I’m not one of those guys who is totally supportive of a cause until its activists block my commute with their protest, although that did happen yesterday. On my way to discuss strategy with a non-profit client, I crossed paths with a bunch of people getting arrested in front of San Francisco City Hall. Despite their witty t-shirts, the scene struck me as especially tragic. Both Mayor Gavin Newsom and the Superior Court of San Francisco (and virtually the whole city of SF) have been solidly against Prop 8 at every opportunity. Perhaps someone involved can explain the action logic to me, since I’m sincerely interested, but the scene smacked to me as a lack of either critical thinking (who are the decision-makers and how will they be influenced?) or leadership (is anyone leveraging the predictable groundswell toward an organized campaign?).

Here are three ideas I think would’ve been more effective.

No one goes home single

If you’ve already decided that nothing short of being arrested will do, make it mean something more than just “we’re willing to get arrested for our beliefs.” That’s wonderful—and absolutely necessary to underscore the vitality of this fight—but stops just short of authentic civil disobedience. Instead of having the lockdown party at SF City Hall, move it to Sacramento. Attach demands to the lockdown, like, “We’re not leaving without someone marrying us.”

Borrowing a historical (and therefore cliché) example: Rosa didn’t block traffic, she refused to give up her seat. Her action forced people to choose between a bad law and human decency. The analog here would be to swarm the Clerk’s office and demand equal treatment. Don’t get out of line, don’t take a number, don’t move until they agree to marry you. Then, if they forcibly remove you, you’ll be arrested for doing the exact same thing as straight couples in the same line, not the illegal-for-everyone sitting in an intersection.

Fake it ’til you make it

The Supreme Court ruling provides a strange and exploitable loophole. If you were a same-sex couple married during the period where same-sex marriage was legal, your marriage still stands. There’s an estimated 18 thousand couples who fall into that category. Who’s to say you’re not one of them? Since there’s no way to tell without demanding documentation (and being a dick) that you and your honey aren’t legally married but merely everything-but-legally married… Just be married!

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that the principle of the thing matters and it’s incredibly hurtful to know that the state is—let’s not mince words here—against you. The long-term goal of this strategy would be to leverage the logistical nightmare of the state having to constantly prove that every marriage was or wasn’t within a certain window, making enforcement of Prop 8 impossible. Considering that everyone in the executive branch from the Mayor to the Governor to the President is against Prop 8, it’s unlikely that Federal Marshals will bust down anyone’s door and make you return those ramekins you registered for.

Appropriate Valentine’s Day

This is the “Nuclear Option” for same-sex marriage.

The historical Saint Valentine was a Roman priest martyred for marrying Christians during the reign of Claudius Gothicus, who had deemed it illegal to do so. He was discovered, imprisoned, and ultimately beheaded because he defied the state and brought couples together out of love. Our modern Valentine’s Day celebrates this concept of romantic love, but conveniently forgets the defiance aspect of the tale. It’s time to bring it back.

Forget the rainbow. The new iconography of same-sex marriage should be the pretty pink heart, Cupid and his bow-and-arrow, smooching lovebirds, and every symbol, idiom, or typeface that advertising guys now employ to sell greeting cards reinforcing hetero-normative relationships under the guise of showing how much you love someone. Nice idea, it’s ours now.

I’m mad, like everyone else. Obviously, I fully acknowledge that the decision hasn’t hit me in the same visceral way as it’s hit others, but I’m hardly an innocent bystander. While my fianceé and I don’t bring them up because we don’t want to politicize our relationship, let’s just say that we’ve made non-trivial decisions based on the injustice we see around us. Prop 8 was a defeat for us, just like the rest of humanity.

So let’s beat this.

I’ve attended South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) for several years but this year was special since it was my first (last?) as a speaker. My session was intended to be about non-profits using their website to accomplish their mission, but we never seemed to make it there. Since SXSW decided to format it as a discussion, I was relying on content to come from the audience members—who were unfortunately relying on me. The idea of letting people down is not something I’m either terribly familiar or terribly comfortable with, so now I’m sharing what I would’ve said if my session had been just me with a microphone (two turntables optional).

Edge of the Web

Every new medium emerges from the husk of the old, inheriting a number of soon-to-be anachronistic metaphors. The early web brought with it the book’s concept of pages, whose final vestiges as a mode of organizing content have been all but erased by the Web-as-Platform concept. The web as a place where you read is no longer true, if it ever was. The web is where you do.

