Archive for Politics

Post-Obama Organizing? It’s Already in the Streets

November 19, 2008 at 1:32 am · Filed under Activists, Flash Causes, Politics and tagged: , , ,

Understandably, there’s been a lot of discussion in the last two weeks about the future of the powerful Obama Internet operation. Does the vast, empowered constituency serve as a virtual public advocacy campaign for Obama policy initiatives? Does it work toward the mid-terms in 2010? Re-election in 2012?

Or does it inspire a “flash cause” that puts tens of thousands of people into the streets in outraged protest less than two weeks after the election in what is a clear sign that what the Obama campaign unleashed in online organizing is just the start.

Based on the incredible success of JointheImpact.com, which channeled anger over California’s passage of the anti-gay Proposition 8 into an instant same-sex marriage advocacy organization that put the old line gay rights groups to shame, we’re voting for the latter.

Built on the WetPaint platform, using Twitter and other social networks, and boasting local organizing groups in every state, JointheImpact generated massive media attention and built itself into an action-oriented campaign that brought tens of thousands of people to mass rallies. The group combined a strong political message at the top with the tools other participants needed to organize themselves.

Here’s how Reuters covered the story:

Amy Balliett, 26, used her lunch break last Friday to start a website — http://www.jointheimpact.com — to call for coordinated action across the United States this weekend.

In a few days, more than 1 million people have visited her site and dozens of marches and meetings are now planned for 1:30 p.m. EST (1830 GMT) on Saturday.

By the evening jointheimpact.com was created, it was visited 10,000 times. By Sunday, there were 50,000 visits per hour and the computer running the site crashed. It has moved computers twice since in an effort to keep up.

“Why do we have to wait for someone to step up and say let’s do a protest?” Balliett remembered thinking after her friend, Willow Witte, posted a blog about California. “Over email we decided to do it.”

Now that’s online organizing. Genie. Bottle. Not gonna happen.

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Change.gov vs. Change.org

November 13, 2008 at 2:21 am · Filed under Politics, Social Networks and tagged: , , ,

If President-elect Barack Obama and his transition team are looking for a model that uses the power of social networks and citizen democracy to open up government, they ought to bring their own homepage – Change.gov – and replace the g-o-v with a little o-r-g.

Online social activism portal Change.org, whose origins predate (by just a little bit) the theme of the Obama ’08 campaign, has opened up a super-connected suggestion box on national policy – and if they’re smart, the new Obama Administration will dive right in. I can almost picture a Capraesque scene in the Cabinet Room come January: Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel dumps a huge hamper of Change.org suggestions on the big, shiny and table and calls on the startled Secretaries to “dig in” as President Obama nods in approval.

Not that you’d divine that sort of attitude from the dot-gov side of the Change domain spectrum: Change.gov is a handsome, well-designed billboard with a light Obama agenda, the latest transition news, and the ability to apply for jobs and send in suggestions. It’s the polar opposite of the much-lauded MyBO site of the campaign, where the campaign allowed organizers to – well – organize publicly using the Obama team’s digital plumbing. And no, your once-prized MyBO log-in and identity won’t work in the Office of the President-elect.

I don’t think you can fault the transition team of Change.gov, especially given the campaign’s track record on balancing real online collaboration with total control over the big brand messages – and I can see some of the wisdom in its skeletal “no drama” approach.

But man, imagine if they’d gone with the Ideas section of Change.org?

I was hanging out over there earlier today and the breadth of the suggestions for the Obama Administration – most of them pretty clear from Obama supporters, as least in the general – was pretty amazing.

The site throws Barack Obama’s quote on open government right up top – both an as encouragement and as a not-so-subtle challenge: “I will open the doors of government and ask you to be involved in your own democracy again.”

The ideas number in the hundreds and they’re divided up by causes – economy has the most suggestions, followed by energy, government reform and education. The suggestions are voted on by Cause.org members – high vote-getters include: closing Guantanamo Bay, gay marriage initiatives, fighting global warming, and legalizing marijuana. Yeah, it’s a young liberal crowd on the whole. But there are some really interesting ideas – I was taken with the suggestion of Michael Kleinman, who describes himself as an aid worker from L.A.:

The most effective reform would be to establish a new cabinet-level Department of Development, with the power to coordinate US foreign assistance across and throughout the Government, while also implementing a long-term, strategic approach. USAID, as a sub-cabinet agency, lacks the ability to play such a role.

There are a lot of efforts out there to keep the super-wired organizing work that came to life around the Obama campaign alive – and even grow it into a real national movement that transcends a mere election campaign for a single politician. What Al Giordano is attempting with his network of Field Hands is a good example of the post-election “keep-it-going” mindset. It’s light on any unity of policy yet, but as Giordano points out, people are talking actively about their own roles as participants in democracy – something that is, frankly, a pretty new concept for a lot of Americans. And that’s what the Change.org transition site alternative is all about – a potential complement to the Change.gov side, the “outside” to the politician’s “inside.”

“I see it as parallel attempts to get people involved in civic life again — one through the public sector, the other through the private,” said Josh Levy, editor-in-chief of Change.org in an email. “I think they can work together.”

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