"Massive" protests already underway in Chicago

[pat_k]

89. Around 2006, my partner and I had a notion. . .

. . .of creating a membership organization with a sophisticated platform that enabled members to submit and vote on issues for which the organization's paid citizen lobbyists would lobby. For each campaign, professional staff would be responsible for keeping a "feedback loop" going -- i.e., reports on meetings with staffers or legislators, tracking legislator positions, follow ups for unanswered questions, and calls to action that would engage members in the process of either thanking the member for action taken, or admonishing them for being evasive, non-committal, opposed, or whatever.

We had put together a proposal and were seeking investors for software development and enough staff to pilot in a single congressional district. Our idea was that you needed to have the infrastructure and staff in place before soliciting members. That is, from day one members would be getting value for member dollars. We didn't like the notion of doing the usual soliciting of donations so we could build what was needed. To our thinking, that would be like Kinko's going door to door in a neighborhood to collect money to build a Kinkos.

We really saw this as a service organization. One that, in addition to lobbying on the "top" issues, and creating a feedback loop between the members and the citizen lobbyists they "hired," it would also provide training and support services for individuals and groups to connect and engage in their own DIY lobbying efforts. We firmly believed that our own efforts on our own behalves were worthy of support by paid professionals. And we believed members would pay a fee to get that support. The basic idea was that we needed to break out of the all volunteer, do things on a shoestring approach that leads to rapid burnout or the model of handing a donation to some organization to work on something you care about, without engaging you in the process in any way.

Anyway, we never got off the ground because we got caught up in the mortgage mess and attention shifted to our pro se lawsuit, but that is another story.