The Occupy Movement morphs and keeps going

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/6/occupy-movement-inequalitysystemicchange.html

"Many veterans of the 2011 movements nevertheless continue to believe that their electoral systems have become so broken that real change must come from outside. Rather than just making an end-run for government office, they believe they need to rebuild the economy and political structure, starting at the level of local communities and growing upward from there. That’s where some of the most interesting activism is happening.
Occupy alums have been especially busy promoting worker cooperatives, whose earnings tend to stay in local communities rather than being siphoned to big banks. One of the first enterprises to grow out of Occupy Wall Street was a worker-owned print shop, and in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Occupy activists helped affected communities set up their own cooperative businesses in order to be more resilient against the rich developers who arrived in the wake of the storm. Occupiers in Boston have been working with a non-profit called the New Economy Coalition to support new cooperative projects. People from around the country attended the Jackson Rising conference in Mississippi last month, which focused on using cooperatives to build lasting economic power in black communities hit hard by the last financial crisis. This so-called New Economy movement has been growing for years, but Occupy brought a new generation into it."

I admire the Occupy movement. They tried something. It worked to a degree, but they were basically squashed. So now they try other things and keep going.

What happens when low-wage earners suddenly get a raise

http://gothamist.com/2014/06/05/living_wage_casino_workers.php#.

"Before the contract I was at $11.68 an hour, and when the raise came in I started making $21.67. Before I was making less than $300/week and after, it was $575. It helped a lot.
Before the raise, a lot of times I fell behind on my rent payments. It was a dilemma: which was more important, food or bills? So I made the bills and I'd buy whatever food I could afford afterwards. Luckily, my aunt lives here, so any time I was hungry I could go by her place and she could give me dinner or lunch. I'm very lucky I have family.
I'm 50 years old, and I don't have too many other options for work, but I appreciate this job. I'm always on time. I got sick a few weeks ago, I had a fever of 102, and I called my boss and he said "OK, we understand." We have better health insurance, better protection for the employees.
It's a tremendous change, getting this contract. Right now there are so many people living in poverty each week, doing what I did, struggling. Do you pay rent or do you eat? This country is a very rich country, with a lot of rich people, but so many are in poverty. It's only right that people who work hard get what they deserve. The minimum wage has got to go up. If it goes up, it makes a huge difference! The minimum wage has gotta go up."

Employees are people too.  Without them shareholders would be holding worthless paper.

People Power is overrated?

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117091/ukraine-and-other-people-powered-revolutions-are-overrated

"This is not to deny the emotional force of the protests. Anyone who has ever attended a rock concert or a football game knows how much fun it is to be part of a roaring crowd. The experience is far more intense when you are standing in a crowd that might change history. Since the eighteenth century, philosophers have tried to describe the hallucinatory power of a mass movement. When Michael Walzer interviewed American civil rights activists they all told him the same thing about protests: 'It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.' It is precisely because he understands the euphoric power of crowds—and especially because he understands how they can embolden people cowed by an unjust state—that Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, is so determined to prevent Ukraine’s revolution from spreading.

Yet a successful street revolution, like any revolution, is never guaranteed to leave anything positive in its aftermath—or anything at all. In the West, we often now associate protests with progress, or at least we assume that big crowds—the March on Washington, Paris in 1968—are the benign face of social change. But street revolutions are not always progressive, positive, or even important. Some replace a corrupt tyranny with violence and a political vacuum, which is what happened in Libya. Ukraine’s own Orange Revolution of 2004–2005 produced a new group of leaders who turned out to be just as incompetent as their predecessors. Crowds can be bullying, they can become violent, and they can give rise to extremists: Think Tehran 1979, or indeed Petrograd 1917.

The crowd may not even represent the majority. Because a street revolution makes good copy, and because it provides great photographs, we often mistakenly confuse “people power” with democracy itself. In fact, the creation of democratic institutions—courts, legal systems, bills of rights—is a long and tedious process that often doesn’t interest foreign journalists at all. Tunisia’s ratification of a new constitution earlier this year represented the most significant achievement of the Arab Spring to date, but the agonizing negotiations that led up to that moment were hard for outsiders to understand—and not remotely telegenic."

People Power works and it helps people. But yeah, it might be overrated.

protest movements still need underlying structure

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/20/opinion/after-the-protests.html?_r=1

"Protests like this one, fueled by social media and erupting into spectacular mass events, look like powerful statements of opposition against a regime. And whether these take place in Turkey, Egypt or Ukraine, pundits often speculate that the days of a ruling party or government, or at least its unpopular policies, must be numbered. Yet often these huge mobilizations of citizens inexplicably wither away without the impact on policy you might expect from their scale.

