Transcripts For CSPAN2 Rules For Revolutionaries 20161204 :

Welcome everybody. I am the co founder and just briefly we have been here now almost two years. It grew out of an annual conference that we do call personal Democracy Forum which is focused on how technology is changing government and we been doing it since 2004. We have traveled similar paths for a long time. Two years ago we opened this to be a yearround gathering point for the people in conversations focused on civic tech. How tech can be used for the public good. Its a pleasure to welcome everybody here. Let me just say i am really excited for the chance to get into this conversation about rules revolutionaries and how big organizing can change everything. We are living in a very unusual time. It isnt just the moment after the election. We are living in an age where participation in politics is possible at the scale of millions. Its a very confusing thing to experience and a lot of us are right in the middle of that moment now, asking what why do, and the confusion comes from the fact that everybody is in motion. A lot of people are suddenly activated and concerned and ready to get engaged and try to do something important, and this is the classic challenge of organizers. Who better to get into this question than two of our best organizers in the digital arena, zach who have no longer goes all the way back to around 2000 when he built the website that made fun of george w. Bush and get called out by the president in 1998. It was a primary. Then from there he worked for a while and was sent to help president ial campaigns in the 2004 cycle and ended up helping the Howard Dean Campaign and the John Kerry Campaign with their work, more recently he worked for organizations like wikipedia which is another kind of entity that involves lots and lots of people and a big enterprise, and more recently worked on the Bernie Sanders campaign. I dont know many people are here, but becky has long been organizing the trenches of Progressive Movement work with credo, a phone company with a conscience is the tagline. She actually built, as president of credo, a Action Committee which did. Interesting work in the last off your cycle targeting members of congress were Tea Party Members and figuring out how to do a lot of the field organizing that could challenge them in a serious way. When she left credo to go work with zach, it was about a year or so ago, thats when i started started to pay a lot more attention. I know zach, hes kind of a mad genius, but becky is also one of the Progressive Movements sharpest tax and has done a lot of really important things which maybe we will get into. It is really a special treat to have you here. I guess i want to just open by asking you to say a few words at the beginning. The . Everybodys mind is okay, so so now what. Its a week after 119, now what. What do you think . Wow, okay well i think first and foremost, we are people who have been deeply moved by what has happened, and it has been really emotional for us just like it has been, i would suspect for everyone in this room and one of the approaches we have has always been that we are peers with the volunteers and the volunteers are our colleagues and we are in this movement and its something we are in together. Of the what now, the first thing is we are experiencing, in in absorbing that we have entered into a dangerous. In our history as a nation, and i think we want to acknowledge that what you are feeling, we are also feeling. We can also see certain things more clearly because we work in politics and we are part of the Bernie Sanders campaign weve been traveling the country and talking to voters and we made a different choice and the primary about who to support and what kind of campaign to run based on where we thought the country was. We find ourselves today, a week after a result that was stunning, but something that, that, in many ways doesnt surprise us because we can see how we got there and in some ways we think we could be in a different place so we find ourselves trying to understand how can we use the best tools at our disposal to be part of the resistance and be part of the opposition and resist the normalization of what is an unprecedented moment in american history. We also, we wrote this book in august and we wanted to take the lessons from the Bernie Sanders campaigns not as high consultants that would pay us to tell us how he did the thing on the Bernie Campaign, but to actually deliver that back to people. Do you want job at uber . No. But how do we turn that back and open source the thing that we learned because even though we didnt win we learned a couple things. We find ourselves in this moment, our book is literally out this week which is helping people with very concrete ways to organize and face the urgent challenges of our time. Those challenges are just a little bit different than we thought they would be. So right now at this moment is to start this conversation with you. Im tempted to start processing the election, but we said were going to hold off. I think thats right. We could do that, we could relitigate the campaign, litigate is probably the wrong word to use in the trump era. There will be time for audience questions of people really do want to get into that, but i think its more about Lessons Learned and, in particular, lets start by understanding what was different about the style of organizing that you developed and you now call big organizing. I think a lot of people who came up through experiencing thing like the dean campaign, and then went into things like the Obama Campaign that were so successful in 2008 and 2012, adopted a certain model of how you involve volunteers, how you understand the electorate and target voters and a lot of it was, in effect, i think joe was one of his digital strategists, you have to sort of lifted up from the surface but it has to be directed from top down. They develop the message of training people to be community organizers, giving people concrete tasks that i was kind of a big pyramid and at its very best, it moved millions of people in a very constructive way to help him win as an outsider in 2008 against Hillary Clinton and in 2012 as an incumbent. I think that model was, in large degree, what was being used in the clinton campaign. Sanders campaign did not have the Establishment Base and it didnt have the people doing that style of organizing. You are forced by necessity but you also had a different philosophy that you are working on. Take talk a little bit about that. Okay, i think with the step back a little bit little bit and challenge the way you described how that obama organizing played