Specifically, I’m talking about the new 4G Internet service that’s just around the corner – aka mobile broadband. 4G allows you to open your laptop / iPad / etc anywhere in network range and have a high speed web connection. Like the 3G service you currently get on your smartphone, but about 5x faster. In many cities, its already here (you’ve probably seen a bazillion 4G ads already).

My question is, will the leap to 4G help social change organizers? How? What creative ideas could it enable? Like, what cool things could door-to-door canvassers do with mobile broadband? Or, how could 4G be used at a march or rally? Will it change the way we lobby Congress? Or revolutionize voter registration?

Some ideas that have been floated include:
• giving canvassers access to rich data and streaming media on iPads / laptops
• registering voters or recruiting volunteers at events
• setting up portable predictive dialer phone banks
• mobile live video streaming from direct actions, hearings, or board meetings

I’m sure there are a bunch of forward-thinking folks out there with other smart ideas. Here’s the thing — if your idea is great, it could get funded and developed. Will you take two minutes to brainstorm about it? You can either email me directly — tate-at-tatehausman.com, or fill out this two minute survey.

I ask on behalf of Mobile Citizen, a nonprofit project that provides 4G service to schools and nonprofits for just $10 a month. Mobile Citizen may subsidize as many as 20,000 4G accounts in 2011. They already have a good sense of how 4G can help schools and social service agencies. Now they are hoping to fund and develop breakthrough ideas or tools that would help social change organizers take advantage of 4G.

This is a unique opportunity for organizers to weigh in on what new tools they want in their work. Mobile broadband has the potential to create big breakthroughs. But will it?

Brainstorm with me in the Mobile Citizen survey.

I’m looking for volunteers to collaborate with me on a totally unique way to strengthen progressive politics — studying whether GOTV emails to friends make a difference in turnout. I think they might. And I want actual hard data to prove it.

The idea comes from the controversy sparked by my last blog post, “Let Them Send Emails,” in which I and two other progressive New Yorkers touted our very unscientific, but impressive results from sending out GOTV emails to our friends. Social scientists who read the piece dismissed my methodology, and rightly so. Now I’m actually designing a (fairly) scientific study to create measurable, accurate results.

If you want to join me, here’s all you need to do:

1. Write an email to your friends, urging them to vote. The shorter and sweeter, the better. I don’t care what it says, as long as the point is, “Get yourself to the polls on Nov 2.”
2. Make a list of everyone in NY to whom you could send.
3. Send me your list, no later than noon on Thursday, Oct 28.
4. I will then randomize the list, and send you back HALF of the list.
5. On Nov 1, you send your email out to that half of the list.

That’s it. Should take you an hour, tops.

Going through this process will create a “treatment” group and a “control” group of your friends. After the election, I will pull the voter file from the NY Board of Elections, and look at which of your friends voted and which didn’t. If the “treatment” group voted in higher numbers than the “control” group, then the emails worked.

It goes without saying that your friends’ personal data will NEVER be public, anywhere, and that your friends will only be contacted by you. Zero privacy issues.

There’s a lot of buzz these days about using new technology to turn out votes. As someone who cares deeply about democracy and elections, I want to learn everything I can about how to get more voters to the polls. So why wait for someone else to do the study, when we can do it ourselves?

Email me — tate-at-tatehausman-dot-com — if you want to collaborate with me.

In short – you embed a widget in your page that allows a visitor to call you, without giving out your number. The visitor plunks his number into the widget, hits go, and that phone rings. If that person is on the approved list, their call goes directly to whatever destination number you’ve given it. If they are unapproved, it goes into a voicemail.

The e-marketing crowds are batting their eyelashes at this, but does it have any value? They claim its a great widget for social networking sites; in fact, early investments came from people behind LinkedIn, Digg, Plaxo and Facebook, among others.

But would this be useful to a campaign or organization? How? Click-to-call is still too novel an idea for a mass audience. Give it another 2 years for wide adoption, and then maybe web visitors will be ready to make one click calls to a hotline or organizer. Any other ideas?

And btw, call me! (wink!)

GIMP is basically open source Photoshop. Not quite as powerful, but just as user friendly. Great for web-based art and photo manipulation. A little complicated to install, but once running, its easy. Anyone else out there using it?

(Props to Michael Donnelly, my fantastic one-man staff at the Hall campaign, for getting me with the program.)

It’s basically spyware that you launch on your own Mac if it get pinched. Sends you screenshots of the thief’s activities, triangulates their IP address for physical location, and even takes photos of the thief if you have an iSight.

Fan-frickin-tastic.

I’m wondering if this is a smart, just-in-time tool for getting custom software apps, or failed expectations waiting to happen. I have a couple apps I’d love to pitch.

Anyone used it yet? Any reviews?