Tonyo Cruz (foreground) at a recent event in Manila on digital campaigning

Mary Joyce: You are a very prolific digital activist – president of the famous mobile activism organization TXTPower, prominent blogger at tonyocruz.com, and  founder of a Filipino bloggers’ organization. How did you first become  involved in digital activism?

Tonyo Cruz: I’d like to think that I started my activism in high school. I was among the students of Manila Science High School who published an underground paper called The MaSci Times in 1991. We used the old program Printshop to design this one page newsletter that poked fun at our school principal and voiced out our complaints, among others. We just had it photocopied and came out with about a dozen issues.

Bayan, the multisectoral group I worked for in 2000-2003, was among the first people’s organizations in the Philippines to go online. Their first website was hosted in Geocities. As Bayan media officer, I introduced email, email groups and text messaging as ways of quickly and surely reaching journalists. Bayan officials later used email,
email groups and text messaging as tools for managing the organization. These tools — mobiles and the web — later proved crucial in the mass actions that led to the People Power uprising of 2001 which ousted President Estrada.

Following Estrada’s ouster, a group called Plunder Watch pressed [now President] Arroyo to prosecute Estrada. The group held a big media event for the launch of its website which contained Estrada’s accountabilities and liabilities. I was also the media officer of Plunder Watch and oversaw the management of the said website.

That same year, my friends and I gathered in Quezon City to form TXTPower. The following years, I was also involved in trying to form Indymedia Pilipinas which gave way to Indymedia in Manila and in Quezon City.

MJ:  Social networking is very big in the Philippines and Friendster is the most popular. According to their Country Sales Manager, Narciso Reyes, there are about 14 million active Filipino users on the site, which is almost 70%
of the total online population of the Philippines. Has this large user base translated into Friendster being used for digital acitivsm in the Philippines? If not, why not

TC: We will see by late this year whether Friendster will get the attention of candidates and parties, or whether voters themselves would use Friendster for their choice of candidates or for election-related causes. I do hope they do so.

MJ: Although there aren’t figures yet available, there is a growing number of Filipinos migrating from Friendster to Facebook, particularly the tech-savvy urban middle class. You recently used Facebook to organize a blogger
meet-up in opposition to President Macapagal Arroyo. Why did you choose Facebook to organize this mobilization? Which is more activist-friendly, Friendster or Facebook?

TC: Friendster has provided limited use to political activists simply because Facebook has overtaken it as the preferred social networking site of the most articulate, most dynamic and most political segment of the lower, middle and upper classes. They may be fewer than Friendster but these Facebook users are more influential. Also, there
are more activists, journalists and politicians on Facebook than on Friendster.

We did not have a Friendster group vs. Cha-cha [the charter change to increase the President's term in office]. Nobody bothered to form one there Our friends at the Facebook group/cause Pilipinas Kontra ConAss meanwhile reports to us that they now have 30,000 members there.

We however yet to see hundreds or thousands mobilized via new media for whatever political or social cause. I mean, I wish these groups would be able to convince their supporters to go from online to offline and have those contingents of Facebook users join the broad, multisectoral mobilizations in the streets. This can happen. TXTPower hopes to do something like this.

MJ:  Filipinos practically invented mobile activism with the “coup de text” of President Joseph Estrada in 2001. How has mobile activism in the Philippines progressed in the last 8 years? What do you see in the future  for Filipino mobile activism?

TC: We now have over 70 million mobile phone users out of a population of 90 million. In the urban areas, most already have mobile phones.  Cellphones have also been integrated into parties and organizations as tools for maintaining their organization, reaching out to new and old contacts, for mobilization, and for publicity.   Some have used it for fundraising. These positive developments have all in all armed citizens with a new tool or weapon in the battle against poverty, injustice and traditional politics.

We foresee more battles ahead on consumer issues. Mobile phones and services themselves are heavily taxed and government has repeatedly tried and have not given up its dream of imposing all sortsd of new levies and taxes. We also wish the government will take on the oligopolies boldly regarding bad services and expensive rates. We want
government to bring down the cost of mobile phone services so more people can enjoy them and so people’s organizations can maximize them for progressive ends.

Take for example the use of access codes. The telcos charge huge fees for providing and maintaining these access codes. On top of these fees, the telcos and content providers charge P2.50 per message sent to these access codes. A regular text message costs P1.00.

Another example is data subscriptions or mobile internet. This is only available for corporate accounts and they are very expensive. This is a reason why the Blackberry and iPhones have not become popular. Mobile internet (GPRS/EDGE/3G) remains very expensive. There are cheap options like bulk pricing of P10 for 30 minutes or P5 per 15 minutes but we think mobile internet will be more popular if there are daily, weekly or monthly subscriptions that should be cheap and affordable.

MJ:  You recently started a Filipino blogger’s association, and you have also said that bloggers will play a critical role in tracking the 2010 election.  What are the characteristics of blogger activism in the Philippines?

TC: Filipino bloggers have not been involved in many activist causes due to many reasons. But there have been attempts to open the blogosphere and blogs to progressive causes such as the Blog Action Days for the past two years which tackled poverty, the anniversary of the People Power uprising and, most recently, the No to ConAss campaign.

Two years ago, a newspaper columnist caught the ire of bloggers for writing an article lambasting and humiliating overseas Filipino workers. Editors suspended the columnist after bloggers took on the issue across the blogosphere and mainstream media. I think that was a first.

The Philippine blogosphere is still growing and there should be more opportunities in the future so bloggers can exercise good citizenship using new media. The next issues looming in the horizon for blogger activism are electoral reform, election of progressives and new media coverage of the 2010 elections.