out. The book, that title are kind of rules for radicals. Thats when he wrote that book and started getting funding from big foundations and started sending organizers around the country largely because of the funding they got that sustained all the stops in Many Organizations around the country. It sort of became his paradigm of organizing until it was sort of the only organizing that was available to anybody. When i first became a labor organizer, when i was just out of college and was a little lefty from the suburbs, i went out and i was trained in this model. That model, its oneonone, knock on the door, have a conversation, when somebody over and this whole letter of engagement. They never said that but the idea sort of comes from that frame of organizing. Once they get the stop sign, then they have the sense of power and they did something in my community. Who knows, maybe a stoplight and the people in this way of thinking, someday people will build up to actually having power over their whole lives. We are rejecting that for something else, but its important to note that the organist Obama Campaign are also rejecting that. It didnt come from, they did amazing stuff on the Obama Campaign, but that was a whole another another part of the campaign, that neighborhood model came from people like jeremy bird and cushman and it was simultaneously being pushed forward on the primary campaign by Marlon Marshall so, they came from New Hampshire in this Little Laboratory that was led by most of them and some other people where they kind of embrace that frame with relationships and oneonone communication. They try to scale it. They were trying to win a primary in New Hampshire. Theyd have these house meetings. It was also very influenced by their advisor who had been in organizing director for the farm workers in california. That house party model, marshall would would yell at us if we said house party, but in that model that the farmworkers process was an evolution and a little bit of a rejection from the old model. It was amazing what they did in 08 in South Carolina and then all over the country. That model took root as the standard obama organizing model. This whole generation of organizers learn to work with volunteers and they would ask them to lead a Neighborhood Team and that person would be a leader of the team that they called the snowflake model. I think the way we looked at what we were doing was, that was great, but in the beginning the campaign, we have 46 states and you are exactly right about how becky saved the whole operation. It wouldve been a massive she had income. so we have tried to evolve a model that will allow that. Do you want to describe that model . You were saying its not the top down but actually we believe in an element of top down. We think about it in slightly different terms. We rethink about it is is that thinking about topdown verses bottomup we really think about peertopeer movement where there is a central plan to win and we distribute the work. But the relationship in doing the work is not just up to a campaign staffer. Its actually to each other to the other volunteers and this is something that hasnt necessarily been possible in the past because its been difficult for the volunteers to talk to us and to talk to each other. What we realized was bernie was such a long shot and he started, the book is about organizing. Its not about the Bernie Campaign and we use bernie is an example because it was a formative experience that shows it was possible. Bernie has 3 name recognition that beginning. By the end of the campaign we sat through 46 of delegates. We didnt get as far as we needed to go but we take a very close. We always knew all along we would have to have a Huge Campaign to overcome the advantages of resources and name recognition. And so we figured out what we need to have is a centralized plan because we couldnt just have hundreds of thousands of people doing just whatever they thought. Thats what they were doing and it was beautiful. They were writing software and they were writing music. They were doing all sorts of things but it wasnt something that would add up to bernie. It was our job to actually make sure all the efforts that they were putting forth was actually going to be pushing bernie across the finish line. So its really important for us to get a centralized plan and the idea was that it was not a flower bloom but more like a flower franchise across all the states. So we had to get them to work on a centralized plan that we had to distribute the work so people could do it across space and time. We knew we could manage them to do all this work. We could only divided up and we would have to have to manage each other to do the work if we were going to get enough things done. It was such an enormous organizing challenge we had to basically figure out what was best. Cynics say a little bit about one of your innovations in Tech Knowledge he turning a mass meeting into something that almost every person attending at the meeting turned into a really generative role. So the barnstorm model. Thats probably the most important organizing innovation in the campaign and you were you write about it a lot in the book. Why barnstormers . I will try to put it in context. The barnstorm, there was a structure to get people into a room like this, get like 100 people, sometimes 500 people, sometimes 60 and then we have a structure that led to them getting organized. It was almost like forming crystals. They came in as water and they left as a crystal. They were formed into teams that knew what to do but that was a structure of how we did the meeting was one piece of this larger structures. Would have been with the barnstormers was you realize you had to get everyone on the phone calling voters in order to campus so we could find out who was for bernie. We had colorado and california and texas to wonder bernie to win and they wanted the election to still be going but in order to do that we couldnt get killed in the first four states or else wed be out. What happened was how are we going to do this and so we were like we have thousands of event hosts so we send emails saying to the phone bank and there was nothing. Bill were not responding to the email. The phone bank will happen at my house so zach had this crazy idea. The Fundraising Team was like no you cannot keep us going so zach at this crazy idea and hes like order to get people together in person and we get them to commit in person to hold a phone bank and i thought it was. But he was so attached to the idea that i felt the only way to get past it was to try it and have it fail quickly. Its really important can be dashing