Tag Archives ⇒ online organizing

Opening Doors and Moving on Up

February 3, 2011
· Martin Kelley

Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence has announced that Bar­ry Cross­no will be their new incom­ing Gen­er­al Sec­re­tary. Old time blog­gers will remem­ber him as the blog­ger behind The Quak­er Dhar­ma. FGC’s just pub­lished an inter­view with him and one of the ques­tions is about his blog­ging past. Here’s part of the answer:

Blog­ging among Friends is very impor­tant.  There are not a lot of Quak­ers.  We’re spread out across the world.  Blog­ging opens up dia­logues that just would­n’t hap­pen oth­er­wise.  While I laid down my blog, “The Quak­er Dhar­ma,” a few years ago, and my think­ing on some issues has evolved since then, I’m clear that blog­ging is what allowed me to give voice to my call.  It helped open some of the doors that led me to work for Pen­dle Hill and, now by exten­sion, FGC.  A lot of cut­ting edge Quak­er thought is being shared through blogs.

I thought it might be use­ful to fill in a lit­tle bit of this sto­ry. If you go read­ing through the back com­ments on Bar­ry’s blog you’ll see it’s a time machine into the ear­ly Quak­er blog­ging com­mu­ni­ty. I first post­ed about his blog in Feb­ru­ary of 2005 with Quak­er Dhar­ma: Let the Light Shine and I high­light­ed him reg­u­lar­ly (March, April, June) until the proto-QuakerQuaker “Blog Watch” start­ed run­ning. There I fea­tured him twice that June and twice more in August, the most active peri­od of his blogging.

It’s nos­tal­gic to look through the com­menters: Joe G., Peter­son Toscano, Mitchell San­tine Gould, Dave Carl, Bar­bara Q, Robin M, Brandice (Quak­er Mon­key), Eric Muhr, Nan­cy A… There were some good dis­cus­sions. Bar­ry’s most exu­ber­ant post was Let’s Begin, and LizOpp and I espe­cial­ly labored with him to ground what was a very clear and obvi­ous lead­ing by hook­ing up with oth­er Friends local­ly and nation­al­ly who were inter­est­ed in these efforts. I offered my help in hook­ing him up with FGC  and he wrote back “If you know peo­ple at oth­er Quak­er orga­ni­za­tions that you wish me to speak to and coor­di­nate with or pos­si­bly work for, I will.”

And that’s what I did. My super­vi­sor, FGC Devel­op­ment head Michael Waj­da, was plan­ning a trip to Texas and I start­ed talk­ing up Bar­ry Cross­no. I had a hunch they’d like each oth­er. I told Michael that Bar­ry had a lot of expe­ri­ence and a very clear lead­ing but need­ed to spend some time grow­ing as a Quak­er – an incu­ba­tion peri­od, if you will, among ground­ed Friends. In the first part of the FGC inter­view he mov­ing­ly talks about the ground­ing his time at Pen­dle Hill has giv­en him.

In Octo­ber 2006 he announced he was clos­ing a blog that had become large­ly dor­mant. It’s worth quot­ing that first for­mal goodbye:

I want to thank those of you who chose to active­ly par­tic­i­pate. I learned a lot through our exchanges and I think there were many peo­ple who ben­e­fit­ed from many of the posts you left. On a pure­ly per­son­al note, I learned that it’s good to tem­per my need to GO DO NOW. Some of you real­ly helped men­tor me con­cern­ing effec­tive­ly lis­ten­ing to guid­ance and help­ing me under­stand that act­ing local­ly may be bet­ter than try­ing to take on the whole world at once.

I also want to share that I met some peo­ple and made con­tacts through this process that have opened tremen­dous doors for me and my abil­i­ty to put myself in ser­vice to oth­ers. For this I am deeply grate­ful. I feel sure that some of these ties will live on past the clos­ing of the Quak­er Dharma.

