What the Netroots have the Peace Movement needs

In a January article for zmag,  Aaron Kreider writes:

For most people, online activism equals an inbox full of email. Our participation is restricted and we generally act as passive consumers. For most groups, they struggle to make their small static website interesting (if they have one at all!) and to distribute an email newsletter – mastering the possibilities of the dynamic web lies far beyond their grasp.

We need to develop a community of activists and web developers, create web sites that share, develop central repositories of information, increase our efficiency, and develop new forms of online activism that dramatically increase participation.

And doesn't all that sound familiar?

While Kreider is writing of left movement politics generally, much of what he says in the article is specifically true of today's peace movement.  I can't imagine a better place than this right here to begin answering that need.   The progressive netroots have what the antiwar movement needs to build a more effective online infrastructure. Let's talk about it.

 

In doing the research for my diary on J27 local support rallies, I visited literally hundreds of peace movement websites, and it's a thicket.  

Some of the most successful recent actions by the peace movement have been organized using internet methods.  Coordinated local events held nationwide on short notice to mark a dark milestone and to protest escalation both went exceedingly well.  However, both of those events were run using a borrowed infrastructure.  While they may be coalition partners in the peace movement, groups like MoveOn and True Majority have political agendas quite separate from the antiwar movement.  Even AFSC, the other key partner facilitating those events, while its leading role in the peace movement is without doubt, is still a multi-issue organization   So what's the problem with borrowed infrastructure for a grassroots movement?  Kreider, using the example of MoveOn:

In the absence of a well-networked movement, we have the apparent success of MoveOn.org. As described in their "Election 2006 People Powered Politics" report, they have been extremely successful in motivating volunteers to support their agenda. The problem is that a very small group of people set the MoveOn agenda, but they got tens of thousands of people to make phone calls and 250,000 people to donate money. The leadership is almost completely inaccessible, without a personal connection. ...  MoveOn turns campaigns on and off, activating thousands of volunteers around an election cycle, and then abandoning them. ... We should be investing in movement-building and developing grassroots leaders, not in TV ads and outsourced politics.

While I'm not quite as critical of MoveOn, Kreider makes some key points.  Central is this, an effective movement cannot be dependent on a resource controlled by a small group with its own agenda, no matter how good the intentions of that group may be.  There's another related lack.  To be effective and able to grow, there need to be ways for people to connect, to create or find local events and groups, 365 days a year, not just on special occasions.  Kreider:

Every year, there are hundreds of conferences and trainings often organized by part-time activists who do it as volunteers and without access to a database or strong network of people and groups who might attend.  For instance, several years ago, a student at Bard College organized a weekend-long activist conference. Bard spent several thousands dollars on it, but it only attracted ten people.  While there a large number of conferences, often local activists are not aware of events in their own or neighbouring communities. Being able to attend a local conference is especially important for maximizing accessibility (ex. easier for people who work or have other responsibilities to attend) and thus attendance. One solution here is to create an activism event calendar that is syndicated so that it appears on dozens or more of sites. There are some sites that have general calendars (Protest.Net, CampusActivism.org), and a much larger group that have organizational calendars, but no one has managed to achieve critical mass.  The other solution is to create a public database of groups and people – to facilitate event outreach.

There are the rudiments of these on the UFPJ website, but that's it's own story that seems to have as much to do with UFPJ's permanently cash-strapped condition as anything else.  When I was doing the work researching support events for the J27 March on Washington, it was apparent that local activists who had learned to use the MoveOn and AFSC event creating tools discovered the UFPJ calendar page and began to use it in the same way.  To their credit, in a couple days UFPJ recognized what was going on and put a link to the calendar on their front page with the rest of the March info.  The limitation there seems to be overwhelmingly one of finances and resources, and perhaps netroots experience with building internet fundraising capabilities may be able to help address that problem.

Kreider also notes that the lack of a sufficient internet infrastructure results in great lost time, effort and opportunity well beyond event organizing:

Due to the lack of a central skill resource repository, organizations are constantly re-inventing the wheel. For example, hundreds of activist groups are writing "How To Write an Effective Press Release" fact sheets. Thousands of peace groups wrote leaflets to oppose the US invasion of Iraq. These resources range from professional quality to fliers that are poorly laid out, text-only, a single column, use strange fonts, and make excessive use of bold, capitals or underlining. The quality of the content varies too. If a social movement is writing thousands of press releases and distributing hundreds of thousands of leaflets then we should invest in quality. For people who are writing poor quality materials, they need to see better examples so that they can learn how to improve. For new authors and people developing new ideas and new campaigns, a resource clearinghouse will provide them with a way to distribute their material and get feedback. People will be motivated to spend the hours necessary to develop quality materials if they know that their material can be widely distributed through a resource clearinghouse. It is possible than an anti-war leaflet could be used by a hundred groups, and that they could distribute tens of thousands of copies. Even the best writers would benefit from being part of a team of activists from across the US (or even the world) who would electronically collaborate in producing the best resource possible – whether it’s a leaflet, fact-sheet, poster, or book.

There's one line in the piece which revealed that while Kreider has some valuable ideas and insights, his own experience with internet organizing is limited:

For instance, I am unsure as to how effective online activism can be for needs like fundraising and recruitment.

Many of the people that launched the Dean campaign internet operation first got involved because of their antiwar opinions.  It quickly was shown "how effective online activism can be for needs like fundraising and recruitment."  The irony is that the antiwar movement itself has not had as yet developed he infrastructure to do the same.  (A bat for UFPJ?)  Perhaps some of those who helped develop the vast and diverse online tools the partisan netroots today enjoy, or others with the technical and design skills necessary, might be interested in putting their skills and efforts into helping the new antiwar movement build the net structure it needs to build a proper internet infrastructure for what seems to be a rapidly rising tide.

Even the best organizing work being done in the antiwar movement often has a very rudimentary web presence.  Take for example the case of "the COW", Connecticut Opposes the War.  The COW is a coalition not just of the traditional peace groups, religious and political, but also a large portion of Connecticut organized labor, the citizens group CCAG, and a number of local community and social justice organizations.  It has engaged in an ambitious locally based peace organizing campaign of house parties and town meetings.  On F24, the COW is sponsoring a coordinated day of 20 Town Meetings around the state on the war.  Until the past few days, it didn't even have a website, just an email list and a Yahoo Group.  Finally with little more than ten days before this major event, they finally got this site active.  Obviously it's a good thing that they finally have a site at all,  but such an ambitious project could have benefitted greatly from better, sooner.

But that's far from the worst.  I mean no disrespect for the people who maintain many of the sites that make up the antiwar net presence, they work hard and try to do their best, but the lack of net literacy is obvious.  Usually the website is run by a willing but overwhelmed volunteer, I suspect from information I see on the COW's site that it's someone that's also a Kossack here--someone that might have been glad for some help from a cadre of peace netroots techies, I'm sure!  In an even more revealing example, here is the website for a group for whom I have the highest regard as activists, the influence of their training and resources is widespread, but their website speaks for itself:  Traprock Peace Center.  Traprock is great, that's where I got my CD training a generation ago, but their website is several generations behind.  I have no doubt someone works very hard and probably taught herself Front Page to manage the site, but for the quality of work it does, Traprock simply deserves better web representation.

I thought dailykos, where many antiwar people gather and where many of us are familiar with the many kinds of tools that promote open-source participatory organizing online would be a good place to initiate this discussion.  It shouldn't be the long term home for that discussion, among the other  missing elements of the antiwar netroots, there is no community blog for the antiwar movement.  And maybe that should be one of the topics for discussion here?