MJ:  Social networks, mobile, blogs – there are so many areas for digital activism in the Philippines. Which do you think will be most active in the near future, particularly for the 2010 elections?

TC: Filipinos are now using all these new media tools. In fighting for social justice, the more people involved, the better. This is also true with the arsenal of tools which can be used by activists and people themselves. Filipino activists should be able to discover and learn to use these new tools. New media practitioners like bloggers
meanwhile should take the opportunities available to them to redirect these tools for social justice, not just for profit.

If and when new media players attempt to form a group that will coordinate new media coverage of the elections, all these tools will come to play: the social networks and mobiles for internal and external communications, the blogs for publishing, etc. If and when that time comes, such a group would be able to defend its rights against possible government restraints and to cooperate in a toe-to-toe manner with mainstream media.

image credit: DigiActive

(Courtesy of Misterarasmus)

Background: In late June, following the Iranian government’s repression of public protest over the results of the 2009 elections, an ad-hoc network of internet specialists formed in support of the protesters. Fronted by open source advocate Eric S. Raymond, NedaNet, named in commemoration of the killing of Neda Agha-Soltan, provides information necessary for people within Iran to anonymously reach and publish to sites government filtering would otherwise make inaccessible.

Tools: Tor, blogs, IRC, email, USB drives, phones, word-of-mouth

How these tools are being used: NedaNet members maintain documents that explore how to bypass the Iranian government’s highly sophisticated and adaptable filters and work to anticipate what they will screen next. While the group currently recommends Tor for accessing the Internet from within Iran, they are also actively considering alternatives that could take over should current methods to evade the filters suddenly be blocked. They also maintain contact with people in Iran to help them keep continued Internet access.

More “interlinking circles of collaboration” than an organization, members of NedaNet communicate through blogs, IRC chats and websites that provide forums for members to gather more information and exchange ideas. Twitter hash tags provide topics for searches that lead to those forums. The groups working together mostly remain separate for security. As open source advocates, many of the members knew of each other through that arena. In fact, Raymond was one of the originators of the movement.

In the earlier days of the protests, proxies were collected and distributed via email and phone to people within Iran to enable them to bypass the restrictions. However, once it became known that the Iranian government had started deep-packet inspection on all traffic, activists were and still are advised against setting up or using proxies. Use of a Tor client removes the need for them.

While access to the Tor Project site is usually filtered, the site has many mirrors from which the client can be downloaded. According to recent Tor Project metrics, “there were around 7800 new and returning Iranian Tor users on June 24. By ‘returning’, we mean Tor clients that were off for at least several days, so they didn’t have cached directory information.” This suggests that Tor use was widespread even before the protests began. The same report notes that “bridge usage from Iran has boosted to 950% as compared to June 1.” As users receive copies of Tor clients over email or exchange them via USB drives, this could increase.

Challenges: As an open source based group, NedaNet believes that the test of a secure solution is that it works even if how it does so is public knowledge. Consequently, new solutions are at risk of attack even as they are being built. This however, is also one of the strengths of open source solutions and internet technologies have historically been built in the field. A bigger challenge at least for users within Iran is the general lack of bandwidth which makes any internet solution more difficult. Even before the election, 256Kbit was legally the cap on bandwidth for most people in Iran, according to one researcher. Furthermore, NedaNet recognizes that Tor is only a temporary solution.

Analysis: As an unstructured organization, NedaNet has the advantage of being able to maintain a high level of security for its members. Using open source tools in the field allows their solutions to be tested even as they are built, which is important for a security product which will be fully exposed the moment it is used. However, both the decentralization and the openness make it challenging to develop and deploy new solutions quickly and efficiently while simultaneously trying to remain fairly covert. While most of the members exist outside Iran, security is a real concern.

NedaNet servers are crowd-sourced, all work is performed pro bono and they do not currently accept donations. During this crisis a lot of energy is being directed towards this effort. However, once the perceived need ebbs, it will require focus to direct such a decentralized group in order to stay ahead of the government. Considering its relationships, even if tenuous, to other anonymous and free net groups, NedaNet will be able to take advantage of work being performed on behalf of other initiatives around the world.

Using pre-existing tools means the time to launch is shortened and the team can move on to developing long term measures. However, those tools come with known risks which make them temporary at best. Developing a lasting solution requires balancing the essential non-organized nature of the group with the various needs for security, field-testing, and rapid development.

Description and Background:

With funding from Google.org, the Rockefeller Foundation, and others, InSTEDD began its social, technological mission with CEO Eric Rasmussen (a former U.S. Navy chief doctor for disaster response in the Pacific), Dr. Dennis Israelski as the Vice President of Global Health, and Eduardo Jezierski as the Vice President of Engineering.  Along with Chief Technology Office Robert Kirkpatrick, Chief Operating Officer Judith Kleinberg, and several other full-time team members, InSTEDD operates very much like a classic startup in which everyone wears many different hats (click here for bios).  In addition to the executive team, InSTEDD has over a dozen dedicated team members on the ground in their Mekong Collaboration Program (MCP).  This program focuses on rapid detection and rapid response in the Mekong Basin of Southeast Asia – Cambodia, Thailand, Lao PDR, Vietnam, Myanmar, and the Yunan province of China – and has been stationed in Phnom Penh, Cambodia since 2008. In the region, InSTEDD partners with the Mekong Basin Disease Surveillance Network (MBDS), a collaboration network of the six countries’ local governments and Ministries of Health that work to improve cross-border disease information sharing.  Not only does InSTEDD work closely with MBDS, but the organization also established a field-based Innovation Lab (iLab) in Phonm Penh in August 2008.  By empowering young Cambodian developers to design technological solutions based on their local expertise and understanding, InSTEDD works to maintain a creative, organic environment in which sustainable innovation can thrive.

