Online Activism

As part of my plan to build the greatest US activist events calendar EVER. Here are a couple ideas:

Free Conference Web Hosting - users can choose from basic conference templates. Perhaps using Drupal.

I've fixed a bunch of bugs on the Energy Justice Network Map and implemented some more features (like a TinyURL).

The "National Map" and "Local Map" features are working a lot better.

Next up - serious revision of the signup process. And then hopefully importing a more recent government data set.

The Energy Action Coalition has a new networking site

I'm hoping that they will start sharing their data with webservices. Open sourcing the software would be good too, but I think sharing might be more important.

I've come up with an algorithm that predicts whether a webpage is an activist/liberal event. It's designed for conferences, but works for other events too (convergences, assemblies, climate camps, etc).

It's based on tests done on 20,000 webpages. I ran logistic regression tests using 5000 keywords, of which 170 are included in the algorithm. In my test data set, I correctly identify 74% of the events (on a page level), and 99% of the non-events.

I've been collecting a list of activist websites, primarily english speaking from the US and Canada, for my conference finding bot.

Here is a customized google search that uses those sites:

http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=006452045356193133822:sp984foeerq

I'm working on my bot/spider to find activist events. It's going well!

I collected a data set of 10000 webpages by spidering groups and events that were listed on campusactivism.org/activismnetwork.org (using sphider from sphider.eu). This gave me around 1000 event pages (mostly because of the event webpages).

I'm using logistic regression and SPSS.

I also considered using Bayesian filtering.

Currently the model classifies 63% of the "activist events" correctly, and 98.6% of the non-events.

WiserEarth users are raising money to create an API and people are contributing in droves!

If they do a good job (eg. allow access to all the fields I need), I'll create an Activism Network + WiserEarth mashup that combines the data from both. This should be especially useful for people and group data, maybe events too.

If successful, this could be the first mashup of two activist social networks! Maybe this will kickstart interest in sharing even more data!

(Note: Activism Network has had an API for two years or so.)

I could create a service that would offer free hosting to activist/liberal conference organizers.

I could prepopulate the structure and provide some empty pages that the organizer could fill in. Thus there might be sections like: home, schedule, registration, contact, getting there, housing, tabling, etc.

The organizer could just write up text descriptions for each page, upload a logo, and they wouldn't have to worry about getting a domain or website space, doing html and css. They might be able to choose from several themes/layouts.

So one of my goals is to have the best activist events calendar (starting with the US), and to make it a lot better.

I'm pretty sure I've already got the best calendar (you can see them: www.campusactivism.org/searchevent.php - hit submit without any criteria), though it could be much better.

I've started collecting a pretty good list of reoccuring annual conferences (70 of them), as a lot of conferences reoccur and thus they're easier to list (or encourage the organizers to list them - which is the goal).

Activist social networks are unlikely to reach more than 1/1000 of the number of people of commercial networks like facebook (Facebook has 150 million active members, service oriented Idealist has 178,000, environmental activist oriented WiserEarth has 21,000). These sites not only lack the membership base, but they are also likely to get fewer page views per member as well.

Thus activists are best off piggybacking on existing commercial networks - especially now that this is possible with facebook markup language and the OpenSocial standard.