User:Woozle/My Left Wing/Revolution 2.0 Outline RFC/resources

The brass tacks

Before planning a battle, it's important to know what your resources are. This will determine what strategies you have available.

• who is involved/interested, and to what degree?
• what are people's strengths and specialties: ideas? strategizing? networking? business/financial management?
• what kind of resources (financial and otherwise) does each person have that they are willing to make available for revolutionary purposes (and under what conditions)?
• where are we located geographically? (exact addresses optional)

The important part of this, though, is who are we?:

• Who else can I talk to when I want to brainstorm or suggest a plan or philosophize?
• If we come up with some coordinated action that we can take (whether that's something effortless and purely symbolic, signing a petition, or each contributing 1% of our income towards a hostile takeover of Fox News), what kind of numbers will we be looking at?
• If something is (or could be) happening in a certain geographical area, who might be nearby to get involved?
• What particular strengths and talents do individuals among us possess that might be of significant use to the group?

There are more questions that could be asked, but those are probably the most important ones.

• To do: create a "resource profile" questionnaire that people can answer on their user pages in The Revolutionary Bar & Library.
• To do: find some way of aggregating individual answers into (a) a searchable resource directory and (b) summary statistics.

A bit of philosophy

The thing I find most frustrating about all the existing grassroots organizations is that they only seem to see us -- their mailing list entries -- as potentially open wallets.

This is a well-done video by MoveOn. It contains a lot of really useful information about the deficit, presented in an easily-graspable way. But where on their web site is all this information pulled together, preferably in both raw and cooked forms? Where are the forums (of any kind) where we come together to decide which budget items we agree should be cut and which should be maintained?

A site called change.org has taken a step in the right direction: they are essentially a platform for generating and publicizing online petitions -- which has been done before, but here there is feed of new petitions, petitions are assigned any of a handful of categories, and there is a search function. If you want to see if someone has already started a petition for (or against?) your cause, you have some chance of finding it. (MoveOn is apparently considering a similar feature for their site.)

But again: where is the pre-discussion:

• to determine the level of support for a cause (by itself or relative to other causes)?
• to subject the argument to scrutiny so it can be corrected, refined, and strengthened before it goes public?
• to see if there aren't other ideas that might serve the same ends even better?

Where is the library of factual information and discussion upon which petitions can build their case? (Wikipedia certainly provides facts, but typically not in relevant chunks with their own URLs -- and it is not set up to encourage discussion.)

And beyond those criticisms: why is it that all we can do as citizens, apparently, is to sign petitions, make phone calls, and send money? What about protests, boycotts, and other forms of collective action? What about creating artwork (and ideas) for mass advertising campaigns (billboards, print media, TV, radio)?

One of the key concepts of liberalism is that we don't work in a top-down way -- we don't all march in lockstep to orders from a central authority. Why is it that all of our grassroots organizations seem to think that we do?

Wouldn't we be more powerful, collectively, and better able to compete against the forces of authoritarianism (who do frequently march in lockstep to orders from a central authority) if we had a organizations that were designed to make better use of our energy as independent thinkers?