I invited Marty to answer Peter's questions. Instead he elected to forward a link to a paper he co-authored with Jillaine Smith and Allison Fine entitled, provovactively enough, Power to the Edges: Trends and Opportunities in Online Civic Engagement (Pdf). While you are at it, check out these related links:
- Marty's Greenmedia Toolshed
- Marty's blog, Networkcentric Advocacy
- PACE - Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement
- E-Volve Foundation: Network Driven Advocacy
Marty and his co-authors are questioning the hierachical, organization-centric, or philanthropist/funder-centric models of giving for democracy. Rather than single issue orgs in silos with hieararchies, treating consitituents as sources of money, and sources of votes, why not consider the network itself to be an asset for demoracy? The vibrancy of the network, its commitment, its social capital, with power dispersed throughout the network - is that not closer to democracy than funders telling us, "Here is 'The World We Want,'" when really it is the world they want: one in which they, or the hierarchy on which they sit aloft as board members, or founders, are central, pivotal, and in charge? In the networkcentric view, funders are nodes on a flat network, through which pulses money, love, passion, commitment, ferment, and brain power. We all have something to give and even the wealthiest person who has done well in business can learn humbly from the lowest of the low on these flat, fluid and nimble "wirearchies."
Those who can remember the days when Foundation Exchange was new, can maybe hear in Marty and his friends the same raw passion for engaging people from all walks of life not recipients of largess, or a mass of half-people in need of a tribune, who need to be told what world they want, but as collaborators and colleagues. Now, the difference is that through blogs, email, listserv, meetups, webex, webcasts, podcasts, etc. the multitude (or a computer literate subset) are only keystrokes away. Through the web we have many-to-many conversations out of which opinions evolve, rather than one to many broadcasts delivered from on high via soundbites, advertising, delegated authority, and propaganda. With the web, no overhead is needed. Little staff. So the hiearchies of top down command and control can be "routed around" in moments, as the net itself routes around damage. That is the ideal, though the internet commons itself is a public good, that like any other can be fenced off and enclosed back into the old proprietary silos of government, business, and philanthropy, requiring its networkcentric advocates to defend the feisty net itself, as does Electronic Fontier, as one of the few truly democratic public spaces left in our increasingly docile and well-managed corporatized world.
So, "The World We Want" is a flat network of peers. Call it democracy. Do funders want that too? Or will they harrumph? Actually the networked world is more congenial in many ways. Funders are welcome as human beings for once, not just as sources of wealth and influence. Online no one knows you are rich. Join us as a person. Out of that comes trust and friendship. Then people can network towards shared goals, their sleeves rolled up, each giving what he or she can. How else can the world be changed for the better?
no other way
Posted by: JJ Commoner | May 29, 2005 at 02:33 PM
From the bottom up and from side to side, in the presence of the wealthy and powerful, who will tell us now and again about The World We Want. As Tracy Gary said to me recently over supper: "In what other way has the world ever been changed except from the bottom up?" Of course the truth is that the science of propaganda is as advanced as genetic engineering and many a world we want has been created by marketers. Yet that false world is about to be broken asunder, a system of dry and dead lies, acknowledged to be such partifcularly by those who create them. "It is all bs, but hey it is a job." Those paid liars are going to be broken like dry sticks by an emergent world they cannot control with rich branded bs, whether corporate or governmental. JJ, these are our people, the "creatives," "the conslutants," the English major in marketing, the journalism majors. We teach them, coach them, manage them. And as insiders we know that they are empty husks, half alive. And what they have killed in themselves will have its revenge. What they have done, I have done worse and for less money. I do not judge them. But for myself - what rises cannot any longer be swallowed down.
Posted by: Phil Cubeta | May 29, 2005 at 03:17 PM
From the bottom up and from side to side, in the presence of the wealthy and powerful, who will tell us now and again about The World We Want. As Tracy Gary said to me recently over supper: "In what other way has the world ever been changed except from the bottom up?" Of course the truth is that the science of propaganda is as advanced as genetic engineering and many a world we want has been created by marketers. Yet that false world is about to be broken asunder, a system of dry and dead lies, acknowledged to be such partifcularly by those who create them. "It is all bs, but hey it is a job." Those paid liars are going to be broken like dry sticks by an emergent world they cannot control with rich branded bs, whether corporate or governmental. JJ, these are our people, the "creatives," "the conslutants," the English major in marketing, the journalism majors. We teach them, coach them, manage them. And as insiders we know that they are empty husks, half alive. And what they have killed in themselves will have its revenge. What they have done, I have done worse and for less money. I do not judge them. But for myself - what rises cannot any longer be swallowed down.
Posted by: Phil Cubeta | May 29, 2005 at 03:18 PM