Organization’s Objective
Progress of citizen driven interest work is almost by definition messy, decentralized, and independent, and these characteristics are the source of its power. What is needed is a structure and strategy designed to better harness that unique distributed power. We propose a networking approach designed to address two central challenges in re-inventing citizen engagement and issue work:
To stop focusing on individual organizational growth and dramatically broaden the active base of participation.
We are more connected to each other via a variety of communications networks, but at a price. We are increasingly overwhelmed with information. Deluged with calls and emails from hundreds of important causes, we are cutting our ties to organizations of all kinds in order to stay off the “radar” of direct mailers, phonebanks and email campaigns.
The public has not walked away from commitments on issues but from the current models of civic engagement. Building membership in organizations has become a zero-sum game.
People want to take a stand on support for anti-war, health care, human rights, environment, etc. but it must be at their initiative, on their schedule, and increasingly for relatively short periods of time.
To overcome the dysfunctional lack of collaboration among progressive groups without imposing equally dysfunctional centralized command and control structures.
It is time to come to grips with the self-defeating fragmentation along issue, identity, and other organizational lines, and to learn from the self-organizing capacities of online networks. Fewer people are joining organizations but the “non-joiners” have nonetheless found remarkable ways to self-organize when it meets their needs.
While resisting appeals from traditional membership organizations such as churches, political parties, and civic organizations, literally tens of millions of individuals have also developed their own ad hoc, self-organizing networks within spaces provided by Care2, Friendster and MySpace, or by using tools such as AIM or Skype. These individuals are creating new social ties around common interests in ways unimaginable just a few years ago.
How can we leverage the self-organizing behaviors of the new culture to foster increased collaboration across a range of citizen driven issues?
