ACTIVISM SUPERHIGHWAY

On March 29, 1995, there was an explosion of activism on US college campuses. Typically quiet schools, like the University of Kentucky at Knoxville, Claremont College, Kansas State, and Bowling Green, saw large protests. At dozens of large schools like Yale and the Universities of Illinois, demonstrations drew hundreds of people.

More than 100 campuses in all participated in this "National Day of Campus Action Against the Contract With America" &emdash; an event spearheaded by the Center for Campus Organizing (CCO), the national campus activism clearinghouse based in Cambridge, MA where I work.

Some credit for this upsurge goes to Newt Gingrich, whose plans to shrink or eliminate many student aid, welfare, and environmental protection programs angered millions of economically vulnerable students. But much of the credit goes to the Internet, which CCO used to coordinate, publicize, and share ideas for the day of protest.

Just two years ago using the information superhighway to coordinate a national student protest would have been next to impossible. Internet access was often limited to a fraction of the student population engaged in technical research or computer classes.

1994 was the turning point. Suddenly a large majority of students at activist gatherings had "net" access. The Student Environmental Action Coalition, College Republicans, and opponents of California's Proposition 187 all were using e-mail (electronic mail) networks. In 1995 CCO joined the crowd, initially linking activists who had been working without email on educational rights, curriculum reform, and peace activism.

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How does one use the Internet for political organizing? In some respects the process is similar to conventional organizing. You seek out interested allies, call a meeting, set dates for events, and plan future meetings to develop literature, engage others, and handle details. A big difference with the Internet is that meetings are no longer limited by time or distance.

Here are ten suggestions based on our experience with March 29:

• Use Email, not the "Web." Although much recent attention has been lavished on the World Wide Web, which allows properly equipped Internet users to publish and view pages of text and graphics, the most promising technology for activists is still basic e-mail, since it is so widely accessible. With e-mail, there is no postage bill, and no need for "phone tag."

• Set up an "e-mail discussion list" A sympathetic computer system manager can help you establish a discussion that allows subscribers to send electronic mail to all other participants simultaneously. Participants check their mailboxes every day or two to read all the messages sent, or "posted," since the last time they logged in. National distribution of a message to hundreds of organizations can take less than fifteen minutes. We established a new discussion list expressly for the purpose of organizing a day of national action.

• "Seed" the list. It helps to personally invite some experienced organizers to join first, so that there is a "critical mass" of people who can offer advice to new organizers.

• Make it easy to subscribe. By circulating a short explanation without technical jargon on how to join the discussion, we attracted 300 participants quickly, many of whom were not e-mail experts.

• Allow the participants in the list to set the tone. We asked each new subscriber in early February to introduce themselves and explain why they were interested in the Contract With America. Introductions from hundreds of people &emdash; like Dina in New York, Pamela in Nebraska, Mark in Hawaii, and Trista in Kentucky &emdash; set a participatory precedent. With a week, subscribers voted on a proposal to set March 29 as the national day of action (it passed 20-4).

• Circulate a "call to action." At a weekend retreat, we drafted a stirring 2-page "call to action." After we sent it out initially by email, it was redistributed widely, helping to attract 1,200 participants on over 280 campuses to our main discussion.

• Compile an organizing packet We compiled the best organizing ideas &emdash; including the results of some face-to-face brainstorming sessions &emdash; into a fourteen part "organizing packet" that any Internet user could obtain in five minutes, again via e-mail. Campuses like Harvard who held their rallies early due to spring break provided same-day reports telling others what worked and what didn't.

• Have a facilitator. The ease of sending email is, ironically, one of the biggest problems. Left unchecked, email junkies can dominate debate by engaging in "wars of words" sending fifty or more messages per day. To eliminate this problem, we used a rotating "facilitator": someone with the responsibility to promote democratic participation and limit the posting of garbage. Many campuses also set up their own local electronic discussions for protest planning, on which the most relevant material from the national list was shared with a few dozen students from that particular campus.

• Pay attention to gender representation. One important role of a facilitator is to promote the participation of women if the discussion becomes dominated by men &emdash; a problem we saw even though women were 50% of subscribers.

Some issues associated with email cannot be so easily resolved. The lack of face-to-face communication makes it difficult to build personal relationships with others. Email is not very effective for quick decisions. It only works for consituencies that are on-line.

Alghough we did our best to overcome these limitations, we were unable to reach millions of young people who attend community colleges or who cannot afford college at all.

Yet e-mail has proven an effective way for groups engaged in similar activities on campus to exchange ideas with others around the country without incurring huge phone bills or plane fares. The March 29 "day of action" was successful largely because these groups were able to share in the creation of the event.

Now, hundreds of politically active student groups have established contact, demonstrating that the current generation of students is not as apathetic as they are often made out to be. And the potential has only begun to be realized.

[Rich retired from the Center for Campus Organizing (CCO) in 1997. CCO can be still reached in Boston at (617) 725-2886. And you can still get a blank copy of the "call to action" circulated for the March 29 action by sending a blank e-mail to call@pencil.cs.missouri.edu.]