Upgrading Civil Resistance? Gene Sharp's "Methods," Rewritten for 2012
BY Nick Judd | Tuesday, May 8 2012
Ushahidi's director of crisis mapping, Patrick Meier, and Meta-Activism Project founder Mary Joyce are collaborating on a project to update and add to Gene Sharp's 198 "Methods of Nonviolent Action," a manual for civil resistance, with ways these techniques could be adjusted for the 21st century. Together with other contributors, they're managing a spreadsheet in Google Docs with each of 198 methods from the pioneering researcher in protest and activism. For each — and a few new ones added on — they're listing ways the traditional method could be tweaked to take advantage of new technology, and ways that those methods could be completely reinvented. Read More
The Double Life of the Obama Campaign's "Julia" Character
BY Miranda Neubauer | Friday, May 4 2012
Two critics of "big government" have taken the Obama campaign's latest interactive, a several-frame graphic that seeks to paint President Barack Obama's policies favorably in comparison to Mitt Romney's, and turned it into a microsite with a remarkably similar parody. "It’s funny because Julia becomes a web/graphic designer, and that’s something I’ve been doing since I was 15 or so," Josh Fields, one of the creators, told techPresident in an email. "I think the part of the story for Julia that’s missing is that life is more of a stumble and fall than a race to the top. That’s something I question if Romney or Obama understand, you can’t promise all this stuff and not expect people to be pissed when they don’t get it." Read More
Planned Parenthood's Most Radical Response to Critics: To Listen, and Let Their Supporters Lead
BY Melissa Gira Grant | Thursday, May 3 2012
Taken in aggregate, the Planned Parenthood/Komen debacle earlier this year was not just a victory for Planned Parenthood, the beleaguered standard-bearer for pro-choice politics. Owing in large part to the way social media can influence mainstream debate, as well as the work that grassroots reproductive rights activists have done to re-center the fight for reproductive rights on larger questions of economic and social justice, activists were able to put efforts to curtail access to abortion and birth control on the defensive. Read More
AFL-CIO PAC Workers' Voice Gives Activists Keys to the Coffer
BY Nick Judd | Thursday, April 26 2012
The AFL-CIO's new political action committee, Workers' Voice, sent an email to supporters today asking them to sign up for a web platform that promises to reward action with the chance to have a say in how the PAC spends its money.
Right now, the action platform asks for an email address and some survey information — do visitors think they should earn points for canvassing door-to-door, or making phone calls to voters; should the PAC spend money on ads or on voter registration — but digital director Tim Tagaris says it will soon be replaced with the platform proper.
Read More
How YouTube Wants To Make Itself More Nonprofit and Activist Friendly
BY Nick Judd | Monday, April 9 2012
Early Google employee and former YouTube product director Hunter Walk leading is "YouTube for Good," an initiative formalized last year to make the video site more useful to activists, educators and nonprofits. The initiative draws on time contributed from existing teams inside the company, but also relies on a small and growing staff — when I spoke to Walk on Thursday, he was on the hunt for an engineer — to work specifically on products for those groups.
Read MoreOvary Funny: Womens' Rights Project Hopes to Have Members of Congress In Stitches
BY Miranda Neubauer | Friday, March 30 2012
Calling itself "Government Free VJJ," a group started by three women after a conversation on Twitter is hosting an organizing initiative asking women to knit — or crochet! — a uterus for each man in Congress, so lawmakers will leave the reproductive organs of living, breathing, non-woolen American women alone. Read More
#StopKony: The Simple Viral Demand That Sparked a Broad Debate
BY Nick Judd | Wednesday, March 7 2012
Every part of a viral marketing campaign targeted at raising pressure on the U.S. and other governments to work towards the capture of Lord's Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony, called "Kony 2012," is fascinating. (Some supporters also invented the hashtag #stopkony, hence the headline.) The campaign intends to pressure specific American elected officials, using the newfound power of networked public opinion to spur more action. Last year, President Barack Obama ordered 100 military advisors to help the Ugandan military remove Kony. But the campaign's scale and the narrow focus of the advocacy in its centerpiece, a free 30-minute web video with high production values, raised a laundry list of questions about its sponsor organization, their exact goals and their mission. Read More
Amid Social-Media-Fueled Furor, AOL Pulls Ads from Limbaugh's Radio Show
BY Miranda Neubauer | Monday, March 5 2012
AOL has become the eighth company to pull its advertising from Rush Limbaugh's radio show over his remarks directed to a Georgetown University Law Student over her testimony to Congress in support of coverage of contraception. As with the companies that previously announced removal of their support, AOL has been under pressure through critical social media reactions, and announced its decision using that medium as well. Read More
Things Online Organizers Say
BY Nick Judd | Wednesday, February 22 2012
What do you get when you put hundreds of left-leaning, meme-obsessed activists in the same place at the same time?
One is Rootscamp, a weekend gathering of the progressive organizer tribe in Washington, D.C., that wrapped up Sunday. Hundreds of activists convened for an unconference to talk about new tools and tactics for organizing online. The other correct answer is an, um, stuff people say video targeted to their peers and with a series of guest cameos by leading online organizers, including Rebuild the Dream's Natalie Foster, MoveOn's Daniel Mintz and Julia Rosen, Reddit cofounder Aaron Swartz, and others.
Read MoreWith Pinterest and Twitter, Activists are Out to Punish Komen
BY Nick Judd | Friday, February 3 2012
Susan G. Komen for the Cure's decision Friday to reverse a rules change that would have cut off further funding to Planned Parenthood may not be enough to stem the outpouring of anger against the breast cancer research charity. Komen's grantmaking rules no longer oblige it to issue no new grants to Planned Parenthood, but online activists are hoping to channel continued anger at what they say is the politicization of women's health issues into a sustained campaign. Read More