Those of you famil­iar with pieces like The Lost Quak­er Gen­er­a­tion and Pass­ing the Faith, Plan­et of the Quak­ers Style know I’ve long been wor­ried that we’ve not doing a good job iden­ti­fy­ing, sup­port­ing and retain­ing vision­ary new Friends. Around 2004 I stopped com­plain­ing (most­ly) and just start­ed look­ing for oth­ers who also held this con­cern. The online orga­niz­ing has spilled over into real world con­fer­ences and work­shops and is much big­ger than one web­site or small group. Now we see “grad­u­ates” of this net­work start­ing to take on real-world responsibilities.

Bar­ry’s a bright guy with a strong lead­ing and a healthy ambi­tion. He would have cer­tain­ly made some­thing of him­self with­out the blogs and the “doors” opened up by myself and oth­ers. But it would have cer­tain­ly tak­en him longer to crack the Philadel­phia scene and I think it very like­ly that FGC would have announced a dif­fer­ent Gen­er­al Sec­re­tary this week if it weren’t for the blogs.

Quak­erQuak­er almost cer­tain­ly has more future Gen­er­al Sec­re­taries in its mem­ber­ship rolls. But it would be a shame to focus on that or to imply that the pin­na­cle of a Quak­er lead­ing is mov­ing to Philadel­phia. Many parts of the Quak­er world are already too enthralled by it’s staff lists. What we need is to extend a cul­ture of every­day Friends ready to bold­ly exclaim the Good News – to love God and their neigh­bor and to leap with joy by the pres­ence of the Inward Christ. Friends’ cul­ture should­n’t focus on staffing, flashy pro­grams or fundrais­ing hype.  At the end of the day, spir­i­tu­al out­reach is a one-on-one activ­i­ty. It’s peo­ple spend­ing the time to find one anoth­er, share their spir­i­tu­al jour­ney and share oppor­tu­ni­ties to grow in their faith.

Quak­erQuak­er has evolved a lot since 2005. It now has a team of edi­tors, dis­cus­sion boards, Face­book and Twit­ter streams, and the site itself reach­es over 100,000 read­ers a year. But it’s still about find­ing each oth­er and encour­ag­ing each oth­er. I think we’ve proven that these over­lap­ping, dis­trib­uted, largely-unfunded online ini­tia­tives can play a crit­i­cal out­reach role for the Soci­ety of Friends. What would it look like for the “old style” Quak­er orga­ni­za­tions to start sup­port­ing inde­pen­dent Quak­er social media? And how could our net­works rein­vig­o­rate cash-strapped Quak­er orga­ni­za­tions with fresh faces and new mod­els of com­mu­ni­ca­tion? Those are ques­tions for anoth­er post.

Gladwell and strong tie social media networks

September 28, 2010
· Martin Kelley

A lot of peo­ple, include Jeanne Burns over on Quak­erquak­er, are talk­ing about Mal­colm Glad­well’s lat­est New York­er arti­cle, “Small Change: Why the Rev­o­lu­tion Will Not Be Tweet­ed”.

Mal­colm Glad­well’s modus operan­di is to make out­ra­geous­ly counter-intuitive claims that peo­ple will talk about enough that they’ll buy his boss’s mag­a­zine, books and bobble-head like­ness­es. I find him lik­able and divert­ing but don’t take his claims very seri­ous­ly. He’s a lot like Wired Mag­a­zine’s Chris Ander­son, his some­times spar­ring part­ner, which isn’t sur­pris­ing as they work for the same mag­a­zine empire, Conde Nast Pub­li­ca­tions.

In his arti­cle, Glad­well takes a lot of pot­shots at social media. It’s easy to do. He picks Clay Shirky, anoth­er New York “Big Idea” guy as his rhetor­i­cal straw­man now, claim­ing Shirky’s book “Here Comes Every­body” is the “bible of social-media move­ment.” Read­ing Glad­well, you kind of wish he’d get out of the echo box of circle-jerk New York Big Talk­ers (just get­ting out of the Conde Nast build­ing’s cafe­te­ria would be a good start).

