Tools For Grassroots Organizations

Activists who try to work within the conventional, top-down organization are often frustrated by a system that limits creative cooperation and advances the most aggressive individuals into leadership roles even if they are not the best qualified. NetRootz sets the stage for an alternate,
bottom up organizational system, using web-based tools to facilitate communication and organization on the grassroots level. NetRootz is based on individuals who belong to many groups rather than single groups with many members. Individuals maintain their contact information and control which groups they belong to and the level of their involvement. Groups can be anything from a neighborhood watch, to a short-term issue-oriented group or a local political action group. Since it is the individual who subscribes to the system, they can coordinate their political and non-profit activities without conflicts.

The November 2006 elections stimulated a great awakening of many people who became politically active for the first time. As they extend their energy to other grassroots activism opportunities, they will be looking for the type of organizational tools they used in campaigns.
NetRootz provides these professional tools at little or no cost to grassroots organizations, while helping individuals to manage their participation in multiple groups.

The Human Brain as a Model for a Peer-to-Peer Organizing

In the movie What the Bleep Do We Know? there is an animation of the inner workings of the brain. A web of connections forms, breaks and evolves as messages are processed and stored, while unnecessary links are discarded in the interest of efficiency. Compare this fluid functioning
to the restrictive, pyramid configuration that has controlled organizations in our culture for centuries.

What if, instead of the traditional top-down organizational structure, we used the functioning of our own brain as a new paradigm for how groups of people can work together to accomplish their common agendas? A bottom-up, cooperative structure would afford community activists a way to organize and accomplish goals in a manner consistent with their progressive values. Imagine people coming together to accomplish short or long term goals, from getting someone elected on a local level to ending the war in Iraq. A group of people who share an idea could use
web-based tools to seek out other people with compatible agendas, check to see if similar groups already exist and organize and collaborate at will.