A hypothetical Bridge Commission

No grassroots organization is an island.

We are in an ecology of groups.

These are my imaginings of the role and operation of a NorCal Kerry Bridge Department.

• Harvest new institutional relationships that can add value to the campaign. (Build bridges)
• Sustain those relationships through communication, activity, and reciprocal support. (Keep bridges)
• Exploit relationships to accomplish campaign goals, in concert with other departments of NorCal Kerry. (Use bridges)
• Retire relationships when they are no longer of use. (Close bridges)

There are hundreds of relationships to manage, just in the Bay Area. I imagine your recruiting volunteers to establish committees to manage the bridge life cycles for specific types of orgs.

Pulling numbers out of my hat:

1. Unions (150 locals, and regional leaders),
2. Democratic Clubs (20 clubs with 20 or more active members),
3. elected officials (2000 around the Bay Area),
4. X-for-Kerry (if they don't exist, foster them),
5. activist organizations (local Greenpeace, MADD, et al),
6. other Kerry/Dem groups (5-10 around the Bay Area).

We are more powerful together than apart.

How will these bridges contribute to our winning the election? Information, experience, volunteers, and other resources. We need office space to plan an event? 500 cheerleaders at a rally? Permits for a block party? Procedures for precinct walking in Hayward? A bus to Nevada for the weekend?

We can manage the risks, and the rewards are high.

What if we do nothing?

We're likely to create problems.

• Event conflicts.
• Voter fatigue.
• Message conflicts.
• Volunteer burnout.
• Wasted money.

We may have problems:  

• FEC rules govern what information we can share, what we can coordinate, what and how money is spent or resources used across organizational boundaries. We need to understand and manage those risks.   
• Empty relationships that waste time without yielding useful results.
• Burning bridges. It is very easy for personality mismatches or a bad day to spoil an entire inter-organizational relationship. We need methods that help us:
  • screen out likely firestarters on our side,
  • detect likely firestarters in partner organizations,
  • detect fires promptly, before they expand
  • prevent fires and
  • put out fires.

The Bridge Department's clearly the place for "relationship" people

What is the basis for forming organizational relationships?

1. Find what we have in common
2. Set aside what we don't have in common
3. Move forward

We must always recognize self interest. Frequently encountered:

• Recruiting. Especially for grassroots organizations, new and interesting ways to get new members. 
• Money.
• Visibility. Can we raise the profile of our partner? Have them sponsor or host events, projects, materials? 
• Money. 
• Credit. Will they get acclaim from people they need, respect, or admire? Will their membership hear praise and acknowledgement?
• Money.
• Activity. Some organizations need excuses to to do more than have meetings. Activity bonds members and solidifies members.

Organization

I see the Bridge Department as a committee of committees. With maybe 25 to 30 volunteers total for the Bay Area.

Six committees will be based on the type of partnership. A group working with elected officials would probably have a different style and approach than those working with activist groups or with unions.

1. Unions
2. Democratic Clubs and local Democratic Committees
3. elected officials and high profile endorsers
4. X-for-Kerry 
5. activist organizations
6. other Kerry/Dem groups

So we have relationships. How do we get things done? How do we create value for the campaign?

A Bridge Pass committee will funnel work between the Kerry organization and its partners. When you need a speaker for a "biotech" house party, the Bridge Pass committee will get the word to the appropriate liaisons. When a liaison reports back that a union local needs support for a rally, the Bridge Pass committee will connect them with the field volunteer committee.

IT requirements

1. Extranet private blogs. For each relationship, a weblog where the   partner organization and the Bridge liaisons can post items to each other,   cc'ing emails to the blog for a communal record. This is a private weblog.  
2. Extranet public blogs. These are again one per relationship. But   they are visible to the world. This is the face of the two parties working   together in public. They are only public after both parties agree to work with   each other.
3. Public blog for the Bridge Commission (doesn't that sound better   than department?) listing the public weblogs for each activated relationship.  
4. Partner organization profiles. Who they are, how to contact them,   what they need, how to work with them, what they can offer, notes on previous   encounters. Private to the Commission.
5. Shopping lists. Not just Craigslist classifieds, but a place for   liaisons to follow through on status.
6. Internal discussion. Blog/wiki/listserve combination.
7. Project status. I'm thinking about the simple Google internal   weekly status tool. Every week a system emails a web form to all employees.   They enter what they did last week into one field, what they're planning for   this coming week, and any problems or issues worth noting. They press "submit"   or "reply" and it's posted with all the other responses to a team web page.   Due first thing Monday morning. You can see the weekly archive and get a   snapshot of what's been going on and what's happening.

Comments

[Bob Jacobson, Grassroots for America]

Brilliant, Phil. You capture the urgency of the challenge and provide a solution to fit. I'm not a big fan of blogs, because they're so non-directed, but you work with what you have. No. 1 Question: how will you get funding or in-kind contributions to begin? I'm sure you've thought this through. -- Bob

[Phil Wolff]

No, I haven't thought the money through. While I suspects the components of a solution are free, integration won't be fast or polished without money. The pitch for money?

- Unified Democratic Coalitions are often too slow, barely coordinated, and leave resources untapped. The competitive advantage goes to the best team players. Winning in fundraising, membership recruitment, volunteerism, and media goes to the party with the better ongoing integration of its affiliated organizations. You have tools to enable volunteers and staff to become "An Army of One"; this helps your many armies work intelligently together.

- Secondary pitch: make this a for-profit business: if you are a commercial interest, use this toolkit to actively manage your business's ecology of organizational relationships. CRM but for partnerships. I think potential customers could include the private sector. For example, Harley-Davidson using these tools to help bikers organize their clubs, advocate to H-D for new features and services, coordinate activities, and recruit new members and riders.

[Valdis Krebs]

This white paper on building networks may be of assistance -- especially the 4 phases of network/bridge building. Although it focuses on connecting small businesses, it can be applied to connecting various types of small groups for a common purpose.

http://www.orgnet.com/BuildingNetworks.pdf

[Brian Sarrazin]

Phil, you’ve got it all here.

Your outline offers an appealing way to structure a 4th phase (from Valdis’s paper) network and I think your section on “relationship” people shows insight. As you and I discussed, human nature is rarely fully leveraged in technical designs. Structure is vital, but not necessarily causal. Ultimately, the information needs to flow, and self-interest, as you point out, is the answer. My personal sense is that with an adaptive system, we can get past dogma like this:

“It’s The People, Stupid!”
http://www.ventureblog.com/articles/indiv/2004/000475.html

… when, but only when, we are willing to relinquish some control. And to that end, Ito offers what I think is a very helpful perspective, perhaps you’ve seen it:

http://joi.ito.com/static/emergentdemocracy.html

The point I find most important here is actually within a quote he offers from Johnson (author of “Emergence”):

“Self-organizing systems use feedback to bootstrap themselves into a more orderly structure. And given the Web's feedback-intolerant, one-way linking, there's no way for the network to learn as it grows, which is why it's now so dependent on search engines to reign in its natural chaos.”

I believe we can structure a system that offers “two-way” linking by spurring people to be the link, by structuring our understanding of human motivation, and human foibles, into the design. A system that presents event/project formation/completion in an open, iterative way, such that the “environment” of volunteers “selects” with their activity/enhancement forces two-way linking via the most (if, like me, you agree with Nietzsche) compelling human drive of all: power.