Counter-swarms

Occupy Wall Street organizers -- to further protest their eviction earlier today from Manhattan's Zuccotti Park by New York City riot police -- are stepping up their scheduled global "Day of Action" rally set for Thursday throughout New York City and in other cities where Occupy encampments have been shuttered in recent hours and days.

In a flash rally today attended by hundreds of Occupy protesters along 7th Avenue in midtown Manhattan near the failed Lehman Brothers' former world headquarters building, the movement's organizers asked passersby to "join the Global Movement for Economic and Social Equality and the 99 Percent" for a Day of Action on November 17th. Events that day will include a 7 a.m. "Resist Austerity" rally at Zuccotti Park just before the opening of the New York Stock Exchange "to confront Wall Street with the stories of people on the front lines of economic injustice." Then, at 3 p.m., organizers have scheduled simultaneous rallies at 16 central subway stops in all five NYC boroughs "to listen to a singular story from one of our hardest-hit and most inspirational neighbors." At 5 p.m., Occupy supporters will move to Foley Square near Wall Street to "listen to stories, a gospel choir, a marching band" and "march to our city's bridges to demand that we get back to work rebuilding our country's infrastructure." The flier urges participants to "make it a musical march. ...Bring your songs, your voice, your spirit." [For more information, search N17Event on Facebook.]

Today's flash rally came hours after New York City police, acting on the orders of NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, arrested 200 Occupy Wall Street protesters in the wee hours as part of a long-planned eviction strategy aimed to clear Zuccotti Park -- the symbolic epicenter of the global Occupy movement. The 1 a.m. eviction was part of a coordinated crackdown by authorities in multiple cities, from Zurich to Portland to London and Calgary after two months of demonstrations in city parks and squares across the country and in cities around the world. In a morning news conference hours after police moved in overnight, NYC's Mayor Bloomberg said the city wanted to clear Zuccotti Park for cleaning but that it had intended to let protesters back in later -- provided they wouldn't live there and re-occupy the space with tents and tarps. But the city decided to keep the park closed when its attorneys were served with a Temporary Restraining Order mid-morning against the evictions. Zuccotti Park remained empty and closed for most of the rest of the day, pending the outcome of a court hearing on the TRO and the legality of the city's actions against the protesters. [ At about 5:30 p.m., the judge upheld the city's ban on tents and tarps, and protesters moved back into Zuccotti Park, without camping gear.]

The raid against Occupy Wall Street came just days after similar actions to break up Occupy Portland and Occupy Oakland-- and a half-day before Occupy Toronto, Occupy Calgary, Occupy Zurich and Occupy London were similarly confronted by authorities. Occupy Los Angeles spokesperson PJ Davenport told The Huffington Post that: "The timing of the evictions of occupiers in Portland, Oakland and New York City are no coincidence. Sources at Occupy LA have received notice from our information networks that the proverbial hammer is coming down and that a nationwide effort is underway to close all occupations. Here at Occupy LA, despite our friendly relationship with City Council and the LAPD, we believe that it is a short matter of time before we are asked to leave."

Occupy press spokeswoman Dana Balicki told WNYC Radio Host Brian Lehrer on his daily radio call-in show today that Occupy organizers would not be deterred by the evictions. "The messaging here is that we are undeterred, our spirits are high and our resolve is unbeatable. ...We are letting the City of New York, Mayor Bloomberg and the world know that we are not going anywhere and that you can't simply throw an idea in a dumpster." Gideon Oliver, one of the lead attorneys representing the Occupy protesters, told Lehrer the crackdowns represent "a new form of represssive conduct. Unlike temporary, stationary rallies of the past, Occupy has created a 24/7 component and taken on messaging and communicative tactics that are unique, so to attack" the movement by clearing the parks they occupy for health and safety reasons "is clearly a pretext."

Meanwhile, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan told the BBC that leaders of 18 cities in which Occupy protesters had set up encampments coordinated their raids across the county. "I was recently on a conference call with 18 cities across the country who had the same situation," Quan said.

On Monday, the Canadian magazine Adbusters, which conceived of the movement -- and apparently aware of the multi-city crackdowns yet to come -- said the protesters should “declare victory” and head indoors to strategize. "OWS isn't a geographical place so much as it is an idea and an attitude," spokewoman Balicki said.

Watch this space for updates.

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Illustration, top: Day of Action poster by Occupy Wall Street.]

[Photos of Tuesday's Occupy Wall Street eviction, top, by Don Emmert of AFP-Getty Images, and below, by The Associated Press - both with permission.]

Gaming the System

It's called Armchair Revolutionary and it's the latest high-buzz social media play aiming to crowd-source social change -- only its cofounder, Ariel Hauter, says it is very different from the rest. He puts it simply. "The user experience for online social activism simply sucks," he says. "There's nothing fun" about click-and-give sites. "Why is the experience of activism online so uninspired?" he asks in one of five blog posts offered up this week as part of the site's beta launch.

