Online Activism

I am starting a Philadelphia group for liberals, progressives and radicals who are using Internet technology, particularly the web, to promote social change. We can share ideas, share code, help each other test and debug, get our projects to share data, explore emerging technologies, and perhaps collaborate on new projects.

We could meet once or month or however often people want.

Personally, I

For longterm social change you need a long term strategy. Sure you need to fight the short-term battles (otherwise people suffer and die), but hopefully the left can scrape together some support for longterm institutions.

One example of such a program would be a database of skills and trainers. We need to convince all of the existing social change training organizations (Training for Change, Midwest Academy, AFL-CIO's trainers, ACORN, various socialist groups, etc) to publish their materials under the Creative Commons License. These materials should be available in large chunks (as books) and broken down into smaller chunks (chapters or exercises), and available online for free (PDF an HTML) - or in printed form for a charge.

Evolve Foundation recently came out with a paper on online activism called Pushing Power to the Edges with only barely mentioning Race, Class, or Gender.

Online activism might manage to mobilize millions of middle class white people, led by upper-middle class men who push the Mobilize Button. But is that pushing power to the edges?

I'm reminded of the Zapatistas who are common example of how the Internet can be used by a grassroots group that otherwise wouldn't have much power to acquire international fame and support. But wait a minute! Pratically every communique I read (and
I read many of them out load on a college radio show) was written by Subcomandante Marcos. Because he had more privilege that other people in the movement he became a media idol. We ended up reading poetic stories about rainbows, bridges, sea shells, Don Quixote, Alice in Wonderland, and parrots instead of about the conditions of people in the villages who were the most oppressed.

MySpace was recently purchased as part of a $550 million deal. I think part of its value lies in trying to build profiles of people so that corporations can sell them products and target online advertizing.

We need a noncommercial/free/open social network that won't sell out to corporations and that will end the need of having to maintain a profile on seperate commercial networks so as to stay in touch with friends.

I believe I have a good idea to make it work. The technical aspects of creating a friendster or myspace is relatively easy. A good programmer or team could crank it out in a year or so. The trick is publicizing it.

Someone made a map that shows US Military Casualties from the Iraq war.

Hopefully someone will be inspired to create a map of Iraqi civilian casualties. You could use data from Iraq Body Count, and the Geonames database to convert Iraqi cities into longitudes and latitudes.

I did a map of the Schools that belong to the Workers Rights Consortium - an anti-sweatshop monitoring/accountability organization that was created by anti-sweatshop activists, the majority of whom were students.

I used the data from the WRC Affiliate Schools page, which I combined with my existing data for school locations.

Hope to come up with more activist uses of mapping. Days of Action for instance.

The geographical distribution is typical of privileged white middle to upper-middle class student activism.

I am playing around with the Google Maps API. You can see a list of
Activism Groups in PA

Or
All of the Activism Groups

Other states work too. Unfortunately the point-loading is rather slow, but I used the Faster Loading Hack which really helped.

The API is cool.

Aaron

I went to Advocacy Dev II - a conference for activist software developers. Read about it on the Wiki link.

It was good. High energy and good networking with perhaps 60-70(?) people.

I spent most of my time on the database track - talking about how to create standards for nonprofits to share their data (between organizations or even within the same organization), and to create one or more good nonprofit databases (note: Groundspring has stopped working on Ebase - the leading nonprofit database). CivicCRM is one good canidate for becoming this database. Unfortunately, developing standards is hard because you have to convince a critical mass of people to make it useful.

After about ten months of work, I'm proud to release the Activism
Network software client!

Activism Network
You can see two examples or download it.

Basically this takes the software that has been running on
CampusActivism.org for three years, and lets you install in on your
own website. Doing so, we can create a network of a hundred websites
sharing activism data!!!

Website owners can customize what data they receive from the network.

This is an early (alpha?) release that I'm hoping to use to generate
interest and feedback. Particularly I need some ideas about what kind of

I posted this recently to the Civicspace community email list:

Communication is gendered.

Men dominate, interrupt, don't listen, take other people's ideas and make
them look like their own, distort what other people say, when they do
listen they listen to other men, speak with more authority, talk more, and
talk longer.

If you create a regular online means for communication (ex.
discussion forum, blog, email list), if you don't do anything, most
of the time it will be dominated by men. This choice is political
because by doing nothing you are supporting sexism. When you and