Micah Sifry is one of the political commentators whose writing about technology, organizing of the Resistance (or, in his preferred parlance, the Defiance) in Trump 2.0, and how organizations are alternatively finding footing and struggling this moment has been most informative and grounding for me in since the 2024 election. Micah was kind enough to link to my piece on the genealogy of digital teams and tools in his excellent Substack. He included this challenge:

My only addition would be to discuss how in the move from grassroots to the cloud, whether we’ve undervalued the power of self-organizing communities. In the earlier days of this field, campaigners often tapped “the power of the crowd” to get things done. We still have lots of distributed campaigning (as well as some negative experiences with the challenge of scaling between national leadership and local autonomy) but in addition to looking at how campaigns use staff and tools, which Browner Hamlin covers very well, I’d love to see more on how ordinary people as well as super-volunteers are either empowered, or entasked.

This is an excellent point and something that I have pretty strong opinions about. I’d like to dig into at greater length in the future, but for now will offer some quick thoughts.

I should say at the start that this is a place where my work in a global advocacy organisation is likely highly divergent from a US-based campaign or a community organisation. As always, I have perspectives on these differences but what I see on a daily basis in the global Greenpeace network is quite different from someone working an electoral campaign or doing community-based housing justice work, for example.

The organizing aspects of digital work has indeed become underserved in recent years. Instead there has been a significant emphasis on mobilization – which requires less effort on the part of people, is often quite time bound, and is more conducive to low bar asks like signing petitions or making donations. Organizing, by contrast, is hard, slow and messy.

From an institutional perspective, my sense is that there are a few key drivers. First, as I already wrote, organizing people is hard and slow. Second, most campaign strategies in my context have the role of volunteers in an organized state as an end-of-process outcome – not an essential part at the start of the campaign design or theory of change. Third, is a structural reality – in my context, organizing tends to sit in smaller, less resourced teams and the technologies for organizing don’t receive the same degree of investment as a CRM or website (due to the smaller staff constituency and smaller budgetary impacts).

But to model some of my previous writing on the genealogy of teams, this is an endpoint and not where things began. 

Thinking back tools for organizing people (or better still, tools for people to organize themselves) was a central part of the digital suite in the most successful campaigns and organizations. In fact the early days of digital saw some of the greatest potential as a domain of work through the tools made available to volunteers (and often built by volunteers) in the Dean campaign in 2004 – some of which were subsequently productized by Blue State Digital and other firms. Whether it was at Democracy for America or later the Obama campaign, internal social networks that enabled volunteers to start affinity groups or local groups, organize house parties and participate in field canvassing, while inviting family, friends and neighbors to join was a key part of the digital infrastructure.

I must again refer readers to Daniel Kreiss’s excellent book on the Dean, Kerry and Obama campaigns, “Taking Our Country Back.” It charts the emergence of digital teams and tools through those campaigns. If you’re interested in how they first started showing up, what their challenges were and how they grew – go read Kreiss. 

Whether it was the Dean or Obama campaigns or MoveOn.org – the 2000s were in many ways defined by digital campaigns trying to figure out how to build large groups of people who showed up not just online with petitions and donations but offline and in person as well. The heavily electoral nature of the technological innovations – with US presidential campaigns being a primary, but not exclusive, driver for new tools and new consultancies – meant that there was always a strong linkage between the purpose of offline organizing (the field functions of voter registration, persuasion and turnout) with the distributed qualities of digital. That is, online tools for organizing often closely mirrored the traditional functions of a political campaign.

After the success of the Obama campaign and the well documented popularity of My.BarackObama.com (aka MyBO), many nonprofit and labor leaders wanted to see the same power of digital organizing tools brought to bear in their own contexts. Many groups tried and failed to get the same results. A key learning for practitioners like myself was that expecting to get the same results as a dynamic presidential campaign in almost any context that wasn’t also a dynamic presidential campaign was going to be incredibly challenging. Learning that this is hard and it’s unlikely that an organization can get the same traction with an internal social network or organizing platform was key. But the lesson was not that organizing online was a bad investment. 

Moving forward we see the popularity of distributed online petitioning as a step towards democratized digital engagement. Change.org did this in more cynical ways, but technologist Nathan Woodhull launched ControlShift Labs as a more movement-oriented distributed organizing platform. He originated it with GetUp in Australia (an Open Network organization that was one of the first groups using the MoveOn.org model outside of the US). CSL was then incubated by Citizen Engagement Lab (CEL), at the same time I was also launching an anti foreclosure and eviction project incubated at CEL that eventually became OccupyOurHomes.org. I was the first organization using ControlShift in the US because of this connection. We used the distributed petition and events platform as a vehicle to empower people facing foreclosure and eviction to tell their story and build support – both in their community and online. 

ControlShift was and is used by the Greenpeace network and is still a tool I love. While it’s very much a distributed petitioning tool, Nathan has always valued petitions as a starting point of engagement and campaigning – not an end point. The features that were added to CSL over time speak to this – from facilitating easy petition delivery to targets, to organizing offline events as a part of the campaign. When we were using CSL in Occupy Our Homes, we held weekly training calls for people who started petitions – helping them sharpen their campaign, think through who they can be asking for support and what steps they can be taking to move forward. 

