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

In late November and early December, my colleagues and I were working at collecting information from the 1,500 organizations that comprise the Peace, Justice & Environment Project (PJEP).  We work with organizers that are the contact person for their organization, mostly through email, occasionally by phone.  For me, it averages out to my talking to each person that I work with maybe once or twice a year.  There are several hundred people that I work with.

Those mostly fairly tenuous relationships resulted in our being able to accumulate 100 actions protesting the Obama escalation of Afghanistan, while keeping the 1,500 organizations apprised of the growing number of actions.  Just after the December 1 and 2 actions, I got a call from a North Carolina organizer wanting to know how we were different from United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), which had limited resources and was not able to organize around the escalation protests, other than sending out emails.  I responded that PJEP is sort of like a national organization’s outreach, communications and technology departments.  PJEP involves itself in no content creation or leadership articulation of the issues.  PJEP is mostly just process, process seeking to empower the actions and projects…

It happens that while I am deep into composing text describing evolutionary theory, I’ll get an idea having to do with creating or adjusting online website programming designed to enhance communications among social change organizations.

There is the actual idea and there is my awareness of the context of the idea generation.  Then, there is my awareness of the context’s context.  One of the interesting repercussions of theorizing about the origins of consciousness is a frequent shift of position to being aware of how I am aware.

Back to the idea.  It struck me that our PJEP network of almost 1,500 organizations spread across 50 states has little ability to effortlessly proliferate a local action, petition, boycott, eletter or fundraiser campaign across state lines without someone having to cajole, encourage or harangue an ally or potential ally, who could then take that action or campaign and post it in a different state network.  Negotiation accompanies almost every attempt to forge an alliance if there is text involved.  Most organizations have few contacts outside their immediate town or region and so don’t even start the process.

The idea was to simply allow the banding together of different local organizations, or chapters…

The Peace, Justice & Environment Project (PJEP) has over 1,400 organizations participating in 40 online networks in 50 states.  A basic premise of the project is that by making available powerful online resources such as petitions, eletters, boycotts and online fundraising, it can allow small local organizations to have more choices when seeking to accomplish social-change goals.  PJEP seeks to enhance creativity, empowering local activists to facilitate change.  In addition, PJEP seeks to put into the hands of local activists powerful email lists, built from these online resources, providing access to allies to accomplish goals.

There is a sleeper issue regarding health care that only occasionally gets much play in the media.  My wife and I have been running small businesses for 30 years.  Good staff is integral to a healthy business.  Health care benefits are too expensive to provide to staff in a business as small as Marcia and I maintain.  This is particularly true in our case because we have a daughter with diabetes, a condition which closed off options regarding health care.

After our daughter contracted diabetes, our insurance was doubled to $30,000 a year.  We then contracted with a staffing firm to handle payroll in order…

The Peace, Justice & Environment Project now covers 50 states serving over 1,400 organizations.  Our first fundraiser on July 4th was a success.  Where do we go from here?

I began working on this project over three-and-a-half years ago.  It started with my seeking a way to flip Moveon’s model by supplying local activists an ability to create actions and develop powerful lists with the potential to propagate those actions across wide areas from the bottom up.  Marcia and I experimented with Moveon techniques locally.  We were effective, quickly building an 1,800-person activist list, driving people to events, getting media coverage.  Would it be possible to develop a system where the lists were shared by all participating organizations in a state?

Programmer Rod Homor and I worked out a web application that we were able to test statewide in Illinois with the new Illinois Coalition for Peace & Justice.  It was well received.  It was an online commons offering participating organizations an ability to form ad hoc coalitions with other organizations around the state.  Organizations shared network resources (a central email list) when enough organizations voted support for one another’s projects.

I took the show on the road.  First Minnesota,…

Marcia got home late last night from an activist event and burst whooping into the bedroom where I was slipping from book to book.  I was reading Alinsky on organizing, Freud on the structure of humor, an Evo Devo text on Lamarckian evolution and a book on handedness.  I jumped, startled by her entry.

“We got it!  We got it!”

Unable to read the letter without her glasses, she handed it to me.   I read what we got.  The federal government had granted 501(c)3 status to the Peace, Justice and Environment Project.  Donors writing checks to PJEP could take it off of their taxes.

It was time to call Laurel and break open the champagne!

Marcia has worked for three seasons conducting the research, writing up the documents, consulting with friends (thank you, Allan Gratch!) and rewriting documents in order that contributions to the project could be deductible.  We could now begin the process of soliciting donations.

Then I realized that this is when the mythmaking begins.

