DigiActive.org

Geotracking the protests on Peru’s Bagua massacre

History never stops. It progresses ceaselessly day and night. Trying to stop it is like trying to stop Geography.
- Augusto Monterroso Bonilla

Background: In Peru there have been ongoing protests by indigenous groups contesting government policies they argue limit the economic development of the heavily indigenous Peruvian Amazon area. On June 5, the Peruvian government forces opened fire on the crowd, killing and wounding dozens (probably hundreds) of civilians in the city of Bagua. The massacre has drawn the attention, of among others, Human Rights Watch.

A Chile-based human and indigenous rights think-tank, Centro de Políticas Públicas y Derechos Indígenas (Center for Indigenous Public Policies and Rights – CEPPDI), has been tracking the protests denouncing the massacre using a newly developed maps section on their website.

Tools: Google Maps, stand-alone web site

How these tools are being used: Using the Google Maps API, the CEPPDI published a map noting protest locations world-wide, along with basic information and photos on individual protests, when available.

Outcome: The information has been regularly updated, and it shows, at first glance, a good density of protests in Latin America and Europe, but little movement in North America. This provides a clear geographic visualization of the impact (or lack thereof) of the massacre – an analysis that would have been otherwise much harder and time-consuming to make.

Analysis: Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are one of the most powerful tools available to understand and grasp geographic information, however, they were until recently very difficult to use.  Software costs and fees for cartographic files, as well as time consuming data entry made GIS prohibitively expensive. Google Maps (and the offline Google Earth) are certainly bringing the power of GIS to the masses, and the  CEPPDI’s effort is a great example of the power it brings to even relatively small organizations and relatively unknown causes to visualize geographic information.

The CEPPDI’s effort seems to be geared to continuing to develop further maps, as this map  is part of a section in their website dedicated to maps. I hope this effort is continued, and for different uses than tracking protest sites: in this case it would have been useful to get some overlays and information on the actual conflict area, with a close-up mapping and possible a mapped time line of events. All of this is straight-forward with Google Maps, and while listing protest sites is an important task, it is one that provides a narrow exploration of the subject, with as much effort in developing the content as it would have been for a deeper and broader look at the causes of the protests. They actually do this with the issue of mining concessions in Chile, the other map currently available in their website.

With the availability of Google Maps, any organization or movement that wants to enhance their impact online should consider doing mapping – ultimately, geographic information enhances the experience of the spectator, provides activists on the ground with a sense of proportion, and allows the cause to identify geographic patterns that might prove vital to the struggle.

Journalists, commentators, bloggers, and organizations like DigiActive should continually seek to enhance their geographic visualizations. CEPPDI’s effort is an interesting, if currently limited, step in that direction. After all, a well-labeled map is sometimes worth a thousand words.

Link to map:

• http://www.politicaspublicas.net/panel/mapas/geonoticias/309-mapa-protestas-por-bagua.html

Tool: push out your content with widgets

Tool: the widget

Tool Description: A widget is a piece of HTML code that can be embedded into a blog or web site to display content from another source. For example, the widget on the left, from the American site http://jobs.change.org, pulls content about recent social change job postings from the Change.org database and displays them on this page. Other widgets which work in the same way include event count-down clocks and DigiActive’s comment and Twitter feeds, which you’ll find on our left and right-hand toolbars.

Activist Application: As activists, we are often looking to bring useful content to our web sites in order to attract readers or to push out content we have created to other platforms so we can get as many “eyes” on that content as possible. According Danny Moldovan of Jobs for Change, “Our goal is to spark a nationwide movement toward careers in the common good.” Their methods for achieving this goal is to bring together lots of these jobs in a single place (their site) and then send job-seekers to that site.  If they can push out these job posting to other sites and blogs through their “featured jobs” widget, that means that  more people will find  those positions.

Ease of Use: Embedding a widget is quite easy.  If you have a blog, you just create a new box on one of your tool bars, copy and paste the HTML of whatever widget you want to add to your site into that box, and then save your changes.   The widget will appear on your toolbar next time you load your site.

Creating your own widget is also easier than it once was, thanks to free online services.  The  Free Kareem campaign, for example, created a Free Kareem widget of news update on Kareem’s imprisonment using the free application WidgetBox.com.

Hat-tip: Danny Moldovan

Tool: WordPress plug-in for Kareem

Tool Description: A plug-in is a small application that functions as part of a larger host application. They are very common in blogs. For example, Akismet, the spam filter on DigiActive, is a plug-in which works through our blog platform, WordPress. Plug-ins can also be used for activism as a way of disseminating information over a blog network via a widget that a blogger installs and which produces content for the blog’s readers.

Activist Application: In February of 2007, Egyptian blogger Abdelkareem Nabil Soliman was arrested for perceived anti-Muslim postings on his blog and sentenced to three years in prison. Even since that time, a dedicated group of activists has run the Free Kareem campaign (http://www.freekareem.org), which sought first to obtain Kareem’s release and now to support him in solidarity while he is in prison. They have released a WordPress plug-in (download here) in order to maintain awareness of Kareem and to connect people to their different online efforts.

The widget (above) includes text explaining Kareem’s situation, links to the campaign on social network (Facebook, MySpace), video (YouTube) and mobile micro-blogging (Twitter) sites, and a tell-a-friend button so bloggers can ask their friends to insert the plug-in into their blog as well.

Ease of Use: Moderately easy. You need to download the plug-in and then upload it to your WordPress blog. You can also personalize the plug-in according to the features you want to show.  Installation instructions are available here.

Tool: Dipity Makes Creating Interactive Timelines Easy

Tool Description: Dipity allows you to create interactive timelines which can be embedded into your blog, campaign website or social networking profile. Chronological information is presented graphically using any combination of text, pictures or videos. Users can choose between a traditional timeline view, a list view, a flipbook view or a map view which presents any geotagged data or entry on a google map.

Activist Application: Campaign websites often have dedicated pages detailing background information on the campaign or the cause in addition to multiple entries or posts detailing any new or recent developments. It is often a challenge to present such information in a way that is easily and quickly understood by the average reader who might not necessarily be familiar with the campaign’s intricacies. As a visual illustration, a Dipity timeline makes it much easier to follow a succession of events and understand their details. In the example below, the FreeKareem.org is using the timeline to display the developments of the case of jailed Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer since the day of his arrest as well as developments in the campaign to free him.





Useful Features:  in addition to the ability to include multimedia such as pictures and videos in the timeline itself, an interesting feature of Dipity is the possiblity of collaboration. Several users can edit a single timeline simultaneously and work together in inputing entries and information. Timelines can also be linked to feeds and be automatically created and updatted through entries from your Picasa, Twitter, Pandora, Wordpress, Last.fm, Flickr, Yelp, Blogger, Youtube account or any regular RSS feed.