Since its inception in 2018, and in pieces dating back at least a decade before that, there’s been one pair of beliefs, entangled down to the quantum, that our friends & informal partners at the Institute for 21st Century Citizenship have returned to perhaps more than any other:

• That we have never really been the United States of America, except during our second most existential moment to date, WWII, and its immediate aftermath.¹
• That in the face of current challenges, of which globalization is the most benign, it’s never been more important that we live up to, if not the meaning of our creed, then at least to the veritas of our name.

To this end, the simple, yet powerful, idea our colleagues have most frequently returned to–in 2010, in 2015, in 2020, and again this year–has been this: that each year, on July 5th, the day after we celebrate our independence, we celebrate our interdependence, on each other.  An eponymous proposed holiday to be known as Interdependence Day.

For our part, one of the inciting incidents that motivated the development of Creative Politics was an extended virtual holiday some of us birthed into existence called Connected Educator Month. CEM, in turn, was a labor of love-child born out of a U.S. Department of Education initiative originally known as the Education Technology-Focused Online Communities of Practice project, or EDCOP, which soon became known more simply as Connected Educators, taking its cue/name from a term first appearing in the National Education Technology Plan of 2010 and, independently (apparently it was in the air), as the title of a popular book on the subject, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach’s The Connected Educator.

The goal of the Connected Educators project was to identify, through research and development, evidence-based best practices involved in creating online communities of practice for educators, which, in turn, were to be used to get more K12 educators to start developing or joining these online communities, start using social media as a professional tool more often (not just to chat with friends), and get more administrators to recognize and support this new form of informal peer-to peer learning.

Connected Educator Month was an outgrowth of the project intended to accelerate this process, primarily by:

• Showcasing & celebrating all the remarkable/cool things that were already being done in online communities
• Fostering greater collaboration and collaborative development–the sin qua non and grail of community builders–throughout the education space, via the process of developing events & activities specifically for the celebration

It was successful beyond our most exhausted dreams.²

Originally envisioned as a one-time one month one-off, CEM ended up running for four years. By the third year, its reach extended year-round, via its extremely popular and beloved community newsletter (regularly cited as one of the top features of the celebration, with a Lake Wobegon vibe many said made them feel they were both appreciated and part of something bigger than themselves), and its equally cherished–and ginormous–Twitter feed. By Year 4, there were more than 1,000 education organizations and companies officially hosting hundreds of CEM events and activities, with thousands more being held informally “off-calendar.” Friends and relatives at Google determined it was being promoted and/or discussed at more than seven million virtual locations online, and was reaching 17M+ educators and education supporters/day around the world via Twitter alone.

In our first year, about 20% of the events and activities created for the celebration involved collaborations between two or more participating organizations; by year four, nearly 70% of the events & activities on our calendar were collaborative, most involving three or more groups, and a few might be best termed as hyper-collaborations, involving entire countries like Australia, New Zealand, and Norway creating their own CEMs and connecting and integrating them with our own. Most significantly, from the perspective of the original goals of the Connected Educators project, you couldn’t go to a major education conference like ISTE and walk more than 10 yards without seeing the words “connected educator” somewhere in your sightlines.  This, plus the explosion of books, articles, and online education communities (creation of new ones, membership in those pre-existing) collectively became the ‘our work is done here’ moment of the project, and it came to a close.

When it comes to interdependence, and Interdependence Day, our work will likely never be done, but it’s easy to see how and why CEM’s twin goals of showcasing what exists today and fostering collaboration to strengthen the ties that free us (not a bad social media slogan, right?) fit a celebration of interdependence like a glove.  Interdependence badly needs to be showcased–the prime movers for the holiday are the thermonuclear remarks reckless individuals in our country are detonating with increasing frequency both re: their fellow citizens and humanity around the globe. The kinds of people who make these remarks tend to think very concretely; abstractions like e pluribus unum are no more than slight breezes across the face of their ignorance.

