DigiActive.org

Digital Activism in Iran: Beyond the Headlines

clockwise from top-left: Gholamhossein Karbaschi’s Twitter page, the reformist web site Ghalam News, YouTube video of a nurses’ protest taken by a citizen journalist, Mir Hossein Mousavi’s Facebook page, toolbar from Kalamhe, another reformist site

Background:  Protests against Iran’s presidential election results continue despite the warning of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Friday.  However, Iranian reformist candidates Mir Hussein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoub and their supporters have few communications options. They have no access to national TV, radio, or newspapers, which are under state control.   Text messaging is being blocked and web sites are filtered.  How are they able to organize a huge protest movement?

While the mainstream media has focused on the role of Twitter and decentralized organizing, the real picture of digital activism in Iran is more complex.  Protests are organized centrally by the campaigns of reformist candidates and then that information is disseminated both online and off.  The role of citizens with regard to social media is as citizen journalists, using YouTube and Twitter to report on what is happening, rather than to organize the protests.  Since this activity is intended for an international audience (and is in English) it is no wonder that this use of social media is more visible to a Western audience than the online tactics actually being used to organize the protests.

Tools: web sites, Facebook, Twitter, mouth-to-ear networks

How these tools are being used:  With regard to the post-election protests, decisions are made centrally by Mousavi and Karoubi and their campaigns. When they take their decisions they communicate them in different ways. First, they publish them on their websites, for example Kalamhe and Ghalam news.  Web 1.0 (as well as totally offline communication methods) are just as important as Web 2.0 (social media), though the latter is receiving for more attention.

Second, the reformist leaders use social networking systems to communicate these message. On Saturday Mir Hussein Mousavi’s Facebook published the news that demonstration will be held today. Mousavi has more than 65,000 supporters in his Facebook group and every message can reach this army of people directly.  Supporters were also asked to pass the message to others, implying that the leaders are deliberately making use of their supporters’ online and offline personal networks.   One of the main ways to organize the demonstrations  is person-to-person communication or talking with friends and neighbors… the mouth-to-ear method.  It still works and no government can shut it down.  (Maybe Iranian leaders imagine a divine power can prevent this form of communication as it did in the election.)

Third, as has already been noted (and overemphasized) in the mainstream media,  Twitter is being used.  However, the dynamic is different than has been previously reported.  Gholamhossein Karbaschi, a top adviser to Karoubi, communicates about his activity on his Twitter account (@gkarbaschi, in Farsi).  This is one of the only instances where Twitter is actually being used to organize protest inside Iran and again, this is centralized organization coming from the campaign of a reformist candidate.  An indication of the centralized nature of Twitter for organizing in Iran: @gkarbaschi has over 4,700 followers but is not following the feeds of any other users.  He is using social media to broadcast to a domestic audience, not to interact.

As has also been noted, people in Iran are using Twitter as an important broadcast (rather than organizing) tool to report events, slogans, and minute by minute protest movement. In this way, Twitter has turned a local struggle into a national and  international one.  A scene of a girl murdered by security forces is one dramatic example of news reported on Twitter.  As many reporters and interested observers around the world have learned, it also allows an international audience to follow the event in real time.

Finally, Iranian citizens upload films from around country on YouTube to show demonstrations, protest movements and reformists’ messages.  International mainstream media are using these citizen videos in their Iran coverage.  This combination of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, central organization and decentralized dissemination shows the flexibility of these tools and the true complexity of the use of digital activism in Iran.

Iranian Elections, Information Sharing and Twitter

Earlier this week, amidst travel and trying really hard to work, I followed the events of what was happening in Iran post-election.  I followed it all on Twitter.

There are many comments I could make on the events, but I wanted to highlight something that will be important for how information and participation happens in the months and years to come.

The fact is, we are all becoming a larger part of the information dissemination mechanisms that were once reserved for formal media channels.  DigiActive has reported many instances of citizen journalism, on-the-ground reporting and information gathering, but now we’re talking about the addition of a process of broader dissemination.

We’re “regular” people, we have the information coming to us, and it’s our choice to pass it on or not.  The reason I  read hardly a single newspaper article on the topic all day was because I was getting my information handed to me by people from Boston, Europe, Iran… everywhere.  Regular people.  I got all the relevant links I needed from those 140-character posts.

The fact is, we are all now part of the information dissemination mechanism now.  When I reported on the Moldovan protests in April, I noted that part of the process that we were seeing was not necessarily just that the protesters were using social media tools to get their message out, but that the resulting international furvor that erupted was fueled by other people who were not on the ground.  Not even in the country.

