Sometimes being in a social movement involves exciting things like street actions or public performance. More often, there’s painstaking and not very glamorous administrative work to be done. Today was one of those days.

During the day I worked on setting up the next web project after Occupy 2012 finishes in twelve days time. More on that as it moves to viability. The evening was my first Strike Debt organizing meeting in the US since the People’s Bailout.

After the publicity generated by the Rolling Jubilee and associated Strike Debt actions, there is a huge backlog of data, contacts, affiliate groups and so on that we have to work through. There are some 25,000 emails in the Strike Debt accounts now. So for several hours this evening, we worked through ways to clarify this data. This means working on spreadsheets, designing visualizations, devising intake forms and other work that is very much like work, except that you don’t have to do it but you chose to anyway.

It’s the difference between, if all goes well, sending an email to nycga.net and never ever hearing back from anyone and getting a proper response that leads to you becoming involved. It’s about making sure that people who want to know what’s going on can do so, and also about finding ways to share the administrative labor this involves. All good stuff. Nonetheless, I am now too tired to generate any more thought  out of the event. I forgot that activism is actively demanding.