Ethan Zuckerman has posted a beautiful piece that stitches together many of the ideas we deal with in How To Win and the Center for Artistic Activism. I can’t recommend it enough:
Overcoming political polarization… but not through facts
It ties together polarization, confirmation bias, the media, David Simon and The Wire, and the need for addressing values and narrative before facts.
I’ll post it here for the sake of archiving: Continue reading
Activist Questionnaire Results
This is an attempt at a summary of the results of questionnaires, interviews and a focus group at the Dublin Grassroots Gathering in June 2008 on the theme of what is winning in horizontal activism. This was done to hopefully be part of a broader movement discussion on goals, strategies, and visions. Thanks again to everyone who participated. Long may the experiments continue! Queries and comments welcome. Thanks again!
At the Grassroots Gathering in June 2008 30 people filled in a questionnaire, 12 attended a focus group and 7 were interviewed on the topic what is winning? The question about what winning is was intended to be a way to focus in on activists and their groups’ long and short-term goals, strategy, obstacles and current optimism or lack of optimism. I also wanted to know if people would propose specific alternatives what these might be. This question also turned out to fit into a broader movement discussion as the journal Turbulence (see www.turbulence.org) had brought out a thought-provoking issue on the topic of what it means to win, in June 2007.
The Grassroots Gathering (see grassrootsgathering.wordpress.com) was a good place for this study both because the question of winning fitted in with the focus of the Gathering on horizontally organized social movements, including goals and strategy, and because the Gathering generally attracts people who are or want to get involved with such movements. A Grassroots Gathering is both more specific than a Social Forum, for example, in that people are involved in horizontal-organizing which is what I wanted to look at, and less specific than a conference organized by a particular political group. In other words there was likely to be a spectrum of people involved in horizontally-organized activism attending. Continue reading