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Organizing Tools in the Digital Genealogy 5 Jun 3:15 PM (4 months ago)

Micah Sifry is one of the political commentators whose writing about technology, organizing of the Resistance (or, in his preferred parlance, the Defiance) in Trump 2.0, and how organizations are alternatively finding footing and struggling this moment has been most informative and grounding for me in since the 2024 election. Micah was kind enough to link to my piece on the genealogy of digital teams and tools in his excellent Substack. He included this challenge:

My only addition would be to discuss how in the move from grassroots to the cloud, whether we’ve undervalued the power of self-organizing communities. In the earlier days of this field, campaigners often tapped “the power of the crowd” to get things done. We still have lots of distributed campaigning (as well as some negative experiences with the challenge of scaling between national leadership and local autonomy) but in addition to looking at how campaigns use staff and tools, which Browner Hamlin covers very well, I’d love to see more on how ordinary people as well as super-volunteers are either empowered, or entasked.

This is an excellent point and something that I have pretty strong opinions about. I’d like to dig into at greater length in the future, but for now will offer some quick thoughts.

I should say at the start that this is a place where my work in a global advocacy organisation is likely highly divergent from a US-based campaign or a community organisation. As always, I have perspectives on these differences but what I see on a daily basis in the global Greenpeace network is quite different from someone working an electoral campaign or doing community-based housing justice work, for example.

The organizing aspects of digital work has indeed become underserved in recent years. Instead there has been a significant emphasis on mobilization – which requires less effort on the part of people, is often quite time bound, and is more conducive to low bar asks like signing petitions or making donations. Organizing, by contrast, is hard, slow and messy.

From an institutional perspective, my sense is that there are a few key drivers. First, as I already wrote, organizing people is hard and slow. Second, most campaign strategies in my context have the role of volunteers in an organized state as an end-of-process outcome – not an essential part at the start of the campaign design or theory of change. Third, is a structural reality – in my context, organizing tends to sit in smaller, less resourced teams and the technologies for organizing don’t receive the same degree of investment as a CRM or website (due to the smaller staff constituency and smaller budgetary impacts).

But to model some of my previous writing on the genealogy of teams, this is an endpoint and not where things began. 

Thinking back tools for organizing people (or better still, tools for people to organize themselves) was a central part of the digital suite in the most successful campaigns and organizations. In fact the early days of digital saw some of the greatest potential as a domain of work through the tools made available to volunteers (and often built by volunteers) in the Dean campaign in 2004 – some of which were subsequently productized by Blue State Digital and other firms. Whether it was at Democracy for America or later the Obama campaign, internal social networks that enabled volunteers to start affinity groups or local groups, organize house parties and participate in field canvassing, while inviting family, friends and neighbors to join was a key part of the digital infrastructure.

I must again refer readers to Daniel Kreiss’s excellent book on the Dean, Kerry and Obama campaigns, “Taking Our Country Back.” It charts the emergence of digital teams and tools through those campaigns. If you’re interested in how they first started showing up, what their challenges were and how they grew – go read Kreiss. 

Whether it was the Dean or Obama campaigns or MoveOn.org – the 2000s were in many ways defined by digital campaigns trying to figure out how to build large groups of people who showed up not just online with petitions and donations but offline and in person as well. The heavily electoral nature of the technological innovations – with US presidential campaigns being a primary, but not exclusive, driver for new tools and new consultancies – meant that there was always a strong linkage between the purpose of offline organizing (the field functions of voter registration, persuasion and turnout) with the distributed qualities of digital. That is, online tools for organizing often closely mirrored the traditional functions of a political campaign.

After the success of the Obama campaign and the well documented popularity of My.BarackObama.com (aka MyBO), many nonprofit and labor leaders wanted to see the same power of digital organizing tools brought to bear in their own contexts. Many groups tried and failed to get the same results. A key learning for practitioners like myself was that expecting to get the same results as a dynamic presidential campaign in almost any context that wasn’t also a dynamic presidential campaign was going to be incredibly challenging. Learning that this is hard and it’s unlikely that an organization can get the same traction with an internal social network or organizing platform was key. But the lesson was not that organizing online was a bad investment. 

Moving forward we see the popularity of distributed online petitioning as a step towards democratized digital engagement. Change.org did this in more cynical ways, but technologist Nathan Woodhull launched ControlShift Labs as a more movement-oriented distributed organizing platform. He originated it with GetUp in Australia (an Open Network organization that was one of the first groups using the MoveOn.org model outside of the US). CSL was then incubated by Citizen Engagement Lab (CEL), at the same time I was also launching an anti foreclosure and eviction project incubated at CEL that eventually became OccupyOurHomes.org. I was the first organization using ControlShift in the US because of this connection. We used the distributed petition and events platform as a vehicle to empower people facing foreclosure and eviction to tell their story and build support – both in their community and online. 

ControlShift was and is used by the Greenpeace network and is still a tool I love. While it’s very much a distributed petitioning tool, Nathan has always valued petitions as a starting point of engagement and campaigning – not an end point. The features that were added to CSL over time speak to this – from facilitating easy petition delivery to targets, to organizing offline events as a part of the campaign. When we were using CSL in Occupy Our Homes, we held weekly training calls for people who started petitions – helping them sharpen their campaign, think through who they can be asking for support and what steps they can be taking to move forward. 

An additional benefit of the ControlShift platform is it allowed for federation. So while I had resources to spend on digital organizing at Occupy Our Homes, many of the community based organisations I was working in network with – or even local Occupy encampments – did not have the technology infrastructure to take their offline work and promote it online. CSL allowed me to make this platform available to local groups for their own organizing purposes, a form of movement generosity that engendered stronger collaboration.

At its best, this sort of distributed petitioning platform can provide incredibly empowering opportunities for regular people and volunteers, not just paid activists.

As we look towards 2016, peer-to-peer SMS tools had a moment of popularity. I’d need to dig deeper to recall the exact products and when they were introduced…but writing from memory makes me think of that campaign cycle as the one where organizations and campaigns began to ask supporters to use distributed peer-to-peer text messaging as a key way to get people to attend events, make donations, and turn out to vote. 

Unlike an internal social network, peer-to-peer SMS has a lower barrier to participation and can be effectively run with smaller volunteer bases. So it is both more ubiquitous today but also more prone to high volume and low ethics implementations that can approach unwanted spam. Is that a good use of volunteer time? Probably not – but doing it with good data, for opted-in recipients can be a valuable connection, even as the spammers have made this less successful for everyone else. 

Similarly – virtual phonebank tools have been an effective form of volunteer participation from this mid-teens era for electoral campaigns. They remain a key pathway for how people can give their time in support of a campaign or organisation, talking directly to people that may be like them. For my context, it is not a common nor important tool. But to me the potential for value to be derived from good data and authentic forms of communication are high. Humans talking to humans, provided someone picks up the phone, feels anachronistically powerful at a time of AI slop and predatory spam.

The last point that comes to mind is the impressive implementation of Slack as a volunteer engagement and communications platform. In “Rules for Revolutionaries,” Becky Bond and Zack Exley tell the story of the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign and how they built an impressive volunteer apparatus supported heavily by consumer communications technologies. Though still riding the volumes of a dynamic presidential campaign, the principles they developed for trusting volunteers, opening lines of communication, connecting people, developing relational organizing models – all of this feels more replicable at smaller scales than the social network level tooling of the Obama campaigns. 

