Online Activism

You can see a beta version of the site I've been working on since January:

Energy Justice Map

The mapping is especially fast if you use the newly released Google browser Chrome
(For a map with a large number of markers, it is approximately five times faster than Firefox - which is an insane improvement!)

We're mapping around 10,000 power plants, primarily in the US, for the Energy Justice Network which is part of the Energy Action Coalition (a large coalition of anti-global warming groups).

I originally wrote this in 2004, but never published it anywhere. Here it is with some small edits.

“Information wants to be free.”
(Stewart Brand at the first Hackers' Conference in 1984)

“Activist information wants to be free too.”
(Aaron Kreider, 2008)

Introduction

Walmart Watch just came out with a
map of Walmarts.

You can find new stores or old stores. You can find stores near you. You can find stores that have been stopped. Users can update information about the store.

I like it because it's very similar to what the Energy Justice Network is going to be doing with our power plants map site. You can find power plants (instead of stores), update their information, find groups or start your own group to oppose them, and share resources (files).

A book that I recently noticed. Looks interesting. Unfortunately it looks a little on the theoretical/academic side, which has its place, but I'd really love to see more popular education oriented mapping projects.

http://www.an-atlas.com/contents.html

ZNet has launched their new website: Z Communications.

They're moving from a community of commentators, to a much larger and dynamic community that includes any of their members who want to join. It's possible that tens of thousands of members could start to use the new system.

They did a complete redesign of their site - which looks very good.

Several of the leading nonprofit email service providers sponsored a study on
Email Messaging, Online Fundraising, and Internet Advocacy Metrics

Among many useful bits of information, I notice they found a 0.3% mean conversion rate for an email donations appeal.

Today I mistakenly typed in ufpj.org - to get to the United for Peace and Justice (aka UFPJ) website.

It's redirected to democrats.org!!! Appalling, but unfortunately not all that uncommon on the web.

Presumably some unethical person bought up the domain and redirected it to the democrats. It's on the fringes of legality.

If you do a Whois look up on it, you find "Domains by Proxy" which is a service owned by the owner of GoDaddy which keeps your information private (making it harder for people to find out who is behind this, though the general function is to reduce spam).

The r

Loosely based on the idea of Google's PageRank (a measurement of a page's authority, based on the strength of incoming links), I think it would be interesting to have one or more measurements of PoliticalRank for web sites.

Unlike PageRank, which is more of a quantity measurement, PoliticalRank would be a quality one - evaluating the relative political position of a website on a basic left to right scale (where left wing pages would be quality, just kidding!).

You'd need to write a bot that would collect a massive database of webpages. Then you'd evaluate the relative politics of each website (and perhaps each page on each site) based on factors like keywords, the site that the page was on, incoming links, outgoing links, and ultimately on user site reviews.

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.

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.