We'd better run in to pull out the survivors from this burning wreck of mismanagement. There's little time.
Here we be : a significant share of the prospects of the Democratic Party in the upcoming '06 elections have crashed and are burning fast. Time is of the essence. People scream from the wreckage, "save American Democracy", "Help!".
Meetup.com has crashed and burned : about 95% of its user base has fled Meetup's extraordinarily high new fees ( $19 a month/$238 a year for the "privilege" of toiling to restore and rebuild American Democracy from the grassroots level up )
If we want the service which meetup once offered for free - and even a better service than that - It's up to us to build one. All of the organizations and money in the World can't provide this service for us. The existing grassroots organizational efforts are heavily balkanized, and there isn't even any central space (as far as I am aware ), an Internet commons or agora, where the numerous organizations doing grassroots work share space, talk to each other, or even acknowledge each other's existence. It's a balkanized turf battle, and so you won't find help from that quarter, from the alleged leadership.
No, we the people must lead on this one. The Meetup.com conflagration has been ongoing now for over a month and no national leader or group has stepped up to take charge of the situation.
The health of American Democracy demands that we take action.
Do you want the Democratic Party to make significant gains in the 2006 elections ? Or, do you want to witness a rout and live in an insane, grim, brutal rendition of Margaret Atwood's "Handmaid's Tale" ?
Here are the stakes:
I am setting up a blog, with a dedicated email address to organize this ( give me about 1/2 hour ), in my hope that you here on the DailyKos - and indeed all people who care about grassroots democracy, grassroots organizing, and the '06 elections will gather together and work with me to build this service.
For now, as I have to run off for the afternoon, anyone who wants to work with me on this can email me at :
B r U ceN s aR a ( at ) Ea T hlinK dot NeT
[ hint : remove all spaces, make all letters lower case, and substitute @ for ( at ) and . for "dot" . It's a crude anti-spam cipher. ]
Come on!
It's not so hard, making democracy work - you just have to try. It'll be fun.
I have a general sense of what would be necessary to set up a service to replace Meetup - a free service. The initial needs of such a project would be, #1 - people to organize and salvage Meetup.com groups in their own states and areas and to help in other organizational capacities #2 - programmers familiar with Perl and database work. In order to better sort emails - as I get a chance - I'll set up email categories at this blog, for categories #1 and #2.
The majority of Meetup.com's user base has fled Meetup's new fees ( see: fee announcement last April, and ensuing discusion ) , and one can scarcely imagine how the darkest plans of Karl Rove and the GOP could have dealt a worse blow to grassroots democratic organizing in America.
Here's a discussion on Meetup.com about the situation, and here is a Google search of the terms "Meetup. com, fees".
Here's my personal experience :
I live near Worcester, MA.
There was a meetup in Worcester - with 400 people signed up - scheduled in early June. Another two related political organizing meetings ( such as a "Take Back the Media" meetup with 50 people signed up ) in my area with no leaders raised the sum total of potential activists who had signed on for orphaned, leaderless meetups to about 500 people. But, these meetups weren't going to going to happen : no one had stepoped up to pay this month's $19 installment. So - gritting my teeth all the way abnd holding my nose - I paid the fee. 4 cents per person, but the yearly fee for such a dubious "privilege" would be $228. I can't sell that one to my wife. No way. So, I paid just this once. For an email list.
You see, organizers have to pay those fees in order to even contact people in those groups. I paid $19 for the right to be able to contact that base of 500 potential activists. Extortion ? Whatever. Call it what you will, but the fees have decimated Meetup's user base.
So, let's take action. Let's get down to practical details :
How many hours of work and how much $ - programming hours, monthly server fees, and ancillary costs - would it cost to build and, far more crucially, maintain, a system which does everything that the Meetup.com system does ?
I am not asking that question in the abstract :
I am the co-founder of a new organization which is adapting free open source software to power its national discussion site. Now, I'm not a programmer (nor do I play one on TV ) but I am working with one, and in my own project it has been the case that our part time volunteer programmer ( who is, admittedly, very talented ) will produce a software configuration that would be able to cover at least a portion of the services that Meetup.com has until recently provided for free. Not all, but the potential - with some work - is there.
So, I have at least an inkling - and probably even more than that - of the dimensions of the problem and what would be required to construct a service that would replicate Meetup.com's service.
I'm guessing that about 10 part time programmers - good ones - could set up such a system in about a month. Maybe I'm off here - maybe it would take 20 talented volunteer programmers, plus a few graphics and web designers. OK.
For a national scale project which provides a key, crucial tool for grassroots organizing, that's not too high a hurdle. There are most likely more than a few dozen good programmers with the necessary skills who would help with such a key venture.
In fact, there are almost certainly thousands.
What of the other requirements ?
Graphics and website designers ? There's no lack of those specialists : check.
Legal, and other ancillary professional help ? : check.
Money to keep it running 24/7 month to month and year to year ? : OK, now we are talking. Basically, this is one of the most fundable nonprofit 501c(3) ventures I've ever seen. It's a no brainer.
