Putting like-minded people together is important because it will give people a place to get a good hearing for their ideas; we also see it as a key ingredient to building communities.

By community, we mean groups of related people with common interests and goals, as well as the motivation to pursue them together. Finding or forming such groups can be the key stepping-stone between alienation and influence, and is central to our program. The revived public square that we envision will be more than a vast marketplace of ideas – it will be a place to meet people, discover commonality in surprising places, and develop and carry out action plans when agreement is reached. It will be richly diverse as a whole, but made up of small clusters that are internally very similar and compatible. These smaller clusters will connect to each other to form more fluid coalitions that could amass over time the numbers necessary to have larger public impact. We imagine that the kind of cellular structure we intend to facilitate will maximize the benefits of small and large group membership.

When specific ideas for solutions are supported by large enough numbers of people, they can and do get a hearing. Enough supporters of specific solutions can attract media attention, and increase the possibility of still further enlarging the numbers of people in support of an idea.

But while allying with thousands of other people creates the possibility for significant shared impact, the voices of the individuals that make up such a movement are increasingly drowned out. An individual’s relationship to the group as a whole tends to be abstract and relatively weak, and his/her relationship with the group’s leadership also tends to be limited.

Being part of a well-functioning small group, on the other hand, can give everyone an opportunity to be heard and to interact directly with other people. In addition to the camaraderie that can evolve from such contact, small groups are excellent incubators for new ideas. By nestling these small groups within a network of larger coalitions, both levels of participation can feed off one another and grow.

Traditionally, communities are made up of people who live near one another, but the Internet has made relationship across time and space far more possible. At the same time, our experience has been that Internet relationships have limitations, especially if the connections are online only, without any face-to-face interaction. That’s not to say that intimate community can’t form online, just that online connections are often weaker and more diffuse than those formed offline. In our view, the Internet is an ideal place for movement building, making it possible for bigger (and looser) coalitions between groups to form. It is less ideal as a medium for small group community.

This is one of the primary reasons we plan to launch the Dialogue Network for Action, which emphasizes personal contact between a team of like-minded people. Once the Activist Solutions population is large enough in any particular geographic area, we’re going to help people get together in person to talk about solutions they can agree on. What they produce will go back on the Solution Exchange for more feedback. When the time comes to develop and carry out strategies, the cellular structure of the program will enable semi-autonomous small groups of people to plan and carry out their own strategies. These small groups will simultaneously be connected to a larger coalition of people and groups that are all trying to promote the solution that they’ve created together.