“I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.”

Thomas Jefferson

It’s time for a new breed of political activism that brings people together both on and offline to produce new solutions to problems that concern them, collectively choose the best of the ideas created, and then act together to get them implemented.

The purpose of both Activist Solutions projects, the Solution Exchange and the Dialogue Network for Action (DNA), is to encourage and enable people who are not yet politically active to get involved, and to offer those already involved new ways to contribute more creatively.

The Solution Exchange will be the first project launched (you can see the latest content here here). This new political website will offer a free flow of horizontal and vertical interaction. Contributors will post summaries of their ideas for solutions and comment on each other’s work.

The Dialogue Network for Action (DNA) will follow as soon as the Activist Solutions population is large enough for people to create many small compatible problem-solving groups in their geographic area. This largely face-to-face dialogue project will be added because we believe that direct interaction is vital both to the development of community and to popular movement building.

Participants in both will exchange ideas, build relationships, and increase their influence with leaders, legislators, and public officials, as well as with each other. Some of the solutions produced, and their authors, might gather enough public support to significantly impact public policy.

Groups and individuals that are able to agree on specific solutions will form fluid coalitions that collaborate on joint proposals and lobby for the ideas that they’ve developed. Such flexible alliances will maximize each participant’s political clout without squelching anyone’s autonomy.

We will invite many organizations and individuals, representing a range of political ideologies, to post their own ideas for solutions to political problems. The political organizations that choose to participate will increase their numbers and their influence, by spearheading action in behalf of the solutions created and endorsed by their own members.

Each fluid coalition will form around a shared positive vision. It’s relatively easy to get people to energetically agree on “what’s wrong” and “who’s to blame.” Many political movements neglect the more challenging work of identifying constructive alternatives.

The alliances that emerge from the Solution Exchange and DNA projects will be both strong and constructive precisely because of their focus on solutions. The proposals they produce will offer the public a range of contrasting plans for the future to be compared, considered, and discussed.