As I was Googling for something from an old work project, I stumbled across this interview with Marshall Kirkpatrick from 2006. Marshall and I had met a few years before at the Nonprofit Technology Conference. He has gone on to become a leading blogger on new media issues and is now a Senior Writer at ReadWriteWeb. I’m pleased to say that I think what I said still makes sense over 5 years later, and I would give nearly the same advice today (in principle).

Bridging The On-Line Real-World Gap: An Interview With Ruby Sinreich Of Netcentric Campaigns

Ruby Sinreich is the Web Maven at Netcentric Campaigns, a division of Green Media Toolshed. She is also the founder and editor of OrangePolitics.org, a progressive multi-author blog about politics based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Previously, she was the Online Organizing Manager in the Public Policy Division of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.Ruby and I talked in the following interview about Netcentric Campaigns and building an effective on-line strategy to support off-line, real world political organizing.

Ruby:

Network-centric advocacy is based on a philosophy of empowering the grassroots, your supporters, the “network.” We try to build strong networks between activists so they collectively form an effective movement. There are five aspects that we think are necessary for effective social networks

1. You must have strong social ties so that the members trust each other and know who (with what skills) is in the network. Friendster/MySpace/Orkut/etc. are one way to build social ties, but so are in-person gatherings. Happy hours can also build your movement.
2. There needs to be a common story that ties members together. They should have a shared sense of what the problem or what the goal is. This can vary widely, it might be a generally shared value, or it might be a mutual bad guy.
3. There has to be a dense communication grid so folks have many ways to meet and communicate with each other. Blogs and social networking tools are a part of this, so are instant messaging and face-to-face gatherings.
4. The members should share resources with each other. This could be money, space, information, etc. Like a directory that members can access, or sharing expertise.
5. Finally there should be a sense of purpose so the network members know what the network is for. So they think of it as a tools for collective action or whatever the goal is.

Marshall:

It seems that there has been work to bridge the online world and the offline world for progressive causes for at least a few years now. Are there specific lessons that have been learned that have changed the way that you now advise organizations to, for example, build strong social ties with online and off or build a common story?

Ruby:

I don’t really think much about the distinction between on- and off-line. When we know our goal and our strategy, that leads us to tools which may or may not be online. We want to use a lot of online social networking and self-publishing because it’s very supportive of the kind of ties we want to build.

The internet itself is very network-centric (at least right now) so it lends itself to organizing in this way.

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