Moreover, our “freedom ties” (yep, we’re rolling with it) not only badly need to be strengthened before the nation and world fly apart (with irreparable ruptures and consequences), but many more such bonds can and should be formed. Too often, thanks to the myth of rugged individualism permeating our nation in the last fifty years (a fairly tale that would have puzzled the pioneers who were supposedly its archetype), we Americans get hung up on the “dependence” syllables of the i-word, treating it as more of a necessary evil than as the mortar allowing us to build a better future, an ineffable yet material substance whose rare earth-like supply could be de facto unlimited and self-propagating if only we’d allow it.  Enfin, the virtual world of new media is the ideal locus for any such celebration of the virtues of mutuality; it’s where the worldwide web of relationships, not only in our own lives, but the lives of others, is most and most easily made plain/laid bare, and it’s where new connections are most easily formed and developed.

So what made CEM such a success, and what lessons can be applied to these prospective new festivities?  Here are a few, including embedded kickstarts for the new new thing itself.

Casting A Wide Net

There’s a tendency when organizing events of this kind to treat them like weddings, complete with seating charts for the tables.  That tendency is magnified in a case like ID-Day where theoretically every organization in the world could be invited to participate. This instinct for exclusivity, which is ultimately merely masking for a more sympathetic, but more difficult to accept, fear of unmanageability and/or loss of control, is a temptation, we learned with CEM, that should be vigilantly resisted.

Instead, we should embrace the giddy reality that, in this context at least, having the event “blow up” is a good thing, even the goal. QED, we should cast a very wide net, and “see who salutes,” less for the sake of multiplying the number of participating organizations (a long list of such is de rigeur and a very low barrier to entry) than to maximize the level and quality of participation.  Without naming names, suffice it to say there were huge above-the-fold organizations involved in CEM that almost certainly were a legitimizing draw, yet contributed very little to the substance of the event itself, while many smaller organizations, perhaps hungrier, more nimble, or just waiting for their moment to shine, became dynamos of the celebration.

Be that as it may, there are certainly types of organizations whose participation we think would be collectively critical to advancing the cause of interdependence, including:

• International organizations, especially those that not only have multinational memberships, but in which fostering interactions and bonds between nations is their main, if not sole, purpose.
• Binding organizations, for lack of a better word, meaning entities whose main purpose is to specifically bring together groups that just don’t like each other (or, more accurately, believe they don’t), whether inter or–especially–intra-nationally, e.g. Braver Angels, More In Common, Seeds Of Peace, The Ulster Project, et multi al.
• Democracy organizations, e.g., the National Endowment for Democracy, the Democracy Fund, the Hewlett Foundation, the National Election Defense Coalition, Democracy Works, Everyday Democracy, Fair Vote, Vote Riders et al,  because failure to recognize and celebrate our interdependence is one of the gravest threats to democracies like ours.
• Ethnic organizations, with as wide a representation of these groups as possible, because so many are effectively invisible to each other beyond media caricature.
• Business organizations, like the Business Roundtable, Rotary International, and the US Chamber of Commerce, because nobody sees and understands interdependence on a daily basis like the business community, and business groups are likely to help maintain ideological balance and transpartisan credibility.
• Labor organizations, because they represent so many of those who are undervalued, unseen, and taken for granted who, at the same time, are often among the least tolerant of others different from themselves (albeit with stiff competition from liberals of a certain ilk).
• Environmental organizations, the chief defenders of interdependence where it’s most sacred–the natural world–who bear keenest witness to the consequences of its disruption.

No doubt you can think of more; we’re counting on it. To that end, we’ve created a spreadsheet much like the ones we used for CEM, to which we, and hopefully you, will be adding the names of organizations you feel should be involved.

More Than A Day

It was important that CEM was a month-long event, allowing us to include many more–and many more types–of events & activities, as well as get audiences for them all with minimal channel conflict. It also allowed organizations to keep joining up and adding to the calendar as momentum built, even after the event started–and all the way through to the bittersweet end. Even so, by the third year even a month wasn’t long enough, and increasing numbers of participating groups began scheduling events before the month began (and, to a lesser extent, after it ended, e.g. to “continue the discussions”).

More importantly, as we struggled to mount the first celebration on a very tight timeline–the event was greenlit on May 31 and was scheduled to begin on August 1, which meant we had just 60 days to rally the education community at a time of year when many of its decision-makers are often nowhere near their places of God’s work–we made a command decision to allow organizations to include relevant events and activities they were planning to do anyway; in fact, we solicited and in some cases even hunted and gathered them from the Interwebs ourselves.

