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On the DK rec lists is Sunday 1/20 in NYC, Yas/Ono, a Very Special Meetup!!
Good for them! Even though I’ve been banned from there, and didn’t appreciate the hostility and nastiness of some of them, even kossacks have rights, and those rights include the right to associate freely. Considering the utter weakness of the public versus plutocratic interests, I’d like to see citizens of diverse political stripes become friendlier, more cooperative, and more public. It seems inevitable that cooperative political action will result from politically minded people socializing in a more compelling way than is possible online. Political blogs appear to be very self-limiting, ito activism, and there is little social capital acquired by even the most prolific posters.
It’s sort of a no-brainer that online political blogs, of any appreciable size, would facilitate local meetups, but this seems to be the exception, rather than the rule.
I would suggest that the kossack meetups also establish a parallel presence via meetup.com. If they’re looking to recruit aggressively, they can also create a facebook page, and hand out and post flyers giving their facebook name/address.
The tech meetups that I’ve attended, via meetup.com, also suggest a model that mixes business with pleasure. Basically, you just get a speaker to give a 20 minute talk about some interesting topic. By ‘business’, I don’t mean the drearier, but necessary planning and maintenance stuff. Think ‘Ted Talks’, i.e., some structured activity that educates. The drearier, but necessary planning stuff should be done by people more committed, and willing, to do drudge work. In the real world, you won’t be able to build a mass movement with an egalitarian distribution of drudgery. :-)
You probably can’t pull this off (i.e., meetings with an educational speaker) without a little bit of a budget, but I did attend a smallish tech meetup (about 20 people) in a bar in Newark. (The budget would be for a meeting room.)
In Newark, Audible.com is now sponsoring a lot of the tech meetups, and they provide a very nice room in their corporate building, along with pretty decent eats (as well as beer, if you’re into that, which I’m not.)
Of course, similar considerations apply to other online communities, like FDL; and also across the political spectrum, like Ron Paulians and Tea Parties.
We also need a common space, for Kossacks + FDL’ers + Greens + Anarchists + Tea Parties, as was ‘pioneered’ by Occupy. This was one of the most positive aspects of it, but when I was in Manhattan last week, Zuccotti Park was basically empty. Not one sign, not one hippy, not even a covert government agent or homeless dude! How sad is that?
In light of where we were, Occupy-wise, less than 2 years ago, the dailykos shindigs are more like baby steps. Nevertheless, I’ll take even little bits of good news, happily. Todays little bits can grow into tomorrow’s big bits, if nurtured properly.
UPDATE: Please see my comments, below, re 350.org’s localization and organization features. Considering what else is out there (that I know about), it’s rather impressive. OK, I brainstormed similar stuff years ago, but didn’t implement it. 350.org is implemented, and shows the way forward to an online activism platform.
I recently made a minor suggestion for nudging blogs in a more activist-friendly direction. In the end, though, what you want is tighter integration with whole activist platforms (like local.350.org) that span online communities. By doing such integrations, the blog platform will become an activist platform, itself.
(In case anybody is wondering, I haven’t changed my mind about 350.org being a veal pen organization, nor about their embrace of what is essentially a scientistic myth. However, I am giving credit, where credit is due. They definitely deserve credit wrt local.350.org, considered as an activist platform, regardless of what it is that they are espousing. Likewise, I have credited the Tea Parties electoral efforts, without embracing all of their agenda, either.)
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I posted on Daily Kos for five years, and attended Yearly Kos in 2007. The best part of belonging to it was meeting other “Kossacks,” whom I found to be a talented and fascinating group of people. The great majority of them weren’t political operatives on the make (though I ran into plenty of those at Yearly Kos) but ordinary citizens who thought they could make a difference by working within the system at the local level.
What spoiled dKos for me was that it became a de facto communications and fund-raising arm of the Democratic establishment–an ironic turn of events for a site that was created to fight the establishment. The site owner and front-pagers ruled dKos with an increasingly heavy hand, showing less and less tolerance for criticism of people with a (D) after their name.
