Gurus are not enough: A call for organizers and organizing in social media
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ivan7 min read
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Summary
Gurus, mavens and experts convey information -- the way things are. Organizers cultivate leadership and facilitate exploration of a vision -- a way to see how things could be.
Gurus, mavens and experts convey information – they tell you the way things
are.
Organizers, conversely, cultivate leadership and facilitate a community’s
exploration of its vision – they offer a way to see how things could be.
Naturally, we need an accurate picture of how things are before we can
strategize ways to improve them, and so it’s important to continually listen to
and learn from the experts, taking from them relevant information and measuring
it against our own experience and knowledge. But folks involved in social change
– online or offline – can’t stay there. We have to be willing to step up and
do the difficult organizing work that leverages our knowledge and experts’ data
into something larger: a movement.
Everybody Organizing Everybody
Community organizers are a natural fit for “web 2.0” – the movement from
one-way broadcasting on the web to two-way coversation and connection. I want to
expand the definition a little bit, however, and suggest that online organizing
goes far beyond the professional, experienced organizers.
One of the defining aspects of web 2.0 is social organization. People are
constantly presented with their social circles in visual media: Facebook news
feeds, MySpace top friends, Twitter updates, etc. In short, more people can see
their network, in a much more literal way. This is especially true for young
adults (currently Millennials) who might have social networks scattered across
wide geographic areas and are less firmly rooted to a specific place through
vocational, familial or other commitments.
Communities at the margins of society have always had a more visceral
understanding of their social networks, which are often the sites of social
change planning and strategizing – consider the role of black churches in the
US civil rights movement, or gay bars and bathhouses in the early Stonewall era
of the gay rights movement. So I don’t want to suggest that this phenomenon of a
community visualized is necessarily new for everyone, but I think it is new for
many folks in the mainstream of society.
The online “social web” – social networks and social media – allows people
to organize their social connections, not simply to put them in order, but to
connect and collaborate with others. Evite invitations and Facebook events are
clear examples of this, as is Wikipedia.
Increasingly, the social web is teaching everyday folks how to be community
organizers.
It’s usually gurus, however, who get – or take – the credit for this
transformation. On the contrary, I see it as a much more grassroots bubbling-up
of organizing skills. Everyone has the ability to organize and inspire others;
the current tools are simply making those skills more visible.
Fewer Leaders, More Leadership
“Organizations and societies,” wrote Bruce Kokopeli and George Lakey, “do need
leadership, but they do not need leaders.”1 They argued for a shared value
of leadership, in which many individuals took responsibility for the direction
of a group, but didn’t invest the institutional power in a single person to call
the shots. A critical part of this feminist approach relies on cultivating
leadership among more and more individuals. Everyone has a stake, and everyone
has a say.
While there are particular challenges putting that theory into practice in an
organization, the good news is that movements, particularly those engaging in
online social change, are particularly positioned to take advantage of this
approach.
The fact that more people are organizers, and that everyone can exercise
leadership, does not mean that there is no role for the full-time organizer.
Indeed, the “professional” organizer becomes more important than ever, passing
on stories and lived experience, and sharing a pedagogy for cultivating new
leadership. What fades away is the positioning of some people within a movement
as “experts” to whom everyone looks for direction.
Paulo Freire calls such an approach “co-intentional education,” in which each
person is both teacher and student. Those with more experience may seek to
inspire or ask questions to further dialogue, but as a way to further develop
strategy rather than dictate to or control the masses.
Attempting to liberate the oppressed without their reflective participation in
the act of liberation is to treat them as objects which must be saved from a
burning building; it is to lead them into the populist pitfall and transform
them into masses which can be manipulated. … [T]he oppressed must see
themselves as women and men engaged in the … vocation of becoming more fully
human.2
This may seem like heavy or strident language in the context of online petition
drives or peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns. But my goal is to push social
change organizers to look toward the larger picture. What sort of movement do
you want to build in the long-term? What role do people play in that movement –
is it a passive one of letter-signing and donation-giving, or an active one of
working from the ground up for lasting change?
Selling, Giving and Cultivating
Want to support online organizing? Help promote a panel at SXSW 2010: Vote for
us by the end of Friday!
Ivan Boothe is part of a proposed panel for the South by Southwest Interactive
conference,
“Connecting Communities for the Common Good: Owning Online Organizing,”
along with Ben Rattray, founder of change.org; Peter Corbet with
iStrategy Labs; Sally Kohn of the Center for Community Change; and moderated
by Kari Dunn Saratovsky from the Case Foundation.
We need your help to get this panel on the schedule! Please consider
voting for the panel at SXSW
(quick registration required). Additionally, please leave a comment on the
panel’s page. Voting accounts for only about 30% of the decision to include a
panel, so we want to demonstrate support for discussion around online organizing
with your comments.
Social marketing experts are adept at building brand loyalty, or encouraging the
formation of an identity around an issue. They know how to sell the idea of
“social good” to the public at large, using people’s goodwill toward a cause as
a way to market to them through a given company, and increase donations to a
partner charity. Well-known examples of this are the
RED campaign and Starbucks'
Ethos Water.
Online organizers turn a skeptical eye toward “social good” and social
marketing. It doesn’t mean such projects aren’t worth exploring or learning
from, and it doesn’t mean that everyone involved is a charlatan simply out to
make a buck. But selling people an identity, even a “good” one, is fundamentally
different from organizing for social change. Freire again: “Conviction cannot be
packaged and sold; it is reached, rather, by means of a totality of reflection
and action.3
Movement building also goes beyond electoral organizing. Folks working for
social change often form common cause with those organizing around a political
candidate, and there is of course much to be learned and shared between the two
practices. But whereas elections are centered around a single charismatic
leader, a fully-engaged, vibrant social change movement consists of both shared
vision and shared leadership. Elections give people an answer, while movements
ask people a question – and then encourage them to speak for themselves.
Instead of selling or giving supporters a solution, then, online organizers
are involved in cultivation. There are pieces of both social marketing and
electoral organizing present in online organizing, of course, and experts in
these fields can be a useful source of data, but we should be wary of
replicating these other models when it comes to leadership.
Network Wisdom
There is a developing praxis being explored by numerous thinkers and strategists
in online organizing. For sociological analyses – stories and experiences –
danah boyd is indispensible.
Clay Shirky,
Allison Fine,
Valdis Krebs and
Howard Rheingold
explore the power of networks of individuals, while
Beth Kanter,
DigiActive
and
Debra Askanase
provide concrete case studies of online organizing in action.
What’s your experience? Who are online organizers with whom you share
successes and strategies? Please offer your wisdom in the comments!
Like the idea of discussing and strategizing about online organizing? Please
vote for – and even more importantly, leave a positive comment on – the
online organizing panel proposal for SXSW.
The deadline is the end of the day this Friday, Sept. 4, so don’t delay! (More
information above.)
Kokopeli, Bruce and George Lakey. Leadership for Change: Toward a Feminist
Model. New Society Publishers, Santa Cruz, Calif., 1985. Available from
Training for Change. ↩︎
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum International
Publishing Group, New York, 2004, pp. 65–66. ↩︎