Online Activism

ActivismNetwork.org is winning the poll. At 48% of the votes it has a substantial lead over MovementIsPower.org

My early favourite, FromBelow.org, is last place. Obviously the general readership doesn't read lengthy sectarian and anti-sectarian texts on how building socialism from below is the way to go.

I really really really wanted activism.org but Wendy Russ has it. What is really funny is that she was using it to hold an annual "Clean up the Internet" day where people were meant to remove old pages. So there she is, sitting on a really nice domain name, and not using it.

I'd tried emailing her a couple times to see if she'd let me have the site (I suspect she is slightly liberal) - but she hasn't responded. You can email her too and lobby on my behalf.

I started running ads from Google's AdSense program on my site three weeks ago. They are only on a part of the site that mostly attracts people from search engines who are not interested in activism.

So I figured it wouldn't harm my goals to give them some ads to look at.

I didn't think this would be a significant source of revenue - but actually it is. It now looks like I'm making around $5/day. Thus I could make $1800 in a year (which is about 20-25% of what I need to live on - sans health care). If I put ads everywhere and my traffic recovered (note: my website traffic is around 2000 visits/day, down from its peak of 4000) then I could make enough money to live on.

I need a good name for the new version of the software that will run on hundreds of websites. I've been using "Grassroots Online Activism Database" but that isn't catchy. I need something short and not technical. Something like GetActive, or Moveon.

Any ideas?

I have been learning how to use CivicSpace and how to program modules for CivicSpace/Drupal.

You can see my trial edition of CivicSpace with modules that reproduce some of the CampusActivism.org functionality. Currently you can view things in tables, sort them, and see individual instances.

I predict that either Microsoft or Google will attempt to monopolize website development by creating a content-management-system that is linked to their search engine (includes it for searching within your site and also for searching the internet), and possibly operating system (if Microsoft does it).

It is possible that a growing push for standardization and the need to validate one's html code (due to the demands of XML - or other systems for doing a better job of sorting everything on the web using tags), and due to typical corporate practices (witness what happenned to radio), there will be a rationalization in the website development business. We will move from having millions of different types of websites to fewer and fewer.

I'm currently doing a lot of networking with other activist tech projects. I'm strongly considering working with CivicSpace which is a Content Management System (CMS) based on Drupal. It's popular among politically oriented developers.

CivicSpace emerged from DeanSpace (a website platform used for Dean groups, in Howard Dean's 2004 run for the Democratic nomination).

CivicSpace is still in its early stages (version 0.8), but they have big plans. They have the same goals that I do - namely of creating a network of websites that share activism data. CivicSpace is currently running on 100 websites. Thus it makes sense to join-in on the project. Hopefully I'll fit in!

An excellent review of what Moveon.org has been up to recently.
Part I
Part II

GOAD (Grassroots Online Activist/m Database), aka "The Network", to a large degree works. You could add, edit, search, and browse - and it will generally work. This makes me *extremely* happy!!!

At first I thought I had a serious slowness issue on my hands (it took 30 seconds to add a person), but now I suspect that the problem isn't so bad and that my webhosting company was partially to blame (the server was running slow). Now the server is doing better and you can add a person in 5 seconds with GOAD. Editing a person takes the same amount of time. By contrast you can add/edit a person in approximately 1 second if you do it directly on campusactivism.org. Browsing is much less of a problem as that only takes 1 second with GOAD.

I'm working hard on creating a system to share an online activism database between as many websites as want to join in (it's looking like a beta will come out in January - email me if you want to help test it!).

So far, as one of the very few individuals involved in sharing activist data and putting it online, I've been deciding on my own what information to track. With sharing it gets fun because people will have different ideas on what we should be tracking.

I see several options.

1. We can require that everyone tracks the same data. The reason to do this would be to avoid having incomplete data. For instance, if you were tracking student activists and some websites didn't ask for graduation dates - you'd run into trouble. I learned in sociology, doing linear regressions, that missing data is messy.

Ten years ago when I was studying computer science in college, our program was perhaps 80% men. Since then, I believe significantly more women have entered computer science and the computer field in general.

As an activist, I've learned that men hold disproportionate power in pretty much every progressive organization and probably hold a majority of the power in perhaps 80-90% of organizations that aren't explicity focussed on feminist issues. At least in the student movement, perhaps more so at the national and regional level (ex. at conferences) this gets a significant amount of attention. Not enough that things become magically ok, but at least it gets talked about.