1. John Emerson in January 2005.

For their time and insight, thanks to:

• Joe Baker, Scott Harrison, Natasha Nummedal, and Kevin Reid at Amnesty International USA
• Gamal Eid at the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information
• Steven Clift at Democracies Online Newswire
• Tate Hausman at Free Range Graphics
• Meg Davis, Jagdish Parikh, and Acacia Shields at Human Rights Watch
• and David Jacobs at MediaRights.

For their comments on my draft, thanks to Joe Baker, Blaine Cook, Diego Galli, Sarajean Rossito, Anthony Russomano, Elijah Saxon, Jon Stahl, and Emily Thorson.

Special thanks to:

• Marco Stoffel for funding this research,
• Cynthia Brown for commissioning it,
• and Mary Frances Huang for proofreading.

" class="mlpt">Acknowledgments

2. http://www.stoptorture.org. John Lannon provides a brief summary of electronic campaign activities connected to this site:

The Campaign to Stop Torture used the Internet for two purposes; firstly to try to extend the protection of international scrutiny to a wide number of potential victims, and secondly to provide the public with more opportunities for action. [At www.stoptorture.org] the public could register to receive the latest appeal cases by email or mobile phone text message anywhere in the world. By replying via email or mobile phone they were then included in an online petition, and a pre-written email was sent immediately to the relevant authorities. Those who registered were offered screensavers and other freeware, and website visitors were encouraged to send postcards to friends telling them about the campaign. The Stop Torture website also provided visitors with the latest campaign information, and Amnesty reports and publications were made available in English, Arabic, Spanish and French.

Lannon attributes the “high level of support amongst those who subscribed” partly to the fact that “it enabled individuals to act politically without organizational affiliations.”

During the 12 month period up to 8 October 2001, a total of 32,791 subscribers from 188 countries registered on Stoptorture.org. The countries with the highest numbers of subscribers were the US (18.4 percent of the total), UK (14.8 percent), Canada (6.8 percent), France (6.6 percent) and Australia (5.8 percent). Interestingly, with the exception of France, these were the countries with the highest English-speaking Amnesty membership at the time; although the actions themselves were available in French and Spanish, the site navigation, instructions and registration were only in English, and this may have had an impact on who subscribed. Over 4,000 subscribers also opted to receive the action alerts by SMS text message....

While Amnesty’s existing membership base was crucial to the success of Stoptorture.org, a survey of over 700 subscribers indicated that 36 percent were not involved with the organization prior to signing up.

The first month of 2005 saw several campaigning organizations circulating electronic action alerts challenging the nomination of Alberto Gonzales as President Bush’s nominee for U.S. Attorney General.

The initial round of actions called on the Senate to challenge Gonzales’s relationship to the administration’s policy and memoranda on the use of torture. However, since the hearing a handful of groups actively opposed the Gonzales’s approval blasting email alerts encouraging supporters to vote against Gonzales.

Bloggers are also organizing. As of January 28, 2004, 487 weblogs have signed on to the Daily Kos Statement Opposing the Confirmation of Alberto Gonzales. Comments to the statement provided contact information for Congress officials and updates on the Judiciary Committe vote. Blogger Walker Willingham produced a series of downloadble flyers customized with Senate contact info for each state.

Chelsea Green Publishing offered free copies of the book Guantanamo: What the World Should Know to all blogs who join the call to vote “no” on Gonzales. Dimpled Chad Productions offered free copies of the music parody CD "American Way" by Dimpled Chad and the Disenfranchised.

In conjunction with their email lobbying campaign, Human Rights First launched a Flash movie about Gonzales. MoveOn also raised funds to air a televsion ad.

The effort seems to have had some impact. Prior to the Senate Judiciary hearings, not a single Senator seemed prepared to vote against Gonzales. But the final vote was 10-8, with all Democrats voting against, including those who had previously and publicly indicated a likelihood of voting for him. All Republicans voted in favor.

On other fronts, the ACLU is pursuing a strategy of litigation seeking information about detainees held by the United States. While there is little the public can do to participate in this strategy (beyond financial support), the ACLU has posted over 600 documents acquired under the Freedom of Information Act. These have become a primary source of information about the Bush administration’s policies. The documents have been used by other NGOs and the media.

On Terrorism

“The dynamics of insurgencies are fairly similar. These are political wars. There is no military victory that is completely isolated from a political victory. It’s all politics in the end. In order to win a guerilla war you have to acquire the trust of the population. The U.S. so far has not had that in Iraq, and it was the same in El Salvador. That insurgency was able to last for a very long time and the war was ended not by a military solution but by a political one.” [source]

Terrorism is generally targeted against one population to influence them or a governing elite for the benefit of another population. Because of the highly politicized nature of terrorism, traditional NGO advocacy techniques and tools of persuasion may not apply.

Some terrorist organizations have used the Internet to coordinate decentralized activities or to promote their cause and point of view. Terrorism may be motivated by economic, religious, cultural, personal, or political concerns.

The reaction of most militaries and governments is one of force, attempting to suppress and destroy organizations accused of terrorism cutting of their means of communication and finance. Non-state actors may attempt to bring economic pressure on parties through, say, legislation or divestment. A third strategy would push for opening alternative, non-violent political avenues of expression.

Each of these strategies have online counterparts.

Elkarri was founded in 1992 as an organization and social movement promoting dialogue and a peaceful resolution to the conflict in the Basque Country. It is currently conducting an outreach campaign to generate support for its 2005 Peace Conference. The group is relaunching its Elkarri’s Web site to be an integral channel of participation.

