This week’s guest-poster Justin Massa will be liveblogging the from the National Commission on Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity’s first hearing on Tuesday, July 15th. The the Miami Valley Fair Housing Center is video streaming the day as well. 

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Late last year, The Economist touched on the ways that mobile phone users were “mastering the tricks of the mobile trade” with regard to protesting in the Philippines, Sao Paulo, and Jena, Louisiana. While the piece suggests that “pioneers of mobile telephony and texts as tools of protest and dissent” find “simply summoning people to demonstrations” to be “old hat,” I continue to run into individuals, groups and organizations via email, on blogs and at conferences that care to better integrate text messaging into their actions, both private and public, but still have no idea where to start.

Having in the past spoken with Katrin Verclas and Tad Hirsch about the exciting work they’re documenting and accomplishing with the use of mobile technology, it is easy to see how people would be excited by engaging in similar action. Getting started, however, can be an understandably confusing endeavor. Mobile Commons, geared to the organization, and Anyvite, geared towards individuals and groups, are two great starting points for the mobile-interested person who finds themselves starting from scratch.

Campaigns that are in a situation where they think that they might want to organize their users by utilizing mobile technology should keep an eye on Mobile Commons, a New York City based start-up that builds infrastructures designed to help organizers connect with users via the user’s mobile phone. Their tool set makes it possible for users to opt into campaigns simply by SMSing key words related to the campaign. Representatives from Mobile Commons showed me one campaign they had worked with where users could find information about the fish they were eating simply by texting the word “fish” to a particular number. By having them opt in, users can then be sent information, locations for action, and other information useful and related to the campaign. Further, campaigns can ask for information about the user in order to build user lists.

Mobile Commons, by all appearances, struck me as extremely user friendly and operable by nearly everyone. In addition to working with the ACLU, the Human Rights Campaign, The Sierra Club and many other campaigns, they also work with private companies as well.

Also interesting, though this more relevant to the individual, is Anyvite. The service, which TechCrunch very recently gave a positive review, is geared more towards individuals and leisure-oriented groups and it makes it possible for a group to edit an event on the go. Users are no longer bound to the one event, saved the way it was when organizers brainstormed it back at the laptop. Would you like to change the location of where you’re meeting? Want to change paint ball to football? Anyvite users are kept up to date with event edits via SMS, meaning no one will be left in the dark as users will remain up-to-the-minute informed via text message. This is a lovely departure from older, more traditional electronic invites and it is clearly more-geared to group action – As TechCrunch says – it is “sort of like a Twitter for groups.”

It’s a mobile jungle out there. Knowing where to start, for individuals and for organizations, is a sizable chunk of the battle.

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Will the Millennial generation be able to buck the hyperindividualist tendencies with which they were instilled thanks to 80s and 90s political mentalities? Will they be able to avoid getting in their own way when pushing forward for collective change? I have heard this question time and again and yesterday, as featured in our news links, Sally Kohn, senior campaign strategist with the Center for Community Change, addressed the issue in an op-ed for the Christian Science Monitor.

“The lone cowboy story was a myth,” writes Kohn, recognizing and celebrating the Millennial’s shift towards an embrace of collective action. I had a similarly themed conversation as early as last week with Josh Levy of Change.org, where we discussed our simultaneous appreciation for how awesome the movie Iron Man was while also marveling that it exists as yet another continuation of the dated mythology that suggests “one great hero will save us all.” Enabling collectivist political and social behaviors is impossible without the connectivity provided by Internet technologies, the Millennials are moving beyond that myth. As Douglas Rushkoff said at this year’s Personal Democracy Forum, “You can either be an in-charge individual, or an in-charge collective,” and this generation has showed which side they prefer.

I agree with Kohn’s caution, and believe it important to keep a close eye on the Millennial’s tendencies towards the hyperindividual (Kohn suggests that the Internet is a tool of the individualist). The Millennials are a generation struggling with its own identity. Further, I agree with Kohn’s assertion that the Millennials must be cautious with regard to how we move forward as a collective by taking as many of their actions offline as possible. They must strive to participate in as many face-to-face ways as they can, so as to strengthen a connection that goes beyond familiarity with screen names. It is important that the Internet is consistently embraced as a tool, not a single answer, with regard to increasing civic engagement and degrees of social capital.

Where Kohn’s assertion gets tricky, however, comes when she claims that “the Internet does not bind individuals in shared struggle the same as the face-to-face activism of the 1960s and ’70s did.” Generational comparisons as measures of success are both tricky and dangerous. This mirrors an argument I have heard time and again between the 50+ crowd and Millennials themselves—an argument centered around an expectation held by the elder collectivists that believe that since the youth are not rioting in the streets ala France in May of ‘68, something isn’t going right. Unfortunately for that argument, May, 1968 is as mythical as the proverbial lone cowboy.

On the 40-year anniversary of said summer, it is sexy to remember all of the radicalism that took place all over the world, but in doing so, it is easy to forget that in the US, many of the fruits of that particular movement weren’t as attractive as we care to remember. There were, of course large successes with regard to “the culture war” and the movement towards a stronger civil rights policy, but the rise of Nixon’s “silent majority,” the cultivation of distrust in government and the collective, and an eventual embrace of the hyper individualism that we’re now trying to re-imagine also came out of it. It is important, as Kohn points out, to be sure that the Millennials are careful to embrace as many opportunities for face-to-face action as possible, be they opportunities provided by Meetups, using Couchsurfing, flash-mobbing, or other available tools and mechanisms. We must be careful, though, to not get too hung up on measuring the successes of this generation by the foggy, glamorized spectacle of the ones that came before.