This time around, we saw this same process magnified immensely.  A message from Mousavi highlights how important this process was not only in what was said - One Person = One Broadcaster - but also in the the resulting relay-like speed that the message reached the world.

Mousavi recognized the the power of this information stream.  Clay Shirky alluded to it in his Q&A with TED on the topic, and colleague Gaurav Mishra highlighted it in his analysis of the events as well.

No one was told to do anything with the information coming out of Iran, or had any explicit instructions to do so.  The messages could have remained dead in the water.  But we were all engaged by what was happening, we were interacting with other people through discussion, and we genuinely wanted to participate by adding to the conversation, spreading the information and learning more about the situation.

The fact that people had real-time, important information in their hands that they could “touch and feel,” and their ability to actively join in the conversation and the spread of vital information made momentary journalists out of us all.  And it will continue to do so more and more in the future.

“Where is My Vote?”: Iranian Expats Organize Online

UPDATE: I’ve changed the title of this post to reflect the fact that it is Iranian expats who are using Facebook for organizing.  I have not seen evidence of the tool being used effectively to organize within the country.

Background: On June 14th , Iranian expatriates and supporters around the world protested the results of an election in which President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad claimed a statistically unlikely landslide victory over challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi. The new slogan became “where is my vote?” as protesters asked why the votes of Mousavi supporters had not been counted. The campaign, which I will describe below, has both centralized and decentralized elements and has succeeded so far in organizing worldwide protest.

The question is, will this structure allow for the sustained campaigning necessary to overturn the vote? In the language of Gaurav Mishra’s 4 C’s of Social Media, this campaign has achieved Content creation and Collaboration on collective action, but will it be able to create a Community which will sustain longterm action once the Iranian election is gone from the headlines?

Tools: Facebook, Twitter, stand-alone web sites, citizen media sites

How these tools are being used: This campaign began before Election Day.  Setade Ma (meaning “our campaign”), a site launched at the end of May, encouraged voting in the upcoming election. The central action associated with this campaign was worldwide simultaneous demonstrations on May 31st (similar to those that occurred on the 14th). At the May 31st demonstrations, participants around the world were asked to hold banners saying “we vote” and then to submit those photos to the central site, similar to the geographically-dispersed take-a-photo tactic used in the US for the Step it Up campaign against global warning and in Morocco for the Help Erraji campaign. (It is not clear how people outside Iran were actually going to vote in the election, unless Iran has an effective system of absentee ballots, but the goal seemed to be to create a mass movement in favor of voting.)  Showing awareness of the ability of social media to spread a campaign, the site also linked to its own Facebook group, Twitter stream, and a page on Balitarin, a community website that helps its users find links of interest on the Iranian Internet.

This previous organizing proved crucial in helping activists to organize worldwide protests only two days after the election on June 14th.  The Setade Ma Twitter stream did not end up being particularly useful, amassing only 125 followers (and excellent graphic design).  However, the Setade Ma Facebook group proved key. After the election it was transformed into the largest “where is my vote?” Facebook group and was used to organize the London, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington DC protest on June 14th.

The Facebook group organized by the Sedate Ma activists ended up being only one of the many Facebook groups (see right) created using the “where is my vote” (WiMV) meme and logo. There are dynamics of both centralization and decentralization at work here. There are 24 WiMV groups on Facebook and the Sedate Ma group is by far the largest with 3,000 members at this time. The other groups are smaller, with a few hundred to less than 10 members. This is not necessarily a weakness. Facebook allows groups to only message 5,000 members at a time, so Facebook groups can only be used for effective communication at low volume.

Some organizers, who may or may not be associated with Setade Ma, created a stand-alone web site, whereismyvote.org, to direct potential supporters to Facebook groups organizing protests in Toronto, Vancouver, Paris, Boston, and Winnipeg. It is generally a good idea to create a stand-along site to mirror and centralize information on the frustratingly decentralized Facebook (as recommended in DigiActive’s Facebook Guide). However, only three of the five links point to the pages indicated. In the flurry of event creation, centralized control seemed to have been difficult.

