The Times profile of Avaaz and Ricken Patel, Feb 9 2011

Ricken Patel is trying to bring governments and businesses to heel around the globe. Its finger clickingg o o d If public opinion is the new superpower, is Ricken Patel its prime minister? The 34year-old Canadian is the founder of one of the worlds biggest online communites, thecampaigning network Avaaz meaning voice in Farsi which has seven millionmembers.Fashioned in the citizen-politics spirit of MoveOn in the US and 38 Degrees in the UK, itgalvanises public opinion online and uses it to influence those with the power to implement change. While MoveOn and 38 Degrees focus on national issues. Patel and the Avaaz faithful want to fix the world. When I meet Patel at his headquarters in Manhattan he is chewing over the language of acampaign e-mail. His computer pings incessantly with Skype alerts. In the three days Ispend with him he takes dozens of calls from his internationally scattered team but alsofrom royalty, diplomats, politicians, activists and non-governmental organisations lookingfor guidance on how to set up similar projects. Posters from campaigns decorate his office walls. One urges Robert Mugabe to recognise Morgan Tsvangirai as the winner of the2008 Zimbabwean election. Another, the campaign Avaaz launched in 2007, shows Tony Blair alongside the caption Even He Is Pulling Out/Block The Escalation In Iraq.Looking up from his computer, Patel explains why the minutiae of messaging isimportant. There are two types of fatalism. The belief the world cant change, and the belief you cant play a role in changing it. If in a few hundred words you produce aconvincing counter-argument, people respond.The message he is poring over asks for a show of solidarity with the protesters in Egypt who are calling for Hosni Mubarak to step down. A sentence of the rallying call personifiesthe ethos of Avaaz: There are moments when history is written not by the powerful, but by the people. This is one of them.The campaign aims to collect one million signatures and to encourage members aroundthe world to telephone their governments to demand that they support Egyptian citizensquest for democracy. The campaign is also seeking donations to pay for satellite internetterminals to thwart attempts to shut down public communication channels.The theory is that such massive attention from the international community will reducethe potential for human rights abuses, encourage other governments to do the right thingand keep open communication channels vital to the democracy movement. Our goal is tosupport Egypts protesters by showing that the world stands with them, Patel explains.This kind of rapidly employed, results-focused campaigning has made the pressure group, whose mission is to Close the gap between the world we have and the world most people want, one of the most important new voices on the global stage. It has members in all 192UN countries, including Iran and China where the site is illegal. The UK has just over500,000 members making it the fifth most Avaazie nation after Brazil, France, Germany and the US.Desmond Tutu, Al Gore and Gordon Brown are fans. Rather than separate politicians intogood guys and bad guys it has a policy of slamming them when theyre judged to be wrong and supporting them when theyre right. Brown has been on the receiving end of both, yet still praises the group for driving forward the idealism of the world.In an era of issue-numbness how did the group earn such eminent cheerleaders and become one of the favourite meeting places for global netizens? I think people withcompassion and public spiritedness in their hearts were yearning for it, says Patel, a man

described by his employees as a Mr Miyagi character [from The Karate Kid ]. Its like weput a call out saying Practical idealists of the world unite and they have.This union claims to have achieved impressive results, including upholding the EU ban onGM crops; preventing the introduction of a law to gag the media in Italy; halting thepassing of a law in Uganda that would sentence homosexuals to death; stopping theinternational whale-hunting ban from being overturned; helping Iranians to access news by keeping banned internet sites live during the 2009 election; pushing through a law inBrazil to block politicians convicted of corruption from running for office, and bypassingthe Burmese Governments block on international aid after Cyclone Nargis by depositing$2 million (1.25 million) in donations in the account of a local businessman to pass to themonks running the relief effort. In terms of numbers of lives saved, thats one of my favourite campaigns, says Patel.These victories, and most people whether they lean to right or left would regard them assuch, have been achieved by collating monumental petitions with vast numbers of signatures and then dropping them into the inboxes of their targets. If this doesnt work the organisation stages sit-ins, rallies, phone-ins and media friendly stunts such as takinga herd of cardboard pigs to the doors of the World Health Organisation to demand aninvestigation into the link between swine flu and giant pig farms. It also created a threemile human chain handshake from the Dalai Lama to the doors of the Chinese Embassy inLondon to request dialogue between the parties. If such genteel acts are ignored,campaigns are honed into hard-hitting adverts on billboards, TV channels and innewspapers.Patel assures me that such bare-knuckle tactics are employed only when an individual ororganisation refuses to negotiate. For example, when the Hilton hotel group apparently failed to act on a petition requesting that it introduce a scheme to help staff identify gueststrapped in the sex trade, it was given four days to come good, otherwise advertshighlighting its inaction would be run in the chief executives hometown newspaper.Hilton signed up. Some might see this as blackmail but for others its an efficient way of forcing corporations to put people before profit and is the quintessence of the groups the world in action motto.Hotels are ground zero for the rape trade, says Patel. Now 80,000 eyes and ears [Hiltonemployees] will be trained to spot it. Im not going to lose any sleep over how that wasachieved.Not all parties come on side so smoothly. Last year Avaaz tangled with the Canadian broadcaster Sun TV over its licensing application to launch a news channel that wouldhave to be included in all cable and satellite packages. Avaaz raised concerns that it would be a conduit for the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, and was receiving preferentialtreatment because Kory Teneycke, the channels development vice-president, was Harpersformer communications director.Sun threatened legal action and ran articles in its newspapers claiming that Avaaz was aGeorge Soros-backed interest group meddling in Canadian affairs. The mud-slinging came to a head in a live TV debate. Teneycke suggested that the petition had false signatures.Patel offered to trace the IP addresses of any dubious signatories to identify the computersthey were from. Teneyckes face crumbled. Days later he resigned, admitting that he haddebased the debate.But its not only from campaign opponents that Avaaz has encountered criticism. Onlinedebates have waged between activists enamoured by the speed and efficiency of theclicktavism model and those who think it encourages lazy, ineffective armchairactivism. Adding to this argument is