In addition to publishing their own research, the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information collects and publishes online publications, campaigns, reports, and statements of the various human rights organizations in English and Arabic. HRinfo sees itself not only a means of exchanging information, but also a place to archive that information so that it remains available to Arabic readers in any part of the world. The organizers hope to strengthen civil society by creating a widely accessible body of knowledge that does not exist elsewhere in Arabic online, forging a secular, legal framework with which to address grievances.

Just Vision is an multimedia project telling the stories of non-violent Israeli and Palestinian civilians working collaboratively for peace across the Green Line. The Web site current features the 16 profiles in English, but will expand to a total of 180 profiles translated into English, Hebrew, and Arabic. The project is also producing a feature-length documentary focusing on four projects. The stories from interviews with individuals on both sides of the conflict who have lost loved ones. Every aspect of the production is also collaborative: the staff, production team, and advisory board include Palestinians, Israelis, and North Americans. The release of the film will be accompanied by a classroom discussion guide as well as the launch of an activist email network. (Full disclosure: I helped design and program the Web site.)

And finally, the Web can facilitate the processes of truth, justice, and reconciliation.

Desaparecidos.org is an online memorial to the some of the 30,000 people who were “disappeared” in Argentina during the “dirty war”.

A Web site established by Bishop Desmond Tutu's Truth & Reconciliation Commission in 1998 http://www.truth.org.za/ accepted confessions and apologies from white South Africans online.

Another type of campaign could facilitate free and widespread access to legal information, including legislation, and court judgments. [more] Human Rights Watch has published resources on how NGOs can contribute to the prosecution of war criminals at the International Criminal Court, as well as a topical digest of the case law of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

" class="mlpt">On Torture and Terrorism

3. Wikipedia as “marketing techniques that seek to exploit pre-existing social networks to produce exponential increases in brand awareness, through processes similar to the spread of an epidemic.”

Campaigners may use a Web video or animated Flash piece complete with music and dialogue to convey their message. There are generally large files that require slow modem users to wait will the files are downloading.

Free Range Graphics has designed and produced the extremely popular campaign animations The Meatrix and Conflict Diamonds. See their gallery of Web animations for more. Free Range’s pieces shy away from dry facts and statistics in favor of a compelling narrative. They rely on humor and a mix of cultural references, particularly pop culture, using images that are already ‘part of the conversation’ in the news or in the culture at large as a metaphor or narrative device.

They also use music to catch the user’s attention. The Forest Slash — to the tune of the Monster Mash — uses the voice of Bobby Pickett, singer of the original tune. It was released as an MP3 around Halloween as part of a campaign on deforestation.

Messages conveyed in a fun or edgy way are more likely to attract a general public.

As such, it may be difficult to attract a wide, general audience with ‘difficult’ content. Humor, is obviously, not appropriate for every issue. Amnesty International USA’s Torture Test piece is an immersive educational piece with photos and audio, posing questions and answers about U.S. policy. The piece encapsulates the message of AIUSA’s campaign on torture and points to action alerts elsewhere on the Web site. However, the content of the piece itself is general and not directly pegged to specific actions and can thus live on after the specific campaign has ended.

Amnesty International’s Flash piece on Guatemala did not take a humorous angle in calling for the abolition of the Estado Mayor Presidencial (EMP). The Web movie, complete with movie and voice actors, told the story of the EMP and its implication in high profile human rights cases of abuse and disappearance. Combined with a media strategy and offline lobbying effort by local groups and Amnesty’s international membership, the campaign was a success. It was reported heavily in the Spanish press, ultimately drawing a formal response from the Guatemalan government. The Guatemalan Congress passed a law to abolish the EMP on September 24, 2003. The president signed it into law shortly before leaving office.

Developing Flash animations requires significant commitments of time, labor, and/or money. If your target audience is already dedicated to your issue, they may not need something Flashy. However, if your audience is a broad public, it may make sense to develop a compelling Flash component.

Such animations should be integrated into the overall campaign. It is very easy to generate excitement about something cool, but it may not move your cause forward. A Flash animation should also be timed within the arc of a campaign. An animation may not necessarily lead to immediate action. It may get a week of play before traffic subsides.

When attracting a lot of page views, generally a small percentage of users will take action, or provide their email address, but it should be very clear to the user how they can get involved.

Launching a viral campaign may begin with a simple email blast to supporters, particularly individuals with access to the media such as journalists and bloggers — people can reach many others if they like it.

Once in circulation, make it easy for users to send it along to their friends.

Forward this to a Friend

A survey by the Institute For Politics Democracy & The Internet found that email forwarded from a friend has greater credibility and is read more often than e-mail that sent directly from a campaign organizer.

While campaigners can provide an easy mechanism to forward an email to a friend, this is largely outside a campaign’s control. Please include an end date and a Web address. Email petitions forwarded from friend to friend can circulate on around the Internet indefinitely — long after a situation on the ground has changed.

A user taking an action on the MoveOn site is sent a confirmation email that includes a personalized ready-to-forward message to a friend about the subject of the action. This serves a multiple purpose: verifying that the email of the action taker is a working email address, proving the user with immediate confirmation, and automatically encouraging the user to forward notice of the action to their social network.

Plug into Existing Networks

Organizations like Witness, MediaRights act as distibutors for grassroots video and film production. They pull from existing communities and supply existing networks.

" class="mlpt">Viral Marketing

4. freedom to do so. It is not tool building for advocacy, it is tool building as advocacy.

These freedoms have additional political consequences. Individuals are not just embracing freedom of expression online, but pushing for the freedom to access information about their rights and about the government that is supposed to serve and protect you, for instance access to the language and the ability to comment on legislation before it is passed.

Examples

Below are some powerful examples of the power of openness.

