Revolutionary geekery and melodramatic reflections on perpetual learning and other pathways to peace

My new agency for worldchanging communications, ON:SUBJECT, has seen the light of day last month. You’ll find me blogging over there from now on.

I can’t say it often enough: If you are working for a small, cash-starved, well-meaning nonprofit, please resist the temptation to have your website custom-built. Do yourself a favour and go open source.

Even if you might have the money today to pay for someone to programme all the bells and whistles you might want today, think beyond the current contract. A website is not a brochure that you print once and never touch again – you want to build a site that sustains your organisation’s growth well into the future.

The programmes that power today’s websites have grown in sophistication over the years. Most problems have been solved before. Thousands of developers have poured their collective wisdom into the leading open source content management systems (like WordPress or Drupal) – and they will continue improving them even if you don’t pay a dime. This collective wisdom is yours to benefit from.

Do ask yourself: What will happen if your web development company goes bankrupt? What happens if they start charging ridiculous amounts? What happens if you fall out with them?

If your developer has built a proprietary website system for you (and maybe a couple of other clients), you don’t stand a chance. You will have to start over again. But if you’ve chosen a widely-supported open source system, you’ll just smile and find someone else to do the job for you.

One of the problems with a blogging schedule is that you postpone the post until last minute and then you get sick. Or decide to watch Tatort. Or both.

A friend of mine is deeply involved in setting up a sustainability scheme for restaurants here in Belgium. One of her problems: Restaurants touch upon so many aspects of sustainability that it’s hard to decide where to focus. Local, seasonal or organic food? Consumption of energy and water? Recycling? Workers’ rights?

Her idea is to weigh the sustainability achievements of each restaurant and to distribute gold, silver or bronze marks depending on how well they scored. That, of course, raises new questions: What is more important – changing the lightbulbs or changing the menu? Cooking with ingredients from the farmers’ market or with those that carry ecolabels? And how do you verify each of these?

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“We’ve become very good at inviting the right people and making them feel good in conversations,” explained U. “But when it comes to taking action, hardly anything happens.”

The European Commission clearly is a difficult beast to change. Together with a group of likeminded officials, U. had hosted a series of events and conversations to focus the culture of the commission back on its purpose: Building a European Union that serves its citizens. The process was always meant as a grassroots effort, but had run into one clear obstacle: How can you inspire the volunteers engaged in those conversations to action?

When U. brought this question to an open space I attended last week, it reminded me of work I had been involved in more than a decade ago.

Lessons from Grassroots Organizing

Right after I left school, I worked for a while with one of the most amazing grassroots activist organisations I know. As part of the protests against nuclear power in Germany, X-tausendmal quer had set out to organise non-violent blockades of the trains transporting nuclear waste to the final disposal site in Gorleben. Just imagine thousands of citizens sitting down on the railway tracks and not leaving until forcibly removed. All of this without a hierarchy that would have repulsed the more anarchistically-inclined amongst us.

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Last week, I had a conversation with Adam Kahane, author of the book “Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change”. He had related his impressions from witnessing the Copenhagen climate change summit to a group of social entrepreneurs at the Hub in Brussels by describing two opposed camps: Those that focus on their own needs as individuals and those that focus on the needs of the whole no matter the costs.

I asked Adam: “What is it that could make a difference in such a stuck situation like in the climate change negotiations?” The answer I got: “It’s difficult.”

Indeed it is, and that is why I am asking the question. If it was easy it would be boring.

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