Although there was a single dailykos group back in 2005, it looks like all the rest are from no earlier than 2011. From NEW DAY * – How to Form a Daily Kos Group + What is the Closest Major City to Your Home?
I did a quick read of this page, and saw that there’s some special facility for soliticing new members. Unless I missed it, though, there’s no easy way to solicit new members on a bulk basis, or automatically.
On a bulk basis:
You’d have to add a slot in your database for, say, zip code info (which will get you in the right neighborhood). Then, you have your programmer write some code which redirects people to a page where they are strongly encouraged to enter their zip code. A non-answer answer (“not interested, thanks”) response is allowed.
After a month or two, a regionally specific email goes out, with invitations.
You can have your programmer sniff out IP’s, to get the user’s IP service router geolocatiion info. This could be way off, but is generally close, more than otherwise.
The IP geolocation info gets stored into the database, and every month or so, an invitation email is sent out on the basis of this information.
Finally, another quote:
(emphasis mine)
Since I’m on the subject of blog communities and activism, I’ll also point out that 350.org has very nice localization features (much more impressive than dailykos), which allows local groups to make their own web pages regarding each event which that group is having. (Thus, we can see that a lot of local groups are using the 350.org website to fight fracking, even if the non-local aspect of 350.org isn’t doing much about it.) These web pages allow for event invitations to be accepted, have friendly URL’s, have facebook and twitter integration, etc.
Here is an example of a local event page: http://local.350.org/events/150/
From What is 350 Local?
THIS level of activist and organization friendly functionality is what, IMO, blogs should have had years ago.
Looks like I’m going to have to change the title of this diary….
I got banned from the Kos too. We ought to form a club… It is really interesting to see how Stalinist these supposedly milktoast, establishment Democrats can get. They are by far the nastiest bunch I have ever encountered on the Internet, aggressive, insulting, vindictive, petty. I was amazed. Here at FDL, with few exceptions, we are really quite civilized, even when we disagree with each other. I wonder why the Kos attracts such drek.
Honestly, I think it’s important not to generalize from even large numbers of nasty people. Some people are paid to bully others, I’m sure. (Read a recent confession of such a paid manipulator, recently, though I’m not sure if the confession is made up, or not.)
Also, people who are essentially hostile, and also cowardly, will gravitate to a relatively anonymous platform, where they have zero chance of getting punched in the face. :-)
One of the advantages of local meetups is that the normal level of inhibitions of aggressions are in place. And, if it turns out that your dailykos meetup has more establishment Democrats than you care to deal with, that just means you need to find – or create – a different type of meetup.
We need both more tailored meetup/networking, as well as more ‘un-tailored’ meetup/networking (such as Occupy was providing.)
I can’t believe that the average establishment Democrat are such assholes as I have encountered at Kos. I have never seen anything like it anywhere.
With DKOS, my rule is to read but not post, because I’m not eager to be nominated as “Concern Troll of the Day.” Also, there were often statements during the years I read DKOS most that the purpose of the group was to elect Democrats, and not to support third parties — so, in sense, my participation would have been a kind of going against the announced terms of use.
There have been some good posts there, and some ironic comments actually pointing to the right thing to do. For example, after the assassination of Osama bin Laden: “If you’re that upset, why not call for Obama’s impeachment!” Good idea! I saw some threads after one of the more notorious “Kill List” defenses by some administration official where there were lots of expressions of eloquent outrage, mixed with some comments basically saying, “Yes, but the bottom line is that the Republicans will benefit from any dissension.” A bit like Dean Rusk’s remark during one of the Vietnam hearings to an antiwar interrogator, maybe Senator Wayne Morse (or was it William Fulbright?): “Hanoi will be mighty glad to hear that, Senator.”
What did you do to get banned? I know that Markos has declared conspiracy theories and advocating a third party are grounds for banishment. There are probably others.
By the way, Stalinism is a good description of the dKos bullies, who make up a small but very powerful subset of the community.