0415EdSchwartzNetActivism.doc

Ed Schwartz and NetActivism, Theory and Practice: Legacy and Lessons for Localism, Civic Education, and Community Organizing1

Peter Brodie Miller

Ed Schwartz wrote the book on using the Internet for community organizing, in 1996,

NetActivism: How Citizens Use the Internet. He provided a sum-up of what he had learned over

the ensuing five years in “NetActivism 2001: How Citizens Use the Internet,” published as

chapter 7 in the predecessor to the current collection underway, Advocacy, Activism and the

Internet.2

Ed not only wrote about using the Net for community organizing, he did it. A leader in the

application of technology to government, politics, and political activism during its formative

years, Ed’s biography blurb from NetActivism’s publisher concludes:

Dr. Schwartz has been a pioneer in the use of computers and now the Internet in promoting citizen participation. In 1982, he developed innovative systems to track the performance of public agencies and city expenditures, using one of the first IBM PCs. He was the first elected official in Philadelphia to computerize his constituent services, and participated regularly in local activist bulletin boards as a councilman in 1985, nearly ten years before the concept of "electronic democracy" was recognized anywhere else in the country. Within months of accessing the Internet in 1994, he became a leader in the movement to build community networks throughout the country and in efforts to help citizen organizations use the Net for political empowerment. Today, the Neighborhoods Online Web site that he created and manages is accessed by thousands of community activists and public officials throughout the country.

References to NetActivism are included in numerous accounts and evaluations of the period and

it’s still cited for its insights and usefulness. Along with his previous and follow-up technology

achievements, they’re most fully appreciated as rooted in Ed’s primary concerns, his emergence

1 An online version of this article is available at peterbmiller.wordpress.com/_________ [and/or ___]. It’s based upon previous treatments of Ed’s work, including one from 2011 that features more integrated graphics and multi-media.

2 Ed Schwartz, NetActivism: How Citizens Use the Internet (Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1996); Steven Hick and John McNutt, editors, Advocacy, Activism and the Internet: Community Organization and Social Policy with a forward by Noam Chomsky (Chicago: Lyceum Books, 2002).

in the study of community and political theory and his active political involvements, much of this

reflected in mission and work of the Institute for the Study of Civic Values that he founded in

1973. It is here where Ed’s technological accomplishments are embedded. The beginning part of

the O’Reilly biography provides the informing context:

As founder and president of the Institute for the Study of Civic Values in Philadelphia, Ed Schwartz has been a national leader in movements to revitalize neighborhoods and expand citizen participation in government for more than 25 years. In the 1970s, he built a citywide coalition of community organizations that led to his upset election to the Philadelphia City Council as a councilman-at-large in 1984. Between 1987 and 1992, he served as director of Philadelphia's Office of Housing and Community Development, overseeing the rehabilitation of more than 4,000 houses and apartments for low-income residents of the city. In 1992, he returned to the Institute for the Study of Civic Values full-time to develop new models for community planning and citizen empowerment for the 1990s. As a Ph.D. in political science from Rutgers University, Dr. Schwartz has written widely on problems related to civic participation, neighborhood development, and America's democratic heritage. His first book, Will the Revolution Succeed? (Intext, 1973) was excerpted in "The Nation and Change in Higher Education." Since then, his articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, The American Prospect, Shelterforce, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Philadelphia Daily News. The work of the Institute for the Study of Civic Values itself is profiled extensively in Robert Bellah's award-winning book, Habits of the Heart.3

Ed died in 2012. The Institute had passed away earlier and, along with it, iscv.org as an active

domain and virtual presence. In appreciation — with the help of the Wayback Machine at

archive.org4 — we’ll take a look back on Ed’s achievements in political theory and practice and

then at the pivotal role technology came to play in their integration and implementation, with an

eye towards summing and pointing up the legacy, lessons, and resources that Ed’s work brings to

any movement and effort in the arenas and fields of localism, civic education, and community

organizing in America.

3 Bio at www.oreilly.com/pub/au/339. For one citation, see Scott London, “Civic Networks: Building Community on the Net,” paper prepared for the Kettering Foundation. March 1997, at www.123helpme.com/view.asp?id=30955 — On April 14, 2015, Google listed 15,100 results for “Schwartz NetActivism,” Google Scholar 236 citations, 45 up to the year 2000, 200 since then.4 The Internet Archive Wayback Machine, founded by Brewster Kahle of the Internet Hall of Hall, and Buce Gilliat, in 1996, deserves its own testimony of appreciation. I trust the use I make of it here is but one grateful demonstration of its usefulness in preserving so much of the Internet where many mistakenly think contributions live forever but which, without the Wayback Machine, would otherwise be irrecoverable. For another recent appreciation, see Jill Lepore’s “Cobweb — Archiving the Internet,” The New Yorker, January 26, 2015, pp. 34-41.

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* * * * *

Amidst the dispersion of Occupy sites at the end of 2011, the Berkman Center for Internet and

Society at Harvard University sponsored an open public affairs panel/seminar event, “The Fate

of Civic Education in a Connected World,” on December 5. It was not planned for what would

be the culmination of the Occupations, but rather to coincide with the publication of two edited

volumes: Teaching America: The Case for Civic Education (David Feith, ed.; Rowman &

Littlefield), and What is College For? The Public Purpose of Higher Education (Ellen Condliffe

Lagemann and Harry Lewis, eds.), neither of which was actually brought into the program, a

claim that can be verified (or refuted) by reference to any of the archived videos of the

proceedings.