Glad­well’s cer­tain­ly right in that most of what pass­es for activism on Twit­ter and Face­book is ridicu­lous. Click­ing a “Like” but­ton or chang­ing your pro­file image green does­n’t do much. He makes an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion between “weak ties” (Face­book “friends” who aren’t friends; Twit­ter cam­paigns that are risk-free) and “strong ties.” He cites the Civ­il Rights move­ment as a strong-tie phe­nom­e­non: the peo­ple who put them­selves on the line tend­ed to be those with close friends also putting them­selves on the line.

What Glad­well miss­es is strong-tie orga­niz­ing going on in social media. A lot of what’s hap­pen­ing over on Quak­erQuak­er is pret­ty strong-tie – it’s trans­lat­ing to work­shops, arti­cles, and is just one of a num­ber of impor­tant net­works that are form­ing. Peo­ple are find­ing each oth­er and mak­ing real con­nec­tions that spill out into the real world. It’s not that online orga­nizes cre­ates real world changes, or even the reverse. Instead, under the right cir­cum­stances they can feed into each oth­er, with each com­po­nent mag­ni­fy­ing the oth­er’s reach.

One exam­ple of non-hierarchical involved social media is how Quak­er blog­gers came togeth­er to explain Tom Fox’s motives after his kid­nap­ping. It did­n’t have any effect on the kid­nap­pers, obvi­ous­ly, but we did reach a lot of peo­ple who were curi­ous why a Friend might choose such a per­son­al­ly dan­ger­ous form of Chris­t­ian wit­ness. This was all done by inter-related groups of peo­ple with no bud­get and no orga­ni­za­tion­al chart. But these things don’t have to be quite so life-and-death.

A more recent exam­ple I’ve been able to see up close is the way my wife’s church has orga­nized against dioce­san attempts to shut it down: a core group of lead­ers have emerged; they share pow­er, divide up roles and have been wag­ing an orga­nized cam­paign for about 2.5 years now. One ele­ment of this work has been the Savest​marys​.org blog. The web­site’s only impor­tant because it’s been part of a real-world social net­work but it’s had an influ­ence that’s gone far beyond the hand­ful of peo­ple who write for it. One of the more sur­pris­ing audi­ences have been the many staff at the Dioce­san head­quar­ters who vis­it every day – a small group has tak­en over quite a bit of men­tal space over there!

It’s been inter­est­ing for me to com­pare Quak­erQuak­er with an ear­li­er peace project of mine, Non​vi​o​lence​.org, which ran for thir­teen years start­ing in 1995. In many ways it was the big­ger site: a larg­er audi­ence, with a wider base of inter­est. It was a pop­u­lar site, with many vis­its and a fair­ly active bul­letin board for much of it’s life. But it did­n’t spawn work­shop or con­fer­ences. There’s no “move­ment” asso­ci­at­ed with it. Dona­tions were min­i­mal and I nev­er felt the sup­port struc­ture that I have now with my Quak­er work.

Non​vi​o​lence​.org was a good idea, but it was a “weak tie” net­work. Quak­erQuak­er’s net­work is stronger for two rea­sons that I can iden­ti­fy. The obvi­ous one is that it’s built atop the orga­niz­ing iden­ti­ty of a social group (Friends). But it also speaks more direct­ly to its par­tic­i­pants, ask­ing them to share their lives and offer­ing real-world oppor­tu­ni­ties for inter­ac­tion. So much of my blog­ging on Non​vi​o​lence​.org was Big Idea thoughts pieces about the sit­u­a­tion in Bosnia – that just does­n’t pro­vide the same kind of imme­di­ate per­son­al entre.

Mal­colm Glad­well min­i­mizes the lead­er­ship struc­ture of activist orga­ni­za­tions, where lead­er­ship and pow­er is in con­stant flux. He like­wise min­i­mizes the lead­er­ship of social media net­works. Yes, any­one can pub­lish but we all have dif­fer­ent lev­els of vis­i­bil­i­ty and influ­ence and there is a fil­ter­ing effect. I have twenty-five years of orga­nized activism under my belt and fif­teen years of online orga­niz­ing and while the tech­nol­o­gy is very dif­fer­ent, a lot of the social dynam­ics are remark­ably similar.

