WebCooperation

Conversations For a Better World

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 18:10:48 +0200

“Conversations for a Better World is a shared blog on population and development issues. It is a place where people exchange ideas and opinions, a place for us to be ourselves. The idea is to get people talking about how we can co-create a better world. And we want you to join in and become part of a global network of ‘conversation starters’. Conversations is based on ‘the power of we’ – the idea that when it comes to addressing complex challenges, collective wisdom is called for”.

The project is a collaborative blog aimed at people interested in development issues. The Blog aims to foster lively debate and is created and coordinated by the Media and Communications Branch of UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund.

A very powerful example of the need of new specific projects aiming to enhance a global, development-oriented and web-based conversation. Who better than the UN itself?

Ghana's based 'Young People We Care'

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:21:42 +0200

Young People We Care (YPWC) is a youth led and youth focused organization that is headquartered in Ghana, with additional satellite offices in Uk and Canada. The organization “aims to educate and inform youth on global issues; inspire them to take action; encourage youth participation in global issues; identify and build sustainable partnerships aimed at youth development; and provide young people with the tools and resources required for effective action”

These guys do a great use of partecipative web to organize and drive all their activities; for example the “online volunteering programme provides opportunities for volunteers to provide support and assistance “virtually”, in other words, they volunteer via the internet. The virtual volunteer programme is innovative and, of course, cost effective for all involved. Volunteers can work from anywhere and don’t have to travel all the way to Ghana just to help out; they can volunteer in their pyjamas in their rooms anywhere in the world”

[via Global Voices]

Following Iran Updates

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 08:59:38 +0200

The Audience following Iran in these hours is the biggest online movement ever seen.

You can keep up with the situation throught
Iran Twazzup, Global Voices Online, BBC, Mashable and some live blogging channels: The Daily Dish, Revolutionary Road and

Numerous hot links about the social media issues related to the protests on my Delicious account.

Iran Clashing Reports

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:13:00 +0200

With Iran facing a serious of clashes, manifestations and fights between Mousavi supporters and Police, the Social web offers a wide coverage of what is happening, despite the attempt of the governament to block any voice arresting hundreds of people, shutting down tv and radio channels and closing down facebook and youtube…

Here is a range of interesting material:

a list of some users twitting live on the situation from inside the country - here are the results with the main ashtag on the event, iranelection; Live blogging of the events on the Huffington Post; reports on the situation on Global Voices and frequent updates and comments by Juan Cole and Robert Fisk.

Update:
here is the BBC News “Role of the Web” page on Iran’s protests.
Iran.twazzup offers a live report with different ashtags, news, videos and links

Lebanon: Natra Bareed Web Initiative

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:19:31 +0200

Social Media Exchange reports about a Web Based Campaign to promote an event regarding Homosexuality in Lebanon through Viral Marketing and buzzes.

Natra Bareed?

Singapore Pink-Dot Smart Mob

Thu, 28 May 2009 20:24:46 +0200

“More than 2,500 people in Singapore gathered at Hong Lim Park to form a human Pink Dot - a symbol of love and inclusiveness. It was Singapore’s first public rally in support for the Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. ” [GV Article]

PinkDot is the first Singapore Web-Portal about freedom of Love, supporting Gay, Lesbians and transgender right of expression in a still very conservative and repressive culture. The PinkDot community organized a SMART MOB using a wide average of social tools. The event had a great online coverage and was reported also by BBC and various Online Newspapers.

Iran, Facebook down. Again?

Mon, 25 May 2009 12:04:00 +0200

Iran’s web based political campaign had a very short life.

Governament blocked the access to both Facebook and Flickr.

Too bad Ahmadinejad couldn’t manage to understand the importance of a free and open debate on the world wide web. Another chance lost. Again.

UPDATE 26/05 It seems Facebook is up again now.

