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:
Mark this event on your calendar! Paul Getsos, co-author of Tools for Radical Democracy: How to Organize for Power in your Community, will do a book reading on Wednesday April 2nd 2008 – 7:00pm, Magers & Quinn Bookstore (3038 Hennepin Avenue S., Minneapolis).
In Tools for Radical Democracy, Getsos and co-author Minieri share stories and tools from their nationally recognized and award-winning work of building a community-led organization, training community leaders, and conducting campaigns that changed public policy and delivered concrete results to tens of thousands of people. The book contains keen insights for using technology effectively, building more powerful alliances, and engaging in the social justice movement.
“This manual is an organizer’s organizer. I hope many people will put this to use.”
—Heather Booth, founder and president, Midwest Academy
“This book is ‘the secret’ for building collective power for long-term social change.”
—Nat Chioke Williams, Executive Director, Hill-Snowdon Foundation
“Minieri and Getsos provide real-world examples of how ordinary people can become leaders who effect positive change. This book will be required reading for our staff and recommended reading for all our members.”
—Janet S. Keating, Co-Director, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition
“Students, scholars, and social activists alike will find something to their tastes in this how-to guide for rebuilding democracy from the ground up.”
—Joaquin Herranz Jr., Assistant Professor, Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs, University of Washington
I picked up this article by Eugene Eric Kim via Jon Stahl’s blog.
In it, Eugene writes about a training experience in which he clearly sees the impact of differences in technology understanding - what he calls the technology understanding gap:
The following day, I co-led a session on this topic with AngusParker. Two of the participants were dealing with the specific challenge of connecting members of a national network of leaders in reproductive health, so we used that as a case study. We decided to use Clay’s contention to frame the problem, resulting in this whiteboard:
What do you notice about this picture? Obviously, the Tools column is completely empty. That’s a dead giveaway that I’m facilitating this discussion. (That and the horrific handwriting.) Figure out the basics first. Don’t let the question about technology drive the discussion. During the discussion, one of the participants asked, “What tools can we use?” I responded, “Let’s not worry about that now.” So we kept talking and talking, and I noticed the two non-technical participants in the group squirming like crazy. So I stopped, noticed how gaping the Tools column looked, and said, “You’re uncomfortable about not having discussed the tools, aren’t you.” She nodded. “Don’t worry about it,” I responded. “The tools part will be easy, once we figure everything else out.” “Easy for you, maybe,” she said. “You already know what goes there.” That was not quite true, but I got her point, and the force of it struck me so hard, I had to stop for a moment. I looked at the gap, and I saw possibilities. She looked at the gap, and she saw a void. That was upsetting for her. It made it hard for her to think about the other aspects of the problem. It made me realize how much I take my technology literacy for granted. But it also created an opportunity to discuss how easily we are sidetracked by technology. “Tool” does not have to mean software, and making that assumption prevents us from exploring other viable, possibly better solutions.
Jon follows up with this observation:
often, people who are less technically literate think that if they only fill in the right answer in that middle “Tools” column, that their problems will all be solved. When, really, it is more important to get the Promise and the Bargain right. I like to call this pattern “magical tool thinking.” It results in a lot of wasted time and effort trying to identify that magical, right tool — effort which should go into thinking about process, objectives and how to sustain the non-technological parts of the organizing effort.
I couldn’t agree more - with both of them. In fact, it is this “Technology Understanding Gap” and the its impacts that Jon notes that we address with our Community Organizing and Technology Institute.
Our goal with COaTI - and really all of our programs - is to help organizers understand what’s possible with technology so that organizers can put the “tools” in their proper context and focus on the goals and strategy that should drive any technology’s use.
I had a conversation yesterday with someone who’s trying to wrap his head around how to talk with organizers in his organization about what a database does and what value it provides - why they should use it, and how to think about using it.
