The Guardian, a progressive UK newspaper, is creating PDFs of its stories every fifteen minutes.

It's like they are printing a fresh newspaper every fifteen minutes! Or at least a semi-fresh one.

United for Peace and Justice is organizing 11 regional protests on October 27. It's an interesting alternative to the more-typical national or semi-national mobilizations. Normally the mass mobilizations are in DC, NYC, and Los Angeles (with Chicago another possibility). I don't recall the last time someone did this type of decentralizing - fitting between the national mobilization and a day of action with protests in 100 cities.

Now if only the US could catch up with Canada. Canada is debating whether/how quickly to pull out of Afghanistan...

Students for a Democratic Society put out their first News Bulletin. This is a good sign.

10 weeks after its summer conference, SDS still hasn't approved an organizational structure for itself, nor does it have any people officially filling positions. Though apparently this doesn't seem to be a problem for most of its members - as group and member levels are, I'm guessing, likely very high =)

Two people recently released a paper on the

Social and Political Views of American Professors which shows a strong liberal bias (and one that has probably existed since the early seventies), particularly in the social sciences. It is worth reading (or at least skimming).

Unfortunately, while they do a lot of cross-tabulations, they do not do any linear regression models that would allow one to get a multi-variable analysis of what is going on (perhaps they have plans to do that later - as this is only a "working paper").

The Campus Climate Challenge nicely released a copy of their survey results providing an insightful look at who is active in the student climate change movement.

The results show the lack of diversity that is typical of the student environmental movement (and to a lesser extent of other student movements). Particularly worrisome is the degree of race and class stratification.

Geographical Diversity
Students are from liberal states - like the northeast, and less so from southern states. For instance, Texas has about 7% of the combined US/Canada but only 0.6% of respondents. Florida has 5.4% of the US/Canada population, but only 2.4% of respondents.

This has larger implications beyond the Activism Network software.

Nobody, to my knowledge, has done a good job of creating an activist calendar that is used by a lot of organizations. There are a lot of calendars that are used by only several groups, but nothing with breadth.

(Please correct me if you know of a good example.)

For instance, there are a lot of IndyMedia sites. They generally have a calendar, however the calendar is only used by a small number of groups. An exception to this is Seattle - which is weird because they're actually using a pure text calendar (not calendar software).

What would make you visit CampusActivism.org (or ActivismNetwork.org) more often?

What kind of features would it take to get you to visit once a week?

What would make you more likely to tell your friends about this site?

I'd love some user feedback on these topics!

The GovTrack site has a map of congressional districts and you can even add the layer to your existing Google Maps mashup.

You can try out the iCal feeds

I'm working on getting Activism Network to export the events into several iCal feeds so that they can be imported into your personal calendar or that of your website. For instance, Drupal and Google Calendar both support iCal. I think all the major calendar applications do so. Hopefully this will make it easier for IMC and other activist sites to include events from the calendar!

Note: Activism Network also has RSS feeds for the calendar and other things (new people, new groups, new resources) - though they are kind of hidden/buried.

I'm using iCalcreator to do this (a php library that lets you create iCal files).