Insights into organising online

The IPPR Manifesto for a Digital Britain is gathering pace with a full calendar of events and associated papers. I couldn't make it to "Organising Online - where next for Unions and the Internet", but Will Davies has now published the paper he wrote, and some of the insights have general relevance. Will suggests that campaign organisers may find the Internet helpful:

* Where there are obstacles to a campaign scaling –e.g. affiliates or members are very geographically scattered
* Where the mainstream media are not very responsive – e.g. the fuel protests were not taken seriously by the press until after it had already scaled up.
* Where a campaign wants to scale very quickly, often for a short time – e.g. a ‘flash protest’ where protests come out of nowhere, then disappear again.

He adds: "In summary, the internet’s role in civil society tends to be as follows. Fragmented and scattered groups with quite specific shared interests can use the internet to find one another, then to coordinate their activities (including meeting face-toface).
"In certain circumstances, a viral effect can occur, whereby the number of people involved grows very fast, but lessons indicate that this tends to work best as a short sharp public campaign, on one quite narrow issue (e.g. Jubilee 2000). There is less evidence to suggest that net-based associations can sustain themselves for long periods of time without becoming more like traditional institutions. Moreover, there is little evidence that net-based associations have discovered a legitimate means of converting themselves to traditional institutions."
Will's conclusion: "One of the central questions hanging over the internet, as a feature of civil society, is whether the technology can ever enable groups to complete the shift from networks to institutions. Can networks ever reach a level of political organisation where they can take decisions, to represent themselves with one voice?
"To date, the internet’s main success stories in civil society have been in coordinating people who don’t want to speak with one voice, but nevertheless will all benefit from the public profile that a large social movement can attain. For this reason, trade unions should be wary of embracing a highly decentralised social model. But that doesn’t mean that a decentralised technology can’t be of use in specific situations.
"The social function of the internet is to help people find and locate those with over-lapping interests, and to enable them to interact with one another within the specific limits outlined earlier. Except in quite rare cases, this must usually be accompanied by periodic face-to-face contact for whatever reason. It is up to trade unions to work out how these technological capabilities can best be channelled towards their interests and their members’ interests."
On his personal blog, Potlatch, Will writes" What I was trying to do with the paper and the event was to transfer some knowledge from studies of social capital and computer-mediated communication, in the hope this could support future union strategies online. They probably knew most of it already, but if I had to donate intellectual capital to anyone, I'd rather it were the TUC than the usual chat sharks (you know who you are)"
More please...