The Occupy movement was the preoccupation and most cited event of the night — the specific

occupation most frequently referred to being the Harvard one, not the more publicized one in

downtown Boston, not too surprising given that the it was taking place a block away from the

symposium in Austin Hall, on the other side of the Cambridge Street overpass, in Harvard Yard.

The most frequently cited expression of the night was “We the People.” It was cited as an

answer to the Occupy question, “Who are the 99?” — not so much as the foundation for civic

education. What an opportunity — it would have been a splendid occasion to call up

www.iscv.org.

“We the People” has a number of organizational standard bearers and curricular approaches

associated with it, of special note being the one developed by the Institute for the Study of Civic

Values, among other reasons, because it was especially designed for practical political occasions

such as this. Alas, the web site had just recently been removed from active availability due to

infirmities suffered by founder and director Ed Schwartz.

A good portion of the site is recoverable if one goes to the Wayback Machine at archive.org,

directly to wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://iscv.org, where you can pick one of the later ISCV

home pages from the indexed list with many of its links preserved. There, below the bar graph

indiating the Wayback Machine’s various “captures,” the Institute’s home page offers a red,

white, and blue welcome, just below the American flag blowing in the wind, Independence Hall,

the Statue of Liberty, and a multitudinous array of horizontal menus, side bars and boxed

resources that extend well below the initial page view and address contexts as varied, and united,

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as Justice: Ancient and Modern, YouthRAP, Neighborhoods Online, and civic education, helping

citizen organizations in Philadelphia and throughout the country define how “We the People”

can build communities that “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” and

“promote the general welfare.”

A useful guide for this is Building Community in the American Tradition, an online manual and

discussion guide that uses principles of the Preamble to the Constitution as a civic framework for

building community on our blocks and in our neighborhoods.

The introductory chapter — “From ‘Me’ to ‘We the People’ — A Civic Framework for

Community” — spells out its basic philosophy and approach, one that begins quite naturally with

the Declaration of Independence and the basic elementary school teaching but nonetheless

radical notion that it is a set of principles that define us as a people.

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For most of us, the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence summarize what we think of as being distinctly "American" values. "America is the only country in the world that is founded on a creed," G.K. Chesterton observed in What I Saw in America, written around the turn of the century. "That creed is set forth with theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence... It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just." Letters to the Editor defending individual rights and condemning inequality still appear in the nation's newspapers every day. We remain quite clear as to what we expect from America as individuals.

And what we expect is based upon, not just the Declaration, but the Constitution’s Bill of Rights,

and not just in terms of our individual rights, but the one that addresses our identity as part of a

community.

For, as Schwartz goes on to ask, what provides a basis for collective action in this country —

what we call “community”? It is the First Amendment freedom of association, a protection of

our basic right to associate with others in common cause, the “right of people peaceably to

assemble,” about which Tocqueville observed that the United States was the “only country on

the face of the earth where the citizens enjoy unlimited freedom of association for political

purposes.” But an even stronger, more compelling statement about our identity as part of a

community, about “we the people,” is to be found in the Preamble to the Constitution, along with

a more positive statement of principles about our identity and collectivity and creed, the purposes

for which we associate. Especially where there are a wide range of differences and diversity

among various people, from a neighborhood level on up, the principles of the Preamble,

Schwartz encourages us to appreciate, can form a common framework for civic coming together

and action. It can, astonishingly, provide answers to the following — at the very least he invites

us to give them a consideration for doing so:

1. Who are "we the people" of the neighborhood? What are their backgrounds, their views, their relationships with one another. Do people, in fact, respect one another as equal partners in making the community work?

2. What values do you share as citizens that might help you create a "more perfect union?" Especially if the neighborhood is diverse, is a shared commitment to America's civic ideals a sufficient basis for building community among the people who live and work there?

3. Is there "domestic tranquility" among the distinct organizations within the neighborhood, or are they in constant conflict with one another? What is the nature of these conflicts? Can they be resolved? On what basis?

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4. What needs to happen in the neighborhood to "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity?" What are the major obstacles to "the blessings of liberty" and how might they be overcome? What specific strategies and programs are needed?

5. How can everyone with a stake in the neighborhood be persuaded to "promote the general welfare" as you have defined it? What should individuals, organizations, businesses, agencies, and government be doing to achieve the goals that you have set for yourselves?

The questions — by the very straightforward boldness of asking them — encourage each

individual to ponder and consider common goals and principles and look at what we might

possibly share. Schwartz, it should be noted, is not actually certain and asks if we really do share

a civic commitment to this language and these principles, “[e]specially if the neighborhood is

diverse.”

Schwartz wants to ask, too, if we can even say, recite the Preamble. What does it mean, if we do

so, when we get to that part where we say we “ordain and establish” this Constitution? Is there

not an element of active participation and commitment?

Is this not something of a sophisticated version of what we are encouraged to participate in when

we’re invited to take the Pledge of Allegiance, another matter than Schwartz provides some

interesting contributions to? It has frequently been pointed out how the Preamble’s goals span a

wide range and contain both conservative and progressive aspirations — domestic tranquility and

the common defense frequently associated with law-and-order sensibilities, a preoccupation with

the general welfare as an underpinning for broad-based government-supported services. It is not

far-fetched to consider a community encompassing a concern for them all, is it.

At the very least, the Preamble is most useful in reminding us that the Constitution is not at end

in itself, but rather a means to achieve some basic common goals. And insofar as there are those

who do treat the Constitution (like the flag) as an end itself, does not the “ordain and establish”

portion of the Preamble (like the “pledge of allegiance”) help us understand why.

So much of Schwartz’s approach appears to be conservative, even reactionary, yet it is hardly

traditional in the usual way.

