Ravi Gupta is standing with both hands resting on the lip of a lucite podium. Some 600 audience members, including his mother, are staring intently back at him. Few of them have ever worked in politics before, but they're all here to hear the former Obama administration staffer tell them how they can help save the progressive cause. He just has one problem: He forgot his laptop at the airport.

Instead of prepared remarks, all he's got is a well-worn legal pad and a book (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Israeli futurist Yuval Noah Harari). His stripped-down preparations are an apt if unintentional metaphor for going back to basics. "What I’m about to share with you is just two days of absolute bitter focus with my notepad and an incredible book," Gupta says, laughing.

'It’ll take time to get out of the Silicon Valley mindset that you can innovate and move metrics instantly.' Tracy Chou

Gupta was starting from scratch, just as Democrats across the country are now doing. The party has lost access to the essential tools it’s used to force political change in the face of obstruction—the presidency, the Senate, the veto, the filibuster. So, what do you do when the political levers you’ve always pulled suddenly vanish and you find yourself alone with your ideals? That's what he and this rapt crowd had come together in this unremarkable hotel ballroom in Raleigh, North Carolina, to figure out.

Gupta dreamed up the Arena Summit shortly after election night, a moment in history he and others in the room talk about the way some people talk about the day JFK was shot—everyone has a story. He saw it as the chance to start incubating new ideas to promote a progressive agenda, because clearly the old ideas weren't working. Techie types have gravitated toward this opportunity to innovate on political idealism. Organizers include co-founder Swati Mylavarapu, a former Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist, and Tracy Chou, a former Pinterest engineer who sits on the Arena’s advisory board. And the affinity makes a certain kind of sense: The industry as a whole skews left, and technologists fancy themselves natural-born fixers of broken things.

Yet when it comes to fixing the thing that is government, progressive techies are finding that progress is never just a click away. No one has built an app for righting the course of history. Technology has radically changed political movements, but they still require footwork and paperwork and the kind of slow and steady incremental gains foreign to people accustomed to moving fast and breaking things.

“There’s a little bit of tunnel vision in the tech industry, and it’ll take time to get out of the Silicon Valley mindset that you can innovate and move metrics instantly,” Chou, who had planned to work for Hillary Clinton’s presidential transition team, told me. And so, she and other technologists have come together with activists in Raleigh to figure out how to adapt their sensibility to the old-fashioned work of organizing. Building a billion-dollar company starts to look easy by comparison.

Lincoln Pennington

The New Wave

The presidential election jolted many progressives out of complacency and inspired a wave of creativity and activism, at least at the outset. As many a novelty t-shirt explains, protest has become the new brunch. But Gupta believes all this activity is only as good as its organizational wherewithal. Harnessed properly, it could become a powerful force of resistance. Managed incorrectly, it could further fracture an already broken party. With the Arena, Gupta hopes to manage what could be chaos by creating some kind of infrastructural backbone.

“There are a lot of people doing the same things, but for various reasons people aren’t working together or even aware of each other yet,” Gupta told me on a visit to WIRED’s New York office before the summit in Raleigh in March. “There’s tons of new activity. It’s not a bad thing, but it’s something we need to unwind to be successful.”

Think of the Arena Summit as equal parts spring training, group therapy, summer camp, and speed dating for progressives. The first took place in Nashville, the second in Raleigh, and Gupta has a third planned for Detroit in June. The goal: to train a field team of inexperienced candidates, face hard truths about the past, forge lasting bonds between local communities, and help disparate organizations find their perfect match.

These meetings are chock full of people who are trying something new. Walking the halls, you bump into Matt Traldi, who co-wrote the Indivisible Guide, a Google Doc that went viral and has become a kind of blueprint for angry liberals looking to make themselves heard at local town hall meetings. In the lunch line, you might stand behind Catherine Vaughan, whose site Flippable aggregates donations from people across the country for competitive local races. Look closely, and you might be able to make out the message on Kyle Keyser’s t-shirt: “VoteYourOssoff.com,” a crowdfunding campaign Keyser, a documentarian by trade, created for Georgia congressional candidate Jon Ossoff.

Gupta views these grassroots efforts as Democrats’ fundamental advantage. Where Republicans have the Koch Network—a coterie of conservative billionaire donors organized by Charles and David Koch—Democrats have an eclectic array of activists and causes in their camp. “We’re college students, union folks, Silicon Valley people, communities of color. You put that all together, and there’s strength to that,” he says.

“We’ve got to be comfortable with the messiness of that coalition for a while and do the best we can to bring a little efficiency to it.”