Digital Tools Being Developed: GeoChat, Mesh4X, Evolve (tools that incorporate Twitter, RSS feeds, Facebook, SMS text messages, and so on, as applicable)

How These Tools Are Being Designed and Used: As Ed Jezierski explained to me in our Skype interview, GeoChat helps people in the field to share and report data with each other as well as with those at headquarters, amplifying the amount of information flowing between health workers; Mesh4X coordinates this information by synchronizing between various organizations’ virtual databases; Evolve functions as a place to curate the collective information and subsequently analyze it for conclusions.  For more details about InSTEDD’s approach, tools, and impact, read more after the jump.

The key factor that differentiates InSTEDD from other organizations also contributes to their technology’s success – their approach.  Through field observation, team members learned that the technology should be completely controllable from SMS and mobile phones (because SMS channels tend to stay open during disasters), as well as function with low signal or even offline.  In the iLab, InSTEDD’s MCP helps Cambodian developers understand the process of determining local needs and innovating applicable, technological solutions.  The lab fosters their ability to re-evaluate and repurpose new technology in the future.  MCP also sends these members from the lab to the field in different disaster or outbreak response events; the staff observe these efforts and test out technology with locals in order to determine which user interface or SMS they would rather use or receive. And finally, all of InSTEDD’s tools are open-source and free – a feature Dr. Brilliant envisioned that is critical for continual innovation and adaptability.

Though the MCP has ten to fifteen small, open-source projects going on continuously (including hotlines, AIDS patient reminders over SMS, and so on), I spoke with Ed Jezierski about the following three interoperable tools:

GeoChat enables people in the field to communicate via SMS with others using the Internet at an operations center.  Those in the field can text their location and GeoChat will pinpoint them on a map, allowing anyone with a computer to click on that location and engage in a bidirectional conversation across platforms.  It also allows users to subscribe to relevant health alerts so that health volunteers/rapid response teams can receive and report important data with their mobile phones at any time.  Ed outlined the following ways in which GeoChat operates…

• By subscribing people in the Mekong region to GeoChat health alerts, they receive vital information back.  By transforming health bulletins into locations on a map and sending relevant SMS blasts to health volunteers, those in the region can be more aware of disease symptoms and therefore catch the disease before it spreads.
• For cross-border communication, GeoChat provides an “international chatroom” where people on either side of, say, the Lao-Thailand border can quickly inform each other of potential diseases (e.g. children or animals getting sick) by sending local SMS. Regional borders, after all, are prime areas for disease outbreak due to trade between humans and contact with animals.
• GeoChat is always evolving. The team adds features that people request. For instance, if people are using Twitter, they can send a Twitter message that others will see as an SMS message on their mobile phones; these people can reply with an SMS text that will then appear to the Twitter user as a Twitter message.  In another example, GeoChat can incorporate the use of Thuraya satellite phones.  Basically, GeoChat provides social network capacity that can be customized for local needs.

Mesh4X synchronizes data in a seamless way across organization’s differing systems and databases.  It allows everyone to see the same collective information as well as revise the information in one shared virtual database.  Take the example of registering survivors of a natural disaster:

• Various organizations registering survivors can direct their existing applications/databases (e.g. an Excel spreadsheet or an isolated system) to the same Mesh and merge their data using one URL and password. This single database consolidates data from different systems into the same set of columns.
• The database is visible to any field workers with Java-enabled mobile phones, so that anyone who can access the information can simultaneously edit the database online or offline (changes send whenever they find a signal).  Using any application, people can add to or clarify their data so that these changes will appear in everyone else’s spreadsheets/systems.
• I think of Mesh4X along the lines of the The Blind Men and the Elephant parable.  With several different survivor databases, survivors would have to seek out each system and families would have to consult each one to find out if their loved one is still alive.  With Mesh4X, all of the survivor data would be readily available in one master database.  Or, since each village’s experience with one disease results in fragmented data and potentially incorrect diagnoses, Mesh4X would enable everyone to pool their data for a more thorough analysis.

Evolve allows multiple teams around the world to collaborate around streams of information regarding a specific disease or disaster. From news feeds and reports to emails and SMS alerts, Evolve parses huge amounts of information into keywords, locations, and times to form a common shared picture of an event’s progress.  Ed explains the tool in terms of enhancing disease detection by improving timeliness (detecting a disease as early as possible), sensitivity (aggregating information as broadly as possible), and specificity (filtering information as accurately as possible).

• As incoming information (Twitter updates, RSS feeds, SMS messages, etc.) flows in, people collaboratively add tags and comments, “curating the content.”  People use tags to hypothesize what a disease might be. Each item is put on a map for a visualization of updates.
• Evolve learns these tags (according to keywords, location, time) and develops the ability to suggest tags.  When an analyst looks at the information, he/she can thumb up or thumb down the tags to better sort the information that can be confirmed. By making it easier to detect and understand what is going on, decisions can be made more rapidly about how to stop the disease.
• Evolve can be made public in situations like the swine flu outbreak, but can also be used privately for national security and public health issues.