In the aftermath of that first CEM, we came to realize what we had done out of expediency was actually vital to the goals of the project, that as gratifying and validating as it was to get groups to create new offerings “just for us,” it was much more important–for participants and cause alike–to demonstrate to the former that events and activities aligned with and bearing the magic we were promising were and are happening all around them all the time and, far from disappearing when we folded up our tents for the season, they continued to be there to keep right on engaging with till kingdom come. Which is how Connected Educator Month became a year-round affair.

In the case and cause before us now, Calliope’s arrow would seem to have a much smaller target: a day, a single day, July 5th, not so much as a week, let alone a month. But here we’d draw upon a great, albeit often reviled, American tradition: the holiday season. Christmas is only a day (did you know that?)–in fact, in some households, it’s less than twenty minutes, no matter how much mom and dad put under the tree³–yet the Christmas “season” begins before the first leaf turns, especially now that climate change is afoot, with Halloween not far behind. How long should ID-Day season last? See below for how that should be determined, but as with Xmas, the day itself should only be the climax, with ongoing activities sparked by this most recent 7/5 continuing at least as long as the best Christmas presents endure, and a lot longer than post-Christmas sales.

Catalyzing Support

Any event like CEM that grows explosively in reach online does so not as pre-ordained consequence of a hefty marketing budget used to carpet bomb in all the right places, but rather because the organizers have successfully recruited a number of “force multipliers,” a mix of organizations and, especially, individuals with the reach, relationships, credibility, and authority to reach many more potential participants directly and actively than the organizers can on their own.

In the case of a CEM or Interdependence Day, whose purpose is to break new ground and create new mindsets, more than identifying and recruiting the best collaborators is involved–you have to train and educate your potential partners in said mindsets, especially if your goal is to expand its reach beyond true believers, which typically means recruiting messengers who are themselves outside that often hermetically-sealed circle.

Unfortunately, to generate an organically viral event typically requires far more collaborators than than you likely have the bandwidth to really inculcate. Even if you had said capacity, the kinds of partners you want are, by definition, both successful and busy, and while it’s true that “if you want something done, ask a busy person,” in such cases you’re typically asking such thaumaturges to do something that’s already their proverbial bread and butter–even busy people are unlikely to have either the bandwidth or, frankly, the inclination to learn a speculative new ‘cuisine’ on the fly.

So you need to create catalysts, pieces of scaffolding that, like their chemical namesakes, can, in small doses, general big reactions and results; simple and high-level on the surface, but with enough available depth to let your champions & evangelists drill down to bedrock understanding of any key point or concept that catches their fancy. The catalytic scaffolding⁴ we created for CEM is far from the archetype I just described, but seemed to do the trick and, in any case, well-illustrates the high-level principles that should guide what we create for ID-Day, north stars like:

• Filling In The Blanks — There are few things scarier to most people than a blank sheet of paper, or, as Nadia Boulanger, the greatest music composition teacher of the 20th century, would put it more positively, “the greatest creative freedom lies within boundaries.” So, each year, to help our partners get beyond this paralysis, we’d:
  • Give them a set of pedagogical themes for the event to stimulate their thinking (without requiring their offerings to fit a theme, but giving more promotion to those that did, especially since said themes helped all participants navigate the experience as well)
  • Create “showcases” for specific kinds of ongoing activities (e.g. contests, collaborative projects, book clubs, etc.), which we’d promote regularly, promoting every entity in the promoted showcase every time we did so, and thus allowing us, in turn, to give a lot of necessary extra promotional love to the offerings that required the most partner investment
  • Provide them with a brainstorming/creativity guide that included a list and brief description of every possible activity format we could think of, including, wherever possible, exemplary examples and/or tips for making them successful, based on previous CEMs and other experiences, and in some cases, where appropriate, giving them statistical snapshots of what participants had collectively done in prior years (to encourage first-timers to do something, and veterans to do something different).
    • The guide also included an extensive list of education topics intended to provide the inspirational basis for the use of any format, sometimes, again, with more specifics about what others have done in the past.  Only a fraction the topics we included were explicitly online community-related because, of course, the ultimate goal of the event was to show educators how communities and community functionality can be used to improve anyone’s work, no matter their interests or obligations
• Making It Brainless, Seamless — Never underestimate the level of inertia created by the slightest level of effort outside someone’s routine.  Put another way, if you want something promoted, promote it yourself; that is, give your partners promotional materials they can literally just drop into the distribution vehicles they use, and always give them options, because the better your champions are, the less likely they are to want to be just told what to do, even if they know they have no time to create anything original themselves.  Our promotional toolkits for CEM were a great example of this principle, widely praised and even more widely deployed.  These kits typically contained:
  • 20+ different text promos for use on home and other pages, some for sites catering to front-line educators, some for sites with an administrator focus
  • 50+ potential tweets, some general & basic, some more cheeky or related to specific elements of the celebration
  • 4-5 newsletter blurbs
  • A sample dedicated e-mailing, suitable for editing
  • 25-30 images that included every shape and size in use by 5% or more of all websites, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau that year
  • Ready-to-print postcards and flyers
  • Logos & other identity they could use in any way they pleased
  • A Twitter widget they could brand or co-brand and put up on their site to automatically track and display the best of the flood of commentary and resource links flowing through that year’s event hashtag
  • A code snippet that when dropped into their website allowed them to hold real-time “open houses” for visitors on their site (which many did as their first event to get their virtual feet wet)

