(Read in French) An important aspect that our qualitative research report generated was the need for longevity in campaigns whose ultimate goals will not be met in a matter of weeks or months, but rather years and may include a multitude of international actors. The campaigns that claimed some of the most amount of this long-term success were Movimiemento 15 and Occupy Central with Love and Peace (OCLP), later to become more publicized as the Umbrella movement. Both of these cases utilized decentralized or, more aptly, distributed leadership whose entire design encourages participation and is intended to view all participants as equal contributors. The decreased the costs of action and inspired longer term commitments.

Picture of ansel.ma, october 2014 (Flickr). Yellow umbrellas were symbols
of the Umbrella movement in Hong Kong.

In the case of OCLP, campaign founder Benny Tai Yiu-ting, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong, wanted this concept of participatory leadership to reflect the universal suffrage that they were demanding from the Hong Kong and subsequently Chinese governments to provide them with. Tai’s first step to achieve this was to actively try and find someone to take a central leadership other than himself because he felt that the campaign wouldn’t be as effective under a solitary figurehead. When no one would lead the charge, Tai and two others decided to fill the void and eventually met over an estimated 1,000 meetings with interested parties and stakeholders in the wider pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. These meetings would discuss exactly what type of electoral reform to propose, such as full public nomination of all of the chief executives in Hong Kong, and essentially were able to crowd-source from leaders and engrain their involvements into the organization and goals of the entire campaign. OCLP then went on to hold a public referendum that drew almost 800,000 votes and identified the precise electoral process they want the government to enact. The online portion of this referendum was also subject to a sophisticated cyber attack with Chinese characteristics, which fellow researcher Nick Dagostino will touch on in an upcoming blog post on cybersecurity risks.

Throughout this year and a half process from spring of 2013 to the later summer of 2014, Tai and the other leaders were also acutely aware of the potential negative aspects of distributed leadership and were able to successfully mitigate against them. Due to the fact that OCLP had the stated intentions of civil disobedience at some point in their campaign timeline, Tai was very deliberate about explaining exactly what this means, the legal ramifications for protestors and utmost significance of peaceful protests. This was in part done through the publication of the Manual of Disobedience, which highlights the philosophies, legalities and protocols of civil disobedience. This resulted in a large percentage of peaceful campaign participants throughout the roughly 3-month occupation with only mild flashpoints of violence with typically nefarious actors intentionally starting skirmishes. This allowed the campaign leadership to have greater freedom in the actions and demands the Umbrella Movement could make because broad public support was there while the campaign remained peaceful.

Another benefit of this distributed organizational structure was that the OCLP campaign could remain flexible when shifts in spotlights occur, as they most definitely did in Hong Kong when two student groups in particular who had been involved in the wider discussion on democratic reform, soon became the face of the Umbrella Revolution. As the occupation began in late September 2014, Tai he said that he was not upset or felt that his movement had been co-opted because “it was clear that the [pro-democracy] foundation was strong” and that the “spirit” of the Umbrella Movement was very much a reflection of OCLP. Additionally, the student organizations were a driving force in the sheer number of occupiers throughout the Movement and in some ways integral to the ultimate success of the campaign. Both organizations were able to succeed in mobilizing and sustaining supporters due to the beneficial nature of distributed leadership.

This strong and encompassing foundation was only achieved through practicing distributed leadership structure intentionally from the very outset of the Occupy Central with Love and Peace campaign. Other campaigns in our study, such as Idle No More nationally, was more reactive to growth and unorganized in message; similar longevity and sustained public interest was not achieved. All OCLP campaign participants and organizers I spoke to were confident of the campaigns long-term ability to thrive, despite the decision of the Chinese government to postpone making a decisive statement on electoral reform until summer 2015.