It seems we are running from one extreme to the other these days…a new paper appears about online civic engagement which promises to be the thin edge of reform in community organizing; meanwhile we are still slogging through the drudgery of door-to-door work to be supported by a new national voter database specifically designed specifically for nonprofits’ use.
In April, the Center for Civic Participation organized a meeting of activist-voter-geeks and the techno-geeks that love them to talk about establishing the aforementioned national voter database. This would be a terrific advance for basebuilding community-led organizing, but only if it’s as widely available as electricity and costs about the same. Of course, success in that endeavor will aggravate the problems that most non-profits in general and basebuilding groups in particular had with their databases last year. It was a train wreck. Look for a new report from PTP examining the technology wins and losses that community organizing had with civic participation projects. In the meantime, watch for information on the group that came out of the April meeting. It’s got the “cute” name of “the newginia task force”
The report, Power to the Edges: Trends and Opportunities in Online Civic Engagement, takes the optomistic view that we’re on the track to the restoration of citizen democracy in this country. This paper does a good job of collecting the fundamental arguments for “self-organizing” combined with “e-activism” as applied to civic engagement. The title “Power to the Edges” seems to be from a summary of the practices employed by the failed Dean and Clark campaigns, which were highly decentralized, and not from the victorious Bush campaign, which wasn’t.
It’s handy having all the arguments in one place, but the paper is probably weakest when it tries to make the case for a trend. For example, the paper cites the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s collection of predictions called The Future of the Internet to support this argument:
The cost of technology and access continues to drop, and although a digital divide persists, it is closing and will continue to close over the next decade. Internet usage continues to broaden both in terms of who is online as well as what they’re doing online.
The trouble is, that report doesn’t predict how large the digital divide will be in ten years. The Future of the Internet report wasn’t a survey of Internet use. Nope, it was a survey of 1286 experts, academics, pundits, futurists and what have you. They are entitled to their opinions, and they have lots of them. They seem to be quite divided on most issues in the report, including the future of broadband use in households.
In fact, the Pew Center’s surveys of actual usage show that Internet penetration has been stalling out at around 60% (See http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/Internet_Status_2005.pdf, page 59.) Since Progressive Technology Project supports groups that are in the 40-50% of the population that isn’t online in any meaningful way, we tend to see little salvation for grassroots democracy in the online world unless or until the online civic participation thinkers develop a more comprehensive view of just who is exactly out there in the offline world. When we’re toasting the online revolution, let’s not forget that the glass is only half full here. We need more creative thinking and discussion about how to integrate all kinds of organizing using the new technologies.
