Minister Al-X

Bringing Our Online Communities Offline.

Zephyr Teachout, the former internet Director for Howard Dean's Presidential campaign, wrote a very timely piece this week about bringing our online communities offline, a topic which I'm sure a lot of us have been thinking about.

She notes that while the internet is surely disrupting the status quo of how politics is waged, most of the energy right now is going into "fundraising, list-building, and ... online community building". But what Zephyr hopes to see come from these new internet tools is "offline communities based on online connections but rooted in public places."

As someone who has become part of an offline political community through the internet, or more specifically through Music for America, I find this to be a highly germane topic for discussion. I was attracted to Music for America in part because it showed the promise of being able to bridge culture and politics and I saw first hand how much easier it was to persuade people to vote, and vote progressive, when you talked to them, face to face, in cultural spaces that they felt comfortable in. But I also recognized the limits of what MfA was doing- I mean how much time can you really expect to spend at concerts? And how much of a real community can be formed in places where the costs of entry are as hi gh as a music venue? MfA had a brilliant way to get through to people and tweak their interests in combining culture and politics, but there was little fostering of offline communities, outside of volunteering for concerts, to plug kids into.

Why is it important to focus on these cultural spaces? As Zephyr notes:

Local involvement in community organizations – be they explicitly political or not – correlates with much greater sense of power over political life. Sidney Verba and Gary Almond have shown, in a multi-decade, five-country study that participation – even passive participation – in local voluntary organizations appears to directly lead to greater satisfaction with government.

In addition I'd like to point to one of the central philosophies behind what MfA did in the last election- the single best way to get someone to vote is to have a friend, or at least someone they can identify with, ask them too. It has been shown that a young person is between 8-12% more likely to vote if another young person asks them to, so just imagine the potential increase if it wasn't just their friends and random peers who asked them to vote but rather if they and their friends all belonged to some sort of offline community where each person encouraged the others in the group to participate in politics.

But the fact remains that the civic groups that once formed the bedrock of the Democratic Party have largely disappeared, for a variety of reasons. However, Zephyr seems to think, and I agree, that the internet can help to remedy this situation.

Among one of its most unsung charms, the internet lowers the barrier to finding places to host public events, and telling people about them. If political and media (though that's another essay) organizations with incentive and opportunity exploit this lowered barrier, the Internet could power a resurgence of a new version of the great American voluntary association.

How could the internet be used to fuel this resurgence? Zephyr seems to think that the DNC could be the central avenue of advancement for a resurgence of voluntary associations and if it turned itself into more of a "service organization" and if it utilized Meetup more effectively. She also spends considerable time discussing how a group like the ACLU could facilitate these local groups, which I won't summarize here.

Anyway- as I noted above, I believ that this is one of the more vital conversations for progressives who are interested in fundamental political change in this country to have, and I'm glad that Zephyr and other bloggers are thinking about it.

So let me pose a question- what do you think that we need to do to really start to build local voluntary organizations? What do you think that the role of national organizations, like the DNC, the ACLU, and America Comes Together, could/should be in helping to foster these groups? What is a reasonable timetable for getting these types of groups off the ground, and what sort of investment do you think they will take?

posted by Anonymous @ 12:06 PM