Another interesting Facebook action was the campaign to change your profile picture to the green WiMV icon (also at right). This meme appears to have been started by a smaller WiMV Facebook group and the profile action seems to have been that group’s  main purpose. The only information in the description section of the group is “If you voted for Mousavi change your profile picture to / WHERE IS MY VOTE? image / Join this group and invite your friends to do the same. lets make facebook green”.  (Green is the symbolic color of Islam and Iran.)  Changing profile pictures really leverages the network effects of Facebook. When one person changes their profile image that change is pushed out to all that person’s friends via the friend feed. Ideally, the following exchanges occur:

Finally, the organizers attempted to promote their events through citizen media sites, which have a wider audience than a Facebook group but are more accessible to activists than the mainstream media.  For example, A supporter posted a photo and links about the San Francisco protest on the site Now Public, which collects and distributes news from unconventional sources by letting citizen journalists upload their own stories.

Outcome: Based on the photos and video uploaded by WiMV supporters, it appears that international protests on June 14th occurred in San Francisco (USA), London (UK) , Dallas (USA), Paris (France), Dubai (UAE), Melbourne (Australia), Köln (Germany), Atlanta (USA), Washington DC (USA), Los Angeles (USA), Winnipeg (Canada), Boston (USA), and Toronto (Canada). At somes protests dozens were present, at others over 100.  (You can see a selection of images from the protests after the jump.)

It was certainly a successful example of fast, free, international collective action. The question is, where will the movement go r from here and will it be able to transform current enthusiasm and ad hoc organizing into an organizational structure with the stamina to continue a longer campaign?

Analysis: The WiMV campaign followed a decentralized structure that is common to digital activism campaigns built around high-profile issues.  However, was this decentralization a good thing for the cause? On the positive side, it is likely that more events were organized because people who became aware of the WiMV/June 14th meme could create their own Facebook page to organize an event in their area and invite their friends and contacts. This seems to be the case with the WiMV Melbourne, Dubai, and Atlanta groups. (Other local pages were created but they did not seems to organize protests.) In another benefit of localization, the very active Paris group created their own profile icon in French: “ou est leur vote?” (where is their vote?) and their own Blogspot blog, which acted as a stand-alone site to centralize information about their protest.

Unfortunately, the negatives of decentralization seem to be more substantial than the positives. The first reason is misinformation.  While the “official” DC protest was meant to take place at the Iranian Interests Section, someone posted on the wall of another group that the DC protest should be on the lawn of the White House.  Second, many of the groups were “identity” groups rather than “action” groups. People joined them to identify with the cause of free and fair elections in Iran, but no protests were organized within those groups.  People who potentially could have been recruited to attend a protest fell into the “dead zone” of inactive group.

The most serious concern with regard to decentralization is its implications for sustainability.  Supporters are spread across a miriad number of event groups on Facebook, which was effective enough for this first action, but how will these supporters be contacted for future actions that are not organized at the local level? (Also, what about people who attended the protests but are not members of the Facebook group?  Was their contact info collected?)

For true coordination beyond a high-attention meme, centralization is necessay and WiMV’s current structure on Facebook does not lend itself the the sustainable community which is most likely to lead to future collaboration and action. After the the explosion of activity for June 14th, people interested in continued action will need to come together into a single leadership team and then start reaching out to the group founders in an effort to get everyone on the same listserv and in the same group.  It will not be a fun or easy process but it will be necessary to create a sustainabile community for this issue.

Protest photos after the jump…

Read more »

Case Study: The Report Card on Vote Report India Version 1.0

The 2009 Indian Lok Sabha elections have come to an end and so has version 1.0 of Vote Report India.

We have had our successes and failures and I have talked about some of them before.

I think we did a lot of things well –

- We were able to get the website up within a week, thank to some great work by the Ushahidi and eMoksha teams.

- We were able to build a number of important relationship, with civil society organizations (like Jaago Re/ One Billion Voters, National Network for India, Liberty Institute, Citizens for Justice and Peace, and Women’s Political Forum), traditional media organizations (like Al Jazeera) and new media organizations (like Global Voices, Indipepal, Desipundit, BlogAdda, NGO Post and Digital Democracy). In fact, our partnerships page looks like a literal who’s who of the important players working on the Indian elections.

- We were able to generate a lot of buzz for Vote Report India, on blogs, on Twitter, and in mainstream media within a very short time.

- We have been able to build a vibrant Vote Report India community that has been active in supporting us on both the technical and outreach side.

Here are some things that have not gone well –

- We haven’t been able to establish a relationship with any big Indian media organizations on one hand, and National election Watch and the Election Commission on the other hand, in spite of some serious discussions.

- We haven’t been able to integrate the Swift functionality into Vote Report India (aggregating feeds from multiple sources and crowdsourcing the tagging etc.) on our original timelines.