Impact: Thus far,  InSTEDD has seen great local implementation of its tools.  The Cambodian CDC now uses Mesh4X and three countries in the MDBS network registered at last month’s ICT Forum to begin using GeoChat to communicate with each other.  Shannon Oliver, InSTEDD’s Director of Communication for the Mekong region, actually informed me that all the representatives from the six countries in the MBDS network committed to adopting GeoChat at last month’s conference – three countries remain to be registered.  Shannon also explained how, as of two weeks ago, ChangeFusion and OpenDream (two social entrepreneurial companies in Bangkok) began piloting GeoChat with the MBDS/InSTEDD team in Mukdahan, Thailand.  Since Mukdahan borders Savannakhet, Laos, the Thai border region has been vigilant in monitoring and reporting the progress of swine flu, sending out blast messages to people on the status of the disease in the area.  Many other proof of concept pilots have been conducted, in which people use various technologies to see how they work in the field; these pilots have successfully proven that the products are viable and applicable on a local scale.

Moving forward, the Mekong Collaboration Program faces such challenges as maintaining agile learning and quick turnaround with its technology.  They hope to apply their concepts in other regions in the years to come.  In doing so, InSTEDD also wants to transition to a social enterprise model as opposed to relying solely on outside funding and grants.

Ed characterized MCP’s initial challenge in the region as its biggest opportunity – the ability to work with regional governments/Ministries of Health in a neutral way and to build trust with local residents as well as disease response organizations.  This organic process with a locally-focused approach has allowed the MCP to draw from the talented and creative people in the region who want to use technology to reduce human suffering; Ed describes the iLab as “tapping into a latent energy” that far exceeded his expectations. When asked about MCP’s success, both Ed and Shannon emphasized the qualitative nature of InSTEDD’s work.  Rather than trying to quantify lives saved, they look to MCP’s impact on public health.  Both team members were optimistic, as am I, about the broader scalability of InSTEDD’s tools in the ongoing work to improve early detection and rapid response.

Sources: Skype interviews with Eduardo Jezierski (VP of Engineering) and Shannon Oliver (Director of Communication, Mekong Region); InSTEDD website and blogs; Robert Kirkpatrick’s SlideShare presentation; Dr. Larry Brilliant’s TED speech video; BusinessWeek’s InSTEDD interview

See 'n' Report coverage of the Long March: visual monitoring of information updates

The Long March in Pakistan is a case study in digital activism. The campaign utilized the full range of digital tools, from blogs to social networking and citizen journalism, through the use of old and new technologies. Yet the most interesting aspect of this campaign is not in the tools themselves, but in the breadth and depth of the digital coverage.

The campaign mixed old and familiar tools such as Twitter and Facebook, 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.

DigiActive interviewed one of the organizers, Dr. Awab Alvi.

Tamara: Tell us about the organisations and people involved in the March.

Dr. Awab Alvi: The Long March was a movement by the civil society, lawyers and a few political parties who believed in creating a level of public pressure for the restoration of the judiciary in Pakistan [Reference November 3rd 2007 when, the then, President of Pakistan General Pervez Musharraf fired the top 60 judges of the country merely because they were becoming a hurdle in his reign of power].   This was the second Long March [first one was in 2008] and it started from Karachi to go all the way up north some 1200 km to Islamabad to try and orchestrate a sit-in [Dharna] and push the parliament to restore the judges

The Long March was essentially organized by the lawyers and various civil society organizations in Pakistan – supported extensively by a few like minded political parties who believed in the supremacy of the judiciary

Tamara: You ran an extremely innovative campaign using SMS, MMS, email – using blogs, feeds, videos etc. Did you notice any trends in terms of the effectiveness of the different tools?

Dr. Awab Ali: To follow the progress of the Long March in Pakistan we had to utilize the prevalent technology and Pakistan has a tremendous mobile user base.  Twitter would have been a great tool but its expensive to send SMS’s messages internationally and they have stopped sending updates via SMS since a few months.  We, with the help of our friends in See ‘n’ Report created an SMS number which was also supported by an MMS and email address, so that people going on the long march could send updates live.

Once we had the system established we just needed to propagate the information.  Initially it started from our roving reporters and slowly spread to a wider base.

I believe the social web was essential in spreading awareness to the digital savvy individuals in Pakistan.  The traditional media and electronic media coverage was biased as well as slow. In many occasions we had far more updated information as compared to any media outlet in Pakistan, merely because it was from the people actually taking part on the ground.

People used Facebook and Twitter as well and likewise the information was shared across both channels.  All the information was more or less scattered across so many areas that it then needed to be consolidated into one place and that is when we started the CoveritLive which became one of the most viewed tools through out the long march. The CoveritLive application was in my opinion impressive at consolidating various sources into one unified application.

Tamara: What was the problem with your contact number?

Dr. Awab Alvi: Well the contact number was not easily memorisable – so you either needed a good publicity campaign or you needed an easy to remember number. We had neither – short launch meant less exposure and volunteer finances did not permit spending money on publicity

Tamara: In terms of the mobile coverage, it has been my experience that in some countries, even though the mobile coverage is huge, usage is limited by resources. Many people may not be able to afford the calls and use a system of “beeps” to communicate. Is this the case in Pakistan?

Dr. Awab Alvi: SMS do cost money – unless we develop a reimbursement fee that could always be a hindrance. In the first long march, a project called See ‘n’ Report did reimburse the reporter with mobile credit – but I’m told it was difficult as people were not on a single rate package – SMS hover between Rs 1 to Rs 0.30 per SMS, this is not much of a variance but misreporting merely to siphon of mobile credit was rampant. People could send an SMS for Rs 0.30 and get Rs 1 in exchange – that’s a Rs 0.70 profit for the reporter

So our aggregation of long march updates – was then dependent on digital savvy reporters having GPRS to send Twitter updates – and sometimes they would also send the odd SMS.

