I am going to talk about the overall vision driving essembly: empowering people to be heard and change their community, nation or world, with particular focus on one principle that drives the design of the site, grassroots organizing.The idea for essembly came out of my experience with grassroots organizing. Organizing is most basically the process of getting people who have a common goal together to affect change. When I first saw online social networking in the summer of 2003, while working on the presidential primaries, it hit me that the same principles that drove social networking online were fundamental to organizing on the ground. In designing essembly we have not tried to reinvent the wheel, but rather use the internet to make the traditional methods of organizing more efficient are more readily available to anyone.

The most fundamental tool of grassroots organizing is the house meeting. The first step is for a group of people with a common concern, or perhaps simply a common community, to get together at one of their homes and discuss their concerns. Once concerns and goals are identified, and leaders, or organizers, chosen for the group, the next goal is to recruit other potential supporters. This is done by tapping into the social networks of the existing supporters, by asking them to each have their own house meeting, inviting over people in their social network likely to be interested. The organizer attempts to lead discussion among the people at the meeting, and get them to contribute to and endorse the goals of the newly forming movement. He then trys to get some of the people at the house meeting to have their own meeting, and so on. The spreading of the movement if about using social networks to build a strong community united around a goal. The third step is for the newly formed group to take action.

Many of the most powerful examples of regular individuals having a powerful impact came from grassroots organizing and house meetings. Cesar Chavez organized one of the most powerless groups in America, largely latino farmworkers, and managed to secure union contracts for them. He did this by talking to and inspiring groups of farm workers gathered in shanty homes, and cultivating leaders from among the farm workers to organize their social networks. The modern Christian Conservative movement has also been built on house meetings. Parents all over the nation who were enraged by inappropriate textbooks and sex education managed to gain control of school boards and assure their values were represented in their community schools. Whatever the specific ideology or example, the democratic process has been at its most potent when individuals use the power of organizing to change America.
Essembly is designed to build upon the lessons of generations of organizing. Organizing requires that people connect in three basic ways:

1. Social connection
2. Geography
3. Ideology

The first two types of connection are mapped out by today’s social networks through the creation of profiles and friend connections. Resolves allow for the mapping of ideological connections for the first time in online social networking.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 5th, 2006 at 2:00 pm and is filed under General, Organizing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.