Proposal for a direct action plan

Hello tech group, this is Josh over in media.

One of the problems we have in media is that we can't get hard stats on... well on anything really! So I propose that we solve this problem with a questionnaire type deal. The questionnaire can help out a lot of the other groups as well, education group can figure out where people are the least knowledgeable, events planning can get a grasp for what occupants want to do, and media can get some answers to publicize to help clear the air on a lot of misconceptions.

Questions in mind would be things like;
-How much do you make (to clear up that we're all jobless)
-Do you think ALL corporations are evil (to clear up that we're not all against capitalism)
-Do you support Obama (to combat that pesky "Nobama" slogan)
-How many branches of federal government does America have? (To help education in where to focus).
-Etc

All would be multiple choice to give various degrees of Yay or Nay.
We could publish these findings on the occupyJacksonville.us page after every saturday GA meeting.
I feel having these kinds of figures would help us out immensely.

Why do I bring this to the Tech Group?

My idea is that I would need at least one member of tech willing to set up a laptop (just one for a prototype run, and preferably a windows client) at the GA for people to sit down and answer. Might suggest a bottle of purell too! I can personally make a quick and small application that would be used for the questionnaire and for calculating the statistics. Of course, this would require that the owner of the laptop trust me or their anti-virus program lol.

Anyone interested?

As I have stated, you are welcome to my hosting.
There are a ton of installers with free software available to us.
http://www.softaculous.com/softwares/polls
I have used lime survey before, it's ok, a bit of a pain to input, but not hard at all. Very flexible. If you want to try it out, pm me and I'll set one up for you. If you like it, you can save the database and install anywhere and just use your database so you don't have to redo shit!

Actually I just tried lime, and it needs a php module not installed, so I have to email my host and see if they can get on that, but it only takes seconds to put it up. This is a new thing, they just updated to this version a month ago. Check the others!

What kind of hosting platform do you have?

Does it allow virtual hosting?

I've got a lot of ideas for the website, I'm just trying to plan it out as much as I can before we start writing code.

I'm not sure how many people would be comfortable answering some of those questions Josh but as long as everything is optional then it shouldn't be a big deal.

I'll try to add some type of polling system into the web system to give us greater flexibility in our data mining and voting processes.

Well I was thinking this would be an optional questionnair that we could present to those physically attending the GA's. This would be an on going thing from week to week to see what kind of view points and demographics are being represented during the GA's. All questions are optional, default name field set to John Q. I think it would help to see the big picture, and perhaps motivate people of different perspectives to attend.

Geno wrote:What kind of hosting platform do you have?

It's a virtual host, mom and pop (husband and wife) out of england. The servers are in texas, I've had them since 2003 with only minor bumps, mostly due to the time difference. I have 32gb of space left and I doubt we would even dent the bandwidth here. They are pretty easy to deal with, no real restrictions other hosts have, I can do pr0n if I want, they don't care.

I have data from a class survey we did if you want to see an example of the metrics you get, I'm sure I saved it. There is a pretty good video or flash based demo of how to use it on the lime site. What is confusing is the types of questions, it can be anything from check box to essay. We sent it to our class database and asked for info about reuniting, I bailed out of it as I saw it going over the cliff. That is exactly what happened too! No REUNION for you!

Just wanted to pop in and say this is a great idea. I think the strength of this movement is that it is TRUE democracy and everyone's voice counts equally. This will become more apparent as we can all vote as a national collective on issues!

Why not print the questionnaires and pass them around? You might be able to reach more people than if you are doing it one at the time on a laptop... just sayin'...

When writing a questionnaire, you want to start with basic socio-demographic data: age, education, occupation, income, marital status, perhaps ethnicity and religiosity.

Then move to substantial questions.

Given that people will fill those standing up (if you go for questionnaires), you don't want open-ended questions - ease of filling them up + can be quickly entered into a data base, and you can get basic cross tabs and correlations easily (as opposed to qualitative research).