Now, funding even the best of 501c(3) efforts can sometimes take a little time. OK then - perhaps fees are necessary. Very small ones. But I'm guesing that such a system could be set up - in the long run - as a free service that would, in essence, be a free public utility, like a library.
In terms of startup cash, the monthly server fee would be in the hundreds of dollars. That's doable on an ad-hoc basis while the venture got going.
Further, consider this : think of it this way : the DailyKos is financially viable simply from site traffic - and, the site runs off some fairly heavy duty servers, not run of the mill machinery. The advertising revenue generated from site traffic alone, from a new, free Meetup utility would possibly be enough, alone, to foot the bills. Is the health of American Democracy worth the visual blight of a few ads ? Yes, it is.
Fund a utility key to American democracy with advertising ? How cheaply crass !
Well, whatever. It works well for Markos, and it can work well for this project. I'm looking for solutions that work, not haughty beauty-queen solutions which are afraid of getting their fingernails dirty. I'm looking for solutions that are lean, mean, fast, and cheap.
The staffing and funding needs of such an effort would be slight - basically, the task comes down to a largely automated, database driven software sytem which would require consistent but fairly minor amounts of human intervention.
So : can we build anew that which Meetup provided - a free service that enables all who wish to use it to organize at the grassroots level, to revitalize a sagging culture of American civic participation ?
Yer darned tootin we can. Yes.
Ben Franklin would have approved, and he was not a radical or a threat to society but - rather - one of the preeminent community pillars of his day, a brilliant titan of bootstrapping.
Franklin founded what was probably the first public library in North America, and Franklin's motivations were certainly practical ones. He was quintessentially pragmatic, and the institution of free public libraries has served American Democracy well. For Democracy to thrive, the people must be educated and informed. Now, in our time, we face an analogous need. Franklin would have been right here, and surely he is in spirit.
Franklin would have looked at all of this silliness - the crashing and burning of Meetup.com that has happened as Meetup ran out of money and suddenly sprang what seems like an unbelievable and punitive fee structure on the very local leaders who were determined to revitalize democracy in their communities - and asked this :
Well, why don't we build it ourselves ? What is necessary ? Come on folks, step up and be counted. This is your patriotic duty - Democracy itself is at risk.
Without a healthy grassroots democratic culture, the most avaricious, venal elements - or simply those marked more by a thirst for power than by the creative imagination for new approaches that democracy so desperately needs - will surely dominate the politial process. If we - the people - are not engaged, well then we deserve the government we get.
If we sit passively by while Meetup.com crashes and burns and the luminaries of the technorati and political class whisper, gossip, and cluck at the spectacle, what might be said of us, we who are also looking on at the spectacle ?
Could we rightly be called sheep ? Well, yes. If we don't take charge then we ARE sheep, lambs even, to the slaughter. Bah! B'aaah. Hey, where's that conveyor belt leading ?
OK. So you want to rise above the flock, to be more than a herd animal. We all have that ability and that right. Every one of us. All can lead.
SO:
No one is minding the store, and no one is working ( visibly at any rate ) to pull the survivors from the burning wreckage of the Meetup Hindenberg crash -
No one has stepped up to propose a plan which will fill this vast hole that has opened up in grassroots organizing. Yes, there are many worthy individual grassroots efforts besides Meetup.com, but provide what Meetup.com provided - a free service that allowed all comers to self-organize as they saw fit.
I could criticize those who run Meetup.com for their astounding, sudden recourse to a fee structure which punished those engaged activists who were working to rebuild democratic society. Yes, that seemed like extortion - as if those who were running Meetup.com had decreed :
"If you want your painstakingly built meetup groups to continue, cough up the $ !"
Yes, that was an appallinglHere we be : a significant share of the prospects of the Democratic Party in the upcoming '06 elections have crashed and are burning fast. Time is of the essence. People scream from the wreckage, "save American Democracy", "Help!".y ill considered decision, and it raises the question - what can be said of Meetup.com's leadership culture that it apparently occured to none "of meetup's leaders to publicly air Meetup's financial difficulties or to simply present those financial woes to Meetup's users, to ask those users what sort of fees they would be willing to bear ?
Yes, the incongruity of that - as the managers of a service that sought to revitalize American Democracy and civic engagement treated the venture like a 90's DotCom crash 'n burn operation rather than as a sacred public trust, such that they burned through whatever startup capital they had and then considered it somehow appropriate to suddenly levy whopping fees on key members rather than to present the finanncial shortfall to let the people who were using the service propose a solution or hold a bake sale.... the impoverishment of leadership and the abnegation of responsibility inherent in that... - the painful lack of wilingness on the part of Meetups' leaders to make the management of the effort transparent and even a teensy bit democratic is astounding.
Agreed.
The health of American democracy is not a concern to be treated as a private country club venture : it is a scared public trust. Yes.
That said, what are you going to do about it ?
I am setting up a blogspot site and a dedicated email address : I have some specific ideas on what can be done, on how to proceed. And, I welcome your ideas and your talents.
Permalink | 46 comments