We’ve been mulling over the relationship between the American Left and the new communications technologies. Integrally involved with this process is our role as co-facilitators of PJEP and its network of 41 statewide or multistate websites, where we are constantly seeking ways to empower small local organizations. The network sites provide them access to easy ways of communicating with allied organizations while building their effectiveness and contact lists through online petitions, eletters, boycotts and fundraisers. For example, right now we’re posting demonstrations surrounding the 7th anniversary of the US led invasion of Iraq. Actions are occurring across the country, appearing in the 40 networks, to a central position on the home page of pjep.org that lists over 120 actions around the country. The question we keep asking ourselves is: What other vehicles are there, that not only share information, but also offer opportunities for organizing?

There are, of course, the various national Left organizations that endorsed the protests that occurred the day after Obama announced he was sending additional troops to Afghanistan such as the United for Peace and Justice, Veterans For Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out, Peace Action, the A.N.S.W.E.R Coalition, National Assembly, National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance, Pledge of Resistance, Voices for Creative Nonviolence and World Can’t Wait. They supported the actions by sending out emails to the activists on their lists. This is not a particularly creative or innovative way to use online technologies. The American Left is still firmly positioned in Web 1.0. We’ve not seen evidence that encouraging these organizations to behave differently, embracing some 2.0 upgrades, for example, would make a difference. They are almost without exception dramatically underfunded, and they have a mindset mired in one-to-many communications.

One of the problems limiting national organizations is that they don’t usually think in terms of encouraging collaboration at the local “grassroots” level, letting their local chapters work with other organizations’ local chapters within their communities. Such relationships would provide an ability for local chapters and activists to create and initiate their own projects tailored to the circumstances and needs of the community. They could be provided with funding, technical support or other resources. Such results do occur, but haphazardly instead of as part of a larger strategy. The use of new technologies to integrate local chapters of different national organizations is almost nonexistent, other than mentions on one another’s websites.

There are the aggregator websites, like Democraticunderground.org, which provide a place to congregate, converse, post content and share opinions. These sites have not been built to serve as tools for organization, though some of the blogs have crossed that line. Whereas Talkingpointsmemo.com is pretty much pure centrist story posting, Dailykos.com offers powerful organizing trajectories in addition to opinion sharing. Powerful voices there rise to the top, voices expressing unique interpretations of the political landscape and offering effective calls to action. Nevertheless, Dailykos is seen as a support site for the Democratic Party, not a Left venue.

Counterpunch.org, Alternet.org, Truthout.org, Commondreams.org, Buzzflash.com and Truthdig.com, are curator sites displaying and archiving news from a Left perspective and don’t push specific activist interventions or lobby for particular actions. TheNation.com, Motherjones.com, Progressive.org, and Inthesetimes.org, the independent political media, also are not action creation and execution forces on the Left. Click here for an overview of these types of publications and websites.

Perhaps inspired by Glenn Beck’s success last September in getting tens of thousands on the D.C. mall, in November, the popular webcast and radio producers, the young Turks at theyoungturks.com called for health care demonstrations in L.A., N.Y. and Atlanta at the offices of CNN. Turnout was small, but it was an interesting experiment. Other than the large immigrant rights demonstrations, has another video, cable or mainstream TV vehicle used its platform to get activists onto the streets? This is again, a one-to-many communication, hardly 2.0, but it sets an interesting precedent if the origin of the action emerges out of, for example, social networking tools.

Candidate Obama’s campaign, of course, used 2.0 tools with maestro-like finesse, empowering local organizers in ways unheard of by providing access to real-time information on campaign supporters which could be used in support of focused projects or to orchestrate local events. The Left has nothing like those kinds of resources or a central message. What might the Left take from the Obama campaign that the Left can use?

Facebook seems to be central to almost all the horizontal, spontaneous demonstrations occurring around the country. Responses to Prop 8 and then the Israeli-Gaza protests were integrally tied to Facebook use, which helped to bring out activists from all demographics. The radicals of the 1960s finally awakened to social media. It feels likely that new organizing tools or techniques are going to emerge in a context of Facebook or Twitter integration. We’re still watching for a large, Twitter-inspired/directed protest to occur in the U.S. as occurred in Dresden, Germany earlier in February where twitter was used successfully to thwart a planned neo-Nazi march.

Though there is a seamless integration between individuals within local organizations posting Iraq War demonstrations to one of 40 networks across the country with all that content appearing in a single spot (pjep.org home page), with over 1500 organizations accessing information about the accumulation, what could enhance this process of individuals within local organizations feeling empowered by awareness of the larger whole?

