Message for A Second Term

Organizing has ground to a halt in this pandemic. Whatever we might have done to show up and talk to people to support an independent California that we might have normally done before the pandemic is just too risky for me and probably you, too, today. What I see that there is to do is to plan for the future. My campaign for election as chapter coordinator for nine Southern California counties is based on putting together a plan to find technical assistance in building up our contact management system.

We need to be able to prospect through thousands of contacts

There are roughly 39 million people in California. If the California National Party is to get a checkbox on voter registration forms, the state law mandates that we would need 60,000 people to register. To do that, we need a way to work remotely to gather names with contact information. We'll probably need about 100,000 contacts to sift through to register. We can count on the partisan duopoly, more likely Democrats than Republicans, to disallow and/or deny registrations in the office of the Secretary of State and probably any registrar of voters office in every county. The party won't be able to fight every denial so we will have to expand our goal to exceed the threshold significantly.

For the sake of illustration, let's say that the California National Party sets up a program where we have one CNP activist with the goal of 5 registrants.  You can pick either 12,000 to 20,000 people who read e-mails or URLs in text messages and will show up, say, at every 3rd event near them. We need something to manage people at that scale. We have it, but it's not working right to manage phone banking (a very 20th Century concept) or to be able to manage people who respond to a text message.

I don't believe that the California National Party has a sufficient infrastructure to create our own narrative for either California subordinate to the USA (as it is now) or the California independence movement. Again, our contact management system must be repaired and expanded to drive our own content to news media.

Because of that problem, I am writing a manual to seek out technical assistance - either an intern or volunteer covering much of the following:

• definition of the problems with our contact management and e-commerce system
• the functions that need repair and management by a person with technical expertise
• the substance and duration of the relationship between the technical person and the party
• the plan for developing the party's technical infrastructure

Again, none of this will happen on the streets. I picked this not only because the work can be done remotely, over the Internet but also because it is something that I have seen novel political movements neglect for well over a decade. While our contact management application is not groupware, it is more essential than a collaboration package for political organizing.

With your support, I will prepare us for a time to meet for California and gather for our interests, to come up with plans for our neighbors to work towards being free of country indifferent to our needs.