Micah is likely more familiar than I am around the recent history of digital distributed organizing, so I want to pull the camera back a bit on my thinking on “the power of the crowd” to get things done.”

There is a philosophical aspect to this and there is an organizational one. 

Organizations need to believe as a core part of their theory of change that people power is the critical force on the left for creating a better world. If you believe that, it should be reflected in your budgets, your staffing, your tools procurement. 

But if you believe people are just there to send in donations in the mail and not do much else, then it is unlikely that your organization will design campaigns that build a meaningful role for volunteers in your work.

Similarly, if you haven’t internalized an approach to people power that values volunteer/offline participation, it is very unlikely that you will be designing campaigns that benefit from what digital organizing tools or digital volunteer spaces can offer. And so over time – again, in my context at an international campaigning NGO – I have seen budget cuts and tools turned off for platforms that orient towards the volunteer experience or distributed organizing functionality because our campaigns are less and less oriented towards these activities as being essential to campaign success. 

Connecting to my previous essay on team evolutions over time, volunteer organizing was once a part of a generalist digital campaigner’s job description. But as digital teams grew, this became a more specialized function – either in a digital team or in a role housed in a volunteer or field team. They had tools to go with them – oftentimes tools that were separate from the rest of the digital marketing or CRM stack, but sometimes still integrated. 

What was relevant (again, in my experience, which will be very different to what we see in larger US orgs or political campaigns!) was that when budgets needed tightening, the freestanding ‘volunteer organizer’ technologies were easy line items to cut. They usually didn’t have a big staff allocation. Turning off a low volume tool and single role in the staff was an easier cut to make than someone writing emails to fundraise or a tool that generated a huge portion of the organization’s budget.

These have been painful evolutions to watch. 

In a time of global political upheaval and intense dissatisfaction with what major political parties are offering, with rising right wing nationalism in many parts of the world – the importance of tools and trained professionals to support regular people coming together, building trust and affinity, and having the technological options to take responsibility for making their communities or their country or the world a better please feels more important than ever. 

The technology itself isn’t the issue for me. There are some purpose built distributed organizing tools and plenty of larger digital community platforms (Discord, Slack, Facebook) that are fully capable of enabling people to come together to organize. The gaps stem more from a lack of commitment to real organizing within organizations (and outside of the political campaign context especially), as well as a lack of people who are trained as organizers capable of approaching technologies as a means to the end of organizing people together. 

I think the progressive movement has suffered from being so reliant on presidential campaigns as a vector for innovation. If the labor movement had been the primary source of digital technology funding, I imagine organizing technology and trained organizers would be more prevalent. Hell – if ACORN hadn’t been destroyed by Republicans (while most Democrats stood by in silence), I imagine organizing technology and trained organizers would be more prevalent. 

Ultimately, organizing is hard. It takes time. It takes money. It requires relating to people as complex beings. And building technology that supports this sort of work requires technologists who have a deep understanding of how organizing works. No doubt some of what we have exists because of people who have spent time working to build this understanding. But we don’t have enough. 

The two things I would hope for more of is organizations that commit to people power and show this by investing in tools and training for both volunteers and staff to support this as a fundamental building block for all strategic work. And that we all pay closer attention to the theories of change being advanced by politicians and by organizations – if people power isn’t central to how they are committed to making change, then we should be skeptical about committing to them with our money or our time. 

Direct mail and deepening relationships 2 Jun 9:58 AM (4 months ago)

Jason Lewis recently wrote a piece in The Giving Review, which offers a strongly critical analysis of how progressive non-profit organizations in the US have become over reliant on direct mail and the ways in which it shifted the relationship between advocacy organizations and their base. 

[D]irect mail wasn’t born out of malice. It was a clever solution to a real problem: how do you raise money at scale? In its early days, it felt like a democratizing force—a way to reach ordinary people, invite them into causes, and build broad-based support. But over time, what started as a savvy way to raise money turned into something far more powerful.

Lewis makes a compelling case as to the negative impacts of direct mail success on non-profit organizing.

Instead of building relationships, organizations collected addresses. Instead of organizing members, they segmented audiences. The mailing list replaced the meeting hall. Participation became a product: a compelling story, a crisp ask, a promised outcome. What it delivered, more often than not, was a passive supporter expected to back someone else’s agenda. It didn’t just reshape how nonprofits raised money. It rewrote what participation even meant. Over time, the logic of the mailing list became the logic of the movement.

The point wasn’t to organize people—it was to acquire them. And, just as movements were becoming more data-driven and donor-centric, private foundations were stepping into their modern role: gatekeepers of what counts as legitimate change.

Direct mail shaped how organizations talked to donors. Foundations decided which organizations were worth listening to. And they didn’t just bring cash. They brought a checklist. They funded the groups that looked most like them: strategic, professional, low-risk. Logic models? Check. Slide decks? Check. Predictable outcomes? Even better. Organizing? Too messy. Lived experience? Too emotional. Foundations didn’t ban movements. They just stopped funding them.

Much of this resonates for me. Organizing has been commodified and shifted downwards. The diction of membership based organizations was sanded down as groups treated the possession of an email address as equal to having a member with deep, sustained ties. And funders prioritised the groups that followed best practices, built big lists and focused on certain deliverables as opposed to organic power building. 

What I do not really buy is that this is a byproduct of an overreliance on direct mail as a fundraising tactic. While direct mail certainly presaged a professionalisation of nonprofit fundraising and while it offered models that would be copied in the digital age, at the end of the day it is simply a channel of giving. Most big progressive advocacy organizations do not have direct mail as their primary income channel. Even if it’s significant, it does not strike me as one that is determinative of organizational approaches in 2025.

I don’t agree with Lewis’s blaming direct mail fundraising for being a fundamental cause of where we are now nor the idea that organizations should walk away from this channel. But I do think he’s right that there are hallmarks of heavy direct mail fundraising reliance that lead organizations away from building real, deep memberships and a belief in people power. Organizing with people can be icky, because people are not spreadsheets. They have warts and hair, bumps and bruises. Lewis writes:

We’ve spent decades teaching everyday donors to stay out of the important conversations; to give when asked; to trust someone richer, more polished, and more “in the know” to make the big decisions. And now we’re left with a culture of disconnection and confusion. We act surprised when people pull back, when communities stop engaging, when democracy starts to shake. But maybe the real surprise is that we thought this setup could last.

The willingness to challenge our current assumptions of how organizations relate to people and how they ask for their time, energy, and, yes, money is going to be essential for navigating through and out of the Trump era. For some people, the only way they will be able to contribute to this work is through giving. For those people, it still behooves organizations to find them and reach them with opportunities to give. Giving itself is not bad, nor disempowering, nor even neoliberal. It’s what some people have to offer. 

But treating donors, especially small dollar donors, as something other than cash machines is essential. The act of giving needs to be put alongside digital and offline activism, community building and relationship development, training and volunteering. It’s one behavior out of many that organizations need to be successful. Regardless of channel of gift, if someone’s first engagement with an organization is to make a donation, it is on the organization to find other forms of meaningful participation for that new donor. A donation should be the start of a deep relationship, not the end of a shallow one.