It is time, Hauter says, for online giving to, well, get "stickier" -- to get less "slacktivist" and more location-aware, experiential, and engaging. Think armies of online gamers playing social games that help finance a series of short-term, "do good" projects over time. Started by the founders of The Hollywood Hill, a social change organization comprised of film, television, music, and gaming professionals in the Los Angeles area, Armchair Revolutionary is aiming to offer the public a chance to help micro-finance for-profit social ventures through its integration with Live Gamer, a micro-payment site. Armchair Revolutionary's advisers include the producer of Pulp Fiction, the producer of An Inconvenient Truth, the screenwriter of The Bourne Ultimatum, the producer of Electronic Arts' MySims and the president of 42 Entertainment, one of the best-known makers of alternate-reality games.

"Arm Rev" as it is otherwise known, reflects the cross-media diversity of its founders, combining the features of Facebook games such as FarmVille with social networking apps like foursquare (the mobile location service), and then throwing in micro-donation opportunities throughout. [Hauter says the goal is to eventually create large-scale "cause mobs" of gamers who can start crowd-sourcing activism in new and bigger ways, tapping not just into one kind of social medium, but into many at a time.] The payoff? Volume. Critical mass. "We are finally getting to a point [in the evolution of Web technologies] where we are able to tap into ... millions of people in a very viral way," Hauter says. ArmRev.org will be the platform for funding games-for-change, serious games, and alternative reality game projects developed by the Play4Change Lab, a collaboration between The Hollywood Hill and the University of Southern California's Games Institute. The site also will be the platform for funding documentary film projects developed by The Hollywood Hill.

Hauter says Arm Rev could take online fund-raising to the next level, pushing it beyond today's click-and-give one-offs to more engaged and sustainable crowd-funding communities. To test its ability to do this, Am Rev is launching with three projects, including a video game called "Make Waves" which incorporates sensors, simulation and augmented reality to promote cleaner and more sustainable waters. In this one, players "own" and maintain a 3-by-3-foot plot of the ocean, just as they would a virtual plot in FarmVille. A player's actions could help ease overfishing and pollution. Another project is called "End of Darkness." It is a game that brings users together to support, with micro-donations, three leading energy and micro-financing organizations -- E+Co, Grameen Foundation, and Selco India. Players work to finance the launch of the first publicly financed international clean energy company selling and servicing low-cost solar power kits to the world's poor. The project also invites leading thinkers to submit their projects for review.

Arm Rev advisor Robin Hunicke told ABC News earlier this week: "Blurring that boundary between science, activism and entertainment is what Armchair Revolutionary is all about."

What do you think? Can the combination of virtual worlds, online games and micro-fundraising via social networks help engage millions of new people around social causes in ways that weren't possible before? Is there something in this model that could be applied to the workplace and business teams working to achieve greater employee engagement and innovation?

Let us hear from you.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by Chris Gorgio for istock.com)

(This first posted on Justmeans.com and appears here with permission)

"Do" v. Think

At Stanford University's TEDx Silicon Valley conference this past Saturday, Nancy Lublin, CEO of the youth empowerment nonprofit, Do Something, said we have gone too far as a society lauding social entrepreneurs and other leaders — and not far enough celebrating the people who follow them.

"All movements are led by the people in the middle," Lublin told the Dec. 12 gathering. Lublin, who founded Dress for Success in 1997, has since helped to evolve Do Something, a New York City-based youth empowerment nonprofit, from a debt-ridden, stodgy group into a high-profile magnet for teens. Lublin says 90 percent of teens say they want to make a difference but only 23 percent actively volunteer. Do Something, she says, works to transform talk into action; the nonprofit draws more than 1 million hits each month to its Web site while spending millions in grant money to support young people with good ideas ready to launch or to scale.

Lublin says she believes that the social enterprise sector "spends most of its time and money on helping the 1 percent" of change-makers. Meanwhile, she says, most of the work that is impacting those in need is actually being done by the less-heralded or less-privileged 90 percent.

"We are now obsessed with creating the new at the expense of creating impact," she said. "We have been told that social enterprise will change the world but no -- impact will change the world. Changing something is what really matters, not simply that we have created something new. We don't need another new cancer organization; we need the 300 new cancer organizations [that already exist] to learn how to work together."

Lublin added: "Scale is not necessarily religion. It ought to be impact." She urged conferees to "give permission to people to join something" rather than to encourage them to create something new. "Nothing happens in social enterprise without smart, talented, innovative followers."

What do you think? Is this fair? Does the social enterprise movement pay too much attention to innovative visionaries and not enough to the people or teams implementing the sector's big ideas in the field? Why do you think so?

(Photo: Suzie Katz on Flickr)

(This post first appeared on Justmeans.com and is reprinted here with permission)

50 Social Media Tactics

From SlideShare [and out of the viral, cause-wired conversations now on Twitter] comes this useful bag of tricks for getting your group well-versed in the basics of social media:

50 Social Media Tactics for Nonprofits

View more presentations from Chad Norman.