Ray Rogers‘ name is a legendary one in the world of grassroots organization, and he is especially well-regarded in the world of labor activism. He graduated from the University of Massachusetts in 1967 at the peak of the golden age of modern American organization. In conversation he consistently returns to Saul Alinsky’s seminal work Rules For Radicals, explaining that it has forever been an important resource for him. At present, he is the director of the Stop Killer Coke

In the 70s, Rogers coined the term “corporate campaign.” He is the director of Corporate Campaign Inc. and he has since successfully put the tactic into action against several substantial corporations, including Campbell Soup Co. and J.P. Stevens. He has a background in both social and political organization, the latter of which he cites as a great experience to constructively inform the former. In his early 60s, Rogers is exceedingly energetic and is still very excited to take almost everyone on, from Exxon Mobil to American Airlines (which he campaigned against in the 80s). In the middle of the conversation, he took excused himself to take a call on the other line. When he switched back, he said emphatically, “I’d love to find a way to zap these outfits that send you pre-recorded messages about whatever.”

A corporate campaign is a collective bargaining campaign that focuses on the importance of comprehensive research,coalition building and varying forms of political pressure. According to CCI’s website, a corporate campaign “develops strategies and tactics and structures campaigns in ways that strengthen internal union solidarity, maximize membership and family involvement and generate favorable media coverage.” Rogers ads that it is a lens through which a campaign can be seen as a whole, and where tactics stop being seen as ends and are turned into effective and moving means.

Here, Rogers explains what drove him to go after Coke, what he could be doing better, the steps he takes into consideration when planning action, and how he wishes he were better using the Internet. campaign,which is working to mobilize consumers against the Coca-Cola corporation.

Why Coke? What drove you to go after them with such intensity?

Killer Coke was set up to go after the Coca-Cola company and to hold them accountable. That is the main reason we became involved. I was hearing more and more about cases of systematic torture that were happening to unionists in Columbia and it sounded like a replay of what had happened previously in Guatemala. The issue was one of life and death and people were coming to me, asking what should be done but no one really had any resources to move it forward. Just what I need, right? Another issue and no resources [laughs].

At that point, I had been looking at going after Exxon Mobil, but what I needed was real financing. However, the things that people were telling me about Coke were so horrible. I am not naive and I have been taking on corporations for many years, so I did my own investigation and research. What I found was that the situation in Columbia was as bad, if not worse than it was being reported to me. It was a replay of what was happening with the company in Guatemala in the 80s. So I began to look at how to build a broad case against them that looked at all of their weaknesses. I researched sensitive issues around the company and then I came up with one sentence to describe them:

“The world of Coca-Cola is a world full of lies, deception, immorality, corruption and widespread labor, human rights and environmental abuses.”

I have put that out there as a challenge. I have toured it around. If it’s wrong or misleading, then they can go ahead and sue me.

When putting together a campaign, what are the steps you put together before putting it into action?

There are two basic things that you need to consider if you plan on being successful against a major target or adversary. First, you need to determine where you are coming from conceptually and analytically. You need to be able to lay out a strategy that goes from Point A – the starting point – to Point Z – total defeat. We’re not out to annihilate anyone, but the idea is that you know that as you get closer to point Z, the target will begin to reach a breaking point and there is then a willingness to compromise.

Second, you need to come at it from an organizational level. You must ask, “Can I mobilize the necessary forces to reach my objectives? Can we force these companies and political mechanisms to the breaking point?” I don’t mean that you figure out if you can make them make concessions that look good in the papers? In the case of Coke, real people are dying. Animals are dying. The environment is dying. Spin is no replacement for actual progress. So you need to know if you have the tools necessary to get closer to that breaking point. Can you generate the money? The drive? The person power?

It is important for people to understand the importance of breaking corporate power into manageable units so that you can challenge, attack, divide and conquer accordingly. It is important to be able to identify which tools work best. How do you get votes to the polls? How do you communicate? Is Internet, direct mail, handing out fliers, or other options going to work best? Considering how you will effectively communicate is obviously important. Without it, you don’t exist.

Where do you see some of the biggest failures in this sort of organizing?

