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.

Where's the Beefing?

The thing I find most frustrating about all the existing grassroots organizations is that they seem to see us -- their members and mailing list entries -- as being limited to the following roles:

• money supply (from which donations may regularly be coaxed with the right emotional arguments)
• petition-signer (sometimes they even let you add your own text or modify the boilerplate, but they rarely send you a copy... much less submit your edits for others to consider, or even send you a copy for your own reference)
• phone-caller (the organization has decided that this is the one thing we're outraged about today)

Note how none of these provide even the least bit of interaction between individuals; we are all expected to either agree with whatever the organization has decided, or just stay out of it.

This is a well-done video by MoveOn. It contains a lot of really useful myth-countering information about the US budget 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's the data? Where are the forums? How are we supposed to come together and decide which budget items we agree should be cut and which should be maintained? I put this page together in less than an hour, as a starting point for discussion and reference; why doesn't MoveOn have a page like that -- or even something much better than that?

To their credit, MoveOn does seem to have started polling their members -- occasionally -- about what priorities they should tackle next. This makes me think of an IBM PC configured with 16k of memory and a cassette tape for storing your BASIC programs: given what they could do, this is crippleware. Calling it a "toy" is giving it too much credit; it's a brightly-colored rubber squishy thing from the dollar store.

Oddly enough, there seems to be very little overlap between the "grassroots org" sites and the "online petition" sites -- when you'd think that online petitions were a tool that grassroots orgs would want to embrace and extend. As far as I know, MoveOn has so far only considered putting such a feature on their site, though petition sites have been around for over a decade now.

Moving on from MoveOn and looking at online petition sites, though, where is the 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
• to see if there are other ways (besides petitioning) to accomplish the group's goals

Where is the library¹ of factual information and discussion upon which petitions can build their case? Wiki software is free, easy to install, and easy to maintain. Why don't they use it? Why don't they have forums? IRC channels?

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 tend to work that way) if we had a organizations that were designed to make better use of our energy as independent thinkers?

Even assuming that we agree with everything MoveOn or HRC or ActBlue or whoever decides (and of course we frequently do agree with them), what about the thousands of political arguments that we participate in every day on Facebook, LiveJournal, and other social venues? We could be much better advocates for the truth if we had some focused crowdsourced fact-finding tools, so we didn't each have to do our own research.

Conclusion (a.k.a. The Point)

All that aside, the point of doing a resource inventory is this:

A society -- populace and government -- is made up of individuals. We don't need specially-anointed individuals, politicians, to run things for us. We can work together as a self-governing people.

If our official government is broken, we need to think in terms of building a new one -- even if all we're doing is building replacement control modules for an existing vehicle of statecraft (rather than building the entire vehicle from scratch), and then overpowering the hijackers who have wrecked the old control modules.

We are all the legitimate government, the legitimate owners, of the United States of America. The difference between us and the official government is that they have an operating organizational structure for governance. We need to build one for ourselves -- a better one -- if we're going to carefully pry their fingers off the wheel and regain control.

Footnote

1. Wikipedia certainly provides facts, but typically not in relevant chunks with their own URLs -- and it is not set up to encourage discussion. The same applies to other wikis, including those dedicated to political issues. I could probably say a great deal more on this subject.