 So I want to thank Collin and the Berkman Center for the opportunity to participate in this conversation. Occasionally at the Kennedy School you have the opportunity to engage in what I think of as conversations with the future. And I think this is one of those moments and I'm grateful for it. It's also an extraordinary moment. And my friend Tom Hayden used to say, change is slow except when it's fast. And we're in a fast moment right now. And so you can't avoid thinking that choices made, directions taken have consequence in ways that for many periods of time they don't. Things are in flux. Things are at crossroads of different kinds. And so choices we make and actions that we take have unusual significance I think. Now Collin said earlier that those of us up here we were supposed to provoke you. So I'm going to try to do that at least a little bit. The place I want to start is I want to talk a little bit about what organizing is about and about what collective action and mobilization is about. And as sort of an effort to kind of frame one way to approach this question of internet and politics that we're going to be looking at. And Jeremy is going to talk specifically about the relationship of organizing and new media in the context of the Obama campaign. And so I'm sort of starting off with the groundwork on what's the organizing piece of that. I think one of the most insightful things that de Tocqueville wrote when he came here in the 1830s about to study American democracy was, one of the things he wrote was in a democracy he said knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all forms of knowledge on it depends all others. It's interesting because he didn't talk about the significance of individual liberty which is certainly one way we think about democracy. But he talked about the creation of collective capacity because he was very concerned about the isolated individual confronting an all powerful state based on his experience in France. And he was interested in combination not simply as a process of aggregating individual preferences but a process of transformation. Of transforming individual preferences into common interests into common concerns and into common focus because that's what he felt was at risk. Where the broad common interests that link communities and link people across across domains. Not just the linking the transformational linking of individuals one to the other in terms of common interests but also resources the capacity to act on those interests. So both the ability to conceive them and the ability to act on them he linked to the process of combination as a transformational exercise not simply a matter of aggregation. And that form of organization indeed then shapes American politics from much of our history often in the form of civic associations and more particularly social movements and other forms of organization. Ways in which people could discern common interests and mobilize common resources on behalf of those interests. So what I want to talk about is sort of what some of the core elements of that are. There's sort of three I guess there's there's three ways I think of what goes on in order to create that kind of purposeful collective action. First is leadership leadership as the practices that enable others to achieve purpose in the face of uncertainty and there's there's each of those words is important. Uncertainty is what demands leadership of us. It demands an adaptive response not just a routine shared purpose is what creates the capacity to achieve it. And the focus on others is my understanding of what leadership is all about. It's about creating collective capacity and I'm not just talking about brilliance of personality. I'm talking about practices that enable groups to work effectively to achieve their purposes. Secondly is building community around leadership and by community I mean a bounded stable entity capable of exercising agency. Okay so I'm speaking very specifically about collective agency and thirdly power. In other words a community that then is able to use its resources purposefully to create the capacity it needs to achieve its purposes. So leadership community power. Now and I have to say that I think the Obama campaign which Jeremy is going to talk more about probably invested probably made the greatest investment in the development of this kind of civic capital which to steal from Bob Putnam I talked of civic infrastructure in terms of leadership teams trained organizers and actual capacity on the ground to turn these wishes into into reality. An enormous investment that was made there. Now I just want to touch on a few of what I think some of the key factors are the first enabling this sort of process to happen. First is shared values the significance of values as organizing core especially in the case of social movements and certainly was the case in this campaign. Values are broader than interests values are communicated and experienced emotionally and values are the sources of motivation for action. In other words if you ask where do you get courage where do you get hope where do you experience empathy. That's how values are experienced and made real. So there's an empathetic capacity that's essential for the communication celebration and realization of values in particular narrative as a form of values expression. Which is all about choices individual or collective choices and about ways in which people access courage or hope in order to be able to act upon them. So that's that's number one as a as a condition. And of course the the this campaign was rich in that language and rich in that practice from top to bottom. Second shared interest so number one shared value second shared interests. Now by shared interests I mean interests based on relational understanding in the organizing world. One of the first things you learn is how to have a one on one meeting and the purpose of a one on