Building Power in the Digital Age

How organisers and developers are coming together to rethink the role of tech in movement-building

As organising increasingly intersects with digital infrastructure, questions of strategy, tools, and control are moving to the centre of left politics. From large-scale campaigns to everyday movement work, digital technologies shape how organisers connect, mobilise, and build power – yet they often remain underdeveloped or poorly aligned with organising needs.

For the Brussels Office of the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung (RLS Brussels), Sophia Bader spoke with Daniel Sestrajcic, organiser with decades of experience across movements, parties, and political education and co-creator of the Zetkin Foundation and associated platform, and Ada Regelmann, senior project manager at the RLS Brussels coordinating the organising programme, about the role of tech in organising today, the challenges movements face, and why building tools collectively matters more than ever.

RLS Brussels has been putting quite a bit of energy into this intersection of organising and tech. Why is this topic important to you, why does it matter now?

AR: A large part of organising work today already depends on digital tools – (nearly) all of our work, political or otherwise, does. I mean, we all use these tools to get things done. And when you think of the Mamdani-Campaign that knocked on three million doors in New York, or Die Linke in Germany whose membership almost doubled to 100.000 within a few months and which faced the task of integrating these people into its political activities – none of this would have been possible without digital means. But the tools that exist are often built for very different purposes, like commercial, marketing. They don’t necessarily fit how organising actually works.

Over the last years, at RLS Brussels, we created numerous opportunities for bilateral exchange and mutual learning. More recently, we decided to step this up. Together with partners at the Clara Foundation and the Zetkin Foundation we developed and supported a number of activities (a code camp, a meetup, a conference, a reader) to create spaces for in-depth learning and more challenging, complex discussions among organisations and parties that go beyond mere attempts to replicate practices that may not readily be transferable from one context to the other.

What has come out of these collaborations is a much clearer sense that this is something the Left needs to take seriously and work on collectively, instead of everyone trying to figure it out on their own. It is to bring together people who organise and people who build tools from different contexts to actually sit down together and talk: what do you need, what works, what doesn’t? And use this as the starting point for creating the tools we need.

People often talk as if digital tools are changing everything in politics. From your experience, what role does tech actually play in organising?

DS: The funny thing is that people often come from this idea that tech will solve organising. That once we bring in digital tools, we’ll suddenly be able to organise and then just stand back and let it run. I don’t believe that at all. Tech is not the solution to organising. Human relations are the solution to organising.

If you look at the methods we use, they’re not new. They’re built on the same ideas organisers had 100 years ago, whether that’s socialist organisers, union organisers, communist organisers. It’s about how we build relationships, how we create spaces where people actually want to be part of what we’re doing.

That also means looking critically at how we organise. What kind of spaces are we offering? Are people actually co-creators, or are they just expected to sit through another boring meeting? I’ve been organising for 35 years, and I’m honestly bored to death of bad meetings. People don’t want that. We need to think much more seriously about how we involve people, how we make space for them, also for people who don’t think or act exactly like we do. If we want to build a mass movement, we need to be broader than that.

So for me, that’s the starting point. Tech only makes sense once we understand that.

Can you give a concrete example of how digital tools can actually strengthen organising work?

DS: Yeah, I mean, one very simple example is phone banking. And I think people sometimes misunderstand that as well. It’s not about replacing meetings or replacing face-to-face organising. It’s about adding another way to actually talk to people.

A real-life example: Say we’re planning a healthcare outreach where we call around 1,000 of our members. And the point is not just to say, “Can you come to this event?” It’s to ask: how is healthcare working for you? What problems are you facing? What matters to you right now? That’s a political conversation. And it’s also relationship building.

At the same time, it gives us knowledge. We learn what people are interested in, when they were last active, what they might want to do. That allows us to organise better.

And then, of course, there’s the scale. In an election campaign, we made 100,000 calls. We didn’t speak to everyone, but we spoke to around 35,000 people. That creates a huge amount of data that you can analyse and actually use to inform your strategy. But you can’t do that just using pen and paper.

Looking across Europe, it seems like a lot of different approaches are emerging. What stands out to you when you analyse them?

AR: It’s astonishing how many different approaches are out there, which are often not visible to each other. You have parties building their own apps to organise members, others experimenting with canvassing tools, some trying out chatbots for first contact, others focusing more on how to structure and use their data. Often these things develop in quite isolated ways.

One of the things we’ve been trying to do is simply bring these experiences into the same room. When people compare how they organise a canvassing round, or how they follow up with contacts, or how they structure their data, a lot of very practical learning happens.

You keep coming back to the need to connect organisers and developers – and at Zetkin, this is what you do, you connect people around this one platform. What happens when people start working together around this tool?

DS: Well, it’s not the platform itself that keeps people together. That’s not what builds anything.

Yes, there is the technical side to it and many organisations are using it for their own respective needs. But what we’re trying to do with Zetkin is bring together these different kinds of people – organisers, developers, movements, parties – across countries as well. You might have someone from a housing movement in the UK talking to a party organiser in Germany, or climate activists in Denmark. And when you start talking, you realise that many of the challenges – some of them related to tech – are actually the same.

On the surface, you could say what connects people is that they’re using the same tool. But that’s not really it. What connects people is the shared understanding of what we’re trying to build, and the shared knowledge about how to organise. The platform is just a place to meet and work from. What unites them is this shared vision and motivation.

Where do you see the main issues or gaps or difficulties right now when it comes to tech and organising?

AR: We recently published a survey on the use of tech tools in organising. One thing that it revealed, but that we’ve also been hearing again and again anecdotally from partners, is that tech is often something people deal with quite late, basically when there’s a specific problem to solve or they want to take the next step in their work. But by that point, a lot of the important decisions have already been made: how people organise, how contact is maintained, what kind of data is collected, what kind of follow-up is possible.

From the survey work we’ve been doing, but also from conversations with organisers, there’s a clear sense that people want to work more strategically with this, but don’t always have the time, the tools, or the exchange spaces to do it, and do it early on as an integral part of their organising. So that’s the real challenge.

There’s also a political side to all this – who owns the tools, who controls them. How do those questions come up in your work?

DS: For a long time, digital tools and advanced knowledge of strategic organising have been something mainly available to people with capital, and also to the far right. They’ve had the resources to either buy what they need or invest heavily in building their own infrastructure. And you can see the result of that. Not least after Trump’s victory, but also across Europe, where the far right is organising internationally in a very coordinated way. That gives them a lot of strength.

On the other side, many organisers have had a hard time getting access to tools they can actually trust, or tools they can shape themselves. And often tech people are working quite isolated – within their (often corporate) organisation or within national borders. We want to change that. To use digital tools for organising, but also to bring together all the knowledge and all the people on the Left who actually want to contribute to building our own. If we can do that, we become stronger, more effective, and we can activate more people.

AR: If organising increasingly runs through digital infrastructures, then questions of control, access, and purpose are key. Part of our work is making sure that people who organise are not just users, but also have a say in how these tools are developed and that these actually support what we want to achieve.

DS: That’s also where this idea of “by organisers, for organisers; by the movement, for the movement” comes in: it’s a very practical question of who builds, who decides, and who benefits.

Photo credits: IMAGO / Stefano Montesi