For Interdependence Day, given the importance of reaching the unreachable before we/they tear our country apart, we’d add, at a minimum, cheerfully in-your-face stickers and buttons to the package, especially given the number of sites and offline outlets that can, in today’s zazzling world, easily take such designs and replicate them in the hundreds at relatively low cost.

• On-Ramps For All — We knew going in that we could get participants by the palette via leveraging the structure of the education system itself, in particular a set of resources designed to make it compelling and easy for school districts to participate by, for example, incorporating CEM into their in-service professional development programs. In the process, we’d be able to involve all the administrators and educators in the district in the celebration in a single gordian stroke, and worked with CoSN, a core partner interfacing with education at the district level, to make it so. In Year One, with so much to build from the ground up, the District Toolkit was basically the standard promotional toolkit with some additional resources, notably a PowerPoint with accompanying notes that walked them through the event, why it’s important, and potential ways to participate as a district, with brainstorming and supporting handouts built in; we also launched a district-specific version of the Connected Educators newsletter, which continued throughout the program’s history.

In Year Two, with much of the event’s infrastructure already constructed, we were able to develop a toolkit that was much more extensive, professional, multimedia, interactive, and district-specific. In Year Three, we added tools that enabled the districts to evaluate the levels of connectedness and associated efficacy they were enjoying before the event, afterwards, and on an ongoing basis, to force-multiply adoption in the best possible way, by making it evidence-based (a test we were, by then, confident both CEM and online communities would pass with all colors flying). It’s easy to imagine developing resources like these at the classroom, school, and district level for Interdependence Day, as well as for each of the core types of organizations we’ve indicated we believe should be involved.

Beyond this, in one of her many seminal contributions to the event, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach⁵ convinced the rest of the team that in order to expand the number of participants beyond those already actively involved in online communities (insularity by presumption being a classic pitfall for initiatives of this type), we needed to develop what she called a connected educator starter kit, an ingenious confection that gave all who downloaded it a simple way, a different way each day, to, by means of simple actions, become, day by day, a more connected educator every day of the celebration–and remain one when it was over. It’s a testimony to the power of this idea that thousands and thousands and thousands of copies of this starter kit continued to be downloaded and shared for weeks, months, and years after the event, undergoing annual revisions as the ur-text it became, which compels us to ponder what its equivalent would be for interdependence, the simple acts for each of the 30 days of social & international spirit we’re seeking to bring to life.

Community-Based To The Core

There’s an old saying in marketing and sales that gained new currency during the dot-bomb era of the late 90’s when the frothy crest of the wave about to crash was lousy with pet-related start-ups:⁶ “eat your own dog food.” What’s meant by this is that if you’re selling a product, you’d better believe in it enough that, however distasteful, you’re willing to use it yourself and/or live by its principles & values; better yet: do so where customers and prospects can see you do it. This is especially true in new media because, on the one hand, the Net has stripped much of the world down to its skivvies in one way or another, ushering in an era of such radical transparency that TMI has become a thing, and on the other, it has, in classic Newtonian style, given rise to so many new forms of fakery that authenticity has become the coin of the realm, especially among the young. In the case of both CEM and Interdependence Day, the product is community. Some of the ways we “walked the walk” (another phrase popularized by the post-modern era) in CEM that seem applicable to the new holiday as well, in addition to those already discussed, included:

• A Deeply Shared Calendar — In the case of most events, online and off, the calendar of events is carefully planned and laid out by a central organizing group of some kind.  And the event itself takes places in a central location controlled by the organizers, who typically stand to benefit from every page view.  Not CEM.

