|
Collaboration and Mobilization: Report from the Grassroots Use of the Internet Conference Yale University Law School, 2001 By Marley Elizabeth Greiner
On March 10 I attended the second annual Grassroots Use of the Internet Conference, held at Yale University Law School in New Haven. Hosted by Organizers' Collaborative and Yale Law Students for Social Justice, and co-sponsored by numerous progressive activist organizations including moveon.org, VoterMarch.org, HumanRightsTech.org, and TechRocks, the meeting brought together over one hundred Internet activists to discuss ways in which to harness technology for social change. Happily for this technophobe, the conference presentations were user-friendly and ran the gamut from elementary technical tips (handling large volumes of email) to the more esoteric issues of Internet advertising and database sharing.
The conference was divided into two plenary sessions in which general issues were discussed, followed by workshops and a wrap-up session. The morning plenary session included presentations by Lou Posner of Voter March, the organization that mobilized (with virtually no funding) over 10,000 Inauguration Day protesters in Washington, D.C. alone as well as numerous local demonstrations throughout the country; Audrie Krause of NetAction; and Elizabeth Randolph of Women's eNews, a syndicated news service sponsored by the NOW Legal Defense Fund. Especially compelling was the presentation by Gaye Williams of the Service Employees International Union, the fastest growing union in the US today. SEUI, which represents over 1.3 million health care, building, and public service workers in the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico has developed an innovative and far-reaching program to assist working families to gain access to home computers and the Internet, to receive job training, and to strengthen their political voice in the workplace and community through technology. The afternoon plenary featured Matt Eisenberg from the Progressive Technology Project and Wendy Seltzer of the Open Law Project at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, who discussed online collaborative development of legal arguments in the field of public law, including the suggestion that this type of collaboration could be expanded to include the writing of legislation.
I attended two workshops, "Collaboration" and "Mobilization.” The Collaboration workshop featured Josh Hilgart, Online Communications Manager at People for the American Way, and Internet activism pioneer Rich Cowan of Organizers’ Collaborative, who in the early 1990s organized the National Day of Campus Action Against the Contract with America. Both discussed at length the need for collaborative efforts: database sharing; the establishment of portals; the development of quality low-cost software specifically designed for social activists; and the huge need to create easy-to-use sites which could link individuals and organization together as well as facilitate collaborative web, brochure, and flyer design, advertising, and shared distribution of action alerts.
The most relevant workshop for me was the afternoon Mobilization workshop, which got down to the nuts-and-bolts questions of effective Internet activism: getting the public aware of your cause and organization; convincing Internet and potential Internet users that the Internet is an effective organizing tool; de-jargonizing technology; and developing efficient and successful systems to deliver your message. Seth Merritt of TechRocks Emediacy Program spoke at length about effective Internet fundraising --direct mail is pretty much saturated – try banner advertising, opt-in email, interstitial advertising; co-branding; or multi-media flash video, if you can afford it. Focus on the effect -- cute and funny -- people will forward it on to their friends. Merritt illustrated this with several flash videos used by a large environmental organization with which he worked that proved enormously successful. Of special interest was a discussion of newly-developed software that streamlines and tracks the distribution and effectiveness of announcements and action alerts, and makes letter-writing easy as pie for the newest newbie or the most harried veteran. The bottom-line message is to make activism as easy and pain-free as possible. Your constituency will love you for it and you'll get results.
The theme of the conference was obviously cooperation and collaboration -- a positive step away from the current narrow focus and subsequent isolation and polarization created by the politics of identity. There was an attempt to resurrect the politics of commonality, which many of us who came up through the anti-war, civil rights, and feminist movements took for granted. Bastard Nation is clearly on the cutting edge of activism, both organizationally and technologically, but there are also many resources out there which we can tap into to make us even better.
********************* Organizers’ Collaborative is a volunteer-based educational organization established in 1999, whose mission is to create social-change networking and to act as a clearing-house and technical-assistance resource for Internet activists, both seasoned and new. It is currently finishing work on a user-friendly database program (with more software and document templates to follow) which it will distribute free of charge to non-profit organizations and providers of technical assistance for social change. It is also developing an index of thousands of activist email lists to assist people in finding electronic discussion groups by issue area. For more information go to www.organizenow.net. The page includes not only information about the organization, but numerous technical tips and a comprehensive list of links to technology and social change organizations.
******************* Marley Greiner is co-founder of Bastard Nation, past Executive Chair, and currently member of the Executive Committee. You can reach her at maddogmarley@worldnet.att.net
********************************************************** (This feature appeared in the Spring 2001 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.) Copyright 2001
Bastard Nation |