Marty Kearns: Network-Centric Advocacy is adaptation of advocacy and traditional grassroots organizing to the age of connectivity.

Network-centric advocacy focuses resources on enabling a network of individuals and resources to connect on a temporary, as-needed basis to execute advocacy campaigns. The network-centric advocacy approach fosters the creation of self-organizing teams to compete for aid from other network elements (manpower, talent, funding, tools, connections to the public, and experts). Leadership of campaigns is decentralized. Basic services are supported by a variety of generic issue-neutral and flexible service providers.

The network-centric structure allows for the application of talent to engage opponents at moments of weakness or when they are “off balance”. The network relies on loose and flexible collections of participants taking advantage of technologies and communications tools to collect and deploy in “campaign time”. The goal is to tip policy debates and create policy effects that are disproportionate to the resources expended.