the freedom activist network

Mutual Aid for Liberty Activists

Darian, James and I just finished a brainstorming session on the C4SS blogger's call about mutual aid for liberty activists. Here were some of the ideas we came up with:

1. Contribute to a pool, with aid being commensurate with contributions and/or according to agreement with other members.

Considerations:
-High level of trust among members
-Method for verifying claims
-Method for protecting the pooled money from theft including govt confiscation/ encryption
-More likely to be implemented by local clubs where members know each other well

2. Social network w/mutual aid pledges to people an activist connects with as "friends"

Considerations:
-Provision to ensure people don't feel obligated to accept new friends based only on brief internet conversations.
-Option to allow privacy and hiding friend lists and/or pledge amounts except among friends.

3. Set up a blog where members could post requests for assistance with paypal links and/or other addresses.

Considerations:
-A template would facilitate people asking for help when needed.
-In order to maximize aid to liberty activists, utilize a blog that's already popular among them (possibly fr33agents?)

What are your ideas for implementing mutual aid among liberty activists? Are there other considerations or solutions for any of the options above? Who wants to work on implementation? The more ideas the better... none of these mutual aid ideas are mutually exclusive!

Tags: activism, mutual-aid, social-networking

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by John P Goodman on October 29, 2009 at 12:05am: This sounds fantastic and is definitely something I would support. There quite a few technically savvy individuals on FA so I suspect the actual implementation/infrastructure already exists.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Michael Lowry on October 29, 2009 at 12:35am: I think the whole mutual aid bit was how fr33agents got formed in the first place.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Andrew Taranto on October 29, 2009 at 1:10am: The first thing that started germinating in my mind when I heard of this was some kind of mutual aid bit torrent/P2P network. Imagine a client program that sends/receives aid requests to/from friends, who in turn would send/receive aid requests to/from their friends, etc. You might be able to rate aid requests by friends of yours and all those ratings would combine into a composite so people distant from the request's origin would have ONLY that to go by in determining whether to make a contribution. The rating might be weighted according to the degree of separation (i.e., so someone "nearer" to the request might see it rated higher, all else equal, than someone who's a friend of a friend of a friend of the requester), the age of the request, the degree to which the requester has him/herself responded to other requests, and so on.

So you'd sit down, sift through requests, sort them by various criteria, use PayPal or whatever (goldmoney, ad hoc currencies, etc.) to make one-off donations, etc.

I had two main points in concocting this: (1) keep things as decentralized as possible, so as not to make a big pool 'o dough vulnerable to criminals, or a "system" easily co-opted by criminals, and (2) allow for anonymity (I'm not entirely clear why that strikes me as important at the moment, it just does).

Thoughts?; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Kirsten on October 29, 2009 at 1:57am: Andrew Taranto said:
(2) allow for anonymity (I'm not entirely clear why that strikes me as important at the moment, it just does).

That is interesting because the exact opposite would be important to me.

From the perspective of a giver, I would want to understand fully to whom I am giving and for what purpose.

I have been on the giving side of a couple different in-the-freedom-family sorts of aid actions- one to someone I know pretty well and one to someone I barely knew at all. With the person I knew, he didn't ask for help and was reluctant to take it, was kind of badgered into giving us a $ amount that would help him take care of the issue he was facing, thanked each and every one of us personally for helping, and explained what he did with the unexpected surplus he received (passed it along to another person in need). We saw the positive results for him of what we had done.

With the other person, I was one of a fairly large group of people who raised or gave money to someone who did, I am sure, need the money given his legal situation and loss of livelihood. He was asking for help, but I had no idea (maybe others did) how much he needed or what it was going for, how much he had already gotten, and whether and when more was needed. We never got updates on his legal case and how it was going. I never got so much as a generic group thank you. As far as I recall, he just sort of stopped responding to the main person coordinating our fundraising efforts. I had given about $300 to this person and had no idea what was the outcome of my giving. I have no reason to think it was used improperly, but this lack of visibility caused me to take a step back and reconsider what I was doing.

I don't like to think about this, but there are people who take advantage of other people's generosity. I think anonymity makes it a lot easier for some people to take advantage of others. There's a certain level of accountability that is lost, and I don't feel comfortable with that. And I like to make my own informed judgments about when to provide help to others. I know many people who are well-intentioned and generous, but I just don't think they are very good judges of character and I would not want to rely on their judgments in making these sorts of decisions.

From the perspective of a recipient, I would much, much prefer to know where any aid I received was coming from. I would want to thank them personally and make sure they knew their help was used wisely. I would want to know who they are so that I could bump them up my priority list in case they ever needed my assistance. And I would want to have some idea who I was being associated with in accepting whatever aid I might receive.

