The Grunion

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 14:07:38 GMT

Mass uprisings slip through our fingers

On one of the last mornings before I was to leave Australia, I met up with a girl I had kind of grown up with. My family would always see the Crawfords at Christmas – the two girls of the house were around my age. I always wondered what it must have been to grow up surrounded by girls and a very strong female role model, and in turn perhaps they wondered what it was like to have three devilish younger brothers that could at any moment set fire to the garden. After getting lost a little on the windy day, I finally found Rebecca sitting waiting with a coffee in a Clovelly coffee shop. As I walked in she looked up and as she smiled I saw she was beautiful – like an Italian goddess literally radiating some sort of light. I felt a bit rueful at my rushed hung over state, but then I reasoned that the Crawfords had always been like that.

Seeing as we hadn’t seen each other for years we had a lot to catch up on (the mothers-grapevine had passed along the relevant details of our movements naturally, and I had to laugh when Rebecca said she was worried about what kind editing that didn’t involve.) We went through it all – boyfriends old new and potential, the family, whereabouts of errant friends, the baby boom, and what was on the horizon. We managed to get through this all even though I got worried I’d have to tackle the waitress to get any attention.

Having finished her Phd Rebecca told me she was ready to look forward to a new project. Off handedly she told me that she was thinking of writing a book. Before I could follow that up, she also mentioned that one another project involved doing a documentary following the lives of three Labour Party women as they ran for election in the next election. Rebecca has been involved in politics as long as I can remember. We sat in the café and talked about where our experiences overlapped.

Specifically, what was on my mind was the early mass ‘No War’ demonstrations of 2003. I had not been in Australia for the huge demonstrations that took place, in which a reported 250 thousand people choked the heart of my birthplace. I had participated in the ones in the Netherlands. Almost as a follow on to these rallies I briefly joined a group calling themselves ‘American Voices Abroad’, which sprang up at a grass roots level carrying forward the momentum of the demonstrations. To me, and to many others, the global demonstrations were incredible – to date they are the largest demonstrations ever held in the world. In the US they were the largest demonstrations since the Vietnam war. This is significant in that people claim that Generation X – which is now hovering around the 25 to 35 year old range - is essentially an apathetic generation. Although one of the strongest things about the rallies was the multi generational participation, the dichotomy between the reality of the mass protests and the supposed lethargy of people my age is quite marked.

The protest of Feb 15 and March 22 in 2003 were significant events. In terms of ideas, the confluence of so many people allowed for the cross pollination of political agendas. Terms like ‘neo-liberal’, and ‘economic imperialism’ cross seminated with ideas as basic as war is wrong. Suddenly you had a multitude of grassroots agendas coming together to march under the ‘no war’ banners. A huge gathering presented people with a sense of solidarity, which was only reinforced when we went home, and watched the news coming in from around the world showing the huge demonstrations in major capital cities. The sense of empowerment was real.

Since that day, activist bodies like Greenpeace have asked themselves how to harness that energy, and that sense of mass peaceful action. When I talked to Rebecca about it, she said that the Labour Party had no idea how to connect to that body that took to the streets, and they weren’t asking themselves how to.

A major party like the Labour party in Australia doesn’t have to harness the power of a grass roots uprising to create social change. Rebecca explained to me that the labour party has a long history, with a detailed public policy, with which the party members are familiar. As we talked I learned that the inter party political positions (left center and right) of party members is actually based on their interpretation of that policy; what policies they’d give up and what policies they’d consider fundamental to labour operations. Rebecca explained to me that no party could ever represent the true wishes of 20 million people, so government becomes a form of compromise.

What we have to do, said Rebecca, is justify to the people why we sacrificed one position in order to push another position through. That is the art of governing.

In contrast, I realized that Greenpeace is outside the structure of this form of governing, and acts as a pressure group upon the political framework Greenpeace doesn’t do solutions work; it acts as a catalyst for social change. The thing that is fundamental to what Greenpeace is all about, is non violent direct action. We use the media to leverage our actions to gather public attention – this is the pressure that we bring to bear on parties such as the Labour party.

Yet we share a common wish to harness the public to achieve social change. It occurs to me that neither of us have any idea how to really get a grip on what happened in early 2003.

Sat, 30 Aug 2003 13:01:17 GMT

This summer, Dave Hill got a refreshing break from the run-of-the-mill spam that routinely invades his e-mail inbox. Instead of hawking mortgages, penis-enlargement pills or weight-loss products, a message arrived that seemed straight out of a science-fiction novel.

The anonymous e-mail offered $5,000 to any vendor capable of promptly delivering a collection of far-fetched gadgets for conducting time travel. Among the mysterious devices sought by the message's author were an "Acme 5X24 series time transducing capacitor with built-in temporal displacement" and an "AMD Dimensional Warp Generator module containing the GRC79 induction motor."

More >

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 14:47:20 GMT

Here's a fantastic article from Brian Eno about US propaganda, population control and the neo con regime.

