there have been many diaries lately about what new features we want and how we should improve the effectiveness of our community. i would like to lay out my vision of how we could turn 37,000 registered users and the hundreds of thousands of lurkers into a real force in the political reform sphere. Markos says he is a reform democrat and we talk a lot here about what reforms and changes are needed, but how effective are we in working for those goals?
my proposal is to create an advocacy wing of kos that functions as a non-profit citizens lobbyist organization. This is Common Cause in the 21st century. What John Gardner said back in 1970 in launching that venerable organization still rings true today: "Everyone is organized but the people."
what we have now that Gardner didn't was an extremely low bar of entry into the political sphere, where knowledge is power, but doesn't cost much money. the Internet has given us an extremely cheap and efficient way to communicate, coordinate and advocate for our values. but we are just at the tip of the iceberg.
Dean's campaign on the Internet proved the viability and impact of the netroots and the key was the trust. the staff on the Dean campaign trusted their supporters to work on their behalf. they used their ideas, thanked them profusely and the end result was the hype was bigger than the actual level of support. but that hype, the news coverage, the hundreds of thousands of people engaged at an incredibly early point in the cycle was enormously valuable. the story of Dean is how the campaign used their supporters to alter the political playing field on a scale much greater than their relative numbers. that is the power of the Internet.
to most non-profits and the Kerry campaign the online members are there open an email, sign a petition and send in some money. as this site has proved with the Sinclair boycott, we can be trusted to do a lot more than sign a petition. with a little herding, a killer ap and a few servers we too can alter the political playing field.
i propose that we start a 501(c)4 wing of dkos. we use some of the great open source software out there to coordinate our efforts, seamlessly making it a part of the main page posting and diaries. i know Markos that you know all about what my brother has been doing at civicspacelabs and i know we can find a way to create localized and issue based subsets of the main dailykos. like any truly successful open source project there would have to be some employees to coordinate the efforts and do the boring tasks that volunteers don't find sexy enough to do. additionally they would also be able to be the official voices of the organization and serve the crucial role of coordinating our efforts with other organizations working on the same issue.
i imagine a spot on the homepage to highlight the day's advocacy opportunities, i.e. call up your reps and find out how they voted on this issue. Or write an LTE about what this idiot Senator said on the floor today. when you clicked on it, it would take to a specific page that coordinated all of the efforts on that particular issue. you could post wiki style updates to the information that we are collecting or add another tally mark to the number of emails sent to CNN that day. or a coalition partner needs a couple people to go and get copies of the public file of a radio station in Minot, ND. we put up a call on the main page, get a volunteer to sign-up, they go and make a copy and fax it in. bam, its done.
crucial to this is a way for people to be acknowledged for their contributions. there is nothing that encourages good behavior more than being able to report back and being thanked by somebody for helping out. there could be local campaigns with calendars, events, ride boards, listservs, blogs, flyers, media targets, RSS feeds: you name it we could do it. say someone goes and does a bunch or research, they post it up and someone else signs up to go and double check all of the links and quotes. another person calls up a couple of news outlets to figure out which reporter is responsible for the issue. they then post up that info and put out a call for people to feed the research to the reporter. low and behold the next day an article full of our hard work is in the paper the next day.
the possibilities are limitless, web space is cheap, volunteers can do real work and we should accept nothing less than the best. we want change, well lets work for it. lets put our money and our time where our mouth is and become true reform Democrats.