bottom up change

I apologize to readers who have wondered where I’ve been over the past week.  Actually, the past two weeks have been very slow here at Bottom Up Change.  If it wasn’t for Nathan Pyles’ excellent contributions (for which I’m extremely grateful), there would have been little new content.  But I do have a good excuse!  First it was the OFA-MA Organizing Forum, which I posted about last week.  Since then, I have been busy starting up a new grassroots organization in Boston, which I want to write a little bit about here.

The past two weeks have been very exciting for me because I’ve begun to implement some ideas that I’ve been mulling over for several months.  Actually, these ideas date back to the beginning of this blog, when I began thinking about the possibilities of using blogs and other social media to connect with progressive organizers around the country.  But it was only over the past few weeks that my thinking about this topic began to crystallize into something more specific.  It’s been an inspiring few weeks and I’ve been able to confirm some of my suspicions about the power of social media as a tool for organizing.

In early May, I attended a meeting of the Young Democrats of Massachusetts (YDM), where I met with the chair of the Boston chapter, Kevin.  I had originally met Kevin at a “tweetup” (a meetup for users of Twitter) and we later connected on Twitter, where he told me about the YDM meetings.  I then met another YDM member, Ash, a few days later on Twitter.  It was refreshing to finally meet some active progressives in the Boston area who used Twitter as much as I did.  I had been to a half dozen tweetups this year, and while I always enjoyed meeting new people at these events, the attendees were usually in marketing and public relations.

When I met with Kevin and Ash in person at the YDM meeting, I laid out some ideas of holding a tweetup for politicos on Twitter.  They both were very interested in the idea and I began planning it.  My main reason for organizing a political tweetup was to see how much interest there would be in another idea I’d been toying with.  I wanted to organize a forum for the candidates in Boston’s mayoral race since it is the most competitive race for mayor that Boston has seen in over 10 years.  My idea was to make it a “social media” forum, where I would promote the event on Twitter and people could “tweet” their questions for the candidates to a hashtag (such as #Mayor).  I also thought it would be an interesting experiment to make a candidates forum as interactive as possible by making social media a major part of the forum.  The name for this forum would be Tweet the Candidates (of course).  I had been trying for several weeks to get in touch with the campaigns of Mayor Menino and City Councilor Sam Yoon, but not with much success.  It seemed that the campaigns weren’t too interested in attending a forum of uncertain turnout organized by an unknown person–me.  So after I talked with Kevin and Ash about the tweetup and the possibility of a social media candidates forum, I decided that I may have a better chance of persuading the candidates to attend the forum if there was an organization sponsoring it–one with a track record of achieving a solid turnout at events.  This led me to the idea of creating a social media organization in the Boston area that focused on politics and government.  When I began to promote the tweetup, I used the name “Social Media Progressives” for the group.

I wanted this organization to be identified as an association because at this stage, its primary aim is to connect people interested in progressive politics and social media.  I defined the organization as bringing together the tech community and the political community in the Boston area so people could start sharing ideas and collaborating about how social media and other technology can improve our politics.  Or, to use the more formal language I’ve written for the group, “Social Media Progressives is a new association of progressives interested in the ways that technology is changing politics, government, and journalism, particularly through the rise of social media.  One goal of this association is to increase collaboration between the online and offline worlds of politics and technology.”  As you can see, I wanted this group to serve as an umbrella organization for tech and politics broadly conceived, and I wanted the focus to be taking the online conversations offline so that progressives could meet, form relationships, and work together on real projects.  You can read more about our tweetup at the invitation page that we used.  I also created a Facebook fan page (please become a fan) and a Twitter account for our group.  

A few days before the tweetup, I met with Kevin, Ash, and another person I had met on Twitter, Yasmin, whose main interest was in the “Government 2.0″ movement.  Thankfully, they bought into the concept of Social Media Progressives and became founding members.  We didn’t have money and we didn’t have any other members, but our organization was up and running.

As you can see from the pictures on our Facebook page, the tweetup was a success.  We had over 40 people sign up, and over twenty people showed, which was a good turnout for our first event.  People from many different backgrounds attended.  We had the Chief Technology Strategist for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, members of the YDM,  almost the entire staff of Generation Progress, and several prominent members of the social media community in Boston.    We held a raffle for Clay Shirky’s book on technology and social change, “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations”.  When the night was over, people were enthusiastic about the potential of this organization to grow over the summer.  The plan is to have one Social Media Progressives tweetup a month.  In the future, we hope to attract prominent speakers in the world of politics, technology, and social media.  We are still planning a “Tweet the Candidates” forum sometime over the next few months.

Social Media Progressives could be a model for other online organizing efforts around the country, particularly those using Twitter.  In fact, I have talked with several people who are interested in creating SMP chapters in several cities.  Of course, this effort isn’t entirely unique.  I know that others in the progressive “Twittersphere” have been trying to organize progressives.  Most visibly, Jon Pincus has been successful in providing progressives on Twitter with a common space to share information under the #p2 hashtag.  There may be other efforts to organize progressives on Twitter that I am not aware of.  But what I would like to see with SMP is a way to take the online conversations and connections offline so that we start building relationships in local areas among people who use social media and consider themselves progressive.  These offline gatherings can also serve the purpose of educating progressives on new technology and create opportunities for collaboration with the tech community.  By focusing on offline gatherings and emphasizing the importance of local activism, I think that SMP can develop strategies for taking online organizing to a new level.  But this is just the start.  There’s a lot to learn and a lot to do yet.

In a later post, I’m going to go into more detail about how Twitter can be used for online organizing, and how SMP will be employing these techniques.  There is a lot of potential in combining social media with progressive organizing.  I’m excited about where this will lead.