Past regrets and the quest for digital enlightenment

Life often has too many regrets.

As an activist I regret not being more involved with the road protests of the 90’s and although they were very much the noise that woke me up. As a historian coming of age in the 80’s I regret not crossing the Iron curtain to Eastern Europe, to visit countries as yet unaffiliated by western capitalism, in what must have been a truly alien world, for better and worse. And finally as a child of the 70’s,with a travelling soul, I regret not being old enough to turn on, tune in and drop out to hit the hippy trail from London to Istanbul to Goa and beyond.

The flotsam I’ve found in the beach huts of Dahab and the drug culture of Nimbin suggest little remains of what I would have like to have found, but one day I will follow it. One has to wonder why people started the journey, and if they ever returned. Were they seeking drugs and a good time, to see something of the world that had previously only been accessible to the rich, or something more spiritually enlightening from suburban Guru’s, Swami’s, Lama’s or elderly Beetles.

In a quest for enlightenment, not so much spiritual as digital, I recently returned from a somewhat simpler trail to the remote wilds of British Colombia, via the embryonic protests at Wall Street – which perhaps offered something more cosmic.

The justification to burn carbon, was that the US is pioneering models of online to offline activism and heroic digital list building – using the mass marketing techniques of the commercial sphere. As an event, Web of Change on Cortes island offered the hook, drawing forward thinking digital folk and offline mobilisers, from across the not for profit sector. As a digital quest, well if the UK has sated itself with offline activism, and if the purely online remains in a different sphere then perhaps in and amongst the bears of Canada, I can find out what lies in between.

Travelling invigorates ones imagination, and as jouneys go, the chance encounter with whales, the Rainbows across the ferry bow and time to enjoy Vancouver, Washington DC and New York didn’t hurt. Travels aside, as an event it was interesting but sadly lacking in the cosmic ray of inspiration I demanded.

To take away, were the detailed plans for ladders of engagement (or perhaps swimming pools of engagements) – and apparent pioneering from the Engage Network, some scars from west coast North American hippydom – sorry I’m British, I simply don’t care how you feel about that last workshop, and no I don’t want to express myself – I’ve spent years developing this angst, lots of cool people and future contacts, a new found admiration for the Tea party, lots and lots of academic jargon and yet more buzz words tied to storytelling – although there were some interesting stories to be heard.

But I didn’t find the big answer, which is a shame, so moved on to the offices of Greenpeace in Washington DC, seeking something more. There’s some fuel here, but again more confirmation of my prejudice that the UK is quite good at offline activism. I met like minds, asking similar questions, but no-one really assembling the pieces into some answers.

And finally I ended up at Occupy Wall Street weeks in, which seems disorganised, but a powerful idea, and perhaps the beginnings of something bigger. If such protests can take inspiration from Egypt and find fertile ground at the heart of capitalism, then there is hope for us all – but still they need more people, as the handful in the park, while a very poignant manifestation of offline activism, have a way to go before the authorities become threatened.

So as a journey of 10,000 miles I didn’t find the answer, and perhaps there is more to be discovered in one’s own imagination. And yet I hear good things from Argentina, bold frontiers from the mobile technologies of sub Saharan Africa, clever ideas from Turkey and yet my hope rests in the high tech professional culture and, rapidly emerging activist culture of India. Perhaps there is a path to follow down the old hippy trail to digital as well as spiritual enlightenment.

And then when worlds collide

So I’ve already rambled about the old skool NVDA related launch of the Mattel campaign, and yet what was new was the revolving door between online and offline activism, which surpassed even the unconsidered integrated efforts of Airplot.

I hope to consider what made this work, but the biggest question is how it came together? I can’t take the credit although my new job title suggests I should, and if anything it came down to wiser heads than mine, a sense of desperate ambition and a clued up campaigner.

So what happened? At the end of the morning NVDA activities the volunteers regrouped, armed themselves with Barbie’s and scattered across London to hide and photo the Barbie’s in situ. Each Barbie was tagged (a unique ID and a QR code) and the details were uploaded to a website.

