I'm Justin Ruben, MoveOn's organizing director. The fact that there's a conversation happening here about MoveOn's organizing model is pretty damn exciting. I imagine it's kind of like the moment three Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans first encountered each other on the internet--"You mean, there are OTHER people who want to discuss this thing I spend 24hrs a day thinking about?!"

Certainly, for MoveOn, it's a very important discussion.

Put simply, people working together, in the real world, can be powerful.

The purely online actions MoveOn members do together--signing petitions, doing phone calls, raising money to run ads--are great. But they work better when they're paired with things that are harder--organizing a rally, running a voter turnout drive in your neighborhood, meeting with an editorial board, etc. Few people will do these things just because MoveOn asks them to via email.

So over the last four years, we've worked to blend elements of traditional, "old school" organizing models with our online, email-based model. That means adding in ongoing leadership development, groups of folks working together on the ground over time, local volunteer structure, person-to-person accountability, training in skills like recruitment and facilitation, etc.

It's been a process of trial and error, and we DEFINITELY have a lot to learn.

Which is why this conversation is so great. So I want to lay out what I see as some of the most interesting and exciting questions we face. To get there, I want to clarify what our actual organizing model is, and to correct some misconceptions about how we organize that I think are getting in the way of fruitful discussion.

First of all, what's our organizing model?

I think the thing that most folks are familiar with is, lots of folks are on the MoveOn list, and they take the actions which motivate them--calling congress on issues like the war, signing petitions, writing letters-to-the-editor, making or rating ads, donating to progressive candidates, going to houseparties to watch progressive films, etc.

There's also an amazing group of volunteers who do skilled work together to make the organization run--for example, our "support team" who handle many complex requests members have, and during the last election ran a support hotline that fielded thousands of calls from other volunteers.

Then there are the MoveOn councils--in over 200 cities, MoveOn members work together through their local council to organize local events like rallies, district meetings, town halls, vigils, etc. These are coordinated by a national team of 70 truly amazing volunteer organizers, the Regional Coordinators, who in turn are recruited and trained by a national paid organizing staff of nine.

These councils actually grew out of the precinct teams that formed during MoveOn's '04 election campaign, when members in 10,000 swing-state neighborhoods ran a major neighbor-to-neighbor voter turnout drive, powered by 500 paid short-term organizers hired through our partner, Grassroots Campaign, Inc.

After the election volunteers were eager to keep working together. With our small-donor-powered fundraising model, we couldn't afford to keep anywhere near that many organizers on staff. So we set about building a model of organization that used relatively few organizers for the things that organizers are really good for--one-on-one leadership development and accountability, for example--while relying on "scalable" online email organizing for things like recruitment, information flow and distributing materials.

It turns out combining online email-based organizing with staff-driven, "old-school" organizing isn't easy. Some experiments, such as "congressional district captains" and neighborhood teams, failed outright. But eventually we morphed the neighborhood teams into city-wide councils, which worked better. We began focusing on creating a new layer of skilled volunteer organizers to work with local volunteers. We developed new tools for folks to run more effective actions locally. Now we have a pretty unique model.

With only 10 organizing staff, MoveOn's councils can, for example, organize a few hundred news conferences or rallies on a single day. We've also focused heavily on developing our rapid-response capacity, allowing thousands of our members to act together within a news cycle to help shift the frame or inject a progressive message--something that is, unfortunately, all too rare in our movement.

And contrary to the claims by some in this forum that MoveOn doesn't really do leadership development, our organizing model depends entirely on highly skilled volunteers who put in lots of time and themselves are actively developing other volunteer leaders. Few organizations I've worked with depend this much on, and put this much trust in, volunteer leaders.

One other question this begs, of course, is that of decision-making. Some folks in this forum have either said, or implied, that what we do isn't really organizing (or movement building) because it's not formally democratic. It's an important issue.

On the one hand, our Regional Coordinators and our local leaders drive our agenda along with our membership as a whole. Lots of our ideas bubble up from the field. We consult our leaders before launching many of our campaigns and actions. When we take on an issue, we make sure through surveying or an actual vote that there is a member mandate to act.

On the other hand, the members can't vote for the board. They have to live with how we frame the questions. They can desert the staff, but they can't fire us. As small "d" democrats, we should weigh seriously the benefits and drawbacks of this model. I can imagine that at some point we may add more formal democratic mechanisms to MoveOn and it may make us stronger. This debate is as old as the Left and we shouldn't put it aside.

That said, having been part of organizations with very different forms of decision-making--from consensus driven spokescouncils and collectives, to formally democratic unions, to non-profit advocacy groups, I've never been in any organization that was more focused on trying to always figure out and do precisely the thing that would most excite and motivate and serve the members of that group.

I want to address one final misconception--the notion that we're marketing or mobilizing, but not really bringing new folks into the movement.

When I joined the MoveOn staff in '04, I figured I was mostly going to be helping to network together committed activists--people who were already politicized and "activated" and were now using MoveOn as a way to take action together. I couldn't have been more wrong. In every gathering I went to, person after person raise their hand and say "I've never done anything like this before, but..". But I got this email from a friend. But I got a call from this MoveOn organizer. But I heard about this houseparty, and I decided to check it out.

Our surveys confirmed it -- the majority of people volunteering had never done anything similar previously. Others had been inactive since the anti-war movement 30 years earlier. And I'm still hearing stories about how folks who got involved or trained during that campaign have gone on to start other organizations--or have become local MoveOn leaders and brought many others into the movement.

Since 2004, I've had that same experience--every MoveOn campaign is full of folks who are new to activism on every campaign we've done.

This is no accident. MoveOn's model works well for bringing in new folks because 1) we grow by viral spread, so we give a lot of focus to issues that people are excited enough about to pass on to a friend, and 2) our scalable model isn't easily overwhelmed by big influxes of people during high-energy moments. (As anyone who's ever tried to volunteer for a campaign only to never get a phone call back can attest, traditional organizations can definitely get swamped when energy spikes).

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OK. So. Where DO we need to evolve? What are the questions we need to figure out, together, that will help move MoveOn's organizing to the next level and strengthen the progressive movement in the process?

Let me offer a few of the questions we're wrestling with on the staff. Hopefully these can spark more conversation:

• In an environment where MoveOn is attacked by the right for any misstep, how can we foster more local organizing and start-up campaigns without endangering the brand that MoveOn members have worked hard to build?
• And how do we allow members to organize local MoveOn campaigns quickly and agilely, without ending up in a situation where a minority of folks end up taking positions in MoveOn's name that the majority of MoveOn members in the area wouldn't agree with?
• Online organizing makes it easy to gather lots of reputational data--e.g. what people think about each other, after they interact at a houseparty or online. Can we use that reputational data to help elevate those folks to leadership that others actually want to follow?
• How do we do rapid response with an organizing model that's primarily volunteer driven--when the leaders often have day jobs and/or aren't available on a moment's notice?
• Can we use scalably organized social activities--book clubs or playdates or bar nights--to dramatically "thicken" the relationships between MoveOn members, or progressives in general, in ways that inrease our capacity to work together on concrete political goals?
• Is there a way to build and sustain neighborhood level organization using online tools and a scalable model--given that the traditional method--intensive staff organizing support--is incredibly expensive?