Across the country, the Obama campaign is doing the work most progressive advocacy organizations gave up on years ago: organizing. Yet it was by organizing that we built the civic infrastructure that fueled the great social movements that have shaped our politics. When Sam Adams' Sons of Liberty launched its "Solemn League and Covenant" pledge drive to commit individuals to a boycott of British goods, its real impact was not on the Brits, but on building a powerful organizational infrastructure that sustained a virtually non-violent revolution across New England. In other words, organizing not only mobilizes individual resources to solve a problem, it creates a collective capacity to shift the power asymmetries responsible for the problem in the first place.

Organizing is based on the development of leadership; i.e., people who accept responsibility for engaging others in collective action on behalf of common purposes in the face of uncertainty. They bring people together, build new relationships among them, and create new understanding, especially of common interests. This constituency can then commit the resources to act on these interests. Organizing, then is as much about discerning what needs to be done - and why - as it is about doing it; it is about motivating the unmotivated, as well as deploying resources of the motivated; it is about commitment to horizontal relationships, especially across differences, as it is about commitment of an individual resource of a signature, a dollar, an email, or a phone call.

In its early years, the founders of MoveOn recognized that in the absence of organizing, a communications vacuum had emerged that left motivated individuals with no strategic way to contribute. Using the Internet, one could contribute their money or their voice to a targeted collective effort on behalf of a particular issue. People self-recruited, MoveOn staff decided strategy, and if "members" didn't like the direction, they could vote with their "feet" (or their mouse). By aggregating individual voices, MoveOn could both enhance their impact and achieve results.

So what was missing?

Organizing change demands a way not only for the motivated to express themselves, but also for the motivated to engage the unmotivated; a way not only to aggregate individual preferences, but to develop a shared understanding of common preference; a way not only to do what is asked, but also to participate in devising strategy as to what to ask. And it demands the development of leadership skilled in these democratic arts. What if Sam Adams had persuaded thousands to sign a boycott petition, but failed to organize his constituency?

It is not that MoveOn leaders do not recognize these limitations. In fact, they have been struggling with the reality that political change requires more than one email mobilization after another. In 2004 they undertook a major effort to recruit, train, and deploy precinct leaders to get out the vote. Although it may have increased turnout, it was intended to be yet another mobilization, this one face to face, but lacking any long-term commitment to transform it into a self-governing organization. More recently, as a result of local activists who did want to organize, they have experimented with ways to encourage "members" to work with each other to achieve local objectives. This is constructive, but moving from a mobilizing to an organizing organization will require a major investment in leadership development - a challenging task if participation in the governance of their organization is not one of the benefits of membership.

We can only hope that after this election, MoveOn leaders will learn from the organizing the Obama campaign has begun to do, perhaps take advantage of it, and commit to building the genuinely representative organization that the progressive movement sorely needs.
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