DigiActive.org

Campaign: MySpace used in slavery apology campaign

Description: Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas proves that no one is ever too old to be a digital activist. To commemorate the bicentennial anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the United States, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution last month apologizing for slavery. The passage was due in part to the online activism of the 91-year-old actor.

Digital Tools Being Used: MySpace

What Is He Doing: A longtime activist for racial and social equality, Douglas said recently in an interview that as a Jewish person, he felt it was necessary to stand up to oppression and demand the United States to make an official apology to African Americans. For the last two years he has used his MySpace page to get signature for an e-petition that asks politicians to make an apology. Douglas has also been interacting with viewers of his page with videos and commentary about his cause. His online discussions have also given him exposure to young people who he feels will be the future leaders of social activism.

“I try to get the young people to write to me, in my blog, to make an apology for slavery,” Douglas said in a video. “I think it is very important for young people to get interested in things that they have not been interested in.”

Blog Action Day 2008: A focus on world poverty

Vimeo has announced it’s 2008 challenge to bloggers, called Blog Action Day.  It’s meant to encourage and empower bloggers around the world to focus on one pertinent issue to write about on 15 October 2008.  Their aim every year is to “raise awareness and trigger a global discussion.”

This year’s topic is focused on global poverty.  Vimeo has even provided bloggers with a video (below) to post beforehand to spread the word, which I’ve gone and posted on my blog, and have seen several times this week on other blogs!  Please join in this effort, and follow the links below to learn more.

Blog Action Day 2008 Poverty from Blog Action Day on Vimeo.

Blog Action Day 2008 Poverty from Blog Action Day on Vimeo.

Tool: Twitter being used by the American-Israel Chamber of Commerce

Recently, companies and organizations have been hopping onto Twitter to use as a tool to communicate to customers, followers, interested parties etc.  Some use the tool as a newsreel, some use it for promotions or customer service.  But what would the American-Israel Chamber of Commerce get out of the situation?

Ask Guy Tessler, who works in Atlanta for the organization’s Southeast Region.  Interviewed by Toby of Diva Marketing, Guy mentioned the importance of being able to put a human face to his organization, and feels that Twitter, by virtue of its brief, direct and personal forum for conversation, provides an effective way of doing so.

With an organizational mission as follows,

“to boost the Israeli and Southeastern economies by helping their companies develop business relationships with each other and explore new market opportunities”

Guy hopes to use Twitter as a networking tool that he hopes can him reach specifically the local markets.  Please read here for the full interview.

Tactic: Using Twitter to increase participation at Blood Drive

click to watch video footage

Description: The Austin Social Media Club and the 501 Tech Club recently had a meet up. They also gave blood. These two things happened simultaneously at the “Tweetup Blood Drive” in Austin, Texas.

Tools Being Used: Twitter

How These Tools Are Being Used: Twitter is a great micro-blogging tool that helps people get short and urgent messages out to a large audience. It has a viral effect that echo’s on and on.

Outcome: The Tweetup Blood Drive was a huge success! The Blood Center of Texas confirmed that the two groups helped double the amount of blood donors. This tactic can easily be replicated by many other cities, blood drives, and all sorts of events especially as twitter continues to gain more popularity.

Tactic: S.A. Activist Gives ‘Voice’ to HIV/AIDS Awareness

Tactic: European net freedom lobbyists unite to fight new internet bill

Description: The Telecoms Package is a proposal from the EU Commission to reform the EU’s regulatory framework for electronic communications networks and services with a view to completing the internal market for electronic communications. It is seen by net freedom activists as a serious threat. Especially some of the amendments brought in related to intellectual property rights would lead to monitoring and blocking of websites and peer-to-peer exchanges by ISPs, permitting ISPs to sanction users by suspending or terminating internet access.
The proposal was due to be voted on by the responsible committees on July 7, followed by the vote of the European parliament as a whole on September 2. Not long before the committees’ votes hundreds of amendments to the package made it impossible to overlook it, which bore the huge risk that members of the parliament would vote for a bill the consequences of which they could not foresee.

Tools Being Used: Blogs, Wiki

How These Tools Are Being Used: On July 1, netzpolitik.org from Germany, La Quadrature du Net from France and the British Open Rights Group published a press release on their respective blogs announcing their actions to stop the Telecoms Package or have it changed in a way that it would not inflict net freedom any longer.
The involved groups subsequently organized the action mainly using a wiki, frequently posting updates on their respective blogs or websites to communicate the progress to the public.

What Are They Doing: Especially before July 7, the work mainly consisted of mobilizing an opposition by contacting members of the European parliament and their respective assistants to inform them about the dangers of the Telecoms Package and to convince them to drop or reject the amendments related to intellectual property rights. The organizations’ tactic included inviting volunteers via their open wiki - and “advertising” that trough blogs - to participate in this effort, which made a broad action possible.