- We haven’t been able to get users to submit reports in large numbers. We have a little more than 200 reports in the system, which isn’t bad. However, we would have needed many more reports to capture the complexity of the 2009 Indian elections.

- The voter turnout in all four phases has been low, putting a question mark on the effectiveness of all digital civil society campaigns like Vote Report India.

Here are some lessons from Vote Report India version 1.0 –

- It’s still difficult to build a grassroots movement in India exclusively on the internet. Even online campaigns need to be supported by mainstream media for reach and SMS for the feedback loop. We had SMS, but we didn’t have the resources to advertise on mainstream media.

- In a country like India, which has a free and noisy news eco-system, transparency initiatives like Vote Report India need to not only get original reports from users but also aggregate reports from mainstream media.

- Transparency, in terms of availability of information in a usable format, is not a big enough incentive for Indian users. Users expected Vote Report India to closeloop the issues and give them feedback, and we were not set up to do that.

On the whole, I think that we did quite well, given our time and resource constraints.

Our biggest achievement, I think, was being able to build a vibrant community around Vote Report India and we are grateful to all the people who contributed to the project.

As I said, this was only version 1.0 of Vote Report India. We will take a short break and then relaunch Vote Report India as a platform to crowd-source the performance monitoring of our elected members of parliament, using the Ushahidi/ Swift engines. We will move the present homepage to 2009.votereport.in and start new pages like 2014.votereport.in for new elections, including local assembly elections.

Selvam and I, along with the other members of the core team, will continue to devote a substantial part of our time to Vote Report India. We are looking to expand our team, so do write to us at votereportindia@gmail.com, if you would like to become involved in a significant way.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics, my blog on social media and social change.

Presidential Candidates Go Virtual in Iran

Description:The Iranian presidential election will be held in about a month and more than 400 people have registered as candidates. However, they still need the Council of Guardians to approve their nominations. In the last presidential election in 2005, less than 10 people among over 1,000 registered candidates got the chance to run, and all the lucky candidates were faithful and loyal to the Islamic Republic. This time the supporters of leading candidates are using digital means to promote their favorite politicians. Facebook and YouTube, which were banned until recently, have been used by candidates to beef up their chances in the coming election.

Tools and People: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s supporters started to use all the digital means at their disposal. Their virtual campaign is named Dar Emtade Meh (means “following kindness”). In this site supporters are invited to use Facebook, SMS,Twitter,YouTube and blogs to communicate the message. YouTube is used in very pivotal way by campaigners and several Ahmadinejad’s meetings and trips are there. Ahmadinejad is considered a conservative politician.

Mir Hussein Mousavi, former Prime Minister, has launched an internet based TV. His campaign claims that more than 1,000 blogs announced their support of Mousavi. He is supported by former reformist president Mohammad Khatami and he calls himself an independent candidate.

The supporters of Mehdi Karrubi’s, former parliamentary speaker, have launched a Facebook page where several election films are published. Karrubi is considered a reformist candidate.

Impact: It is very interesting that Iranian authorities allowed Iranians access to Facebook and YouTube just a few months ago and already we see they are really present in candidates’ campaigns. The presence of bloggers as adviser to candidates and/or their campaigners reveal that citizen media has creeped its way into mainstream politics. Mohammad Abtahi, former vice president and blogger, is adviser to Karrubi and several bloggers are active in Mousavi’s campaign. Just as we now have “governmental NGOs” in Iran, in the future we will probably have “state-run citizen media.”

What Pew’s 2008 Election Poll Means for Digital Activism

Last week the Pew Research Center,  a nonpartisan American “fact tank” that studies social trends,  released their report on the Internet’s role in the 2008 presidential elections.   The results of the poll were not surprising.  Political use of the Internet increased from 2004, both in the sense of Web 1.0 information-seeking and Web 2.0 content-generation.  The Internet has also moved up in the media rankings;  it’s tied with newspapers as a source for political information, though TV still leads.

However, what I am most interested in is the implications of these trends for digital activism.  Does online political activity during the election reveal any trends in the likelihood of Americans to use the Internet in organizing for social or political change?   While information about the proliferation of online communities and an increase in “participation” (as opposed passive information-seeking) made me optimistic, the poll did not seek to ascertain the effect of online activity on offline outcomes or to differentiate between participative activities I would consider activism (creating strategic communities of interest and organizing actions) from more passive participation, like joining an email list.

