Mobilizing #AfghanistanTuesday to #closeGITMO

We've been talking about how to have an even bigger impact on #AfghanistanTuesday.

What if we could get everyone who was ever involved with #AfghanistanTuesday to help us build a huge wave of support for the January 11 national (and international) mobilization to stop American detention practices at places like Guantanamo, Bagram, and many other prisons? What if we could turn the holiday hibernation into midwinter mobilization??


Now is the time for all of us to become modern day Paul Reveres. There are already hundreds of people planning to converge on Washington, D.C., on January 11, 2012, and to participate in solidarity protests in other cities. Let's use the power of Twitter to turn that into thousands and tens of thousands (or more)!

We already have widespread recognition of the #AfghanistanTuesday tag, and growing awareness of the #closeGITMO tag. Now we just have to generate a tsunami of activity!

Here is how we are going to do it:

(1) Top tweeps have to become recruiters. The people who are putting in a huge amount of effort, week in, week out, to do lots of great tweets on #AfghanistanTuesday need to take it to the next level and help pull other people into the process.

If each of our several dozen "top tweeps" could figure out a way to really pull in more of their followers, think about how much greater our reach would be!

(I've started to organize some of the people who have been at least somewhat active in #AfghanistanTuesday in the past onto lists - and if we all work at it we can get the people on all these lists to be much more active!)

(2) Casual tweeps have to become top tweeps. There are many people who do a single tweet every #AfghanistanTuesday. Imagine how much more impact they would have if they committed to doing two, or three, or five really thoughtful tweets! What would the cumulative impact of that be?

(3) Retweeters have to become full-fledged tweeps. There are lots of folks who retweet #AfghanistanTuesday tweets -- and that's great! -- but imagine how much more exciting Tuesdays would be if all of those people committed to writing an original tweet of their own! And what if they actually took the opportunity to engage in conversation with some of the other #AfghanistanTuesday tweeps? (After all, look at how many tweets are posed as questions, and invite true conversation!)

(4) Lurkers have to become retweeters. We have no real way of knowing how many people read #AfghanistanTuesday tweets without interacting with them in some way - e.g. retweeting. Imagine how word would spread if just a fraction of the people who notice those tweets made the tiny extra effort to retweet and share them with friends!

(5) Have we left anybody out? Certainly there are people who are not yet even aware of #AfghanistanTuesday. But if we start doing the things above, there will be MANY fewer people who will be able to say, "#AfghanistanTuesday? What's that?"

January 11 is just around the corner. Let's get to work!