In some cases, efficiency means money. Already, the Arena has launched an incubator program for promising organizations that need a financial boost. Flippable was the first so-called Arena Fellow. In other cases, efficiency just means getting people who are working on the same problems in the same regions in the same room together.

“We need to create a space for people to come together and unify around a common vision of the future, collaborate, and in some cases merge together to fight the battles ahead,” Gupta told me.

Let’s Do Some Shit

For Scott Goodstein, whose firm Revolution Messaging led digital efforts for Bernie Sanders’ primary campaign, attending the Arena Summit felt like the first productive step he was able to take since the election. "I was sick of the DC depression and all the blame-gaming and second-day quarterbacking," Goodstein tells me as we sit in the lobby of the Raleigh hotel. Upstairs, a roster of the left’s rising stars are telling their stories on stage: progressive Virginia gubernatorial candidate Tom Periello; Bob Bland, one of the co-chairs of the Women’s March; and Jon Berkon, a lawyer who’s fighting gerrymandering in North Carolina, among others.

The way Goodstein sees it, there are three buckets within the Democratic party right now. The first two are the institutions refusing to take blame for a multitude of mistakes and the people still arguing about whether Sanders or Clinton represents the soul of the party. He believes bucket three includes all of those people on stage—and most of the people in the audience.

“Bucket three is people who said, ‘Let’s go do some shit,’” Goodstein says, palming a stack of business cards he’s collected around the conference. One belongs to a former Burt’s Bees employee who decided after the election to run for office in Durham, North Carolina. “I wouldn’t have necessarily known about that guy, sitting in my office in DC,” Goodstein says. “But now, I’m like yeah I’ll contribute $100 to that.”

At 43, Goodstein is an elder statesman of sorts in this crowd that’s mainly comprised of millennials just dipping their toes into the political pool for the first time. He sees himself in a lot of them. Back in 2003, Goodstein was working as a punk rock promoter when the Iraq War was starting. Frustrated and feeling helpless, he left his day job in the music industry at the age of 29 and launched the groups Punkvoter and Rock Against Bush.

“That’s the same thing these folks are thinking about,” Goodstein says, gesturing to the business cards in his hand. “It’s, 'Holy shit I have to do something.'”

Goodstein also remembers what happened after he and all those other young Democrats took up the fight: They lost badly. George W. Bush was re-elected. Another five years would pass before Goodstein could use what he’d learned and apply it to President Obama’s winning 2008 campaign. The people entering the proverbial arena today will face the same setbacks, he predicts, and they’ll need to be ready to keep this sense of urgency alive.

“This is still in its infancy level,” Goodstein says.

Scotty Crowe

Move Slow and Make Google Docs

For the many tech industry activists at the summit, that kind of plodding progress isn’t exactly second nature. Zach Sims, for one, started his online coding school Codecademy as a 21-year-old entrepreneur in 2011. By the end of the year, Codecademy had more than one million users. When I ran into Sims at the summit, he worried that this weekend that was supposed to be all about action wasn't actually getting anyone anywhere. It didn't offer much, he said, for "people who are used to doing things faster"—people like him.

Sims has a point. Time has always been the key obstacle to successful movements. Getting energized is a lot easier than staying energized, and it only becomes harder the more you lose. Patience may not pay in an industry driven by exponential growth and lightning-fast returns. But in politics, it's the norm.

At the summit, for instance, you had heartfelt group discussions and motivational main stage speeches from Democratic leaders. You had a rousing chorus of “Do You Hear the People Sing?” led by former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm. But you also had the mundane messiness of getting so many people with different backgrounds and agendas to work together. One small group session of attendees from North Carolina started with announcements about who was planning to run for what office but devolved into a lengthy conversation about the best way to set up the group's next meeting. A conference call? A video chat? Who would set up the Google Doc with everyone's availability? Could they use a calendar? What would they talk about? And how would it be any different from the multitude of cause-based meetings so many of them were already attending?

On its face, the slow-moving minutiae of getting organized couldn't be farther from the moonshot-worthy work the tech industry craves. But it's no less crucial. If anyone can understand both the power and complexities of creating something for millions of people in hopes of changing the world, technologists should. The main difference: Unlike building a billion-dollar startup, political organizing sometimes has a timeline you can't speed up. After all, presidential elections only happen once every four years.

Back on stage, Gupta wanted to talk about the book sitting on his podium. It explores how civilizations and governments rise and fall, and most importantly, who reaps the spoils when they do. The one common idea? Mass cooperation. Time and again, when regimes fail, he tells the crowd, "The most organized group is the group that always takes power." That will take time. For now, there's Google Docs.