CampusActivism.org / ActivismNetwork.org

I'm working on version 3.3 of the software!

My main goal is to increase the interactivity/community-building features. Thus I've added the ability to Write Comments. You can write a comment on almost everything. You can delete other people's comments (Ex. if someone writes a nasty comment about you in your profile).

I've added photos. You can upload one or more photos for a person or group that will be displayed with their profile and in a photo gallery.

Currently I'm working on the ability to add "friends".

There are a couple smaller things that I might do now or later - including adding tags, popularity based functions (what resources/people/groups/events are "hot"), and links to your other social network profiles.

This has larger implications beyond the Activism Network software.

Nobody, to my knowledge, has done a good job of creating an activist calendar that is used by a lot of organizations. There are a lot of calendars that are used by only several groups, but nothing with breadth.

(Please correct me if you know of a good example.)

For instance, there are a lot of IndyMedia sites. They generally have a calendar, however the calendar is only used by a small number of groups. An exception to this is Seattle - which is weird because they're actually using a pure text calendar (not calendar software).

What would make you visit CampusActivism.org (or ActivismNetwork.org) more often?

What kind of features would it take to get you to visit once a week?

What would make you more likely to tell your friends about this site?

I'd love some user feedback on these topics!

You can try out the iCal feeds

I'm working on getting Activism Network to export the events into several iCal feeds so that they can be imported into your personal calendar or that of your website. For instance, Drupal and Google Calendar both support iCal. I think all the major calendar applications do so. Hopefully this will make it easier for IMC and other activist sites to include events from the calendar!

Note: Activism Network also has RSS feeds for the calendar and other things (new people, new groups, new resources) - though they are kind of hidden/buried.

I'm using iCalcreator to do this (a php library that lets you create iCal files).

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 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).

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.

I'm proud to release the latest version of Activism Network.

The new version is Beta because I did a large number of changes to the structure of the code that might have unforseen consequences. So I suspect more bugs than version 3.1.7 (which was relatively very stable and low on bugs).

The main goal of the release is to make it easier for other developers (including myself) to modify the code and to customize it. For instance, I turned the javascript navigational menu into a global array - to make it possible for you to change it all in once place, and without understanding the rest of the code.

Currently I'm doing some work to see if it is realistic to try and make the next major version of Activism Network allow for user customization of what is in the network. Here comes the "Network of Anything"! The goal is to increase the number of people using the software (and thus create a community of developers by opening it up to non-activist networks), and to make it easier for activists to create their own networks.

Thus instead of just being useful for activist networks, the software could be used for any type of network. There would be a user-interface that lets you choose 1) What is in your network and 2) What properties those things have. You could design your own type of network, without understanding how my software is structured and without knowing PHP or MySQL.