This is not to say that there wasn’t plently of cause for pessimism as well.  The increase in partisanship online  became the Associated Press’ headline for their story on the poll.  People who engage with politics online are more likely than they were in 2004 to visit sites that share their point of view.   This seems to vindicate Nicholas Negroponte’s theory of the Daily Me and Cass Sunstein’s theory of echo chambers, both of which imply that current online political behaviors are detrimental to democracy because they feed narrow-mindedness and create fragmentation.  (This is the cyber-skeptic side of the Internet-and-democracy debate, the optimistic side being  represented by Yochai Benkler and his theory of the networked public sphere, among others.)

The participative Internet is good for pluralism, but pluralism is a double-edged sword.   While the Pew report does give support to a theory of echo-chambers, it also clarifies that there are many echo chambers, not just the left and right poles made famous by the map (left) of the US political blogosphere presented in the 2005 by researchers Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance.

The Pew poll notes that those who are “most information hungry” (let’s call them political junkies)  “are delving more deeply into the ‘long tail‘ of online political content, where they frequently seek out information that carries a distinct partisan slant….”   So the politically engaged Internet user of today is likely to find a community of like-minded people who share her views.   This could be positive if these online communities  give their members the power to lobby decision-makers on the issues that matter to them.  It could be negative if these more fragmented communities merely replicate the polarized online world of Sunstein and Negroponte: pro-life vs. pro-choice, gay marriage supporters vs. NOM.

I tend to believe in the positive interpretation of online pluralism: more communities of interest means more sources of collective power and more influence from ordinary citizens.  Part of the reason I believe this is that there was so much online participation this cycle (see graph below).

Although Obama supporters were more politically engaged than McCain supporters, probably due to the Obama campaign’s more robust new media operation (full disclosure - I was an OFA new media employee), both sets of supporters were “participating” actively online.  I use the word “participating” in quotes, because the Pew poll makes no distinction between “engaging politically in an online social network,” which implied, at least for the Obama campaign, the ability to form groups, plan events, and exercise significant agency, from “signing up for email news alerts,” which in this context means being the recipient of a broadcasted signal.

Another reason it’s difficult to get at the implications for digital activism, as I stated earlier, is because the poll does not seek to ascertain the effect of online participation or its connection to offline events.  Were people who participated online more likely to vote, canvass, or convince a friend to take political action?  We don’t know.  I hope the next Pew election poll in 2012 recognizes that the most salient forms of online political participation have effects offline, and that in order to gauge the effects of online action, we need to look for the effects of that action in the real world.

image sources: Adamic and Glance via www.futureofthebook.org; the Pew Internet and American Life Project

Campaign: Sinclair Broadcasting Boycott of 2004

NOTE: This post is an excerpt from The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler. It is rather unusual for DigiActive to reproduce an extended excerpt from another source. (The sub-headings and links have been added, but the text is unedited.) The reason is because 1) the author permits reproduction of the online version of the book under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sharealike license and 2) this case study is so well written, we really could not improve on it. We encourage you to read and annotate this spectacular book at http://yupnet.org/benkler/ and buy a copy through Yale University Press or Amazon.

Figure 7.1: Sinclair Stock, October 8-November 5, 2004

Description: Sinclair, which owns major television stations in a number of what were considered the most competitive and important states in the 2004 election— including Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, and Iowa—informed its staff and stations that it planned to preempt the normal schedule of its sixty-two stations to air a documentary called Stolen Honor: The Wounds That Never Heal, as a news program, a week and a half before the elections. ² The documentary was reported to be a strident attack on Democratic candidate John Kerry’s Vietnam War service. One reporter in Sinclair’s Washington bureau, who objected to the program and described it as “blatant political propaganda,” was promptly fired. ³ The fact that Sinclair owns stations reaching one quarter of U.S. households, that it used its ownership to preempt local broadcast schedules, and that it fired a reporter who objected to its decision, make this a classic “Berlusconi effect” story, coupled with a poster-child case against media concentration and the ownership of more than a small number of outlets by any single owner. The story of Sinclair’s plans broke on Saturday, October 9, 2004, in the Los Angeles Times. Over the weekend, “official” responses were beginning to emerge in the Democratic Party. The Kerry campaign raised questions about whether the program violated election laws as an undeclared “in-kind” contribution to the Bush campaign. By Tuesday, October 12, the Democratic National Committee announced that it was filing a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), while seventeen Democratic senators wrote a letter to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), demanding that the commission investigate whether Sinclair was abusing the public trust in the airwaves. Neither the FEC nor the FCC, however, acted or intervened throughout the episode.

