Hi

The official election report included the following passages: 

The SCC has been allowing multiple overlapping chapters to exist without border limitations due to the lobbying of Brian Setzler, a neotribalism advocate.  It’s now exceptionally difficult to organize such endorsement systems allowed for in the bylaws due to the separation of groups into such tribes.  Anybody in any part of the state can make a “Chapter” and claim to have a say in an endorsement in a far flung other part of the state.

...

Abandon overlapping cells.  Follow political boundaries.

Given the results of the large bylaw proposals wholly rejecting neotribalism, it should be noted that for young people, the neotribalist model isn’t in any way inviting.  Upcoming generations are way less clique-driven and are more intersectional.  The pattern isn’t to coalesce into a singular close-knit tribe, it’s to connect to many larger groups for shorter periods of time and to move to and from such groups, gathering multiple diverse experiences.  While authors such as Robert Putnam have lamented non-tribalist behavior as alienating, that’s not what people actually experience.

This exposure to many different groups worldwide with the expansion of the Internet has linked people to social and economic justice issues all over the world.  The next generations are thinking globally and acting locally.  They are thinking about their carbon footprint in ways only a few of us in the Green Party were talking about decades ago.  Our platform of decades ago is the new reality of today’s youth.  We should empower today’s youth to take our platform and keep moving it forward, rather than be stuck in the past.

In any case, it’s not the Party’s job to superimpose any hyper-conservative neotribalist structures upon our members, volunteers, and activists. 

We exist as a within-system political party that operates in solidarity with many intersectional progressive groups that work in systems and outside of systems.  Our structure mirroring the current political system for convenience of organizing candidate and issue campaigns within the existing political system does not itself impose a structure on how groups operating outside of the system may self-organize. 

The near-universal rejection of the cellular model neotribalist bylaw proposals at this convention should lead the Party to reconsider moving to non-overlapping chapters that cover political subdivisions and have smaller and larger bodies up and down the political system hierarchy.

It’s nearly impossible to build a coherent endorsement system when cells can organize outside of any boundary.  Right now the state doesn’t even “cell” nominations to any subdivision – it just requires the whole state to vote for all nominations.  But the structure of non-partisan endorsements is even worse.  The endorsements for those are done at the local chapter level, but not really, since any “chapter” can “cell” itself to cover the entire state and thus add itself to votes in faraway areas.  We have enabled parasitic amoeba to fester, not cells.

The author's statements do not accurately represent Robert Putnam's ideas, specifically his differentiation between binding and bridging social capital. 

I suspect this passage also fails to accurately represent Brian Setzler's ideas, so would invite Brian to respond here as well.