We used a collaborative calendaring platform called Sched and allowed anyone and everyone to add their events and activities to the CEM calendar, subject only to a light approval process, deploying tags (provided mainly by the participating orgs) and color-coding to make it easy for every participant to sort through and personalize it based on their interests, thus preventing it from overwhelming anyone. And every organization’s events and activities were held on their own sites, not ours, which:

• • Made it much easier logistically to include everything they were doing or wanted to do in the celebration
  • Made clear that are motivation was really, truly, solely to support their work, not cannibalize or compete with it and, perhaps most importantly,
  • Made it easy for participants to continue to participate after the official closing because they already knew the way and way around all the groups whose efforts they’d enjoyed.

• A Google Doc State Of Mind — We definitively updated the old phrase “you can Google that,           y’ know” from a second-person plural perspective: by year four, virtually everything created for or about CEM, both internally and even public-facing, took the form of a Google Doc, Sheet, Slides, or Form, as we sought to squeeze every drop of creative nectar from the old online community maxim, “none of us is as smart as all of us,” embodied by the popular collaborative platform. At first it was just our platform du jour for planning docs, recruitment tracking and punch list sheets, as well as all the key collateral & messaging we just had to get right, but once we launched, its use–meaning our collaborative ethos & signature–expanded rapidly.

As early as the first week, participants pulled together the Connected Learning Manifesto at right; pretty stirring–and elegant, right?  People asked us who they should be following in education, so we created a sheet and let the community tell us and each other (it appears to be still in use around the Net). This soon became our de facto response to every frequently-asked question, even if we thought we had the perfect answer, if only to emphasize the prime directive of the entire event, that everything goes better with community (provided you do a little doc- or sheet-seeding to show everyone good spots to dip their toes in), and we soon learned, viscerally, the liberation we were trying to teach others, that sometimes the best way to bond a community closer together and ensure future responsiveness is to get it wrong or make a mistake, get called on it, and graciously concede–no harm, no foul–to the point where those of us without reputations to defend were sorely tempted to screw up on purpose.

Virtually every potential project started with a sign up form and a collaborative brainstorming doc; Google Forms were used for surveys, polls, contests–anything we could think of that would lower the bar for participation and get another fraction of the 70% who typically only read or watch online to contribute more to the community than just metrics and usage data, implemented anywhere we could plausibly claim not to be able to proceed without community input, without looking either dishonest or foolish.

But for me, the signature example of what a Google Doc mindset can achieve had to be what we called the matchmakers, especially the first one we created.  In Year Two, we had decided to start running contests, on the theory they’d go viral and could be used to get specific types of user-created content we wanted, in hopes of spurring others to do the same (it worked, and we’re about to tell you why). But we soon realized we had an awkward problem–having gone all-out in other areas, we lacked the resources to provide top-drawer prizes to the winners.  Rather than go hat in hand to groups already contributing so much to the event, Sheryl and I decided to test a bold hypothesis: that if there were groups that wanted to run contests and needed prizes, there might well be groups that had prizes but lacked the interest or wherewithal to run contests. So we took a Sheet and created what we called the “Contest Matchmaker,” seeded with our own contests (which meant revealing we had no prizes for competitions we were already promoting, and risking embarrassment if no one came forward to help us).

Within the first 24 hours, we had great prizes offered for all of our contests, and then the much cooler thing we hoped would happen began to happen, and happen, and happen–other groups began putting contests on the sheet, other other groups began supplying prizes to them; (other) groups began posting prizes, and still (other) groups began creating contests in response to the new prizes on offer.  And this continued throughout the month.

Because collaboration was the ultimate substantive goal we were hoping to achieve, we had actually been doing matchmaking manually since Day One, Year One, seeing opportunities as events and activities began populating the calendar, making introductions, and providing support. By Year Two, the number of opportunities were already exceeding our capacities; inspired by the success of the Contest Matchmaker, we began creating matchmakers for a variety of other purposes, and I have no doubt this played a significant role in more than tripling the proportion of collaborative events/activities, even as total number of organizations involved continued to burgeon, which could potentially have replicated the paradoxical isolating effect of many densely populated urban areas.

