report to Leadership Committee

Introduction

The year 2010 was a year of major growth, in both member numbers and political visibility and influence, and significant change for May First/People Link.

1 -- We are now comprised of 500 members, about 75 percent of whom are organizations. Taking into consideration that each of the member organizations has a group of its own members who use our resources, MF/PL has a "membership user base" of nearly 2,000 people. Essentially, this makes us one of the largest political progressive organizations in this country.

2 -- We are now "looked to" by many of the US-based and International movements and conferences as the major source of technological work, planning and leadership.

3 -- Our political influence has strengthened by virtue of our deepened relationship with the Social Forum movement, the Climate Control movement and our individual work with labor unions and grass-roots organizations. We continue our work within the Association for Progressive Communications Also, our stances on such attacks as those launched against member "the Yesmen" have identified us, in many minds, with a resolute stance on privacy and Internet rights.

4 -- Internally, we have established a solid, working tech support group which answers support tickets and does server maintenance work. This is completely new in MF/PL.

5 -- We now have 70 working servers spread across five locations. Our back-up systems are stronger and more sophisticated. Our security measures are stronger than they have ever been.

All growth brings challenges and errors. We have our share.

1 -- Portions of our infra-structure appear to be unstable with outages and daily downtime on at least three of our better known production servers. There have been almost no lost memberships as a result but this affects members' work (which runs counter to our priorities) and it may very well dissuade new members from joining.

2 -- Our Co-Directors committed two major errors this year:

a -- We completely missed the importance of the Net Neutrality issue and debate. While that was a very tough campaign to enter -- for structural reasons -- we didn't try to fashion our own campaign or figure out a way to get involved. That resulted in MF/PL being marginalized from the issue and many of its proponents (some of them very important potential allies for us) and it resulted in the campaign being conducted by very liberal thinking and framing (led substantially by FreeSpeech . org) and devoid of any attention to people of color or working people.

b -- We downplayed the massification of Social media use and, rather than project an inclusive stance toward it, often balanced our actions and comments in favor of criticizing it. MF/PL has never opposed the use of Social Networking sites but, because our argument was framed so sharply, we are often identified with that stance. This was primary Alfredo's responsibility. This error also garbled the discussion around Free and Open Source Software and crippled our effectiveness in espousing that critically important position.

3 -- No matter our member composition, MF/PL is view as a white organization by many activists of color. In part, this is because there is a deep-seated segregation in the left of this country and the first glimpse many organizations of color get of us is our techies. They are almost all white. In addition, the above mentioned stances on Social Networking sites and FOSS often cast us, in the eyes of people of color organizations, as technocrats, purists or eccentric scientists...and not practical activists.

For that reason, our current recruitment is mainly of white people and white organizations. This, given the way the world is going, is organizational and political suicide. And, of course, it means we aren't doing our job politically.

This is the most poisonous problem we now have.