Author Topic: Developing Assets and Protecting our new found friends.  (Read 5797 times)

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Offline Che Gookin

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Developing Assets and Protecting our new found friends.
« on: December 09, 2008, 01:53:32 AM »
What is an asset? An asset is a person or persons who are willing to share information. Most of the time on the forums these people come forward themselves and bare their souls to the entire world. In the past this has worked quite well for sparking conversation, debate, and flamefests. It has also helped prevent kids from being in program and it has helped get kids removed from programs. For the purposes of our work we need to consider discretion and timing.

Discretion is the act of protecting the identity of the asset. If you find a person willing to share information with you don't run to the forums and start madly posting all about the person. Keep their name, location, and personal details secret until they agree to release that information if they even agree to it all. Likewise, don't immediately post newly found information on the open forums right away either. Assets are notoriously nervous little people who might well be scared off if we immediately post their information.

Timing is everything and we need to be honest with our assets about nature of the relationship between the asset and the handler. If you are handling a veteran of a program you need to state almost immediately that our intentions are to find information for a program specific exposure site. I'd rather be using information coming from people who know what deal is rather than people who are duped. A critical aspect to getting program veterans to volunteer information is our method.

Different people have different approaches to developing assets. I tend to take the time to meet people, get to know them, and then start asking questions. Others start hosing down the the landscape immediately. Either way the important thing to remember is be polite, if they tell you to fuck off accept it and move onto the next person. Getting into arguements with potential information sources is only going to eat up your time. Just say thank you and move onto the next person on your list.

In alot of ways it is like telemarketing. How often do you hear of a telemarketing screaming at you over the phone after you told them to bite your ass? Probably not very often as most of them say good bye and hang up.

On these private forums I want us to practice some rudimentary precautions with our assets. Never post the name of an asset on these private forums. I'm not 100 percent convinced that this forum will always remain private. Post their information yes, in the pertinent thread please, but leave their name and personal details out of it.

Another thing I want to caution everyone on is saturating our prospective assets with requests for help. The reason why I want people on myspace and facebook to be very careful about who they are sending out requests to is to not frustrate people. I mean I hate constant invites to groups, private messages from people I don't know, and that sort of thing. Meeters need to be very careful and be sure they are communicating with each other. Personally, I'd like to see only one meeter per research project, but if more want to help and they can work it out between them that is great as well.
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