Public policy, social issues, gender politics, religion, civitas, and other taboo topics fall under the hammer of Shava's iconoclasmic force of natural philosophy.
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Shoe leather season
Wednesday, November 05, 2003
1:45 PM
Posted on aether, Michael Stein's blog, where he's been posting about how his recent minitour on the Dean Campaign shows that the online community is peaking, and may dissolve into contentiousness at any moment.
I wrote in a comment:
I've been working with the Dean folks for about six months, and I started on the net in 1981. I was an activist in the free-net movement for about a decade, and a digital divide activist, before life interfered.
But I grew up in an incredibly political family. I'm a district leader in Portland Oregon for the Democrats. I'm running a civic engagement nonprofit. I have a few dozen issue campaigns and a handful of candidate campaigns under my belt.
What I can tell you is that the view of the campaign you'll get from touring with Dean is very different from the view on the ground in Portland.
We are converting Dean campaigners into the backbone of a county party badly in need of revitalization. The new blood has really gotten us old political hands out putting together training and mentorships.
The same thing is happening at least in Georgia.
The online community is great, but it's the GOTV (get out the vote) activism on the ground that will win this election, and build and maintain Dean's general reputation with voters.
In Dean's declaration speech he said that this campaign runs on "mouse pads, shoe leather, and hope."
Forget the shoe leather at your peril.
What *I* see is that the online community has become a stable infrastructure to support real life organizing on the ground. It's ripe.
We've set up phone trees so that one person with net access has a few people without to keep informed.
There's a toll free number for unwired folks to find out what's current.
More an more meetings beyond meetups are appearing in communities all over the US. In Portland, we are meeting-challenged -- there are too many things for everyone to go too. This week we have meetups,
half a dozen events to table at, sign waving on the highways, Dean's visit on the 11th and house parties for his birthday on the 15th, and several letter writing parties -- not to mention the smaller coordinating committee meeting to set subcommittee agendas for the next month (finance, tabling, media, multimedia, training, Democratic Party liaison,...), and then the subcommittee stuff which is mostly transacted online.
I'm on five local groups (portland for dean, oregon for dean, portland meetup hosts, portland supercommittee, and out for dean), and monitor a couple national lists, in addition to my local democratic party lists.
But these lists are largely the communications infrastructure of an emerging traditional organizing effort.
Don't say the online efforts are peaking. Say that they're becoming ripe and bearing fruit.
Give 'em hell Howard! ;)
Shava Nerad
shava@efn.org
40-somethings for Dean
/* I don't think it really exists, and I don't have time for another blog...;) */
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