Historian Arnold Toynbee theorized that civilizations gained the brio to flourish in the face of a "challenge-and-response" scenario: a military defeat, an inhospitable climate, or some other hindrance, was requisite to call forth the creative energy that would build an empire.

There's a lesson there for progressive advocates rolling out of bed this morning with an extra spring in their step ... and for conservatives who'd just as soon pull up the sheets.

Progressive online organizing has blossomed during the opposition's governance, and it's survived the post-2006 Democratic majority in Congress -- for understandable reasons. But one onion-layer behind the netroots in the Internet organizing history are Matt Drudge and Free Republic: online spaces that grew huge in the late 90's against the challenge-and-response scenario posed by the Clinton administration. Nowhere is it written that liberals must dominate cyberspace.

Apply Today Green Corps’ Field School for Environmental Organizing.

GreenCorps is an awesome advocacy organizing training program for recent college graduates interested in pursuing a CAREER as an environmental organizer. I went through (most of) this program in 1997 and highly recommend it for the right person.

The deadline is February 1st - apply here

Feel free to contact me with any questions - jnet (at)democracyinaction.org or 406-880-jnet (5638)

Many of us will probably remember, however vaguely, Robert Putnam and his famous "bowling alone" thesis about the decline of social capital in the US. Some of us remember thinking that it was more about transformation and reallocation of social capital, but to make that case right now would be kind of pointless and a distraction from the work Putnam is doing now (even if it's right, which it may not be).

Putnam has just published the results of five years of research on the effects of diversity on social capital within communities (which here means neighborhoods or something similar). The conclusion: diversity reduces social capital within the community. Most striking, and most distressing, it turns out too that members of a diverse community not only trust persons of other ethnic groups less, they also mistrust others of the same ethnic background.

Earth Day Network, one of our newer users, is hailing the approach of their signature holiday with multiple online actions.

The action here is pretty straightforward as pertains the technics -- there's also a pledge to use energy-efficient bulbs, which is a basic signup page -- but it's drawing traffic from several enormous mailing lists looking for topical links and turning its supporter signup chart vertical.

With the young emperor set to cart more bodies to the Sumerian charnel house, we would be remiss to make no comment on the issue of the day, to which so many of our users are lending their energy.

We've been spotlighting on the home page the outstanding house party event that True Majority is running through our Distributed Event tool. (And note their comprehensive Event Kit -- putting organizing material like that in the hands of would-be local activists in conjunction with the signup pages is what really makes a house parties action rock.)*

More importantly, it's a response to the mad and unpopular "strategy" of more, deeper, and alongside tomorrow's Day of Action to Shut Down Guantanamo (scads of DIA types among the sponsors) represents a critical test for that netroots we keep hearing about.