This muted effect is not because social media isn’t good at what it does, but, in a way, because it’s very good at what it does. Digital tools make it much easier to build up movements quickly, and they greatly lower coordination costs. This seems like a good thing at first, but it often results in an unanticipated weakness: Before the Internet, the tedious work of organizing that was required to circumvent censorship or to organize a protest also helped build infrastructure for decision making and strategies for sustaining momentum. Now movements can rush past that step, often to their own detriment."

The basic point here is a good one.  The Internet makes gathering large protests much easier, so they happen more frequently. BUT, we can't lose sight of the fact that protests are a tool, not an end.  There must be some structure and some thought as to what the ultimate goal is for a movement to succeed. So while we can be amazed at the size of the muscle (protests), we have to also look for the bone, or the structure behind it.  I think this is a good way to look back at the Occupy movement.  There was a great job getting people on the street, but not enough built up behind it. I think a lot of Occupy people are now working on that structure, having caught the bug on the street.

"I am either out there, on barricades, or I am in Facebook."

http://boingboing.net/2013/12/23/euromaidan-a-facebook-revolut.html

"Now I am a rebel. Work, family, books, computer games - everything has been relegated to the backfround background. My wife supports me. Sometimes I am ready to start crying, reading a post on Facebook, and sometimes I shake with rage. I am either out there, on barricades, or I am in Facebook. It is the only news outlet I can trust. Sometimes it is nervous, sometimes depressive, or paranoid, sometimes full of romanticism, optimism, beautiful and tender stuff. Today it is angry.

It is Day 29 of #euromaidan. Imagine a medieval military camp on central square of a modern European city. It is cold, there is a central stage, there are free sandwiches and hot tea everywhere. Firewood is burning in oil barrels. It is clean and organised. Everyone is set, quiet, and free. Maidan at night.
Maidan is a Ukrainian word for square, or plaza, usually meaning the central plaza. Independence Square, Maidan Nezalezhnoti, where people went to prevent VFU from coming to presidency in 2004. Where people went to demand constitutional elections in 2010, when they were just about to be cancelled. So everyone knows where to go. I went, too."

   How Ukraine protests.  They seem to require a "leader" to organize on-the-spot protest tactics.  But they also simply rely on each other, for news, support, ideas.

Why did OWS choose to be leaderless? Comparing it to Civil Rights movement

http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2013/10/22/did-the-occupy-movement-reject-the-civil-rights-movement/


"Roughly speaking, the CRM deployed 'big organizations' in the pursuit of a clearly defined mission. The organizations were Black churches, political groups (e.g., the NAACP), and various labor and student groups. While there was no single leader, the CRM clearly has a leadership class that set the agenda and worked in a fairly top-down manner. It was also highly bureaucratic in that that they set a vast apparatus (the SCLC) to collect funds, conduct litigation, and distribute resources.
In contrast Occupy works on an explicitly decentralized plan. The movement strives to have a horizontal structure and leadership, in the traditional sense, is discouraged. There is no analog to the NAACP or CORE. It also has a very vague set of goals, at least in comparison to the CRM’s demands for voting rights and equality in housing and education."

I tried to deal with this regarding Anonymous' Project Chanology against Scientology in 2008.  They also did not allow "leader fagging."  One reason is that no one should receive more credit than any other person for the action, since it is a group action.  Another is that there is simply less need for designated leaders, since communication is so much simpler and cheaper now.  So I wouldn't say OWS rejected a method of organizing. I would say they utilized tools unavailable to the Civil Rights movement that made a leadership structure mute.

Crowd sourcing your civic duty

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theresa-bradley/el-hacker-civico-how-civi_b_4334088.html

"'We didn't just 'angry tweet,' we actually did something,' Soto, a 28-year-old IT engineer and social entrepreneur, said at the time.' Citizens need to understand democracy beyond voting every few years, and government needs to understand that we're willing to participate.'
Seven months later, Mexico's president appears to have heard them, hiring Soto and nine others to launch one of the world's first federal civic innovation offices, part of a broader national digital agenda to be formally unveiled today [Monday, 11/25, 1PM ET]. Building on a model pioneered in a handful of U.S. cities since 2010, Mexico's civic innovation team aims to integrate so-called 'civic hackers' with policy experts already inside government -- to not only build better technology, but to seed a more tech-minded approach to problem-solving across federal processes and policy. What began as outside activism is slowly starting to creep into government."

