CampusActivism.org / ActivismNetwork.org

I'm dramatically increasing the number of releases for the Activism Network project. I'm now averaging one release every two weeks.

ONE Northwest (an environmental tech group) has a blog called Movement As Network that advocates for an increased focus on networking (and a downplaying of organizational ego) if one wants to build social movements and be successful.

See their paper.

I think the Activism Network software is Network-Centric. We emphasize the network. There isn't any one organization that comes close to even being a tenth or a twentieth of the site's content. Instead the site includes over a thousand activist groups that belong to over a hundred networks. These groups (and people) are involved in hundreds of different campaigns.

The best release yet. Or so I hope. Fixed some medium-sized bugs.

Download

I've released Activism Network 3.0.3. It's better than the previous version (3.0 release canidate 2).

I encourage people to check it out and provide feedback. I'm going to do a freshmeat.net release soon.

It's the same version running on campusactivism.org - so it's relatively solid.

Ok, I'm serious. I mean it. A real release. Mass chaos. Security issues. Error messages galore. Bugs. Struggling at 3am to fix things, because traffic is lower then and less people will notice.

I'm hoping to convert campusactivism.org (and activismnetwork.org) over to Version 3.0 of this software that has been in development for about TWO YEARS.

It will mostly look like activismnetwork.org does now. However there is a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes. For instance I tried to make everything better organized and simpler (ex. the number of MySQL tables will fall from around 70 to around 50). There is better documentation of the code. I've got decent international support which I'm inviting developers to test out by installing the software on their own website. I wrote an installation guide and made it easier to install.

I'm working on getting Activism Network software to work for an activist in Turkey. So I'm struggling with

1) Importing the Geonames Table - with UTF-8
I had to re-import the geonames table (that has world cities, with longitudes/latitudes) so that I would preserve the UTF-8 fields. UTF-8 uses 1-3 characters to express each letter and can support almost all of the world's languages. I had a lot of trouble importing data. Finally got it to work using Navicat's import wizard when I split the data into two chunks (otherwise it was only importing 37,000 of the 53,000 rows). Turkey has 53,000 rows in the geonames table - so hopefully most of the small to large cities are in it. It's only 4mb - so the size isn't bad at all if you just need data for one country. By contrast, the entire geonames database is 400mb (with indexes).

Check out this example of general usage of this software. Using Campus Activism/Activism Network for non-activist purposes -- A Soccer Network.

http://www.activismnetwork.org/soccer/

It's based on the latest software build (which isn't yet publicly released), and is not a finished product.

It uses .po files to translate the language into "non-activist" english. For instance, "issue" is replaced with "tag".

You also need to create your own database to store the information and several other things which I'm going to make e

This has been the worst web-hosting crash I've seen (normally I like JaguarPC, but they really messed up). Our website was down for a bit over two days. Campusactivism.org is up, still waiting for other sites, notably activismnetwork.org.

Apparently there was one or more spammers on the shared server. Then they had a RAID hard drive array crash. During this time, they did a lousy job of communicating what was going on with users. For instance, my first support ticket request got a reply saying the server would be up shortly. The second support ticket got a reply saying they "hoped" it would be up shortly. One day later things weren't much better. Basically I had to pester support and they must have prioritized restoring my account. Support was overloaded and responded to some things very slowly (sometimes taking 6 hours).

Map of our Network

It's a map (using Google Maps) of some of the 1300 groups on our site.

Very slow in Internet Explorer (2 minutes). Fast in Firefox (15 seconds).

While my goal in developing the Activism Network software was political, it could easily be used for completely apolitical goals.

Radio
For instance, I'm very interested in radio. I enjoy listening to FM and shortwave radio stations from hundreds to thousands of miles away.

Somebody could download the software, install the server and client, and create a database of radio hobbyists. The event calendar could include club meetings, ham fests, dx-peditions (trips where hobbyists go to a remote location, setup very long antennas, and listen to their radios), and others. The resources would include radio station schedules, radio-control software, propogation prediction software, decoder software, guides to building antennas, modifying radios, and more. For groups, you'd have a list of ham, shortwave listener, or other radio groups. For issues, you'd have things like shortwave, longwave, AM, FM, scanner, HAM, Morse Code, etc.