OneWebDay

Those of us involved with the planning and organizing of the Get FISA Right movement are honored to be serving as OneWebDay ambassadors. This “Earth Day for the Web” is about raising awareness of the importance of the Internet, and this year’s theme, “online participation in democracy,” is something that we at Get FISA Right value highly as political netizens. We hope our story can serve as a model for online political engagement, one that can inspire others to take action, and build on what we’ve started.

How Get FISA Right started

The story of the Get FISA Right group has already been covered heavily in the press. Here’s the 30 second version: A group protesting Barack Obama’s decision to support the current FISA legislation appeared on his campaign website my.barackobama.com, and as tens of thousands of individuals joined, it became not only the largest group on his site, but a movement strong enough to force Obama to take notice. His response to the Get FISA Right group was a moment of validation, marking an unprecedented event in U.S. politics — never before had a candidate, or any politician for that matter, given a group of individuals carte blanche to organize a mass protest on their official campaign website.

This movement would not have been possible without the kinds of Internet technologies that have become almost commonplace today in the online political world. First and foremost, is my.barackobama.com (also known to members as “myBO”), which allows individuals to form groups, manage mailing lists, and publicize events. The site, created in part by former Facebook founder Chris Hughes, enables people to connect online—and the group that coalesced around a protest of Obama’s stand on FISA was the spark that set things off. We first started getting attention with rapid growth, and within a week had become the largest group there.

But perhaps just as critical to the Get FISA Right group is our wiki. From the very beginning, we realized the wiki was essential to our group. We used it to collaborate on the Open Letter to Senator Obama, to track important statistics on the movement’s growth, and provide an archive for all the press and coverage we were getting (and continue to get!).

Finally, there is the patchwork of social networking sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, that we use to connect to people. Facebook, because of its popularity, became a natural choice to experiment with a “Night of Facebook Action,” a Facebook event we hosted on July 9, 2008. It was one final push to influence the vote with people coming together online to watch the proceedings. Today, our group has over 2000 members.

Through the use of these internet technologies, the “social” in social networking really came through, and became a key component to our success. And we’re still trying to innovate. We’re currently working with SaysMe.TV, a start-up company that buys television ad time from cable providers and sells smaller, and less expensive, slices of it to individuals to run their own spots. (Of course, the videos also run on the Web.) We’ve created an ad about FISA, and it’s currently scheduled to run 28 times in five different markets. It’s a new approach to media, and Wired calls it a “first for online activists.”

Lessons Learned

Over time, we developed four “lessons learned” that we hope others can use to build on our success.

Boring technology enables excting activism campaigns

To borrow from Clay Shirky, “Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.” By this, he means that it’s not until technologies become ubiquitous and commonplace and, indeed, boring, do they enable profound social changes. For the Get FISA Right group, this meant two things. First, the technologies themselves had to be free, readily available, and easy to use. Tools like Wetpaint and Google Groups “pages,” and sites like Facebook meant there were platforms around which we could collaborate. But beyond the tools themselves, for this group, collaborating across the Internet was “boring.” Many of the group members were already well-versed in blogs and wikis, and were able to quickly acclimate to the unique social norms and cohesiveness required to be productive online.

Transparency Over Perfection

The wiki allowed us to work together, but because the website is open and accessible to all, our work was posted out in the public domain well before anything was fully ready. If we worked for a political campaign, this would never happen. But we decided transparency was something we valued, and conducting our business out in the open, we felt, only added to our credibility. That said, not everything was completely public. Certainly email discussions aren’t “public” in the sense of a wiki, nor are the pages in the Google Group; clearly, not everything can be done by committee. But every effort was made whenever possible to forgo perfection, get a draft of something together, and post it quickly.

Don’t Take It Personally

What is striking about the Get FISA Right planning group is the level of professionalism involved. Every single member of the team is able to both give and receive constructive criticism extremely well. To an extent, the sense of urgency around the group’s mission — mobilizing the citizenry in the days before the July FISA vote in the Senate — forced an environment of quick decision making. But there was also a level of honesty that was palpable, as folks gave their opinions and hashed out decisions in real-time.

It May Look Chaotic But…

At the time of the planning group’s formation, the team numbered around 18-20 people, and, for us, this was just about the right size to kick-start the movement. The group grew and morphed as the needs and skills required changed. We found ourselves with enough varied backgrounds, expertise, and interests at the table, not to mention time zones, that work was getting done 24/7. When we had a need which wasn’t met within the group, someone always said, “I know someone. Let me invite them!” There are some downsides of this ultra-flexible “worth a try” approach — for example, it wasn’t always clear where to check for the latest updates, and we still could do a lot better packaging information for the media — but the results speak for themselves: whether it was two in the afternoon or two in the morning, people were available to work through whatever issues came up. Get FISA Right continues to grow as our mission and purpose develop, and we’re now at over 60 people, with eight to ten people at any given time working on separate initiatives.

What The Web Means To Us

For most of history, “participation” in government was a joke; power flowed through the barrel of a gun. As communication speed increased, participation increased, and with the invention of the printing press, large participatory democracies began to arise, where an increasing number of literate citizens could be informed enough to vote and feel connected enough with their government to care. Late in the 20th century, though, we saw a backward step for citizen participation within government. The news media, the extra-extra branch of government meant to keep the President, Congress, and the courts accountable, had become controlled by a small group of powerful institutions more concerned with profit than dialogue.

While access is still not universal, the Internet has revitalized the ability for many citizens to become “netizens,” and participate in the formation of their own government’s policy. When people can connect with others from across the globe and share information via wikis, blogs, and sites like Flickr and YouTube, information can no longer be controlled, filtered, or blurred to fit the needs of the few, instead of the many. People will demand what they feel they deserve. Because the Web provides social networking and community organizing opportunities in such abundance, we have great hopes for a rebirth of freedom and the future of our democracy.

What’s Next?

Get FISA Right formed because a handful of netroots activists took Barack Obama’s words to heart, calling the Senator to task. If the group has their wish, they’ll be following up with President Obama in January, and if last month was any indication, Obama will have more community service volunteers than he bargained for to making sure his actions match his words.

Our long-term vision is emerging, and our goals for the next year are clear: work with other activists to put pressure on the next administration and Congress to reform FISA legislation and strip telecom immunity. In the last few weeks, we’ve continued on this path by working to influence the Democratic party platform via the Obama campaign’s in-person “listening meetings” as well as via the netroots platform, where our language on FISA was adopted in the civil rights plank. And we’ve created an “Election Center” on our wiki, so we can track candidates’ FISA positions for the upcoming primaries (yes, there are still primaries!). Our strategy is to take things one step at a time, learning as we go, and continuing to innovate — leveraging the power of a free, open, and accessible Internet.

On OneWebDay, our group will be celebrating the new possibilities for our politics that the Internet has made possible.