Does your organization have a whammy bar?

"Can it have a whammy bar?", The Harmonix (Guitar Hero) guys asked.
"Why, What would a whammy bar do?" the Huangs (investors) responded.
"We don't know yet, but it has to have a whammy bar", the Harmonix guys responded. "Because whammy bars are cool."

Does your organization have a whammy bar?

Guitar players get this allusion right away. For the non-musician, a "whammy bar" or tremolo arm, is the lever on a guitar bridge that allows the player to raise or lower the instrument pitch by pulling or pushing the bar while the notes are still fretted on the neck of the guitar. Jimi Hendrix is famous for his dive bomb and sky-high whammy bar use. And yes, whammy bars are cool.

What's cool about your organization?

I'll confess that I don't know what an organizational whammy bar looks like. It might be something Web 2.0 -- a Facebook page, a velvet rope social network, #yourconference @Twitter. It could also be a tool, a jobs board, photo sharing, geo-mapping, or a wiki. Whammy bars don't have to be digital. It could be something really cool that you do at your annual meeting that attendees talk about afterwards.

Whammy bars are about leverage and the fun you get from applying, expressing yourself, and being surprised and delighted with the result. What's your organizational whammy bar? I'd like to hear about your success stories.

secure communications for digital activists

"It is no myth that repressive regimes are becoming increasingly more savvy in their ability to effectively employ sophisticated filtering, censoring, monitoring technologies (often courtesy of American companies like Cisco) to crack down on resistance movements. In other words, political activists need to realize that their regimes are becoming smarter and more effective, not dumber and hardly clueless"
Read the rest to Patrick Meier's excellent article article How To Communicate Securely in Repressive Environments.