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On this day, June 30th, 2008, the news brings to our attention a grassroots cry for help to Bob Barr, a reminder that “real change” happens offline, a look at what happens when you make the netroots angry, and much, much more.

• Sally Kohn, senior campaign strategist with the Center for Community Change, reminds us to log off once in a while.
• It looks like Bob Barr’s supporters would like to see him read Ms. Kohn’s article.
• With regard to environmental issues, Chinese Millennials are starting to make something happen.
• Don’t piss off the Netroots.
• Community organizes to help family (aw).
• With regard to mobs, does ’smart’ necessarily equate ‘wise’?
• Perhaps you’d like to know the (speculative) future of e-politics.
• And finally, want to win a campaign? Bring a camera

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Here are some other places to check out great PDF2008 coverage.

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17 teenage girls at Gloucester High School in Gloucester, Massachusetts are pregnant. Time Magazine reports that some adults “dismissed the statistic as a blip,” while others blamed media glamorization of young, unwed motherhood. It has been revealed, however, that the regional boost in youth pregnancy was attributable to a pregnancy pact made between the young girls.

Often considered in any discussion of effective collective action is the concept of safety/strength in numbers. By moving forward with an otherwise radical action side by side with many co-conspirators, potential adverse reaction is assumed to be diluted, if not diminished completely, when distributed over many perpetrators rather than a few. Further, by many perpetuating an otherwise perceived devious action, an image of normalcy can then be associated with the action when many participate.

While two teen moms from the area, unrelated to the pact, have come out to call the pact “dumb,” I wonder how ingenious the proposed agreement sounded to the girls in the planning stages. It is likely that the allure of such a pact was rooted in the perception of safety in numbers that was imagined to be inevitable when a certain critical mass of expecting mothers showing up to school was reached. These teenagers, believing that motherhood would bring to their lives something they felt was otherwise missing, believed that they would make deliberated teenage pregnancy a non-deviant, normal action by moving forward together.

Herein we ask, at what point does safety in numbers cross from being a successful tool for collective action into being an inhibitor on reason?

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“The interesting thing with the Internet and online promotion is that for the longest time, corporations have been stealing underground methods of advertisement. They were absorbing methods of dissemination, ones we basically created because we were broke, into their own marketing tactics. For the first time, we are in a position so subvert their tactics of dissemination for our own benefit. For the first time, using Facebook and email tools, I feel like I am on a similar playing field.”

-Joe Ahearn of SleepWhenDeadNYC.

“Don’t underestimate Facebook,” says Joe Ahearn of the social networking site.

[Along with Entertainment4Every1 and showISmonster] SleepWhenDeadNYC, led by Ahearn, put together a huge show that was scheduled to take place at the Jamaica Bay Research Wildlife Preserve. Over 10 bands were slated to preform and over 400 people had RSVPed via Facebook. However, a little over twelve hours before the show was to go off, the weather report pushed the Parks Department to revoke the permit that SleepWhenDead had worked for over a month to procure. It would be another month before they could host another show.

Fortunately for them, with less than a day to maneuver, they moved the show to an accommodating venue in Brooklyn. What trouble did they run into along the way to doing so?

In the past, Ahearn has used a mailing list service and worked with a “decently sized” list, though he was recently booted for “not properly documenting” how he collects his subscribers. And since there is a cap on how many emails can be sent through Gmail in a day (500), his 1000-contact-strong mailing list is too big to manage there.

So in this event, he turned to Facebook.

“One of the bands started the [Facebook] ‘event.’ As a side-note, when I organize these things, I don’t usually let people see [the RSVP list]. ‘Cause I invite 900 peoople and if it looks like not a lot of people are going to show up, I don’t want someone to think, “Oh shit. Uh…” and not come.

“This one was big. Right before show got moved, 400 people marked that they were going to be there. But it was opened under this other kid’s page and if it is opened from by someone else, they have to make you an administrator [and that didn't happen]. So I kept calling him over the past two weeks telling him to make me an admin, but he didn’t know how to. And it was frustrating, especially when it came to moving the show around.”

Fortunately, at the last minute, the message was disseminated accordingly by various folks related to the show and it was an overwhelming success.

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This afternoon I talked to a friend of mine who manages a non-profit alternative arts venue. Folks who frequent the place expressed concern about the cups the venue uses for beer, soda, and other beverages, which aren’t environmentally friendly. Alternative cups, made of corn, cost nearly three times as much as plastic cups cost. This makes for an interesting ethical quandary: when a non-profit arts venue like this already operates on something of a shoestring budget as it is and, and it, like any other non-profit is struggling in today’s economy, how much priority should it put on making strict, environmentally concerned concessions when this might mean cutting the already low pay of staffers or in this case? What if it means potentially closing the door on some artists because it is no longer affordable to sustain low-profit yielding shows?

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Justin Massa, the executive director of MoveSmart, is liveblogging the National Fair Housing Alliance/Leadership Conference on Civil Rights annual conference in DC this week.

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A note to activists and organizers on the importance of not burning out.

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