Citizens are beginning to demand more openness and transparency from their leaders. As Dan Gillmor noted yesterday, the individuals who used to be the audience are now becoming co-producers. People are attracted to participation; they like the power of co-creation, the opportunity to do more than simply write a check. In this NetSquared dialogue, Micah Sifry of Personal Democracy Forum asks: How can nonprofits thrive in this environment?
Though this conversation wandered among the relevant issues somewhat, these snippets spoke directly to the nature of grassroots politics:
MoveOn.org started during the Clinton scandal, with the intent of 'moving on' to the more important issues facing the country. As Joan Blades recounts it, this started with a single e-mail sent to 100 people. Eight years later, the organization is still working on how to engage people in political dialogue. Much of this work requires listening to what members have to say, through a variety of input mechanisms.
Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! tells the story of how we live in the most powerful country on earth, yet we don't go to the polls to vote. We fail to take advantage of a right that people in other countries will die for. Goodman's early days on public access ended when a local Manhattan TV station stepped up with interest in televising their show, and started streaming it from MNN.org. From here, the organization expanded in rough leaps, sending out discs via Fedex for next-day news until scale warranted more reliable broadcast mechanisms.
These stories both implied a top-down structure, so Sifry asked:
What about enabling listeners to talk to each other, so that they are
more than consumers of the news? Democracy Now! finds the idea of
"trickle up journalism" to be challenging, since editors can only
process so much conflicting opinion and information. In the other
chair, MoveOn has over three million members, and it incorporates
elements of both hierarchy and bottom-up. Blades also commented that
the more successful you are, the harder it
is to step out of established processes and move quickly with change.
It seemed that neither of these organizations has worked out a process
for handling a few <-> many conversation yet, but online
servicers know that this would be expectedly impossible at scale. The
one example that appears to work is on the citizen journalism side,
where OhmyNews uses a many <-> few <-> many model, rather
than a many <-> many model. (That being said, we have little
information about how that cost structure works, or how much content is
not included because of bandwidth constraints.)
I
sat in on this session hoping to absorb secret wisdom essential to
grassroots politics. Though these snippets were helpful as a reference,
the discussion raised more questions than answers. This was also
reflected in the IRC backchannel, which had a lot of Amy
Goodman fans, but reflected the need for more pragmatic discussion (as
versus issue politics) from the panel. What are good tools? How can you
harness volunteer power? What resources need to be invested for a
positive return, and in what areas could results can be anticipated?
Has all of the success in building membership, audience, and mindshare
resulted in successful actions? Just wondering...
Tags: christine herron christine.net space jockeys netsquared net2 nonprofit nptech technology moveon democracynow personal democracy forum grassroots