one meeting is to discern common interests. It's to learn about another person enough that you can discern is there a common foundation here. Is there a basis here to act together purposefully and are there resources to there and are we ready to commit to one another to achieve that. And I emphasize commit because that's what takes it beyond aggregation. What takes it beyond aggregation is I commit to work with you you commit to work with me and the kind of peer commitments that that create organizational capacity. Third shared structure organization occurs through structure and structure although certainly my generation had issues with it and you know perceived structure as oppressive. But one of my favorite pieces is Joe Freeman's piece the tyranny of structuralist ness in which she makes the argument that if structure is not visible it is nevertheless invisible and just hides dominance patterns that are much better acknowledged and put up front and dealt with. And so structure is what creates the space within which stable interaction can occur creativity can occur decisions can be made and so forth. It involves the identification of common purpose of shared norms and of clear roles and responsibilities. So again in the Obama campaign the structure behind the movement was critical. Twenty five hundred organizers. It wasn't just like thousands of leadership teams popping up out of the earth spontaneously. These were organizers trained who in turn trained leaders who in turn coached those leaders and created a structure through which people could work together with one another productively. We learned because a lot of the sources of teaching that have fallen out of our culture. It's something our big civic associations used to do haven't done for years. And so when people come together they automatically very often their group efforts dissolve in frustration and in failure and in people being pissed off at one another. You know what I'm talking about. You said I could use humor. Anyway that was an attempt. No we all have awful group experiences and the thing is that they're not necessary. They can be designed so that they don't happen. And there was a real effort in this campaign to do that fourth shared strategy. The work of figuring out how to turn what you have into what you need to get what you want. And it's not a one time deal where somebody sets a strategy and then everybody implements it. Strategy as you know is adaptive. It's an adaptive art. It means learning in real time from new information and adapting your tactics and patterns of behavior to accommodate that information. Nevertheless to pursue a clear goal and objective. That's the purposeful part and often it's the most creative part of organizing. And so certainly in this campaign there was a clear strategic objective objective elect Obama president. Okay. So but there was a lot of innovation and adaptation of strategy in the course of that. And there was a structure and a place and a mechanism through which that work could be done. And finally shared action. The ability to mobilize and deploy resources in the real world. Not just talk about it. Think about it. Speculate about it but actually do it by resources. I mean money. I mean time. I mean effort and energy. And the deployment meaning drawing individual resources together into a common purpose. And I'm sorry the mobilization drawing resource individual resources together that can be devoted to a common purpose and their deployment was of course is one of the key things in any organization or social movement. Just creating voice. That's one way. In other words say we want to mobilize people who feel a certain way and they all it all turns into letters to somebody. That's great. That's an expression of voice. But the mobilization the deployment of resources goes far beyond that in terms of what's required to actually make change and make your influence felt. Just one little example are the people in the window. Is it the window plant in Chicago who are sitting in over there because Bank of America cut off the credit of the company. And so then the company shut down and so then everything was problematic. And so here's a group that was able to act collectively using their resources not just to protest but to to stimulate a mobilization around them with it in a very specific and focused way. Coming up with that strategy being able to count on the commitment necessary and being able to actually translate it into action and then make the most of that action requires an enormous amount of focus. Of course in a campaign you either contact voters or you don't they either vote or they don't the outcomes are clear and explicit and therefore possible to learn from. And so that's my final condition here is action that is clear specific intentional and that can be learned from so value shared values shared interest shared structure shared strategy and shared action. In my perspective are conditions for the creation of effective collective action. And the question I think that that needs to be addressed is to what extent and how and in what ways can the new technology support this kind of activity help it enhance it ways in which it may detract from it or whatever. And I sort of want to close with just just one distinction. I think it's very important to appreciate the distinction between carpenters and tools and that the best tools in the world do not build a house. It takes a carpenter and the emphasis in this campaign on investing in the development of skilled carpenters that is people who knew how to use tools because they had a clear purpose. They were trying to achieve is what enabled the tools to be used in such a powerful and effective way. And I think the distinction between what's agency and what our and what our tools is a critical one to sustain. And I hope that's something that we can explore in the time that we have here together. Thank you.