Building Collective Capacity : New Forms of Political Organizing<\/p>\n
I’m here at the Internet & Politics conference at Harvard University, co-hosted by the
\nBerkman Center for Internet & Society and the Institute of Politics. The purpose of
\nthis event is to gather leading practitioners and scholars to reflect on lessons
\nlearned from the recent Presidential election and preliminary thoughts on moving
\nforward from here.<\/p>\n
The majority of the conference will be held by Chatham House rules — no attribution.
\nBut the keynotes are open, and here’s the first one, featuring Prof. Marshall Ganz
\n(Harvard Kennedy School) and Jeremy Bird (Obama for America).<\/p>\n
Marshall is giving a backgrounder on organizing as a general matter. He has significant
\nresources available on this topic elsewhere, but here is the quick summary:<\/p>\n
What’s needed for purposeful collective action? <\/p>\n
1. Leadership: Achieving shared purpose in the face of uncertainty.<\/p>\n
2. Community: A collective entity capable of exercising agency.<\/p>\n
3. Power: A community able to use its resources to achieve its purposes.<\/p>\n
Enablers:<\/p>\n
1. Shared values (broader than interests — they are the sources of motivation)<\/p>\n
2. Peer commitments<\/p>\n
3. Shared structure<\/p>\n
4. Shared strategy<\/p>\n
5. Shared action<\/p>\n
6. Action that is clear, specific, intentional, and can be learned from<\/p>\n
To what extent can new technologies support these activities? (Or detract from?)<\/p>\n
The Obama campaign emphasized carpenters, not tools.<\/p>\n
Now for Jeremy’s response:<\/p>\n
The “Jazz” and “Classical” metaphor from 2004 describes the connection well. Start with
\nthe startegy and look at technology as a resource. Four stories that illustrate the
\ninterdependence between technology and strategy.<\/p>\n
1. April 11, 2007 — Florence, South Carolina. Not necessarily the most tech-savvy
\nstate. In putting together tickets, were planning to capture emails, but then decided
\nto also capture cell phones. In December with Oprah, asked 30,000 to text the campaign
\nand also capture their numbers. Texting underappreciated — were able to text just the
\nteam leaders. Or have volunteers send back pictures to keep other teams motivated. South Carolina house meeting program. Sam Graham-Feldson came to shoot video.
\nDespite the written program, no one knew what they were doing. What the video did was
\ntell the story: both to the rest of the campaign and to the community. (at 7:31, all the volunteers knew we’d won via the text message program).<\/p>\n
3. Maryland. Teams who organized themselves using the MyBO tools. With two weeks left when Jeremy arrived to GOTV. This was a very different environment with much tighter connectedness. Through the ‘Net, bring together the volunteers into trainings, sufficient to hit every voter 3 times before the primary.<\/p>\n
4. Pennsylvania. 8 weeks to go while TX and OH is going on. Took the online tool, PATeams tool, that allowed volunteers to log in and target neighbors. It was the “classical” and the “jazz” coming together. It enabled the volunteers to set and hit goals without setting up an office, to connect folks together and not just “go online and make calls” — they felt they were part of a community. Eventually led to the neighbor-to-neighbor tool.<\/p>\n
5. Ohio (general election). We started to shoot all sorts of video. It was one of the most important things we did, because it told the story of what we were doing. Nationally, we set up VoteForChange.com that allowed people to download and turn in voter registration forms. As every individual downloaded the form, it gave organizers information about voters — but it turned out it was the most rich source of volunteers. These were young people who sought this out themselves.<\/p>\n
These are still designed with field and new people sitting together. In 2008 we’re still figuring out if new media is a separate thing. We’re trying to figure out how to make organizing and online organizing work together.<\/p>\n
In Maryland, a statewide group of 150 were already meeting every Saturday, all volunteers leading their own teams created through MyBO. Is it possible to use this technology for smaller campaigns? How to do it without the 2,500 paid campaign organizers that the Obama campaign had? The person who raises their hands first to be the leader may not be the best leader. One of the key questions is how to build leaders \u2013 how to define, how to select, are there tests? The hard part is that many of these are interpersonal skills; it\u2019s not like learning geography. Marshall is trying to develop a distance course, but people will enroll as teams, not individuals. \u201cSelf-organization\u201d is a chimera, a wish. It takes skill and practice. Buffy, in CA, was able to produce more calls per organizer than most other states using the technology to leverage. This was not the traditional leadership structure: we launched interdependent teams with shared norms, which diverged from the usual top-down individuals who burn out or have other issues. Coaching plays a critical role here. (Just because it\u2019s face-to-face doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s traditional).<\/p>\n
Videos to ask people to sign up were very effective \u2013 saw great numbers. A good video, connected to a real narrative, and a way to capture people who say they want to do something connected to that. One of the real challenges is communication of emotion, affect, via the Internet. It\u2019s easy to express emotion but harder to experience it, lacking the empathetic component. Video enables empathetic communication.<\/p>\n
Counterfactually, what if Cesar Chavez had different tools \u2013 what difference do the tools vs. the carpenter make? If the Farmworkers collapsed because of a lack of accountability, then this risk is heightened without empathetic interaction. There was a time when the Farmworkers tried to market rather than organize the boycott \u2013 disastrous \u2013 perhaps the Internet would make this worse.<\/p>\n
What to do when the wrong person becomes a team leader? Fire them. In PA, with only 8 weeks, we messed up. We spent too much time trying to figure out how to support bad leaders. Is there was more transparency because of the Internet tools \u2013 more data to measure outcomes.<\/p>\n
Change.gov is, with \u201cdeliberate haste,\u201d trying to figure out how to move forward. Still going through 500,000 responses to the survey, much of it qualitative. Last week\u2019s conference of best team leaders to figure out what worked in the campaign. This weekend another round of house parties to keep getting more feedback. All of this is to figure out what the community wants. We\u2019re not just asking the house parties to meet but do a service project around the holidays.<\/p>\n
Re: Marshall\u2019s interview with TechPresident \u2013 Marshall now states he perhaps was being impatient without an understanding of \u201cdeliberate haste.\u201d The campaign is gathering lessons learned, which is wise.<\/p>\n
But governance is different than both campaign mobilizing and community organizing. It\u2019s key for us to know how to set up the organization. Also, the campaign was doing a lot of learning from mistakes and successes, and this has some resemblance to gathering feedback from the citizenry. A movement hasn\u2019t emerged within an administration before \u2013 but why can\u2019t government get people involved in the same way that the campaign trained team leaders.<\/p>\n
The Obama campaign had enormous resources \u2013 \u201cDon\u2019t expect that to be the norm.\u201d People contributed because they wanted to know that there\u2019d be an office in their community \u2013 they could see the results. Alinksy: \u201cThere\u2019s organized people, and there\u2019s organized money.\u201d Barack figured out how to do both.<\/p>\n
You can offer tools, but you have to get people into the tools. The context was vital.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Building Collective Capacity : New Forms of Political Organizing I’m here at the Internet & Politics conference at Harvard University, co-hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Institute of Politics. The purpose of this event is … Continue reading