Just put a # in front of words

Let’s look at stepping away from the #dotcons as an example of hashtag affinity group organising. A hashtag can help name a problem, but it cannot by itself create a movement. It only becomes a tool for social change when shared language connects people to shared relationships, practical projects and action. The “spade and compost” metaphor is useful for this, the hashtag helps identify the mess, but the point is to pick up the spade and compost with them. A useful progression is: Name → Connect → Organise → Act → Build → Repeat:

• Name the problem: #dotcons, #stupidindividualism, #deathcult, #techshit give people a shorthand for something they already experience but may not have language for.
  
• Connect the people: hashtags allow people who recognise the same problem to find each other. But this needs to become an affinity group of action, not just a pile of accounts using the same word.
  
• Make the metaphor understandable: explain what the hashtag means and give groups lived examples. Otherwise, it becomes just another insider language.
  
• Turn criticism into a question: What can we do about this? Or What did you do today to help your community step away from the #dotcons?
  
• People need a next step: join a project, move a community conversation to the #openweb, install something, help document a project, host a server, organise an event, teach somebody else.
  
• Create visible alternatives: this is where #OMN matters. If you tell people to leave something, you need somewhere meaningful to go.
  
• Build collective habits: the hashtag becomes useful when a community consistently uses it to recognise problems, share experience and coordinate action.
  
• Compost the criticism: don’t only keep producing negativity about the #dotcons. Turn the accumulated criticism into knowledge, relationships, tools and projects.

These are the messy problems we need to compost. The path of “making positive posts about specific openweb projects” is part of the answer, but positive promotion alone isn’t enough. People also need a shared explanation of why the existing system is a problem and a language for understanding it.

So the hashtag isn’t the movement, it is the flag, vocabulary and filing system. The movement is the people who organise around it and actually do something. And that’s the bit missing from “just put a # in front of the words.” 🙂