Online Activism

Today I participated in an auction for the activism.org domain which ended with a final bid of $1300. Someone else won. In the last 5-10 minutes, it went from $500 to $1300. The auction was done at snapnames.com.

While online social networks are potentially useful for recruitment, they present a danger to activists by promoting bad strategy and ineffective forms of networking. By contrast a good social change network, such as Activism Network, will encourage strategic thinking and promote grassroots activism.

Good Uses for Online Social Networks
First, let us examine where online social networking ought to be most useful and see how it does.

Recruitment
I suspect online social networks are most useful for recruitment. This makes sense if they operate like off-line networks. It is clear from social movement research that the most critical factor to mobilize people to participate in social movements is a network (aka relational) tie to someone else involved. People are generally recruited by their friends or acquaintances. Even if you are recruited by a stranger, through additional participation in group events, one becomes acquainted with group members and this dramatically increases the likelihood of a cycle of continued participation.

Greenpeace has launched their Melt software on
Cool The Planet

The interface is weird. For instance, I type in Philadelphia and it gives me a long list of unlikely cities that I'd live in. I suspect 99% of people who type in Philadelphia, want Philadelphia, PA. The 7000 people in Philadelphia, MS should use a zip code or something.

They'll probably improve the interface and it will be more interesting once people add content.

I've been having conversations with people who are organizing a website called the
Future 5000.

"Future 5000 is the largest online network of progressive youth organizations in the history of this country. This searchable online directory and networking site will help us better visualize and organize our movement, people, activities and resources. Using this tool, organizations will be able to:

• develop a leadership pipeline

• strategically build our movement

• ultimately redesign the U.S.A. and our relationship with the rest of the world"

AdvocacyDev III, Oakland, July 31 – August 2
The third convening of organizers, activists and
developers working with open source tools for
online advocacy and organizing will take place in
Oakland from July 31 to August 2. If you're
passionate about creating better tools for online
activists and organizers, please join us for
knowledge sharing and brainstorming!

Sessions will include:

* Show and tell on all the latest open source
eAdvocacy platforms and tools, including the
latest from CivicSpace/CiviCRM, Radical Designs
Activist Mobilization Platform (AMP), GoodStorm, and others,

MSN has a new site where you can see who searches for different keywords as well as the

gender and age of people who visit your site

This site is "female-oriented" with a 65% number. I'm not sure if they mean that 65% of the visitors are female, or if there is a 65% chance that the majority of the visitors are women.

For age, we get twice the number of under age 18 users and some strange results in the other brackets (why are we getting a normal showing in the 50+ age group?).

Someone created a mashup that lets you see the

Impact of global warming using Google Maps.

You can see the land that will be covered by water, based on different predictions of sealevel rise.

He's using a 50 GB NASA data set for altitude data.

Justin Podur recently wrote an article about

Free Software and ZNet

They are renovating their site and you can help the project by joining in on the
Wiki and Forum.

They are going to use Drupal.

You can use this Firefox plug-in to transform the way you see the Internet by trusting your social network to let you know what's good, instead of multi-national corporations.

Get OutFoxed plug-in

Unfortunately it doesn't yet work with Firefox 1.5. So I wasn't able to test it. But I enjoyed reading the online documentation/thesis about it. This is the kind of thing that could become REALLY BIG.

I'm not sure how well it can handle multiple dimensions. For instance, almost everyone should trust me on issues of spyware, whereas my views on politics are more subjective. Ultimately there are an infinite number of dimensions of knowledge.

Activists need to embrace the use of maps in our campaigns.

Maps allow you to make information more appealing to the reader, without dumbing down the content (for instance, you don't have to turn your argument into a short slogan). Complex statistical arguments about the correlation between one factor and another are much easier to grasp if they are presented in a nice chart, or better yet, a map.

Currently I'm guessing that we're on the threshold of a coming wave of activist maps. Here are several factors that will start the wave:

1) Google Maps API - has created a renaissance in maps on the internet by making it very easy to create a map, and by provoking a number of competitors (notably Yahoo and ESRI) to provide free APIs.