PTP Blog

Seems like the MySpace folks are working to build a case against the idea that MySpace users are politically disengaged.  A recent survey

. . .revealed a few key facts: that MySpace’s young user base is more politically engaged and active than the U.S. population at large, that they tend to be politically independent, and that they plan to vote in the 2008 election.

Read the rest - it is quite interesting at MySpace touts early success with political polling initiative

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?

The Community Forum on Rebuilding New Orleans going on now at LSU in Baton Rouge (sponsored by a whole range of organizations and politicians) is an interesting example of using technology to get a message out- with an attempt to get input in from the field. Steve Bradberry from NOLA Acorn had contacted us few weeks back with this problem: How do we bring the evacuees into the discussion on rebuilding their city? Steve wanted to know - What did PTP know about how to tackle this? The initial idea was for a town hall meeting, which may still be in the works, but this Forum has became an intermediate step within the process of bringing the voices together.

It turns out that if you hold your event at a large university, you’ve got great access to a broad pipe to the net. It also turns out that LSU had a system for remote learning that uses a product called mediasite from sonic foundry. While we have done one (1!) web cast, this was not something we had used before. We consulted with the Steve Mack at luxmedia501 who confirmed that this was a pretty good product. It projects a small video picture, audio along with a slide (I’m not calling it a powerpoint!) in the remainder of the screen. Works fine, but it requires a bit of tech support to produce. Jeff Karlson from Acorn was charged with pulling this together and we started exchanging a lot of phone calls as we coached him through the process. The concept was to have the evacuees connected with Acorn meet at their offices to watch and participate in the event via e-mail. Jeff wanted to make sure that it worked. Really sure, so we we hooked them up with Dan Luke from Hard Working Pictures to produce the web cast. Web casts are funny things because you need video, audio, computer and network skills to get them to work. The webcast started late because it ran into technical problems which is understandable because it was put together very quickly and the connections hadn’t been tested properly until the day of.

Watching it, I was very impressed with its ability to plug you into the process. I’ve had it on in the background most of the day and I wonder how many people could sit through it. Also, I wonder if many emails or phone calls came in from the field. That being said, this is a useful prototype for getting the word out. Let’s hope all the coalitions, organizations, networks that are pulling together to help with Gulf coast recovery work as hard to get the diaspora vidible and plugged in.

This hurricane has presented a challenge to community organizing - how to reach all the people dispersed by the storm and create or re-create democratically-led organizations that can respond to the government and private interests that will control the rebuilding of the cities and towns. This is a big challenge for community organizations that usually are struggling to survive and barely made it through the hurricane themselves.

This is a critical moment for developing power for low income survivors - Some national organizations (PICO network, Jobs With Justice) are using their Washington connections to bring the voices of the communities directly to the federal government. These and others are organizing in the evacuation housing sites. Houston’s The Metropolitan Organization - affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation - has formed a survivors’ leadership group which is developing a set of demands (Another article.) ACORN is organizing evacuee groups in Baton Rouge and Houston. According to Madeline Talbott of ACORN, they brought computers to the Houston Astrodome to give ACORN members a way to register with FEMA on-site.

These national groups have some visibility, but the unaffiliated local and regional organizing groups are also engaged in noteworthy, if unsung, efforts. Randy Stoecker over at the U of Wisconsin has put together a rudimentary list of organizations that meet this list of criteria:

1 Its pre-Katrina address was in an affected community.
2 It is governed by the people it serves.
3 It is currently involved in relief efforts (including organizing efforts)

Please check it out and support groups on it. Add to it if you know of more groups.
Groups that PTP has engaged with in the area: Southern Echo in Mississippi, Louisiana Bucket Brigade, Working Interfaith Network in Louisiana. There is also an impressive philanthropic organization at the Southern Partners Fund, which has set up a special fund for recovery. With its board made up of staff from community-led organizations, Southern Partners Fund is well connected throughout the region. They’ve got their finger on the pulse of community organizing.

Even as the local community organizing groups are struggling to put together a forum for power, the online organizing networks have mostly focused on relief issues by using computer systems to track missing and safe evacuees or to match housing requests. With so many people displaced, the internet hasn’t been much help in bringing the displaced back together. Most of the low income people in the hurricane’s ground zero weren’t on the net anyway. While there has been some interesting techniques used - I like the People Finder Interchange Format (PFIF) as an interesting technology application - generally speaking these are tools for the portion of the population on the net. The internet hasn’t a offered good substitute for a coordinated on-the-ground organizing effort. As usual, its greatest benefit to organizing has been as a fundraiser, but most of the funds are going towards individual survival and not yet towards strengthening the organizations that help communities as a whole survive. Our organizing community sorely lacks a robust fundraising system for community-led organizing. PTP has set a goal to develop a solution to this problem and we will write about it in the near future.

In the meantime, it sure looks like the “times they are a changing” again. Let’s make the most of it.

SWOP has built a very nice web log, covering the news from on the ground in Albuquerque. Here’s their entry covering the founding of Grassroots Global Justice in San Antonio in April.
Karlos is the communications wizard at SWOP. He recently told us on how they intend to use the blog in their community organizing.:

We are going to be doing “breakfast and blogging” workshops over the summer as well to demystify it for folks who may think it is difficult. Ultimately, the idea is to have an online community that resembles the folks we organize with where we can start to create a dialogue about grassroots issues. It is only a supplement to our organizing and mission.

Also, it’s a way to get around the corporate media filter, straight to targeted audiences. Particularly when corporate media doesn’t cover community demos, events, etc., but also to comment on stories that do run locally.

Blogging - not just for breakfast any more…

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.