Reevaluating non-profit best practices and mechanisms of funding is essential. Reimagining what it means to be a member of an organization has to be a part of that. I don’t think it’s a story of any one fundraising channel, but rather the overall posture organizations take to engaging their base and building multidimensional relationships with them. 

The organizations that spend the time investing in multidirectional, multichannel relationships with their supporters will be the ones that have the best chance to grow and build power with and through their base. When that is happening, people will donate with joy, and what channel they’re giving will be completely irrelevant. 

A Brief Genealogy of Digital Teams and Technologies 9 May 6:43 AM (5 months ago)

Author’s Note – This brief history was originally written for internal audiences in the Greenpeace network. It attempts to provide a broad overview of the way digital technologies and digital staffing have evolved over the last twenty-plus years, in particular in the non-profit advocacy sector and political sector. Both because these sectors in particular and digital technology in general have an historic bias towards American companies/organisations and because my perspective is that of an American who has worked in electoral and advocacy spaces, in the US and globally, there is a strong bend in this analysis towards events involving taking place in the US, with US participants. My hope is that this US-centric approach does not undermine the core content of this loose history, which is meant to describe large trends and dynamics within organisations around the world. I view this as a genealogy – a study of the lineage and developmental shifts in three clear epochs of time.

This is not meant to be a literal genealogy, nor an academic investigation of the evolutions of different civic tech platforms and their utilisations over the last 25+ years. I seek to capture in what follows a characterisation of the zeitgeist around technology and digital teams I have been a part of, built and seen operate around the world. 

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Advocacy organisations used the internet prior to 1998. Greenpeace itself was a pioneer in the use of websites and email. But the modern conception of the internet as a place for organising, building people power and engaging large audiences for political and policy ends can reasonably be linked to the founding of MoveOn.org in 1998. MoveOn.org was birthed out of the impeachment of US President Bill Clinton, when two successful California technologists started an online petition which they shared over email calling for Congress to “Censure President Clinton and Move On to Pressing Issues Facing the Nation.” The petition garnered over half a million signatures, as well as helped recruit thousands of in-person petition delivery actions and tens of thousands of phone calls into Congress. 

MoveOn.org became effectively the first major digitally-native advocacy organisation. After Clinton was impeached, they asked petition signers to commit to engage in electoral activism and donate to candidates opposing those who had voted to impeach him. In short order, MoveOn.org had created a conceptual framework for digital advocacy that relied on emails, petitions, online donations, volunteer cultivation, phone calls to decision makers, and connecting people to elected officials. 

EPOCH 1 (~2000s): All-in-one (or two)

In this first epoch of digital advocacy, which I loosely place from 1998 to 2012, the industry had common hallmarks for teams and technologies. 

Epoch 1 – Teams

The MoveOn.org model relied primarily on ‘campaigners’ who were responsible for delivering multiple types of digital engagement, in different channels and settings. They managed email lists and used them for advocacy, list growth, fundraising, volunteer recruitment and earned media. They engaged with allies, elected officials and the media. They fundraised – almost exclusively through small dollar asks from their supporter base. They created videos and ads. They used digital tools to organise offline events – from house parties to protests. Somewhat anachronistically, MoveOn.org had almost no real website. For years, the domain was a compendium of petitions and little else. 

Moving on from MoveOn.org, there are common hallmarks of early digital teams in this epoch. While the naming convention varied (Internet? New Media? Digital?), teams were often similar in structure and skillset. 

Digital teams tended to be small. The people in them were usually generalists or people with multi-disciplinary responsibilities. If there was differentiation, it usually started with a web or visual designer and did not go much farther than that. Digital campaigners of this era were expected to: 

• write emails, 
• create web content, 
• write blog posts, 
• fundraise over email and on the website, 
• recruit volunteers & drive attendance at offline events,
• create social media content (as these sites started to exist), 
• produce web videos, 
• manage data (primarily email list segmentation within a digital toolkit), 
• create and place digital advertisements, and 
• conduct blogger and digital media outreach.

The notable exception may have been with the visual design and development of websites themselves. Those discrete tasks often required technical hard skills. If organisations did not have them, they were outsourced to agencies or skilled volunteers.

In most organisations that existed prior to the creation of the internet these tasks required close collaboration with other departments (Fundraising, Communications, Policy, Volunteer, etc). At MoveOn.org, campaigners were responsible for all of it. 

Early digital teams may have been independent departments in some organisations, but often they sat within a Communications department or grew out of an IT department. 

These multidisciplinary, generalist teams (augmented by expert designers and in some instances database or web developers) benefitted from operating in a domain that was nascent. There were no long-agreed best practices.  There were no degree programmes that turned out young graduates to staff organisations with similar people, with similar perspectives and philosophical approaches to the use of technology in advocacy and elections. In contrast, American electoral campaigning as it related to field (offline) organising, communications, and fundraising had best practice approaches that reached back to the days of Abraham Lincoln. Teams of digital generalists essentially had a blank slate to determine what would work best when it came to building power online.

Epoch 1 – Technologies

For the bulk of the first epoch, digital teams relied on online two types of digital tools. 

First and foremost were websites. Content management systems (CMS) became common as ways for non-technical or low-technical generalists to put content on web pages. The popularisation of CMSs as a tool for digital teams aligned with the emergence of Web 2.0 – which allowed for interactive websites, user-generated content, unique URLs for pages and posts. By using WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) content editing, CMSs allowed more people of limited technical skills (like myself) to post frequently and bring attention to specific posts and pages via directly linking to URLs. 

The other primary tools were all-in-one digital toolkits. Products designed for advocacy and non-profit practices included broadcast email senders, email databases, fundraising functionality, petition pages, tell-a-friend pages, letter to the editor pages, and geomapped elected official datasets that allowed organisations to directly send petitions from constituents to elected officials. Practically speaking, these toolkits enabled digital teams to build lists, engage them with numerous types of engagement asks, raise money, and re-engage to build lists even more. They did not require hard technical skills – usually some basic HTML knowledge was sufficient to get the most from these toolkits. 

Early digital toolkits included products like GetActive, Convio, NGP, Engaging Networks, Action Kit and Democracy in Action. Later in this epoch also included Blue State Digital, Salsa Labs, EveryAction, NationBuilder and Action Network.

One critical factor at this stage of digital technology development in nonprofits is that there was little to no movement of data between websites and digital toolkits. Digital toolkit landing pages were generally styled to look similar to websites, but not be a part of them. If there was movement of data, it was periodic, manual transfer of donor information or membership information from fundraising or volunteer databases into or out of the digital toolkit. The processes for the bulk of this period were manual and infrequent (weekly? monthly?). Digital teams got to work primarily within one major platform (the toolkit) beyond the website – and email was the primary channel that was relevant for data-generating and data-utilising purposes.

From a technical perspective, the only necessary skills for effective use of most digital toolkits was basic HTML. This, conveniently, was also all that was needed for producing content on CMSs. And even this wasn’t totally critical, as both toolkits and CMSs had WYSIWYG interfaces that allowed emails and web pages to be published without any coding knowledge. 

