Tools

The Guardian recently posted a blog about digital activism – mostly a nice personal reflection on the author’s positive experience of taking Avaaz actions and how that they feel connected to a wider movement and part of a social change by doing so.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jan/18/online-activism-internet-campaign-mobilise

But, the comments to the piece made me reflect on the wider debate on digital activism, particularly the “digital activism=slacktivisim=not real activism” debates of the last year and it left me feeling uneasy.

The uneasiness stems from feeling like I am a spectator in a debate about my area of expertise and passion instead of an active participant, and I know that others feel the same.

It really bugs me that the main commentators called on in this debate are not us or the women using mobile phones in small isolated villages where they save lives by providing and receiving information about health, markets and important civil news or the activists who resist dictatorships and human rights abuses by documenting evidence on videos/mobiles and sharing with the world via the web or the million of us who show our concern and empathy for others by taking part in activities we online and in the real world after reading about them via an email passed on by a friend, a twitter or facebook share we came across.

I am bored to death of seeing academics, pundits and “things were more activist in my day before this internet stuff” campaigners who are driving the debate, putting us into a constant defensive back foot focused on debating the tools rather than how we can use them to work together to achieve the changes we collectively want.

Collectively I think we (and I include me in this) need to step up and start directing this debate. I know we have amazing and inspiring stories, lessons, observations and techniques that if shared, would go some part to changing the tone of the debate into a more rounded discussion that looks at how we can achieve our goals rather than looking backwards to defend the tools we happen to use.

So radically I am suggesting a collective course of action and hope there is some energy in the room for it to run, but first a question.

Why do the current pundits and academics get the media space? Because they are writing/written books that have a PR campaign that provides hooks and ideas for editors to run with and the book gives the writer a authority above their normal role as graduate student, researcher, campaigner to comment in the public sphere.

So my suggestions are that we follow suit.

We collectively write and launch a e-book, or collection of our collective blogs, articles, interviews, and digital know-how. The actual format doesn’t really matter, what does is the buzz that the content generate, as it provides the authors a wider readership, authority and profile, a more knowledgeable sector and a wider range of pundits for media and editors to feature to balance the current cynical and pessimistic tone around most public debate and comment on the impact of digital activism and campaigning

This will mean that fellow campaigners and NGOs can have access to a better understanding of how effective our digital campaigning efforts are, partly informed by our results as well as these debates in the media, and at the moment the digital activism=slacktivism crowd is getting more airspace than us.

To ensure that we do tell our stories in a way that are understood in the way we intended, we need to be seen advocating and developing our own profiles with leading articles rather than justifying ourselves in the comments section.

What do you think?

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The hope and promise of technology to improve governance was on display at last week’s Personal Democracy Forum 2010. So too were the technologies created to make those hopes a reality. Some were not yet in beta, others had been in use for over a year; some had official presentations, others were mentioned as asides. Here is a rundown of the applications that were discussed.

Mobilization

Frontline SMS
Cited in the “Digital Divide” panel, Frontline SMS was described as “mobile phones to save the world, used for sending pictures of diseases to doctors far away…”

From the site: FrontlineSMS is the complete text messaging solution for the non-profit sector.  FrontlineSMS turns a laptop – or desktop – computer and a mobile phone or modem into a two-way group messaging hub. Since it works anywhere there’s a mobile signal, it doesn’t need the Internet, a major advantage for many grassroots NGOs. Once you have the software running on your computer, you can send messages to wide groups of people, and collect responses to any questions or surveys you might want to run, all via text message.

Meetup Everywhere

Lets people schedule associated Meetups all over the world for free. Create a topic you’d like to meet up about, and everyone else around the world can either join you or schedule their own Meetup on that topic. Message boards and tweets allow you to discuss scheduling with other interested parties. Examples:

Huff Post Green fans scheduled 329 Meetups all over the world to brainstorm ideas for fixing the BP oil spill

• HuffPostGreen – 329 Meetups around the country have been scheduled to brainstorm ideas for fixing the BP oil spill June 8, after the Huffington Post putu up the idea on Meetup Everywhere.
• Shakira – Fans have organized 89 flash mobs around the world to dance Shakira’s Waka Waka dance in support of 1GOAL: Education for All.
• NY Road Runners – 61 groups in 5 continents are using Meetup Everythere to find each other and train together before coming to NYC for the Marathon.