• Leveling Up Ownership — Like a good Peace Corps volunteer, the prime directive of good online community developers is to work themselves out of a job, to let the community itself take ownership of the enterprise; this was the gravitational pull of the event–and not just because it grew so big we couldn’t have ridden herd on it even if we wanted to.  The first year was a classic example of the old African proverb: to go fast, travel alone, and we had to travel very fast.  But Year Two began with the formation of a core community, a group of top community leaders and representatives from providers who had, like the community leaders themselves, played a significant role in the success of the first year’s event, with some individuals who had not been involved at all sprinkled in, as protection against groupthink, myopia, and confirmation bias.  We met weekly from early July until the official celebration started up again in October,⁷ initially in person, then by videoconference, with a rich tapestry of Google Docs of all sorts binding us together in-between meetings, and as we had hoped, the level of enthusiasm and innovation took great leaps forward, though the creation of specific culture associated with the event, which a core community typically provides, was, because the event was so decentralized, more a product of the community as a whole.

As for the celebration itself, the history of how we handled CEM’s themes was typical and. we think, instructive.  In Year One, we decided internally what the themes would be.  In Year Two, we seeded the discussion with ideas, but the core community ultimately made that call.  In Year Three, we and the rest of the core community came up with a list of potential themes, then allowed the larger community to vote on and determine them.  In our fourth and final year, individual or groups of organizations adopted and took over running each theme; because we wanted all the themes to have sponsors of some kind, in a few cases, if an organization was willing to take on the responsibility involved, we and the core group let them create a theme themselves.

After Year One, every new element of the celebration we came up with was always delegated to an organization or group of volunteers who wanted to take it on; in some cases, providers and/or communities came to us with ideas themselves that they wanted to own–to which we never said no, and never had reason to regret this.  In Year 3, we began involving the community in sustainability; some became sponsors, others were involved in crowdfunding, which we provided weekly seminars that either we or producers at Crowdrise delivered (we recorded theirs, with permission,⁸ and made it available to the community). The project ended before we could completely hand it over to the community, but as testament to how far long the Peace Corps path we were, there’s this: by Year Four, with no increase in paid staff from Year One, many, many more organizations and a much, much greater event scope involved, each of us was nonetheless responsible for a significantly smaller portion of the overall portfolio than originally, which was a good thing, as least for me, as I had little time to do more than crank out newsletters, so extensive had the celebration become.

A Wide Variety Of Formats

Any online event that lasts thirty days had better involve more than just Zoom, WebEx, Adobe Connect, Bb Collaborate, and GoToMeeting.  We pushed and rewarded participating organizations for getting beyond the online conference big three (webinars, online chats, Twitter chats), and by year two, as you can see from the list below, groups quickly caught on, and began spinning out events & activities of all shapes and sizes, driven less by a desire to outdo each other, we suspect, than to break through the noise of an ever-burgeoning cornucopia wrapped up in a smorgasbord, which, in turn, had become the centerpiece of a banquet surrounded by a plethora of buffets.  By year four, I was writing and publishing up to six e-newsletters a day, each promoting a different slate of events with little overlap between them, events and activities that included:

• Webinars (esp. panels, as opposed to single speaker/keynotes, w/moderated back-channel chat)
• Asynchronous forums (on specific topics, with active moderation, guest experts, etc.)
• Blog series (not just single blog posts, unless the authors supported and encouraged discussion of the post)
• Podcasts (Apple created and featured one on the iTunes home page), Internet Radio Shows (BAM Radio created a dedicated Connected Educators radio channel, etc.)
• Twitter chats
• Maps, visualizations
• Event guides (both Edutopia & EdSurge published annual guides to CEM; many others, both inside and outside education (including the New York Times, published special sections, op-eds, investigations, and more)
• Printables (rubrics & manuals, buttons, stickers, and the like)
• Guided tours
• Open houses
• Book clubs
• Exhibits/exhibitions
• Launches of anything online community-related (a new site, a new community, a new or upgraded piece of community functionality, etc.)
• Online courses, classes
• Assessments, quizzes
• Wikis, databases, directories
• Matchmakers
• Collaborative projects
• Apps, platforms, and/or special event-specific versions of same (e.g. edconnectr, shown at right)
• Social games
• Virtual worlds, simulations, hands-on demos
• Contests & challenges
• Polls, surveys, other research (either conducted or published during the event)
• Regional & local in person events & activities
• Blended events (part online, part offline)
• Badges, honorifics (that were either awarded or could be earned, along with university course credits [another Sheryl coup] the last two years of the event
• Videos
• Viral interactives
• Art, music, theater, and other performance forms (created specifically or related to the event–yes, this happened)
• Others I’m forgetting