Transparency International, an international coalition of organizations fighting corruption, uses the Internet to share project ideas within their network, and with the public at large. Among their recommendations is a push for governments to develop online bidding systems for public contracting, opening the process to review, fair competition, and eliminating favoritism and graft.

OhmyNews

From Asia Times:

While South Korea’s journalists and political leaders have been debating how to reform Korean media for decades, the hot new OhmyNews website has paved the way for a new type of democratic journalism with its thousands of ’Net citizens — netizens — as contributors. Readership is in the millions and netizens act when called upon....

Three [media] reform bills are expected to be pushed through the National Assembly soon, and one reason is the alternative Internet media, especially OhmyNews.

A last minute appeal on the site and via cell phones is credited with tipping the close election in favor of opposition candidate Roh Moo-hyun, a candidate “summarily rejected by South Korea's conservative media.”

In contrast to South Korea’s “overwhelmingly conservative mainstream newspapers”:

A close reading of the site's articles reveals that its young non-professional journalist contributors are anti-corporate, anti-government and often virulently anti-American. OhmyNews covers the topics found in the daily media, from sports and entertainment to politics, but always infused with a point of view.

From Japan Media Review:

The pioneering South Korean news site posts hundreds of stories every day -- most are written by housewives, schoolkids, professors and other "citizen journalists." Founder Oh Yeon-Ho says his site is changing the definition of journalism -- and who can be a journalist....

Citizen reporters submit about 200 articles every day, and about 1 million readers visit OhmyNews each day. The site mixes straight news reporting and commentary. Its influence at the grassroots level has been widely credited with helping President Roh Moo-hyun win the popular vote last December.

This takes place within an extremely wired society. More than two-thirds of the population of South Korea has Internet access. South Korea has the highest per capita broadband usage in the world.

Wikipedia

A wiki is a software application that allows any user to create and edit Web page content via a Web browser. Wikis use a simple text syntax for creating new pages and links between internal pages on the fly. Lots of decentralized organizations and groups (for instance, Indymedia) use wikis to collaboratively develop documentation and resources.

Wikipedia was founded in 2001 as a collaborative encyclopedia edited wiki style. It is a massive experiment in knowledge production, allowing anyone to edit a page. Every day thousands of users contribute new pages and update existing ones on Wikipedia.

The Wikipedia strives for “balance” in its entries on contentious subjects, encouraging discussion on discussion boards when controversy heats up.

Critics charge that the reliability of Wikipedia can never be guaranteed. However, this has not dissuaded its fans and users.

Of particular relevance to campaigners is the rapid response to December 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean. The sites network of volunteers rapidly curated links to some of the best resources and information on the disaster and reconstruction.

The site is also accessible in multiple languages, and many articles exist in parallel languages. Wikipedia is now one of the most extensive and certainly the most current encyclopedia in many languages. The entire contents of the site can be downloaded to CD for offline distribution to places with unreliable Internet connections.

Others have used Wikipedia’s free software engine to create their own wiki encyclopedias. Disinfopedia is a project of the Center for Media and Democracy. It is “a collaborative project to produce a directory of public relations firms, think tanks, industry-funded organizations and industry-friendly experts that work to influence public opinion and public policy on behalf of corporations, governments and special interests.”

Indymedia

Indymedia is many things to many people: a collection of autonomous independent media organizations; an open publishing system; a global, grassroots infrastructure for free speech, dissent, and activism; a network for solidarity and technology exchange; a movement for truth and social justice, both local and international. Indymedia rose to prominence during the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in November 1999. Since then, the global justice movement and Indymedia have grown along side each other, often intersecting and mutually supporting one another.

“The Independent Media Center is a network of collectively run media outlets for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of the truth. We work out of a love and inspiration for people who continue to work for a better world, despite corporate media's distortions and unwillingness to cover the efforts to free humanity.” [source]

The Indymedia centers are operated by the principles of open collaboration and consensus. “Open publishing is the same as Free Software.” writes tech volunteer Matthew Arnison. “They’re both (r)evolutionary responses to the privatization of information by multinational monopolies.” On the open news wire, news is distributed at no charge and without advertising. The process of creating news is also transparent to the readers. (Many local Indymedia Centers hold regular journalism training sessions open to the public.)

Web sites of the over 150 Indymedia Centers around the world provide an online forum for independent journalism documenting local and international struggles for social justice, and forging local and international solidarity and popular power. The network produces printed newsletters, documentary films, radio programs, and photo exhibits, and works with international gatherings of progressives like the World Social Forum and regional Social Forums.

Centers also collaborate with each other across state and national borders. The global tech group is a decentralized collective that coordinates tech issues that affect the main Indymedia site, listservs, and other shared resources. The Indymedia Tech Solidarity Project “works to ship containers of computers to Indymedia centers and social movements in the global south to build popular communication capacity.” While participants in local Indymedia Centers organize face-to-face, international projects are coordinated through email lists and Internet chat.

The Indymedia network does not have a single, clearly platform or set of issues they are pushing for, however, I believe the network has augmented the force of protests by the global justice movement against the Bretton Woods organizations. I credit that movement for recent reforms and gestures those organizations have made, including opening discussion with more moderate NGOs.

Moderation

This openness is not without its consequences, though. Open discussion boards and email lists are prone to erupt into hostile “flame wars” and other arguments. Open content collaboration is open to sabotage.

Electronic networks have proven relatively effective at stopping things. They effectively connect communities who share similar opinions and provoke discussion among those who do not. Hoeever, it is has proven less effective at building consensus or getting people to agree on something that they do not already. An ongoing challenge for activists and organizaitons is generating places where open discussion leads to the forging of new opinions.

