These internets are becoming powerful things, eh?
Let's take a look at some of the best online organizing practices we've begun to develop. Add more in the comments, so we can develop a standard playbook together, whatever the issue.
- Traditional non-profits and organizations have their place, but online activism has two advantages.
- First, it allows for rapid, coordinated response in a way old line, direct mail organizations cannot.
- Second, online activism allows us to morph into "pickup" teams, like some playground basketball team, to gear up quickly on an issue for maximum impact and coalition building. www.DowningStreetMemo.com is a good, current example.
More after the jump.
- Online activist tools like letter to the editor technologies really help widen our impact beyond the national outlets to influence local coverage in a way that can have a very high impact.
- Sometimes these pickup teams get started in communities like this, and then take on an expanded, continuing mission. The Propagannon site, which is becoming a more substantial ePluribusMedia organization, is an example.
- Generalist, activist blogs like Kos, Steve Gilliard, Talking Points Memo, TAPPED, Americablog, MyDD, Hullabaloo, Billmon, The Next Hurrah and others act as traffic cops driving people to these activist sites. This has become a very effective way to organize, and it has arisen organically.
- In the future, issue oriented activist blogs can link with local and state parties to ramp up our impact on the local level. This part of our VLWC is still gearing itself up from the ground up. Local and state parties are still feeling their way through this process, but almost all realize the potential for growth and vitality by getting good at this.
- A lot of us create "Call to Action" diaries here, and that's to the good. Fewer of us create these activist campaigns to good effect. georgia10 and SusanG come to mind as people who turn awareness and outrage into action, but many more of us could become better at virtual organizing, and not just at creating diaries and awareness.
- I would recommend that someone in the dkos community take on the role of repository of activist campaign sites that emerge here or elsewhere. Every week, a recommended diary or front page diary should emerge that lists for the whole community the latest such activist sites. Many new sites, once announced, won't make the recommended list and won't get attention. Cheers and Jeers has institionalized a news review, and we sometimes get listings of the best rated diaries and comments as part of a weekly summary. That's all good, but it does not give us a channel for action. Our online organizing needs to improve.
- We also need to get better at making 30 second spots to run online or sometimes on TV. I would call on the community or the DNC to create such a service that could assist the best of the activist campaigns in creating such advertising. This effectively outsources, from the party's perspective, the process of new campaign and issue creation/identification, but allows the party or some other body the opportunity to strategically support the best, most essential or most promising campaigns once they get themselves off the ground. This supports grass roots activism, rather than "from-the-mind-of-God" strategic thinking from some central committee, designing (slowly!) campaigns from DC or elsewhere. What new campaigns need is support, but innovations always come from the fringes, by definition.
- Now, offer some of your thoughts or observations. Enter your #11 point in the comments.