Some well-meaning people, organizers and activists are unable to analyze the situation and make appropriate judgments based on their goals and actions. It is important to move forward concisely. There isn’t a lot of room, especially on a small budget, for trial and error. What happens a lot of the time is that people will demonstrate against something. They will organize a protest or a demonstration and then they will wait to see the response. There is no response. Then they organize a bigger one and there is no response and this keeps going. What happens? The plans get bigger but the attendance goes down because nothing is happening. This is because too often, people see demonstration as a strategy and not a tactic. That happens with all elements from time to time.

Sometimes, people don’t know who they’re trying to reach and that can create an opportunity to waste a lot of resources. Working in political organization taught me the importance of targeting. When McGovern was running – I was so wild about him at the time; I would have been likely to go out and flier and canvass an entirely conservative neighborhood because I was so on fire, but it wouldn’t have done any good. It would be like throwing the fliers in the trash, only worse because [the residents] would have been so angry about it that they would probably have been more likely to vote against him. You’ve got to know what resources you have, know where to direct them, and understand how to best put them to work.

How much does PR and negative publicity come into account when you are organizing a campaign like Killer Coke?

I look at publicity like the icing on a cake. If I were to give you a cake without icing, you might say, “This is nice, but where is the icing?” Then I might give you a plate of icing and you would probably say, “I wanted icing, but I really want it with the cake.” They both work together to make up what it is you are looking for.

Negative publicity causes concern for corporations, but they can weather that. In the case of Coke, this is a multi-billion dollar corporation. If the going gets tough, they can just buy good publicity. So you need to come at publicity as a component of something larger. Media relations is just one part of a multi-dimensional strategy.

It is important to have nice, eye catching literature and it’s important to do this so that you can control your message when putting it out there. But if you develop a great overall campaign, you’re in an especially good spot because the media can’t ignore that and they’re forced to tell the truth. There will always be elements in the media that try to undermine you, but if you develop something solid, it makes it hard for them to ignore. You will generate good coverage.

Where does the Killer Coke campaign need to improve?

The whole thing is obviously really time consuming. I spend much of the day and night putting together a case against [Coca-Cola]. I can easily say that over 20 thousand hours of time has gone into this. I have raised lots of money in labor struggles that I have been involved in in the past and we need to start to do that with this. We built this campaign from the ground up and I am doing a lot of organizing and putting together our strategy but we’re not yet in a fund raising mode. I am working day and night on organizing, but we haven’t done an adequate job raising money. We need to figure out how to do that.

In your experience, what are some good ways to move forward with a campaign on a limited budget?

If you don’t have much money but you need to get the message out there, you have to set up a website. Start to develop an organization and a network. You need to be able to find and reach out to those who are sympathetic to your cause or to people who have similar sympathies. Take all of this information and start a database of contacts.

If you need money, reach out to foundations who are willing to back something meaningful and well organized, put together a plan and ask them for help. Coming from a spot where we have very little of it, I can tell you that getting your hands on money is time consuming.

What is your experience with using the Internet for organizing?

Unfortunately, I am pretty ignorant with regard to that. It took me a long time to figure out what a fax machine was. And I finally got it and was floored by how much time and money it saved. Then the Internet comes along and I am learning a whole bunch of new stuff. People would ask me all the time if I had looked up KillerCoke.com, which had already been bought by the company. They bought it all up. And I know that I could be a very rich man if I were to sell them KillerCoke.org. Had I understood this game better, I would have gone in and bought all of it up before they had. I did not really understand how important a tool it is.

We now have a retired New York City school teacher who is doing the work on the site. I have relatives who know what they’re doing who tell me how to use it. The Internet is a powerful weapon. It is a great communication tool and it is critical to modern organizing. The downfall is that people get it into their heads that the Internet is going to stop the demand or need for grassroots, person to person organizing. Getting on the phone, direct mailing, canvassing, and just being out there in general is still very important. You can never replace that. But at the same time, we would never have this global campaign if it weren’t for the Internet. I wouldn’t be getting daily emails from people asking how they can help or giving me all of this information. In the end, it is a phenomenal tool.

And as far as strengthening democracy goes, and holding corporations accountable, the Internet is a powerful tool that will better benefit the underdogs than it will the overlords. If we had the resource to do so, we’d have an entire Internet division.

