I have an idea for a tactic to build power and end the war in Iraq: create a website to coordinate the most extensive picketing that US military recruitment offices have ever seen. The US military is already having trouble recruiting, and a website could be a powerful spark that could reduce recruitment and otherwise exert enough pressure to be a major factor in causing the US to leave Iraq.

I'm not talking about a day of action. I'm talking about round the clock picketing of hundreds of military recruitment offices.

The website would include a database of military recruitment offices and a schedule. Users would sign-up to picket their local office and to mobilize the people in their community to do the same. The goal would be to picket the office for as many hours that it is open as possible. It might be best to try and get two people doing it (having someone with you makes it easier). Each recruiting office would have a picketing schedule that would be publicly displayed online.

You can download the latest version of Activism Network
3.2.1. The release primarily includes a number of bug fixes that were present in the 3.2.0 beta release.

I'm involved in the Alternatives-IMC project.

“The goal of the Alternatives is to open a vibrant, inspiring, and multilingual Indymedia site through which users will both share information about current efforts toward creating fundamental change and work collaboratively on projects to make change happen in their communities.

We intend this site to become an indispensable resource for those interested in the basic fundamentals of fundamental change -- the who/what/where/when/why of what people are doing to better the world -- as well as a living laboratory for those who want to make change happen NOW.”

For a long time I've been interested in the idea of a distributed database. While it would be hard to do, one way that would make it easier is to for the local sites that were part of the decentralized database network to store the data in two parts. The first part would be data that came from that location and could be edited. The second part would be global data that would be updated based on a regular time schedule. Thus things could only be edited/deleted in one spot. Updating the local read-only database would still be messy.

I wrote this for IndyMedia Centers (www.indymedia.org type groups).

What is the website?
www.CampusActivism.org – campus version.
www.ActivismNetwork.org – general version.
www.ActivismNetwork.org/developers/ - developers site. Code download.

Who is behind it?
Aaron Kreider. A former student activist who left grad school to work on this, and has done over 90% of the work. It isn’t directly linked to any specific organization, though we’re happy to work with fellow travelers.

Who funds it?
Currently it is funded by some very small ad-revenues and Aaron is paying the rest (and is looking for part-time consulting jobs in php/mysql).

This is an old link, but I just saw it.

Counter Cartographies Collective UNC 2006 Disorientation Guide

Ouch! My website traffic is down by 50-70%. Now I'm getting around 1200-1500 visits/day. Google has put many of this site's pages in the supplemental results, which means they appear very low in the search engine rankings and will generally get you zero google search traffic.

I could understand Google putting the school pages or silly zip codes pages in supplementals - but they put many of the group pages in supplementals. That doesn't make sense because those pages have a lot of unique content (group descriptions and names differ a lot).

It's possible that having both the activismnetwork.org and campusactivism.org site with the same content is causing trouble.

As the years go by, more and more organizations are creating networking sites (either just plain directories, or schmancy social networking ones).

Unfortunately everyone is creating their own proprietary site. The data that they are collecting, whether they admit it or not, is effectively owned by them - as it has nowhere that it can easily go. Yes, these organizations are creating their very own Data Silo!

The problems of a data silo include
-Concentration of data in the hands of an elite. Users might be able to remove themselves from the site, but in general the site owners can do almost anything they want with their user base including choosing the campaigns they work on, choosing how they work on those campaigns, fundraising money, and otherwise shaping their actions by exerting the power of setting the agenda (ex. MoveOn asks its members to fund Democratic canidates, whereas it could be raising millions of dollars for United For Peace and Justice or other grassroots peace groups). Typically the owners of these sites aren't accountable or come from segmented organizations that do not represent the breadth of our social movements.

I modified my Yahama T-85. I replaced all the fm filters (not sure what they were exactly, as I'd replaced some of them before with narrower ones) with 150 khz ones (that I got from dxer Bill Ammons). So it now has five 150 khz filters.

The downside is that there isn't much difference between the four filter settings anymore (superwide, wide, narrow, and super-narrow). So changing filter width isn't fun anymore. Suprisingly it doesn't matter too much whether you are using two 150khz filters (super-wide) or five of them (super-narrow).

The advantage is that I think I gained several decibels of sensitivity (I think from replacing old yamaha filters - the new low-loss filters have a couple db less loss than the old ones, not sure when the new ones were introduced -- or it is possible that the gain is from using a narrower filter and thus being able to concentrate on amplifying the signal). Also now I get the strongest signal meter reading for all stations when I'm in super-narrow mode, without having any distortion (probably because Bill Ammons matches the filters), except for a couple stations that are over modulating. Previously, I'd get a stronger signals in super-wide mode, because the narrow filters had higher loss (and/or were misaligned).

A group of people needs to launch a quality web forum for US activists!!!!! I've been thinking this for a couple years. It's an example of movement-building online activism than I'm hoping we'll see more of.

(Canadians already have one)

I suspect most people don't appreciate the usefulness of a high quality web forum - simply because, like quality email lists, they are rare. The overwhelming majority of email lists either have too little traffic (they never took off, or due to neglect they are dying), too much traffic (spam), too high of a ratio of off-topic messages to on-topic ones, too many weirdoes, too many posts by the same people, or some other problem. Web forums have similar problems.