Digital Tools: cross-referencing blogs (in particular talkingpointsmemo.com, MyDD.com, dailyKos.com), web sites (stopsinclair.org, BoycottSBG.com)

How These Tools Were Used: Alongside these standard avenues of response in the traditional public sphere of commercial mass media, their regulators, and established parties, a very different kind of response was brewing on the Net, in the blogosphere. On the morning of October 9, 2004, the Los Angeles Times story was blogged on a number of political blogs—Josh Marshall on talkingpointsmemo.com, Chris Bower on MyDD.com, and Markos Moulitsas on dailyKos.com. By midday that Saturday, October 9, two efforts aimed at organizing opposition to Sinclair were posted in the dailyKos and MyDD. A “boycottSinclair” site was set up by one individual, and was pointed to by these blogs.

Read more »

Campaign: Bangladeshis microblog the elections to ensure transparency

On 29 December 2008, Bangladesh held its 9th Parliamentary elections, but this time there was a new twist.

Global Voices reported that Software company Somewhere In would offer to the citizens of Bangladesh a set of internet and mobile tools that allowed for quick and easy dissemination of election news. Their motives were simple: offer a public forum where people can get real-time information and, more importantly, hold the government accountable.  In part of its open statement to the government, Somewhere In states:

“tomorrow, any update from any blogger has the potential to reach the whole world.

this time, for the first time in your political history, bloggers are watching you.”

On election day, people were urged to use either the internet or SMS message to report events of the day to the New Age website, which also provided direct synching with an interactive map.  The following tools were offered:

“bloggers share quick news to the election microblog
- just login and type from web or sms to 5455: ! your message

bloggers can sms directly to an interactive map
- send sms to 5455: ! your message @location regarding their district

bloggers can analyse and share political stories on the election blog

bloggers can share the latest microblogs through nearly any blog“

The results, continually updated, are displayed on the sites homepage, along with numerous blog posts with various information.

Importance: This joint business/citizen initiative is a big move towards increased transparency of a country that has, in recent years, topped the list of highest corruption rates in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (It was ranked most corrupt in 2005 and has slowly moved to number 147 in 2008) and has been under interim government (and military) rule for two years.

The full impact of the initiative is yet to be seen, however, its collaborative and public nature is sure to raise a few heads within the country and around the world.  We at Digiactive hope to see its effectiveness carried through and perhaps duplicated elsewhere.

Related articles by Zemanta

• EU Corruption Perceptions Index 2008
• Bangladeshi corruption scandal after 122 workers paid to fix toilet
• Democracy’s Return: Bangladesh Prepares to Vote
• Bangladesh set to hold 1st election in 7 years

Tactic: Why Don’t Chilean Parties Use Web Tools?

Description: Last week El Mercurio (one of the oldest newspapers in Chile) published a report about the use of Web technologies by political parties in the country (original source in Spanish). The article stated that what the parties were using was very very basic and lacks the “social” element. Even though each one of these parties have a website (list here), they don’t apply the latest interactive Web 2.0 technologies.

Organizer: The political parties of Chile

Purpose of Action: To win elections and gain voter support

Organizing tools not used: YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, or blogging

Outcome: The impact of this new situation is uncertain, but if access to the Internet increases and the activities of young voters online continue to increase, we will see a very different electional process in 2009. The fewer the number of parties that understand this, the lower the probability that they will understand the phenomenon of “Politics 2.0″ that is consolidating around the world and may produce very deep changes in the way we understand “Government”.

Ease of Replication: If we look at the political campaigns in the US, and search a bit about the use of this tools, we can see that, for example, Obama has more than 800,000 followers in Facebook and Ms. Clinton has 150,000. In the past presidential elections in France, the Internet was not only important in the campaigns (in fact Nicolas Sarkozy opposed using it to debate with other candidates), but also it allowed to spread the news who was the winner, due to the bloggers who had fresh info that the media couldn’t get at the same time.

Read more »

Tactic: Zimbabwe Election Watch Map

Description: This mashup overlays a Google map of Zimbabwe with information about breaches in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Principles and Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections* since July 2007.

Map URL: http://www.sokwanele.com/map/all_breaches

Organizer: Zimbabwe Election Watch, a project of the Zimbabwean movement blog www.Sokwanele.com

Purpose of Action: To make an accessible visual representation of complex longitudinal data about breaches in electoral standards.

Organizing Tools: Google maps, a blog

Outcome: Results of the March 29, 2008 election will be announced on Monday, March 31..

Ease of Replication: Creating a basic Google map with your own locations is pretty easy. Adding customizable icons and creating preferences that allow you to display only certain icons takes a little more skill.

Read more »