You know the problem that I see with the Greens is that it confuses grass roots with disorganized.

I think it is good to have a grass roots organization where people have
the ability to provide input and to let ideas bubble up from the base.
But I also think that without strategy enormous amounts of time are
wasted having to explain how to do simple things, and why you want to
do them in the first place.

I suspect, from the brief interactions with the people I have met
locally where I live, and the comments that I had when I first joined, from one of
the guys in the office in Sydney, that the Greens treat lack of
organization as a virtue – or should I say lack of the use of the tools
that enable productivity to take place as a virtue.

The things that I proposed when I attended the first meeting: a
listserve to communicate to obviate the need for someone to cut and
paste everyone's names into the “to” field of an email, the idea of a
written business plan, targeting fund-raising around specific
objectives… these are fundamental to any organization succeeding…. well perhaps not the listserve… but you get it.

One of the problems with a group that wants to do something, whether it is a charity, a business or a government department, not having established these things early on
is that the longer time goes by the more the members of the organization build a belief that they don't
need these things and that what they already have is enough to build
on, because that is what they have always had, what they have always done…

My belief is that without real change politically in this country, and by that, I don't mean a change of government, I mean a party that “keeps the bastards honest” like the Dems used to do,
environmental issues such as climate change, will become so monumental,
that noone will believe that they have a role to play in helping
generate recovery. I hope that it is not too late for this. Labour and Liberal are the same in this regard. They play to the power groups and that means the lobbyists. And those guys are smart. They know how to position an argument to ensure that it appears to be of real benefit to the populace. (But is very specifically of benefit to their clients).

I thought that the Greens might be the party to achieve this, by getting on top of one single argument – Climate Change. The problem
is that from all appearances the local members of the party are so caught up in being little “g” “green”
that they are not able to think in terms of being “Green”
- something that would mean being efficient and using management and productivity tools applied to
deliver rapid results one of the ways in which to operate.

If I am right, then the Greens will never amount to much more than they
are right now – a fringe party that is full of do-gooder, basket-weavers. That would mean that for change to take place in this country someone else, another group with both
will, enthusiasm and the ability to use the available tools, will be
the group that any thinking person will need to put their effort into.

It might even be, ironically, The Pirate Party.

They only have one issue, and without doubt, should be able to motivate a considerable amount of support among the youth of this country. Even though in reality, if you looked in people's houses, you would probably find that very close to 100% of people have some sort of infringing copy of a piece of software, a game, a CD, a movie on disc, on their hard drives… somewhere… So the Pirates shouldn't just have a youth agenda…

Anyway, this was about The Greens, not the Pirates. The Greens need to pull their socks up.

Most corporations of any vision and size are monitoring blogs for mentions of their brands in order to defend against the danger of people telling stories about a negative customer service experience and allowing it to fester. Their fast action, that I have experienced a number of times over the last few months, is a direct measure of how active those organizations are that respond to blogs, and how lacking in vision those organizations that don't respond are.

It will be interesting to see if The Greens make contact with me.

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