Do you live under a rock? If you do, you might not have heard of the Pickens Plan yet, which is former “oil tycoon” T. Boone Pickens’ roadmap to oil independence: alternative energy resources.
What’s interesting is that Pickens is being progressive not only in his message but in how he is delivering it. I think the term “powerful lobbyist” is going to start changing as people realize how easy the internet makes it to gather thousands or even millions of people behind a particular policy initiative. That’s where the real leverage comes from, after all.
If you check out their web site, they have a whole “community” section that offers the standard range of community functions: profile creation, groups, events, images, and forum interaction.
So is it working?
The short answer seems to be yes. There’s a lot of activity in the community section of the site, and you can’t help but think of the Obama campaign site when you cruise through the navigation.
The groups are numerous and seem to be active, there are 8,575 pages of members that you can flip through and friend or message. In other words, the community certainly seems to be healthy.
What’s most interesting to me is how effective Pickens has been at building community around an issue using a combination of online tools and old-school advertising (you’ve seen the TV commercials, right?)
The Pickens community kills most of the organizational overhead simply by existing online. With tools that can scale effortlessly and let users self-organize on a lot of the projects that would traditionally take paid staff to coordinate, it becomes a lot easier to organize group action.
And what is political power if not organized group action?
I think we’ll see more policy-oriented groups start to form working around this model.
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