To maintain openness and quality, different sites use different methods. OhmyNews retains a staff of professional editors. IndyMedia’s publishing software gives administrators the ability to hide content they deem contrary to the mission of the organization.

Others, like Wikipedia and Slashdot, a popular technology news and discussion site use the size of its user base to balance content. Slashdot randomly grants registered users moderator points they can use to rate articles as positive or negative. Users who post informative or funny comments receive “karma” points for their quality posts. Users who post redundant or ignorant and belligerent posts lose karma. The general readership can then browse comments at different thresholds - viewing only the highest rated comments, only the generally good and above, or all comments. Moderators may also be meta-moderated, receiving karma points for particularly good rating decisions.

Wikipedia fights sabotage via the sheer number of members online checking each others edits.

Licensing

The spirit of openness is also spread and protected with a handful of licenses that grant varying degrees of freedom to reproduce or alter content and software. The licenses may grant or restrict terms of commercial use. The GNU Public License, Mozilla Public License, and the Creative Commons Licenses are perhaps the most important. See this extensive list of Open Source licenses approved by the Open Source Initiative.

" class="mlpt">On Openness

5. summarizes some of the impact of blogs in 2004:

• Howard Dean's blog becomes the model for online grassroots activism. Many of the ideas for the campaign were actually came from supporters through the campaigns blog.
• Campaigns experimented and found that ads on blogs make money and influence people, such as the Kentucky Democratic congressional candidate Ben Chandler who turned a $2,000 investment into $80,000 in donations through liberal blogs.
• Bloggers are invited to both the Democratic and Republican National conventions, as members of the press.
• Mainstream media like the Associated Press tried reporting through blogs, and even international journalist such as Kevin Anderson of the BBC covered the presidential elections via blogging.
• Rather-gate created an end to old media's power to set and change the national agenda at their liking. Conservative blogs also showed dominance in the area were liberal blogs typically roam.
• Sadly, the year also went out with a bang as the online world reacted to the disastrous tsunami in Asia. Once again bloggers were on the scene with support and information that could not be matched.

And from The Rise of Open-Source Politics, November 22, 2004:

Blog-based political networking has had all kinds of concrete political effects. Best known is the way prominent bloggers like Joshua Micah Marshall, along with some conservatives like Glenn Reynolds, fired up the Trent Lott-Strom Thurmond story, which led to Lott's fall from grace. More recently, bloggers have spurred the resignation of a homophobic Congressman (Ed Schrock),... distributed Jon Stewart's blistering October 15 appearance on CNN's Crossfire, beat back Sinclair Broadcasting's plan to force its stations to air an anti-Kerry documentary, and formed a back channel for unhappy soldiers in Iraq and their families back home.

Blogs by Language January 2005 [source]
English	1286508
French	87506
Portuguese	81077
Farsi	64049
Polish	42754
German	35149
Spanish	26389
Italian	10402
Dutch	9826
Chinese-big5	8986
Japanese	8058
Catalan	7983
Icelandic	6497
Indonesian	5472
Chinese-gb2312	4771
Malay	3913
Esperanto	3390
Danish	2937
Thai	2445
Latin	1717
Japanese-euc_jp	1685
Czech	1621
Swedish	1447
Finnish	1371
Breton	1278

Large scale online collaborations have emerged in recent years that are not centrally or hierarchically organized. These exist outside of, and in some cases in opposition to, traditional membership structures coordinated by non-profit organizations.

These movements are enabled by access to free and easy to use publishing tools and fora on the Web.

Web logs, or blogs, started out as personal diaries, with short, journalistic entries published in reverse chronological order. There are no defined rules for blogging, though stylistic conventions have emerged.

Anthropologist Alireza Doostdar, provides a useful analysis of Iranian blogs as a kind of fluid “speech genre”, closer to oral than written modes of communication in their informal and personal tone. “Shorter, bolder, more provocative but perhaps less coherent writings are often preferred to longer, better thought-out but possibly less exciting ones,” she notes.

Blog entries do tend to be short, under 500 words or so, and often refer to other Web pages or blog entries on other sites.

Some blogs are open to comment by other users, either the general public, or limited to registered users. Often a blogger will respond in the comments section to comments others have made to a blog post, generating a kind of conversation.

Some blogs are built collaboratively with multiple authors submitting stories or links. Some feature the ability to rank stories and/or comments so that, while open to the public, various filters exist. (See more on moderation.)

The blogosphere thrives on commentary and discussion and interlinking. Bloggers linking to and responding to each other create other another kind of online dialog. A particularly persuasive analysis may be picked up by many other bloggers, spreading from blog to blog. This has prompted the creation of Web sites that monitor blogs for the day’s popular topics and news. Many blogs also link to blogs they read along a sidebar, or “blog roll.”

The interlinking, interactivity, structure, and tone is quite the opposite of most NGO Web sites which lack any mechanism for public feedback, save a general email address. Also contrary to traditional NGO campaigning, information flow between users is both visible and encouraged.

The barrier to access is extremely low, with several free and low-cost blogging tools and services available online. This has enabled enormous numbers of people to post to the Web in real time. This massively parallel, instantaneous feedback has led to huge spikes in traffic around certain issues. (See more on viral marketing.)

Within these loose conventions, it is the content and community that attracts users. Sites that frame their message in a digestible way attract communities of users who respond to it. As anyone with access can join the blogosphere, there is some jockeying for popularity — any social group will have its core group, its “in-crowd.”. Popular blogs receive huge amounts of traffic. Blogs that publish frequently are also more likely to attract repeat visitors looking for new content. Thus a collaborative blog maintained by a community has a better chance of building a following very quickly. Successful blogs also strike a balance between a focus and variety — finding a niche, a unique voice, or point-of-view, vs. posting an interesting mix of links and topics that provide different points of entry and relevance to a diverse audience.