Should the last point not be self-evident, go now and count how many of your bookmarks are about reading vs buying, selling, searching, inspiring, or communicating. I’ll wait.

One thing we increasingly do on the web is self-organize. On every social network from Facebook to Flickr, we form groups. Most of the time, these groups are purely recreational alliances of common interest. Every once in a while, they are political. Consider some recent examples:

1. The Facebook Bill of Rights & Responsibilities group that achieved greater democracy in the site’s management
2. Concerned citizens flocking to support a designer whose work was stolen by a stock art company
3. Last weekend’s #AmazonFail uprising that investigated why gay, lesbian, and feminist books vanished overnight from best-seller lists

These three particular victories are interesting because they all have two things in common. First, none of their efforts are centered around or guided by an outside organization, non-profit or otherwise. Second, they were all—what’s a nice way of saying this?—wrong.

1. Facebook’s back-pedal traded a vital discussion (Do I “own” my comments on your Wall? Should I have access to them even if you delete your profile?) for Democracy Theatre.
2. The designer, it turns out, may have been plagiarizing others’ work himself.
3. Even Clay Shirky, “Here Comes Everybody” author and post-organizationalist, admits that #AmazonFail was about misguided emotion and not justice.

The lesson that I take from this ad hoc activism is that the general population is neither apathetic nor disorganized. The multitude is brimming with passion about even “niche” issues like intellectual property law or transgender rights (which have received far less media coverage than global warming) and have the means to come together to make demands of top decision-makers. But, given their respective failures, these campaigns also illuminate the need for non-profits to assume a new role in online activism: providing a strategic avenue for collective action.

No more educate-motivate one-two punch? Their most primary roles wrested from them, where does this leave non-profits websites that raise awareness and compel action (two things they no longer need) only to then bill you for it with a donation request?

Your mission, online

It seems appropriate to confess at this point that I feel blessed to work with non-profits on exactly these issues. This post is written not out of frustration with them but a desire to vastly improve their lot.

If a committed and easily mobilized online audience seems like a burden, it’s clearly because we’re looking at the situation incorrectly.

It might be as simple as structure. If your website is handled by Communications, it’s going to be a place to read and not a place to do. If it’s handled by Development, donor conversion is probably your #1 metric. Ben Rattray, founder of Change.org, once noted there was a trough of online stagnancy in middle-sized non-profits. The larger have independent web teams, the smaller has a “web team” who also happens to be the Executive Director. At this top level, directly in service to your mission, is precisely where a tool so powerful as “the Internet” belongs.

Is it as simple as looking at your mission and saying, “How can we use the Internet to achieve this?” Almost, but before you go running off to reinvent your whole website, my experience has found two crucial principles that should guide you: sincerity and granularity.

Consider the top 3 actions on WeCanSolveIt.org: sign a petition, tell friends, donate.

Robin Beck, an online organizer and co-worker emeritus of mine (uncharacteristically optimistic here), claims that we’re so used to dodging the Internet’s scams and spams that to really provoke online activism requires a higher order of sincerity. Non-profits are offering big boxes of “make the world a better place” or at least “feel good about yourself”. If we take the lid off and discover instead a “fundraising ploy” or “list-building exercise”, we’re not going to buy another box.

On its most basic level, this means that the action you’re requesting has to directly solve the problem you say it will. Adam Green of MoveOn and Change Congress publicly dropped some science on a recent email action alert he received in a blog post entitled, “Profiles in Bad Online Organizing, Part I”.

I’m not saying the DSCC has no role to play in getting Coleman to step down. I’m just saying they should play an honest and effective role.

But beyond that, it means asking for something that you couldn’t do without your supporters. You have a task that seems impossible, but you’ve figured out how to break down into smaller pieces so—if everyone does their part—it’s a snap. Which brings us to granularity…

A full academic discussion of granularity is available in “Wealth of Networks” if you can wade through it.

The root of granularity is “grain” and sand provides a great metaphor for understanding it. A sand castle is made of very small granular contributions. A single grain or a heaping bucket all contribute to the achievement of building the sand castle. Donations are granular, as supporters can give any amount they choose. Signing a petition is not, as you can only sign it once—lacking the heaping bucket. A video contest is also not, as it takes a high initial investment—lacking the single grain.

Online, this translates into the scope of transactions that your website is capable of handling. Wikis are notoriously successful at granularity. I could write an entire article on “Wookiees” or, if some reason I lacked the time or motivation to do so, I could merely correct someone else’s spelling of “Wookie”. This range of involvement allows for increased participation (and increased accuracy, but that’s a different article).