In NetActivism and elsewhere, in Ed Schwartz’s repeated reference to us as “citizens,” another

traditional identification mark of his approach that appears to be conservative, even reactionary,

an identification frequently avoided by progressive and those on the left — in part out of concern

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that it splits off and separates out non-voting immigrants — Schwartz in fact uses the title to

emphasize the common rights, responsibilities, and ownership we all have in living in, sharing,

and shaping our common world.

Of note here, too, regarding the questions the Preamble helps raise, are the links to the

accompanying resources that Schwartz provides. In looking at the first, questions about “we the

people” in your neighborhood or community, there's a mixture of additional traditional historical

resources — Frederick Douglass' 1852 Independence Day speech and Susan B. Anthony's 1872

Women's Right to Vote address — and links to current information and resource pages to help

clarify particular questions — the latest census data retrieval by tract; HUD enforcement of Fair

Housing Laws and questions about whether tough enforcement would result in opposition and

what this suggests about your neighborhood's attitudes about “we the people”; the overview of

the Americans with Disability Act and a question about people with physical or mental

disabilities; the ACLU on the Rights of Lesbians and Gays and a question about people with

varied sexual orientation. These resources underline the energy and vitality of our founding as

they are applicable to our diverse circumstances and the usefulness of current information to help

guide our considerations and actions.

Douglass’s "The Meaning of the 4th of July for the Negro," a scathing attack on the hypocrisy of

the celebration, filled with irony and humor and a reverential regard for the Declaration’s

principles, along with its anger and bitterness, and Anthony’s inclusion of the entirety of the

Preamble in her Women’s Rights address and the breakdown and use of each of its parts provide

testimony and evidence of the ongoing relevance of our founding and its capacity to inspire.

And it's precisely the latter, the current resources and the practical community organizing efforts

they inform that are the point of the Institute's existence and purpose. Before moving into the

world of government, politics, and political activism and technology’s pivotal role, let’s take a

bit of a deeper look into the political theory at work here and its resources and rootedness in a

broader foundation in American political life and beyond.

* * * * *

Ed Schwartz’s education and the intellectual foundations of the Institute for the Study of Civic

Values are rooted in what certain academics within the discipline of Political Science have

referred to as "The Berkeley School of Political Theory," the school of thought that provided a

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critical yet sympathetic influence on the New Left movement and the campus rebellion and

activism that gave it much of its character and definition, a school of 60's radicalism that is

distinguished by its rootedness in a certain kind of conservatism in contrast to what most

radicalism of the day grew out of, in American political life and in the tradition of classical

western political theory. Its anti-war sentiments would take pride in the formative years that Ho

Chi Minh spent in the United States, the American founding influence in his follow-up activism

on behalf of Vietnamese rights in France, and in his later leadership at home and authorship of

the Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. For Schwartz and the

Institute, Berkeley School roots reaching even further into conservatism and antiquity were

exemplified by the inclusion of tributes and resources such as the memorial section for Wilson

Carey McWilliams and his essays on, among other themes, “Values and Politics” and “Justice:

Ancient and Modern,” substantial sections from John Schaar's “The Case for

Patriotism,” promotion of Sheldon Wolin's The Presence of the Past, and preservation of a major

address by Norman Jacobson, “On ‘Modernization’ in America: A New World Passional.”

Schwartz not only built on the Berkeley School, he developed a distinctive depository and

testimony for it.

The political sensibilities and sentiments of the Berkeley School can be found in the series

Schaar and Wolin wrote together for the New York Review of Books, later compiled and

published as The Berkeley Rebellion and Beyond — Essays on Politics and Education in the

Technological Society. The Berkeley “School” was never a formal one in any traditional sense,

but those associated with it — the colleagues, graduate students, teaching assistants, activists and

writers who made contributions — gave it shapes and perspectives, and provided

acknowledgements to its influence and impact, e.g., Doug Lummis in Radical Democracy and

Langdon Winner, who has provided an intricate ongoing examination of technology out of the

Berkeley School experience, in Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in

Political Thought.5 Peter Euben has specialized in emphasizing the relevance and applicability

of classical Greek political theory and his titles reflect characteristic themes, topics and language:

"Taking It to the Streets: Radical Democracy and Radicalizing Theory," Platonic Noise: Essays

on the Modernity of Classical Political Thought, "Democracy in America: Bringing It All Back 5 Doug Lummis, Radical Democracy, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996, p. 165; Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology — Technics-Out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977, p. ix.

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Home." The cultural territory extends to Greil Marcus’s Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's

Basement Tapes (1997).

Most recently, Frank Bardacke’s award-winning 850 page Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar

Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers (2012) exemplifies the combination of

scholarship and political commitment that typifies the school. Joshua Miller’s The Rise and Fall

of Democracy in Early America, 1630-1789 (1991), provides useful links between our official

and Puritan foundings, and his intellectual odyssey and Wikipedia contributions on any of the

Berkeley School founders, especially as seen via fullwiki.org, provide a good mapping of its

territory.  

The ISCV memorial section for Wilson Carey McWilliams and numerous selections of his

writings indicates the deepest and most lasting connection here. Schwartz studied with him both

at Oberlin and Rutgers; McWilliams served as the Institute’s Vice President; Ed’s contribution to

Friends and Citizens — Essays in Honor of Wilson Carey McWilliams (2000) reflects those

special ties and, along with the other contributors, further helps identify both the community and

ethos of the Berkeley School.6

Beyond this, Schwartz's contribution is marked not only by his Lincolnesque tying together of

the Declaration and the Constitution but also by his integration of the Berkeley School with some

of its natural allies and collegial schools of thought — found at the ISCV “strengthening

democracy” resource site and elsewhere — Robert Bellah and his work in establishing the field

of American Civil Religion, Amitai Etzioni and the school of Communitarians, Benjamin Barber

and his conception of strong democracy, Robert Putnam and his warnings about isolation and

privatization in “Bowling Alone,” and Saul Alinsky and his contribution to community

organizing.