Organizations and commercial entities have had mixed success in their attempts to promote an issue or product on community sites. Members of a community can be very protective against what they perceive as exploitation. On the other hand, a well crafted argument or interactive Flash piece may be very widely linked.

Usage

In January 2005, the Pew Internet and American Life Project published the results of survey on blogs in the United States. Among their key findings:

• 7% of the 120 million U.S. adults who use the internet say they have created a blog or web-based diary. That represents more than 8 million people.
• 27% of internet users say they read blogs, a 58% jump from the 17% who told us they were blog readers in February. This means that by the end of 2004, 32 million Americans were blog readers. Much of the attention to blogs focused on those that covered the recent political campaign and the media. And at least some of the overall growth in blog readership is attributable to political blogs. Some 9% of internet users said they read political blogs “frequently” or “sometimes” during the campaign.
• 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online.
• The interactive features of many blogs are also catching on: 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs.
• Blogs have not yet become recognized by a majority of internet users. Only 38% of all internet users know what a blog is.

Blog creators are more likely to be: Men: 57% are male; Young: 48% are under age 30; Broadband users: 70% have broadband at home; Internet veterans: 82% have been online for six years or more; Relatively well off financially: 42% live in households earning over $50,000; Well educated: 39% have college or graduate degrees

In December 2004, it was estimated that Iranians maintained 300,000 blogs online with around 75,000 of them written in Persian from inside Iran.

China’s biggest blogging service provider blogcn.com reports that the number of subscribers increased from 10,000 in June last year, to more than 500,000 in December 2004. [source]

Other easy blogging tools are emerging as well: audio blogging or posting short audio clips recorded via a telephone call; photoblogs for sharing digital images online; and moblogging, posting photos or text to a Web log via a cellphone or mobile interface.

The increasingly popularity of cell phone cameras has had political consequences as well as a kind of grassroots surveillance. In one example, in November 2003, a photo taken with a cell phone camera outside a Portland nightclub shows a large toy monkey stuffed behind the bumper guard of a Portland police car parked in front of the club. The car was clearly visible inside the restaurant/bar, where a hip-hop party involving mostly black patrons was being held. The resulting press, which published the photo, pushed the police to conduct an internal investigation.

Syndication

One consequence of the rise of blogs is the increasing use of different methods of syndicating content. Using a standardrized content tagging system like RSS and Atom, users tag chunks of text to indicate title, date, and topic. Users can quickly check the latest headlines from a variety of Web sites without downloading the entire page, Web page designers can incorporate automatically updated headlines from favorite or related sites into their own. Popular news aggregators like Google News and Yahoo! Full Coverage may scan RSS feeds rather than full Web pages for new headlines to include on their sites. One well-placed link on these sites can generate huge amounts of traffic.

U.S. government agencies are syndicating weather alerts, disaster alerts, and press releases. The Supreme Court of West Virginia syndicates summaries of recent court decisions through RSS. GovTrack.us scans RSS feeds to track what bloggers are saying about bills as they work their way through Congress. For more on use of RSS in Government visit rssgov.com.

Syndication feeds can be transferred to other formats: phpList will forward updates to an email address. Recently announced feedbeep will forward syndicated content to SMS text messages you can receive on your cell phone.

Related to audio blogging is the phenomenon of podcasting, in which digital audio programs are released at regular intervals. This is a kind of independently produced “radio” broadcasting through a syndicated feed that the user subscribes to. Using a special RSS reader, the programs are downloaded as MP3’s to the users computer or MP3 player when new ones are available. Democracy Now! the largest community media collaboration in the United States posts digital audio of its programs at http://www.democracynow.org/streampage.pl. A podcast feed is available at http://www.walgran.com/democracynow.xml

Aggregation

Another consequence of blog publishing is the aggregation of information by theme. Bloggers may have a particular point of view or thematic interest. Many blogs sort their postings into into thematic categories, making it easy to find related content.

Treehugger.com, Metaefficient, and Worldchanging.org collect technology-related news, products, and strategies for sustainable development.

Though not strictly a blog, since 2002 Online Volunteers, a personal Web site, has posted links to news about the massacres in Gujarat, and its subsequent investigations. Over time, it has become a primary resource for information.

" class="mlpt">On Blogs

6. Organizations should be much more conscious of soliciting email addresses from their supporters, particularly at offline events. Far too many presentations end before a signup sheet is passed around. By then it’s almost always too late.

While maintaining a Web site does require some specialized knowledge, maintaining an email list is easy. Human rights groups can use email lists to broadcast human rights abuses in real time, reaching out globally for solidarity and support. Whether publishing a newsletter, sending out an action alert, announcing an event, raising funds, building solidarity, or generally spreading the word, the costs for maintaining an email list are minimal. And the impact can be great. (See the examples page.)

There are several free listserv services available to individuals and small organizations.

Steer clear of “free” services from big corporations, though. Not only are these often padded with advertisements, but Yahoo! and Topica don’t much care for the privacy or security of your users.

Below is a list of organizations that provide email list services run by for activists, generally staffed by volunteers and funded by donations. They generally do not include advertisements on their email lists. Many have specific policies about the types of groups they support and the types of email messages they do not. See: autistici.org/inventati.org, cat.org.au, communitycolo.net, icomm.ca, interactivist.net, mutualaid.org, nodo50.org, onenw.org, resist.ca, riseup.net, sindominio.

