the readout: Feb 24th

Learning Lab Session 1: How to organize and win online

The Kairos Learning Lab has officially begun! 27 organizations from across the country came together to workshop and innovate campaigns for housing, reproductive, climate, and racial justice. If this is your first time hearing about the Learning Lab, here’s the scoop of what happened yesterday:

In the first call, we heard from Joe Delgado — Kairos’ Director of Organizing and former ED of ACCE-LA (The Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment - Los Angeles). In 2020, this neighborhood member-led organization did the unthinkable and pivoted their entire organizing program to digital during the pandemic. Despite all odds, they tripled their membership, won a city-wide eviction moratorium, and elected progressives into office that aligned with their member’s demands. Pretty wild huh?

ACCE-LA went from having no experience using digital tools to winning campaigns online – not by deploying the “digital-first” skillset of social media ads and big emails lists, but by applying what they know about relational organizing and direct action to build their own model of online organizing. Here’s what Learning Lab participants had to say:

Do you want a piece of the Learning Lab, but forgot to apply? We got you covered – check out the action step that groups are taking this week to identify where their members are online.

User Error Panel: The Internet Post-Roe

Last Wednesday, we hosted a panel on the state of our reproductive rights since the Dobbs Supreme Court decision last year, and how tech issues like content moderation and data privacy shape how people access care. As our Director of Campaigns Jelani Drew-Davi said,

You can find a longer recap (and a link to the recording) here.

The Supreme Court on tech: “We really don't know about these things”

This week, the Supreme Court heard arguments on two different cases (Gonzalez v. Google, Twitter v. Taamneh) that deal with how platforms moderate content. Here’s a good recap from Gizmodo on how the arguments went (tldr, they were kind of a mess!) But the quote below is all you really need to know:

Justice Kagan is admitting that the justices aren’t equipped to design the building blocks of internet governance – but she also reminds listeners that tech is the only industry expected to regulate itself. 

The decisions the Court makes could fundamentally change the internet. The impacts of this decision are too great to be made without the participation of the constituents of the internet – including organizers and the communities we organize.

This is why ReOrganized exists – to be a place where organizers can have conversations about how decisions on tech impact our work. So on a scale of 1-5 — if 1 is “I have no idea what Section 230 is” and 5 is “I have strong opinions” — where do you fall?