Digital teams benefited from web developers and visual designers who had the technical capabilities to go beyond WYSIWYG editing, but campaigns and organisations could launch a substantive digital presence with only a CMS, a digital toolkit and a single campaigner with the responsibility of producing content across multiple digital channels. 

In essence a functional digital presence could be achieved through one person, of no to low technical skills, using as few as two technology platforms. (An exception could be noted that ActionKit always required SQL developer capacity and the MoveOn campaigners relied on some technical support to deliver email segmentation and list management). 

EPOCH 2 (~2010s): CRM at the centre  

Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2007-2008 was the first instance of a national campaign or major organisation to invest in building a massive, mature digital team. (“Taking Our Country Back” by Daniel Kreiss is an excellent look at how digital evolved from the Dean and Kerry campaigns in 2004 to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.) While the first campaign falls within the first epoch, it presaged what we would see as digital crew in other organisations: growth in teams and specialisation in roles. 

By the time President Obama ran for reelection in 2012, the shape of the next digital epoch’s teams and technologies was becoming clear. No longer was the structure of a US presidential campaign the outlier for digital team taxonomies – it was now a common structure. This included a more varied use of digital technologies.

Epoch 2 – Teams

OFA 2008 gave digital teams around the world a model for how resources could be allocated across different areas of digital practice to get the best results. This included heavy investments in design, in email and web page optimisation, in SMS programmes, in large-scale testing, and advertising.

More capacity allowed for greater specialisation. Greater specialisation allowed for more experimentation, the deepening of the best practices playbook within those domains, and, theoretically, greater organisational impact through higher efficacy. 

In practice this evolution saw the movement away from generalist digital practitioners and towards domain-level specialisation. A robust digital team might now include different people responsible for:

• Email (but not necessarily differentiated between fundraising and non-fundraising emails)
• Website content
• Data management
• Analytics & reporting
• Web design & user experience
• Video 
• Mobile
• Advertising 
• Social media

The rise of bloggers as respected journalists saw the responsibility of blogger outreach move out of digital teams and back into more traditional communications/press teams. 

Practically speaking, we see a digital team that may have been composed of one to two types of job description in the 2000s become a team with eight or more differentiated roles in the 2010s. For national and international organisations, this proliferation of roles and headcount was not a fundamental barrier. Digital was a promising domain and unit heads were able to justify increased investment. That is, unlike most incumbent organisational functions, digital teams grew with the expectation that they would deliver measurable value and impact for their organisations. 

Epoch 2 – Technologies

For the early years of this period, most digital teams still employed a CMS and an all-in-one digital toolkit. But parts of the digital toolkit were beginning to be segmented off from use in favour of some ‘best in breed’ tooling choices. This could include things like purpose-built broadcast email platforms, highly optimised tell-a-friend or after action pages, and donation processing platforms. 

CRMs sought to unify online supporter and donor data across digital and non-digital platforms. Storing data about the same people in different systems required new technology and new skills for moving data and managing what constituted ‘truth’ about who someone was, what they had done with an organisation, and how they wanted to be communicated with. While fundraising teams had used CRMs – customer/constituent relationship management – for a while, CRM companies like Salesforce sought to integrate more marketing functionality that was relevant to digital engagement and campaigning. 

The rise of point to point APIs (application protocol interface) allowed simple data movement, often through visual interfaces but sometimes in code-based environments. The data movement was generally not too complicated – records moved from A to B to C and back again through linear processes. This required greater stewardship of data and provided a more clear benefit for segmentation and list management that went beyond email as a channel. 

Beyond this more simple technical infrastructure for data movement between systems, we also begin to see more advanced matching of email and donor data records to the voter file (in the US in particular). This requires developing a more sophisticated view of who individuals are and what data updates from external data sources (voter files, organising databases, consumer data) with datasets maintained by organisations and campaigns. This sort of person matching was between data sets where there were clear, unique identifiers (email, phone number, street address, name). In later years matching of supporters across differing data sources becomes more challenging, due to a lack of common unique identifiers (e.g. social media handles) or anonymisation of tracking data.

The growth of channels as domains of practice similarly led to an increase in the need for reporting dashboards and analytical tools that sat outside of the digital toolkit itself. Data could now be brought together across web, email, social, and fundraising channels. 

As the 2010s progress, we see an increase in the number of people in teams, an increase in the options for tooling to deliver largely similar digital outcomes as the 2000s, and a commensurate increase in the skills required to effectively manage those tools. Or, framed in the other direction, as we built teams with more people and specific skills, they sought out tools that would best enable them to achieve their narrowed areas of responsibility. Generalist digital campaigner roles became less and less common, but the perceived opportunities of specialisation and domain expertise made this feel like an easy choice for managers to make. 

EPOCH 3 (2020s): Data warehouse at the center

While the 2000s were a time of explosive digital growth that saw the emergence of social media and mobile smart devices by the later parts of the decade, the 2010s saw consolidation of tools and platforms used by campaigns and organisations. The internet was no longer a place of wild growth in the types of tools and platforms providing opportunities to organisations. Instead, it became a place where massive Silicon Valley corporations and their funders reduced innovation, limited competition and locked audiences in as commodified eyeballs to sell to advertisers or sources of data to, well, sell to advertisers too. 

The Covid-19 pandemic pushed organisations even further towards digital reliance. The loss of offline and face-to-face engagement channels due to the risk of illness and death led to even more investment in digital teams and technologies. 

As the world began to come out of the pandemic, Silicon Valley introduced us to a new technology at scale – generative artificial intelligence. It arrives as an offer to solve the problems organisations and exchanges face – problems derived from the arc of digital team growth and technology proliferation. 

Epoch 3 – Teams

The 2020s see an increase in specialisations that were started a decade before. Email staff get split into different domains of practice. In some cases (INGOs), it is likely  fundraising experts and everything else experts, while with political and marketing contexts, the division may be between email writers and email optimisers. Social media staff proliferate with each new large platform and content type. Writing for a website is no longer the same job as writing for email or writing for a microblogging platform. Different engagement channels and platforms require their own staff to manage them and their audiences. (“Require” here reflects a common choice, but it is one to be examined soon.)

Data teams show even more signs of specialisation. Data analysts, data engineers, data scientists, data visualisation experts, data architects and more roles have become commonplace, both in terms of the sorts of job descriptions we see in organisations and the need for specialisation to make the tools we procure work effectively.

Generalist roles are largely gone from national and international organisations. The siloing of digital teams – which may also include the fracturing of these digital roles across digital, engagement, campaigning, fundraising, data and IT departments – means there is reduced integration between and interaction with different digital functions. There is a greatly reduced literacy of cross disciplinary knowledge – that is, someone whose job is to create content for Twitter and engage audiences there may not be able to write fundraising emails or draft website content. Someone tasked with web analytics may not be able to effectively strategise about email list segmentation or after-action conversion page design.

What are the consequences of the proliferation of headcount, specialisms, and tools? Different digital practitioners are reaching different, but overlapping, audiences through different channels. From the outside people may not perceive these differences directly, but many organisations find it harder to remain coherent. This in turn leads to poor messaging engagement in different channels, pasting content from one channel to another without a recognition of different audience and stylistic needs. 

