Learning to organize

Regular message board contributor Mary is looking to start a collaborative weblog focused on organizing around progressive causes. What follows is from Mary herself.

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Some of my "rough draft" thoughts on what I'd like to help start. I'd like feedback on these ideas -- they need to be whipped into shape.

One thing I noticed is that we don't have a place to just get organized. I think we are ripe for a place where we list out all the ways people can take action. I'm thinking of a blog that has a whole bunch of organizations that are in this fight with us, including people like moveon.org, Project Vote Smart, Democrats 2000, Wellstone Center, Southern Poverty Law Center, CommonWeal Institute, and all others that actively contribute to a vision of real democracy. We could list the websites for people interested in helping a candidate, so people could find out where to go to get signed up.

I'd like a blog where it is a community blog (much like the Political State Report) with lots of different contributors each adding their own voice and passion to it.

The contents of the blog would be ideas and approaches to how to best make changes to the status quo and some ways to track how we are doing. We will need to have updates from people on what works and what doesn't, and some insight on why for both. We can celebrate successes and find ways to show that real action does make a difference. I also think it can be a place where we can support each other when things look bleak.

As with any successful project, I think we need a mission statement for this blog. What should it say?

Tonight natasha helped me get started and I've requested the name "CreatingHope.net" for the domain name. I definitely need the help of some good bloggers to help get things setup or it will be slow getting off the ground. And I need volunteers to help with providing content and ideas.

MattS suggested the following the other day: What about starting up a national organization with local chapters dedicated to political education on a grassroots level? It would be kind of a national organization of book clubs, except instead of reading a book a month you learn about one political issue a month.

We should start a catalog of these ideas. And then see if we can get someone to pick up an idea and help get it started.

I also think we could provide good pointers on how to write letters to the editor and your representatives. We could provide feedback on letters or articles we're writing so we can really crisp up our arguments.

Everyday we could open up threads for "proposals", "what I'm doing", and "status", stealing the wonderful open thread concept that Kos came up with here. [ed note: I stole the concept from MyDD]

Let me know what you think. (Here's my email address if you would rather do it via email.)

Posted February 04, 2003 05:21 PM | Comments (28)