(Photo Courtesy: Indymedia Ireland)

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On this day, April 30th, 2008, the news brings to our attention social networking-savvy nonprofit organizations, thoughts on Egypt’s “schizophrenic” response to the internet, [more] flash mobs (and Mo Rocca on dramatically simulating them), and Urban Middle-class moms: the O.G.’s of grassroots activism.

• The Chicago Tribune realizes that social networks are no longer exclusively playgrounds for children, teachers gone wild, and pedophiles – Nonprofit organizations can be found using them too.
• A freelance journalist responds to all of the recent news about Egypt and Internet action has at least one person trying to make sense of Egypt’s emerging position. He suggests that “the government’s response to online opposition has been predictably schizophrenic.” Further, those leading online movements against the ruling clique in Egypt must “recognize the limitations as well as the opportunities of the medium.”
• Inspired by Improv Everywhere’s “Grand Central Freeze” video, Penn State students try to have their own “organized fun.” Mo Rocca talks about appearing on an episode of Law and Order: SVU as a flash mob organizer who is inspired by the same video [though, having not seen the episode, I can't tell if this is a joke as Robin Williams is shown here as the leader of the mob - Did anyone see this? Am I the only one only watches SVU re-runs in chunks on the USA network and knows nothing about the new episodes?] With the world experiencing around one flash freeze a day, is this public performance party-trick is quickly on its way to becoming the Lolcats of 2008?
• Finally, we learn about grassroots organization from those who do it best. Remember: “Hell hath no fury… like an Urban Middle-class (and up) Mom scorned.”

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Peter Deitz is a Montreal-based micro-philanthropy consultant and the creator of Social Actions. By way of aggregating social change campaigns from nearly 20 social action platforms, Social Actions purports to make it easier for an Internet user to be connected to their cause of choice.

With May fast approaching, Deitz is staring down the barrel of an extremely busy month. He will be attending Philanthropy’s Vision: A Leadership Summit, which will be put on by the Council on Foundations. There, he will be live-blogging the Next Generation Sessions, where Kiva, Donors Choose, and other “usual suspects” will discuss how technology will factor into the future of philanthropy. He will then head to Sweden, where Social Actions is a finalist for consideration in the prestigious Stockholm Challenge. Later in the month, he heads to San Jose for the NetSquared Mashup Challenge, where Social Actions is also a finalist. Finally, he will be hosting a two-day workshop about micro-philanthropy following the NetSquared Conference.

He spoke with us recently about how Social Actions came about, what it is up to now, what brought him back online after writing it off for four years, and where he sees the off and online activism intersecting now and in the near future.

Why is a site like Social Actions necessary?

I started writing about micro-philanthropy a year and a half ago. At the time there were six platforms doing this work and each had a similar mission. Then there were engaged and socially conscious platforms popping up nearly every other week. Social Actions serves as an attempt to bridge the gap between these platforms. The project attempts to free the content from the platform on which it was created in the hope that the people most likely to engage in the specific campaign will do so given the opportunity.

Right now, we’re building an open API [application programming interface] to get this done more effectively. We will be working with third party developers to get widgets out there that will sift through the campaigns and actions so that the user can find the right platform on which to take action. We want to tear down a lot of the walls that separate platforms and we want to make actionable content easier to find. Right now if you want to get involved and you go online, you wouldn’t know where to start. If you were to start by Googling an issue, you’d get flooded non-actionable content as well as a few actions from the platforms participating in Social Actions. The API would be meant to streamline that process a little better.

Did you start with the present model for the site in mind or is that something you eventually worked towards?

I can’t say that the current form of the site is what I was thinking of from the start. I kept going off on different tangents and as one gained traction, we would continue to go into that direction. It’s not the most strategic way to proceed, but we will try stuff out, move forward and backward, find what works and doesn’t and we move forward accordingly. We’re not coming at it from a business structure and we don’t have an advisory board. Sometimes we spend weeks working on something. And when I say we, I sometimes mean just myself. And if things don’t go well, I sometimes have to abandon that component.

What brought you to care so intensely about micro-philanthropy? What informs your current activism?

I have been involved in various ways with social change movements for a while now. My activism, and I don’t want to turn people off with that word…

It’s funny. On the blog, we’re trying to figure out how to not turn people off by the term. Maybe 2008 is the year for changing perceptions about it. Well, maybe not, considering all of the organization around the Olympics.

