Essay by Jon Lebkowsky via Jim Moore
This is a fantastic thread of articles highlighting the way that the network of people who supported Dean congealed, worked together and worked in a way that defeated opposition because of speed and flexibility. If we swap out parties and organizations we can start to envision a new strategy for plotting network-centric advocacy campaigns.
Political parties gave us a centralized approach for sustaining coalitions based on ideology when our communications were limited to snailmail, telephone, and broadcast media. With the Internet we can find affinities and form coalitions with a speed and agility that traditional party structures can't match – or comprehend. The politics of the future is about sustained affinity networks that can form ad hoc coalitions around specific issues, and the leaders of the future will be those who find resonance with that Internet-enabled new reality, as Howard Dean and Joe Trippi have done.The rant continues to reflect the need to build on the solid base of network-centric theory. Strong social ties, common story, transferable communications and technology, shared support structure and clear motivational triggers.
To win we must find more and more ways to deepen the support that online organizing provides for face-to-face community. Face-to-face meetings generate and feed the intimate daily personal communication networks that help people stand up to the media-driven information assaults that currently define politics as usual. Face-to-face community involves identifying local people who share your values, obtaining social permission to get together and talk politics, sharing information and developing understanding, and taking meaningful personal action to play a part in a larger political whole......activists everywhere will use these and increasingly better tools to form coalitions, and ordinary citizens will expect and demand increasingly sophisticated platforms for participation in Democratic governance
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The key is going to be designing strategies, messages and providing leadership that embraces these new activists rather then frustrates them.
