J20 minus 62 — build a phone tree

When I was younger, when people still carried pagers without fears of them exploding, before cell phones were in every pocket, parents would arrange phone trees for sharing information about school closures or canceled hockey games. There were no really great, universal options for mass communication at that time. Nobody had ever heard of a group chat.

Since then, technology has gotten better and it's easy to just gather folks into a group chat on Signal or iMessage or to invite them to a Slack or a Discord. However, group chats have some disadvantages: they're noisy, they tend to fragment, and they're vulnerable to group drama. It's easy to leave people out if they aren't in the group chat. Group chats are also vulnerable to infiltration: if one bad actor gets in unseen, then they have access to everything and everyone in the chat.

Phone trees, on the other hand, are a time-tested way to establish community mass communication. The idea is this: make a list of everyone in a community who needs to be contacted in some time of need. From this list, select a smaller subset of responsible parties who will be able to communicate messages onward to another subset of the phone tree. A good example can be found here. You can put as many layers in this tree as make sense.

Phone trees have both advantages and disadvantages compared to group chats. Among them:

• Advantage: phone trees allow better "compartmentalization," meaning people in the tree don't have to know the identities of the other people in the tree. This helps mitigate the impact of espionage or other bad acts. If, for instance, someone in the community is arrested, it's possible to sever that part of the tree from the rest of the group to keep the entire group safe.
• Disadvantage: phone trees are considerably slower than group chats for connecting with people.
• Advantage: phone trees are much less noisy than group chats, leading to better "signal-to-noise" ratios and making it easier for community members to be able to receive critical information while tuning out superfluous chatter.
• Disadvantage: phone trees tend to create a top-down hierarchy. This isn't always bad, per se, as in many cases it might be sensible for a small group of responsible people to make a call. There are also models of phone "graphs" that don't have a clear hierarchy, but they're more complicated to make sense of.
• Advantage: phone trees don't require everyone to use the same app.
• Advantage: phone trees can be saved offline.
• Disadvantage: phone trees require training a large number of people on how the phone tree works.
• Disadvantage: phone trees risk a message becoming corrupted as it passes between parties.

It's also possible to come up with a hybrid between phone trees and group chats: each cluster in the tree is a small group chat, with one or two responsible notifiers. This cluster is connected to the larger community through only one or two connections, who can then pull themselves out of the broader community network if necessary, minimizing the impact of any infiltration. Let's give a simple example.

Alice, Bob, Charlie, and Danielle are key members in a rapid response community defense phone tree. The community mobilizes to block ICE vehicles during raids, hoping to prevent deportations. The community has 40 people in it (including the four key members) and is organized in four group chats. Each group chat has two key members in it.^[1]

Suppose Alice covers Group 1, Bob covers Group 2, and so on. Alice is Bob's backup in Group 2, Bob is Charlie's backup in Group 3, and so on. Someone in Group 2 notices an ICE vehicle rolling through town and sends a message to the group chat. Alice relays that information to Group 1, Bob relays that message to Group 3, and so on. The entire community is quickly notified. Group 1, being physically closest to the raid arrives to attempt to block ICE first. In the process, Alice and her peers are arrested. Bob then removes Alice from Group 2, and the other key member in Group 1, Danielle, leaves Group 1. This then insulates the rest of the community in the event that Group 1's phones are hacked, ensuring the scope of any possible investigation is limited to Group 1.^[2]

One benefit of this approach is the anonymity of it. None of the people in Group 1 need to know who the key members are. They don't need to know that Alice backs up Group 2, or that Danielle is primarily responsible for Group 4. As long as people maintain communication discipline, this model makes it very difficult for investigators to map an entire community.

This model is proven. During World War II, after some early setbacks, the French Resistance developed a similar organizational structure with small cells with weak connections between them.^[3] Any one cell that was taken down could only reveal a tiny part of the resistance network, its goals, and its structure. This frustrated the Gestapo, who committed disproportionate resources to trying and failing to eliminate the resistance.^[4]

Phone trees will allow your community to construct a communications network that mirrors a decentralized, cell-oriented community network. Group chats are nice for organizing at scale, but the strongly centralized nature of a main group chat for a community carries a lot of risk.

Phone trees aren't just useful for protest organizing. They're also great for disaster response management, event organizing, or community management. They help lower the cognitive burden for people in a community or movement by reducing communications to only smaller networks. You can create a phone tree even if you're not organizing against the state, and since the numbers change very slowly compared to a group chat where members come and go, it's much easier to store that data offline. They're often overlooked given the convenience of modern communications tools, but they shouldn't be overlooked for their resilience and flexibility. Consider starting a phone tree with your community, friends, or family today and make sure to practice using it.