Enough theory. Let’s see these in action.

A case study

In my final year as Senior Webmaster for Rainforest Action Network, we pulled off an online campaign using exactly these principles. The organization’s mission is:

Rainforest Action Network campaigns for the forests, their inhabitants and the natural systems that sustain life by transforming the global marketplace through education, grassroots organizing, and non-violent direct action.

The impossible goal was to catalog enough products that contained palm oil or its derivatives to map the supply chain back to the primary forces of deforestation in tropical rainforests. The team consisted of a palm oil campaigner (Brihannala Morgan), an online organizer (Robin Beck, see above), a web designer/developer (me), and three awesome interns.

Step 1 was to ask supporters to go to their local supermarket and find products that contained palm oil, palmitate, etc. For this step, the team created an instructive yet entertaining video on YouTube. We further incentivized the mission by awarding the top “Supermarket Sleuths”.

Step 2 was to ask our online activists to enter the UPC numbers (the form is down now) of products they found. For this we connected to a third-party database to help verify that products were real. Since activists could also mark certain products as not containing palm oil, it was mostly self-regulating.

Step 3 was to ask those same online activists (I use the term “online” loosely here, since they’ve spent most of their time in grocery stores) to return, warning stickers in hand, to mark those products containing palm oil. RAN headquarters followed this up with a letter to companies whose products were getting stickered.

Was it sincere and granular? Cataloging every product that contains palm oil was certainly not something that three staff and three interns, all located in San Francisco, could pull off. It was also sincere in its intention to find the major players in rainforest destruction. The project was granular, too. An individual could find, submit, and/or sticker just one product and still add value or could spend a whole weekend (and we had activists that submitted hundreds). If you just wanted to correct false positives, that was also an option.

Was it successful? Wildly. On the first day of Step 3, the phones were ringing off the hook with companies whose products contained palm oil. A few days and they were disclosing their supply chains. A few weeks and the major producers were calling to schedule meetings.

I don’t want to downplay the amount of energy that the team dedicated to this project but, in absolute terms, it was a small investment. Everything from the online form to the backend database could’ve received a lot more attention—although the stickers were sweet—but they still managed to do the job with only a few weeks of staff time and a few hundred dollars (mostly the stickers). Not bad ROI for getting a meeting with a major player in the palm oil business.

Next steps for your organization

If you’ve read this far and want to shift your website to a mission-driven strategy, here are your next steps:

1. Put together a team. Find folks with a past history of pushing the technology envelope (anyone who secretly signed you up for Twitter or has been caught on Yahoo Pipes will suffice). Balance these with folks who have a handle on the strategic goals of the organization. Bonus points if these are the same folks. Three is ideal.
2. Give the team some space. If they’re successful, these people are about to pull off a task that your organization currently deems impossible. Give them some time to figure out how. Tell them not to come into the office for a week and instead generate 100 ways to accomplish your organization’s mission online. The first few dozen ideas will be boring, but then things will pick up.
3. Ground it in reality. Wow, the team came up with seriously wacky stuff, some of it ignoring current realities. Cut anything that you can’t start small and then slowly build up, along with ideas that aren’t both sincere and granular. From the remaining list, ask the team which idea they’re most excited about and do it first.
4. Provide success indicators and time limits. Measure the impact. At what point will the team get more resources and at what point will you pull the plug or say, “That didn’t work, try something else?” Make the measurements matter to the mission.
5. Start small. Don’t try to do everything out of the gate. Do the most important thing. Then the next. Then the next. All the while, keep an eye on those indicators.
6. Celebrate. It can get lonely on the edge. If you’re really doing something innovative, make sure you take the time to pat yourself on the back. Valuing your team’s motivation, rain or shine, is going to be the key for long-term success. Because…
7. Repeat. The first project may catch or it may not. Even if it does, repeat this process. Figure out how often you can afford to take a chance on something new (every quarter? twice a year? annually?) and re-assemble your team when it’s time.

If this seems exciting but a little bit daunting, then we should talk. Diligent was started with organizations exactly like yours in mind and with a mission “to harness the dynamic and democratic power of the Internet for social change.”

That’s mine, what’s yours?

Yesterday’s Yes Men antics re-awakened conversations around my office about doing more microphone stealing and “identity correction“. We’re no strangers to the method (at the time of this post, a search for “yesmen oil” on YouTube shows a past action as the second link) but my teeth still clench when I hear Aikido Activism misused. Hint: it doesn’t mean “use their strength against them”.