"What occurs to me in reading their book is that the new American approach to social control is so much more sophisticated and pervasive that it really deserves a new name. It isn't just propaganda any more, it's 'prop-agenda '. It's not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about. When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. "

Thu, 14 Aug 2003 16:39:41 GMT

Emerging website strategies favor immediate engagement

During the dot.com boom, when bright young things were scrambling to grab the six figure pay packets, the dream of those who stayed working with the web to push a social agenda lay with the idea of the promise of a connected world. The potential of mass human networks, controlled by at the grassroots seemed to promise freedom from the existing media monopoly. As the knowledge based society flowers in the new millennium, progressive civil society activist groups have dismissed a sense of disillusionment with new media. We know that some things do work, and that the medium can deliver the message.

Collectively, we're trying to use the web to connect to people - to engage people, to activate people, to change people in order to change the world. We're actively building communities and seeking to find out exactly how to harness their potential. This is radically changing how we use the web.

Over 30 years, Greenpeace has a history of public involvement with its campaigns. What started as a grassroots organization developed into a well known spearhead of the environmental movement. Greenpeace's public involvement occurs within the framework of a diversity of campaign strategies that can see our targets include not only the public, but specific groups such as politicians, commercial giants, unions, schools and institutions.

For the new generations that accept incredibly rapid development, it would almost seem natural that of course we'd want to involve the public - to motivate them, to interact with them. I mean this is the age of public relations where company CEO's take ‘customer relationship management' more seriously than they take ‘wife at home relationship management'. But it's not necessarily the easiest thing for a non profit to do. Why? Business is based on and measured by the bottom line: profit. Non profits are not fundraising agencies - they are activist entities. Customer relationship management is the lynchpin of a fundraising approach, and when it comes down to whether a non profit will spend money on achieving campaign goals or fulfilling fundraising strategies, most non profits would put that money into achieving concrete goals. It all boils down to that although we desperately need to (and WANT to) work with the public to achieve change, public interaction is not inherently an easy thing for a non profit to do.

If you think about what an activist organization is, and how it works, you'd be amazed at what is accomplished by a small group of committed people. When you think about the millions strong anti war protests that took place all over the world recently, you can see that the public is not stupid, and nor is it as complacent as some might wish. We need to harness that energy to make lasting worldwide change.

So it's been a hard step to take; to move away from writing 12 pages in beautiful copy, with gorgeous pictures, about our ‘save the oceans' campaign, and shift towards a strategy based on making the public do something straight away. We're doing it. All the non profits are.

The new phase is about engagement and participation. What that means depends on which non profit you care to look at.

http://www.weblobbying.com/ is a powerful example of how email can effectively act as a lobbying tool. You'll note the absence of pretty pictures and the concentration on clean information architecture. This is the first page of their site - they resisted the urge to brand more heavily, in favor of allowing more opportunity for activism.

http://www.workingforchange.com/activism/index.cfm is a site that also displays a minimal amount of the typical ‘pretty pages' features. Fascinatingly they are extending the reach of the message through supporting a community based radio, whose talks are made available online. Their front pages are a mixture of news and calls to interact.

http://www.moveon.org One of the most successful activist sites on the web, MoveOn profiles calls to action on its front page. News takes a secondary relation in the third column. They can send faxes, stream real media and are currently managing a list of 20 000 supporters.

http://www.amnesty.org Amnesty, at 40 years old, is one of the oldest and most well known non profit organizations in the world. Their front page reflects their development strategy - you can see that haven't yet entirely discarded the legacy of previous phases. They still list reports, press releases and their campaigns on the front page. In line with the general direction for non profits, all of their top articles link to strategies designed to engage and motivate the public.

Greenpeace International has taken a two headed approach. We maintain almost a whole website http://act.greenpeace.org/ devoted to what we call cyberactivism, wherein people can send ecards, talk about issues in the forums, join issue groups… actually you should check it out. You can even join a cyber flotilla. The main page at http://www.greenpeace.org/international_en/ talks about more news and features related work, harkening back to the previous phases of development that concentrated on dynamic news.

These are just a few of the activism sites out there that are at the frontiers of non profit web development. The non profits moving towards public engagement, relationship management and online activism.

All the views expressed herein are strictly personal. I have worked for five years as a staff member of Greenpeace, although I am no long employed in a full time capacity.

Thu, 14 Aug 2003 13:21:37 GMT

Allah akbar!. We have arrived in beautiful Baghdad, and are settling in. I apologize to you a... [Tyler J. Wagner]

Thu, 14 Aug 2003 13:20:53 GMT

May I have a penis please?. I’m back in Manaus now after three weeks on a river boat in the forest. We spent about a week... [If you tolerate this... - the Greenpeace weblog]

Thu, 14 Aug 2003 13:18:06 GMT

A study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in "fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity".

Doesn't that just warm the cockles of your heart?