Introduction to the Big Advocacy Blog

What this is about:

A blog about Big Immigration Advocacy for people who already give a damn

In the Big Immigration Advocacy Blog I will be writing about the unfolding movement of immigration advocates building a new generation of organizations for the improvement of immigrant and refugee lives through the leveraging of collaborative technology, data & analytics, and new systems of mass advocacy like massive collaborative representation.

I will refer to this movement “Big Immigration Advocacy”, liberally borrowing that term, as I have many things, from Innovation Law Lab, who coined the term “Big Immigration Law” to describe the practice of using techniques and technology to represent and protect many unrepresented people with a few committed change-makers.

For the most part, my writing will focus on the most isolated projects, on the borders between nation-states, on detention centers and prisons, and on the innovations in care and protection being implement along the routes used by refugees along their journeys. That focus will extend to the people and the leaders struggling to make these projects work every day.

Any writing I do about technology, data, and systems will be subservient to the larger context of the role or potential role of such tools within the advocacy space.

And, because this blog is about the collaborative advocacy space itself, it is also true that, unlike some of the very best journalism on the topic, this blog is not going to be focused on the human stories and tragedies that have come to define the mire of existence within which immigrant- and refugee-advocates operate in.

Human tragedy is implicit and baked into everything that is covered, but this blog is not meant to highlight tragedy, because my goal is not to make someone new “feel” and give a damn. Rather, I aim to provide systems-level, strategic thinking about how advocacy projects and efforts are being carried out, the challenges that are faced individually and collectively by such projects, and the potential solutions and best practices that can help those challenges be overcome.

This blog is therefore very much for the practitioner first and foremost, and only then for the would-be volunteer who wishes to aid a week or a few days of their time to the projects covered, or the funder who wants to learn more about how the vanguard projects in the immigrant and refugee space are coping and responding to one of the largest global refugee flows in history.

Ultimately then this blog is very much for people who already give a damn, which, again, why like much of the news writing we are sometimes forced into for the sake of a client or the political moment, I will not litter it with explicit human tragedy and suffering. People who give a damn have plenty of those stories hugging the strands of their DNA already.

What I hope to achieve

I hope that over time I will be able to use this space to document how the field of collaborative immigration efforts being carried out in defense and protection of refugees and immigrants, as opposed to their persecution and vilification, is growing and changing.

I hope that over time blog will cover the refugee and immigrant advocacy efforts underway globally, although I know that at the start my focus will be on the refugee crisis that advocates working at America’s borders and detention centers are dealing with.

I hope to give leaders, advocates, funders, and others who care and are involved or wish to be involved in modern advocacy good ideas for how to do so.

I hope to celebrate and encourage the collaborative advocacy community of practitioners.

I hope to also highlight the work that fronteraTech is doing to make its own small contribution to the collaborative effort.

And, I hope that you can forgive me for that fact that it is with considerable irony that I should use a blog, an old-school product of Web 1.0 and not the social web of today, to write about the cutting edge of immigration.