So thanks Liz and thanks Frank Gathering for flying me down from the frozen wasteland that is Canada. Where Canadians are thinking about you, our progressive friends here in the US, with a fair amount of concern since the election. But I have hope because I’m working week in and week out with folks campaigning for social justice and fighting to make the US a better place. I know there’s a lot of work to do these days but I’m so inspired by the amount of mobilization and energy that has just happened in the past year. Seriously, I mean mountains have been moved here. And I mean that being said, we can definitely use more power for the progressive advocacy sector to get the job done even more in 2018. So allow me to share my geeky passion with you here and I hope that it will be part of the puzzle for building more progressive power this year. Here in the US but also across the world. So for the past 20 odd years, my focus in my career has been on how digital and networked culture changes the way that social change campaigning happens. And I’m particularly obsessed with how campaign innovation happens because right now there’s some like upstarts and early adopters like 350.org like indivisible since the election like Movimento Cosece fighting for DACA that are really ramping up fast, scaling really efficiently and kicking some serious butt. But there’s also a lot of other groups and other causes that are just as worthy where they haven’t quite figured out how to move so fast and how to kick as much butt. So the question is how can we spread campaign innovation more evenly throughout the progressive advocacy sector. So I’m going to tell you a couple of stories of how I’ve observed campaign innovation happening across the world. Despite its clunky name, this campaign is really quite amazing. The support don’t punish campaign is a campaign that fights for better drug policies, more humane drug policies across the world. Which is really like the direct opposite of the war on drugs which some world leaders still think is a good idea. But anyways, from a campaign geek perspective, here’s what I think is really cool about this campaign. Last year, they managed to pull off actions in over 200 cities across the world. And this campaign is only five years old. So it’s gone from zero cities to over 200 cities in just five years, which is already pretty impressive. And those events across the world, they’re all run through distributed organizing. Which means that central staff set up a digital toolkit, they give some support through communications, but really local leaders, volunteers and supporters pick up the stuff and totally organize their local events and run the show locally in their cities across the world. Which is innovative and super efficient. And just to show you how efficient that is, the central staff that are managing this network of over 200 cities participating, those are just five people. Based in London that run the whole show. And those five people are not crackerjack campaigners or like high flying consultants that were flown in to do this thing. They’re like young policy wonks, working for the International Drug Policy Consortium. So how did those young policy wonks pull off such an amazing campaign? So I spoke to Jamie Bridge, one of the organizers there. And he told me that they based the campaign after having seen the Robin Hood Tax Campaign roll out across the UK. And for those who haven’t heard of it, the Robin Hood Tax Campaign was kind of like a UK offshoot of Occupy. It was a campaign to fight the financial sector excesses. And it was also set up and run through distributed organizing. The campaign idea was offered through a website and spread around. But people would basically take the idea and set up their local events across the UK. And it was very successful. So the International Drug Policy folks looked at that campaign and basically modeled their Support Don’t Punish campaign on the Robin Hood Tax Campaign. Which is cool and but really not as easy as it sounds. This is like reverse engineering something where you look at a model that’s out there, you figure out exactly how it works, you break down the pieces. And then you’re confident enough to build out a whole new campaign. You’re confident enough that you’ve got the recipe right to build a real campaign and deploy it into the world with resources. So that takes an enormous amount of guts and really is not something that most campaigners and other groups around the world are ready to do. So I’ll give you another story, the Stapodani campaign, which is in my view like an example of forward engineering. So building a campaign based on a model drawn from best practices but that has already been put together. So it’s really one step easier than what Support Don’t Punish did. So the backstory here is that in 2016, my colleague Jason Mogus and I, we did research into what made over 50 of the world’s top advocacy campaigns successful. So a lot of these campaigns were in the US but some from around the world. Because they were successful, we wanted to break them down and see if there were any common practices or common strategies that lay behind these campaigns to try to like surface a recipe that could be used by other advocacy campaigners to build new campaigns. So the result of all this research was that yes, we did find a common pattern and that pattern was broken down into four principles. So the short version of that is that all of these successful campaigns opened up to people power and let their supporters lead and take on more responsibilities like distributed organizing, like the distributed organizing model I talked about. They were also like often groups that worked across networks and across movements to build synergy around their causes. And then there were two centrally planned areas that most campaigns shared strengths in. One was really good cause framing and storytelling. And then running a tight ship and doing a lot of testing and data based campaign performance stuff and checking out how you’re doing and adapting on the fly. So those were the common elements to the successful campaigns. We broke it down into this report and then we took this report on the road and presented it at different places. And Jason went to the 2016 Netroots Nation conference here in the US and in the crowd were some Australians who listened to the panel on the report and the directed network campaigning model and they said, that is what we need to build our new climate campaign on. A campaign to stop the world’s biggest new planned coal project in Australia. And so Jason was basically invited to join their campaign design team and together they built out this new campaign based on this model that had been extracted from all of these successful campaigns. And a year since the Stapodani campaign is launched, it’s really become quite a powerful campaign. In fact, you could say it’s like Australia’s most powerful advocacy campaign at the moment. There are groups all over the country starting up local actions. The NGOs are involved in our amplifying everything and there’s an explosion of creative energy happening. And most importantly, all this people power leveraged by the Stapodani campaign has actually changed the politics around the mine, which used to be kind of a done deal because Australia is like a fan of coal like Trump. But now it’s like the project is actually in danger thanks to this campaign. That’s cool. But just pulling back to campaign innovation. What can we learn from the Stapodani campaign and the Sport Don’t Punish campaign? Well, my view is that those campaigns, they both based their campaign design on the successful practices of a previous campaign or several campaigns that rolled out in real life. So these models based on successful best practices, I like to call them blueprints because they’re kind of like a rough architecture that’s solid enough because it’s based on stuff that worked out there in the world. But it’s also open enough to accommodate adaptation and change. And it would be great if we could release more blueprints like this out into the world. So as it happens, I’m working with a group of awesome campaigners, some folks from ACLU and Indivisible here in the US, but folks from Canada and Australia and the UK. And we are working together. We live on Google Docs. We’re putting together best practices and seeking what campaigners want answered and trying to build out blueprints to help accelerate social change. So those of you who are interested in this, I’d love to see you in the dissect session I do afterwards where I’ll dig into this further. And thanks Frank for giving me a chance to geek out with you all and look forward to one-on-one conversations the next couple of days.