The Net Delusion by Evgeny Morozov, a recent polemic thatsuggests the internet represses and controls as much as it is liberates. Its a debate thatPatel is exasperated by. He regards the internet as a tool that allows people, whatever theiragenda, to do the things theyve always done but faster and on a larger scale. To reduceour actions down to clicking is silly. Its what happens after the clicks how we use thatsupport thats what brings about incredible change.F or all his potential foes Patel has no security. He doesnt feel that his job puts him at risk,although a group opposing female genital mutilation did threatened violence unless he got behind their campaign. But hes concerned that there may be risks ahead. If Avaaz is tomake a real impact against the international rape trade, then the main benefactors,organised crime cartels, will take a hit. Although Patel steers the ship, the big decisions are made by the community. An annualpoll of 10,000 members guides what issues are focused on. Before a campaign goes live itis tested to gauge uptake, and campaigns are tweaked or dropped according to majority rule. This January all aspects of the organisation staff salaries, office rental, campaigncosts became 100 per cent member funded. These costs were previously covered by astart-up fund raised from various foundations on the understanding that they had noinfluence over the group. That was vital to remaining true to the global citizenshipmodel, says Patel, who rarely veers from speeches of ultra sincere, commonsense-rootedoptimism. People lead, not members of a board, and thats why it works. People arent bogged down with bureaucracy. They see the big picture and want whats best for all of us.Thats what makes it an amazing powerful community. My role in it is an honour and atremendous responsibility.Patel has probably been preparing for this role all his life. Born in Edmonton, Canada, to aRussian-English mother and a South African-born Indian father its no surprise hisaffinity is with a global rather than national idea of citizenship. Aged 3, he knew about theCold War and the structure of the human cell and by 6 was striking up conversationsabout colonialism. He went to school on a Native Indian Reservation where he endured bullying but, having read about the communities plight, claims to have felt empathy withhis persecutors. Ive always felt solidarity with people suffering injustice, he says. My theory is that my Mum gave me so much love Ive always had extra to give.He went to Oxford to study PPE (Politics, Philosophy, Economics) and its there that hispassion for activism was born. He played a central role in the 1998 tuition fee protests, drafting an alternative graduate tax plan. At Harvard, where he took his Masters in PublicPolicy, he joined the living wage campaign for the institutes workers, a formativeexperience that saw the first on-campus occupations since 1969 and gained support fromnational press, local congressmen and even the wife of the president of the University.For four years he worked in war torn nations such as Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan and Afghanistan. He lived locally with families rather than in expat compounds and says thatthrough jobs for the International Crisis Group he learnt how to bring rebel forces to thenegotiation table, to monitor elections (covertly), to restore public faith in once corruptpolitical systems and to spot when foreign forces were being manipulated. After returning to the US he volunteered for MoveOn, which was voicing opposition to theBush administrations attempt to marry support of war to the Patriot Act. Through thisexperience he grasped the power of organising public opinion online. His travels hadalready convinced him nations were more united than divided on the issues that really mattered, and so his idea for a global advocacy citizenship was born.Despite

campaigning against and witnessing the shortfalls of the institutions of formalpolitics, Patel has never lost faith in them. If the UN council were an elected body hed beexcited to run for a seat and he regards Black Block and other disaffected youthlibertarian movements that use violence to express disenchantment with the status quo astragic.Refusing to engage in politics declares victory to all the unscrupulous forces trying to useit for their own ends, he says. His mission appears to be to reform the present system intoan injustice-free, alpha version of itself. But if the path to this utopian land is to be laid by governments, why choose advocacy over politics? Theres massive consensus on humanrights, poverty, corruption, the environment and finding diplomatic ends for war. Whatslacking is political will to implement these things. The only way to achieve that will is if aglobal community pushes for it.So if that community is Avaaz, does that make you the prime minister of the new superpower of public opinion? He looks aghast.