Well Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin don’t get the last laugh. It turns out that the community organizer could kick the 9/11 hero’s ass and take down a helicopter-armed rogue moose-hunter for good measure. When Rudy and Palin scoffed at Obama’s background as a community organizer, I instinctively bristled.
Tuesday night showed what community organizing can do. Not only did Obama take the electoral college in a landslide, but the 50-state strategy made red states like North Carolina blue while turning many others purple. He did it with huge turnout, a dominant position among emerging voter blocks like youth and ethnic voters and with techniques learned from the trenches in Chicago.
Only a community organizer could pull this off.
The stories from the field about the Obama vs McCain ground game show the difference. Obama’s field offices were reported full and buzzing with volunteers from all over the country. McCain’s campaign offices were mostly empty and dull, or closed.
Then there’s the Obama campaign’s web strategy, which will go down in history as the first mass scale and most effective use of the social web for political or any other form of organization. But it’s just the beginning, and there is so much yet to be written!
Change.gov shows that Obama fully intends to take his massive email and sms lists, the lessons learned from the campaign and his community organizing instincts together with a new call and program around National Service to really transform the meaning of politics, community and country. The clues are there, and I just can’t help but stare in awe and amazement.
For those of us who dreamed of the potential of marrying bottom-up social movements with a new kind of leadership style, it’s hard to process that our moment may really truly be now. All of a sudden, the work of community organizing just got a new and rather Presidential luster. For those of us who work in the field where social web and real-world issues meet, it’s going to be a very busy time indeed.
MP Charlie Angus (NDP, Timmins-James Bay), a former punk rocker, has just introduced network neutrality legislation to Canada’s House of Commons, and he’s putting all the P2P throttlers in Canada on notice. This coincides with the launch of SaveOurNet.ca to rally citizens to the cause of open access Internet.
For those of you who weren’t able to attend Mesh 2008, you missed another excellent keynote by Michael Geist, this one on Digital Advocacy. Here are the slides synced with audio for your enjoyment.
Today the Washington Post reports on a study by medical sociologist Nicholas A. Christakis and political scientist James H. Fowler with the headline “Social Networks’ Sway May Be Underestimated“. Their work is pointing to the strong impact of social networks in behaviour – discovering that entire networks of smokers appear to have quit virtually simultaneously.
Now this shouldn’t really be a surprise to those who have been paying attention to social network analysis, tipping points and the new behaviours enabled by the social web.
What is a surprise is that the nonprofit/charitable sector has been fairly late to the social web party, while corporate brands trip over themselves to build brand communities, develop social media strategies and deploy viral campaigns as budgets increasingly shift from broadcast to digital.
When it comes to helping to shift societal behaviours to more sustainable and humane patterns, the tools, practices and methodologies of social media and social change were made for each other.
If you (or your clients) are involved in social change and looking for an intensive, practical and productive training into these technologies and practices, Social Tech Training being held June 22-24th in Toronto could be just the thing. I sit on the advisory board for the event.
A co-production of Web of Change and MaRS, this is an amazing opportunity to learn from some of the global leaders in this space. Check out the amazing faculty. The agenda is pretty rich and allows for plenty of opportunities to make the program fit individual needs.
As my own work enters a new and exciting phase, I find myself considering three intersecting and co-evolving forces: the Obama Moment, the New Great Transformation and the Social Web. I see signals in these forces of a new resilience just when we most need it.
The convergence of these forces in the context of tremendous global economic, environmental and political uncertainty signals an opportunity for renewal by change-makers, social innovators and social entrepreneurs for the benefit of us all. The complexity of the world requires better solutions, and we know from the open innovation literature that the ideas we need today do not live within a single organization.
Is this a truly transformative moment at a critical point in human history? Is a new social, economic, environmental and cultural resilience possible, or will status quo forces reassert themselves?
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