So that is a hurdle – we are already working to deploy a more permanent SMS number connected to Frontline and up linked to Ushahidi.

Hence, any way that we can exploit Frontline would be the key in monitoring disasters or activism issues in Pakistan. I have acquired 0313-iReport – a simple number and in turn I believe if we can reciprocate them with up to the minute SMS updates – we might feel the value.

A trust relationship might help – but at the same time SMS is getting cheaper and I see more and more people going for the unlimited GPRS packages.

Tamara: For the long march, how many reporters did you have? Did you recruit/train volunteers?

Dr. Awab Alvi: We had a good 20-30 reporters on the ground spread across – people who were in regular contact with us – many more on the side – we had an army full of Pakistani twitter’ers who were keeping track of all news channels reporting and any breaking news anywhere across the 30 odd news channels would get instantly reported

Tamara: One last question. For your next campaign, what conclusions/lessons have you drawn from the Long March?

Dr. Awab Alvi: Well – we need an SMS gateway (done) – we need an easy to remember number (done) – we need a credible way to verify reports (done ~ Ushahidi verify reports) and we need a viral method. We are working on building on the “313 iReport” idea. iReport is CNNs branding but a well recognized name easy for even Urdu speaking people to remember. We lastly needed an SMS collaboration gateway for NGO’s like human rights and women action forums – with Frontline up and running I believe very soon we will be offering SMS coordination services for NGO’s in Pakistan to make use of our gateway and provide a secure and reliable service. If another long march were to hit us – I believe merely using the SMS network will bypass the controlled media in Pakistan and empower the people.

All these above points were our weakness in Long March II – we improved from Long March I, which was only SMS to email, to blogpost service limited to only 5 people to an an aggregation of a lot more services

Cover it live is a must have tool – its free – but maybe an open source variety aka self hosted would at times might be more secure

But in my case it handled our traffic load tremendously – so I can’t complain.

source: gregorysholette.com

Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, and founding member of the artists’ collectives Political Art Documentation/ Distribution and REPOhistory, as well as co-editor of “The Interventionists: A Users Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life” (MassMoCA/MIT Press, 2004, 2006) with Nato Thompson.

He is currently working on a book about the political economy of the art world and his concept of creative “dark matter”, a theory which states that culture is increasingly being produced by ordinary people rather than experts and paid producers.  In this interview we delve into the implications for dark matter for digital activism, which in its own way seeks to create a new political culture through the creation of digital campaigns by grassroots activists.

Mary: In a short essay in the book A Guide to Democracy in America, you write that “ever more accessible technology for manufacturing, documenting, distributing, as well as pilfering images and information” has created a cultural landscape where “one can hardly escape an encounter with this heterogeneous production.”  You posit that, even though its content is most often apolitical (a YouTube video of a “dramatic hamster“, for instance), this production is closer in spirit to that of politically-engaged activists. What makes this massive creative output political?

Greg : Because it is generated for its own sake ––for the sake of expression, opinion, desire, even collective resistance–– such “bottom-up” cultural production embodies a potential form of opposition to the disciplinary mechanisms of the capitalist market. This may sound more than a little romantic, but its not. Generating, retooling, distributing, and recycling images, artwork, information, free software, all of this activity reveals an impulse that is directly opposite the kinds of enclosing and privatizing mechanisms necessary to capitalism from its inception.

Nevertheless, paradoxically perhaps, this social productivity is now of great interest to many who are part of the market. They are keen to brand such phenomenon as a new form of value production, a new source of capital wealth. I think the recent economic collapse suggests that enclosing, controlling, and extracting this alleged value is a much more complicated process than the proponents of the “new” networked creative economy once thought. Resistance to the appropriation of social production by the market (or the state for that matter) might be thought of as the latest manifestation of a ghost that has haunted the world for centuries (if not longer): the specter of happiness and solidarity born out of real freedom from necessity.

This ghostly apparition, or ghostly promise, is visible especially when we look at the intermittent history of resistance to enclosures beginning with the peasant wars of the 1500s before industrialization, then followed by the worker uprisings of 1848; the Paris Commune of 1871; the revolutions and near revolutions of the early 20th Century including to some extent Mexico (1910), Russia (1917), Germany (1918); or more recently the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the revolts of the 1960s (May 1968 in Paris, Prague, New York, and many other urban centers), followed by Operaismo in Italy in the 1970s, and most recently the anti-Apartheid struggles that culminated in the late 1980s, the events linked with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the massive opposition to corporate globalization witnessed in Seattle and London in 1999, followed by Quebec, Prague, Genoa and elsewhere. With this fragmented “history of ghosts” in mind we begin to narrate a political impulse within the “amateur” détournement of military and corporate technologies ––digital, cellular, genetic–– that are going on today.
Mary: You term this work “Dark Matter” because, while it makes up the majority of creative activity, it remains “invisible to institutions and discourses.” In discussing activism we are ever concerned with over-turning power structures. What effect might Dark Matter have on these structures?

