I want to throw one last volley into the "what the MoveOn model is and isn't" conversation. (I'll write another post today to try and steer us back to the original questions Chris posed about the future, which I think are really vital as well.)

In his post, Marshall raises an important challenge, essentially arguing that the MoveOn model is great, but falls short of authentic organizing. My counter contention: While there's plenty of room for improvement, MoveOn is absolutely a vehicle for real organizing, and for real movement building.

The organizing methods are often different than those employed by pre-internet groups, but correspondence through email sure looks a lot different than correspondence with quill and parchment -- yet correspondence it is. In fact, that's precisely why this particular conversation is so worth having -it's actually about what traditional organizing principles can or cannot look like when applied in a modern, high tech context. And that questions is at the heart of building progressive power in the 21st century.

To prove my contention, I'll use the criteria for organizing from the modern authority on the subject I most admire: Marshall. (I'm not kidding, he really is. Plus my sister is something of a devotee and if I dissed Prof. Ganz she'd kill me.) And I'll try to answer Matt's call for evidence.

Here are the defining components of organizing Marshall identifies as missing in the MoveOn model:

Criteria # 1

Organizing change demands a way not only for the motivated to express themselves, but also for the motivated to engage the unmotivated;

Marshal seems to agree here that MoveOn facilitates the expression of the motivated, which is of course 95% of what MoveOn does. But what about offering means "for the motivated to engage the unmotivated?"

Wowzer. That's the other 95% of what MoveOn does. Think about MoveOn's growth: A motivated software geek named Wes sends a petition about impeachment to 60 friends. A few months later, half a million people have signed on because their motivated friends and family wrote them and asked them to. A highly motivated 21 year old kid named Eli sends an email in his pajamas asking for a reasonable response to 9/11 and another half a million people sign up, again because connected, motivated friends reached out to their less connected, maybe-or-maybe not motivated friends and asked them to take the leap. This chain of engagement has involved over 9.5 million people in the past 10 years.

But how often is it "motivated" engaging "unmotivated"? Not every time, but a whole heck of a lot of the time. I can't begin to tell you how often we heard stories about MoveOn being the very first way people got involved in politics, and they did so because someone they know asked - just like in traditional organizing. And once those people took an easy step in, like signing a petition, they got plugged into a stream of invitations to take bigger and bigger actions - writing letters to the editor of local papers, reaching out to voters, organizing meetings with their member of congress etc. Just like how littler asks lead to bigger ones in traditional organizing.

Also, MoveOn members reach out to new recruits using means well beyond email: In 2006 motivated MoveOn members made 7 phone calls to voters specifically identified through state-of-the-art micro targeting as being unmotivated. I once ran a campaign in which MoveOn members sent nearly 120,000 letters containing personal stories about how threatened programs like Medicare and Food Stamps affected their families to voters in key, swing-vote districts, asking those voters to get involved with the campaign. And the list goes on.

I'd further argue that the MoveOn model is perhaps uniquely well suited to empower the motivated to reach out to the unmotivated, because leveraging technology broadens their scope so far beyond their staff. In 2006 over 100,000 volunteers actually took voter-to-voter action with total staff network of less than 200. Traditional models just can't do that.

Criteria #2

a way not only to aggregate individual preferences, but to develop a shared understanding of common preference;

First, this is a good moment to make another point about the democracy question. I believe "aggregating individual preferences" refers to voting and polling, right? In my last post, I talked about the deep accountability that comes from members voting with their feet, a point Marshal references as well. But If forgot to mention how many major policy and operational decisions are also directly made by the membership.

On politics: Every single primary endorsement, for example, is left up to a direct member vote. MoveOn is working to elect Obama because 80% of the members voted to do so.

On practice: MoveOn only embarked on the ambitious 2004 and 2006 voter-to-voter election programs because members voted overwhelmingly for it.

On policy: One could site the "Positive Agenda" initiative when members voted on the top three proactive issues for MoveOn to prioritize in 2006 and beyond. And in 2007 the entire membership voted on which of two competing budget proposals the organization should support as part the anti-war campaign.

Just as a point of contrast, I'm reasonably certain the participants in Obama's organizing drive are never asked to vote on such definitional questions as which candidate to support, which positions the campaign will take on the issues, and whether or not the organizing should focus on the election.

Moreover, MoveOn staff poll a statistically representative sample of the membership before they do just about anything and follow the results pretty directly (as they have to according to the "deep accountability" principle discussed earlier).

