Join the Impact Today

Today, all across the country, thousands of young activists will be protesting Prop 8 and the other anti-gay marriage propositions that passed last week. These protests are being organized in a decentralized fashion via Google Groups, Facebook, and wikis.

While most of the organizing is decentralized, the initial impetus for the protests came from a 26 year-old Millennial - Amy Balliet:

Seattle activist Amy Balliett, founder of web-spawned phenomenon “Join the Impact” realized that the site ‐ at that point, only a two-day old project ‐ had reached a certain critical mass, logging 50,000 hits per hour. The “impact” was crashing servers.

Little did she know how viral this thing would become.

“Join the Impact” began as a blog post and email template by Willow Witte, a friend of Balliett’s who had sent the missive to inspire friends after the passage of California’s anti-gay marriage Proposition 8.

The success of similar propositions in Arizona and Florida, as well as an anti-gay adoption measure in Arkansas, only added gravity to the situation. Witte encouraged contacts to forward the note to their local LGBT groups to solicit plans of community action. Balliett responded to her friend’s email saying, according to a post on the site, “We shouldn’t wait, we need to mobilize now, and we need to on a national level, at the exact same moment, throughout the country.”

And mobilize they did: this past Friday, Nov. 7, ‘”Join the Impact” hit the web. Five hours later, the site logged 10,000 visitors. Apparently a lot of other people shared the young women’s desire to turn despair into resolve.

By midnight, 20 cities’ worth of young volunteers had signed on to organize protests against the discriminatory propositions.

The next evening, Nov. 8, the site had tripled its hits.

By Monday morning, a plan had emerged: Cities around the country would organize their own efforts to coordinate a synchronized protest for Sat., Nov. 15, 10:30 a.m. PST. The movement became officially global with hits from the UK and France, and by Nov. 11, over one million visitors had come to the site.

A friend of mine in California who is following all this said that most of the organizing going on around Prop 8 is being driven by young people, who were the only age group in California to oppose Prop 8.

I don't have time at the moment to go into anything near the detail this deserves so I recommend that you go and read Nancy Scola's reporting on it at Tech President. Calitics will also be covering Join the Impact protests throughout the day.

This is probably the most significant example of young people using technology to organize around a specific issue (not a candidate) since the pro-immigrant rallies organized via MySpace and Text Messaging in 2006. This is an important development in itself and for the LGBT community, and it's something that all activists should be watching and learning from whatever their issue.

I'll try to give this more coverage via a post-mortem when I get back online tomorrow.