In her new book, Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age, Alison Fine stands at the intersection of new technology on community activism.

Fine takes the skeptical community activist, nonprofit communications manager, or policy advocate on a whirlwind tour of new social media. She peeks in at everything from blogging to on-line advocacy and everything in between. She provides accessible examples of grass roots campaigns qualitatively reshaping and enriching themselves through judicious use of new web technologies.

This is a great book for many people. Consider my friend K with responsibility for an all-volunteer advocacy group. K comes to the technology table looking for practical ways to update an acceptable but static web site, spruce up jury-rigged email communication, and organize an ad hoc membership list. The organization could incorporating or switching entirely to a blogging (or full content management system) web site with email and news subscription capabilities. This would provide a way to get news up and out faster, bring activist volunteers into organizing the work and discussion, and expand the network’s political reach. But without much time to gain technical skills in the context of a totally unrelated full time job, all this can sound pretty alienating.

Momentum bridges that gap pretty well. It makes the case that a judicious dose of the new may by-pass some of the time- and skill-intensive burdens of technology of the mid-nineties to up until recently.

What makes the book equally useful for those perhaps more familiar with these technologies is the author’s down to earth, non jargony writing. Too many of us who may “get it” technologically come across as too many steps ahead of those still struggling with less connected activist bases.

I heard Allison Fine speak at the 2007 Grassroots Use of Technology Conference in Lowell Mass. I will admit that I almost skipped her keynote because I figured this was familiar ground. I wound up impressed by Fine’s passion and clarity and immediately got the book.

If you have the responsibility to bring a sense of these new technologies to those organizations and activists new to it, particularly in small and medium sized organizations, it provides a solid way to check your own ways of explaining these things against hers. Use the book for grounding.

Philosophically, Alison Fine emphasizes openness and connectedness as critical to social change today. In our modern era, grass roots activists frequently feel weighted down by the power of the mainstream media, corporate advertising, and limited availability of official political dialog. Technology in grass roots hands can’t of itself change the political balance. Yet there is a sense that organizing and advocating in an open, connected and networked way can help rebalance the odds against public and private strangleholds on public discourse.

For many nonprofits, loosening up and bringing supporters and constituents in as partners comes hard. Control of message about one’s services and politics may be as hard to let go of for small community organization as for traditional private manufacturer about its products. Fine steadily challenges this at a practical and engaging level.

The book echoes themes in an earlier project Fine took part in, the widely distributed 2005 free publication, Power to the Edges, still available from EvolveStrategies (http://www.evolvestrategies.net/whitepapers/PushingPowerToTheEdges_05may...) Here, Fine updates the argument in that earlier work:

“It’s counterintuitive but true that the more decision making you push away from the center, the more powerful a networked effort becomes. That’s the power-to-the-edges concept. The more a network is used, the stronger it becomes; in fact, as it is used more, it recharges itself. Unlike traditional fuel sources, social networks to not go from full to empty of get ‘used up.’” (pages 87-88)

As someone involved in many community organizing initiatives myself, I recognize the challenge in these words. The new technologies just make it all the more pressing to confront top down campaign style organizing. She argues convincingly that today at least, more focused effect on issues and society can come from loosening up and engaging one’s network in developing ideas and plans.

Fine connects this theme to the wider effects of the Open Source revolution. Open Source software projects, such as the Firefox web browser, compete by bringing the volunteer energy and creativity of collaborative groups to software development. Open Source systems continue to reduce software costs for complex network communications.

Working systems still have to be built and customized. Yet Open Source (the collaborative development of some of the most important software in use today on the web) can give developers a significant head start in building those systems.

The Open Source software strategy provides a parallel philosophical challenge to private and proprietary control of most other creative and intellectual work. Open Source fuels Open Content. It reinforces the pressure to work and share ideas openly in one’s network, along the lines of Fine’s book overall. What ideas you give away, what you keep “for sale”; where you collaborate and where you centralize

(At the risk of really losing you, I can’t resist adding a side note that I also am struck by a parallel with the process of learning to work with chi (energy) in doing chi gung (qigong). It takes a while to grasp the Taoist precepts that the more you circulate chi through your system, the more energy you have. You gain rather than lose energy by dropping energy out your feet or out to the periphery of your body. At first this is equally counterintuitive to some of the organizing messages about social networks in Fine and other writings on the topic, and the one has helped me to grasp the other.)

Fine also touches on three other emerging trends of importance to activists and nonprofit communications managers: the “expansion of ways that nontechnical people can create and manage their own content”; the role of social networking sites (think facebook) to allow us to establish and control our identities on line; and the growing ability for people to rate and comment on web content to decentralize and democratize information trustworthiness. As this spreads to the political and policy making arena, we have to ask, will these tools increase or help manage political faddishness and superficiality? This too will play itself out depending on the commitments of those who embrace the tools.

All in all, the book is well worth a read for both those just testing the waters and those already in far deep.

Jossey-Bass 2006