Schwartz has added these resources (via the Institute’s bookstore, among other places) to a

freely-available growing online collection of classics in American Political Thought integrated

with a diversity of multicultural democratic perspectives that he gathered over the last third of

the 20th century and into the new millennium. Revolutionary and Constitutional founding era

resources include, too, the transformative journalism of the time, Tom Paine’s Common Sense

6 For references here, see the author’s “Oberlin College and the Berkeley School of Political Theory.”

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and the Federalist Papers, history’s first extended op ed series. Throughout the pages of

ISCV.org there are numerous sidebar riffs, lists of links to key documents and speeches that

make up basic guides to American political life, from the Mayflower Compact through the Anti-

Federalist as well as Federalist Papers to John Kennedy’s Inaugural address on the Civic

Education page; many more sections from Tocqueville, including passages on America’s Free

Institutions, to Barbara Jordan’s 1976 Democratic Convention speech on the Civic Values page;

from Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s "What is an American?" in Letters from An American

Farmer to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation to Martin Luther King’s American Dream

speech on the Opportunity page. Gathered up they provide a substantial curriculum on America's

political life and identity over almost 400 years.

Schwartz’s compendium for the American political tradition includes a strong dimension of

racial and ethnic diversity, women’s movement resources, and radical political organizing. Along

with the Frederick Douglass, Barbara Jordan, and Martin Luther King speeches, Schwartz pulls

in Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address (2008), and integrates links with LibertyNet’s Black

History Month page, the Library of Congress’s African-American Odyssey, and

Watson.org’s African-American History Project. It’s got the Library of the University of North

Carolina at Chapel Hill-sponsored Documenting the American South, Washington State

University American Study Program’s MultiCultural West site, the Japanese American

Network’s Asian American Community Links page, and the New York State Library’s Hispanic

and Latino Web Sites page.

Along with Susan B. Anthony’s speech on "Women’s Right to Vote," there’s Elizabeth Cady

Stanton's Address to the First Women’s Rights Convention in 1848 and source material links

to The National Women’s History Project and National Archives and Records Administration’s

Resource Guide to Woman Suffrage and the 19th Amendment. There’s a list of key events in

U.S. Labor History, a US Labor Study Guide, and Union Songs. Along with the Populist

Platform and William Jennings Bryan’s Behold a Republic speech — including an audio mp3

excerpt reading of the August 8, 1900 address — there are selections from Saul Alinsky’s

Reveille for Radicals and Schwartz’s own essay on “Caesar Chavez: Leader as Organizer.”

And along with Building Community in the American Tradition, curricular articles, handbooks,

and guides include:

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Social Contract Project Discussion Guide — for neighborhood leaders and activists to develop social contracts with government and the private sector for broad-based neighborhood improvement.

Civic Ideals and Modern Institutions — a study guide that examines how we can work to fulfill America's historic ideals through existing institutions.

“On Teaching Democratic Ideals” — an article that discusses how to use civic values as a framework for examining political issues in America.

“The Case for Political Education” — an article that calls for a fundamental reconstruction of civic education in America.

* * * * *

In moving “From Community Theory to Democratic Practice,” as Schwartz titles his

contribution to Friends and Citizens, it is, finally, the practical application of the Institute’s

radical democratic theory that marks its distinctiveness as much as the sophistication and

extensiveness of that theory. The citywide Philadelphia Council of Neighborhood Organizations

(PCNO) it helped build “spearheaded major campaigns for neighborhood involvement in

community development, transportation planning, economic development, and education.”

Benefitting from the way the party system operates in the city, with 69 wards and more than

1700 voting divisions, PCNO elected a significant group of committee representatives in the

Democratic Party ward system, and it was the widespread and targeted participation of those

behind the “Neighborhood Agenda” that led to substantial rehabilitation and development and

Schwartz's election to the City Council in 1984, his later tenure as the City’s Director of Housing

and Community Development that saw the major low-income housing rehabilitation effort and

the beginning of most of the city’s leading community development corporations. Schwartz’s

return to the Institute in the 90’s witnessed, among other projects, the development of a welfare-

to-work community service jobs program known as “PhillyCorps,” a youth urban affairs arts

program (“YouthRAP”), and an “Urban Voters Campaign” that increase voter participation by at

least 15% in more than 250 voting divisions in the city.

And, especially for purposes of this essay, the numerous “Social Contracts,” based upon the use

of the Preamble in Building Community in the American Tradition, exemplify the case-upon-case

school-community, block and neighborhood association applications of the “we the people”

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approach to local community organizing and community building, in Philadelphia and across the

country. 7

There is a kind of outrageousness in Schwartz using the Preamble in this way, some of that

captured in the 1993 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “A Social Compact Forged With A

Page From The Past — Ed Schwartz's Tool To Help Neighborhoods Meet Today's Challenges?

The Constitution's Preamble”8 — caught by the question mark in its title and its description that

it’s a process that Schwartz has “dreamed up.”

