Online Activism

The League of Pissed off Voters has just released the
latest version of their software

I feel that is it closer to Friendster or MySpace in its approach than Campus Activism / Activism Network is. By this I mean that it focusses more on the individual, whereas I put a lot of emphasis on events, resources, groups, and issues.

Indyvoter is definitely very creative and is developing new ideas that might be useful. I think they might benefit from a lot of user testing (every project, including this software, needs more user testing), to sort out which ideas are most useful and also to work on their site's usability.

I hope to attend and meet people. Yay networking!

Aspiration is pleased to host AdvocacyDev II. The second in a series of events that began with the first Advocacy Dev gathering in June 2004, Advocacy Dev II will convene organizers and activists using free and open
source (F/OSS) online advocacy tools, and developers and designers
building those tools.

Activism Network
An early test version of the Activism Network client (and I guess server too).

Note it's going to be faster than the production version, because ActivismNetwork.org is running on the same webserver as CampusActivism.org.

Currently the Activism Network software will only work well for users in Canada and the US (or other countries that are really really small).

The major limitation that is stopping its productive use in English-speaking countries is that I'd need national databases of zip/postal codes that would include a longitude and latitude.

For instance, I would love to expand this software to work in the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and perhaps the Phillipines (note: the Phillipines has one of the highest rates of use, however it also might require bilingual support) - however I need to get postal code databases for these countries. Ideally I'd like to get free databases, but if they can be obtained for a small cost (<$100) then I might be willing to do it, especially if one or more activists in those countries expressed interest in using the software.

I've decided that I need to stop "crying wolf" by trying to estimate when I will have a piece of software done because I have constantly missed my own deadlines by embarassing amounts. But on the other hand, I should practice creating deadlines so that in the future I will be able to make accurate predictions.

Here goes! I'm going to predict that I'll release an alpha client for the Activism Network by June 15. This is aimed at website developers who want to help me customize/improve/test it, and to generate excitement within the CivicSpace community. Then a beta/production worthy release will follow in a month or so (depends on whether I take a badly needed vacation, and whether I start working more on creating a board of directors, found an official organization, and fundraising.).

The city of Philadelphia is trying to become the first major US city with public-provided wireless access.

Here are a few possible shortcomings

There are already probably a dozen social-networking tools like Friendster. I don't know exactly how many because I haven't tried doing an exhaustive search for them.

These sites range in focus from dating, to frienship, to business networking, and back to dating.

On the political side, Care2.com has a friendster-like network of a million liberal people which promotes engagement in political action (action alerts, and online discussion). The League of Pissed Off Voters (indyvoter.org) has a very ambitious plan to also create a political friendster-like community - particularily to engage young people in electoral activism, but also for other reasons too (which aren't entirely clear to me). Indyvoter's plans are much further advanced then their current site - which isn't being used that much.

People who want to change the world need advice on the most effective way to do this.

Generally books that try to give you most of what you need to do activism are called "Organizing Guides" or "Activism Handbooks".

In my mind, the two leading organizing guides are that by the War Resister's League and Midwest Academy's one. SEAC also has a good guide.

However, none of these guides come close to providing the level of detail that would reflect the variety of experiences of thousands of social movement activists. I think the solution is to develop a new online collaboratively written set of resources that would be sorted and edited to provide a level of quality worthy of a good Organizing Guide.

ActivismNetwork.org is winning the poll. At 48% of the votes it has a substantial lead over MovementIsPower.org

My early favourite, FromBelow.org, is last place. Obviously the general readership doesn't read lengthy sectarian and anti-sectarian texts on how building socialism from below is the way to go.

I really really really wanted activism.org but Wendy Russ has it. What is really funny is that she was using it to hold an annual "Clean up the Internet" day where people were meant to remove old pages. So there she is, sitting on a really nice domain name, and not using it.

I'd tried emailing her a couple times to see if she'd let me have the site (I suspect she is slightly liberal) - but she hasn't responded. You can email her too and lobby on my behalf.

I started running ads from Google's AdSense program on my site three weeks ago. They are only on a part of the site that mostly attracts people from search engines who are not interested in activism.

So I figured it wouldn't harm my goals to give them some ads to look at.

I didn't think this would be a significant source of revenue - but actually it is. It now looks like I'm making around $5/day. Thus I could make $1800 in a year (which is about 20-25% of what I need to live on - sans health care). If I put ads everywhere and my traffic recovered (note: my website traffic is around 2000 visits/day, down from its peak of 4000) then I could make enough money to live on.