I look forward to hearing more about your work. I’ll blogwhore it everywhere I go!

Thanks for trying to get this into a format that people can look at and use.

My wife worked for the Obama campaign in its early months, before it became an “official campaign.” The grassroots origins then had the challenge of becoming connected up with a top-down control model. This killed much of the innovation of the campaign, but did allow for the coordination necessary to counter the Clinton machine.

The frustration you and thousands of others is very real. I am attempting now to create a new set of professional activities that has the potential to offer empowerment and a pathway to significance for many more than myself. Time will tell if I’m successful.

The biggest challenge for progressives is getting our act together and supporting each other in a coordinated fashion. While conservatives actively recruit young talent and pay them handsomely (all the while espousing the crap that “we are all on our own”), progressives battle amongst one another for position and compensation. It is an ugly sight.

There is hope for grassroots organizing, though it needs to have a good business sense about it to make the efforts viable. Not a simple thing in the markets of yesteryear that we are currently forced to work within. However, I maintain a glimmer of hope for these occasions. Just in case…

Best,

Joe

I guess that’s why everyone has such a hard time understanding the Obama campaign because people actually DO get involved. The recent Platform meetings were an example I think of this where he challenged everyone to get involved in the discussions around what the platform should look like. I actually held a meeting at which a self-identified Socialist, myslef (Natural Law Party) and a form Republican/Constition Party member among others all came to gether to discuss these issues and write a position paper.

I guess/hope that’s what you are talking about as applied to the political model.

I worry though, that the structure he is using has such a potential for top-down abuse/influence (telling volunteers what/what not to say when contacting others, etc.

Of course, the O campaign is a top-down organization. I’d be interested on your take on how a small truly grass-roots group gets that structure developed in a positive way from the bottom up?

The people I talk to are so frustrated because all of the causes they’d like to tackle are organized this way - and there are so many that it seems like a) too many to deal with; b) the ‘authoritarian’ top-down you discussed turns many people off; c) mostly even if we do participate in this stuff, it’s hard to see if we are having any impact.

I agree about the community garden concept - maybe we should just give up on the national stuff and deal with a community garden here in the apartment complex I live in or something.

But that doesn’t feel right either…

Help! The planet and our country cannot wait. I am a member of the Simplicity Movement - there are several tens of thousands of members but again - the work is mostly individual and has not had much if any effect on society since we are all viewed as a bunch of nutjobs.

Thanks for your response. I appreciate a different (and much more knowledgeable) look at this issue.

You’ve opened up a real can of worms. (Or maybe I did when I wrote this brief comment on a very complex phenomenon!)

I’d start with an observation made by the sociologist, Erving Goffman, in his book “Frame Analysis”, which is that our social worlds are structured substantially through social frames that place us in identity roles. My reason for starting here is that the “right” forms of social organization must have the “right” identity roles for participants to feel empowered and engaged with things they care deeply about and/or are deeply concerned about.

So far, organizations like the We Campaign have only given people passive roles to fill. The money-raising ventures are built on an elite communications model (e.g. raise money, spend it on mass media) and place donors in the role of passive consumer (pay money, get what you paid for). This is not the right social structure. It does nothing to actively engage people and transform their understanding of how they relate to the SOLUTIONS of our society’s problems.

There are plenty of active roles people can fill. And some are already starting to take them on. Consider the front-page article in the NY Times last week about community-supported agriculture. A retired software engineer from Chicago was getting his hands dirty on a farm while learning how to grow his own food. He loved it and it solved many of his problems.

This is but one example. When I think of the power that is possible in local communities, through innovative enterprises like the ones we’ve highlighted on this site, I see many ACTIVE roles people can take on. They’ll transform their identities along the way.

Much more to be said, of course! But I hope this helps get the ball rolling.

- Joe

I think a lot of us in the ‘inter-toobz’ are feeling a really lot frustrated. There are so many issues that need attention, and in spite of all the social interaction specific sites, issue advocacy sites, and every other thing sites, what I see is the breakdown of your very caution in that the structure must be handled carefully.

There are millions of us trying to get all kinds of things done, but unfortunately, we are trying to apply the old ‘box’ to the new situation.

So how do you take the theory you have just espoused, and put it into practical use? The most able groups (MoveOn, the Obama campaign) have a millio or two members - which sounds impressive until you think about the fact that the country has 300 million citizens (I realize some of those are babies and little kids!) Al Gore’s new WE campaign has over a million people who signed up on the new website. But so far - there are a lot of the same old ways of ’sign up here, we’ll send you a newsletter, we’ll let you have a blog, send us money’ and that’s pretty much the end of it.

Even when the FISA Amendment was going through, several well-known political blogs (FDL, Salon, etc) joined up and raised a bunch of money. But they wound up spending it running ads against several congress people after the fact! Not much productive work IMHO.

So, to recap - I’m really interested in how you take a theory like this and translate it into action. How do you define or ‘construct’ the structure? What happens next?