You can get more descriptive information on virtually all of these, along with tips on how to execute them well, here.   For a more immersive gestalt of the event as a whole, we’d encourage you to check out the notably colorful & lively reports put out by the Department of Ed about CEM 2012 and CEM 2013.  But honestly, these reports, and the list above, as lengthy as it is, don’t begin to do creative justice to what became known as “the Burning Man of [connected] education,” nor the role such creativity, once cultivated, and thence prodded to fly, played in its success.  The electricity coursing through CEM was powered by its own version of the uncertainty principle–you never knew from day to day what might happen next, but it was probably going to be something you’d never seen before, like the evening Secretary of Education Arne Duncan became the first cabinet member ever to hold a Twitter chat, with the feedback he heard from educators directly resulting in new policies and programs in the Department–a seismic happening in its own right, given how voiceless teachers are usually rendered within the system–programs that were then subsequently debuted and featured, live and in action, at the following year’s CEM celebration.

Providers geeked out on every platform, even the most humdrum–the webinars, for example, were so interactive that it was not uncommon for panelists to drop off the stage and into the back-channel chat as if they were diving into a mosh pit, as the fete rolled along each and every year, without pause, from New Year’s Rockin’ Eve-style celebrations on September 30 to Halloween tours of ancient (20th century) virtual worlds until the stroke of 12 on October 31st.  Each year sometime in week 3, educators would begin to drop off the radar, not, they protested, because they were bored, but because they were exhausted from the sheer number and variety of functions they just couldn’t miss; it had become a multiweek virtual education rave.  Which leads me to believe it may not be such a bad thing that our baseline is a day, not a month.  If I were a younger man not suffering from IID, I could regale you with stories of event after event until midnight wherever you’re reading this myself; what I do know is this: if K-12 educators, creative as they are, could generate as much creative ferment as they did out of one sentence in a national ed tech plan, it’s nothing less than exhilarating and impossible to imagine what a worldwide celebration of interdependence draw from 8 billion potential participants and hundreds of thousands of organizations could muster, even if only for a single day each year.

What Else

We may have made it sound easy, but of course, behind every element of the event we’ve described, there were dozens, if not hundreds of details, that required, at a minimum, relatively skillful and knowledgeable execution, to the point where it became clear it’s best to approach bringing a massively multiplayer online celebration to fruition the way you’d take on an unusually steep mountain: just keep putting one foot in front of the other, brushing past or negotiating every obstacle flying towards you, and whatever you do, don’t look up.

But a key quality of the pragmatic aesthetic of what we’ve proposed is how smoothly scalable it is in both directions, meaning, in particular, that it can start very small, largely in bootstrap mode, and grow from there–there’s really no minimum critical mass, which means there’s no reason we can’t actually start celebrating Interdependence Day on July 5, 2022, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.  Oh, and by the way, that first year? The one where we had only 60 days post-announcement to stand up the first fest? We brought together more than 170 education organizations who collectively hosted more than 450 events & activities over the course of that very first month.

But even if everyone involved volunteers their time, there are still costs involved–buying domain names, licensing a good calendar platform, designing and building the website, if those skillsets and others aren’t really well-represented among the volunteers involved, etc.  Moreover, frankly, in our experience, a purely all-volunteer approach is not a great model if you want to reliably get things done on any kind of a schedule, and there’s clearly a deadline involved in this particular initiative if we don’t want to find ourselves repeatedly invoking the old Red Sox White Sox Cubs Nats Cleveland Indians rallying cry.