It is critical to note that this is not simply a negative consequence of Conway’s Law reaching digital engagement outputs. Audiences that campaigns and organisations are trying to reach have indeed fragmented across social media channels. Greater investment and capacity is needed to reach them in this landscape. Algorithmic content delivery contributes to the same trend—you’re constantly chasing the trends that the algorithm favors in a given moment.

Organisations effectively have different internal digital stakeholders, with limited structural integration and less ability for people to be interoperable across roles and channel responsibilities. This leads to a loss of flexibility in resourcing (be it for crisis moments, or simple things like vacations or sick leave), competition for resources within digital channels, a lack of understanding of what works in different contexts. In my eyes, a critical consequence of this is the loss of creativity about how to stay on the cutting edge of digital engagement. 

Staff rely on stale best practices, meaning many organisations’ outputs look the same, regardless of what issue they are working on, what their brand is or which individuals are creating outputs. ‘Best practices’ need to be the baseline for creation of new emergent practices. Yet team structures and specialisation often limit this in reality.

Epoch 3 – Technologies

The ‘best in breed’ approach has proliferated further into this era, with even less reliance on all-in-one digital toolkits. The big difference is that breeds are getting smaller. Previously large platforms that provided multiple functions are being atomised into smaller and smaller technology domains. A single data platform has been replaced with multiple cloud solutions and new tooling choices at each stage of the data pipeline. On-platform functions are increasingly done off-platform. Many tools are required today to do what one or two tools did in previous eras. 

The architecture in place for systems and tools has evolved to seeing a data warehouse at the center of the map. The movement of data in and out of the warehouse, the production of data products that deliver value to ranges of stakeholders, the construction and maintenance of integrations and pipelines are consuming activities for digital and data technology teams. The pursuit for efficient data storage and movement practices, along with canonical understanding of who people are as they interact with numerous digital systems, is an essential dimension of this technological era. 

With the rise of smaller and smaller technology classes, increased specialisation of skills is required, forcing more FTEs to fill different technical roles (as we see above). The key here is the technology trend is driving a staffing and budgeting trend. 

Another dynamic in this era is that the companies selling all-in-one style digital tool sets have gone through a period of massive consolidation. Private equity has gotten involved, buying up competitors and degrading the quality of products on offer. This, paired with the availability of cheap money for Silicon Valley to apply into new investments and acquisitions had a powerful impact on the technology landscape.

Convio acquired GetActive, then Blackbaud acquired Convio. BSD split into two companies, both of which were acquired by larger firms. NGPVan / EveryAction acquired BSD Tools (BSD Kit?), ActionKit, DonorTrends and SalsaLabs. Then EveryAction was acquired by Apax Partners, a private equity firm. 

Only a handful of competitors are independent – notably companies like Action Network, Engaging Networks, and NationBuilder.

Major tech players like Salesforce, Hubspot and Microsoft have sought to offer an array of tools and functionalities that at least appear to have a level of unification and interoperability as to replicate past vintages of all-in-one digital solutions. However this is often not as clean as past tools – Salesforce’s offerings are closer to a Frankenstein monster, with body parts stitched together from other acquisitions, as opposed to technology built by one company with one coherent approach.  

AI as a Solution?

Looking across this genealogy, there are a number of meta trends:

• The movement from generalist to specialist roles
• The growth of the number of technology domains that require staffing and tooling
• The atomisation of product offerings within technology domains (with associated increases in costs from procurement processes to maintenance)

Through all of this – from the creation of digital teams to their growth and proliferation – it is unclear if each epochs’ trends bring better results for organisations. Does each FTE today bring the same ROI as 15-20 years ago? Does each new platform that is switched on bring the same ROI as 15-20 years ago? Does the level of specialisation and technical hard skills make organisations more able to achieve their core outcomes of winning on their issue and having financial security? 

Teams are bigger. The quiver of tools in use is larger. But are the results any better?

Generative artificial intelligence products are being sold to executives who are asking these very questions. Whether or not generative AI actually can be a solution to organisations (and my sense so far is that they are not a solution at all), the appeal is obvious. I recently saw an AI company advertisement on LinkedIn targeting executives that was framed simply “For less than a third of the cost of a new Analytics Engineer, you can have a year long subscription to our AI data product.” The continued growth in staffing demands is untenable and AI is being sold as a solution.

The market for AI is with executives who, at some point, must stop hiring new FTEs as every incumbent tool is replaced by more and more niche products, each requiring their own technical expertise and product management. Regardless of whether AI can actually solve the problems of integrating systems, moving data, creating content and increasing staff efficiency – the market demand is a consequence of the trajectory of the last 25 years of digital teams and tools. 

Calling the Question

The enshittification of the internet – especially search and social platforms – also looms large in my thinking. I don’t think our teams and structures are well suited for the necessary period of adaptation, experimentation and innovation that we will have to muster in order to thrive in an enshittified internet. The calcification of thinking into rigid best practices is no longer right for digital teams. (See: Cynefin framework. We are no longer in an Obvious domain. We are in, at best, a Complex domain that requires emergent practices, or at worst a Chaotic one, that requires rapid response.)

As a manager of teams and someone supporting a network of organisations that are resource constrained, the current direction of travel feels unsustainable. The proliferation of tools and requisite numbers of digital and data staffing FTEs simply cannot continue without significant improvements on ROI and organisational impact. It is based on assumptions of arithmetic growth that simply are not reliable in most organisational contexts.

If technology isn’t working for organisations and if the results are not getting better, then there has to be a strategic and functional reset. The missions of nonprofits and campaigns are not waiting while technologists build more and more integrations, or onboard more and more staff. At some point, we must get on with the strategic work that digital and data teams are meant to support. 

Ultimately it should be clear that the freedom, the flexibility, and the lack of binding best practices of the first epoch of digital teams and technology are things that I find missing in today’s working environment. It is up to us all to find new pathways forward – hopefully with a commitment to creativity, courage, and collaboration to once again unlock the transformative power of digital technology in nonprofit organisations.

Special thanks to the feedback and input from Matt Compton, Maria Julia van Boekel Cheola Torres, Sebastian Sibelle, Chad Stein & Mike Townsley. 

MAGA vs Reality 3 Apr 12:31 PM (6 months ago)

I was discussing with some very smart friends the critical question of if Trump’s $6 trillion tax increase in the form of chaotic tariffs might be beyond the power of the rightwing media to spin in favorable terms. Could this event – which likely will precipitate a global economic collapse and massive pain in Americans’ finances – that causes the Trump/MAGA fever to break? Is it something that simply cannot be explained away, blamed on trans kids or DEI?

My short answer is: I’m not sure. I think the rightwing reality popping moment that tested their information ecosystem was Covid and it killing over a million Americans.

The response was “DERP vaccines are the real killer” and arguably a massive acceleration towards Know Nothing anti-science, anti-constitution, election denial insurrection. It undoubtedly took the epistemic schism between right and center news ecosystems and exploded it into a seemingly irreparable rift that threatens the existence of America as a project today.

