Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms
Summary
Jeremy Heimans (Australian-born civic activist) and Henry Timms (American civic leader, Lincoln Center president) are the co-authors of New Power: How Anyone Can Persuade, Mobilize, and Succeed in Our Connected, and Incredibly Powerful World (2018); their old power / new power lens — old power is held, hoarded, and commanded by the few; new power is made by many, open, participatory, and channelled — is the contemporary reference frame for understanding distributed campaigns and digital-era movements.
Key idea in this wiki
- The old/new power lens is the analytical frame distributed-organizing, civic-tech and digital apply when asking whether a campaign is building durable infrastructure (new power) or renting attention (old power); the Social Movement Technologies project curates the practitioner toolkit for distributed-campaign infrastructure [source: social-movement-technologies].
- The new power formulation underwrites the wiki’s networked-movements concept: a movement that is made by many is more durable than a movement that is made by one leader’s charisma.
- The Heimans-Timms pairing with thinkers/zeynep-tufekci (whose Twitter and Tear Gas identifies the fragility of networked movements) gives the wiki the analytical pair it needs: new power can be more durable than old power, but networked movements have specific fragilities the campaign must address.
- The Purpose framework (Timms’s later work) underwrites the wiki’s public-narrative concept’s emphasis on values-of-self-us-now as the operational discipline of new-power storytelling.
Why campaigners read them
Campaigners read Heimans and Timms because the old / new power lens — old power held, hoarded, and commanded by the few; new power made by many, open, and participatory — is the operational diagnostic for is this campaign building durable infrastructure or just renting attention? [source: social-movement-technologies]. The frame is the wiki’s working answer to the recurring strategic question of which digital-era campaigns outlasted their moment of attention and which dissipated as soon as the news cycle moved. The wiki uses the lens in distributed-organizing, civic-tech, and networked-movements. The wiki pairs Heimans-Timms with marshall-ganz and zeynep-tufekci as the three-thinker contemporary-movement framing canon.
Related
- distributed-organizing
- civic-tech
- digital
- networked-movements
- public-narrative
- organizing
- thinkers/marshall-ganz
- thinkers/zeynep-tufekci
Learn more
- On Wikipedia: Jeremy Heimans — CC BY-SA 4.0
Open Questions
- The old/new power lens is a useful heuristic but the operational discipline (what new-power-building means for a specific campaign decision) is under-documented; the practitioner canon treats the lens as a strategic frame rather than as a tactical playbook.
Sources & verification
- [new-power](sourcing target — source page pending) — primary work, link-only
- [heimans-timms-purpose](sourcing target — source page pending) — secondary reference