Californians may be largely locked out of the Trump administration, but they are quickly forming the hub of what’s being called the Resistance.

While the term has been embraced by larger liberal organizations such as MoveOn.org, the intellectual headquarters of this surge in grassroots activism is the progressive Bay Area, where newly arriving techies, longtime activists and wealthy investors, among others, are plotting how to push back on President-elect Donald Trump’s agenda.

With Democrats in the political minority in Washington, many Resisters feel it’s on them to protect what’s sacred, because politicians won’t be able to do it. They say it’s time to move beyond mourning Hillary Clinton’s defeat and start counter-attacking — quickly, because Trump takes office in less than six weeks.

“I’ve been signing petitions and donating money and calling congresspeople,” said Lori Koon, a San Francisco hairdresser who is hosting a Trump resistance meeting Monday at the salon where she works. “And that’s all good, but at this point, if I want to see the world shaped the way I want to, the little people like me are going to have to do it.”

She is leading one of the more than 60 small groups organized by California’s 1.3 million-member Courage Campaign that are designed to brainstorm resistance ideas. Courage Campaign provides the framework on how to conduct a meeting, but it is up to the individual groups to riff on the ideas that fit into its Courageous Resistance campaign.

“I’ve never done something like that before,” Koon said. “But I’m stepping out of my comfort zone because I think it’s important.”

She is illustrative of how many of the planning efforts are in the early stages and taking many forms, both online and off.

“People want to do something — they just don’t know what. They’re telling us, ‘Tell me what to do,’” said Eddie Kurtz, executive director of Courage Campaign.

“The role of civil society is to shine a light on what’s happening here,” Kurtz said. “There were a lot of people who voted for Trump who didn’t realize what they were voting for. It’s our job to expose this and tell stories around it.”

This weekend, several hundred programmers are gathering at San Francisco tech company GitHub for a hackathon on how to “transform your dissatisfaction into a unique idea.” The agenda of Debug Politics: “Find one specific thing about the election cycle you were dissatisfied with and build something to fix it.”

This is the second such Debug gathering. Organizer Jesse Pickard plans similar hackathons in Los Angeles, New York and, eventually, elsewhere in the country.

The first hackathon, held last month, came up with ideas like a browser extension that enables users to better sniff out fake news. Another was a website to help users find organizations where they can help counter the new administration.

Pickard said the Debug idea started with a post-election-day realization that moaning about Trump with other liberals on Facebook wouldn’t accomplish much. Plus, Pickard is motivated by the feeling that he didn’t do enough to prevent Trump’s election.

“On a personal level, I felt I didn’t do enough to actually effect change,” said Pickard, the CEO of Elevate, a brain-training app that was named Apple’s iPhone App of the Year in 2014. He volunteered to knock on doors for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in Reno “but it was very surface-level stuff. A lot of my friends fell in the same boat. And a lot of them have amazing skills to offer.”

Other efforts are sprouting, too, with a more targeted focus.

With Trump scheduled to meet with Silicon Valley leaders next week, other online activists are urging tech companies, including Google and Facebook, not to cooperate with any efforts by the Trump administration to create a registry of Muslims. An online petition being circulated by the activist group Sum of Us, which has offices in San Francisco, says “Donald Trump’s agenda is a dangerous, existential threat to our communities and democracy — and now he’s trying to get Silicon Valley to help him to execute it.”

Longtime San Francisco environmental leader Adam Werbach has been working with Democratic donor Mark Pincus, the San Francisco billionaire founder of game builder Zynga, and his wife, Ali Pincus, founder of home decor site One Kings Lane, and what Werbach called other “senior tech leaders” in funding research in Midwestern and Southern states.

“We want to know, fundamentally, how do we serve people who have been left behind by the economy?” said Werbach, the former director of the Sierra Club. They expect to use what they learn to unveil a policy road map for resistance shortly before Trump’s inauguration in January.

“Right now, we’re doing a lot of humble listening,” Werbach said. “We can’t just make this what we’re against — we have to state very clearly what we’re for.”

Werbach said many of his compatriots who rebounded from previous Republican takeovers, such as Newt Gingrich in the House and George W. Bush in the White House, were lulled into relative dormancy during the Obama years. Trump’s election has reawakened many of them.

“I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’ve never been so overwhelmed by offers of support,” Werbach said. A couple of weeks ago in San Francisco, he helped Beau Willimon — who created the Netflix series “House of Cards” — recruit progressive leaders to help with the Action Group Network that Willimon started to harness the energy of people angered by Trump’s victory. On Dec. 19, activists from the network will demonstrate outside the state Capitol as part of a nationwide movement to urge Electoral College members not to cast their ballots for Trump.

San Francisco writer and activist Rebecca Solnit cautioned that the implications of Trump’s victory are potentially more dangerous than what progressives faced under Bush.

“There wasn’t a danger that Bush would start a nuclear war if someone insulted him,” Solnit said.

At 10:30 a.m. Monday, she will join others in front of the Capitol in Sacramento to read what she described as a “repurposed Declaration of Independence.” It is designed to show how a “Trump administration poses a tremendous threat to democracy itself ... as well as to the climate and human rights and the environment. The threats are all so grave.”

And while Republicans toast Trump at inaugural balls around Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, a group of Bay Area progressives are planning a $75-a-ticket event dubbed “The Blue Ball” at a venue soon to be announced. It’s part cry-in-your-beer festival and part organizing effort to encourage people to support groups that will be on the front lines of the political battle for the next four years.

Organizer John Whaley, a Bay Area Democratic pollster who is putting it together with his wife, Jenn Lynn-Whaley, and others, remembered going to a similar event in Washington, D.C., in 2005 on the night of Bush’s second-term inaugural.

“There seems to be a need for it right now,” Whaley said.

Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli