Online Activism

I need a good name for the new version of the software that will run on hundreds of websites. I've been using "Grassroots Online Activism Database" but that isn't catchy. I need something short and not technical. Something like GetActive, or Moveon.

Any ideas?

I have been learning how to use CivicSpace and how to program modules for CivicSpace/Drupal.

You can see my trial edition of CivicSpace with modules that reproduce some of the CampusActivism.org functionality. Currently you can view things in tables, sort them, and see individual instances.

I predict that either Microsoft or Google will attempt to monopolize website development by creating a content-management-system that is linked to their search engine (includes it for searching within your site and also for searching the internet), and possibly operating system (if Microsoft does it).

It is possible that a growing push for standardization and the need to validate one's html code (due to the demands of XML - or other systems for doing a better job of sorting everything on the web using tags), and due to typical corporate practices (witness what happenned to radio), there will be a rationalization in the website development business. We will move from having millions of different types of websites to fewer and fewer.

I'm currently doing a lot of networking with other activist tech projects. I'm strongly considering working with CivicSpace which is a Content Management System (CMS) based on Drupal. It's popular among politically oriented developers.

CivicSpace emerged from DeanSpace (a website platform used for Dean groups, in Howard Dean's 2004 run for the Democratic nomination).

CivicSpace is still in its early stages (version 0.8), but they have big plans. They have the same goals that I do - namely of creating a network of websites that share activism data. CivicSpace is currently running on 100 websites. Thus it makes sense to join-in on the project. Hopefully I'll fit in!

An excellent review of what Moveon.org has been up to recently.
Part I
Part II

GOAD (Grassroots Online Activist/m Database), aka "The Network", to a large degree works. You could add, edit, search, and browse - and it will generally work. This makes me *extremely* happy!!!

At first I thought I had a serious slowness issue on my hands (it took 30 seconds to add a person), but now I suspect that the problem isn't so bad and that my webhosting company was partially to blame (the server was running slow). Now the server is doing better and you can add a person in 5 seconds with GOAD. Editing a person takes the same amount of time. By contrast you can add/edit a person in approximately 1 second if you do it directly on campusactivism.org. Browsing is much less of a problem as that only takes 1 second with GOAD.

I'm working hard on creating a system to share an online activism database between as many websites as want to join in (it's looking like a beta will come out in January - email me if you want to help test it!).

So far, as one of the very few individuals involved in sharing activist data and putting it online, I've been deciding on my own what information to track. With sharing it gets fun because people will have different ideas on what we should be tracking.

I see several options.

1. We can require that everyone tracks the same data. The reason to do this would be to avoid having incomplete data. For instance, if you were tracking student activists and some websites didn't ask for graduation dates - you'd run into trouble. I learned in sociology, doing linear regressions, that missing data is messy.

Ten years ago when I was studying computer science in college, our program was perhaps 80% men. Since then, I believe significantly more women have entered computer science and the computer field in general.

As an activist, I've learned that men hold disproportionate power in pretty much every progressive organization and probably hold a majority of the power in perhaps 80-90% of organizations that aren't explicity focussed on feminist issues. At least in the student movement, perhaps more so at the national and regional level (ex. at conferences) this gets a significant amount of attention. Not enough that things become magically ok, but at least it gets talked about.

I believe that this website is "on to something". I think it's going to be incredibly successful and rank amongst the top (english speaking) activist websites.

Sometimes it's good to check-in and compare this ambition to reality.

October 2004 - we got 88,000 unique visiters, and 123,000 visits (excluding search engine robots). This statistic comes from Awstats (a free log analyzer).

Idealist.org claims 729,000 visits in the last month. This number should be compared to our 123,000 figure. So we get about 1/6 of the traffic they get.

Zmag.org claims roughly half a million visitors per month. This compares to our 88,000 figure - so again we're getting around 1/6 of the action.

Would you like to be able to do all of the things you can do with CampusActivism.org on your *own* website?

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