At Kairos our goal is to demystify the often misunderstood field of “digital organizing.”

Since 2016 we’ve been training individual organizers and partnering with state and local powerbuilding groups across the country for one purpose – to unlock the full potential of our movement’s ability to organize in the 21st century.

Our current organizing moment is changing constantly. While we have our traditional methods that bring people together, we are also in a time of overwhelming social media activism, tech driven volunteer management, viral online mass mobilization, and bloated spam folders from politicians begging for money.

The time we are in is one where what happens both online and offline tangibly changes our world and there is still so much we don’t know.

Our training team, curriculum, and model is built by labor organizers, culture workers, data nerds, and lovers of the internet who have cut-their-teeth in neighborhoods, public schools, and at the doors for decades.

We teach and explore the “digital” in “digital organizing” always as a realm, never just as a set of tools – a series of places where relationship building can happen, where organizers can find people, where crucial levers of power can be pulled, and where we can break the bottle-neck on what is currently considered possible.

Below is a summary of some of the values and theory that our model for teaching and learning digital organizing is built on. For more information on future Kairos offerings, email us at info@kairosfellows.org, or just keep reading.

Digital organizing is just organizing digitally – no “techy” experience required.

We aren’t computer scientists or tech bros. The only requirement to be a digital organizer is to believe in the transformative power of social justice organizing and being willing to experiment in the digital realm.

As organizers, the skill we bring to the field of digital organizing is our deep-rooted knowledge of what moves people, builds purpose and commitment, and grows leadership.

Whether or not navigating a new piece of software or interfacing with a data set makes you nervous, excited, or both is besides the point – doing digital organizing is still just about building the people-power necessary to win shared goals.

Technology shouldn’t make us forget that organizing is what works.

Sometimes staring at a blinking cursor is also what organizing looks like.

The hyper-saturation of sales and marketing approaches on digital platforms have trained us to believe that our social media pages, email lists, and advertising outlets are just one-way gizmos to broadcast and share info with massive audiences. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Digital tools are just the digital means to make organizing happen. Wherever there is ‘engagement’ there is also ‘interaction’ and whenever we are interacting, we have the potential to be building deeper.

Getting back to organizing basics online produces beautiful results.

Map your digital turf, join people in the spaces where they chat about the things that are important to them, share stories about their lives, or build community — embed yourself and meet your folks where they are at.

Start small — practice and play with what we know about ‘good’ organizing in one digital space, build one leader from an online interaction, and expand and play with what might be possible from there.

Traditional tactics produce traditional results – creating the space to play and experiment with new organizing ideas will lead to new discovery.

The people and issues we care deeply about require us to break the bottle-neck on what’s possible, be open to surprising ourselves, and taking new approaches both online and offline.

We all have routinized tactics. Some work and some do not. But when they aren’t working and possibly haven’t been working for a long time, we owe it to the issues that we are fighting for to try new things – get honest with ourselves and strategize differently.

Taking some space to explore new ideas could be the thing that moves a dead-end, low engagement tactic or routine into a big new strategic idea.

Experimentation isn’t always at the top of the priority list for teams and organizations, but when we take the time to commit to it we may find people, strategies, and opportunities that have long been overlooked.

Creating the space to work together helps us connect the dots between what we know and what else is out there for us and our movement.

We must collaborate, align our visions, and break the silos that stratify the immensity of meaningful ideas we have to share and learn from together.

That “aha” moment you had – someone else had it too, but different – let’s work together to connect on that.

An increasingly digital world requires us to organize and build online.

The people we need to build with aren’t the only ones using the internet. Every CEO, politician, bad policy, news story, or culture war has its platform in the digital realm.

At this point in time, not engaging in digital spaces – for whatever reason – means you’re blatantly leaving power on the table.

When we build online and offline hybrid strategies we amplify our stories, shape narratives, include everyone in our pivotal moments, chase down our targets, and maximize our impact. We call it the 1-2 punch.

What tech does, it does to us too. When it comes to tech behavior and our movements – tech is not neutral.

Our work online doesn’t stop at just using tech platforms to advance our goals – the platforms themselves are part of the problem of injustice that we all face.

We organize using technology critically. We encourage everyone to be healthy skeptics of tech’s behavior.

We build tech accountability into our strategies and work to ensure that the corporations behind our digital spaces are making tech in a way that works for all of us – not reproducing inequality and harm.

In addition to our organizing online we face tech injustice head-on — find ways to target the companies that produce and sell systems that turn neighbors against each other, wreak havoc on worker’s lives, aid police brutality, and automate surveillance of Black and brown communities.

For more information on future Kairos offerings, email us at info@kairosfellows.org, or just keep reading.

Since 2016, Kairos has been developing digital leaders of color and working closely with movement building groups to re envision digital not just a set of tools but rather, as a terrain to contend for political power and as a place for organizing. The pandemic fundamentally changed our lives, including how we organize and many groups have worked hard to not only transition to digital, but to understand the digital terrain.

Tech is regulating and reorganizing our lives - individually, through communities, the economy, our political system, and through our culture. One of the biggest challenges we face in organizing our people in the fight for liberation is mis/disinformation. The massive mis/disinformation problem we are seeing is an issue of digital governance, and the disinformation being spread is rightwing ideology that is disrupting our democracy, stealing resources from us, and harming our lives. 

Mis/disinformation impacts every campaign we run, deepens cynicism in government, and affects our long-term ability to organize. Scholars and journalists have been studying and reporting on the spread and impact of mis/disinformation on our communities for several years now. But when it comes to pushing back and disrupting disinformation, there’s still a lot to learn. The Kairos disinformation cohort is bringing grassroots powerbuilding organizations together from around the country to build tech literacy and digital power grounded in deep community organizing practice.

To intervene on mis/disinformation and build digital power online, we need organizing strategies built from the ground up — and that’s what we’ll do together in this cohort. This learning cohort will bring groups together to learn best practices, iterate on organizing strategy, and build innovative ways to disrupt mis/disinformation.

Registration for the cohort is closed, but if you’re interested in learning more shoot us an email at info@kairosfellows.org.