Spoofing Our Way to Social Change

There was much aflutter in New York City yesterday when a group of volunteer activists released and distributed a fake copy of The New York Times with a banner headline announcing the end of the Iraq War. Upon further examination, readers saw that the paper was postdated July 4, 2009. 

I spoke this morning to two organizers of the effort, Beka Economopoulos and Andy Bichlbaum, about how this massive effort (it took over a year to organize and hundreds of volunteers to pull off) was organized and successfully managed. (And it wasn't free.)

The effort was organized similarly to other networked activism efforts in that it had the following key components:

• A flat structure with no one person in charge. This doesn't mean that these efforts are headless. Instead, it means that leaders emerge because of their passion, or great facilitation skills, or prominence due to their role as a conceiver of the effort -- but they have to use that power very carefully to bring disaparate people and opinions along in a collaborative way. The existence or not of these skills, I think, is often the determing factor on whether a networked activist effort like this one will succeed.
• Lots and lots of volunteer time dedicated to the project outside of the participants' paid work and formal organizations.
• Participant generated ideas. For instance, Andy told me that the effort was originally concieved as a hard copy paper only and then one of the volunteers thought it should have a website that looks like the Times site -- and he went off and did it.
• Some chaos. It is simply the nature of the beast that an all-volunteer networked effort, particularly one like this that takes a long time to plan and execute, will have moments of chaos and even disarray -- and the leaders had better feel comfortable with this in order to be successful.  For this effort there was disagreement on the best ways to distribute the paper that had to, finally, be settled by Andy and his co-leader, Steve Lambert, as time simply ran out for further discussion.
• Resources. Too often institutional philanthropy and nonprofits think of resources only in a financial sense. This effort showcases the importance of leveraging social capital and activating social networks of people with particular technical skills in editing, web design, and organization. They begged and borrowed for most everything else related to the project, but did have to raise about $70,000 in small amounts from friends to pay for the printing of 100,000 copies.
• Multiple channels. This effort was organized by telephone, wiki, in-person meetings when possible, and text messaging. Form always follows function for all efforts, and the group picked up and used the tools that were most appropriate for what they needed at a particular moment in time. For the Times spoof speed and stealth were required, so Twitter and blogs were out. 

Of course, people with their institutional hats on can participate in networked activist efforts like these, and all the better when they do and can bring institutional resources to bear as well. It is a challenge for many institutions that need to take credit or "brand" something to participate.

In a time of scarce financial resources, however, it will behoove advocates to look at a model like this Times spoof and see what can be accomplished when a lot of people agree on a goal and can bring their own talents and those of their social networks to bear on a project.