One of the advantages to organizational advocacy is that organizations have the ability to control information flow. They can plot campaigns and political strategy behind closed doors. They can keep secrets. Many "old school" political warriors have looked at the required transparency of network-centric advocacy model and decided that it could never work.
Small self-organizing teams would need to layout a campaign idea, the strategy, budget and goals to successfully leverage the network. Trolling the network is a sales effort to pick up the right mix of people interested in implementing the campaign. Network participants would need to reveal the strategy they are working on to other network participants (to get feedback and support). They would need to ask friends and friends-of-friends to contribute to the effort. The more solid the plan becomes the more details the core team would reveal to attract resources( people,technology etc.). I would assume that network participants would want to back the campaigns that have the best people, best plans, biggest impact for minimum investment and the best chances for success. The theory is that as you go across the network to build a campaign or project you would reveal to many secrets and strategies traditionally guarded.
The "knowledge is power" players horde strategy, connections and limited resources. They come from a school and a tradition that has lost many campaigns because they have been out maneuvered by opponents. They also racked up "wins" because they were able to careful control and plot a strategy to win the day. They are right in many campaign scenarios.
Network-centric advocacy is not dependent on secrets for success. The power of the network-centric model comes from speed. Individuals that are part of the network would quickly connect across a communication and social grid to find a ripe campaign opportunity. The campaigns would be able to scale up people, talent, hardware, expertise and public support very quickly. They also benefit from the speed to disperse into nothingness and to quickly abandon loosing efforts. Network-centric advocacy gains power in the fact that it can engage in so many campaigns with flexible resources that it becomes very difficult to defend against.
Everyone can know that the network of environmentalist are fighting for clean air, clean water, protection of biodiversity, sustainable economies and against dirty industry and politicians. They can know that 50 talented staff might engage a new two week legislative campaign on the next discovery of a cancer cluster, oil spill, flood, industrial misstep, blcakout, police brutality,etc. Unfortunately, there are a million opportunities to push progressive policy and hammer bad politicians. (Everyone knows the basic Move-on strategy but the unpredictability of the agenda is part of the difficult thing to counter.) The power of network-centric strategy is not in the ideas but in the implementation.
Anyone who has had a good idea for a business or an invention only to watch someone else get a the same idea up and running knows that creativity is not in short supply it is the implementation that is defines the winner. A network-centric advocacy movement wires the implementation skills and ideas together and assumes that the advantage will be gained in the speed. Some of the opponents may know the full details of the campaign plan but will be unable to successfully counter the effort because they will not be able to scale responses, adapt when the campaign launches nor hold their internal resources at necessary campaign level for long periods of time.