Bear in mind, that you need to interview quite a few people, for results to be of any significance.

Josh, the Media Group could get a bunch of mileage out of a questionnaire.

Is there some way we can hedge against ballot stuffing, if we have a printed questionnaires? We could stir up some shit with empirical results.

Hey, Crazy Lady, wonder if I met you Saturday ... Please check out our Occupy Jacksonville Art Group Meeting Facebook page. Hope to see you there.

I love the idea of printing too, I'll just need to loop another person from media in with a printer.

Crazycatlady, would you like to help create a legitimate questionnaire?

CrazyCatLady wrote:Why not print the questionnaires and pass them around?

Mainly because this is 2011 and we have computers. Aside from the cost and waste, this then requires more work to input and correlate data.

There is a great bullshit on polling. The data can be manipulated any way the pollster chooses depending on how the question is asked. If you want a particular answer, you form your question accordingly. It's online
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62rkSS6Y_7Y part one, part two probably has the best example.

This guy is amazing with numbers, the site is jumbled now, used to have unbelievable data.

Mainly because this is 2011 and we have computers.

Yes, you have ONE laptop so that you can interview one person at the time... so, what 10 people an hour at the best?
Plus, people answering might feel singled out... etc., etc.

Thanks for the youtube video.
But, I do have Ph.D. in sociology and actually teach research methods. If you prefer to learn it from the video, be my guest, but there is no reason to be snarky.

I don't believe doing it onsite is feasible. Most people will have internet access at some point, should have email addresses. A poll can easily be mass mailed, and the results come back in a spreadsheet. I am a wiseass, I do the same thing to my students taking notes on paper when we are on a computer. I didn't mean any disrespect, making a joke. Hopefully more people will join this board, most will not have a phd, and may want to see a nice video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWx6uA5aCrE

And yep, I like videos! Especially when they are smartasses.

I want all of you to help me with this.

This kind of debating is what I think is quintessential to success of this whole thing. CrazyCatLady and Dinahmoe, would you two like to help me create the questions to keep a fair and unbiased approach? I ask both of you to bring think up 10 questions, repeats are fine. I wanted to keep it small and quick if possible, so we can fiddle with what stays on the first one.

Zach, if you could, please see if you can secure someone with a printer to print these out? There's a team in media dedicated to printing, and a few on the sign up list have expressed their willingness to donate printing. How many would we need guys? 100 for a first round? IF we can get away with less, great, if we need more, please speak up! I failed statistics twice so I'm not going to pretend to know what a good sample size for our group would be.

We don't have to jump straight to the big leagues with this idea. Let's start small with paper questionnaires at a meeting, if we get positive results (good sample sizes, non-biased results, minimal claims of tampering with data, etc.) we can discuss getting it to larger and larger numbers.

Remember guys, this is week 3 of Occupy Jacksonville, we cannot hope to compete with the big boys using strictly volunteer level skills and resources. But we can get there by building these foundations one brick at a time.

VerbatimCat wrote:I ask both of you to bring think up 10 questions

What like math? What are you looking for? I'll pm you some questions later on today, or tonight. I'm out of town tomorrow.

Lol, you are a smart ass. I like it!

My goal is to create some statistics on the make up of the group in various areas; economic policies, social policies, government policies, or even the lack of answers to these questions (as all are optional). I think this would help to better show how diverse the representation of people are. Of course, this might work against us if everyone answers that they're all communists who want a proletarian revolt, but I'm willing to bet that's not the case. Honest numbers of these types of answers can help us understand the group better ourselves, and can show which directions we should be heading in terms of what the people are looking for out of Occupy Jacksonville.

Please, take your time, as this is strictly voluntary IF you can't get to it in a decent time (say the next 48 hours) says so and I'll request for others to pitch in!

No problem there Mr Huck, you gotz any fences you needs painted?

Hey, Crazy Lady, wonder if I met you Saturday ... Please check out our Occupy Jacksonville Art Group Meeting Facebook page. Hope to see you there.