As I talked with him about his database questions, I realized that it might be a useful exercise to get this out on the net somewhere. Although I suspect that most of us who do tech work with organizers have had some version of this conversation many many times, I don’t know that I’ve seen it in print, so here goes:
I usually start by asking organizers how many people they can track without any additional technology - no paper, no clipboards, no computers, etc. Most folks think about it for a minute and say somewhere between 10 to 20, and that number trends downward as we get into the details of what they feel is important to keep track of – add in things like occupation, number of children, personal history or stories related to the issues in question and folks rapidly downgrade their initial estimates.
Then I ask how many people they can keep track of using the original organizer’s database - the clipboard and various paper forms - and the number usually jumps up to around 40-50 or higher depending on how long the person’s been an organizer and how meticulous they are about record keeping.
Then I’ll ask how many people the organization usually turns out at events like direct actions, press conferences, etc. Organizations without databases, working in urban areas, tend to turn out 30-50 people if they don’t have a good data management process. Organizer’s math suggests this means that they’re capable of making around 100 contacts to turnout those 30 people.
I wrap it up by saying something like “you’ve been turning out around 30 people to most of your events for the last several years - and what’s it going to take for you to build at a bigger scale so you can demonstrate more power and really move your agenda?” The clear answer is always more people and it doesn’t take a whole lot to go from more people to a better way of managing member info. Bottom line is that if you want to contact more people, you need a system to track the information that goes beyond the limits of paper and personal memory.
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?
Twitter’s had quite a bit of buzz lately. If you haven’t heard of it, maybe its because you’ve got better things to do with your time than subscribe to a service that enables you and other twitter users you know to update each other on the minutiae of your lives via the web, cell phone text message, or rss.
But wait, maybe, just maybe there’s something else here. Stay with me for a moment here:
Take twitter, not as potentially annoying social phenomena likened to the latest form of cat blogging, but instead as a communications platform that does a few things really well and really easily:
Do you see it yet? How about some scenarios:
Those are just two examples. There are many many more, and I hope that you’re thinking about and planning to use some of them. Twitter’s not perfect - far from it. Currently, the site can be painfully slow as the number of users outweighs the resources of the server twitter.com is sitting on, but I’d be surprised if that didn’t change soon.
What is really cool about twitter is that it is totally permission based - you can’t just collect someone’s cell phone and and spam them with sms text messages - they have to register at twitter and ask to receive your updates. It may add a layer of complexity, but it means that folks that do subscribe to your updates probably really want to hear from you.
From an organizing perspective, it would be very cool if twitter supported groups, but given how many people are clamoring for this functionality, I hope to see it soon.
What are your thoughts about where and how twitter could be used in community organizing?
The wonderful folks at Greater Birmingham Ministries have posted a video on Google Video - take a look:
You can learn more about GBM at their website, and about their work around the Alabama constitution at http://constitutionalreform.org.
the latest version of Skype includes an option Firefox extension that automatically transforms phone numbers in webpage into buttons that you can click to initiate a Skype call.
Here’s an example of what it looks like in action:
(Click for a larger image)
This example is taken from PTP’s database - Salesforce - but would work the same with any other online database out there.
As you can see, the possibilities are pretty intriguing - imagine setting up a phone list with entry fields - a caller could sit at a computer, clicking and calling their way down the list, entering in response directly on the page and therefore directly into the database. This could be pretty darn cool.
about a month ago, I was having a conversation with a colleague where we puzzling over what it would take for YouTube or similar services to be a tool for community organizers.
One of my thoughts was that YouTube needed some organizing related content before it would be of much interest to organizers or members of community organizing groups.
Well, the folks over at Kentuckians for the Commonwealth may have started the ball rolling by posting this video called “Why We Vote” check it out and forward it on:
Amanda’s got a question about interesting use of Google Maps by community organizing groups.
I started to respond over there, but think elevating the conversation out of a comment thread is probably worthwhile since I think there are some folks reading here that aren’t reading over there, and I’d really like them (if you’re not sure if you’re included in that them, you are) to weigh in on this.
So this is what little I know on the subject: mapping mashups just haven’t reached into the organizations we know doing anything with GIS.
I think there are a few reasons for that.
I’ll expand a bit on each of these points: continue reading…
