What if you could network every idealist in the world?

Written by Noah Flower on Monday, November 23rd, 2009
Filed under Synthesis

There’s a new global network in town. It’s called Imagine, Connect, Act (ICA), its parent is Idealist.org, and based on the call to action it’s shaping up to be a very interesting and ambitious experiment in network weaving. Over 4700 people have already signed up from 140 countries. To see why, I recommend reading the whole three-page vision, which is quite moving, or if you’re not feeling inspire-able then here’s the short version:

In one sentence: It’s time to build a global network that will serve and support all those people who want to make the world a better place, online and in person.

The key to doing this is to bypass all those specific issues that can overwhelm and divide us, and instead focus on three challenges that affect all of us:

1. There is often a big gap between our good intentions and our actions.
2. Our problems are connected, but we are not.
3. The world is full of good ideas that don’t spread quickly enough.

What we need, then, is a network, a movement, an ecosystem that will:

* Make it easier for people and organizations to move from intentions to action.
* Connect people, organizations, and resources in every possible way.

* Find good ideas wherever they are, and distribute them as widely as possible.

If we can do this, and do it well, most of our local and global challenges will be easier to deal with.

The network they envision appears to have a number of key features:

• Self-organizing. It sounds like almost all of the actual organizing that might happen under the ICA umbrella will be done by the participants. The role that ICA describes for itself as an organizer is limited to lightweight coordination, to maintain a decentralized model, but participants are encouraged to organize activities themselves that will create social impact. It’s a little bit like the role that Flickr plays for photographers who use the tool to organize interest groups and tag their photos together.
• Decentralized. The decisionmaking power is pushed to the edges rather than being held at the center. The choices to make are around the kind of action to pursue and that choice sits firmly in the hands of the participants. The only activity that Idealist/ICA envisions for itself at the center is facilitating the discussion of what the network should be, integrating feedback from that conversation, making the public announcement in March, and any other lightweight coordination that needs to happen.
• Open participation. Like MoveOn.org and many issue-specific campaigns such as 350.org, anyone and everyone is invited. This of course expands the reach of the network but also makes it more of a challenge for the members to establish deep personal connections.
• Focused on connectivity rather than alignment or production. In Net Gains, Plastrik and Taylor propose a typology for the goals of networks: connectivity is about building connections without specifying what they’re for, alignment is about building shared interest in pursuing a mission, and production is about taking action together. It looks to me like the goal of the ICA is connectivity, with the aspiration of encouraging its participants to form their own networks for the purposes of alignment and production.

A flip way of describing this would be to say that ICA is throwing a party with a mission statement and hoping that social change will be the result. But that’s not necessarily a crazy idea. After all, many would argue that the deeper function of protests is not media attention but the tightening of the social web among those who care about the cause and are likely to take action again in the future. But that’s at an event where simply showing up is a statement to everyone present that you believe in achieving the same goal. Imagine that it was 1999 before the WTO protests in Seattle and you had the magical ability to convene all of the activists who were about to show up. If you read them the ICA manifesto, what would happen? Would they sit down with each other, share their various goals for social change, and split up according to common interest in order to organize campaigns? Or would the group turn fractious as the many rifts between their rainbow of leftist ideologies came to the fore? The latter might well happen without good facilitation. So here’s my question for the ICA: what are you going to do to help people find common ground?

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