Future 5000 - Networking for Youth Activists

I've been having conversations with people who are organizing a website called the
Future 5000.

"Future 5000 is the largest online network of progressive youth organizations in the history of this country. This searchable online directory and networking site will help us better visualize and organize our movement, people, activities and resources. Using this tool, organizations will be able to:

• develop a leadership pipeline

• strategically build our movement

• ultimately redesign the U.S.A. and our relationship with the rest of the world"

In a way, their mission is very similar to CampusActivism.org/ActivismNetwork.org.

Unfortunately, as I've been too slow in realizing, there is a MASSIVE divide between student and youth organizing. So I'm coming at this from a student/campus background, whereas they are coming at it from a youth one. There are really two segregated worlds, and one of the seperations is a class and color line. Campus organizing is more white and class privileged. Youth organizing is literally two or three decades ahead of students in terms of class/race.

Future 5000 comes from a youth perspective, whereas CampusActivism is campus.

Future 5000 is the result of extroverts. CampusActivism is written by an introvert.

Future 5000 also has a budget and organization that dwarfs mine (which is only me). So even if I did want to do the relational building/networking that they are doing, I don't have the funding to do it - so my outreach model is a quality website (now a networking platform) that speaks for itself. Whereas they are going to be building it up by focusses on a dozen or so communities - that model will hopefully prove very effective.

Fact Check - Regarding, "Future 5000 is the largest online network of progressive youth organizations in the history of this country." They need to get around 1200 groups to be able to claim this (to beat my site - with 1200 being a rough estimate of what portion of my groups are "youth"). They've got the resources to pull it off, but currently I'm ahead (and will probably have 5000 groups within the next three years, at which point many of them won't be "youth"). In fact, I've got the largest online network of activist groups in the world (so long as idealist doesn't count) - at least that I know of. The internet is huge and somebody could be doing something in a language other than English.

What's going to be really interesting is whether Future 5000 and CampusActivism/ActivismNetwork manage to Share Data. This might actually happen!

My latest idea for the first step in sharing data is that we would share a "read-only" version of the data. So our users will continue to log-in and edit their data on the campusactivism/activismnetwork, and we'll export a version of the data that would be either directly imported into the Future 5000 database, or dynamically pulled every time they need it for a search. And vice-versa for Future 5000 users.

We could have a minimum export standard, so if Future 5000 wanted to keep track of a lot of information about organizations (eg number of members, the budget, organizational type, funding type, etc) that my platform didn't track, I'd just ignore them and stick to the basics (group name, address, website, brief description, etc). If you wanted the "full story", I could provide a direct-link to the Future 5000 group page and vice-versa.

While this will work, for the most part I still think it is very silly that they are producing software that will do mostly the same thing that my software already does (and spending goodness knows how much money on it, while I make do living around the poverty line). I even offered to modify my platform to meet all of their requirements, and to do it for free, but they turned me down and decided to write their own platform. This type of decision only makes sense once you start trying to get groups to work together and realize that this breaks down all the time for the silliest of reasons. People just don't trust each-other.

It's possible that their software will knock the socks of mine, but I like to think that I'm a decent software developer and have managed to learn something about writing quality software over the past four years. The one good thing about competition is that seperation can facilitate innovation by discouraging groupthink (and also, unfortunately, by causing you to fight over resources). On the other hand, cooperation is good for solving problems using the best method the first-time and saving resources (time/money).