You can also set up a free announcement list on your own Web server with phpList. The software is easy to install, manages bounces and multiple lists very well, and seems perfect for folks who are not yet ready to tackle Mailman or Sympa — two industrial strength applications.

If you do have a Web site, make sure it’s immediately clear on your site you do have an email list. And make it very easy for people to sign up. No need for pop-up windows — a prominent link or sign-up form will do.

Here are a few tips.

• Be focused and clear. It should be immediately clear what are you trying to communicate, what are you trying to do, and what you asking the users to do. Sometimes too much information may weaken your impact.

• Users have learned to be skeptical about mass email messages. They are likely to receive email messages from other campaigns, too. Be honest about what you are asking them to do and why. Depending on your audience, email response is quite different than direct mail. Emotional appeal may be less effective than a clear, upfront statement of facts. Demonstrate that you are doing something concrete that it can have an impact. If possible, include some good news.

• Do not send large images and attachments. If your message depends on pretty graphics to make your argument, you should reconsider.

  Also, if sending out HTML formatted email, please make sure to include a text option as well. To users with text-based email readers, HTML-formatted email looks like a whole lot of raw HTML code.

• Make it easy to subscribe and unsubscribe. “Trapping” users on an email list without escape is a good way to alienate supporters.

• Be upfront about frequency and privacy. Let the users know what they are getting when subscribing to the email list. Feature an explicit link to your privacy policy.

• If you have a large list of supporters, segment your list. Create different messages for different audiences. Some software systems can associate geographic information or other preferences with a user’s email address. Some users may only wish to receive information about a certain issue, city or country, or with a certain frequency. You can also segment your list to test out different types of messages, measure response, and gauge which is more effective.

• Write for email not for print. People read differently off a screen. Web and email writing should be concise and easy to scan. Put your main point at the top. See a few tips on Web writing here.

• If at all possible or relevant, include action component with everything. Don't send information about a horrible human rights situation without offering the user an opportunity to do something.

• Follow up. Most NGOs are particularly bad at this, and often send out action alert after action alert with little indication of the results of those actions. Those who only send repeated appeals for funds may quickly learn the limits of this approach.

  I’ve found MoveOn a shining example of follow up. Their messages give subscribers a sense of how many people took action, what the effects of that action was, and thanking them for taking action. They even provide feedback in some innovative visual ways.

  If you are collecting email addresses at an offline event. Be sure to add them to your listserv soon after the event. Perhaps send your participants a message thanking them for turning out and letting them know about upcoming activities.

• Be open and accessible, follow up to questions and concerns from users.

• When asking users to take an action, be sure to ask them if they’ve taken action. While some software systems can track online action and clickthroughs, they obviously can not know if a user has taken offline action. Provide a means to measure this. This could be as simple as a button or feedback form a user can submit if they have taken offline action.

• Don’t Spam! Only send email to people who have agreed to receive it from you. Spamming your users is another good way to alienate supporters. It may also get your email messages blocked by various spam filters.

These pages offer a few other basic tips on using email for advocacy:

• A very basic introduction to email lists
• A more extensive list of techniques for email campaigns
• Notes on email newsletter usability
• Drafting effective subject lines
• Writing effective email action alert text

While some of these tips may seem like common sense, they are ignored with surprising frequency. In some cases, this may be because maintaining an online campaign is more resource intensive than it seems at first. At the height of its campaign activities in the 2004 presidential election, MoveOn employed a full-time staff of six (plus volunteers and consultants) to drive its online campaigns. A campaign that asks time and resources from its users should consider the time and resources it devotes to them.

" class="mlpt">On Email

7. Blue State Digital, LLC

Convio

Capitol Advantage

GetActive

Groundspring

Grassroot.com

IStandFor

Kintera, Inc.

RightClick

Each provides a different feature set and data set. Most specialize in Congressional lobbying, while some maintain lists of State and local officials and media contacts. Some companies may be more willing than others to customize their services to your campaign’s specific needs.

At this time, none of these systems offer much multi-lingual support — particularly of non-Latin scripts. The generally do not maintain lists of foreign officials.

Free Tools

Included here are a mix of software tools that are ‘free’ — some at no financial cost to the user, others ‘free’ to share and modify — and a few that are both.

The Organizers Database is a membership database program for Windows designed for small organizations to keep track of activist members or donors.

Congress.org is a public service offered by Capitol Advantage useful for lobbying members of Congress by fax or email via a Web interface.

The Petition Site and Petition Online offer free electronic petition hosting to anyone with an email address. The latter currently hosts petitions in a variety of languages.

mySociety has developed several free, open source applications enabling citizens to lobby and track their elected officials:

The site FaxYourMP.org lets Britons fax their Members of Parliament for free. The site was instrumental in killing the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act of 2000 and the national ID card campaign. The site was set up by volunteers because Parliament did not offer such a service. It is run by a private citizen on a shoestring out of a spare bedroom. Blogger Corey Doctorow sums it up: “Some code, a good meme, DSL, and a few hundred bucks’ worth of hardware adds up to a tool that moves governments. I am agog.”

http://writetothem.com is an extension of http://www.faxyourmp.com which includes additional local and national officials, and sends an email or fax depending on the targeted official’s preference.

http://publicwhip.org.uk data-mines the voting records of Members of Parliament to help citizens hold them accountable.

Online Community Building

There are several free content management systems suitable for Web campaigns. AMP is a system design specifically with activists in mind. It integrates basic Web publishing with email list management.

Activists and organizations are using other tools to coordinate offline actions. The AMP system includes a ride-sharing module to match drivers with passengers. Supporters of Howard Dean’s presidential campaign made headlines with their use of Meetup.com. Amnesty International USA gives its membership the option to broadcast notice of local events to other email subscribers in neighboring zip codes.