Right. The word “action” is now a very popular term. Since action is now a term that we can use more publicly, activism might also become more acceptable.

I came from a background of working with Quaker organizations. I have been involved with the Quakers for the last ten years. I am not myself a Quaker, but I went through a number of Quaker summer camps and I went back as a counselor. I then started to do some online consulting for Quaker organizations. Again, while I am not a Quaker, if you look at the underlying value structure of the Religious Society of Friends, there are a lot of similarities with the the social action communities that are emerging online.

From 1999 through 2003, I went totally offline. I abandoned my computer and grew my hair long and I essentially became a hippy. I looked at the Internet and started to think that all it was good for was the creation of commercial websites and monetizing the system.I wasn’t interested in that. What brought me back was the 2004 U.S. presidential election.

Ah. The era of the born again Internet activist.

Exactly. I wanted to get involved with the presidential election in some way, but I was based in Canada and I had no intention to go back to the United States to lobby for a particular candidate. Instead, I started Voices Without Votes, which was run with an open source content management system. It invited citizens to send letters to US voters via the site. They were encouraged to explain how US foreign policy affects their own country. It was a success and we collaborated with other sites and created a blog called The World Speaks. That whole process was a thirteen month endeavor and it got me excited about doing online activism. This year the project is sponsored by Reuters and run by Global Voices Online.

What made what you saw happening online [in 2004] compelling enough to bring you back into the fold?

I just wondered what good we were doing offline. In 2003, I was in Toronto protesting the war in Iraq. We had all of these people who were having demonstrations and we got nowhere in the process. Offline in North America, you can protest all you want but it brings nothing. And all this time, there was Howard Dean out of Vermont and he was building a viable candidacy online. He was creating a plausible challenge to the initiator of the war that we were all against. It was a fundamentally different and interesting experience. It wasn’t as much about anger as much as it was hope. When stuff happens online, reporters can’t change numbers of attendees the same way they can at rallies. Our impact is undeniable.

And when Dean lost, what were your thoughts about the overall process?

A lot of us came out of the 2004 election disillusioned. I retreated to New York and I worked as a tech consultant for a human rights organization for two years. For me, it took a year and a half to to move forward. But I got bitten with the creativity bug in 2006, and started building Social Actions..

What do you consider some of the potential limits to what can be accomplished with online action?

There are, of course, demographic issues that bring up questions about whether or not tech movements are fully inclusive, especially for those who don’t have the time to go online. We do have to be aware of that. But I don’t think we should think of action in terms of on or offline. The most exciting developments are in the intersections of the two. The tech realm and SMS capabilities are blurring the lines. There are a number of ways in which things are changing.

Where is Social Actions headed in the next year?

My main goal is to move from being a one man operation to making it into something that is financially sustainable. I would like for us to build a team of people working on the project. We just put together an open “unbusiness plan”, or whatever you want to call it. We outlined several directions, one of which focuses on Social Actions existing as a meeting place for people interested in peer to peer social change. We want to host conversations in which people are able to talk about impact, assess platforms and best practices, and discuss why we are doing what we are doing and what it all means.

We also want to work on the API, of course. The fee structure for participating platforms will favorthe most efficient platforms. Finally, I will be forming a consultants cooperative, where we would be able to pay talented folks for non-billable work. I’d like for this to work with companies and organizations who want to get involved in peer-to-peer social action s in some way, and also to put it to work for innovative grand making programs using these platforms.

The amount of time that has been spent in terms of getting things going is sort of unbelievable. I didn’t think that I would play this roll, but connecting people seems to be what I do most these days, and that is great fun. There is something to be said about doing what you do best. I spent so much time on this aggregation project — I spent 12 months trying to build it myself. I am not a programmer or designer. I was trying to build manageable site. And in the fall, I realized that this isn’t where my skills are the strongest so I started to work to establish relationships with people and to bring them together. i could focus on building the API through someone else’s experience, not my own. Now it is getting along quite well.