Outcome: The action was successfully publicized in many blogs and subsequently turned massive (mainstream) media attention on the Telecoms Package. As an outcome, many - but not all - amendments inflicting or endangering net freedom were dropped by the committees. Additionally, the members of the parliament decided to postpone their own vote for three further weeks. That means, the decision will now be made between September 22 and 25. Read more »

Tool: Dipity Makes Creating Interactive Timelines Easy

Tool Description: Dipity allows you to create interactive timelines which can be embedded into your blog, campaign website or social networking profile. Chronological information is presented graphically using any combination of text, pictures or videos. Users can choose between a traditional timeline view, a list view, a flipbook view or a map view which presents any geotagged data or entry on a google map.

Activist Application: Campaign websites often have dedicated pages detailing background information on the campaign or the cause in addition to multiple entries or posts detailing any new or recent developments. It is often a challenge to present such information in a way that is easily and quickly understood by the average reader who might not necessarily be familiar with the campaign’s intricacies. As a visual illustration, a Dipity timeline makes it much easier to follow a succession of events and understand their details. In the example below, the FreeKareem.org is using the timeline to display the developments of the case of jailed Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer since the day of his arrest as well as developments in the campaign to free him.





Useful Features:  in addition to the ability to include multimedia such as pictures and videos in the timeline itself, an interesting feature of Dipity is the possiblity of collaboration. Several users can edit a single timeline simultaneously and work together in inputing entries and information. Timelines can also be linked to feeds and be automatically created and updatted through entries from your Picasa, Twitter, Pandora, Wordpress, Last.fm, Flickr, Yelp, Blogger, Youtube account or any regular RSS feed.

Senegal: Microfinance Online

Description: A surprising number of people in the developing world still hide their money under a mattress at home. Accessible and developed banking systems are still in short supply and borrowing money at double digit monthly interests is prohibitive and discourages business. Microfinance is the bridge that empowers the underprivileged.

Birima provides microfinance loans to the people of Senegal. It supports emerging artists and musicians but it is open to all and in particular women and youths. Birima has been part of an innovative publicity campaign to raise finance and awareness.

Tools: media, video, YouTube, LastFM

How these tools are being used: Founder and Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour, with the participation of singers Patti Smith, Simphiwe Dana, Irene Grandi and Francesco Renga re-arranged N’Dours Birima song (originally recorded in 2000). The single forms part of a global communications campaign run by Benetton’s communications research center, Fabrica.

As part of the Africa Works campaign the video clip of the song was posted on YouTube and LastFm. The campaign also includes a cartoon about micro-credit that was produced specifically for the Senegalese community and African TV Channels. A series of images was produced by photographer James Mollison displaying the progress of Birima’s loan recipients. The subjects include a fisherman, a decorator, a musician, a farmer, and a boxer and the images will displayed on billboards and ads. The campaign will be supported by press advertising, outdoor events and projects.

Campaign: Global Burma Day has a Facebook presence

Description: This Friday marks the 20th anniversary of the Burmese Uprising, when university students began gathering in the capital city of Rangoon to protest the military junta’s suppression of democracy in the country. The uprising ended tragically on September 18 when 3,000 civilians were killed by the junta’s armed forces. These events brought world attention to the Southeast Asian country and made Aung San Suu Kyi an international icon for peace and reconciliation. This weekend protesters will be marking the anniversary with peaceful demonstrations around the world. They are using Facebook to organize their efforts.

Tools Being Used: Facebook

What Are They Doing: The Burma Global Action Network has set up a Facebook group to educate Internet users about the events around the 8.8.88 Uprising and what they see are problems that continue to plague Burma today. Many of the grievances include the Chinese government continuing to block a United Nations arms embargo on Burma while it sells weapons to Burma’s regime and the ongoing problem of getting aid to survivors of Cyclone Nargis. Users can learn about locations of demonstrations this weekend worldwide as well as view campaign videos from organizations like the U.S. Campaign for Burma.

Tool: Using Squidoo to raise money for your cause

What it is: Created by marketing professaional Seth Godin, Squidoo is an online forum that allows members create lenses (i.e. pages) based on their most fundamental passions.  Additionally, users can gain earn ad money through the site.  According to the website:

Squidoo is a hand-built collection of half a million pages built by people just like you.

Squidoo is about finding people when you care what they know instead of who they know.

And Squidoo raises big money for charity every single day by donating money from the ads and links you see on every page.

How can it help activists? There are multiple benefits from using this tool: users are not only spreading awareness of their “passions” to other users (and creating passion from that), but they also have the above ability to raise money and interact in a forum that allows for a high level of collaboration.  These are the ingredients for getting things done.

While many people make lenses to earn themselves a little more, there are an increasing number of lenses being used to raise money for charity.  Some examples include Water Can Save the World, a Knitting Coop in Rwanda to spread world peace, and a philanthropic neurosurgeon who has saved thousands of lives. In fact, Squidoo initiated a Charity Challenge in April of this year, run by the Squidoo Activists.

I would expect similar tools to pop up in the near future, and it looks as though Squidoo still has several charitable ideas coming in the future…

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