I started this post last week at Net2, in an attempt to summarize my talk after our Activism panel ended. Instead, I sat there listening to the Gender and Social Web panel, wondering why we didn't ditch our stupid powerpoints in the previous panel and just host a really informed conversation, as these women were doing. Because there's no way that I successfully communicated anything useful in my 10 minutes about integrating online and offline organizing or the future of real-world activism. Thanks to the invitation of our friend Alan Rosenblatt (aka Dr. Digipol), however, I had plenty of time last night to hit the key points for the students taking his class at AU. It was fun -- Along with Roz LeMieux of MoveOn, we talked about all sorts of iterations of online/offline organizing and really dug into the core differences between MoveOn's mobilizing strategies and our approaches on the Dean campaign, especially in terms parsing bottom-up vs. top-down strategies. So, here they are... The Key Points -- What technology means for organizing and activism: (1) Now anyone can become a community organizer or fundraiser. We keep hearing that this new social web, or "Web 2.0", enables anyone to become a publisher; to create and post content online -- something traditionally reserved for the pros. The equivalent is now true for organizing events, actions, and fundraisers. And it's already happening. With more than 250,000 events organized on Evite.com each month, it's hard for many of us to imagine attending a real-world event that wasn't in some way organized online. (2) This is not new -- it's just different. Successful online organizing relies on the same core community organizing principles that have been around for decades. The difference is that the 'net and mobile technology enables us to amplify, accelerate, and (in most cases) simplify the process -- and for less money. You can apply the same principle to blogs, which are just a powerful new twist on old-fashioned word-of-mouth. (3) The social web and new technology revolutionizes traditional, real-world activism by...

• Creating a realtime, transparent feedback loop that shows people how they're part of something larger than themselves. For instance, photos and stories can be shared and live for the world to see before the same event has ended. Or we can find out how close we are to hitting a national fundraising goal before leaving the house-party fundraiser.
• Enabling organizations to get realtime feedback and instant data reports from actions or events taking place anywhere on the planet
• Putting power in the hands of local grassroots leaders and volunteer organizers that traditionally would have been reserved for professional or paid staff
• Encouraging massive, self-organized actions and mobilizations to take place independent from traditional organizations or structures (e.g. last month's immigration protests)
• Enabling programs to scale more quickly and efficiently than they previously could have with equivalent resources

Exciting times as far as I'm concerned. So, how to get started and be successful at this as an organization? Check out our latest insights paper: Moving From Online Activity to Real World Action