Please share your thoughts with us regarding the Left, social media, new organizing technologies and effective new strategies and interventions. What exactly do you see happening? How will these technologies be utilized?

-Marcia Bernsten & Andrew Lehman

There are about a dozen of us volunteers working with nearly 1500 local peace, justice and environmental organizations in 50 states. The Peace, Justice and Environment Project (PJEP), located at pjep.org, places in the hands of local activists, at no cost, the kinds of tools that larger organizations have access to. This includes such features as online fundraising, eletters, online petitions and boycott tools. In addition, we make available almost 1000 resource documents congregating in 44 issue clusters, offer inter-organizational communications tools, and connect activists with like minded grassroots organizers in other states.

Spontaneous protests have been emerging across the country this last week with activists demonstrating against Obama’s anticipated escalation of the Afghanistan war. Currently United for Peace & Justice (UFPJ) is in flux. They are in debt functioning with all volunteer staff as the steering committee reaches out to member groups to help define the future of UFPJ. As a result, A.N.S.W.E.R., National Assembly, Codepink and World Can’t Wait (WCW) have been, by and large, offering attention to this issue as national organizations. Nevertheless, none of those organizations have an inclusive national presence with chapters or affiliates in every state. Only WCW has put any…

As a Left organizer, it’s not about making things happen but about appraising conditions in order to be in the right place in the right time, with the right tools, with the right allies, with robust contact lists, a powerful message and a unique presentation. Listening to the changing of the times, one becomes a specialist in currents and waves.

Sitting on the beach, with an eye always on the ocean, you see a wave, run out into the water, position yourself and let it carry you toward your goal. Rarely are waves so big that you can see them from far away. Usually, you need to linger at least waist deep in the surf.

We are in a unique situation, what with the slow-motion toppling of our hierarchical society, to be observing a tidal wave of change approach the beach. The usual activist interventions don’t apply. To catch this wave requires an understanding of the change in societal currents, the shift from patrifocal to matrifocal paradigms and the profound effect that communication technologies are having upon this changing seascape.

It’s as if the moon had not risen for 6,000 years and only now has appeared above the clouds. Currents…

This last week we observed repercussions of a clash between a quickly integrating world and a financial elite seeking to enhance its wealth and power by legislating minimal regulation with no transparency. Corporations wished to experience no accountability by their behavior. The result, in this new integrated world, is the beginning of the end of American Capitalism.

What happened between Monday and Friday of last week happened over many months earlier in this century. On Monday, the elites realized that by creating financial vehicles whose sole purpose was to generate exponential wealth, they had manufactured a mythology that had crashed. By Friday a run on 3.4 trillion dollars of money market funds had begun, the equivalent to the savings deposits withdrawal dynamic that occurred in the 1930s. The Government decided to do what governments do – shield the interests of private institutions – to protect the corporations whose behaviors were destroying savings.

The integration of the financial world has exponentially decreased the time that the crises of confidence had spread across the planet. It is now understood that with no transparency, regulation or accountability the elites had created fictitious wealth and hid the location of fiction in the system.

It…

I use an image to explain the relationship between different activists’ intervention philosophies. The image is the teeter-totter. On both the left and right, political activists engage tactics that are part of strategies for change. They seek to move the center, the status quo, the conventions of society located in the present, in the direction of the past or the future. The Right seeks that we withdraw to behaviors society threatens to abandon. The Left works to seek to achieve changes that have not yet been engaged.

At present, with the Right in America having so successfully brought things backward eighty years or more, what with the dramatic increase of stratification and corporate control, it seems like the Left is seeking to go backward to the 1970s when there was some obvious forward movement. Right backward. Left forward. However far back the Right succeeds in pushing back conventions, the Left keeps seeking to place its weight on the teeter-totter in a way that changes the center of gravity, forcing the center to move in the Left’s direction, forward in time.

This competition is a might confusing because our societal convention has time marching from left to right as we read…

They call it the grassroots because that is where spring begins.

The first sign of change is the slight blush of green in the grasses brown and yellow from the winter. As the thaw drifts downward, flowers rise and the change becomes visible in colors. By then the bushes are responding and the first buds and leaves are manifesting hip high. As winter vacates the deeper dirt, the trees finally show the spring has come.

Spring begins at toe level, moves ankle high and grows higher, changing to the waist, then shoulders, and finally past the point that we can reach.

To view where change will come from, note where the thaw is. To observe the future, feel for where creative forces are established and growing. We may not be able to see the thaw, but we can feel its effects.