The article by Inquirer staff writer Vernon Loeb includes quotes from neighborhood skeptics,

too — those who came to see Schwartz “as a kind of outsider, dumping some philosophy in here

and walking away.” But the informative feature of the piece, in addition to all the specifics, is

the attitude change the writer undergoes as he reports on the process of successful project

development. The approach “has apparently struck a resonant chord.” There is something about

7 These include the Safe Schools and Student Support Social Contracts developed between the Philadelphia School District, the City, and a wide range of community organizations represented by 150 leaders aimed at building a city-wide campaign to reduce youth violence in the schools and the neighborhoods, with the Cooke Middle School (Logan) model, developed between the principal and teachers and organizations in the surrounding neighborhood defining their mutual obligation to improve education, inscribed as a banner in the school library. 

Block Club Social Contracts were drafted by the Mayor’s Office, the School District, the Housing Authority, and city-wide organizations like Philadelphia More Beautiful, PhilaPride, and Philadelphia Citizens for Children and Youth, and community leaders from a cross-section of the City’s neighborhoods, most actively from the American Street Corridor in Kensington, North Central Philadelphia, Lower Germantown, West/Southwest Philadelphia, and Frankford. Key models here are the Queen Village Social Contract between residents of a middle class neighborhood and the leadership of a public housing development establishing their common goals for the community and the New Kensington Social Contract developed under the auspices of the New Kensington Community Development Corporation as part of a long-range strategic plan for economic and community development.

The Social Contract Project Online includes the Social Contract Discussion Guide and, in hopes of developing a Social Contract Network programs sponsored by Build-Com Groups came to include the Quality of Life Indicators Project in Jacksonville, FL; the Seattle Neighborhood Matching Fund Program; the Portland, OR Neighborhood Mediation Center Program; the Powderhorn Park, MN Restorative Justice Project; the Denver Five Points Media Program; the Wichita, Kansas Neighborhood Renaissance; Transforming Neighborhoods Together in Knoxville, TN, and the Neighborhood Resource Center in Nashville.

8 http://articles.philly.com/1993-05-09/news/25965652_1_preamble-neighborhoods-constitution

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the Constitution that makes people want to hold it in special regard. He repeats a couple of times

the point about Philadelphia being birthplace of the nation and that Schwartz is offering up a

home-grown remedy with the language of the Preamble. As Loeb concludes in quoting him:

“There has been no attempt to use the preamble to the Constitution as a framework for

community…. That ought to be the center of our source of pride.”

* * * * *

In moving from community theory to democratic practice from the early-mid 90's on, Ed

Schwartz found that many of the limitations on political organizing — accessing information

quickly and easily, sharing information and ideas in a timely fashion, holding collective

discussions at a distance — could be met with emerging technology tools.

We’ve already seen some pieces of this, embedded or referenced in passing in the description of

the “information” and resources for curriculum development and community organizing, the

freely available at-out-finger-tips accessible primary source contributions — the declarations,

preambles, speeches, writings and documents from the American political tradition.

Another key dimension to the “information” needs that Ed saw the Internet providing — and that

he offered guides and suggestions to as well — is one that involves information in its more

“traditional” modern statistical sense, as per the earlier reference to the census data by track and

links to disability and fair housing law information that could inform inquiries about who “we

the people” are in our neighborhoods. Building Community in the American Tradition provides

links to this kind of information for a number of its questions involved with the implementation

of the Preamble’s goals: environmental protection right to know resources, tips and resources

for home and school safety, air and water protection guides; Justice Department firearm and gun

statistics, and program and grant information for support programs for drug-free communities,

public safety, and capacity development.

Ed well knew that the Net could provide a glut of information and that the task was finding and

teaching others how to find information that was useful to us in our deliberations and quest to

understand and build our communities.

In a useful orientation presentation in 2004-05 — as the Community Organizing priority area co-

ordinator for the Community Technology Centers AmeriCorps*VISTA Project, training

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community technology support specialists who were being placed in community media and

technology organizations across the country — Ed outlined ten basic web sites to help profile

and support a community. He listed yahoogroups and google and showed how they could be

used as well as NeighborhoodsOnline.net that we’ll come back to, and the Census Bureau as it

helped identify key pieces of local information. The list also includes:

The State and Local Government Web Site, an easy-to-use online portal to every town,

county, city, and state government website in the United States, with a suggestion to check

out the local Mayor's State of the City address for a fast look at the major issues facing the

community.

NewsLink, an index that links newspapers and broadcast stations by city.

Local Consolidated HUD Plans - Local and state governments that receive Community

Development Block Grant Funding from HUD must submit specific plans documenting the

level of poverty and housing, along with a description of the programs that will be used to

address it. These plans represent a virtual guide to hardship in America.

Bureau of Labor Statistics - Regional Economic Data – BLS's page that tracks data by region

and provides useful indicators of the economic condition of the cities and communities

within each region.

Federal Spending by County – The only listed federal site not currently in operation (due to

the termination of the Federal Financial Statistics program), it still contains links to the total

federal investment in a county, including entitlements like Social Security and Medicare,

grant programs like VISTA and the Head Start, research funding, and salaries of the federal

employees working in the county for every county in the United States between 1993 and

2010, as well as links to Census Bureau Reports on how federal funds are distributed.

Through the first decade of the current millennium Ed’s site on BushBudget.com used the

Consolidated Federal Funds Reports to develop a state-by-state overview of the damage his

administration cutbacks were doing and stands as a model of what can be done.

Vote-Smart — for comprehensive information about state and federal representatives

throughout the country.

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In terms of information, as suggested by Project Vote Smart example, the earlier references to

the ACLU in the Building Community in the American Tradition guide, the information

references to such organizations as LibertyNet, the National Women’s History Project, and the

NAACP, these are not just information providers, they are activist organizations, part of a

network, a wide world of organizations and institutions that contribute to and are tied to the

movement for local democratic community development.

