>Given your situation, don't know if you feel like "giving it away for
>free". But if you do, you might consider offering an on-line course on
>this.
Actually, I'm thinking about writing a book, studying the local youth "movement" (not so much political as cultural). My initial hope was to document what we'd been doing with the workers group since I figured that a kind of handbook on how to get such a thing started could be very useful. But that fizzled out. The weird thing about it, Gar, was that these folks didn't even have the basic decency to do what my own boss as work does: they never tell you what the deadline is; they negotiate it with you. IOW, there's "buy in" where I have some control over the time frame. but with this "workers" group, the people who were the driving force behind would simply assign deadlines and then wonder why the hell people didn't get done on time or dropped off. Well, gee, maybe if you asked the "workers" in the group what worked for them, you'd get a lot more enthusiasm.
In stark contrast, this is not at all how the more social/cultural groups I work with are. There's consensus building, meeting minutes, agendas, and you walk away knowing who's tasked with what and when it's due - on a schedule everyone agrees to. Wasn't happening with the leftwing workers group - very Communist Party USA.
Yakking at Michael Pollak about this ideas, of writing a book about the stuff that *is* working, even if it isn't political organizing. It wasn't anything I think will get published, but self-publishing for the purposes of precisely what you mention is what I had in mind. Also figured that, if I could get a videographer on board, it would be extremely useful in social movement classes (sociology) since my idea is to elaborate various sociological theories in such a study. Question is: time, energy and priorities.
My experience writing for South Atlantic Quarterly reminded me just how difficult it is to write when you aren't supported by an institutional infrastructure that makes it a whole lot easier. By the time I was done with that process, with an awesome editor, natch, I never wanted to read another word that dripped from my digits again. It was exhausting. I'd have to be really motivated and I can't see how I'd want to give up my other extracurricular and very outdoorsy away from the computer activities to go back to so much time in front of a computer! bah!
shag
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