The phrase Aikido Activism, as far as I can tell, originates from an essay of the same name by Reed Burkhart, though the idea has been floating around for a while now (and even used by the bad guys). He describes it as:

a new form of activism combining corporate reform, financial markets strategies, entrepreneurship, et al.

In short, leveraging the power that corporations wield in today’s society by turning bad companies into good ones. That’s pretty close to the mission statement of my place of employment, but a greater understanding of aikido itself might illuminate exactly how such a thing is done.

I was part of a dojo for just over a year, reaching the rank of 5th kyu—which sounds impressive until you realize that a guy off the street starts at 6th kyu. Like the most effective activism, aikido is entirely non-violent. The goal is to neutralize an attack while having compassion for the attacker. It’s perhaps better described via explanation of the first three techniques I was taught and what I would consider their Aikido Activism analogs.

Iriminage. Meaning “turning throw”, iriminage is also called the 20 Year Technique (i.e., it takes two decades to learn it). The first step is to get out of the way of the attack. If you stand still, you get hit and violence wins. Get out of the way and your attacker may follow. If so, you have a chance to step behind. In order to press the attack, the attacker must turn to face you. You turn in place and quickly raise your center of gravity and your arm with it. The attacker, trying to avoid getting hit but also in motion, bends backward. If you step through the attacker completely loses balance and falls over.

Ikkyo. I think technically this means “first lesson” but, for reasons already mentioned, it’s best to get iriminage in the oven before moving on. The first step is to get out of the way of the attack—honestly, this is the first step in every aikido technique but the first urge in so many people is to go on the offensive and make it a contest of strength. Don’t do that. With ikkyo, you let the attack happen but not connect. Then you grab the attack as it zooms past, preferably by the wrist. Since the attack was trying to hit you, there’s power behind it (this is probably where the “use their strength against them” myth comes from). As you turn, put your other hand on the attacker’s shoulder and you create an axis around their hips that they will rotate on, in order to stay attached to their fist. Suddenly, you’ve got them pinned. It can surprise you the first time you get it right.

Kokyudosa. We would end all of our training sessions with kokyudosa. You sit on your knees, facing your partner. You lay your hands on your knees, palms up, and your partner grabs your wrists. You have to throw them from this position. Beginners twist and turn and writhe, teachers watching and probably trying not to laugh. Eventually you discover that if you settle into your own weight and project your hands beyond your partner—trying to grab a ball 100 yards behind them—the dynamic shifts instantly and they go flying. Like magic.

Doing these techniques at a protest, on riot cops, would land you in jail fast. Even though they’re “non-violent”, police officers like to be in charge and pinning them wounds egos if not bodies. Instead, consider them metaphorically.

Iriminage is about finding the moment where the cycle of destruction depends on you, and seizing the opportunity to end it. A boycott, for instance, is consumers realizing that corporations require people to buy their stuff in order to exist. For publicly traded companies, shareholder activism is a similar tactic. Once the corporation is listening, you can raise the expectations of social responsibility like you would your arm, to the point where they will either have to meet them or fall over backwards.

Ikkyo is about pitting the attacker’s desire for destruction against their desire for self-preservation. Sending the two in different directions means they can’t have both and they will almost always choose the latter. You can see this when activists raise the reputational risk around a project without explicitly targeting a corporation. Since the public is quick to damn corporate greed in the abstract but loath to criticize specific ones, this has the effect of giving corporations a choice of continuing an irresponsible behavior or keeping their name clean.

Kokyodosa is about projection. When we, as activists, are focused on the fight and not the future we wriggle and squirm and come up empty. When we formulate a vision for the world we want ten, twenty-five, or fifty years from now we can act with calm and confidence in the moment, which in turn gives us strength beyond our own expectations.

Of course, these are just simple examples and the Yes Men are black belts. They employ all sorts of advanced aikido techniques, like leading (gaining audiences’ trust before springing the trap) and stealing balance (turning normally stolid executives flustered and defensive). Since I’ve recently started to get calls at my office for someone who is not me, inviting me to have dinner with President Bush and serve on Business Advisory Councils, I think I need to enroll at their dojo and finally make it to 4th kyu.

Ended up as as pretty long post. Credit to Oscar Ratti for the art from Aikido and the Dynamic Sphere, the best illustrations of aikido in motion I’ve ever seen.