The extensive and detailed listing of resources in Neighborhoods Online includes a good number

that make up a still-active network of historically-rooted organizational links in the community

building and community organizing resource world — e.g., Comm-Org: the On-Line Conference

on Community Organizing, the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies, Everyday

Democracy, the Center for Community Change, the Asset-Based Community Development

Institute, the National Civic League, the Center for Civic Partnerships, the Wade Rathke Chief

Organizer Blog (and now, also, the Radical Community Work open access journal and blog), the

Highlander Research and Education Center, the Midwest Academy, the Pew Partnership for

Civic Change, and idealist.org — and these are the active ones just from Neighborhoods

Online’s Organizing link. E-democracy takes up a good section of the penultimate chapter of

NetActivism (169-72).

Ed’s achievement is not just the recognition of the dual capacity of ICT — information and

communication technologies — but in his contribution to both, in his active creation of major

list/organizational arenas on both local and national levels.

Like ISCV, much of this is now accessible only via archive.org, where one can find

phillyneighborhoods.org, established for local communication and organizing, and

neighborhoodsonline.net, for national ties and connections, reflecting some of the earliest

bringing together of community organizing and technology usage, a mutually reinforcing

integrated explosion that provides the foundation for the NetActivism. The scope and detail of

these local and national networks underline the capacity of technology to contribute dramatically

to new dimensions of expansion in breadth and depth. 9

9 Philly Neighborhoods identifies local and state elected officials, community organizations, business associations, schools, libraries, recreation and health centers, social services, and a wide range of neighborhood data by map, city planning district, and/or topic, that latter category including housing and community development, trash, recycling and environment, jobs,

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NetActivism reflects the enthusiasm, excitement, and energy associated with the initial burst of

activity bringing all this together, supporting prospects and possibilities in using technology for

community organizing and democratic renewal in this emerging arena at its point of origin and

exponential development in the mid-90’s. In the closing chapter, “We, the People,” Schwartz

summarizes all the lessons about what can be done.

Using the Internet for political empowerment is…about building discussion lists of activists from all over the country who share the same goals and want to work together to achieve them. It's about being able to keep track of government programs and pending legislation even if they don't appear in the newspapers every day… It's about creating networks among organizers in their own neighborhoods and communities who go online to maintain contact with each other even when they're not in a position to meet. (176)

economic support, safety, youth, retail corridor, recreation, culture, health, faith-based, labor, funding and search. PhillyBlocks Email Networks were established to enable neighborhood groups, block captains, youth programs, human service agencies and economic justice groups to connect with city departments, elected officials, and one another — with separate lists for NorthPhilly and NorthwestPhilly, the latter serving West Oak Lane, Chestnut Hill, East and West Mt Airy, Roxborough-Manayunk, East Falls, and Germantown, with another list, Parent Partner, focused on the needs of parents with students in Philadelphia schools, especially low and moderate income parents receiving Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF).

Neighborhoods Online is expansive on the national level in the same kind of way, with a dazzling array of menus and lists: Funding – Data – Media – Community – Organizing – Democracy across the top; Build-Com – Cities – Housing – Education – Crime – Jobs – Environment down the side; and in the middle: Campaigns, E-lists and Blogs (the Civic Values Campaign, the Civic Values Blog, the build-com listserv), organizations (statelocalgov.net, Neighborhoods USA/nusa.org), and lists, lists of email lists and related resources.

Email Lists cover the Comm-Org organizers list, community development lists, the Civic Network, HUD Online forums, Community Toolbox forums, and Human Needs listservs; Building Community resources include the Asset Based Community Development Institute, the Study Circles Resource Center, the national Community Building Network, the Center for Neighborhood Technology, and Neighborhood Link; Neighborhood Resources — fund-raising, writing a grant proposal, Urban Quality Indicators, Healthy Communities Project; Advocates and Congress groups — the Community Action Association, National Civic League, National Urban League, Coalition for Human Needs, OMB Watch, Center for Community Change.

To take but one example to look at more closely, the build-com listserv is tied into the Build-Com Network of neighborhoods in 27 cities across the country, with sample discussion topics, Network material from members including those neighborhood associations listed earlier and orgs and publications like the Evergreen State Society in Seattle and Shelterforce, the Journal of Affordable Housing and Community Building.

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The combination of radically new and powerful information and communications resources gave

the movement’s growth an explosiveness and excitement unmatched since the upheavals of the

60’s. Consider the book’s conclusion and how it exemplifies what it exemplifies:

March 1996 has been a busy month for me, as I struggle to finish this book. There’s been an ongoing fight in Philadelphia around funding for the schools in which many of us are now involved. One night, I got so angry at an editorial in the Philadelphia Daily News that I drafted a letter to the editor on the spot and sent it via email to the paper. It appeared a few days later in a little box of its own, along with other letters on the issue…

Almost as soon as my letter appear, I received n email message from a member of Senator Rick Santorum’s staff, who said she agreed with it. I shot back a thank-you note, but expressed my concerns about the Senator’s position on welfare reform and other issues affecting the poor. She emailed back that I ought to meet with the Senator directly.

I posted various items to neighbors-online related to school funding and the Medicaid cuts that were pending in the Pennsylvania legislature. It was also nice to hear from the energy Coordinating Agency that an announcement about one of their programs drew quite a few replies.

Bruce Spector—an active participant on civic-values—brought a group of his students at Trinity College in Vermont to Philadelphia for few days. I spent a couple of hours with them talking about urban problems. They seemed to like it, and now I can attach a face to the name “Bruce Spector” when it appears on my monitor.