Civic participation

SeeClickFix
Citizens around the world report non-emergency issues; civil servants who monitor the feed can get them fixed. You can even generate a widget showing unresolved issues, enabling you or your site visitors to monitor your municipality’s progress. Government, media, and community groups can set up their own pages to monitor problems being reported (and resolved) within their purview.

Hope+
A platform, incubated by Aspen Institute, for bringing together volunteers and the NGOs who need them. Its partnership with Monster.com is expected to drive more than 32 million volunteers to the site. The thinking is that, once you volunteer you’re hooked. The funnel of participation they envision goes like this:

1. Your time
2. Your friends
3. Your money

IfWeRanTheWorld
Website (in alpha phase) that asks visitors what they’d do if they ran the world, then takes their answers and translates them into “tangible, do-able microactions that anyone and everyone can do”– sort of like making a project plan out of a mission statement.

Piryx
The Piryx “The Social Giving Platform” is a platform connecting donors to causes, helping member causes to “develop a more intimate relationship with donors.” Once they get to the website, the average donor conversion rate is 11%, says Tom Serres, CEO and co-founder.

Political engagement

Visible Vote lets people see how well their elected officials match their own values.

Visible Vote

From the site: Visible Vote is the first and only application to allow you to cast your virtual vote and then notify your representatives of your position weekly. Visible Vote also monitors how often your Congressmen vote in alignment with you and the people they represent.

Microsoft TownHall
In Microsoft’s words, its free Townhall is “software that allows you to easily create a destination for folks to voice opinions, identify problems, offer solutions and come together around common interests and concerns.” It lets people express their opinions and organizations collect data about them.

10 Questions
Citizens post questions they want their political candidates to answer, and vote up or down the importance of all submitted questions are to them. Candidates then have the chance to answer posted questions via text or video. Only Ohio and Pennsylvania are active in this early stage.

VoteIQ
U.S.- based social network platform for all things politics. Citizens can find the candidates who align with their views and values, see where they really stand on the issues, learn more about the issues, and discuss with others like themselves. Politicians and organizations can reach voters highly targeted because of the information they’ve entered in the system.

Video engagement

Civicovideo streams events for remote viewing and archiving, including concurrent social media feeds, supplemental documents, and indexing.

Civico
London-based Civico covered and archived the event. The firm video streams events for remote viewing and archiving. According to the site it offers these features:

• Fully contextualized and indexed with speaker names, agenda items and auto jump points.
• Access documents, presentations, pictures or data relevant to the meeting
• Integration with social media platforms (e.g. Twitter), everyday web-based tools, feedback forums, questions, polls, surveys and consultations.
• Measured audience and engagement statistics

Watchitoo
Combines video chat with video watching so users can watch content together and talk about it.

Campaign tools

Election Mall + Campaign Cloud
Allows campaigns to apply everything Obama did in one place: website, fundraising, organization tools, email, phone, ads, tasking, calendars, GOTV. Pay-for-use model, so it’s meant to be affordable to candidates from the local level to President. For use in U.S. and international campaigns, candidate and issue advocacy. Open API so long as you use the Microsoft Cloud, so it can work with Drupal or other environments.

Pop Rule
Platform for creating a campaign website for as little as $1,000. Pulls together the candidate’s social media feeds, making the campaign distributable. Andy Pariser, reviewing the idea, said it was a good idea for statewide office where money was more scarce; not enough customizability or innovation for a major campaign.

Data

Sunlight Foundation’s Transparency Data Tool
Working with the Center for Responsive Politics and Taxpayers for Common Sense, the Sunlight Foundation has combined several disparate databases and made them available via API to developers seeking to explore relationships between fundraising, lobbying, and elected officials, for example. Non-technical people can access the data with the organization’s Transparency Data tool and download it for investigation or create widgets from it for visual distribution. Some Poliwidgets can be viewed on OpenSecrets.org.

Web Seer
Compare Google Suggest results to discover trends, and visualize that data in new ways. Try it live here.

Were additional apps mentioned in the panels you attended? Let me know of any I missed, below.

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