Building Progressive Infrastructure

For longterm social change you need a long term strategy. Sure you need to fight the short-term battles (otherwise people suffer and die), but hopefully the left can scrape together some support for longterm institutions.

One example of such a program would be a database of skills and trainers. We need to convince all of the existing social change training organizations (Training for Change, Midwest Academy, AFL-CIO's trainers, ACORN, various socialist groups, etc) to publish their materials under the Creative Commons License. These materials should be available in large chunks (as books) and broken down into smaller chunks (chapters or exercises), and available online for free (PDF an HTML) - or in printed form for a charge.

The trainers will still be able to make their money by selling print materials (demand should increase once more people know about them), facilitating trainings (demand should increase due to a national online trainers database), and perhaps from grassroots donations.

The materials could be stored in an online system like the one on CampusActivism.org.

Then we need a trainers database that would have hundreds (thousands?) of people available to facilitate/lead a training on any skill imaginable. We'd want to develop a "core" curriculum of suggested skills for people to learn who want to become activists, and encourage them to learn SKILLS. Part of the problem with new activists is that they get distracted by all the issues and don't manage to focus on one issue long enough to start and win a campaign. Issue speakers should be part of this database, but we should most of what people need is skills.

This trainers database could based upon the campusactivism.org database -- which I have every intention of revamping and developing a "core" list of trainings. A review or certification system would be ideal, but will take work/creativity to implement.

Eventually it'd be ideal to have a system where people can collaboratively write and improve upon resources.

The sad thing is that these two ideas (sharing resources and trainers database) should be TOP priority among activist groups. New technology, like web services, makes this easy to do. However activist groups are promoting their own resources, instead of focussing on cooperation. A little effort invested in cooperation could lead to a massive reduction in duplication, increased specialization and focus on developing quality resources (once you know what's out there, you'd only create a resource if it was going to be different or better than existing ones), and a dramatic increase in resource distribution.

This is just one thing that I'm trying to do with CampusActivism.org. Unfortunately it's so important that there should be a multi-person organization with a $100,000+ budget that focusses on Resources or Trainers. Instead you've got me spending about 10% of my time on it, and I think I've got the best online collection of activist resources compared to any other website by a long shot (note: my trainers database is a mess). Imagine what we could do with just one person working on this full-time!!!

If progressives would have only diverted a couple percent of the money wasted on Kerry in 2004, it'd be enough money to start building online tools for progressives that would act as an infrastructure and help all progressive organizations.

Note: CivicSpace, Organizer's database and CivicCRM are examples of progressive computer infrasture projects. There are others. Just not enough.