One of my own posts to civic-values discussing the Pat Buchanan phenomenon ended upon on the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party web site in Minnesota.

Linda Ridihalgh—whom I hadn’t seen in 15 years—stumbled on our web site and invited me to speak at a symposium sponsored by the University District Organization in Columbus, Ohio in April. It’ll be good to start working with the University District Organization again—this time, via the Internet.

I spent an evening with Hugh McGuire from Hartford, Connecticut—another civic-values describer. Hugh was speaking at a conference in Philadelphia. At the time, we were in the midst of a rip-roaring exchange on the list on the role of class in America that had gone on for several weeks. This meeting had become a list event unto itself, inviting speculation as to what each of us would eat and drink. In the end, it was a great evening. He learned more about how we organize in Philadelphia and I learned more about how he helps dislocated workers reposition themselves in the labor market in Hartford. We weren’t so fr apart after all—as we both told civic-values the next day.

LibertyNet cleared accounts for 17 groups working with Neighborhoods Online—the biggest batch yet. I added them to the email list.

I helped Caroline Ferguson from the Computing Resource Center at the University of Pennsylvania run a training for ten more nonprofit staff members on the intricacies of Eudora, Netscape, and Neighborhoods Online itself, bringing to over 100 the number of community activists in Philadelphia she’s trained over the course of the year.

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I even managed to put a Rutgers graduate student from Palestine in touch with a woman living in Palestine who works for an institute trying to promote democracy there. The woman had visited our offices as part of an international program on civic education and subscribed to civic-values when she returned home. I met the graduate student at a Rutgers symposium and set him her email address when I got home. Now there’s an improbable bit of match-making for you.

Friends of mine in Philadelphia are still a bit bemused at all the time I’m spending on the Internet after so many years of working in the trenches here. But at this point I get two or three calls a week from groups asking how they can sign up for LibertyNet and participate in our training.

The people I meet through civic-values ask about what we do in Philadelphia. What are our issues? How do we organize? How, in fact, do we use the Preamble of the Constitution to help people in an individual neighborhood come together around common goals? For now, I refer them to the Social Contract Project on our web site, but soon we’ll be setting up the buildcom list to help groups all over the country apply this approach to their own communities.

There was a long period when I felt like I was building a hotel on Venus. There weren’t many people on Venus yet, I’d say, but I want to be sure that when they arrived, there would be something more than dust and canals for them to see.

Now they’ve started to arrive—at our web sites, on our email lists—from all over the country and beyond. They come filled with a great deal of anxiety and even anger over what’s happening in America, but that’s part of what’s bringing us together. The hope is that, perhaps, through the Internet, we can talk with one another, come to grips with one another, and unite with one another as a people.

We, the people.

That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? (186-87)

It’s difficult not to be swept up.

It's as concise a statement of the promise of the community technology movement and guide for

building it as the mid-90's period of its revolutionary explosion and growth provided and still

holds lessons for today.

The vitality and lessons of phillyneighborhoods.org can be found in the still-active Phillyblocks

yahoogroup discussion list, with almost 1,000 members, an exemplary model of neighborhood

and community exchange that has retained its political focus. The extensive and detailed listing

of resources in neighborhoodsonline.net includes the still-active network of historically-rooted

organizational links in the community building and community organizing resource world listed

from Neighborhood Online's Organizing link above that can serve as a hub supplemented with

still-existing organizations form other links, living proof of Ed’s claim, “The Internet empowers

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us when it expands the range of partnerships available to us and enables us to work together on

behalf of common goals.” (176)

A key partnership arena, Schwartz points out, is with Internet/Activists, service providers,

software developers, and policy advocates who are the de facto proprietors of the Net, with a

program of universal access tied to an expansion of libraries and community technology centers,

Internet Activist Support Centers Ed called them, networked with community groups, organizers,

and activists, those who are rooted in their neighborhoods and communities, especially those

who are rooted in decidedly political ways, connected to the government and its full range of

public services, budgets, and programs.

The online projects Ed and the Institute were involved with were all collaborations. In

Philadelphia community organizing-Internet activist efforts were undertaken in partnership

with LibertyNet, the city's regional community network; NonProfit Technology Resources,

established to provide technology support groups in the city along with free or low-cost recycled

equipment; and other volunteer and support programs that extended technology training and

access to those ordinarily disenfranchised from its benefits, at libraries and community

technology centers, places supported by federal Technology Opportunities Program and

AmeriCorps program grants.

Chapter 6 of NetActivism, “Virtual Politics,” begins with a critique of the “curious twist to the

attitude of a number of activist groups — especially those involved at the neighborhood level,”

those who “want to influence government, but avoid politics,”10 and in elucidating how the

Internet assists grassroots politics, Schwartz points to and links to a number of organizations and

projects that were providing models and leadership in the mid-90's and examples of ways to

extend political participation — party activists with projects like Digital Democrats who used the

Internet to promote grassroots involvement in the party, build a volunteer cyber army, and

develop a database of households for use in voter registration and GOTV (Get Out the Vote);

issues advocates who used the Internet to mobilize grassroots efforts around campaigns; and

10 For citizen groups, Schwartz tells us, this is nothing short of a disaster. “First, anyone who thinks you can divorce politics from government is just fooling himself… Second, contempt for politicians leads to defeat… Third, avoiding politics protects the powerful from the powerless. The only thing that pleases a politician more than the support of friends is the non-involvement of his enemies.” (153, 164)

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voter activists, like Rock the Vote, aiming for young people in their teens and early 20s, and the

Easy Reader Voter Guides that concentrated on participants in adult literacy.