I don't know if we met or not...I was in the education work group... I will try my best to join you guys on Friday afternoon. If not, I will certainly be there on Saturday.

I will be happy to come up with some questions, the more data the better. If we can print out 200 that would be great as it would cover most of the participants... Even if we get 100 back, that would be great.

I also plan to do some in-depth interviews, as some of the issues would be much better explored that way... the meaning of democracy, for example, or the meaning of capitalism, the motivations to participate, preparedness to get involved in civil disobedience, etc.
To me, this would be a way to explore a creation of a progressive social movement, in the South (rather different than being in NYC, for example).

I don't have much problem with the internet survey, well apart from the fact that it is inherently biased (not everyone is on the internet, and not everyone will be willing to provide their email -- loss of anonymity, etc.). As I said, the more data the better and those are not mutually exclusive.

Another blog I go to was interested in whether attendees were there due to sense of loss or for idealistic reasons. The sense of loss folks are those directly impacted by economic downturn and idealistic folks are indirectly impacted. Not sure how to word question to identify those who have lost out and are also idealistic as well as those who are there because of closeness to someone who has lost out but are not directly impacted.

There is a 'direct action' plan which could educate 'occupiers' so they may sound somewhat consistent to the public.

It's called 'grade school'. That's where I learned about the legislative, judicial and executive branches of our government. It's also where I learned about corporations and their purpose in a free-market system of voluntary commerce.

I also learned that redistribution of wealth, punitive taxation, rhetorical and legislative attacks against banks and businesses and calls for 'class war' are the basic building blocks of Marxism, socialism, and anti-capitalism.

The majority of Americans know this as well as I do. They're not fooled either. The televised chaos, disorder, disobedience and lawbreaking of OWS and other locations has awoken those who have previously not paid attention. And this is why OWS will guarantee a GOP President in November.

You'd be quite surprised how many would abstain to the question because they haven't thought about the frame work of their Govt. since grade school. Probably because life has been dandy in that field for a long time, but now it's not.

You'd probably also be surprised at how poor the public education system is these days, American politics can be very dry.

But then, maybe this is hypothetical and everyone at OWS can name all three and their roles. The stats here say we are rather educated too. http://occupywallst.org/article/70-percent-ows-supporters-independent/

The 3 branch thing was a basic example.

"The televised chaos, disorder, disobedience and lawbreaking of OWS..." You call it chaos, we call it the government trying to abuse our freedom to assembly in order to address grievances. Disorder due to no leaders still. Being a dissident is patriotic. I understand if you disagree, but almost every arrest made has been a victimless, non-violent one. Well, on the protester's part at least.

But thank you for reminding me who I do this for. Unless your high up the banking pyramid or a politician, you're part of the 99%.

I already have my 10 fliers printed.. I will be happy to print 10-20 of the questionares as well

ironhorzmn wrote: And this is why OWS will guarantee a GOP President in November.

Remember folks,

I'm not a troll and you know it. This is reasoned and legitimate debate and for you to pretend otherwise is cowardly and dishonest.

The problem is not that Occupiers 'abstained' from these questions. On the contrary. Many of them spouted the most moronic, ignorant, racist and conspiracy theorist garbage as their serious responses.

You can spin mass lawbreaking, confrontation and calls for violent change (e.g. 'shooting the 13 most important families in front of the White House') all you want but Americans see a dangerous, criminal, envious mob that covets what they have and won't be satisfied until they get it.

If this is being a troll then make the most of it.

Guys, LOOK AT THE NEW UPDATED NYCGA WEBSITE: http://www.nycga.net/

THIS is something we need to get our website to be. Can you guys get in touch with their OpenSource team and figure out what they running to pull this off? We want our website to be like this and somehow to hook up our data to their larger website.

http://www.nycga.net/

It says down at the bottom it's word press, so it's just a blog with a skin. Don't worry, I think ours is going to kick some ass and may be up later tonight, possibly tomorrow!