Greg: It is already happening. This missing cultural mass, this dark matter productivity is rattling all sorts of existing institutional structures, and not only within the art world, but also within academic, corporate, and political spheres of power. I would say that for artists however, the recently popular term “relational aesthetics” (curator Nicolas Bourriaud’s term for art involving social interactivity) reflects the recognition that no work of art is made in isolation, but instead it always depends upon a great deal of unrecognized (and unremunerated) laborers in which artists (and non-artists) collectively generate and regenerate the very possibility of “the work.” The structural reality of art is that there is always a perpetual oversupply of production: there are, and always have been, too many artists, art students, arts administrators for the system to every fully make use of. If we map this structural asymmetry onto the broader economy, we see that something similar is going on there as well. But all of this has been greatly amplified by thirty years of deregulation and privatization and the arrival of the “risk society” with its entrepreneurial, “winner-takes-all” mentality. For most people today the options are greatly polarized: either pass through the eye of the needle and become a highly rewarded “creative” worker, who flexibly manages her own time and assets, or, join the ranks of the vast surplus and redundant population competing for part-time jobs at, or near the bottom of the economy, including precarious service work with little or no job security or benefits. The rise of what, for lack of a better phrase, could be called self-organized dark matter collectivism only illuminates this redundancy. Sometimes, this illumination is democratically and broadly generous, at other times, as with the far right, this organized dark matter is patriarchal, and filled with racial or class resentment. What has to be encouraged therefore is the first form of dark matter, something that I believe can only happen if a strong, symbolic link is forged between these informal, shadow practices and the promise (real/phantasmal) that the “history of ghosts” outlined represents.

Mary: In the essay you also note that cyberspace is a particularly fertile source of this creative activity. Can you give some examples of your favorite sources for Dark Matter on the internet?

Greg: I am most interested in those informally organized groups who are not only active within cyberspace, but who also make use of the Internet to go beyond mere self-representation. In other words, I favor those group-entities who take the organizational, pedagogical, informational, but not-didactic (playful) potential of digital technologies to heart, and yet who are also typically located in a specific city or place, including:

Candida Television: http://candida.omweb.org/

Journal of Aesthetics and Protest: http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/

6+: http://www.6plus.org/borcila.html

Howling Mob Society http://www.howlingmobsociety.org/

Critical Spatial Practice: http://criticalspatialpractice.blogspot.com/

MicroRevolt: http://orangeworks.blogspot.com/

Center for Tactical Magic: http://www.tacticalmagic.org/

Yomango!: http://yomango.net/ and http://www.yomangoteam.com/

The Yes Men: http://theyesmen.org/

Critical Art Ensemble http://www.critical-art.net/

Target Autonopop: http://www.targetautonopop.org/

Temporary Services: http://temporaryservices.org/
> including their wonderful Public Phenomenon Archive

Mary: How can activists – particularly digital activists – apply the theory of Dark Matter to make their work more effective?

Greg: Dark matter is mobilized whenever individuals organize to gain some degree of collective autonomy from the market, just as many of the groups highlighted above have sought to accomplish through their act of informal, self-institutionalization (but also with nationalist and racist organization such as The Minuteman Project, or Storm Front). But what I am calling cultural dark matter is better understood as an ongoing presence/absence that lurks within the very structure of social production (and non-production). By recognizing the fact that most of us are part of this missing, shadow-mass we potentially liberate ourselves from certain expectations including a entire range of symbolic representations of hyper-success generated by the mass media (sometimes drawing on dark matter, such as when graffiti artists are asked to “write” on limited edition, Louis Vuitton sneakers). These images of “making it” are bestowed on a very few individuals, nevertheless we help make that injustice a reality. So rather than ask dark matter to offer a well-defined set of organizing tools it might be better to think of it as calling out to artists and activists to embrace your redundancy!

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Gregory Sholette is an artist, writer, and an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Queens College. His sculpture and mixed media works have been exhibited at the Taipei Biennial, Periferic 8 biennial in Romania, the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago, New Langton Arts in San Francisco, and the Dia Art Foundation, Anthology Film Archives, Apex Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. A founding member of the artist’s collectives Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D: 1980-1988), and REPOhistory (1989-2000), he is the co-editor of two books, Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945, (University of Minnesota, 2007); and The Interventionists: A Users Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life, (MASS MoCA/MIT Press, 2004, 05, 08). At present he is working on a book about “dark matter” and the political economy of art for Pluto Press, and has recently co-edited a special issue of the journal Third Text with theorist Gene Ray on the theme “Whither Tactical Media.”

Websites:

http://gregorysholette.com

http://darkmatterarchives.net (still under development)

Campaign Description and Background:

Digital Tools: Twitter, Facebook, Online Newsletters, Tassatag.org, TheCode.org

What Makes ECPAT innovating and effective?
ECPAT has promoted its cause and campaign on Facebook and uses this new application to promote awareness of child prostitution, human trafficking crimes, and events and note worth news. Similarly, ECPAT, like many digital campaigns, has begun using Twitter feeds. “ecpatusa” is used by the campaign to tweet on current news articles, local events, and important information regarding child trafficking and prostitution. With 115 followers, to date, it has already begun attracting attention from activists and other interested parties, however, this is one of the newer digital aspects and technologies of the campaign and remains underutilized.

TassaTag and TheCode – Connecting travel and tourism to the fight against child prostitution:
Unique to ECPAT is TassaTag.org, a website that is a direct project of ECPAT-USA. TassaTags are brightly colored, hand-woven cotton luggage tags, which “help you spot your luggage more easily while reclaiming children’s lives. It is practical, environmentally sensitive, fair trade, and with it you can make a difference” because by purchasing a TassaTag (bought only online) you become a partner in the larger ECPAT campaign against the prostitution of children. Awareness of the TassaTag logo as a “symbol against the sexual slavery and trafficking of children,” helps to raise greater recognition of the crimes of the  global, illegal, human trade. Additionally, all proceeds go directly to The Regina Center in Nongkhai, Thailand a center “which provides education and income generating skills and opportunities for women.”

While tourism may seem a far a field from the concerns of human trafficking and child slavery and prostitution, ECPAT has been a strong supporter of TheCode.com or the Code of Conduct for the Protection of Children from Sexual Exploitation in Travel and Tourism, “an industry driven responsible tourism initiative.”