Making your tax dollars go further, one hack at a time.

collective action helps Philippines typhoon survivors

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/11/digital-drive-aids-philippines-relief-2013111554736683591.html

"Through a web-based platform, interactive maps created at headquarters are shared with local chapters who can then download the maps, turn layers of data on/off, and add additional data to tailor maps to their own needs.
'The American Red Cross has been utilising mobile data collection domestically in medium-scale disasters since 2007,' Banick said.
'Equipping and training field staff and volunteers to use GPS-enabled devices with pre-loaded damage assessment survey questions has enabled the production of digital maps that display survey results and photos of damaged areas.
'These maps can be updated in real-time as assessments are ongoing.'"

Volunteers, NGO's, and governmental bodies can work together to create helpful maps to show where help is needed most.  This saves on effort and helps with overall understanding of the facts on the ground.  Win-win for everybody!

cities get help from techie citizens

http://www.theguardian.com/local-government-network/2013/oct/01/cities-tech-us

"Local authorities in the United States can now engage with their communities in two-way dialogues achievable using smartphones, tablets, thanks to professionals embracing new managment models that focus on service delivery.
Thanks to well-developed GIS mapping systems, smartphones and tablets are helping enhance service delivery by allowing real time and location reporting of issues and service requests. For example, when citizens in Asheville, North Carolina want to report a pothole, streetlight failure or other problem, they can do so using a phone app developed for their community. The city of Philadelphia uses an app that lets people directly communicate their concerns and requests via social media.
In Utah, the city of Ogden has taken a different path with its smartphone app. The iOgden app also allows users to find local businesses and places of interest directly through their phone. By building features such as "eat here and shop here" into its app, the city has created a one-stop information destination for both residents and visitors."

Just make citizen input a little easier, and voila!  Citizens help out their own town.

Oakland California tries out direct democracy

http://www.shareable.net/blog/community-democracy-project-to-open-entire-city-budget

They're gonna give direct democracy a try.

What is the Community Democracy Project's plan? A participatory budgeting initiative to amend the city charter, which would go on the city ballot for the Nov 2014 election. It would create a direct democratic process for Oakland voters to be directly engaged in decisions around the budget. The platform for decisions and organizing is called the Neighborhood Assembly, which is a forum for education and engagement with the issues. It also allows residents and community organizations to interface with city staff and department representatives.
Residents 16 years and older that have attended at least one Neighborhood Assembly meeting can vote on the budget for allocation of general funds to each city department as a percentage. This will help get young adults engaged in decisions that affect them like parks, police, and after school programs. City Wide Committees, made up of very interested residents, would be established to deal with specific issues and to create proposals for spending discretionary funds that would also be voted on by city residents.
- See more at: http://www.shareable.net/blog/community-democracy-project-to-open-entire-city-budget#sthash.HX2wcbuX.dpuf

What is the Community Democracy Project's plan? A participatory budgeting initiative to amend the city charter, which would go on the city ballot for the Nov 2014 election. It would create a direct democratic process for Oakland voters to be directly engaged in decisions around the budget. The platform for decisions and organizing is called the Neighborhood Assembly, which is a forum for education and engagement with the issues. It also allows residents and community organizations to interface with city staff and department representatives.
Residents 16 years and older that have attended at least one Neighborhood Assembly meeting can vote on the budget for allocation of general funds to each city department as a percentage. This will help get young adults engaged in decisions that affect them like parks, police, and after school programs. City Wide Committees, made up of very interested residents, would be established to deal with specific issues and to create proposals for spending discretionary funds that would also be voted on by city residents.
- See more at: http://www.shareable.net/blog/community-democracy-project-to-open-entire-city-budget#sthash.HX2wcbuX.dpuf

What is the Community Democracy Project's plan? A participatory budgeting initiative to amend the city charter, which would go on the city ballot for the Nov 2014 election. It would create a direct democratic process for Oakland voters to be directly engaged in decisions around the budget. The platform for decisions and organizing is called the Neighborhood Assembly, which is a forum for education and engagement with the issues. It also allows residents and community organizations to interface with city staff and department representatives.
Residents 16 years and older that have attended at least one Neighborhood Assembly meeting can vote on the budget for allocation of general funds to each city department as a percentage. This will help get young adults engaged in decisions that affect them like parks, police, and after school programs. City Wide Committees, made up of very interested residents, would be established to deal with specific issues and to create proposals for spending discretionary funds that would also be voted on by city residents.
- See more at: http://www.shareable.net/blog/community-democracy-project-to-open-entire-city-budget#sthash.HX2wcbuX.dpuf