An additional benefit of the ControlShift platform is it allowed for federation. So while I had resources to spend on digital organizing at Occupy Our Homes, many of the community based organisations I was working in network with – or even local Occupy encampments – did not have the technology infrastructure to take their offline work and promote it online. CSL allowed me to make this platform available to local groups for their own organizing purposes, a form of movement generosity that engendered stronger collaboration.

At its best, this sort of distributed petitioning platform can provide incredibly empowering opportunities for regular people and volunteers, not just paid activists.

As we look towards 2016, peer-to-peer SMS tools had a moment of popularity. I’d need to dig deeper to recall the exact products and when they were introduced…but writing from memory makes me think of that campaign cycle as the one where organizations and campaigns began to ask supporters to use distributed peer-to-peer text messaging as a key way to get people to attend events, make donations, and turn out to vote. 

Unlike an internal social network, peer-to-peer SMS has a lower barrier to participation and can be effectively run with smaller volunteer bases. So it is both more ubiquitous today but also more prone to high volume and low ethics implementations that can approach unwanted spam. Is that a good use of volunteer time? Probably not – but doing it with good data, for opted-in recipients can be a valuable connection, even as the spammers have made this less successful for everyone else. 

Similarly – virtual phonebank tools have been an effective form of volunteer participation from this mid-teens era for electoral campaigns. They remain a key pathway for how people can give their time in support of a campaign or organisation, talking directly to people that may be like them. For my context, it is not a common nor important tool. But to me the potential for value to be derived from good data and authentic forms of communication are high. Humans talking to humans, provided someone picks up the phone, feels anachronistically powerful at a time of AI slop and predatory spam.

The last point that comes to mind is the impressive implementation of Slack as a volunteer engagement and communications platform. In “Rules for Revolutionaries,” Becky Bond and Zack Exley tell the story of the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign and how they built an impressive volunteer apparatus supported heavily by consumer communications technologies. Though still riding the volumes of a dynamic presidential campaign, the principles they developed for trusting volunteers, opening lines of communication, connecting people, developing relational organizing models – all of this feels more replicable at smaller scales than the social network level tooling of the Obama campaigns. 

Micah is likely more familiar than I am around the recent history of digital distributed organizing, so I want to pull the camera back a bit on my thinking on “the power of the crowd” to get things done.”

There is a philosophical aspect to this and there is an organizational one. 

Organizations need to believe as a core part of their theory of change that people power is the critical force on the left for creating a better world. If you believe that, it should be reflected in your budgets, your staffing, your tools procurement. 

But if you believe people are just there to send in donations in the mail and not do much else, then it is unlikely that your organization will design campaigns that build a meaningful role for volunteers in your work.

Similarly, if you haven’t internalized an approach to people power that values volunteer/offline participation, it is very unlikely that you will be designing campaigns that benefit from what digital organizing tools or digital volunteer spaces can offer. And so over time – again, in my context at an international campaigning NGO – I have seen budget cuts and tools turned off for platforms that orient towards the volunteer experience or distributed organizing functionality because our campaigns are less and less oriented towards these activities as being essential to campaign success. 

Connecting to my previous essay on team evolutions over time, volunteer organizing was once a part of a generalist digital campaigner’s job description. But as digital teams grew, this became a more specialized function – either in a digital team or in a role housed in a volunteer or field team. They had tools to go with them – oftentimes tools that were separate from the rest of the digital marketing or CRM stack, but sometimes still integrated. 

What was relevant (again, in my experience, which will be very different to what we see in larger US orgs or political campaigns!) was that when budgets needed tightening, the freestanding ‘volunteer organizer’ technologies were easy line items to cut. They usually didn’t have a big staff allocation. Turning off a low volume tool and single role in the staff was an easier cut to make than someone writing emails to fundraise or a tool that generated a huge portion of the organization’s budget.

These have been painful evolutions to watch. 

In a time of global political upheaval and intense dissatisfaction with what major political parties are offering, with rising right wing nationalism in many parts of the world – the importance of tools and trained professionals to support regular people coming together, building trust and affinity, and having the technological options to take responsibility for making their communities or their country or the world a better please feels more important than ever. 

The technology itself isn’t the issue for me. There are some purpose built distributed organizing tools and plenty of larger digital community platforms (Discord, Slack, Facebook) that are fully capable of enabling people to come together to organize. The gaps stem more from a lack of commitment to real organizing within organizations (and outside of the political campaign context especially), as well as a lack of people who are trained as organizers capable of approaching technologies as a means to the end of organizing people together. 

I think the progressive movement has suffered from being so reliant on presidential campaigns as a vector for innovation. If the labor movement had been the primary source of digital technology funding, I imagine organizing technology and trained organizers would be more prevalent. Hell – if ACORN hadn’t been destroyed by Republicans (while most Democrats stood by in silence), I imagine organizing technology and trained organizers would be more prevalent. 

Ultimately, organizing is hard. It takes time. It takes money. It requires relating to people as complex beings. And building technology that supports this sort of work requires technologists who have a deep understanding of how organizing works. No doubt some of what we have exists because of people who have spent time working to build this understanding. But we don’t have enough. 

The two things I would hope for more of is organizations that commit to people power and show this by investing in tools and training for both volunteers and staff to support this as a fundamental building block for all strategic work. And that we all pay closer attention to the theories of change being advanced by politicians and by organizations – if people power isn’t central to how they are committed to making change, then we should be skeptical about committing to them with our money or our time.