Network Advocacy Model

Concept developed by John Lebkowsky, editor and co-author of the Extreme Democracy book.

The Network Advocacy model

"focuses resources on enabling a network of individuals and resources to connect on a temporary, as-needed basis to execute advocacy campaigns. The network-centric advocacy approach fosters the creation of self-organizing teams to compete for aid from other network elements (manpower, talent, funding, tools, connections to the public, and experts). Leadership of campaigns is decentralized. Basic services are supported by a variety of generic issue-neutral and flexible service providers" (http://activist.blogs.com//networkcentricadvocacypaper.pdf )

Comment from Jon Lebkowsky, co-author of Extreme Democracy: Traditional activist organizations were centralized, which means that power and authority for decision was held by some central entity, and whatever staff/members/chapters were at the edges of the organization acted only according to direction from the center. With a network-centric approach to advocacy (what I used to call nodal politics), members of the activist network connect as peers, and they all have authority to act and make decisions relevant to their context. This is resonant with the thinking behind Extreme Democracy: participation is through smaller, active organizations and teams that are part of larger activist networks." (http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/002752.html)

More information on 'nodal politics', at http://www.mindjack.com/feature/nodal.html