History of the Swarm and Nest

A little while ago I set off to discover the history of an organizing tactic called the Swarm and Nest. Below I've pasted together in roughly chronological order all of the communications I had wrt my investigation of the history of the swarm and nest. I'm posting it here for no good reason.

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Hey Sanjay & Rob

I have a question from le olde GEO history.  Where did the swarm and
nest come from? Some say it came from Wisconsin, but I thought Rob
took it there.

In curiousity,

dr

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i don't know where it came from, but we were doing it at UIUC when i came on in 1999. It seemed like we had been doing it for a while at that point.

good luck on gathering the history!

sanjay

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Yep, I explicitly stole it from our habits at Illinois. Not sure who's idea it was there, or indeed if it was original to Illinois at all. Some Wisconsin person might have represented it to others as a Wisconsin idea, unaware of its history. Then again, perhaps someone at Illinois in the late '90s stole it from some earlier incarnation of Wisconsin that all of us don't know about...

History = rumor.

Rob

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I talked to Jon Curtiss about it.  His impression was that it was a
UIUC invented thing...

dr

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Hi all,

On a lark, I'm trying to figure out where the Swarm & Nest came from. It's something we used to do at UIUC, which Rob took to TAA and I brought to Michigan, and which other grad locals -- UIC, and the Florida schools for example -- have started to adopt.

The consensus seems to be that UIUC introduced it into the grad labor movement. Did we invent it, or lift the technique from someone else?

Send me a message if you've got the info!

dr

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I think we invented them name and lifted the technique. But from whom I have no idea. Probably TAA, but that's just a guess.

Andrew Cantrell

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I don't know if GEO invented it but I seem to recall it arising as a tactic during the card drive. I believe it was adopted as a tactic in an attempt to make the most efficient use of the active members as well as challenge the perception, at the time, of the dominance of humanities in the organizing effort. I think I have some e-mails from the stewards list archived at home that might be relevant. I'll take a look.

Tom Pulhamus

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Hi David--to my recollection, swarm and nest is a UIUC GEO original. I remember being at a meeting where the strategy was named, to much general hilarity, in the 1995-1996 card drive era.

In solidarity , Loretta Gaffney
Editor of the Organizer, 1997-1999

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During my time at GEO, we first began doing Swarm and Nest in the fall of 1999, after Uma, Mike, someone else and I picked up the idea at CGEU that summer. However, Toby and Loretta both said it had been done before by GEO, and I think Toby and Loretta supplied the name "Swarm and Nest"

Dave Kamper

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OK. This is the full text of an e-mail sent by Steve Jahn to the GEO-Stewards list on January 17, 1997. The important bit is the second paragraph:

GEO Spring Organizing Plan for the Election

Welcome back everyone. In December, after reviewing the results 
of our fall organizing (2800 people contacted), and after talking to Iowa 
and Kansas people about their elections, the staff and coordinating 
committee members have been developing a new organizing plan for the 
spring. Many of you know it by now because staff members have been 
talking face to face with those stewards who have been in town.
Basically the plan (modeled after the COGs plan at Iowa) divides
the campus into four sections with one team of a dozen volunteers and one
staff member assigned to each section. Team members will have short (5
min) contacts will all of the 3s, 2s, and 1s we contacted last semester
(hence we are contacting "friendly" people only). The contact will be to
give them election info and to urge them to vote, etc. Phone banking will
continue every week to generate new contacts and make appointments for the
team members. We have continued to modify the plan as we get people's
feedback, but this is where it presently stands.
Stewards will continue to act as representatives of their
departments. But for organizing purposes, we are inviting all stewards to
join a team for 10 weeks so we can get 3800 people out to vote for us on
April 15-16th. It's a 2-3 hour committment. We hope to organize in a 
more communal, social way this semester with less meetings and more 
intensity. Many stewards have already signed up to be on a team, but we 
still need more. So please join us--it will be fun.
Stewards also need to discuss what they want to do with the
stewards' council. We have set up a tentative meeting date of Mon
Jan. 27th 5pm at the YMCA to have this discussion. That date will be 
confirmed at the coordinating committee meeting this Tuesday night.
So please mark your calendar--MON JAN 27th 5 PM YMCA. See you there!

I think the team organization was the germ from which it all sprang. So maybe Iowa is the ur-form? I could probably suss out something more from what I've got (1996 - ????) about how it developed. Maybe another time. Too tired now. Let me know if there's anything else I can do.

Tom Pulhamus