It’s astonishing what we’ve accomplished in the almost three years since we started this project.  After Kerry lost, I went from being an occasional activist uncomfortable attending demonstrations to a hyper activist and…

Designing and building websites that seek to encourage social change is more than a little bit like designing playgrounds for children with slides, ladders, jungle gyms and swings.  A difference is that when I am designing web applications about social transformation, I pay close attention to the principles of change; I seed the software with features that play upon the nature of biological, social, ontological and personal evolution.

When I was maybe nine years old, I went with my youngest sister, Gale, to the playground at the corner of the block.  Gale was four years old and had pink glasses with bluebirds at the temple.  New playground features had been added to the park.  One of them was a hefty plastic animal with a sort of saddle, embedded in a large, powerful, grounded spring that allowed for slow rocking back and forth.  Gale said she wanted to show me something and had me straddle a hippopotamus while standing on my feet instead of sitting on the hippo.  She stood in front of me and then slowly drew the plastic hippo to the ground, yanking the wooden handle coming out of its head.  She managed to draw it all the way…

Laurel, Marcia and I continue to discuss the most effective way to build the PJEP 50-state network of networks.  There are about 15 of us working hard to research and facilitate the state networks as they go up.  At this point, almost 1,000 local organizations and chapters of national organizations are working through 33 states within 26 networks.  (There are several two-state networks and one three-state network.)

Visit PJEP.org to investigate the central site where state and local actions, calendar items and online campaigns (petitions, boycotts, eletters and fundraisers) are collected and collated so that grassroots activity across the country can be explored in detail.

Two logistical issues come up fairly frequently.  Programmer David fixes bugs and enhances features that already exist, or Dave creates new features.  David, Marcia, Laurel and I talk frequently about which of these three areas should be emphasized at any given time.  All three of us feel that for us to achieve our mission, it is vital to empower individuals and local organizations by providing them access to resources and connections to other individuals and organizations so that they are able to accomplish their social-change and political-change goals.  Decisions are made daily…

We’re two and a half years into a project that should have its first stage completed by about July1, 2009.  The Peace, Justice and Environment Project (PJEP) began with a single network of organizations in Illinois. Sixty-six organizations voted to participate in the Illinois Coalition for Peace and Justice (later to become the Illinois Coalition for Justice, Peace and the Environment) on April 1, 2006.  It was at that event that the Actions Options Tool (actionsoptions.org) web application was introduced.  At that time, it was just the Actions Grid (see http://icjpe.org/actions), a petition function and a communications message center.

Over the last two years, four online actions centers have been enhanced or added.  Participating organizations can now create online petitions, boycotts, eletters and fundraisers.  A robust resources library holds hundreds of documents.  The calendar reveals actions, events, meetings and projects across a state.

At this time, 32 states have been integrated into a national network of networks, with almost 1,000 participating organizations.  The national site, http://www.pjep.org, is being developed to present an overview of actions, petitions, boycotts, eletters and fundraisers across the country that are searchable by speed, depth, breadth and…

How would an Obama presidency look if he continues to encourage and utilize the personally empowering, horizontal social networking infrastructure created during his campaign?  As a person observing an important step in our evolution beyond capitalist democracy, I seek evidence of this kind of profound systemic change.

The Peace, Justice and Environment Project (PJEP) came together almost a year ago as several members of the Illinois Coalition for Peace & Justice (now called the Illinois Coalition for Justice, Peace and the Environment) needed a separate organizational infrastructure to grow and mange the quickly expanding concept as it bridged to other states.  The initial focus was to seek practical ways for small, local Illinois grassroots organizations to become increasingly politically empowered by offering them easy online access to each other so that they could form temporary ad hoc coalitions while at the same time making available a number of unique online resources.  At this time, almost 1000 organizations in 29 states are integrated into the network.

In its first year, PJEP concentrated on bringing resources and tools down to the level of the local organization or the chapters of national organizations by providing them the kinds of online capabilities reserved for…

The Peace, Justice and Environment Project (PJEP) facilitates communication and cooperation between almost 900 organizations in 28 states. Individuals within those organizations post to their state network an action or an online campaign (petitions, boycotts, eletters, fundraisers). Ideas for those actions and campaigns emerge from discussions within those individual’s organizations. The principles that make it possible are biological in origin.

Ideas are often variations of actions and campaigns that have been tried out in other parts of the country. If a project seems to have accomplished its goal, often it gets picked up and reproduced again. Most actions and campaigns are reproductions of ideas used many times before.

The way that information travels on the Left has a lot to do with new technologies and old human networks. Listserves, websites and alternative media distribute information quickly. At the same time, many activists are members of several groups. These people hubs quickly disperse information to the activists focused on more narrow tracks. Perhaps 30 national organizations with chapters or affiliates distribute information quickly across the country while human hubs disperse that information to the nooks and crannies of activists working intently on unique, local projects.

On those occasions when a group…