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On this day, April 29th, 2008, the news brings to our attention flash mobs in Bath, Egyptian outrage taken to the web, Gordon Brown’s fund raising envy, and more on the rising popularity of shareholder activism:

• Egyptians are using Facebook to defy government attempts to keep incidents of police brutality quiet. One young woman, Esraa Abdel Fatah, 27, is highlighted for or organizational efforts using the site.
• A flash mob takes on Bath Abbey. The mob freezes for five minutes, people stare, and the The Bath Chronicle deems it a success (seriously).
• UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown is apparently looking to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for tips on raising lots of cash via the Internet.
• Speaking of Sen. Obama, it’s not just the money that he’s raising online that will potentially make him a powerbroker in the party, even if he loses.
• And finally, another discussion about the rise of shareholder activism and it’s impact on US corporations as the economy continues on a downturn.

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Turn-ons: raising Net Neutrality awareness, deflowering activists

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On this day, April 28th, 2008, the news brings to our attention the death of print, blogger-mom anger, hacktivism, and sex-for-action:

• In Madison, Wisconsin, declining print and increasing online revenues lead to one of the first deaths in print journalism.
• Blogger-moms unleash their wrath upon Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus.
• Hacktivists show Obama that the Chinese aren’t their only targets.
• And finally, if you’re doing any work in the name of defending net neutrality – if you have some sort of e-action rolling or you’re organizing any lobbying in the name of this issue or maybe you have a table outside of a Wal Mart and you’re selling brownies to raise awareness about it in any way, or whatever, and if you’re above the age of 18 and you still haven’t gotten around to losing that pesky [Virgin]ity, go. get. laid. now.

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I have received approximately one hundred and fifty thousand notes (in their various electronic forms) from friends and family members about the young blogger that could [get his ass out of jail using Twitter]. Everyone from my net-addicted peers to the 80-something grandparents of net-addicted peers have sent emails, tagged me in Facebook notes, and (not ironically) sent tweet after tweet about this incident, which is such a potent reminder of how everything is changing thanks to how we communicate online — even the process and potential of being arrested in a different, and somewhat terrifying, country.

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Mark Myers has been highlighted by the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and most recently The Nation for his work on The Superdelegate Transparency Project. The open source project, which he started because he was furious with the “elitist” elements of the superdelegate process, tracks political, professional and personal information relating to the superdelegates. The project is now housed at Congresspedia.

Myers’ background is in technology and he works in Florida as a consultant. Our conversation eventually made its way into the realm of Internet and music distribution, which will later make for another wonderful conversation and a hundred great posts. Here he discusses his rejection of a decade of political apathy, the usefulness of a background in tech, and the future of political activism in the Internet age.

How did you initially get involved with this project?

Moving it forward was almost accidental. I reconnected with [Jennifer Nix], an old friend from San Francisco. She had previously written for The Nation, AlterNet and she worked as a published [of Glenn Greenwald’s How Would a Patriot Act?]. She told me that she was starting a blog. She was pretty involved in politics. She wanted me to write about music. We exchanged all of these emails and talked about the possibility of writing about politics.

I had thought that I would be the perfect case-study of someone blogging about politics because I used to be politically active but I have since started to feel more disenfranchised and powerless over the years. I am pretty liberal, but I have never been a registered Democrat. I actually used to be a registered Republican.

I always had issues with the Democratic Party’s top down mentality in terms of how they do business. They spend all of this time getting people ready for their GOTV efforts and organize with a top-down goal in mind. I thought that the run-up to the war was a perfect example of this. They just weren’t listening to their people.

I had first heard of superdelegates in 1992 and the concept stuck in my craw since then. You think about the fact that all of this power is isolated into the hands of the few and it makes you furious. One morning I sent Jennifer an email about how I wanted to get involved and I described what I saw happening with all of this. I wanted to keep an eye on superdelegates and who they were endorsing against how their constituencies had voted. I wasn’t expecting that within a week and a half we would have had coverage in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. I was rather shocked. But she had reached out to Chris Bowers from Open Left and he got into it. Then Congresspedia got on board, and there we were.

It is really interesting that you expressed this discomfort with the top-down leadership of the Democratic Party and your solution was essentially to shake that up by decentralizing efforts using wikis and other Internet technologies. Had you long been looking at wikis as a solution to these sorts of problems?

