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Moveon, Meetup

The New York Times today includes an article on one of the main internet organizers for the war-protesting events, Smart-Mobbing the War, detailing the emergence of the moveon.org coalition.

''The world says no to war'' is just the latest of succesful events that have been organized from the internet. ''If money is what it takes to get attention, we'll do that,'' Pariser says. ''But we'll do it the grassroots way.''

''We've changed the way that we do organizing in the last eight months,'' Pariser told me. ''One of the things is to move past e-mailing and phone calls and get people back out on the street and use the Internet as a backbone for catalyzing that.''

Last week, Howard Dean mentioned Moveon while in NYC for the Meetup event that Dean addressed. There's a writeup in Faux News on the success of Meetup for Dean's campaign, that is linked to on the Dean2004 weblog, with commentary.

Similar to Moveon's transition into using the internet to get out on the street. Meetup has allowed Dean supporters to move his campaign into becoming national at warp speed. In March, 2003, over 2,500 people in 79 cities were able to participate in the Meetup for Dean. Nationwide, nearly 5000 have signed on to Dean's Meetup.

Now there is a Million Dollar Meetup Challenge for Dean.

The next day of demonstration against beginning a war is slated for March 15th. There are reports that if the US is not able to win support at the UN for beginning an attack on the 17th, that the US/UK unilateral coalition will attack on the 14th. We are less than a week away from the United States and United Kingdom unilaterally invading Iraq, breaching international law and undermining the U.N. It seems that the era of irriational fear, led by Bush, is going to wage it's war. L.A. Kauffman of United for Peace and Justice says, ''If war does break out, you are going to see a global day of action like you've never seen.''

Moveon, Meetup, and the voice this has become are not going away. In the Pariser/Moveon article above, Dennis Kucinich said:

''Eli has proven we're in a new era of grass-roots activism. The basis for human unity is not just electronic -- the human unity precedes the electronic, and then is furthered by it. Eli represents 'the advancing tide,' which Emerson said 'creates for itself a condition of its own. And the question and the answer are one.' '' Pariser put it this way: "I've always been a real believer that the best ideas win out if you let them happen."

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