Twitter and the Dec Afghanistan Escalation Protests
March 4, 2010 | Leave a Comment
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 …