Practicum 5 - Kyle Woolwich

So, in addition to the collective bargaining activists, Libyan activists, and Egyptian activists, I also have been following activists working against Wisconsin Senate Bill 6 and Assembly Bill 7, or the Voter ID bill that is currently making its way through the Wisconsin legislature. I've actually been following a specific group called "Fight SB6," which is based mostly on the UW campus. Here are links to their Twitter and Facebook pages, which seems to be where they do most of their online activism:

http://twitter.com/#!/fightSB6
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Save-the-Student-Voice-Fight-SB6/197720840255994

I actually was able to talk to one of the students behind the Twitter account, and I learned that the account is actually run by a small group of students rather than just one person. This is an interesting departure from most of the other online accounts I have seen used by other groups (One collective bargaining account, @DefendWisconsin, appears to be run by more than one person, but they never confirmed it for me the times I asked them).

I have also noticed a difference between the content of the Voter ID bill activists and the collective bargaining activists. The collective bargaining activists appeared to be focusing most of their online efforts into grassroots organizing and getting followers to attend rallies and protests, in addition to an lesser amount of direct lobbying. However, the Voter ID activists have a much smaller number of followers (only 108 on Twitter and 255 on Facebook), and I think it's because of this that they have focused more on using their online representations for organizing direct lobbying by a smaller amount of individuals, but who build better relationships with their representatives because of multiple lobbying trips (as opposed to the collective ID activists, who relied on single trips by large amounts of people based on their large number of followers).

In addition, the Voter ID activists perform a lot of advocacy online by live tweeting events and linking to newspaper articles. For example, today @FightSB6 live-tweeted an Assembly Executive Session in which the bill was discussed and voted on. Another difference is that I have seen them linking to blogs by multiple other groups, such as Rock The Vote, whereas the @DefendWisconsin account primarily linked to blogs by their group and the TAA.