The Pink Panty Campaign

Fri, 22 May 2009 12:48:15 +0200

“The Pink Chaddi Campaign is a nonviolent protest movement launched in India in February 2009 in response to notable incidences of violent conservative and right-wing activism against perceived violations of Indian culture, when a group of women were attacked in a pub in Mangalore. The campaign was conceived particularly in protest against a threat by Pramod Muthalik of the Sri Ram Sena (also spelled as Sri Ram Sena, Sri Ram Sene and Sriram Sena), an orthodox Hindu group based in Mangalore. Mr.Muthalik threatened to marry off and take other action on any young couples found together on Valentine’s Day.” [Wikipedia]

The movement rounded up, got organized and keep relating with the community throught the web, with a Facebook page and a Blog.

Here a great analysis about the movement by Gourav Mishra

Pakistan Long March Web Coverage

Fri, 22 May 2009 12:14:32 +0200

In 2007 Musharraf, president of Pakistan, declared the national state of emergency. With this declaration the president had the right to remove more than 60 judjes from power (some of wich had part in the Supreme Court who had just ruled he was ineligible to hold the post of President).

For the second consecutive year, “Pakistani lawyer community of Pakistan along with concerned citizens, political workers, human right activists and students have been struggling for the restoration of the deposed judges” [official March Blog] and decided to organize a long march across the country heading to Islamabad to force the governament into releasing the judjes.

The group behind the organization uses greatly the social media tools. This is a part of an interview by Digiactive with Dr. Awab Alvi, one of the organizers of the 2009 event:

The campaign mixed old and familiar tools such as Twitter andFacebook, with new and customized tools. Twitter was augmented by See ‘n’ Report. Like Twitter, See ‘n’ Report collated emails but also SMS and MMS updates whilst providing a campaigners front page, compromising a geographical view, multimedia feeds, SMS feeds, twitter feeds and beautifully compiled video footage using Flowplayer (a video player for the web).

All of which was collated through CoveritLive to provide live coverage of the event.CoveritLive is a viewer that can be embedded on a blog or website to link a combination of Twitter accounts and hashtags (upto 12 twitter accounts and 6 hashtags), reader comments, multimedia and live blogs (through iPhones, Blackberries etc).

Activity was monitored through Cligs which provides analytical tools on traffic going through a site.

The available data is huge: here you have articles by Global Voices, BBC News, Wikipedia and an interesting video by Al Jazeera English.

Kenya Web Based Activism

Thu, 14 May 2009 17:04:00 +0200

Throught the GV Rising Voices Group I got to know the Mars Group, a leadership, governance, accountability and media watchdog organization based in Kenya.

“Our goal is to create awareness and to generate an effective demand, by Kenyans, for accountability from Kenya’s leadership and to encourage Kenyans to hold to account those who have committed improprieties.”

Among the many different activities, the group actively work reporting news on Governament and corruption, live streaming videos on their own frequent reports and promoting citizens partecipation. At the moment they claim having more than 170000 change activists on the ground. They also have a blog on which they openly report on all their initiatives.

One of the latest succesfull initiative is about exposing fraud in a supplementary budget tabled in parliament, and after being lambasted by the Minister of Finance itself, a joint parliamentary committee confirmed the Mars Group work stating the existence of financial inconsistencies in governament planning.

One of the greatest project launched by Mars Group is Partnership For Change, a Web Based, ongoing citizen participation initiative that aims to

“advance the strategic use of non-violent action in calling upon the Kenyan Citizen to demand the end of Impunity, Restore Democratic accountability and to end Dictatorship in Kenya.”

The project is a true and concrete Call to action, spreading forms on non-violent protests, advocacy material and much more, aiming to collect people and push em to actively volunteer for the campaign. This is the Facebook group of the project.

Great job guys.

UPDATE: It seems that lambasting the activists wasn’t enough. Lately there have been 3 suspected deaths among Kenya’s web activists, and now it seems that some of them keep being threatened and even searched for direct elimination.