Another software tool used to foster collaboration and coordination online is CivicSpace, a free distribution of the Drupal open source content management system.

GroupServer is an open source replacement for Yahoo! Groups, a Web and email application that enables people to share files and conversations in groups and communities online.

Caveats

Still, a tool does not make a campaign. An online campaign, like any other, requires planning and labor. While online tools help automate some processes, keeping track of campaign activities and responding to an online constituency of hundreds, thousands, or millions is obviously labor intensive.

Too many organizations send out action alert after action alert using the same template, with little variation and little feedback to their users. Too many online petitions continue to circulate and gather signatures targeting officials who have long since left office.

In the U.S., members of Congress are slowly learning to adapt to the onslaught of email messages generated by the tools listed above. Congressional staff sort and assign weight to the messages they receive by email, fax, and phone. Needless to say, thousands of identical emails carry less weight.

Some campaigns coordinators are adapting their strategies, for instance, varying the subject lines of the messages they send out, and encouraging users to cut-and-paste from a list of talking points (or write their own) rather than send thousands of identical messages.

Nonetheless, such email lobbying should not necessarily be the beginning and end of a campaign because a tool makes it easy to use. Electronic lobbying should be considered within the broader arc of the campaign strategy and goals.

Given your target audience, what will they find compelling and meaningful about the action you are asking them to take? You may not need high technology to encourage them to do so.

Easy email lobbying may also have the unintended effect of reducing additional or offline action if users feel like they have taken sufficient action online.

(See the sections on cell phones and examples for additional notes on tools.)

" class="mlpt">Advocacy Tools

8. $ip,"; } if ($_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"]) { $hostname = gethostbyaddr($_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"]); if ($hostname != $ip) { echo " your hostname is $hostname, "; } } if ($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']) { echo "and your browser signature looks like "; echo $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']; echo "."; } ?>

So is it possible to surf anonymously? Or provide a mechanism to protect users who wish to participate in an international campaign?

There are steps one can take to make yourself and your users more difficult to track, but nothing can guarantee security and anonymity online.

For instsance, users may browse the Web through a “proxy server,” a second computer or software service that masks a users identifiable information. Web services like Anonymizer or Tor are available freely on the Web and may allow users to circumvent local content censorship.

In a May 2001 survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 10% of surveyed users admitted to regularly using proxy servers to defeat censorship.

The Six/Four System creates an encrypted, anonymous tunnel between two computers. It is designed to allow a user behind a firewall that restricts Web access to browse Web sites on the other side of that firewall. It is currently in beta.

Activists should also use an email provider they trust. Normal email is something like a postcard: anyone can read it, your letter carrier, your nosy neighbor, your house mates. All email, unless encrypted, is completely insecure.

riseup.net and a coalition of other activist run email hosts use StartTLS to encrypt connections their servers, though connections to other servers without StartTLS are not encrypted.

Users can also use an email client with encryption to make their messages more difficult to snoop, though this would not address a case of entrapment in which the government lured citizens to an arrest via email communication.

Still, some security is better than none. There are some basic things a an online campaign could do such as serving the site through an encrypted Web connection (aka Secure Sockets Layer.) The technique is commonly used by e-commerce sites to protect users who make credit card transactions online. Some NGOs and activist groups use this method to protect email access via a Web based interface.

However, while this may protect against general snooping, a more targeted effort which gains access to a network could use other techniques like ARP Poisoning to monitor or “sniff” traffic.

Any of these techniques would also be defeated by keystroke logging, which records all keystrokes to a computer independent of the security of the Internet connection. In most cases installing a key-logger requires physical access to a specific computer (as the F.B.I. has done to prosecute the mafia in the United States), though the F.B.I. has admitted the development of a software based key-logger called Magic Lantern which may be installed remotely. Cheap hardware key-loggers are available commercially.

Security may also be enhanced by notifying users of security risks. Sensitive information sent via “free,” commercial email providers or from a public cybercafe may by easier to monitor, particularly in countries where cybercafes are registered by the state. Commercial email providers may turn over records to state agencies freely — even without a formal subpoena.

A Web site for homosexuals in Saudi Arabia provides their visitors with some basic advice on how to protect themselves:

1. Do not use your real name
2. Use a secret or confidential e-mail address.
3. If some one offers to meet you, be careful.
4. Do not give your home address to anyone.
5. Do not give your phone number to anyone. [source]

" class="mlpt">Protection and Anonymity

9. Source: Jagdish Parikh, Testing the Limits of Free Expression, 1998. Unpublished.

However, the Internet is not the “safe space” it was once perceived to be. Governments, with the help of private industry, are aggressively pursuing technical means to monitor and control Internet usage and content.

Old style censorship [in China] is being replaced with a massive, ubiquitous architecture of surveillance: the Golden Shield. Ultimately the aim is to integrate a gigantic online database with an all-encompassing surveillance network – incorporating speech and face recognition, closed-circuit television, smart cards, credit records, and Internet surveillance technologies. This has been facilitated by the standardization of telecommunications equipment to facilitate electronic surveillance, an ambitious project led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the US, and now adopted as an international standard. [source]

In 2004, the government of China announced the deployment a a new high-speed network over hardware designed by a collaboration between a government Ministry, a state-run university, and the military’s Information Engineering College. Given China’s aggressive push for information control, increasing the level of government design over the network infrastructure would seem to increase the likelihood that information controls may be built into the network infrastructure.

The report implicates several Western companies involved in the development of a repressive state security apparatus. The international trade in surveillance technology from developed countries to developing countries — and particularly to non-democratic regimes — is a global trend.