As we see it, no funding model could be better suited to and more appropriate for the event than crowdfunding, new media’s major contribution to the field, but this is ideally accomplished as a non-profit, ideally an existing one (the paperwork et al involved in setting up a new one is, as we like to say in tech, non-trivial) with at least some credibility, capacity, and willingness to help get the word out about the campaign.  If you represent such an organization or have suggestions of groups that might be interested in taking on this role (with a portion of proceeds going to their overhead), including, if interested, partnering with us across the board on the development of the event, let us know here.  If you want to be kept apprised of our progress and opportunities to participate, by all means please feel free to subscribe to our free Creative Politics e-newsletter–if nothing else, entertainment, intelligence, and beauty are guaranteed.  In any case, we look forward to seeing you on the first July 5th of the rest of our lives…

Creative Politics is the world’s first community-based political incubator, synthesizing the best of liberal and conservative ideals with technology and history to generate policies, strategies, applications, and actions for the post-modern era that are well outside the beltway, and well beyond just talk.  All Creative Politics blog posts are collaborative, living documents, the way Madison and Hamilton would create them if they were writing The Federalist today.  We welcome, nay urge, your feedback in the comment/discussion section below, and will be using it (with credit) to make what you just read come into focus as reality…

¹ Our most existential moment to date was, of course, when we were most disunited, in 1861-65, a state we seem to be rapidly approaching again. Back
² “Our” and “we” initially included, in addition to yours truly (the producer of the event), Karen Cator, the visionary Director of Educational Technology at the Department of Ed and her second, Bernadette Adams; Darren Cambridge, head of the Connected Educators project, and his right hand man Marshal Conley, both of AIR; Sheryl Nussbaum Beach, founder of Powerful Learning Practice; Steve Hargadon, founder of Classroom 2.0; Tim Shaw and Jenn Johnson of Forum One Communications; Keith Krueger, Gordon Dahlby, and Hilary LaMonte of CoSN; Doug Levin, Geoff Fletcher, and Lia Dossin of SETDA; and Peter Grunwald of Grunwald Associates. Back
³ In our household, we decided to take a radically different approach, which we call “the twelve days of Christmas.” On Christmas Eve, and every evening thereafter until January 6th or we run out of presents, whichever comes first, each person opens one present in turn, and we talk about each before moving on to the next. This not only prolongs the joy of Christmas much longer, but avoids virtually all the stress involved in making sure everything is under the tree by the 24th, lets us take advantage of ridiculous post-xmas sales, which, as you can imagine, include many much better deals than the supposed “best deals of the season” proffered on Black Friday, and allows us to gently make course corrections if someone is feeling they’re either getting too much or too little relative to others, or the wrong kinds of gifts altogether. You do have to have at least one really good present under the tree on the Eve, though 😉 Back
⁴ What does catalytic scaffolding mean? It means it’s my duty as a consultant to create x potential new buzzwords for every y words spoken or written; I only wish there were a third word involved so I could turn it into an acronym as well. Back
⁵ Yes, we got the author of The Connected Educator to preside over the event alongside us or, more accurately, she was the only person other than us who saw how big the event could be and how important it was that it not fail, and so jumped in with both feet, initially as a volunteer, later paid, never left, but never paid what her contributions were worth (in the end, none of us were–when you undertake something like this, it had better be a labor of love–or in the case of ID-Day, invigorating patriotic duty–because not only is that likely all it’s ever going to be, but the best people, whom you need, will be able to smell something mixed with your passion like booze cutting through the scent of Listerine). Back
⁶ Betting on people’s humble relationship with their aminals seemed </alike an especially savvy mortal lock in an environment otherwise characterized by unreality–the Pets.com sock puppet featured in its ill-fated Super Bowl ads became an enduring symbol of the era. Back
⁷ CEM was switched from August to October after the year one because the online education world turns into a pumpkin the last week of August as all educators across the country not already teaching classes are gearing up to hit the ground stunning after Labor Day Back
⁸ We had/have a personal connection to the best-known of this crowdfunding group’s founders, which resulted in our receiving a lot more support than one could normally expect. Unfortunately, because the Department of Ed had provided full funding itself up to that time, and by then was also raising a lot of money for other projects in the same ideational space from many of the same groups we were seeking help from, there was a lot of confusion on the part of both organizations and individuals about why we needed money, which limited the effectiveness of these efforts, but at a minimum, we hope we passed along a lot of insight about crowdfunding to a lot of the community community that they’ve been able to make use of for the greater cause since. Back