Principles for an Online Activist Grassroots Revolution

I originally wrote this in 2004, but never published it anywhere. Here it is with some small edits.

“Information wants to be free.”
(Stewart Brand at the first Hackers' Conference in 1984)

“Activist information wants to be free too.”
(Aaron Kreider, 2008)

Introduction
Online activist networking is taking off. There are several sites focused specifically on activist network (www.campusactivism.org/www.activismnetwork.org, www.wiserearth.org, Crabgrass - https://we.riseup.net/), and countless activist websites. Activists need to decide whether to use the technology to change the way we do activism or to stay in our old patterns of behavior and waste time fighting over niches. Here is a list of useful principles for developing the technology to power a grassroots revolution.

Principles

1) Grassroots Empowerment
Empowerment – we are giving people access to information. They decide what to do with the contacts, organizing resources, calendar of events, and other tools.

Ownership – people control the information they submit. You decide what is related to you. You decide the privacy level of the items that you control. You can share control with others. Some information is held in common - for instance, public information like the name of a school, or an issue.

Administration - an administrator or team of administrators, who are accountable to the community, acts to ensure civility, that the project stays on mission, and to curtail Spam. Decentralizing administration should be the goal (Ex. have administrators that are responsible for content from a geographical area, or specific issue.)

Equal User Access: users have equal access to the data. Nobody gets privileged access to the data (unless it is for the purposes of promoting this network – ex. if we wanted to fundraise to pay for costs). There is an exception to this rule for administrators, who should only use their access to run the project smoothly (ex. approve entries, curtail spam).

Participatory Democracy – promote participatory democracy where it is possible, representative democracy where it isn’t. The dream of the Internet is to reach an unprecedented level of participation in decision-making. Meaningful engagement means more than voting on a poll. It means writing, research, debate (on forums, by email, in-person, on the phone), creating art, protesting, attending conferences, speakers, etc. Often going beyond the Internet – using the Internet to facilitate off the Internet activities.

Organizational Democracy – we need to be democratic while creating software and accountable to organizations that are going to use it.

Sharing is Default – lots of sharing. You add something to the network and then, unless privacy requires otherwise, it is automatically shared.

Interface Choice – we are sharing a database, but there are many interfaces. People can choose how to access the information, and to filter the information to suit their needs.

2) Political and Strategic Commitment
Progressive: focus on the left half of the political spectrum: democrats, liberals, progressives, greens, socialists, anarchists, communists, social democrats, etc. Exclusion of republicans, libertarians, and other conservatives (with very rare exceptions for progressives that exist in those parties/movements).

Anti-Oppression – build a safe space that opposes racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, ableism, ageism and other forms of unjust oppression.

Activist Focus: we are targeting groups working for progressive social change, not service groups. Service groups could overwhelm the activist groups by their numbers, doing service is different form of activity that has different requirements, and service groups receive more funding.

Promote Skills and Strategy – our software should provide a pro-strategy framework, as people fall into doing activism mostly without having a strong sense of how to run a campaign. It’s easier to care about an issue than to have the skills, because the skills are taught in very few places. So the software should focus on getting people to create campaigns with goals, tactics, timeframe, sub-goals, constituencies, etc. We should use something like the Midwest Academy framework (“Organizing for Social Change”, www.midwestacademy.com), or support multiple frameworks. Part of this is to push campaigns and discourage service projects or education for the point of education.

3) Efficiency and Excellence
Efficiency – this network will make it easier for groups to achieve their core mission by reducing the time spent on busy work. For instance, there is no need for a hundred fact sheets on “How to Organize a Successful Meeting”, a hundred anti-war leaflets, nor for every network to spend hours compiling its own event calendar. This network will reduce transaction costs as anyone can upload and have access to a wide distribution network for their information.

Excellence – organizations and people working together will write better materials. Peer reviews will sort out good from the bad. If we provide people with a large audience, they will spend more time and develop quality materials.

Comprehensibility – a central location for resources that will have widespread recognition among the activist public and even less-activist progressive community (the people who share progressive views, but who aren’t so action oriented). This network will save people hours of web surfing time, and increase their chance of finding what they’re looking for.

4) Infrastructure Issues
Relational – we know that forms of oppression are strongly related, and to achieve justice our solutions are related too. We promote coalition building. Our infrastructure will reflect this interconnectedness.

Distributed Network – the data is syndicated so it cannot be shut down, overloaded (ex. DOS attacks), centralized, etc.

5) Miscellaneous
Moderation is Limited: they have a restricted role to enforcing half-decent grammar, proper data entry, and moderating things that are offensive or outside of the left half of the political spectrum.

Open Source / Free Software: this is free software (GNU GPL or similar). Note: if conservatives want to use our software they could download it and create their own site.

Student/Campus Inclusion: track data about schools, have a yes/no campus activist variable. These activists are an important segment of society, leaders in use of Internet technology (thus more likely to be early adopters of our system), and national student networks lack resources and need this infrastructure.

Important Data: As a starting point the data should include people, groups, networks (a type of group that has member-groups), resources (files), events, email lists, issues, campaigns, speakers and speaker topics, and schools.

Providing Incentives for Creation - people will produce more and better materials and organize more and better events because they can use this network to easily publicize them and reach a hundred times more people than they normally would.