With 100 Chainsaw Barbie’s in place, and the map populated; the ask was rolled out to the national volunteer network who then planted more Barbie’s in there locales. As a test we also sent some targeted emails to our most active online users (3+ online actions, one of which has to have been in the last 3 months) and invited them to either a) send off for a Barbie to hide or b) Buy a 2nd hand Barbie, tag her and hide her – depending which version of the test email one received.

Finally with the offline elements in place, the big emails went out, backed up by blogs, social media etc, to the wider online supporter base- with an invite to go hunt down these delinquent Chainsaw Barbies. The 200 ish folk who reported back were then recruited into a Barbie Investigation Bureau – and fed with a series on online and offline asks to target Mattel.

Did this work?
The integration of online and offline asks was elegant. The interface to upload the details was clunky, but previously technically inept volunteers managed to make it work, challenging the idea that there are such folk – disinterested maybe, digitally uninspired probably, but not inept.

As a hit rate perhaps 25% of the Barbie’s were found, which given the effort to buy them online, to tag them, and hide them isn’t great from a numbers perspective, but the idea was stronger that the reality. Again dormant volunteers came out of the woodwork for this, perhaps because one could do this as an act of individual activism – although it’s more cooler done with friends and video.



Online the traffic peaked at 17K on the launch day, and was dead 2 weeks later, which again isn’t as strong as the idea. What worked well was the engagement of the 200ish folk in the aftermath. There was some cool user generate content, videos, photos, Facebook pages and the like, with my only regret being forbidden to put an ask out for folk to send ransom notes to Mattel in newspapers cutouts.

What really didn’t work so well was the way the campaign got bogged down in negociations in Mattel. Although ultimately successful (a good thing) from an engagement perspective it really sucked, as we had plans and people willing to try them and this bit was stifling.

So some final headlines

• Good campaigners think outside the box (Online or Offline) not just webbies and volunteer coordinators, and there’s a job here to inspire such folk, feed them energy and successes so others follow the shiny path.
• Campaign needs and engagement don’t always mix well, which either has to change, or to be worked around. What is the priority here? to engage more people, and to a deeper level, or to win short term campaign goals.
• If something is worth doing, or fun, then people will negotiate whatever technical hurdles need to be negotiated. Digitally unengaged, or disempowered have often chosen to be so and need inspiring not educating.
• Games, online and offline, although the meme of 2011, are fun and we should do more - OK I'm prejudiced, but...
• There is more energy and creativity out there, to do cool stuff, than in here, and we should both channel and enable more while being less worried about the precise look of the thing.

And finally, finally – the no of folk who got involved, in what was an online to offline ask is small compared to the % that send emails. This is not a bad thing, simply indicative, that as a % game we are looking to work with the boldest, the brightest and the, by their own determination, interesting folk at there. The mass will sleep on, sending emails, until the spirit moves them.

It started with a bang

A new campaign, a new frontier, old skool offline activism, new skool online activism, and a mixed up new frontier in between. By some reckoning I’ve been wearing the new digital headgear for a week, and whereas this lot has little to do with me, by heck it makes the online / offline world look like where it’s at. So this may be a blog in two halves – maybe three.

It started online with a video, and a classic brand attack on a company that buys from lots of other companies that buy from the big bad company that’s chopping down the rainforest.

It moved on to some activities in the US, before a whole load of fairly traditional activist activities in the UK, for which I will hand over to the charming narrator George.

Early one morning a small team of climbers snuck into a building site on Piccadilly Circus, to hang a big banner to say Ken dumps Barbie.



As climb actions go this went to plan, the climbers got later arrested, but were in general completely ignored for most of the day by the workers on the site. No one on site seemed to have even noticed the banner outside, and dressed as industrial climbers they were assumed to be on the job. This perception only really unravelled when someone got a bit peeved that they didn’t seem to be doing any work. After a longer while someone asked why, and when they explained to the supervisor that they were from Greenpeace, that they’d hung a banner etc, the dawning reality, and the confusion on the poor guys face – must have been a joy to see.