The Minneapolis-St. Paul E-Democracy project was an especially exemplary model Schwartz

reports on here — “a Neighborhoods Online for activists in politics, if you will” — begun in

1994, managed and maintained entirely by volunteers working with the Twin Cities FreeNet,

demonstrating how to build a full Internet support system for grassroots electoral organizing.

Schwartz’s update in “NetActivism 2001” showed that a great deal had happened in five years.

In the same way that the overabundance of information provided by the Net had to be dealt with

to get its treasures to inform our lives as active citizens, so the problem with e-mail — “still the

most powerful online tool for activism” — had transitioned “from receiving no e-mail at all to

dealing with an e-mail glut that is a major challenge for us to manage.” The case no longer

needed to be made that the Internet could be useful for community organizing and building.

MoveOn's petition on the impeachment debate — two million emails and a quarter million phone

calls to Congress to censure President Clinton and then “move on” — had come to stand as the

“undisputed watershed in the use of the Internet to empower citizens in the political process.”

Online campaigns around specific issues — “flash campaigns” — with online petitions targeted

to elected officials who are appropriate to receive them (e.g., only from their own constituents),

with periodic reports back to supporters to help build a responsive, active membership were

among the rule early in the new millennium — all this before the Obama campaigns pioneered a

technologically sophisticated multi-media hybrid of MSM/mainstream media with the online

tools celebrated in the Journal of New Organizing, the New Organizing Institute, and the rise of

social media and such projects today as rad.cat — and the political activist cores of the

university-based community informatics movement, among nonprofit technology assistance

providers in NTEN.org, and citizen journalists in the Alliance for Community Media.

* * * * *

The neighborhood information movement is hardly languishing. Far from it. Hyper-localism is

one the buzzwords in today’s journalism and e-democracy supports a special forum for locals

online that supports hosts of neighborhood e-lists, placeblogs, and community social nets,

although the initial flourish and promise of the movement in its current form may have passed.

In the Boston metropolitan area, there are no less than six multi-neighborhood, multi-community

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information, communication, and news networks: the wickedlocal.com sites of the Community

Newspaper Company; the AOL-supported Patch.com network; the Knight Foundation-

funded Boston Globe project to develop and expand its local offerings; the community

sites supported by SocialCapitalInc.org; the Boston-wide neighborsforneighbors.org;

www.nextdoor.com.

Ed Schwartz offered numerous warnings about the apolitical dimension of much local and

neighborhood organizing; those established by corporate sources have modest community

development ambitions and no claims to be community organizing forces at all; the more

genuine community oriented efforts can still benefit from this lesson.

* * * * *

With this overview in mind, ISCV's website original aesthetics — the poor design with its busy-

ness, clutter, font selection, thick text boxes without padding, stock clip art, color and

composition — encourages one to consider alternatives that integrate and take account of the

radically diverse dimensions of its content, to imagine a presentation of transformed fonts,

spacing, formatting, color, and design. Consider the possibilities with its maps, images, audio,

and multimedia expanded and differently integrated with an aesthetic that includes something of

the dimensions of both the lyrics and the music of Leonard Cohen’s “Democracy.”

Schwartz moderated a monthly radio program of town meetings on issues of democracy from

Philosophical Hall that won the Pennsylvania Association of Broadcasters' Award as the Best

Public Affairs Program of the Year in 1993. He was a multi-media producer before the concept

fully developed. His O’Reilly biography ends with a reminder that Ed played jazz piano,

organized The Reading Terminals jazz group with Judge Richard Klein and architect Herman De

Jong that became a local Philadelphia institution, winning "Best of Philly" awards twice from

Philadelphia Magazine. Ed’s work merits a design that provides a sense of movement, a new

organization and guide to content that incorporates and conveys its democratic depth and

diversity.

* * * * *

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For those who wondered “Who are the 99%?” in the fall of 2011, a Wall Street Journal article

and blog site showed that the top 1% consisted of those whose yearly income was $507K and let

one enter a household income and find its percentage ranking. It still works.

The Occupation in downtown Boston at Dewey Square across from the Federal Reserve and

South Station was cleared out later during the week of the Harvard open seminar. On December

17, the Boston Globe announced that Occupy Harvard would begin removing tents on Monday,

calling it “a transition, not a retrenchment.” The Berkman Center gave the Occupy events good

attention in places beyond the civic education forum, the December 16 Berkman Buzz featuring

Sasha Costanza-Chock surveying Occupy demonstrators worldwide and Dan Gillmor exploring

Big Media and the Occupy movement. There has been continuing post-dispersion analysis since

then in lots of places.

Among the myriad directions that the Occupations moved out into, some reveal critical uses for

the Preamble approach that Ed and the ISVC developed and suggest there are applications here

for civic education more generally. After all, one direction goes to freeschooluniversity.org —

“Occupy Your Mind” — with its link to other Occupy Boston working groups and its wiki. And

the Declaration of Occupation does begin: “We, the people…”

_______________

Peter Miller (peterm@igc.org) edited the Community Technology Review from 1994-2005 and maintains an archive with some bloggish tendencies at www.peterbmiller.wordpress.com. His essay on "Carl Davidson: From SDS and The Guardian, to cyRev and CyberRadicalism for the 21st Century" is a special paper published by Comm-Org, the Online Conference on Community Organizing. Peter is also contributing a chapter on “Manuel Castells’ Information Age Trilogy and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory: Marxist and Weberian Transformations” to the successor volume to Advocacy, Activism, and the Internet.

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