Glad­well is an hired employ­ee in one of the largest media com­pa­nies in the world. It’s a very struc­tured life: he’s got edi­tors, pub­lish­ers, copy­ed­i­tors, proof­read­ers. He’s a cog in a com­pa­ny with $5 bil­lion in annu­al rev­enue. It’s not real­ly sur­pris­ing that he does­n’t have much direct expe­ri­ence with effec­tive social net­works. It’s hard to see how social media is com­ple­ment­ing real world grass­roots net­works from the 40th floor of a mid-town Man­hat­tan skyscraper.

Relat­ed Reading:

The Future is Now, Let’s Get Started

December 1, 1999
· Martin Kelley

It’s a reflec­tive time here at the Non­vi­o­lence Web. The ini­tial vision of our work has pret­ty much exhaust­ed itself in the four years we’ve been online. In inter­net time, that’s equiv­a­lent to twen­ty years so we’re pret­ty happy.

The Non­vi­o­lence Web grew out of down­turn in activist pub­lish­ing in the ear­ly 1990s. A lot of peace groups were very drained, emo­tion­al­ly and finan­cial­ly, by the after­math of the Gulf War and were lay­ing off staff. Small book and mag­a­zine pub­lish­ers were also being pres­sured by rapidly-declining read­er­ship lev­els and increas­ing pro­duc­tion costs. Although no one might have guessed it at the time, in ret­ro­spect it became clear that the 1980s were a gold­en age for small pub­lish­ing and activist organizing.

But by the mid-90s the sit­u­a­tion had changed. The demo­graph­ic group that had bought so many books were now hav­ing babies and in gen­er­al read­ing more books on spir­i­tu­al­i­ty and child-rearing. The books pub­lished did­n’t appeal to the next gen­er­a­tion — which was demo­graph­i­cal­ly small­er — any­way and the result was that the audi­ence for activist pub­li­ca­tions was shrink­ing fast.

By the mid-1990s it was time to rethink the project of rad­i­cal pub­lish­ing. Luck­i­ly, the Web came along at that point. Just as print­ing press­es opened the way to a flur­ry of polit­i­cal and reli­gious tracts in mid-Seventeenth Cen­tu­ry Europe, the web made pos­si­ble a new form of pub­lish­ing. The Non­vi­o­lence Web began in 1995 to be a part of that work.

Now that first flur­ry is over. In the U.S. at least, even the local piz­za joint has a web­site and the impor­tance of inter­net orga­niz­ing is undis­put­ed. The web has become a mass-phenomenon and new users con­tin­ue to dou­ble it’s size every year. But I’m not sure most activists have real­ly fig­ured out how to use it. I’m not sure we have rein­vent­ed pub­lish­ing. I think most of what we’ve done is tak­en the old forms and repli­cat­ed them online. For exam­ple, dur­ing the recent U.S. bomb­ing cam­paign in the Balka­ns, most Non­vi­o­lence Web mem­ber groups — major U.S. peace groups — put up extreme­ly pre­dictable and bor­ing press releas­es (see my May 1999 essay, The Real Phan­tom Men­ace is Us).

Why haven’t we rein­vent­ed the form? Where is this work going in the next five, ten, twen­ty years?

The inter­net and pub­lish­ing world is abuzz with the promise of the so-called New Media, web­site and orga­ni­za­tions which cre­ate focal points for audi­ences and are pio­neer­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the inter­net. The Non­vi­o­lence Web is one of the few activist New Media projects and with our recent deci­sion to stop our free web­mas­ter­ing for oth­er orga­ni­za­tion we’re plung­ing even deep­er into the world of online organizing!

Over the next few months, the Non­vi­o­lence Web will embark on a project where we’ll intro­duce you to some of the pio­neers of New Media. But we’ll do more. We want to blow open the con­cept of what a peace group does and how we do it. We’ll be talk­ing with inter­est­ing peo­ple doing art, satire, local orga­niz­ing and think­ing. We look at the future of the inter­net, of the future of the peace move­ment, and of emerg­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties like online video.