What has been the impact?
ECPAT has increased its impact dramatically by joining such social networks as Twitter and Facebook. By connecting with international organizations and local campaigns throughout the world, ECPAT International has vastly increased the scope of its audience and the number of people it can help. Through online newsletter and awareness events, ECPAT is hoping to garner the support needed to mobilize Congress against child sex tourism. By raising money online, the campaign is able to garner funds in order to “train people in the travel industry to take an active role against sex tourism [and] inform the public that sex with children is against the law everywhere and if caught the person will be prosecuted and extradited to their home country, if necessary.”

Last week I had the pleasure of talking to my friend & colleague Joe Solomon, Director of the Social Actions’ Cange the Web Challenge. The Challenge asked web developers to create innovative tools to help people find and share online actions in the Social Actions database, with $10,000 in prize money on offer. (Winners were just announced!).

Joe and I had a chance to discuss the challenge’s finalists, trends, and online activism in general. Here are the highlights:

Mary: What digital activism trends did you notice in the applications that were submitted?

Joe: Well, we saw a change in what it means to create a mash-up. In an old-school mash-up you put data together and hoped people would come. As activists we want to expose data, but we also want to reach more people who will find that data. We’re concerned with outreach. We saw a number of developers pushing the boundaries of “meeting people where they are” online. A number of apps bridged ways to take action on sites and platforms we visit and use all the time, like WordPress, Twitter & Facebook, Firefox, OpenSocial, the iPhone, as well as widgets and tools that can work on any website. Also, the Sunlight Foundation had their App Contest at around the same time (they just announced their winners) and if you check out their apps you’ll see a similar trend.

Mary: I know it’s hard to single out one among the excellent finalists, but could you tell us about any projects that surprised you or that might indicate new possibilities in digital activism?

Joe: First, a disclaimer: I’m not a judge of the contest so my opinion doesn’t have an impact on the winners.  One app I like though is the “Take Action” button, literally a button a site owner can put on their site, which visitors can click to receive information on actions based on the content of that site. I like this app because it has the potential to transform any website into a platform for social change. However there are a number of other awesome apps. Really, it’s kinda crazy, we were blown away by the innovation! You can check out an overview of the 40+ apps that draw on Social Actions’s database here. Most are open-source, too!

I think we’re also at an exciting point in time where opportunities to take action online are becoming more engaging. We’re moving from signing online petitions as being one of the main e-advocacy tools of choice to inviting people to share expert advice & research, collaborate in real time, and micro-volunteer as new modes of online activism. It’s not just about the method of delivery. We need more relevant and effective online actions that lead to off-line impact. And I think as this space evolves, the apps that promote these actions will become ever-more engaging and ultimately more successful.

Mary: Other than by building new applications, what are some ways that digital activists can “change the web”?

Joe: Re-purposing the tools we’re already using like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook – and using these to promote issues and engage supporters are great ways to remix the web for change.
image source: Joe Solomon

Michael Silberman (original image: NetSquared)

Today I “attended” a webinar on online strategy hosted by the New Organizing Institute.  The presenter was Michael Silberman, a partner and co-founder of EchoDitto, a communications firm founded by the techies of the Howard Dean campaign.  Below are Michael’s steps to building an online strategy.  I’ve presented his ideas, which are aimed at American non-profits, and then given commentary on how the steps relate to grassroots activists in other countries.  I’ve also added examples from international digital activism.

1)  Choose your moment:  It’s best to link the launch of a campaign to the news cycle so it is relevant.  This can be particularly challenging for activists that work on longterm issues, like the environment, public health, and or women’s rights.  It is common for these kinds of campaigns to link their actions to planned holidays like Earth Day or International Women’s Day, but smart organizations will also be attuned to the news for unforeseen opportunities and be ready to push their environmental campaign when there is news of a toxic clean-up or their women’s rights campaign when a female celebrity is the victim of domestic violence.

An excellent example of connecting an advocacy goal to the news cycle is Syria LinkedIn fail.  Social network LinkedIn had blocked its users in Syria because of a broad interpretatation of US sanctions against that country.  In order to make the block relevant, activist Jillian York created a Twitter tag #linkedinfail, which simulated the incredibly embarrassing #amazonfail story only a few days ago.  Eager not to follow in Amazon’s path, a PR representative responded to Jillian quickly (and on Twitter) and Syrians regained most of their access to the site.

2) Create an “ask”:  An “ask” is a jargon term that campaigners use to refer to the request you will make to your supporters.  While it is tempting to post a list of several actions, in Michael’s experience the most successful asks make only one request. For example, the project Postcards for Iran makes one simple ask:  send a postcard (snail mail or digital) to an Iranian political prisoner.

Michael also stresses the importance of mixing crisis and opportunity messages to spur your supporters to action.  You need to first present the crisis your cause seeks to redress in a way that makes is seem important and moving.  Then you need to present a clear way for your supporters to take action and resolve the crisis by responding to the ask.  First you present to the crisis, then the opportunity.  Michael calls this “crisitunity” messaging.

Finally, Michaels stresses that your “theory of change” needs to be credible to supporters. A theory of change refers to the process by which your campaign’s actions will achieve their goal.   For example, when an Afghan court sentences a journalism student to 20 years for blasphemy in late 2008, the group Scholars for Peace in the Middle East created an e-petition for his freedom addressed to “The Governments of Afghanistan and Iran and the United Nations Council on Human Rights”.  However, it is unclear how this group would be able to present this petitions to these institutions.  Their theory of change, that writing a petition to a variety of inaccessible governments and institutions would free the student, was not credible.  Their goal was noble, but their execution was perhaps too ambitious.  If you ask your supporter to take an action, they need to believe that their action will be effective in achieving the stated goal.

