Advocacy

It was Friday afternoon and went over to search for terms on Twitter that I like to keep an eye on when I ran into a post from @haggaret. It was a call to convert an Earth Hour WordPress Plugin over to Drupal.  Now I'm very aware of environmental issues, but there are 8765 (or so) other hours in the year to worry about, so what's the big deal about this one.  I'm still not sure, but in solidarity I decided to check it out and see when it was, unfortunately it was 8 days later on the last Saturday of March. 

But really, how hard could it be?  A bit of CSS, tad of javascript, and heck, most of the logic had already been figured out for WordPress.  It was a bit more difficult than it seemed at first, but never-the-less, by the time there was one week remaining until the Earth Hour countdown of 8:30-9:30pm on March 28th, 2009, I had a working module for Drupal. 

Was interesting to see how this spread through the Twitosphere, getting a few folks trying out the code within a few hours of providing a download able version.  I had a less functional version the previous evening that I posted to pastbin, but didn't get any feedback on.  I had thought it would be neat to get some spontaneous collaboration around improving this module if the right people were watching.

Ok, Amnesty's Irrepressible campaign looked like an interesting campaign. I was a bit frustrated because the quotes were completely out of context. However, I really liked that they had an API so that I could try to put it back into context. So although most people will just paste in the following javascript widget that looks like:

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the Ottawa Book Launch for Transforming Power, that was held at the Raw Sugar Cafe earlier today.  The cafe was definitely packed with people who came to both see Judy & celebrate Octopus Books' 40th Anniversary.  The venue was intimate and everyone was interested in hearing from Judy.  We have been doing the Website for Octopus Books now for probably 8 years (Krishna & I put up what was at the time a fairly complex site at that time) and also helped Judy Rebick put together her site over the past couple of months.

We took a leadership role in supporting Judy's site because we saw the potential for this project to mobilize the social justice movement in Canada.  When we (Krishna & I) first worked with Judy it was when we helped to launch rabble.ca back in 2001.  Rabble.ca has done a lot to help to focus left leaning media and discussion since that time and it was with rabble.ca that we were involved in our first advocacy campaign to build a petition to release Jaggi Shing. 

A netcast from the 26 Jan 09 meeting of the Social Tech Brewing Co. at the Code Factory, featuring Pam Kapoor, a Gatineau-based communications/advocacy specialist and produced by Chris Brown of Liquid Visual. From the Brewing Co's site:

'Obama's election victory last November has been hailed as the coming of age for online political campaigning. In Canada we've seen the growing importance of online campaigning in recent elections, and in the progressive coalition movement that nearly brought down the government at the end of last year.'

There's been a rapid flurry of political activity in Ottawa this week as it seems like Ottawa may a union of the Liberals & NDP successfully challenge Stephen Harper's minority government.  With the position of Bloc Québécois in Federal politics it is very difficult for any one party to obtain a majority government.  Working cooperatively in coalition governments is going to be an increasingly important skill for Canadian politicians.  We've been busy over the weekend setting up the Canadian Labour Congress' online action tool so that that they can encourage their supporters to send emails to their MP's.  It is interesting too to see how many other people are doing the same thing:

• CUPE's Make Parliament Work
• Rideau Institute's Smart Vote 2008
• Canadians for a Progressive Coalition

We are pleased to announce that we were involved in launching Make Poverty History's latest campagin, "Tell the Prime Minister to make child poverty history". This is a fairly simple implementation of our Connect module to allow individuals to send a letter to Stephen Harper to talk about child poverty. 

We've continued to extend the flexibility of this module so that it can be used to server a great many advocacy campaigns within the same site.  Petitions, letters to targets, faxes, as well generating dynamic lists of targets based on postal code.  We want to allow campaigners to create innovative campaigns that attract the interest and support from those who participate.

Part One at Octopus Books, in which we see Mike address 'Social Applications of the Web for Activists'. The visual presentation is available in a previous post.

November 10th marks another BlogersUnite day.  There are thousands of bloggers out there and the blogosphere is a great place to help inform and influence popular opinion.  Previously they have chosen to focus on other important issues such as human rights, encouraging acts of kindness, mobilizing against abuse & promoting organ donation.  This time they chose to discuss refugees, and challenged bloggers to learn about refugee issues, post an image/link back to the BloggersUnite page and to help raise awareness about the millions of displaced people around the world. 

A friend of mine is in Thailand now for Inter Pares working on this issue, so I thought I would try to spend a bit of time talking about what little I know about refugees in this area.  I've also been aware of what is happening in Burma for a while and have previously blogged about the red shirt campaign and efforts to organize opposition online. October 4th, 2007 there was also an international campaign to get bloggers to raise awareness about Burma.

Well just over a week ago I was presenting at Octopus Books about the elections and the Internet.  Last night showed the first decisive electoral victory in a US presidential election using the Internet as a primary force of communication, community building and fund-raising. 

The talk at Octopus was lined up between the Canadian federal election & American election, and there were some good examples that we could look at from the Canadian experience too.  In organizing the talk though I thought it would be most beneficial to look at the history of the relationship between USA presidential elections & Internet use since 1996.  With the adoption of the Internet, election campaigns have changed to reach it's users.  Likewise the flood of $$ from the USA election cycle has had a huge impact on online campaigning in general. 

It has been a very busy couple of weeks, so I've gotten behind in my blogging.  Fortunately, I've finally got the twist to blend together a couple news stories into something that will hopefully have some enduring interest.

Next week I will be presenting the first of 6 talks on Social Applications of the Web for Activists.  The first one is geared towards the ability for online tools to influence elections.  It is also interesting to know that in many ways the USA election cycle has helped to sponsor various surges in participation in online activism.