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This post explains how to join the Year of Youth Core Team. This is not for everyone. Project 2012 participants will eventually number in the millions, but the Core Team will not exceed a few thousand.
We want a tight-knit, well-organized group of youth leaders willing to commit at LEAST five hours EVERY week toward focused work on specific tasks, and dedicated enough to do 'whatever it takes' to make this movement a success.
This will involve training and being trained, educating and being educated, leading and being led. By pooling our strengths and helping each other become the best possible activists and leaders for liberty, core team members will pioneer a new kind of organization, a new kind of community, and a new kind of politics.
This past decade saw the rise of viral marketing, viral videos, and viral emails. The viral phenomenon has yet to be truly harnessed by any organization in the realm of politics. Here is our attempt.
What you are about to read has never been tried by anyone other than Year of Youth. This is uncharted territory. If you choose to proceed, you will be taking part in an unprecedented experiment in viral organizational growth. Below is part one of a comprehensive viral marketing strategy that will unfold over the next few weeks and months.
First, the minimum requirements, then the first half of the application process.
MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS
--Facebook account
--Google/Gmail account
--Must dedicate 5+ hours per week, EVERY week, toward focused work on tasks
--Must stay current on the core-team forums on YLF - our primary method of communication
--Must be totally comfortable representing YoY publicly
--Must be willing to proactively network and collaborate with fellow core team members
THE APPLICATION PROCESS - PART 1
0) Read every word of this post. It is important that you do all the steps in order.
1) Fill out this form so our volunteer coordinators have your contact information.
2) Familiarize yourself with Year of Youth and Project 2012. Read the YLF introduction - including the linked articles and videos - and the YoY manifesto, vision statement and issues page, then watch our Revolution's Eve and Youth Revolution videos. This step is important for two reasons: to make sure you agree with the aims, stances and methods of our organization, and to empower you to explain YoY and Project 2012 to others. People will ask you questions, so be prepared with answers.
3) Change your Facebook profile picture to one of these two images. It must remain your profile pic until you become accepted as full member. If while an applicant you change your pic to something else, we will take it to mean you are giving up and withdrawing from the process.
4) Go to the YLF homepage, click the Share icon at the top right corner of the Intro post, log into Facebook if you aren't already, type a custom message like "Check this out" into the blank box, then click Share to post it to your wall.
5) Download the Project 2012 promo video here. Upload it to your Facebook profile by clicking Applications (bottom-left on the toolbar) > Video > Upload (top-right) > Select the video file. Fill in the following information:
Title: The Youth Revolution - Project 2012
Privacy: Everyone
Description: (You can customize this, but make sure to include all three links)
Note that for some people the progress bar does not fill up during video uploading. Usually the video is uploading anyway, so just leave that running in the background for 30-60 minutes depending on your connection speed. If you get that problem and it never finishes uploading after an hour or so, try a different browser.It's time for real change.
Join us on the Front. http://youthlibertyfront.com
And help make 2012 the Year of Youth. http://www.yearofyouth.org
If you love the video, pay it forward. http://www.yearofyouth.org/the-viral-video-experiment
Once the video finishes uploading, it will take about 10 minutes to process. When it's done processing, click Edit Video and change the thumbnail to something cool. Once everything is in order, tag 50 of your friends in the video. Try to get people of different political persuasions if possible. This will inevitably start a conversation in the video comments. The more comments there are, the more likely it is to appear in the top of the newsfeeds of your friends and your friends' friends, potentially getting multiple hundreds or even thousands of views. Click here for more details on why this works. Be careful tagging your friends that are mutual with other YoY people - they may have already been tagged and we don't want people being tagged more than once.
When we have done this mass-tagging tactic in the past, the net response has been positive. But some of your Facebook friends may feel minorly inconvenienced that you tagged them in a video they do not appear in, or that they get a bunch of notifications from comments on the video. They might try to shame you for bad Facebook etiquette. One guy even threatened to take us to court. You may respond however you like. But if anyone complains to me, my response will be "Boo hoo, cry me a river" in politer terms.
Once all 50 friends are tagged, take a screenshot of the tags. Example screenshot here. If you're on a PC, PrintScreen and paste into MSPaint or other image editor and save it.
6) Go to the Year of Youth FB fanpage, become a fan if you aren't already, click "Suggest to Friends", select all your FB friends (use the code below to make it easy), take a screenshot of the box once all your friends are selected, then send the invites. You can use the following code to select all your FB friends at once. Once the box is on your screen after clicking "Suggest to Friends", paste this line of code into your browser bar like it is a regular website link, then hit Enter.
javascript:elms=document.getElementById('friends') .getElementsByTagName('li');for(var fid in elms){if(typeof elms[fid] === 'object'){fs.click(elms[fid]);}}
That will highlight all of your friends at once. You can de-select the people who would never speak to you again if you suggested this to them. Then take the screenshot and send the invites.
7) AFTER steps 1-5 are completed, send a FB friend invite to Jackie Silseth (YoY Volunteer Director), Mindy Richards (YoY Volunteer Coordinator), Jared Fuller (YoY Co-Founder & Executive Director), and myself (YoY Co-Founder & YLF Website Czar), then request access to the Year of Youth - Core Team Applicants FB group.
8) Take this quiz. If you have had no previous exposure to the Austrian School, it will be difficult. Take note of which answers you get wrong. Do you tend to err on the side of socialism, Keynesianism, or the Chicago school? Continue taking it until you get 100%, then take a screenshot of the results page. The pic will probably include the answer to the first question, but that's okay.
You don't have to agree with all the answers, but it is important to understand where the Austrians are coming from. The economic articles and videos linked from the YLF intro post were written from the perspective of the Austrian School. This is how Peter Schiff and other Austrian economists were able to predict the Great Recession with such accuracy, while the lame-brain talking heads (mostly Keynesians and Chicago School monetarists) were so consistently wrong.
The Austrian School offers the best ammunition against Obamanomics (which is largely Keynesian), so it will be important for core team members to learn how to go on the offensive with Austrian insights. This will be an ongoing learning process, but the quiz is a good way to get your feet wet. When you answer each question correctly, you'll be given a link that explains the reasoning behind the answer. Feel free to browse through those writings and explore the rest of Mises.org. Ron Paul has said that every day he reads Mises.org and LewRockwell.com (a news site with good Austrian-inspired analysis of current events).
9) Create a new thread in this forum (Join the Core Team) with your full name (or whatever name you go by, first and last) in the title. In the thread, attach the three screenshots you took. If for some reason you were unable to do one of the above steps, explain why and you will be assigned some other (harder) task.
Once the above is taken care of, you will be given access to the hidden Membership Applications forum where you will post your application and receive your personalized applicant task which you will have one week to complete. You will also read details of the fundraising task all applicants must complete: developing a list of 10 personal contacts, then raising at least $50 from that list.
Once your personal and fundraising tasks are complete, you will be accepted as a full member of the YoY core team. You will be fully plugged in: given access to the core-team-only private forums, the War Room forum, our core-team-only Facebook group, and also an @yearofyouth.org email address. We will then work with you to design a specialized 'job' for you that is tailored to your strengths. If you are applying to become a Campus Organizer, we will get you trained and active as soon as possible. Once accepted, you will have become a member of the awesomest organization in the universe. And the rest... is classified.
Good luck!
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