I use Wikipedia as a reader. I’ve only changed an article about three times and it was here and there to fix factual errors. I have had a few other ideas for wikis but they never really had anything to do with politics. I was just ticked about the superdelegate issue–that there were 800 elite people whose opinions were all that really mattered. If someone else had organized this, I would have been happy. I wasn’t really looking to do a lot of free work but somebody had to do it. The idea was out there begging for someone to do it. This project just applied everything–the need, the tools, and the desire–that were already out there. I just applied what was suited to the task.

I guess you reach a point where you see where you fit and you say, “I have to do this.” Without Jen’s participation, this wouldn’t have gone anywhere. I credit her more than me. She asked, “Who are my connections? Who can get it momentum?

How much work goes into maintaining a project like this?

There is a massive amount of work that goes into tracking, matching info, getting citations and working with sources, etc. It’s been a long time since I have had exposure to statistics like these.

There was an article in The Nation about the project that mentioned a pediatrician who works on the wiki and I don’t know him. There are all these people doing this work that I don’t know.

My work had been on an as-I-can-do-it basis. At the start I was working 10 hours a day and 7 days a week. In March and April, I backed off a little too because I was trying to launch another site. I built the original but then we moved it over to CP and they were doing a ton of work. Thankfully, my roll had quickly diminished.

Do you have a background in organizing?

Not in terms of community activism. In my 20s I used to volunteer at the YMCA in Pennsylvania. It was a youth program called Youth In Government that tried to make young people more involved in the political process. I was an advisor there for five or six years. So there was this theory that there is this big process that you, too, can be involved in and I believed that model for a while. Then in the late 90s I began feeling that it wasn’t true.

Geraldine Ferraro’s statements about the superdelegate process exposed a core philosophy of old school Democrats that is still prominent and makes me feel like I was right for feeling apathetic. I hadn’t voted for a while despite agreeing with the things the Democratic Party believes. I have done one-off projects but you could never have said that I was a community organizer. This all was a new venture for me. I was more of a technology person; that is my professional background. I guess the real reason for me getting into any of this was because in my professional career I have a knack for figuring out creative applications for technology.

How has that background helped you in this particular campaign?

In one case, at [a telecom] I was working for, we had a severe need for assistance with service activation unit teams. We had this severe need for help and there was no system offered. Our teams were using spreadsheets and it wasn’t very productive. I was championing for the department internally, but there was this feeling that nothing could be done in this situation. So I started dorking around with other systems and after being told that they wouldn’t be able to straighten out this backed up system for nearly a year and a half, I reconfigured another system so that it could be done there in a fraction of the time. Long story short, It took a developer three hours to put it into action.

When I look at other problems, I look at them coming from this background. I ask myself, “What else is possible?”

What do you see in the future of organization, politics, and the Internet?

I talked about this a bit in a Huffington Post piece a few days back. What we saw in 2004–the Meetup and the Dean and Trippi tactics–really set things into motion. Obama has taken that model and maxed it out in terms of where it is going. What I think is going to happen in the next four to six years is that you will see an emergence of those kinds of activities reaching beyond the electoral context. It will find its way into the legislative process.

Look at a lot of of the laws that get passed. Nobody reads them. Someone does read them for the lawmakers, but there is largely this escape of accountability. What is emerging in the next few years is that folks online will dissect the laws at the committee level. People will take through the laws section by section. They will be dissected and so-forth. Maybe I am over-shooting or over-optimistic, but I think that it is an opportunity to change our relationship with the government.

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The Australian Media discusses Chinese Bulletin Board hacktivism.

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While Superdelegates are the banes of the existence of anyone who just wants to see what’s happening on the news, some folks who find the existence of this institution to be “archane” are trying to figure out how to make its decision-making methods somewhat more transparent. It is all going down through the use the mysterious power of the Internet by way of the Superdelegate Transparency Project. The Nation reports. Monitoring citizen media in the developing world can be something of an overwhelming task. Juliana Rotich, a Kenyan blogger who does just this, discusses the integration of web tools and global activism. PBS highlights the work of Ryan Mark and Brian Boyer, programmer journalists based at Medill, whose experience illustrate efforts to teach journalism via Word Press. Discussed is a favorite topic of Make Something Happen: Information and news aggregation. And because looking into past through the lens of having lived through a time of hyper-accelerated evolution by way of information technologies is so fun, a gander at what The Age was saying about the future of taking organization, action and activism online back in the summer of 2002 (before Friendster!).

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