| Now what?
The short answer: we don't completely know. Obviously, the community space we're building on getfisaright.com will be a big part of the FISA action over the next month. Blue America hasn't released numbers from their calling tool yet (as far as I know), so it's hard to know just how much impact we had; voice mail boxes were jammed, and 11 senators changed their position on cloture in a week, and my intuition tells me we were a big part of that. The thank/spank tool uses technology from Working for Change, and that's not a coincidence: we're shifting to a more sustainable technology base. Also check out our discussion boards, and new "it won't be 500 emails a day this time, we promise" mailing list.
There are a lot of great ideas coming up from the group about what next. One of the most interesting is an organized attempt to influence the platform. The "50 state strategy" infrastructure we set up on Facebook is perfect for organizing this while reinforcing the thank/spank campaign; couple it with events on Facebook and myBO, and MySpace outreach via bands (a strategy Ben Masel used very successfully in his 2006 Senate) ... yeah, that could work. Something I really like about this is that it'll start getting people together in person, which will deepen the bonds of the community we're starting to build.
And we clearly need to improve our messaging. danah, with her usual acuity, points out
Every "Get FISA Right" website, petition, and call to action tells me to encourage my Senators to stop FISA without telling me anything about FISA other than the immunity provision. Only Wikipedia is articulating the provisions. There are more in-depth discussions, like Tim Ferriss' interview with Daniel Ellsberg, but they are few and far between. So I find it interesting that there's a lot of mobilization without a lot of articulate information, dialogue, or debate. Even the politicians seem to be avoiding getting into the details.
True enough. And speaking of obvious areas for improvement, it would be really cool if the netroots could get a little more organized here. As I was editing this, somebody IM'ed me saying that there were three front-page pieces on FISA on dKos. Any links to us? Nope. Oh. As danah would say, le sigh.
Whenever I suggest that our goal should be something like 100,000 people involved, people are really skeptical that we can mobilize that many. I don't get it. Virtually everybody I talk to who doesn't run a telecom company opposes telecom immunity; the majority are against warrentless wiretapping. It seems to me that if we can't get a million people involved, then it's a sign that we're not explaining it clearly and organizing effectively.
So there's plenty to do. The general mood on the mailing list right after the vote was anger and despair, focusing on how dark a day it was for civil liberties. By yesterday afternoon it had started to shift -- still angry, but now much more forward-looking, with good debates about how to balance efforts on FISA with a focus on the fall election, and a growing sense of resolve: it's not over.
Looking even farther ahead, there some even more exciting possibilities. Ari Melber's article in The Nation discusses how net movements like ours can evolve over time; and there are several interesting directions. A couple stand out.
The group's high-level goals include restoring the rule of law by defeating telco immunity, and revitalizing the Fourth Amendment by stopping the government from continuing to expand its surveillance powers and warrantless wiretapping programs. Both of these are are non-partisan issues (as Deborah Pierce's excellent brief history of FISA describes, it was introduced under the Carter administration and broadened substantially under the Clinton as well as Bush administrations), and so one natural evolution for "Get FISA Right" could be in a multi-partisan direction, with membership broader than just Obama supporters, and perhaps expanding its scope to civil liberties in general. As far as I know, no civil liberties campaign as taken the social network approach as effectively as we did in our first two weeks of existence. We could add a lot here.
Then again, the group's genesis as made up of Obama supporters also highlights another implicit goal: get him elected as President. Despite my disappointment with him on FISA, I still think he's about 1000% better than McCain on this and civil liberties in general; and most (although by no means all) of the group shares this perspective. If he reaches out to us and responds to our "ask" in our latest open letter, he could well turn this onlin group of passionate supporters into a major asset in the campaign. If we broaden our scope to civil liberties more generally, by November we could easily grow to 100,000 people, and have months of experience in working together with this network-style activism. Virtually every American I talk to is in favor of civil liberties, and 100,000 activists focused on this could make a big difference in the election. Now that I think of it, we might also be able to help them quite a lot with their social network activism strategy in general.
And related to this, the group arose at the same time as the "Obama accountability movement", and it's the first time that the netroots have actually ventured onto social networks in a big way. So it could also be part of the core of a myBO and Facebook presence for the progressive wing within the Democratic party, creating pressure from the left (perhaps even influencing the platform!) while adding to the forces working to create a Democratic landslide in the fall. Mike Stark's floating an idea tentatively called "Barack's Better Angels" that points in this direction; it'll be a great topic for people to discuss at Netroots Nation.
My guess is that we'll wind up going in both directions, in the process becoming a couple groups initially with subtstantial overlapping membership. Of course, each group would start out smaller than a single big group; I think they'd all have the critical mass they need to survive, and would benefit from being able to recruit different people: Libertarians to the multipartisan civil liberties group, Obama supporters who have been upset with us for criticizing our candidate to Barack's Better Angels.
Of course, that's just my guess as of today. One of the things I'm proudest about in terms of our efforts so far has been our attempts to be inclusive in our discussions and decision making. We're far from perfect here, but getting steadily better: for my CNN interview (no, still not sure whether it aired) we sent our talking points out to the list, and I checked the wiki and discussion thread from the studio before going on. It's going to be a real challenge to attempting to involve as many of our 22,000 members as we can in these discussions about "what next". Still, the quality of the ideas, discussion, and people in Get FISA Right is so extraordinarily high that it'll be well worth the effort -- and the diverse perspectives we get will make the results so much better. If we couple this with in-person discussions at Netroots Nation and potentially meetups elsewhere, we'll strengthen our bonds and reinforce the movement in the process. I can't wait to see how it comes out!
In the shorter term, we'll continue to be who we've been so far: a group of Obama supporters saying no to telecom immunity and telling our government to get FISA right. Thanks to the ACLU's lawsuit, the FISA issue isn't dead, so we won't be letting any grass grow under our feet as we think about who we want to become. We'll continue to move forward on getfisaright.com, learn the lessons from our success so far, and branch out into new social networks.
Hint: rhymes with MooCube. Stay tuned for more
jon
PS: in the interim:
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