If your thoughts on why you envision anonymity as an important element come into focus, I hope you will expand on that.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Teresa on October 29, 2009 at 2:16am: Hi Kirsten,
One of the things that was mentioned in the call earlier is that people without many friends or pledges may be vulnerable to thuggery, though activists with lots of support may want that to be better known. Anyway, we thought it would be good to have privacy options in an online system.

Thanks very much for your thoughts!

Kirsten said:
If your thoughts on why you envision anonymity as an important element come into focus, I hope you will expand on that.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Teresa on October 29, 2009 at 2:23am: Andrew, I love your ideas! Thanks for your thoughts.

Andrew Taranto said:
The first thing that started germinating in my mind when I heard of this was some kind of mutual aid bit torrent/P2P network. Imagine a client program that sends/receives aid requests to/from friends, who in turn would send/receive aid requests to/from their friends, etc. You might be able to rate aid requests by friends of yours and all those ratings would combine into a composite so people distant from the request's origin would have ONLY that to go by in determining whether to make a contribution. The rating might be weighted according to the degree of separation (i.e., so someone "nearer" to the request might see it rated higher, all else equal, than someone who's a friend of a friend of a friend of the requester), the age of the request, the degree to which the requester has him/herself responded to other requests, and so on.

So you'd sit down, sift through requests, sort them by various criteria, use PayPal or whatever (goldmoney, ad hoc currencies, etc.) to make one-off donations, etc.

I had two main points in concocting this: (1) keep things as decentralized as possible, so as not to make a big pool 'o dough vulnerable to criminals, or a "system" easily co-opted by criminals, and (2) allow for anonymity (I'm not entirely clear why that strikes me as important at the moment, it just does).

Thoughts?; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by NickyTheHeel on October 29, 2009 at 2:26am: I kinda envision it as being like Kiva loans but targeted at activism and/or agorism. Obviously it would not need be just pleas for money. Maybe it would be need of an item (say a printing press) or of manpower for a project or a service (eg. graphics work for a project).; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by ThorsMitersaw on October 29, 2009 at 2:27am: I am not sure I understand the aim of this?; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Teresa on October 29, 2009 at 2:50am: ThorsMitersaw said:
I am not sure I understand the aim of this?

Here are a few aims I have in mind:
-Organize and channel support for friends and fellow-activists who need assistance, which will hopefully also get them back on their feet and being active again quickly.

-Decrease lure of dependence on government programs, if any may exist among us.

-Have a handy example to cite when people ask what will happen to people who are down on their luck in anarchy.

-If we open the system up to other goods and projects as Nick suggests above, this could also facilitate investment and collaboration on activism projects, both large and small.

Are there others?; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Kirsten on October 29, 2009 at 3:00am: NickyTheHeel said:
I kinda envision it as being like Kiva loans but targeted at activism and/or agorism. Obviously it would not need be just pleas for money. Maybe it would be need of an item (say a printing press) or of manpower for a project or a service (eg. graphics work for a project).

Right. This is kind of another reason I see visibility as to the need as being important. I spent a lot of time last summer helping friends build a house. There were several work parties over the last couple of years where friends came from around town, around the state and even from around the country and pitched in to speed up the building so they could get moved in before snow fell last fall and also to do things which would have been impractical for this small family to do on their own. We, even as a group, could not have afforded to hire labor to get this done, but we certainly were able to contribute time and muscle to get things done.

Before that, one of this family came down to Arizona, and after doing some work on my house to get it ready to sell, he helped me pack up my shit and drove my moving van up to Montana, was one of several friends who helped move my stuff into my new home, and then took a 6 hour round trip to Coeur D'Alene to return it since the van company we used had no endpoints in Montana. If I had needed to purchase moving services, I could and would have done it financially on my own. But it was a big savings for me not to have to do that, and it was also a huge emotional support to have someone there with me as I closed out a very tough chapter in my life. None of this would have happened in an anonymity-based system.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by NickyTheHeel on October 29, 2009 at 3:06am: I am of the opinion that the market will show that those requesting stuff will enjoy more success the more transparent they are. Of course this could be a fantastic opportunity for an Agorist credit bureau to arise. Who knows.

I do think that donors should be able to maintain their privacy if they choose.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Debbie Harbeson on October 29, 2009 at 10:27am: I may not be understanding this right. But isn't your main point that you'd like for there to be a means of communication to connect those who need something with those who may be able to help?

And if so, don't we already have one right here with FR33?

I don't think I'd necessarily contribute to a pool because I'd want to help on an individual basis rather than having an organization with all the attending complications that go along with that.

Make sense?; ▶ Reply to This