Ahmadinejad aimes to Iran's web activism

Wed, 13 May 2009 16:10:01 +0200

After some of the candidates for the next political elections in Iran joined the web with a massive campaign on the path of Barack Obama’s web activism, also Ahmadinejad’s supporters started a web-based political campaign.

Global Voices tell us about the new twitter and facebook pages on the Iranian leader, and although there are very little followers of the president actively twitting the importance of the web presence in Iran is evidentially rising.

I take the chance to link a very interesting blog with periodical updates on the media use in Iran, Iran plugged in

Global Protests against FARC throught Facebook

Tue, 12 May 2009 18:49:17 +0200

Another great example of the organizative power that lies in Facebook and social networking.

Colombia has been for decades under the pressure, murdering and actions of the Guerrilla groups called FARC. The very difficult situation in the country, among corruption, political fights and political arrivism has always been a very dangerous limit for the people in trying to fight against the injustices that these group keep doing all around the country.

As this article reports, in 2008 a Facebook group started calling people of the whole world to fight against the Farc, using also Facebook applications and blogosphere conversations to involve more and more users. Only on Facebook in few days 110 000 people joined the group, and the all online activities ended up, the 4th of February 2008, in a global day of protest that took 10 Millions people on the streets of Colombia, Spain, South America and Usa, involving all the Colombian citizens who lived outside the country.

Digital Activism - The 4Cs of Social Media Framework

Tue, 12 May 2009 17:23:08 +0200

Global Voices Advocacy cross-posted a great work by Gaurav Mishra , in wich h tryies to set a line in the huge subjective ammount of web 2.0 definitions to state a Social Media Framework. He starts from a 4 level structure, i.e. the 4 Cs of web Partecipation.

Content, Collaboration, Community and Collective_Intelligence are the four elements, different leveles of a gradual evolution in any web services based on users’ partecipation.

He defines the single levels’ characteristics describing then how the different levels might be enhanced to create a Digital Activism Positive Environment. Here he goes:

[…]

The 4Cs Social Media Framework Applied to Digital Activism

Let me explain what I just said my applying the 4Cs framework to digital activism initiatives.

Many digital activism initiatives like Social Documentary and Witness primarily focus on using social media tools to create and share compelling multimedia Content. Some of this Content generates Conversations and becomes viral and some of it might even lead to Collective Action. However, the focus is on Content.

Other initiatives, like Vote Report India or the Pink Chaddi Campaign, start off with a strong focus on Collaboration around a specific event. In its first iteration, Vote Report India leveraged Co-creation by creating a platform for collectively tracking irregularities in the 2009 Indian elections. The Pink Chaddi Campaign leveraged Collective Action by asking its supporters to send pink panties to the Sri Ram Sena as Valentine’s Day gifts. As these campaigns become successful, they try to move to the next Community level, but don’t always succeed in building a long-term community.

Very few digital activism initiatives are able to leverage the Community or Collective Intelligence layers. The Netroots community in the US, especially Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo and MoveOn.org, have been able to build a strong Community around progressive politics in the US. My Barack Obama leverage some aspects of Collective Intelligence during the 2008 presidential campaign.

What About You?

If you are a social media practitioner or a digital activist focused on the Content and Collaboration layers, I would urge you to think about how you can move to the Community layer. If you already run a vibrant community, I would urge you to think about introducing reputation and recommendation systems in it and leverage the Collective Intelligence layer.

If you are designing a new social media initiative, I would urge you to use the 4Cs Framework in the design and strategy phase itself. Perhaps, in phase one, you would want to start with a campaign built around Content and focused on Collaboration, with elements of co-creation and/ or collective action. You would do well to plan for a phase two which is focused on Community, with a dash of Collective Intelligence built in. The question you want to ask yourself, then, is: how can I design a Collaboration based campaign so that it can be used to build a long-term Community?

[…]

Iran's electoral campaign turns on Web?