Maybe total economic destruction challenges that more fundamentally than people’s families dying in ERs while coughing out “but Covid isn’t real” with their final breaths. But maybe it won’t.

Studies late on in the pandemic showed that 54% of Americans knew someone who died of covid. The number shot up to over 70% if you included “or was hospitalised” from Covid. This was an event that affected people directly in the worst possible way and it did not cause the American right to revisit what they thought was true.

A massive recession could be worse, in terms of it directly impacting more people, at a higher level of inconvenience, than Covid did. But I would not underestimate the ability of rightwing media figures and politicians to continue to find ways of misdirecting truth and responsibility from Trump and his flunkies. The MAGA epistemic bubble is large and it is robust. The amount of pain that may have to be felt before it is popped likely is unfortunately large.

La Pausa 17 Jan 7:34 AM (9 months ago)

Since the election, I have wanted to write. I have wanted to quickly move forward with answers as to what has gone wrong, what Democrats could have done differently, what should happen next. Now Donald Trump is about to be inaugurated for a second time. While I think the picture as to what has happened has improved, I don’t think I yet know exactly what should come next.

~

In soccer there is a tactical concept that has become popular in the last few years. It’s call La Pausa and it entails a team in possession of the ball – usually a central defender or a goalkeeper – standing still, with the ball at their feet, and waiting. The team without the ball has likely dropped off, wanting to compress the space they have to defend. But with La Pausa, the defending team is forced to come out of their shape. In so doing, the player with the ball can now see a different set of options, a more favorable set of options as to what to do next.

La Pausa can be infuriating to watch. It lacks urgency. It isn’t satisfying. It doesn’t make you feel like your team is doing what needs to be done. But time progresses, things shift, and suddenly the right choices appear.

Of course it is something that is done when your team is in possession of the ball. When the other team has the ball, your team must still react to it, to try to get the ball back.

I keep coming back to this concept of La Pausa as I think about America and what progressives need to be doing now to best understand what happened in November and what we should do next.

~~

There are two modes that progressive activists and the Democratic Party should be in right now: resistance and reflection.

Trump and his agenda needs to be resisted. Full stop. He will try to do horrific things to vulnerable people – we should not let him. He will try to undo good policies from Biden and Obama – we should do what we can to stop him. There will be times where mass mobilisation is needed to show resistance to the Trump agenda. There will be times where direct actions are needed to resist. There will be times where community organizing and legislative advocacy are needed. Now is not the time to sit idle, nor wait for the 2026 midterms, nor wait for an invitation to resistance.

But while that is happening in the moment, there must also be reflection. Not panic based on exit polls. Not rushing to confirm prior held beliefs of pundits and center-right Democrats. Democrats did face a significant electoral loss. Even if the absolute numbers are by no means historic in nature, the consequences of MAGA Republicans controlling the White House, Senate, House and Supreme Court are going to be dire. Democrats and their coalition must develop an earnest understanding of how this failure happened and what can be done to course correct.

Partly this may be about the policies that are pursued. Partly it may be about the language used to talk about Democrats’ policy goals. But there must be a degree of sophistication in the analysis and an investment in trust.

I firmly believe that America can be a place where vulnerable people are protected, where everyone can be cared for and find dignity in their lives, where people are welcomed and accepted. I believe that we can hold strong in our values of diversity, equality and inclusion because it makes us all better. And I believe we can talk about these values and these aspirations in ways that are fundamentally appealing to all sorts of people in America.

~

When it comes to what Democrats or progressive groups should be doing now, though, other than resistance, I think time is an asset for strategy. Lacking any substantive influence to proactively advance policies through the federal government, taking a moment to land a coherent, intentional strategy feels sensible.

Inevitably a second Trump administration, in addition to being vile and a fundamental assault on American values, will be chaotic and incompetent. Left to his own devices, Trump will advance policies that hurt the economy, destroy jobs, increase inflation, and siphon wealth from the rest of us to the richest people and corporations. Voters will have the opportunity to quickly look around and see that Trump and the Republican Party’s rule is not what they were sold in this past election. As these things happen, the political landscape will shift and the options available to Democrats and their allies will look different. Perhaps even more favorable.

Today Republican’s power feels overwhelming. But it will shift, likely quickly, and with the shifts new opportunities to start winning again will come. La Pausa is relevant.

I have mixed metaphors and concepts here. This soccer metaphor is a clumsy heuristic for understanding American politics and power. But the need to simultaneously be reactive to crises and be attentive to longer term strategic evolutions is an essential demand for the moment we are in.

Resist, today and tomorrow and at every turn needed. But do so while building a deeper sense of how to navigate forward, proactively growing power and adapting to the changing landscape so that we can turn back from this terrible place and bring people to a brighter future.

Big Meetings Beyond the Post-It Note 1 Nov 2024 6:29 AM (11 months ago)

I’ve reached a point where I am feeling incredibly limited by the common strategic planning processes and large meeting design methodologies I find in the international NGO space. And I am not sure what the better alternatives are. I am looking for help and feedback from the community here.

In the Greenpeace world – but also in most other progressive movement and technology spaces I’ve traveled in – the way big meetings are done involve limited plenary discussion, lots of small breakout groups. Post-it notes and butcher paper is used to gather and collate ideas. Individuals write quietly. They share in their small group. The group seeks to identify commonalities and cluster similar topics. Those are then reported at the high level in the room and further clustering and alignment building takes place. The outcome usually looks like a summary of key themes and topics for further discussion.

There are clear positives to this approach. It allows everyone to contribute in the idea and discussion process. At least in the first phase, it does not privilege extroverts and native English speakers, nor people from cultures where being proactive is normal (or, in the inverse, it doesn’t disadvantage introverts, non-native English speakers and people from high context communications cultures). It lowers the barriers to participation and prevents a few individuals from dominating the discussion based on their personal comfort in the meeting context. Theoretically, allowing everyone to participate in this way will produce an outcome that is more reflective of the people in the room.

Additionally, a highly consultative and inclusive approach can be essential to building consensus and buy-in for meeting (or strategy) outcomes. The process in itself is one that moves a room together towards the conclusion. Ideally it creates space for disagreements but closes them in the same phase.

But there are flaws in this model. As anyone who’s sat in a small breakout group with a pile of Post-It notes on their lap has experienced, the contributions in these moments are a mixed bag. Forcing big concepts or complex problems into a few words on a tiny sheet of paper is hard. Nuance and detail are lost. People relate to concepts that fit onto a Post-It in different ways. It’s not clear to people outside the group what the full idea was – only survived on the note.

Clustering as an activity further levels down nuance and complexity. A “Improve data quality” cluster might include topics as diverse as “improving our analytics engineering capabilities,” “automating deduplication with AI,” “building better governance policies for our federated network,” and “unclear KPIs for our social channels due to frequently changing Meta metric definitions.” Which of these did the group think was a strategic focus? No one can say.

Additionally, the small group cluster and report back methodology still creates process artefacts that confuse design for strategy. For example, let’s say one group has a loud discussion on a niche topic that the rest of the room has already dismissed in the other groups. Does that mean it must be included moving forward, as a reflection of the process design? Conversely, in a room with 100 people and 1,000 Post-it notes, how do we ensure that an idea that is only mentioned once and not advanced as fitting well into a clustered outcome is not lost in the process? We cannot reliably ensure that unique insights and complex experiences are adequately captured in this process.

