Oh, wouldn't that be a headline! It would defy history, and just in the nick of time.
In the same way that parks and schools can define a neighborhood, so does the blogosphere need social infrastructure to help us organize properly.
The recent community dust-ups here on Daily Kos suggest that we are still finding our way toward effective online communities. I write because I think that Daily Kos has a key role to play in all this, its own date with Destiny -- a date we need it to keep.
In 2004, Kos said:
"This is a Democratic blog, a partisan blog...with one goal in mind: electoral victory."
Six years later, in 2010, Kos said:
"Daily Kos will be what Daily Kos is, and that oftentimes evolves. I know everyone wants their clearly defined rules, but nothing is that simple.
The "About Daily Kos" section, significantly, has a very different focus:
Daily Kos is the premier online political community with 2.5 million unique visitors per month and 250,000 registered users. It is at once a news organization, community, and activist hub.
Electing more and better Democrats will probably always be at the core of the Daily Kos mission.
However, the strategies and tactics that will best achieve that goal is the part that is "not so simple" and "oftentimes evolves."
Our Daily Kos community has obviously experienced some turmoil recently. Part of that is natural growing pains as we figure out exactly how to BE a community in an environment that (properly) does not provide a lot of structure for interactions.
However, I think most of the anger and frustration results from the disappointment that most progressives feel about the slow pace of change, as I wrote more about in Let's Leave Obama Out Of This.
This near-universal feeling of frustration, which could result in solidarity, instead turns us against each other because (1) many community members want to blame someone for the bad result, but disagree as to who is the culprit; and (2) many community members are beginning to feel panicked, given the urgency of the task before us.
Probably nearly everyone's biggest concern is how we can become more effective as a group. We do a lot of good things:
- Aggregating small donations through ActBlue
- Creating a forum for important new voices;
- Educating each other;
- Signing online petitions;
- Occasionally working the phones and email on a specific issue, or for a candidate.
All good, but we want more. We need more.
The "more," of course, results from turning words into actions. This is obviously central to the site's objectives, as expressed by Kos himself in "Taking On The System," and more recently by Meteor Blades in his recent plea to Tell Us What You're Doing:
The next time you're thinking of writing a meta diary or recommending one or engaging in the inevitable comment-thread battle that these elicit, tell us instead about some on-the-ground action project you're involved in or have in the past been involved in or are just gearing up to get involved in.
That's the objective, so here is how Daily Kos can help us advance the cause:
Whether people can come together productively or not depends a lot on the dynamics of the community, which in turn depend partly on its structure. If you put a 100,000 people in a room and encourage each one to talk about his or her own agenda, more often than not the result will be a food fight (or I guess a pie fight).
Daily Kos's strength comes in part from its numbers, but our large scale also creates a vulnerability -- the risk that we devolve into chaos, both dissipating and sapping our collective energies.
Happily, the problem of creating effective communities on a large scale has already been tackled many times, both offline and online. As examples, I would offer Reddit (online) and Megachurches (offline).
In both cases, the problem of size is handled by creating smaller, more cohesive subgroups that work on focused issues, but within a larger framework.
Megachurches have small group ministries and specialized ministries; Reddit has topical SubReddits. In both cases, the smaller groups interact closely together, to create effective communities, but nonetheless participate more generally in the larger group.
Here is one example, from among many possibilities, of how Daily Kos might deploy such a strategy:
- Create a large number of topical Sub-DKs (e.g., Torture, Clean Elections, Climate Change, EFCA, Gulf Disaster, California, Health Care, etc.);
- Allow each SubDK to have its own Diaries and RecLists
- Have the main Daily Kos page draw from the best of the various RecLists, as well as presenting featured writers.
This would accomplish several obvious things, and two extremely important and more subtle things:
Obviously, the structure would create more space on RecLists, which means more opportunities for reward and inspiration, as well as take some of the pressure off the Rescue Rangers. Also, it would be MUCH easier to find topical stuff of interest. There might even be social benefits from putting some distance between the Pooties and the Income Disparity people.
More subtle, and I think more important, the subcommunities would begin to form their own identities, and could be gently charged with creating action plans around their key issues. This would happen for two reasons. First, making it easier for like-minded people to find each other will strengthen our topical communities. Second, once the emphasis moves away from yelling into the wind to try to capture the attention of Kossacks who care about other issues, and instead toward working with clueful, knowledgeable issue-oriented people, the natural next step will be to "do something" rather than "talk more." That's what we need.
Most important of all, though -- and here is where I talk about Destiny -- the Progressive Blogosphere needs a central meeting spot where we have shared experiences and group identity. That gives us rudder, strength, and overarching themes. Small blogs can't do that and Huffington Post can't do that, and boutique blogs like Digby and Atrios can't do that. Someone needs to do it, and Daily Kos is far better positioned than any other to quickly and effectively fill this need.
But the Daily Kos perpetual mass meeting hall does not fill the role properly. It has the kind of gravity that tends to suck everybody in. Instead, what the progressive blogosphere needs is a center of gravity that energizes lots of smaller blogs focusing on direct action for specific issues. The transfer of energy occurs by providing a better home for subcommunities.
Of course, this community-building structure would directly advance the specific cause of electing more and better Democrats, but it would also help the progressive blogosphere find its compass, and its ability to focus, more generally, which would help not only in electing more and better democrats, but also ensuring that we effectively capitalize on our wins.
[Cross-posted from: Right of Assembly]