AUSTIN — The Sam Adams Alliance, a nonprofit conservative organization, has started an ambitious project this year to encourage right-leaning activists and bloggers to get online and focus on local and state issues.

At the RightOnline.com gathering, sponsored by the Americans for Prosperity Foundation and others here for conservative bloggers, several trainers talked about the tools provided by the alliance, under umbrellas for each locale — known as “Samspheres.” At a session on Friday, the organizational effort was Samsphere Austin. Previous sessions were held in Chicago and Denver.

The alliance’s teaching sessions have a decidedly libertarian, taxpayer mission for conservative watchdogs of state and local governments. And the Samsphere model borrows heavily from activist groups on the left like MoveOn.org and blogging sites like DailyKos.com because of the networks they have built to mobilize voters online.

Some will find that downright amusing, given that the head of the alliance, Eric O’Keefe, has come under fire from critics and liberal bloggers many times over for his previous ties to Americans for Limited Government, an organization that backed tax ballot initiatives (sometimes called the taxpayer’s bill of rights) in several states, like Colorado. When the alliance was created in 2006, Mr. O’Keefe tried to distance the new organization from the A.L.G., according to some reports at the time.



The Sam Adams Alliance and its foundation are classified under the tax code as a 501(c) 3, meaning that it is not required to disclose the financiers of its organization. No donors are listed on its 990 tax form, according to public filings, and on its Web site, it proudly declares that it respects its donors’ right to privacy and to voluntary disclosure, and don’t accept any government funds. They say they are grateful for “our judiciary’s firm respect for donor privacy.” A check of the filings with the Illinois attorney general’s office finds no record that the organization has registered its finances, which nonprofit groups are required to do if receipts total more than $150,000.

Emily Zanotti, one of the alliance trainers, peppered her talk with conservative bloggers on Friday with quotes from Samuel Adams (think tea party and taxes) and stories of the Founding Fathers as she tried to persuade them to build communities. “Without community there would have been no 1776. So we’re moving you, one state at a time, one blogger at a time,” she said.

Mr. O’Keefe, president of the Chicago-based alliance, did not attend the conference. In a recent column about the Democrats’ efforts in Colorado, Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard cited Mr. O’Keefe’s strategy for influence in the realm of public policy and politics. He wrote that Mr. O’Keefe lists “seven ‘capacities’ that are required to drive a successful political strategy and keep it on offense: the capacity to generate intellectual ammunition, to pursue investigations, to mobilize for elections, to fight media bias, to pursue strategic litigation, to train new leaders, and to sustain a presence in the new media.”

And that’s exactly what this alliance is attempting, to build a sustainable Internet presence. Next as targets are South Dakota and Montana, because they have strong right-leaning blogospheres, she said. The effort appears fledgling, so far, and Ms. Zanotti indicated during her talk that the alliance was working on projects that it wasn’t ready to talk about yet.

Back here in Austin, Ms. Zanotti was coaxing her audience to establish networks, to cross-link, to join together as communities to act as watchdogs. “We bring bloggers together to police their communities,” she said, and later added: “Tell us what your local government is not doing … How are they spending your money, where is it going?”

Several prominent conservative bloggers chimed in at varying points during the session, offering some simple tips (write something that gets linked to Drudge or gets bumped up on Google, for examples). Matt Sheffield of NewsBusters told the audience, “Be a part of mainstream online communities. Get on YouTube. Get on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is totally full of liberals.” But, even as some in the audience complained that anyone can edit your edit, he reminded them “Wikipedia is the seventh most popular Web site in the world.”

And Ms. Zanotti remarked, “One thing about Wikipedia .. You have to have the go-gettedness to go there. It will even out.” Saying their persistence would pay off “in the interest of intellectual purity,” the alliance trainer told them not to hold the mindset that “the media is against us, the net is against us, the world is against us.”

Be the tireless minority online, she said, borrowing several times from that Sam Adams quote: “It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds. ”

Those brush fires also translate into a host of new Web sites and tools that the alliance hopes will gain hold. It now boasts three “pedias:” Judgepedia.org for vetting judges at the state level; Ballotpedia.org for initiatives and elections; and SunshineReview.org for transparency in government.

That last one has already generated reviews, with the Minnesota Independent mentioning it in connection with a discussion about whether email messages of public officials — in this case Gov. Tim Pawlenty — should be public information.

On another note, we wondered whether Blogivists — part of the alliance’s effort as an aggregate Web site which pools bloggers together — wouldn’t be considered a competitor to such already established sites as RedState.com, which with its new redesign also is highlighting local/state blogs on its site.

But Eric Erickson, managing editor of RedState, believes otherwise. He told us: I think the Blogivist site is a great way to get new bloggers blogging, but it is not, like a RedState, a full-on community. We encourage cross-posting between the two, because there is a different side to each site.

“The Samsphere model has not been and I don’t think will be a competitor. In fact, I get asked all the time to go to Samsphere meetings and talk about RedState. Getting offline activists online is a needed thing on the right and we find, at RedState, that once someone gets comfortable online, they usually find that RedState’s community is a good place to make an online home.”

Kitty Bennett contributed to this post.