While this is mostly about meeting design, similar practices of large scale consultation, note capturing, clustering and distillation show up as common tools for strategy design. The flaws are fundamentally the same.

My problem is that I don’t know what a better alternative is. I’d love to hear what other large meeting methodologies you’re using and finding effective.

How to you balance the requirement of building inclusive spaces against an information gathering process that doesn’t end up being over-simplified and without nuance or complexity?

How do you ensure everyone has space to share their ideas and perspectives, while still building towards strategic outcomes?

How do you leverage the rare opportunities to have a diverse group of people, with a wide range of skills and perspectives to build something greater than would be possible without having those people together in one place, at one time?

Who is designing interesting meetings? Who do you see innovating in consultative strategy development processes? What pieces do you recommend I read to advance my thinking on this?

My worst professional feeling is sitting in a room and thinking, “This time, with these people, could have been so much better used.” I look forward to feedback and inputs to help me avoid feeling that into the future.

Originally posted on LinkedIn.

Preserving the economy without a restructure 15 Apr 2020 9:57 AM (5 years ago)

I was having a conversation with a few friends the other day about how bad things were likely to get economically speaking and what a post-coronavirus recovery could look like.  Specifically what sorts of hard choices might need to be made when the economy reopens and what it might mean to lose restaurants, bars, concert venues, sporting events, shopping malls, etc as we know it.

It brought me back to my work on the housing collapse and foreclosure crisis, where over 9 million families in this country lost their homes due to (largely fraudulent) foreclosures from when the housing bubble started to pop through the economic collapse. During the response to the 2008 collapse, the Fed gave banks over $16 trillion in response. This amount of money, if still deployed but not given directly to Wall Street banks, could have paid off every underwater mortgage in America. Then it could have bought a home for every homeless family. Then it could have provided free college to all. And so on.

The amount given to banks was truly staggering – and it didn’t solve the problems. Millions were foreclosed upon. Housing values remained down. Massive amounts of wealth, especially in African-American and Latino communities, was destroyed. The Fed, with license from Congress and the Obama administration, pointed a money cannon at Wall Street and the American public barely got anything for it. But the banks stayed solvent and we did not have to go through an economic restructure or change the rules of the road in a substantive way in the industry that was culpable for causing the collapse.

This is relevant in the context of Covid-19 because right now we’re watching the federal government and the Federal Reserve find repeated ways to point a money cannon at business. Over $2 trillion in cash from the federal government and multiple rounds of liquidity from the Fed, with a current projection of up to $6 trillion. This has been done as already approaching 20 million people have lost their jobs and we are still figuring out the scope of the pandemic.

Long story short, we’re going to put an unthinkably large amount of money into the economy – mostly via financial institutions and giant companies – and early indications are that, like 2008 and beyond, the American people will see very little real outcomes from it.

How would I do things differently from the start?

• Federal government pays all workers 80-100% of their wages, via their employer, regardless of income (I am for 100% but am open to being convinced a partial haircut is acceptable). Employers are banned from firing people. This keeps wages in peoples’ pockets, people with employer-provided health insurance on those roles, and minimal disruption to the labor market.
• No rent or mortgage payments for the duration of the crisis. No foreclosures or evictions in this period.  The Fed backs up debt holders in the housing market & commercial RE market. You probably need to go ahead & have the Fed back up any securitized debt objects to prevent a massive wave of financial institution insolvency – but if we’re trying to avoid cataclysm, that’s fine by me.
• Medicare for All for Covid, but for real – not Trump’s bogus allusions to it. No one should pay a cent for Covid testing, treatment, care or vaccine.

You do all this and people stay in their homes, get treatment, have economic security, and we don’t blow up the economy through social distancing and quarantines. You protect pretty much everyone but the investor class, who won’t be seeing their usual returns on non-securitized investment vehicles (like, say, restaurants or bars or sports clubs). But you basically punt the pandemic as an event that requires an economic restructure. This also would do the most possible for stopping the spread of the pandemic due to people not getting care they can’t afford or showing up to jobs while sick.

I would be very open to an economic restructure. I would be very open to Wall Street banks, hedge funds, and private equity vultures taking losses unto bankruptcy. I would be very open to using this moment to get Medicare for All, full-stop.

But simply put, if I wanted to see how the government could have acted in a way that would still put the massive amounts of money in play that are and will continue to be thrown at this problem, with a goal of minimizing change to how our economy works, then this would be what we should have done.

We’ll find out a few years after the crisis that whatever we ended up spending will have been enough for us to have the government do what’s listed above, to protect people, keep them sheltered, fed and healthy… but we won’t have done it. Instead we’ll have enriched Wall Street and protected wealthy investors from losses, with no meaningful public benefit to show for it.

Solidarity Against Trump’s Austerity Death Trap 24 Mar 2020 12:34 PM (5 years ago)

Amidst the fear and pain of the Coronavirus pandemic, the one thing that has given me hope is how people have come together in response – meeting the needs of the moment with togetherness instead of panic. There are countless mutual aid efforts happening around the world and incredibly bravery from frontline medical staff. People sing out their windows together in Italy to give each other hope. People bang pots and pans together out their windows in Brazil to protest the inadequacy of the government’s response.

In the US, all signs point to the Trump calling people back to work next week in the face of all medical advice. Conservatives are lining up with takes that suggest the death of a few percent of the population – hundreds of thousands to millions of people here in America – are less bad than the collapse of the whole economy. Trump thinks a crashing economy is worse for his political future than mass graves. (Let’s leave aside the absurdity that an attempt to restart the economy would survive a million dead Americans, or that Trump even himself stopped the economy to begin with). Carl Beijer has called this Trump’s austerity death trap and I think that captures it well.

Already online there is talk that workers should go out on general strike if Trump tries to force people back to work. My fear is that while the labor movement may not be strong enough to support this, many people will make the hard individual choice that indeed their lives and their families lives are more important than their jobs. They will put some degree of faith in the government to provide direct aid and some faith that they can get by on charity, on credit, and on personal austerity. They will bravely do the thing that is obviously right, but their President (and surely soon, the conservative media and their bosses) is telling them is wrong.

It is critical that people who say no to Trump’s prioritization of the economy over human life feel supported. It is critical that people do not feel alone in this decision, that they not feel shame in their abstention from work. It is critical that space is created for not only people to refuse this demand to keep the gears of the US economy going with the lives of working people.

There is a critical opportunity to both support people and encourage them to make the right decision and create the tools to help spread this reaction – whether we call it a general strike, an abstention, a non-cooperation movement against Trump’s deadly self-interest. What we need is visual and cultural signifiers to share. Not just badges and memes on social networks, but something local and offline.

I’m not a visually creative person. My first thought of a white bedsheet out a window probably has the wrong connotations but is the sort of thing that could be done by almost anyone in the world. A white bedsheet with a painted green slash could provide a solution. The green ribbon is being used in southeast Asia alongside the hashtag #WeWillOvercome. And the color does tell the story of the sort of recovery we want (be it a green stimulus or a green new deal or both)!