3) Launch:  Whatever your plan, you eventually need to get something online.  Create a blog post, send an e-mail, shoot a video.  Planning is important, but eventually you need to launch.

I think if I were writing this strategy, I would have put more detail into this step.  Creating content is not straight-forward and guidance on audience and organizational assets would have been useful.  Still, Michael was making a 40 minutes presentation, so some detail had to be left aside.

4) Outreach and promotion:  Once you have content online, you will need to promote it.  There are three options for promotion:  paid media (advertising), earned media (free coverage from journalists and bloggers), and self-made media (disseminating your own message).  (The first two categories were mentioned by Michael but self-made media is my own.)

Paid media is the least accessible to grassroots activists because of its necessary cost but, thanks to the relative affordability of online advertising, I’ll give one quick example.  During the World Summit on the Information Society in 2005 in Tunis,  Tunisian activists bought Google ad words connected to the summit and linked them to web sites detailing human rights violations by the Tunisian government, a means of redirecting attention to highlight the government’s misdeed.

Earned media is becoming ever more accessible to activists.  This is because, with the rise of blogging, there are ever more media outlets.  You may not have access to a newspaper or radio journalist, but someone in your organization probably knows of a prominent blog that would cover your story.  When contacting a journalist or blogger with your story, write a short personal note to show you are not just spamming the person, and also include a press release with a summary of the main details of your campaign, your contact info, and an image.

Finally, self-made media, the most appealing.  There are so many forms of free self-made media accessible to NGOs now – Twitter, blogs, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, to name a few – that it is difficult to choose which one makes the most sense (and sometimes none do).  The key is audience.  What kind of media are your supporters using?  What kind of media is your target (opponent) using?  In most campaigns, you want to be visible to both.  Also, be aware that these types of media have network effects.  Think about who your partners are and ask them to post your message on their own blog, send an e-mail to their supporters, or re-tweet your message. (For more tips on using social media for activism, check out Beth’s Blog).

5) Watch your metrics: Congratulations!  You’ve developed an online action, launched it, and promoted it.  Now you need to measure your effect, both quantitatively and qualitatively.  Unfortunately, many useful metrics like “open rate” (how many recipients actually opened your e-mail) and “conversion rate” (how many of your e-mail recipients actually took the requested action) are only available through paid bulk e-mail services.  Grassroots activists using free tools  will need to rely on web site metrics, for which excellent free tools like Google Analytics are available.  (Google’s application allows some e-mail tracking by recording hits to specified URLs.)

For qualitative data, look at replies to the mass e-mail you sent through a Google Group you’ve created, comments on a blog post, or responses to your tweet on Twitter. Fortunately social media is interactive, so it is not too difficult to get feedback on a campaign, especially if you ask for it.

6) Follow-up:  The final step is follow-up.  You’ve completed your action.  You know whether or not (or to what extent) it was a success.  Now it’s time to close the feedback loop by telling your supporters how your campaign went.  Michael notes that if you can refer to a press mention of your campaign or link to photos of supporters taking action, this makes the campaign seem more real and vibrant.  Click Diagnostics, a public health start-up which uses mobile phone cameras to provide rural health diagnoses, it particularly good at follow-up.  They often enter innovation contests, which they promote on their Facebook group.  Before the contest, they ask their Facebook supporters to vote for them and after the contest they tell their supporters how they did.

A final note from me: as important as it is, a clear strategy is often missing from the actions of digital activists, who often try one digital tactic and then don’t know what to do if that tactic fails.  In an effort to bring more strategic resources to activists, I will be writing about different strategic frameworks that can be of use in this field.  EchoDitto’s is the first, but there will be more to come.

Web site: www.uscampaignforburma.org

What is it?: The U.S. Campaign for Burma (USCB) is “a U.S.-based membership organization dedicated to empowering grassroots activists around the world to bring about an end to the military dictatorship in Burma through public education, leadership development initiatives, conferences, and advocacy campaigns at local, national and international levels.” With a small staff and smaller budget, USCB has grown its membership from a few hundred people to over 60,000 in the past three years. New media outreach was a key component in this growth, used to organize activists and raise awareness about the cause of Burma.

Tools: instant messaging, e-newsletters, blog, digital video, online social networks (Facebook, Myspace, Change.org, etc.), Ustream live video conferences, teleconferences, listservs, user-created media (photos, videos, t-shirt designs).

USCB has managed to dramatically increase their outreach by combining online with offline organizing. A coordinated YouTube campaign to launch 30 produced videos in 30 days helped increase exposure to the general public, since the spots starred Hollywood celebrities. But public reaction to the spots was mixed. Also, traditional media played a role in the successes and challenges of USCB’s outreach: with Burma often in the news this year (monks’ protest, Cyclone Nargis), more people became aware of the cause and eager to connect with USCB, but media of these events also somewhat overshadowed the organizational work of USCB. The full slideshow goes into more detail, with quotes from people at USCB.

Description:

Digital Tools Being Used: mobile phones

What Are They Doing: Friends of the Congo with the help of university students at dozens of colleges and universities in the United States and around the world had made this action as part of the “Break the Silence Week”, an effort to raise awareness among cell phone users and others about the ongoing civil war in the DRC and the role of minerals such as coltan in stoking the conflict.

In “Break the Silence Week”, you will find a lists of events in different parts of the world which you can join or support.