campaign to try something quickly. We have a standard which is we will try crazy things if the payoff is huge. We do want to try crazy things that the payoff is going to be small. But the payoff was potentially big when we work out the numbers and we are discovered forming volunteer teams on the campaign was important which is dont ask who wants to lead, ask who wants to get to work if we ask to leave something the wrong people would raise their hands. Effect the person that likes to talk a lot, the person that wants to run the meeting but it doesnt translate into work. Never ask people to lead. We asked people to get to work in the most amazing people came out of the woodwork or did all this work and it turned out they were good leaders and we wanted to make them leaders afterwards. Could we have a meeting that got people to work . Just happen meeting and have it not happen. Zach sent out an email to a bunch of people, supporters saying in tennessee. Tell them about the email you send out. Theres a guy named corbin trant who was a volunteer and mcand he came with me and we did this together in his home state. We sent an email to tennessee and we said everybody in tennessee, its one of these five cities and we are going to put you to work. Bernie will not be here. It took a lot of experimentation. People came together and they did want to get to work but we had to create, and its funny because the method we eventually developed in these meetings that did get people to work and not just to work once but to work every week or two times a week that they would be running phone banks. Phone banks were the one tool that we have that we could put people into for a bunch of reasons. Report people into that but it took a while to develop a technique that works. Its not like in a the innovations were mindboggling. It was like we just tried stuff getting people to sign up in the back of the room and make them line up in the front and make each one Say Something attractive about their meeting or just personalize their meeting. Im going to cook. I will have burgers and somebody bring chicken. That was enough for someone to say i will bring chips to the party. We called it a party. We didnt call it a meeting. We did make a boring. We said its going to be a party but heres the funny thing. With the technique like in the old days of organizing it was just organizing. Which is called organizing many had to work out your way of doing the meeting. He does have it figured out so when we tried explaining that to a lot of organizers, some of them were young but also when we tried talking to the digital people like this we where coming from a digital background it was hard to get people to replicate the technique. We found that what we had to do was explain it as the technology. So the meeting wasnt just like organizing, it was a technology and you had to do it just right and that helps people get it. The result is 100,000, 100,000 meetings and Public Meetings where people donate. 55 million phonecalls which i think i worked out the math, you compared it to the 2012 obama general campaign which was as four times as productive just in terms of the number of phonecalls made. The contacts we dont know but a huge funneling of people. I want to ask you about one or two of the rules for revolutionaries. One is that people are waiting to be asked to do Something Big and to win Something Big. And then you also say dont let the perfect be the enemy of the bid. I wonder that. From the beginning we knew the campaign had to be big. The candidates was Bernie Sanders and the Fall Campaign was not going to put over the top. For us this wasnt a protest candidacy. We were trying to get a message out there. We were trying to win and obviously this is a salient part of the day. I have to think about what happened on tuesday. We were this fast french outpost of the campaign. As it turned out there were a lot of people that wanted to be involved in it. Became huge but it wasnt exactly central. So i would say invite some nurses to be part of your group and then i also think you know we can talk to you more about it but literally running in person meetings up of people to work where you come up with it colin you can take the role from another group or make your uncle and divide up the work and you do Work Together on a regular basis together is going to be amazing and people seeing women doing Work Together it draws more people and because people want to start it. The advice is really to get started and maybe to get people from the nurses union to join. A side note on that 53 of white women it was actually 26 of white adult women voted for trump that 52 of the white women who voted voted for trump to 26 of white women voted for trump. Its just interesting how 25 of adults voted for trump and a little bit more than 25 voted for clinton. Its very significant. To rows that behind you. The gentleman next to you. C hi deborah. My question is about organizing a big idea, a big change. My particular issue is a subset of pushing back against privatization of the public good which is pushing back against the privatization of the Public School system which as you know our current president who we are going to miss so much was not great at it. And so im wondering how do you identify Something Big, thats not too big, thats not too big to make people feel like we could never do this but dig enough to inspire action . I think in talking about the book we finally figured out how to make this point. There was one aspect of it that maybe we didnt quite make in the book and its about the way to inspire people, big doesnt mean national. It doesnt mean that you were going to take off all the government but that you actually has to win and not when something smaller incremental but when the whole thing. What that means is you have to come up with a strategy that can get there. If you are going to stop the privatization of the Public School system and rollback and clawback the privatization that happening if thats what you really want to accomplish than then according to this idea we are putting out there what somebody should do is lay out a plan even if its a 20 year plan. If its a credible plan where people can see that yes we work really hard and do x, y and z and a million other things we can see the strategy where we could actually win the whole thing. People are smart and so they understand that your 20 year plan might not succeed but all along the way you are making progress. So to expect people to you now do the kind of hard work that is necessary during every one of those 20 years they have to know where they are going. There has to be some price to keep your eyes on