expected to double by 2050 (Commonwealth of Australia 2010). Any decrease in the amount of food produced in Australia or increase in our own population is seen to also be a risk to international stability. Most recently we have seen the interest in land use come into question in debate about population growth targets in Australia (Dick Smith 2010).

In Australia prime arable land is under threat from mining interests, bio-fuels and foreign investment in addition to our practice of re-purposing arable land for housing estates. Risks to the Australian farming industry include climate change and natural disasters, domination of the retail market by supermarket chains as well as industry restructuring from family farms to investor-owned business (including increasing levels of foreign ownership). All these factors are considered as potential threats to Australia's food security.

Nowhere is the role of coming to grips with a diversity of views more prescient than in this issue of food security. Fossil fules are both a challenge for the environment as well as our ability to produce enough food to feed the world. If author Julian Cribb is to be believed, food and energy scarcity are the underlying factors behind an increasing range of global conflict.

Whether it is the invasion of Iraq explained as a fight for oil security (Brendan Nelson, 2007 ABC ) or the increased roll out of CSG mining in the hope of reducing reliance on oil producing countries, food security is the silent player at the table.

Read The Big Effect of Small Choices to find out how you can support Australian farmers with your everyday choices.