This is not a post about politics. Unfortunately it is a post about politics in EMS. Which most people in EMS profess to hate, including me. We all complain about people playing stupid games with patient care, employees, units deployments, and so on. The truth is that there is politics in everything. That real nitwit that you hate who just got promoted to supervisor? Guess why he got promoted to supervisor. He knew what to kiss, when, and probably how to do it really well. That’s politics in EMS and probably everywhere else.

The problem is that politics is everywhere. Everyone in EMS it seems has an agenda. Rarely is it advancing patient care or the profession.

Which is where EMS 2.0 comes in.  Justin from The Happy Medic and Mark from Medic 999 are they guys who came up with the EMS 2.0 concept. I’ve met both of them and have a ton of respect for them. They are both bright, articulate, young (well relative to me), and motivated. I hope that EMS 2.0 takes off and transforms the EMS profession and industry. The problem that they have is that there are a lot of people and organizations who are happy with the fractured state of EMS that now exists. Some of those people and organizations support EMS 2.0 in public, but I have to wonder how deep that support is. Are they true supporters or are they just keeping close to so they can keep a close watch on the movement.

Which is where the Tea Party Movement comes in. How Tea Party Organizes Without Leaders is a fairly detailed article of the inner workings of the Tea Party movement. The key is that it’s a distributed network of people who have no single leader. Sarah Palin and others pose as the leader of the Tea Party movement, what makes the movement hard to attack is that there is no identifiable leadership structure.

The tea party began as a network, not an organization, and that is what it mostly remains. Disillusioned with President Bush’s Republicans and disheartened by President Obama’s election, in late 2008 several dozen conservatives began chattering on social-networking sites such as Top Conservatives on TwitterSmart Girl Politics. Using those resources and frequent conference calls (the movement probably could not have arisen before the advent of free conference calling), they began to talk about doing something. What they didn’t realize was that they were already doing something. In the very act of networking, they were printing the circuitry for a national jolt of electricity.

A decentralized network with no clear cut leadership, but who’s members share a similar political philosophy. They act independently at the local level, but are able to coordinate their activities at the national (or international) level. If one local group folds, the movement has the ability to heal itself. If a group in a city falls apart because the local leaders are not able to continue on for whatever reason, the individual members of the group can reform into a new group or ally with another group somewhere in the area. It’s more of a cultural phenomena than a political party.

Where have we heard of this sort of decentralized structure before? Insurgencies. Al Qaeda is able to use a similar structure which is why the US focuses so much on intercepting and disrupting the communications networks it upon which it depends.

Have no doubt that in many ways EMS 2.0 is an insurgency. It’s goals, as with those of the Tea Party movement are to change not just the politics of EMS, but the very cultural assumptions that people inside EMS have worked under since the 1970s. Changing a culture like that is not an easy task. In fact, it’s quite daunting. Many people will pose as friends and allies while all the while striving to undermine the entire movement.

Fortunately for Justin, Mark, and other EMS 2.0 proponents, we’re now in the 21st century. All sorts of social media exist, as well as blogs, free conference call services, Twitter, and the miracle of the Internet where documents, images, videos, and most importantly ideas, can be sent around the world in mere minutes. There is no need and no reason to depend on traditional media to spread the word.

You guys have made a great start, now is the time to leverage the brave new world of social media and networking to move the ball forward.

A quick update: My apologies for neglecting to mention Chris Kaiser of Life Under the Lights in the original post. Chris is also one of the fathers of EMS 2.0.