Description:

Digital Tools Being Used: Facebook, blogs, video, wikis

What Are They Doing: Pioneering leaders of youth movements from around the world, and other prominent attendees, met for the first time at the Alliance of Youth Movements Summit in New York City last week to share and discuss how to change the world by building powerful grassroots movements. Their website features videos from how to launch a human rights blog to how to practice passive resistance. They are currently using their Facebook group to organize a worldwide march January 17, 2009 to protest the recent Mumbai terrorists attacks and all other forms of extremism.

Description: Germany’s “Telemediengesetz” is seen as inadequate by many critics. The law is meant to regulate so called information and communication services, mostly affecting the internet. Hence its name: “Telemedien” is a neologism which was made up combining the former descriptions “Teledienste” (meaning one-to-one communication services) and “Mediendienste” (meaning one-to-many communication services). Though it only became effective in March 2007 it has since been criticized by experts as inadequate. As the Bundestag discussed amendments brought in by the three oppositional parties, German bloggers have started an online project to lobby for significant and useful changes on the bill.

Tools Being Used: Blogs, Wiki, Listserv

What Are They Doing: Some bloggers proposed to write a draft for the new bill together. The draft is thought to include all the proposals which can be heard from experts since years but have always been ignored by the government. The project is open for participation.
The bloggers set up a provisional wiki where the draft will be developed jointly much in the way of a Wikipedia article. They then announced it on netzpolitik.org, an important blog which is known for having criticized the Telemediengesetz before, in order to find more people interested in participating in the project.

In their first step, the bloggers started discussing the foundations for their project, including the question whether a wiki is the best solution for their intention. They subsequently set up a mailing list as a means to discuss the project.

The next step after finishing the foundations of the project will be to work out a draft which can be proposed to the Bundestag.

Who is organizing the action? The wiki was set up by the niche bloggers of Telemedicus in cooperation with Germany’s most important blog on net politics, award-winning netzpolitik.org.

Description: Agricultural statistics are difficult to attain and must always be reviewed with care. However according to the current FAO statistics, the Least Developed Countries (49 of the worlds poorest countries) produce approximately 10% of the worlds food, whilst Europe and the US produce between 20-30% each.

And so in a world of adequate food supply, food shortage is still a daily reality. About 25,000 people die every day of hunger or hunger-related causes (according to the United Nations). This is one person every three and a half seconds.

Poverty.com in partnership with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) has started an innovative new campaign that takes one small but effective step to address this gap.

Tools: facebook, on-line petitions, blogs, wiki

How these tools are being used: The Free Rice campaign challenges the user with a simple game. Subjects include Art, Chemistry, English, Geography, Languages and Maths For every right answer 20 grains of rice is donated to the United Nations World Food Program (WFP). The WFP distributes the rice globally based on the greatest need and the website includes a video report on how the rice is distributed.

As the game progresses a tally of the total donation is maintained on the right of the page. Banners at the bottom highlight details of donors to the program.

The program has been running since October 2007 and over 45 billion grains have been donated so far. This is equivalent to feeding 2.5 million people. (The WFP estimates that it takes 400 grams of rice to provide a person two meals a day. With about 48 grains of rice in a gram, this is equivalent to 19,200 grains).

The campaign has utilized a marketing campaign that encompasses wikipedia, facebook (the group has over 100,000 members), snopes, youtube and blogs.

What you can do:

1. Play the game
2. Pass the word about the campaign (banners and logos are available on the website)
3. Add your name to the One Campaign
4. Find out about how you can involve your community

Tools Being Used: Blogs, Wiki

How These Tools Are Being Used: On July 1, netzpolitik.org from Germany, La Quadrature du Net from France and the British Open Rights Group published a press release on their respective blogs announcing their actions to stop the Telecoms Package or have it changed in a way that it would not inflict net freedom any longer.
The involved groups subsequently organized the action mainly using a wiki, frequently posting updates on their respective blogs or websites to communicate the progress to the public.

What Are They Doing: Especially before July 7, the work mainly consisted of mobilizing an opposition by contacting members of the European parliament and their respective assistants to inform them about the dangers of the Telecoms Package and to convince them to drop or reject the amendments related to intellectual property rights. The organizations’ tactic included inviting volunteers via their open wiki – and “advertising” that trough blogs – to participate in this effort, which made a broad action possible.

Outcome: The action was successfully publicized in many blogs and subsequently turned massive (mainstream) media attention on the Telecoms Package. As an outcome, many – but not all – amendments inflicting or endangering net freedom were dropped by the committees. Additionally, the members of the parliament decided to postpone their own vote for three further weeks. That means, the decision will now be made between September 22 and 25.

The extraordinarily fast action against the Telecoms Package was only possible because the leading organisations could fall back on existing structures. In Germany, netzpolitik.org and the company behind it, Newthinking Communications, a specialist for Open Source strategies, are well known as a main power behind the German Open Source and Creative Commons movement. But most importantly, they are part of the Arbeitskreis Vorratsdatenspeicherung, a nationwide association of civil rights campaigners, data protection activists and Internet users founded to fight a telecommunications data retention law.
Within a few years, the “AK VDS” has managed to built up a huge network of activists who mostly spontanously support campaings around the topics of privacy and data security, gathering more than 35.000 citizens to officially bring an action against the data retention law passed in November 2007 at the federal constitional court.

The new awareness for these topics, fed by the seemingly unappeasable demands of several politicians has become a model for organizations in other countries. On October 11, activists in several countries of the world will hold a sequel of the succesful demonstrations organized by the AK VDS during the last years under the motto “Freedom not Fear“. The last rendition of this event in September 2007 attracted about 15.000 citizens in Germany’s capital Berlin, which made it the hugest rally in support of civil rights in Germany within the last 20 years. But while that demonstration solely protested data retention, the German movement now has become a strong opposition to all kinds of surveillance and a defender of data security and privacy on many playgrounds, supporting among others the action against the Telecoms Package.

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.