Description: The Canadian city of Ottawa is planning to close a gap in their 2009 budget by cutting funding for the arts by as much as 100%. To protect funding for Ottawa festivals and galleries, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa has launched a campaign opposing the cuts.

Digital Activism Tools: web site, Youtube videos, social bookmarking and sharing platforms like Digg, StumbleUpon, and del.icio.us

How These Tools Are Being Used: The campaign’s centerpieces are two humorous YouTube videos, Artsy Clean (above) and Crazy Larry, both simulating over-the-top commercials. The first video is a fake info-mercial for the product “artsy clean,” which magically removes culture from a city. The second video simulates a commercial for a blow-out sale at a car dealership – all art must go!

As mentioned in the DigiActive video guide, humor can be an effective way to attract interest and stimulate viral effects (people emailing the video to their friends). The videos end with a call to action – write your City Councillor and tell them not to cut the arts budget.

The videos are hosted on their own web page, http://www.crazylarry.ca, with links to content-sharing platforms, like Digg, StumbleUpon, and del.icio.us. The goal in linking directly to these platforms is to encourage the viral sharing of the campaign to a large number of citizens who will hopefully take action.

Outcome: The Ottawa budget has still not been decided upon.

Hat-tip: Beth Kanter

Digital Tools Being Used: Facebook, YouTube

What Are They Doing: The National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the largest U.S. based civil rights nonprofit advocating on behalf of Hispanics, recently launched two campaigns online to organize its base, which are both featured in its Facebook group. “We Can Stop The Hate” is an initiative to bring attention for a more balanced discussion on the controversial issue of immigration. “Yo Votare ‘08” is another online campaign designed to mobilize the estimated 17 million Hispanics voters in the 2008 U.S. presidential election next month.  Watch their YouTube video.

Digital Activism Tools: Youtube, Digg (social bookmarking), wikis, online forums

How These Tools are Being Used: After announcing their campaign against Scientology via an ominous YouTube video on January 21st (see below), a group of nameless hackers used open forums like the alternative news site Digg to spread their message of protest against what they see as the exploitive and untruthful practices of Scientology. Their movement is very interactive. As it is based on a wiki, new members were able to leave feedback for the original founders and the founders listened. (In particular, they cut back on the illegal harassment of Scientologists, which many would-be supporters felt was illegitimate “cyber-terrorism.”) Anonymous, whose leaders and members are unknown, experienced a great success on February 10, when 6,000 supporters participated in anti-Scientology rallies in more than 70 cities around the world.

After the break I’ll quote a long passage of excellent background and analysis from Carnegie Mellon student Dan Schultz, originally published on MediaShift Idea Lab under the title “Anonymous vs. Scientology: A Case of Digital Media.”

From Dan Schultz’s post:

The Background
I’ll try to summarize things as quickly as possible, but it’s all rather complicated so bear with me! Also keep in mind that I heard about this the same way a lot of people did – Digg, YouTube, Google, and some scattered mainstream Media coverage – so there may be holes in the story.

Around January 16th 2008 some part of a back-alley online community titled Anonymous (aptly named because it is composed only of nameless members – they have no pseudonyms, aliases, or digital identities) decided that they were frustrated with the way The Church of Scientology has handled itself as an organization. They decided to try to do something about this frustration and pulled out the digital battle drums – which I assume involved a post on their community’s site announcing the problems with Scientology and looking to see if anyone wanted to help do something about it.

On January 21st someone uploaded a video to YouTube which ominously listed Anonymous’ complaints and announced an Internet led “war” on the Church of Scientology (note the 2 million + views). Because Anonymous is anonymous I can’t even try to guess how many people were involved at this point, but apparently it was enough to cause a decent amount of online buzz.

The message was spread through various channels of the Internet – YouTube, Digg, online community forums, etc. They also got a blip or two on the mainstream media radar. The interesting part is that efforts weren’t being organized by “leaders” – they were being organized completely via anonymous individuals using a public wiki, meaning anyone could change anything (much like you see on Wikipedia).

Over the next few weeks members of Anonymous began to harass Scientology and continued to make the occasional “press release”. More importantly, though, vloggers, bloggers, and countless other individuals gave their two cents through response videos on YouTube, comments on Digg, and contributions to the blogosphere. Some supported the movement, some just felt it was going to be interesting to watch, and some condemned Anonymous as misguided “cyber-terrorists”, unscrupulous, or simply boring; however it seemed their cause was resonating with people, generating attention, and even starting to be discussed outside of the Internet.

At this point a few more Internet-focused mainstream media folks took notice and mentioned it in various segments. Known critics of the Church of Scientology like Mark Bunker also chimed in and offered advice and criticisms of the anonymous efforts. After listening to the Internet response and gaining support, the anonymous digital harassment changed to legal, more traditional methods. Someone else uploaded a video to YouTube announcing plans for international protests on February 10th.

For me these “real life” protests, where 6000+ people protested in 70+ different cities around the world, are what pushed this whole debacle from “interesting to watch” to “what can we learn from this”. This takes us to today, where another round of protests is being planned for March 15th.

One of Anonymous’ forums has a compiled list of links to local and national news coverage. I would definitely recommend watching some of the news reports if you want to learn more.

Key Success Factors
That’s the story as I’ve seen it, so the question to ask now is how did they do it? How did a fairly small group of completely anonymous individuals manage to generate several million views worth of buzz on the internet? And finally, how did they actually bridge the gap and apply that buzz into real, physical world protests? Thinking about it may help inspire thoughts about where digital media is now, where it can go, and what would improve it.

Although there were plenty of things that could have gone better, here are some components that I think had a lot to do with how Anonymous was able to bring their movement to where it is today:

1. Community-driven issues. Anonymous was a previously established community (albeit a non-traditional one) and its members were able to identify this issue as one that they had a passion for. Compare a community issue to one that is loosely backed by otherwise unrelated individuals and you will see why this matters.
2. Effective targeted digital communication tools. User media sites allow for quick information dissemination to exactly the type of people that Anonymous wanted reach – active members of The Internet community. Those sites let others join in by participating in the conversation, passing the word along, or simply learning more on their own/taking some sort of personal action. Public wikis and forums also helped by supporting coordination and made it possible for anyone to propose and organize action.
3. Tacit understanding of those tools and their potential. Anonymous was familiar with the existing digital media infrastructure (Digg, YouTube, community forums, etc.) and could use it effectively to get their message out.
4. Attention and responsiveness to community feedback. Organizers and communicators adapted and listened to their audience; feedback shaped the movement. You can see a clear shift in Anonymous’ direction in response to audience members’ comments late January. Had Anonymous simply continued on as it began (i.e. through illegal harassment), it is unlikely that the group would have gained much/any worldwide support and I definitely wouldn’t be writing this post right now.
5. Availability of information (to enable critical analysis). There is a lot of content from all perspectives scattered around the internet, so curious parties could look into things on their own using the glories of Google. I’m sure some people may have joined in without checking other sources, but more cautious media consumers had the resources needed to develop personal opinions before getting involved.