Thu, 07 May 2009 11:52:00 +0200

A GV article tells an important story about the electoral campaign in Iran. 2 different candidates are using the web to promote their image and ideas; in particular on the web page of Mir Hussein Mousavi appears a list of 1000 bllogers (here in arabic, translated on the GV article) who are actively supporting him. Iran is the third country in the world for number of blogs, an active partecipation in the next electoral campaign might be really significant.

Update: Another GV report tells us also about Mehdi Karroubi supporters’ use of the web.

Update2: a very interesting post by Gauravonomics summs up the state of web use In Iranian political campaign

Internet India's Elctions

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 12:26:00 +0200

A GV Report about the numerous internet sites that in India are covering the Elction Campaign, political programs and people coverage.

India’s web citizens are very active about these elections. Bloggers are also debating about the Varun Gandhi controversy and about other general issues on the elections.

Twitter-based revolution in Moldova

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 17:44:00 +0200

Student Protests Are Turning Into A Twitter Revolution In Moldova:

“In the last 48 hours, students from Moldova have been tweeting, trying to rally others into demonstrating against the communists. If you look under the search terms “pman” (stands for Piata Marii Adunari Nationale, a square in Chisinau) or “Chisinau,” you can see the tweets about the demonstration coming in a rapid pace. There are also videos on YouTube of the protest. There have been reports that there is limited cellphone reception in the square (thought to have been turned off by authorities). So protesters are using Twitter to give live updates via GPRS networks on their mobile devices. ” (TechCrunch)

Update: An articole about the situation from the New York Times

Update 2: Also Global Voices faces the issues

Update 3: The Guardian Reports about attempts to jail the activist that started the protest (here also an article about it on PI - italian)

Awesome WebCooperation initiative through books and blogs.

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 12:29:35 +0200

A great initiative by Global Voices Online: GlobalVoices Book-Challenge.

The idea is simple but really powerful: becouse of next 23 of April’s UNESCO World Book Day, any blogger wishing to partecipate may read a book about a country or a culture which he/she doesn’t know anything about, writing then a post about it and linking it to the page of the initiative through the comments.

Through the same page of comments the debate will be opened and free, potentially involving people from that same country who might answer your question or reply to your threads.

This is exactly what I mean for “web cooperation”: facilitating debate, cultural head to head and and mutual understanding using the great power of partecipative web.

Thanks to GlobalVoices for this.

African Blogging Platform

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:12:36 +0100

Maneno is a new blogging platform that promises to offer blogging and communication solutions for bloggers with limited or narrow-bandwith in Sub-Saharan Africa. Maneno is a Swahili word, which means “words. (From Global Voices)

Mobile technology for social change

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 19:06:04 +0100

[From the -About- page of MobileActive.org]

“MobileActive.org is a community of people and organizations using mobile phones for social impact. We are committed to increasing the effectiveness of NGOs around the world who recognize that the 3.5 billion mobile phones provide unprecedented opportunities for organizing, communications, and service and information delivery.

We work together to create the resources NGOs need to effectively use mobile phones in their work: locally relevant content and services, support and learning opportunities, and networks that help MobileActives connect to each other. With these things on hand, tens of thousands of NGOs will be in a better position to enrich and serve their communities.

The MobileActive.org community includes grassroots activists, NGO staff, intermediary organizations, content and service providers, and organizations who fund mobile technology projects.”

Egyptian facebook based freedom movement

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 13:50:00 +0100

This is another great example of how web 2.0 is allowing people to get organized and speak up against dictatorial governaments.

Last year a group have been opened on Facebook, collecting over 65.000 people in less than a month. The group and the movement that started from it are called “6 of April” and organized strikes and parades around Egypt protesting against corruption and illegality in Mubarak regime.

Nowdays the movement is active also with a blog and is organizing other activities for the future, starting with another strike on the next 6th of April. Here is an article about the movement from Al-jazeera, a page about it on Global Voices Online and a description of the group on Wikipedia.