Meanwhile several smaller teams of volunteers toured London bus stops, adding full sized subverts – again Ken dumps Barbie – to the display adverts, with a great deal of technical expertise. The subverts lasted most of the week, as they seemed right for the space, and when a NGO friend asked how on earth the organisation could afford to pay for such coverage – well they didn’t.



And meanwhile, another six teams of volunteers travelled the early morning underground, adding in supplementary tube adverts – Ken dumps Barbie, to the mundane commuter fodder. A surprisingly mucky job, if ever I saw one. But again done with a speed and panache that suggests next time someone should give them more adverts.

So all in all, a mundane day, some clever communications, some nice coverage in the Sun, some new pictures and videos, but all very much the way they do things, there’s even some product stickering to come, and little related to the borderlands of online and offline activism.

Then everyone regrouped back at base for phase II – the launch of the Barbie hunt.

Wyrd transitions

I am a capacity building geek, i.e. it genuinely interests me, and maybe even excites me, to investigate and develop new ways of inspiring, equipping, training and mobilising people to campaign on something that’s important to them – albeit broadly within my own preference for a progressive agenda.

So I started this blog to debate whether the organisations I’m involved in were right to move away from old skool offline activism (local structures, public engagement, political lobbying, subvertising, NVDA etc) towards the shiny new frontiers of digital activism. I describe myself as a reactionary simply because instinctively I’d prefer to be chaining myself to something, or driving a RIB full of climbers towards a coal freighter, than clicking on another link.

However I might be wrong, I might be in danger of going extinct and so the essence of this blog was to explore new online capacity building ideas, and to either a) come up with better ideas to justify my reactionary prejudices or b) to learn some new skills (blogging for one) such that I’d find a new role in this new world.

Then the fates intervened in and the organisational wont towards the digital turned into an internal restructuring with a focus on capacity building not to achieve change but to fundraise – while important, excites me less.

For a great many years I’ve argued that such folk exist – with plenty of evidence, folk who want to organise gigs, rattle tins, sort sponsored events and the like, but that they are distinctt from the wider activist base. The argument is that we should do both, enabling people to get involved in a manner of their choosing, giving people the creative space to come up with new campaign and fundraising ideas and that we should resource both paths separately, and well.

To give up on campaigning, or to much reduce it, in favour of fundraising seems counter intuitive, after 15+ years of capacity building to that goal. As the restructuring dragged on, as friends feared for their jobs, as I dabbled with emigrating to the frontline battle against climate change (i.e. the US), things went perverse or just Wyrd.

The plans to fundraise were abandoned, the capacity building team was halved in size, two of us were in essence made redundant, and I seem to have found myself in a digital team exploring the borderlands between online and offline activism. Somewhat poetic really considering the blog I started 9 months before hand.

Now don’t get me wrong, organisational I think we’re being a bit daft, and over time as our ability to deliver offline activism and events diminish, then the simple truth that there is no such thing as a free lunch will become apparent to the powers that be – i.e. what you get out is proportional to what you put in, and in order to have a passionate, inspiring network of volunteers you need to have people on the ground supporting that networ..

However as an individual with a predominately free hand to explore new ideas, to build new capacity building structures online and offline, to facilitate the training of people in skills I don’t yet possess, to try new things – just because, and to support such folk in delivering change – well it’s all quite exciting really, and if one is to believe in fate, destiny, karma in the strength of the wyrd, the clearly the gods are pleased with such paths.

On internet think tanks

Since I last posted, the internal arguments on clicktivism have raged (well smoldered) and since I am trying to motivate myself to go listen to more at 6 Billion Ways, I thought I'd compose some thoughts.

Next week in between our offline restructure, I've been invited to contribute to an online vision as to what our website could look like and do. A pyramid is taking shape in my head based on what we do do, and what we might do.