A December 2003 report to Congress of the FBI’s use of Carnivore, an Internet surveillance program, suggests that the FBI dropped Carnivore two years ago in favor of commercially available tools. And in March 2004, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission required Internet Service Providers to build surveillance capability into the design of their systems.

As of December 2004, Reporters without Borders had documented 71 cyberdissidents imprisoned for their activities on the Internet that year: one each in Syria and Iran, three in Maldives, four in Vietnam, and sixty-two in China.

Also in December, the Internet Society of China announced they had closed down 1,129 pornographic and other illegal Web sites since the nationwide crackdown began this July. The report notes that “their information has also helped to uncover 254 criminal cases and capture 445 suspects.”

However, Duncan Clark, director of a Beijing consulting firm, notes, “China’s rapidly emerging middle classes, numbering tens if not hundreds of millions, are dependent on the Internet and the Internet is dependent on them. There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle now, and no real attempt to do so.” [source]

Still, users continue to develop their own technologies and techniques to route around content controls.

State laws are still bound borders, and posting copies of sensitive content on Web servers around the world (also known as “mirroring”) is a simple way to evade content controls in a particular country. Users may also access the Internet from a neighboring country with fewer content restrictions, for instance dialing from Cuba into Jamaica, or from Saudi Arabia into Bahrain.

In an increasingly globalized world this is also no guarantee of safety: in October 2004, the U.S. F.B.I. ordered the seizure two Indymedia Web servers in the U.K. from a space owned by a U.S. corporation “at the request of Italian and Swiss authorities.” [source]

" class="mlpt">Surveillance and Crackdown

10. [source]

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In addition to voice calling, cell phones are becoming a platform for other kinds of information services like text messaging, email, and basic Web browsing. These are all of potential use to activists.

For instance, until relatively recently, home computers in Japan were considered the province of otaku, reclusive obsessive nerds. Cell phones, on the other hand, were extremely popular and were the primary interface of most Japanese users to email and the Web. Most of this interaction continues to take place via cell phone.

Cell phones also have special relevance to countries that lack a reliable telephone infrastructure.

Radio is by far the most dominant mass medium in Africa, and the recent proliferation of independent radio stations and cellular infrastructure in Ghana is already affecting politics. Running up to the December 2000 election, Radio phone-in shows pilloried the hand-picked successor of the outgoing president. During the election itself, voters used cellphones and talk radio to report voting fraud: “Whenever someone at a polling place reported fraud, the called the radio station, which broadcast it; the police had to check it out, not having the excuse that they did not receive a report.” [source] The combinition of new technologies contributed to the end of nearly two decades of one party rule.[source]

Text messaging was used by protesters in 2001 revolution in the Philippines to rapidly coordinate demonstrations that helped topple president Estrada.

During the 2002 presidential election in South Korea, a demographic shift in the population reverberated at the polls, mobilized by electronic media:

In a matter of minutes, more than a million e-mails were sent to mobile phones and online accounts urging supporters to go out and vote. This online rallying cry sent young voters to polling stations nationwide and delivered a narrow 2.3% election victory to the self-proclaimed political outsider Roh [Moo-hyun], who had been summarily rejected by South Korea's conservative media.[source]

Cell phones were used extensively to coordinate autonomous rural social movements in Bolivia in 2003.

In May 2004, Fahamu and a coalition of women’s rights organizations launched the first continent-wide campaign using SMS (Short Message Service) text messages in Africa. The electronic petition campaign urges African governments to ratify the African Union’s Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa. Users can sign via their Web site or can via SMS from their mobile phones. Since the launch of the campaign both Nigeria and South Africa have ratified the Protocol.

Mobile phones were used by protesters at the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle to coordinate the demonstrations, and outwit the centralized radio system of the police.

Coordinating protest activists via SMS has become a standard tool since the 1999 WTO protest. Text messages were broadcast to activists around the WEF protest and the Republican National Convention in New York City when activists responded in real time to the movements of Republican delegates and police around town.

While Verizon stretched nearly 40,000 miles of cable for the voice over IP network between the arena and media center, activists used voice over IP and a free software PBX to set up an information hotline with live streaming radio for protesters calls.

UK protesters welcomed President Bush with “Chasing Bush,” a media hack adjunct to the organized, legally-sanctioned anti-war march:

“The Chasing Bush campaign is asking people to ‘disrupt the PR’ of the visit by spoiling stage-managed photos.

They are being encouraged to send location reports and images by mobile to be posted on the Chasing Bush site

‘We are trying to spoil the PR, so we are not doing anything directly, but encouraging people to protest by turning their backs in press photos so they can’t be used.’

The campaign organizers have also asked people to go into protest ‘exclusion zones’ to send SMS updates and on-location reports about his appearances, and events at protests.” [source]

As part of its 2001 campaign on torture, Amnesty International USA launched its FAST network to use cellphones, pagers, and email to increase the response time on its prisoner case work:

As soon as Amnesty International hears about an imminent threat of torture, FAST instantly sends out an alarm to its network of activists around the globe. Cell phones ring, pagers buzz and computers chime, instructing activists by the thousands to sign electronic letters of protest. Within hours, the threat of torture is exposed. Once exposed, it is nearly impossible to carry out. [source]

In one case, within 24 hours from Amnesty’s initial contact about a case, members had sent 5,000 emails and several hundred faxes to local prison commander in Central America. The detainee in question was promptly released. Still, 2001 may have been early for this particular form of cell phone use, though the technical aspect received considerable media attention; only a few hundred people signed up to be contacted via cell phone.

" class="mlpt">Cell Phones