OpEdNews - Diary: OEN To Start Empowering Strong, United Voices; Ideas For Petitions

The Occupy movement has made a decision, that for now, in it's early, embryonic stage, it's not going to make demands. But there are a lot of issues that are coming out at the general assemblies of the occupied territories. One way that Opednews.com can help get the word out about why people are occupying is to put out strong calls for policy change-- calls supported by lots of strong, united voices.

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Occupy Washington DC Occupiers photo by Rob Kall

We're going to start creating petitions and actions like petitions, where people sign up to send a message or take a stand to someone or some organization.

There's some technology involved and now, we have it.

At least initially, it will need to be set up by us at Opednews. So we need to get suggestions and then, we'll take the best ones and do the tech stuff necessary to enable them to be shared so they can go viral, hopefully.

To strengthen the petitions, we may use some of our contacts-- some of the leading writers for our site-- to prime the pump, so to speak.

So please either email me or post your ideas as comments.

Some can be very time sensitive and some can be "everygreens" issues that have been around for a long time.

Here are some of the reasons we're starting to do petitions and "tell them" actions:

Petitions are digital actions that engage our members and readers. They can be described as petitions or as letters that we are asking members to sign and then forward on to their friends, put on facebook, etc.

Why do it?

-to lead in seeking and calling for change and improvements that are consistent with progressive values

-to take initiative and actions that our members can participate in

-to engage our members.

-to build community

-to widen our reach

-to make more people aware of Opednews.com and what we do and stand for.

-to empower our readers and members.

-to build our member and subscriber base

I look forward to seeing your suggestions. This is a long term project, so we will not be doing them all at once. But we want to treat petitions the way we treat other content at OEN-- a bottom-up "We" project, that involves YOU our community.