• A Profile tool - telling people who we are, or at least who we think we are, which is of course different to who they think we are
• A Communications platform - or soapbox for us to tell people the news, and/or what we think
• An Engagement tool - to encourage people to get involved. We offer the people the ability to send and email (clicktivism) or to comment on a blog but little more
• An Organising tool - facilitating the creating of events and campaigns online and offline, discussions as to what those events might be, what needs to happen to make them happen, and of course who's coming
• An Empowerment tool - allowing the contributors to shape the organisation, or the campaign, giving ownership to the people who support us. The idea of of crowd sourcing a campaign strategy appeals, the apolexy of our ED when I suggest it, can only be a bonus.

I can feel a dose of Maslow coming on

Narratives of NVDA

OK a month into this blog, and whereas I’ve pontificated about digital activism a fair bit, and ideas as to how to value real world activism, I’ve not really mused much about NVDA (non violent direct action) as a subject close to my heart.

The question is how to describe such activities, without incriminating myself, as often as not I’m in the thick of it. So without sounding too pompous I’d like to introduce you to my new guest narrator George. Over to George.

So here’s a little video I found:



About a small group of volunteers who got up very early in the morning to go down to the Treasury to hang a banner, well within the SOCPA zone and opposite a small police station. Nothing quite like an easy target.

However with a bit of speed, the ladder team wrangled a 3 part beast up against the wall, as the climb team shot up, and the action was done and the blocking team left the scene, as the first two policemen watched on. After dissembling the ladder, while many more police arrived, the ladder team split up and faded into the night, with nary a word spoken. A very clean piece of work.

So hours later the climbers were arrested – top tip if you’re worried about such things, don’t climb, and one wonders why this was worth doing? They were later released without charge.

To the initiated this was a very precise direct comms (communication) event, taking a message to a decision maker – George Osborne, about promises he’d made and was likely not to keep.

As his staff arrived at work, one must expect them to have noticed the big banner on their office, alongside the dangling climbers. In parliament the Chancellor quips that it’s the first time he’s seen someone protest in favour of a bank, and clearly the message has got through.

So how does one measure the value of such an action? And the cost not just in terms of money and time, but also the risks involved – mainly to one’s criminal record, but to an extent to limbs if not life?

Clearly as a set piece direct comms, this had somewhat more impact than a strongly worded letter, a meeting with a senior civil servant, or even Osborne himself – if such a thing was possible. As an action it chips away at the Chancellors resolve, but is unlikely to change his position – whereas the threat of the loss of 10,000 votes in key marginal at the next election may well do.

But such comparisons are tortuous. To achieve change one try’s every tool and tactic available, and after the strongly worded letter, or even 10,000 such letters and the Chancellor still refuses to meet then and only then does one:

Speak out in acts; the time for words has passed, and only deeds will suffice.
Alfred North Whitehead

I'm certains George will be telling us more about such activities over the coming months.

Mass Mobilisations part I

Straying a little from my original remit, another fashion seems to be the subject of mass mobilisations. The argument goes that we have tried many another tactic to create change, and to an extent they haven’t achieved,say for example a zero carbon society. So the one thing we haven’t done is to get a lot of people involved.

I guess there’s a shadow of the civil rights movement here, with powerful leaders such as Martin Luther King, or the struggle for independence under Ghandi, or perhaps closer to home the big CND marches of the ‘80s, or the large Stop the War marches.

But in UK terms what is a mass? A march of 1 million + is huge, voter turnout is higher, a big email ask is smaller and I seem to be revisiting familiar ground here.

So say one was to consider the rise and fall of the Green party. In the 1989 European elections 2,292,696 people voted Green, but then in 2004 that was down to just over 1 million. In the 2005 Westminster elections 281,780 people voted Green and I can’t find any figures for 2010 so what does this mean?

Perhaps 1 million people on the streets, is a big mass, and 250,000 is a more achievable mob. Perhaps 1 million UK citizens clicking an email link is a respectable number and the 30,000 bench mark is, all in all, a bit pathetic.

So maybe there is a comment on click-tivism here. That we ask people to do too many different clicks at the expense of one big click on something important. Maybe instead of a weekly ask, a monthly ask would generate bigger numbers, maybe there is still work to be done list building to get to the point where you can ask for 1 million click throughs.

To be continued