But what about developing a "shared understanding of common preference"? This is referring to something much more deliberative and consensus building, right?

You could find that in the "Great Conversation" initiative of 2003, where MoveOn members called each other and had long discursive conversations about their hopes and vision for America, reported the results, and got see and discuss a national summary online.

Or you could look at the 2006 Positive Agenda effort which began with over 10,000 members gathered in 500 living rooms having blue sky conversations about the big goals they shared for the country. Each party voted and the results created the national ballot that we sent to the entire membership. We even designed the voting tool so that each ballot item had a lively online discussion associated with it during the vote.

Or there's the Great Ideas forum - a discussion board where members can post ideas and rate their agreement and assessment of importance for other ideas. MoveOn sends an email to a rotating 1% of the base every day to drive fresh input into this system and share ideas across the membership.

So, is there way more that could be done here? Absolutely. But deliberative preference sharing is not missing from the model - far from it.

Criteria # 3

a way not only to do what is asked, but also to participate in devising strategy as to what to ask.

A lot of this relates to the accountability, voting, and feedback points I've addressed earlier and for the sake of length I won't try to nuance a repetition here.

I do want to make it clear, however, that the member feedback does not just help staff pick between option A or B. The Great Ideas forum, the issues "tracking poll", the info@moveon.org feedback account, and even the deluge of anecdotal feedback the staff receives (heck I even read every single email that people sent when they hit "reply" to my mass emails) all combine to create a menu of options that correspond to member demand. It's up to staff to cook the options and serve them, yes, but if the members don't like the way it comes out they are quite quick to send it back to the kitchen and demand that they start again.

Here's a key point: A lot of this deliberative co-creation happens through technology, and so looks quite different than the traditional means of 1 on 1's or community meetings. It's fair to say the relationships built online may be weaker without that in person component. But this approach has the advantage of being open to very busy people from all walks of life in every corner of the national community that our country has become in the 21st century. And that's not a strength to be disregarded lightly.

Criteria # 4

And it demands the development of leadership skilled in these democratic arts.

I promise this is the last time I will say this, but that's the other 95% of what MoveOn does.

First, there's the MoveOn councils I've mentioned before. Over 200 of them now in every state run by local volunteers. These volunteers are learning through doing about everything from how to chair a meeting to how to recruit their neighbors to how a bill becomes a law to what it takes for local press to cover public actions.

And get this: MoveOn members have organized over 89,000 local events in the last 10 years. Seriously. Over 89,000 house parties, rallies, vigils, congressional meetings, press conferences, flyerings, media stunts, honk-and-waves, editorial board meetings, movie nights, community conversations and organizing meetings.

Every single one of those events taught the volunteer organizers and participants something invaluable and unarguably solid about "leadership in the democratic arts".

I can't count how many local events I've been to where a med student or a therapist or truck driver stands up and reads an agenda they wrote themselves with shaking hands and trembling voice to an audience of people they've just met. And I've seen that light of confidence enter their eyes when the gathered crowd nods and smiles, asks a few reasonable questions and then rolls up their sleeves, ready to get to work. Every single time I see that, I know our country is in good hands.

Samuel Adams, I think, was actually doing something similar when he set up his "committees of correspondence" to recruit members into the Sons of Liberty in the 1760s. And when he went from town to town in 1773 asking Sons of Liberty members if they were opposed to the tea tax, was that so different from polling MoveOn members? And when it was clear they opposed, and Adams led a group of activists aboard the HMS Dartmouth to dump the tea in the harbor that famed December night, was that so different from MoveOn members gathering to bird-dog targeted congressman in 2006 with giant foam red hands?

Well, yes. In that in the 1770's it took 10 months for the lesser known Annapolis Tea party to follow the Boston example. Today thousands of events can happen simultaneously around the country within days of pulling the trigger. And it took weeks or months to organize enough meetings to get a democratic read on any particular question - a process we can do with the click of a button.

Do we lose something in the translation? Surely. But the point is MoveOn, America, and the world are not going back. So while there will always be offline organizing and local efforts of every different stripe (and thank goodness for that) we've got to make the most of what the high tech world can do to bring together our national community from the bottom up.

MoveOn members, I believe, have created a very strong place to start. The real question, I contend, is not whether this is "real" organizing, but where this real organizing can take America next.