Going out on a limb

I used to like to climb trees. We had a beauty in our yard, when I was my sons’ age. It had a nice low sturdy branch and plenty of higher ones spaced in ideal ways only nature can manage. I liked the feeling of accomplishment to poke my head out of branches some 30 feet in the air and look out over my world, which was mostly limited to the neighboring houses and the school across the street.

I don’t climb trees anymore. The branches don’t feel as sturdy. My center of gravity changed. Muscles and motivation are also waning. But I miss that feeling of accomplishment, and the new perspective on the world I can’t get on the ground.

This past weekend, I tried climbing the proverbial tree.

For two months, I have been part-timing the organization of a local political event — RootsCamp. The idea of open, diverse conversation as the foundation for activism, governance and societal change is something in which I believe deeply. The studies I am doing at IU now are reinforcing the concept of political emergence (perhaps mostly because I’m looking for that reinforcement). In RootsCamp, however, I had to go out of my element and do things I hadn’t done before. I had to put myself out on the limb and find ways to promote something fairly radical to people I had never met. I had to face the constant likelihood of rejection and be willing to come back for more. I had to accept the strong possibility that failure was imminent, and my vision of this event would be dwarfed by reality. In doing so, I excercised some social muscles I hadn’t used in a very long time. The strain was evident.

The Bloomington RootsCamp had just thirteen participants, horribly undersized by comparison to other similar camps with a less open invitation. The Washington, D.C. camp has seventeen organizers listed, each with vastly more experience than I have in doing this kind of thing. There are financial sponsorships, free food and swag, and an attendee list that is up over 200 people. In fact, they had to do a very un-BarCamp-like thing by closing new participation, except to people who were foot soldiers in the recent campaigns. There are some major big-wigs on that roster, including Arianna Huffington and Eli Pariser of MoveOn.org. I couldn’t even convince my own classmates and profs to spend time with me last weekend. It is easy to feel like a minnow in an ocean, by comparison.

What we didn’t have in quantity, however, we made up for in quality. Among those in attendance were a former Bloomington mayor, an up-and-coming school board candidate, and two county councilfolk. We also had some veteran activists and a participating reporter for an alternative newspaper. Mostly, we had conversation that led to both tangible activity and lessons learned. As a bonus, I also discovered some local blogs and a short-term project to create a Planet Info kind of aggregator for local authors.

Failure to bring in the 100 or so local people I was hoping for would not have been possible without trying to do so in the first place. By failing, I met a dozen people instead. They happened to be the right dozen to allow me to come out of the RootsCamp process with a plan for the future. This kind of forum will happen again. Now, I have more people to help me climb the trees.