I don’t know if Trump will press Americans back to work. I do know that if he does, it will likely result in the rapid spread of the coronavirus and a massive increase in human suffering here in the US, at minimum. This is a terrifying moment, the worst imaginable outcome of putting a selfish, stupid, incapable man in the White House.  But in the face of this stupidity, we are not alone. We have each other and we have common sense.

There never really was mass resistance to Trump’s presidency. If there ever will be, this feels like the moment where it will emerge – beyond twitter and across our communities. The irony is now it cannot be in the streets, but must be online and in socially distant ways offline, too. That’s why I see value in a finding a unifying visual meme to connect those who will together reject Trump’s attempt at mass murder at the alter of the economy.

Fatherhood & Bernie Sanders’ Humanism 12 Mar 2020 11:41 AM (5 years ago)

“Are you willing to fight for that person who you don’t even know as much as you’re willing to fight for yourself?” – B. Sanders

I’ve spent a lot of time over this prolonged presidential primary thinking about the concept of hope and why, despite the exterior appearances of a cantankerous New Yorker, I find so much hope in Bernie Sanders and his presidential campaign. 

I believe it stems from becoming a father and experiencing politics with a sense of real consequences far beyond myself. It’s not an original thought to realize that having a child changed how I see the world. It wasn’t until my son was born a little over two years ago that I started to feel the things I believed in emotionally, as opposed to simply believing them intellectually. 

Having a child has shown me the lived value of another human life beyond my own. The persistent fear a parent has for the basic health and welfare of a child that starts helpless and who in time grows to have more and more ability (and at two, still no judgement).  I see this shift in basic stuff – a stronger emotional pull upon hearing of tragedy or a sense of grief at seeing someone experiencing hardship. Other times it’s big picture – a deeper sense of fear as to what looming global problems (climate change, rising right wing nationalism and anti-Semitism) could mean for my son. Through the experience of parenthood, I’ve grounded my politics in a way that is so much stronger, deeper, and more affirming than ever before. 

Life in this country is hard. Economic inequality and insecurity makes it hard. Racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia all make it hard. In the face of these things, not everyone responds to the experience of parenthood by looking outward. People have a tendency to start to build up little walls to protect this new thing that they feel is tenuous or delicate. Parochialism, territorialism and fear set in. Perhaps it’s why we’ve ended up a country so defined by who we fear and what we lack. 

We need hope in the face of these systemic hardships and self-imposed walls. And the thing that is so special about Bernie Sanders’ campaign for President is the way in which he has quietly staked out the most hopeful campaign in my adult lifetime. 

Bernie asks us to look at our neighbors not as others, but as people with the same material, emotional, and familial needs as ourselves. When we do this, we can see our respective hardships. We can see the value and importance of providing care, regardless of cost. Of having good paying jobs with dignity and rights. Of freeing people from the hopelessness of student debt. Of ending military adventurism and investing in solutions to the climate emergency that is already devastating communities across our country. 

“I look around and see so many other people barely holding on,” Ms. Yanos said, choking back tears as her kids did their homework at the kitchen table. “It’s not that I think it will be all rainbows and sunshine if he’s elected, things won’t change overnight. But people younger than me, they are going to demand change in their lifetime.” (NYT)

Politics is fundamentally about how we share our brief time together on this planet. It is about how we care for each other when we are sick and how we protect each other when we are vulnerable. It is about the extent to which we choose as a society to either honor the dignity of our neighbors and other people around the world, or how we distance ourselves from them and deny their humanity through, at best, indifference and, at worst, state sanctioned violence. Through parenthood I’ve felt the difference between these choices like a gut punch. How could we ever choose to not affirm each others’ worth?

Bernie’s platform is one that uniquely puts forward the value of every individual human life. His call to fight for someone you do not know just as hard as you’ll fight for yourself is a bold act of faith in each of us to see the world in the same way. To see that each of us has our own struggles, our own complexity, our own unique value as human beings, worthy of not just protection but societal action on our behalf. From this act of faith comes solidarity and from solidarity comes the power to affect change together.

I don’t particularly care what you call Sanders’ platform – whether it’s democratic socialism or a mere modernization of FDR-style Democratic Party liberalism. What inspires me is Bernie Sanders’ humanism. The belief that the problems any one of us faces merit a president who will fight for them, not because they are big demographic problems that have economic impact, but because, god damn it, it is our friends and neighbors who are dying without care or rationing insulin or having to work three or four gigs to live paycheck to paycheck. That a better world is possible. That this better world can be achieved if we work together in solidarity and with an embrace of our shared humanity.

Sanders has described the effort as a kind of support network for people left out of mainstream politics — an effort to help millions of people, in his words, “feel less alone.” (Buzzfeed)

Bernie is at his best when he gives us not his litany of villains (though knowing the enemies who stand in the way against a better world is important), but when he gives us the space to find hope together. Hope is so important, especially when the economy works for almost no one, when we face a rising global pandemic and a climate catastrophe, when we have been failed by our leaders and it feels as if things are just slipping past the point of salvation. 

We need to have the discipline to find hope, both in each other and in a political movement. I want to be a part of a politics that values each individual life and fights for solutions to the problems we face that are grounded in the goodness of each of us. I want for the audacious hopefulness of Bernie Sanders’ campaign to inspire millions upon millions of people here in America to participate in the political process, demand a better world and build it alongside people they do not know. The urgency of this moment demands it.

I can’t recommend the pathway of having a child to find humanism in your politics. We don’t have time for that. But what I can do is encourage you to listen to what Bernie Sanders is asking of us with an open mind and an open heart, free from cynicism and with a belief that a better world is possible. 

The primary is not over. Biden has not yet won. There is time for us to look around, to look at our country and the need for hope, solidarity and a politics grounded in the value of each and every one of us and still elect Bernie Sanders as President. 

Volunteer. Talk to your friends and neighbors. Donate. Vote.

The Civic Upswell 8 Mar 2017 10:20 AM (8 years ago)

Eric Liu has a piece in The Atlantic that looks at the civic upswell that’s happened in response to Trump. It’s overall encouraging, celebrating that “people are exercising both power and character.” It’s optimistic in a dark time.

This line is something I might be skeptical of:

“The surge will likely outlast his presidency. Americans today are rushing to make up for decades of atrophy and neglect in civic education and engagement.”

Let’s say something – Russia, lying about what he knew, corruption, emoluments, being certifiably crazy – forces Trump from office, either with impeachment or resignation or removal under the 25th Amendment, Section 4. In that case, Mike Pence would become president. Pence is just as extreme a conservative as Trump, if not more. However Pence speaks the language of civil governance. He doesn’t tweet crazy things. He sounds like any other politician.

My fear is that even if Trump is removed from office (which I want to see happen!), the removal of the tangibly insane thread from conservative governance would quell the popular civic outpouring that is currently taking place.

Pence would feel normal, even if he still pursuit draconian immigration/deportation policies, gutted social programs and took a bellicose posture towards Iran, China or Russia. The normality, the leveling-down of extreme policies by the press because of being more normal than Trump, would be a cold splash of water on the current civic upswell.

It would be up to us as organizers to keep it going, but it would be far less self-sustaining and require even more coherent, intentional organizing.