community organizing
Kicking off PowerBase training series!
PTP is kicking off our 2011 PowerBase training series today in Minneapolis, MN. Organizers from X organizations are converging on Minnesota for PTP’s training on PowerBase and Organizing – how you can leverage the power of PowerBase to make your organizing easier, better, and faster.
If you’re not at the training and want to follow along from home, follow us on Twitter @ptptweets and track the hashtag #powerbase
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Mobilizing Communities in a Connected Age: New Report from ZeroDivide and Mitchell Kapor Foundation
The Mitchell Kapor Foundation*, in partnership with the ZeroDivide Foundation recently released a report titled “Mobilizing Communities in a Connected Age.” The report is an assessment of advocacy organizations’ use of technology, and is a companion report to their recent report that outlined the challenges facing philanthropy’s efforts to support technology use by advocacy organizations.
Both reports are well worth reading in full, and you can access both of them from the ZeroDivide Website. What I want to focus on here are the key findings of the report on advocacy organizations, and the implications for community organizing groups.
In the report, Tina Lee, the author conducted a scan of the field, and based on her findings, categorized the field into three categories: Leading, Aspiring, and Legacy organizations. The report details a number of findings that we’ll likely return to in later posts, but overall, four themes emerge that have critical importance for community organizing groups:
1) Integration is key
2) Integration of communications is of particular importance
3) Successful technology integration flows from support by organization’s leadership
4) Organizational culture is a determining factor in success
These are themes that PTP has been talking about for years. In fact, take a look at our 2004 report “From Exclusion to Inclusion: Stengthening Community-led Organizations with Effective Technology” to see how things have shifted over the last several years. More recently, we’ve taken these concepts and made them central to the design of our programs – everything we do is really aimed at integration, communications, and working to shift culture.
We encourage you to download and read the ZeroDivide report, and if you’d like, post back here with any questions or comments that you’d like PTP to take up in future posts. The ZeroDivide reports, taken together, paint a picture of a changing field, and we’d like to invite you to join us in unpacking the implications of the reports for community organizing groups and how we can more effectively work together to build the capacity of the field.
*The Mitchell Kapor Foundation is a supporter of the Progressive Technology Project and included PTP in the survey of groups that are cited in this report.
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PowerBase project now open!
After more than a year in development with a great team of organizers from APEN, SCOPE, EHC, and NYCAHN, PTP is happy to announce that we're accepting sign-ups to get up and running with PowerBase, PTP's new database designed to meet the needs of community organizing groups.
Check out the PowerBase website for more information, to request a demo, and to get started with PowerBase.
Here's the rundown on the process for getting PowerBase:
- Sign-up for a demo (we'll soon have an online demo that you can look at without signing up) - we're asking groups to sign up for a demo because we can't with a clear conscience let you sign-up for PowerBase without looking at it first
- If you like what you see, let us know you're interested, and we'll follow-up with you about pricing details
- After you decide the services you'll need, we'll send you a contract and after we've received it and your deposit, we'll get to work getting you up and running on PowerBase
We've answered the "big questions" about PowerBase over at the PowerBase website, where you'll find information about pricing and how long it will take to get your organization transitioned over to PowerBase.
We're really excited to be starting up the public phase of the project, and hope that you check out PowerBase and decide that it's the right fit for your organization. If there's anything we can do to help, you know where to find us.
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Announcing PTP’s New Executive Director!
Dear friends,
The Board and Staff of PTP are thrilled to announce Arif Mamdani as the new Executive Director of the Progressive Technology Project!
We're especially excited to have Arif because of the leadership role he has played in increasing PTP's commitment to adding value to the organizing community through deeper and more comprehensive engagement. He has been exceptional as PTP’s Capacity Building Director in the last six years, leading our Community Organizing and Technology Institutes (COaTIs), TechCamps and workshops.
While there are many reasons that the board chose to appoint Arif, the simple fact is that he is the ideal fit for the position: he has the skills, necessary experience, and deep knowledge of the work and field to move us forward and to give PTP a very seamless transition. As part of the PTP team, Arif has been intimately involved with planning PTP's strategic direction. He is part of a new generation of leaders who early on saw the importance of adapting technology to organizing needs.
Arif comes in on the heels of six years of outstanding leadership from Mark Sherman who is stepping down as PTP’s Executive Director due to his strong belief in passing on leadership. Mark came to PTP in challenging times and has led us to a point of great strength in our staff capacity, fundraising, and role in the organizing world. Mark will stay on into the spring (which comes late in Minnesota!) to support the transition.
We have a full calendar this year of splendid programming for organizing groups across the country and we’re fortunate to have the expertise of Arif and a very strong staff team. We’re offering trainings on communications and technology, databases and technology planning, online social networking, and basic office software skills. These are all designed to bring entire community organizations up to speed with technology and to help groups integrate technology more deeply into the life of their organization for them to be more successful. You can find more details on our web site at http://progressivetech.org/
Thank you for you continued work and support of PTP. Please take a minute to send a note of support to Arif at amamdani
progressivetech [dot] org. You can always contact me or any other member of PTP’s board or staff with any questions you have – about this transition or any of PTP’s program activities. In Solidarity, PTP Board & Staff
What's media justice?
We're attending the National Conference for Media Reform here in Minneapolis. We recorded Malkia Cyril's speech on the occasion of receiving an award from Funding Exchange's Media Justice Fund. Hint: it's not about the media.
Check it out.
Progressive Technology Project's reach within the social justice movement
We've been looking at the grassroots community led social justice organization movement lately. As part of this we decided to see who PTP has reached over the years. It's interesting primarily because it shows how widespread the movement is. Here's a map from our web site:
Benign Neglect
We were recently in a discussion where the question of the efficacy of social networks such as moveon, truemajority, and the personal democracy forum came up. Someone expressed the view that when grassroots political dialog is conflated into "netroots" political dialog, community organizing’s constituencies are pushed out of the debate.
Community organizing is primarily concerned with making a local impact through face-to-face organizing. Some organizations and coalitions have a statewide impact and, every now and then, a national impact. Netroots uses internet communications to work in the opposite direction, first building a national or regional caucus of donors and bloggers, then it attempts to drill down. In the process, the issues and concerns of community organizing are just about entirely ignored by the netroots sphere.
While financial considerations are not the only factor, the economic base of blogging - online advertising - reinforces a self-referential model. It's internet eyeballs that pay the piper. Bloggers drive traffic by reading and referencing each other. Netroots bloggers are not venturing out to make connections with existing community groups and learning the values and issues that drive this form of grassroots democracy.
Have you ever studied a map of moveon.org meetings or truemajority sponsored demonstrations? Placed on a map, the e-rooters are concentrated in the northeast, the upper Midwest, skip over the near west, and pop up again in the three western states. Online social networks are by and large an urban/inner suburb phenomenon. Community organizing shares some of this turf but is spread out across many more states and into the rural communities. Even where they are in the same cities, the organizational bases usually aren’t in the same census tracts or even the same zip codes. (It's common knowledge:mydd Chris Bowers or Imedia Connection covers the daily Kos last year)
There’s more that they don’t share. They aren’t the same gender, color or religion. They also aren’t likely to see each other in school, on the job or shopping. Young people may meet in myspace, but even here the net fails to bridge the grand canyons of class and ethnicity. Consequently, when issues are debated or candidates vetted, it’s done by well meaning people who by and large haven’t experienced living a lifetime on low wages, losing a job promotion because of skin color or language skills, immigrating, union drives, inferior schools, coal companies grinding their landscape to dust.
Which leads us to the question in our discussion, if our constituencies are not part of the discussion are they better off with or without netroots?