The American Left is interconnected in ways that it has never been before with almost 30 national organizations able to quickly communicate with local members and receive feedback from their experiences in the field. It is the equivalent of 30 huge oak trees with roots extending, intersecting and influencing a wide group of people. For these organizations, it is…

In a similar way that pollsters often end up integral to the running of a political campaign, website design can deeply inform the structure of a nonprofit or volunteer activist organization. Though this has become evident to me with time, this relationship is not clear to most activists I work with. A result of this hazy understanding has been that very early in an organization’s ontogeny, I’m requesting that decisions be made about how information will be distributed, the specifics of control, degrees of transparency, a need for a clearly defined constituency, organization strategies, tactics, allies, media relations and staffing requirements. Integral to how a website is designed is an understanding of how it will encourage relationships and distribute information.

As is often the case when a volunteer organization is brand new, if there is no authority to make the above decisions, the website designer will guess/estimate what the needs of the organization will be. I have an agenda, so I do more than guess/estimate. I seed the organization with my own beliefs: transparency, diversity, horizontal communication.

I have observed that this design can lead to conflict, which is a bit ironic because the websites I design for organizations have…

Grief seems to evidence itself in behaviors of activists around me. Rather, it’s a choice to avoid that feeling that informs how an activist’s life unfolds.

When conducting business, talking to clients and meeting with prospective clients, I don’t pay attention to their internal psychodynamics. Still, I’m frequently astonished at the unique ways that clients think. My job involves guiding clients to achieve an overview of their project, business or business plan in order to translate it into a website navigation structure that provides both introduction and detail. Together we discover the right category names, sequence them and provide a cogent pathway for a visitor to walk. I marvel at the challenges this task presents to certain ways of thinking.

Compel a person to think both big picture and narratively when that person is used to thinking detail and/or associatively, and you can hear the gears grind as if they’ve never driven shift. With time, we finalize a plan, the staff creates a website and the client is happy. Working with people to put their best face forward, I see one of their best faces. I get a front row view of people’s dreams.

Evenings and weekends, I’m in a…

Metaphors for the human brain have evolved over time. There were the clockworks for perhaps a hundred years. Then it was more sophisticated machinery, such as a mill or a calculator. With the advent of cybernetics, the default description of the brain became a computer. More and more, I’ve been hearing the web used as a metaphor for how a single human processes information and forms conclusions.

A qualification for a good metaphor is that it be familiar. As the web becomes ubiquitous, it offers benefits as an explanatory principle for highly complex horizontal systems producing positive, unexpected outcomes.

Malthus was a 19th century philosopher/mathematician who posited that in an environment with limited resources, increases of populations within that environment will reveal patterns as the populations grow and then decline. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations ran with a related theme as he hypothesized that an “invisible hand” would compel human populations to behave in predictable patterns that would manifest in an increase in productivity in a competitive environment, resulting in better goods at cheaper costs. Darwin translated these principles into his theory of natural selection. It is often thought that Spencer’s interpretation of this first of Darwin’s three theories of…

My wife, Marcia, and I sit in meetings with activists from around the country, usually in our capacity as web developers or communications specialists. Our colleagues are sometimes focused on process, often on content, but like nurture and nature, there is no difference between the two.

Then there are the folks emphasizing the big picture calculating present position within long term goals. Others concentrate on the communication that they are engaged in, the conversation they are having and the bridge they are building in the moment. This distinction is subtle and possibly non existent.

The century-and-a-half argument between nature and nurture–genetics or the environment–has to do with a defective perspective that they are two different things. Recent developments in evolutionary developmental biology have opened the eyes of proponents of both polarities. How life unfolds from before conception has to do with the influence of the environment on a genetic template programmed to take into consideration environmental influences. Imagine a world-exploring vehicle that changes its appearance, even the fuel it uses, as it passes through different landscapes–a vehicle designed to invent new looks and tastes as it makes its way across a planet. Is it the environment or the designer that…

I ran a sales firm for 19 years. I went from art school to working for my dad in a girdle and bra factory for a year and three months. Then I tried to establish a commercial art business, ending up as a salesman. I observed that there were two polarities of salesman.

There were those salesmen that concentrated on converting whomever they were with to an opinion that would result in the purchase of that salesman’s product. These were the hard sales guys; though their pitch might be gentle or respectful, they still wanted to convert a potential customer into a customer. This technique involved many, often unproductive, conversations.

The second kind of salesman sought first to establish whether the potential customer was interested in what the salesman had to say; and then, he evaluated whether what he had to sell would result in a potential long-term relationship with multiple purchases. This second kind of salesman wanted to form this conclusion quickly and not waste time, because if the answer was no, then the salesman would continue to search for a potential long-term customer. This technique demanded that unproductive conversations were to be avoided.

When there is a limited…