NGOs recruit bloggers to help change the world

This year NGOs campaigning for action against poverty and climate change watched in awe as developed world governments mobilized over $8.43 trillion to bail out financial institutions and stabilize their economies.

According to Oxfam, this would be ‘enough to end global extreme poverty for 50 years and a massive step towards ending it forever’.

“Developing economies have been left reeling from a crisis they had no responsibility in causing. The actions of the G20 so far have been like rearranging the deckchairs on the titanic, and now they are running for the lifeboats leaving the rest of us to drown. The biggest problem is a lack of accountability at these meetings. Peoples voices are totally excluded.”  (Dr. Kumi Naidoo, Executive Director, Greenpeace)

After years of traditional advocacy at international summits and limited traction, Oxfam and other NGOs are now looking to the online world as a way of bringing voice, transparency and accountability to global forums to help mobilize political will and action.

‘Voice’, an initiative lead by Oxfam, and hosted on ‘writespeakact.org’, seeks to connect bloggers to important political events, where they can gain unprecedented access to policy makers and world leaders.

‘We assist bloggers with gaining accreditation to international summits, arrange briefings, interviews and press conferences. We want to amplify existing voices and support new ones in order to build greater participation and representation“(Jason Wojciechowski, Voice Project lead)

The project launched with “G20 Voice” in April 2009 at the G20’s London Summit, an online election was organized for 50 blogger spaces; ‘widgets’ were placed across partners’ websites.  The ‘Voice’ project team invited people to nominate and vote for their ‘Voice at the G20’.

Blog writers hailing from “bitchbuzz.com” and ‘jackandjillpolitics.com’ to “saudijeans.org’ and ‘oneworldsouthasia.net’ were accredited and brought to the summit to cover proceedings and share their analysis with the world.  The hope was that blog coverage of these events would generate greater awareness of the issues discussed and increase public pressure on world leaders to act against poverty and climate change.

“This was the first time bloggers were able to gain access to the G20, we received a huge amount of media coverage and interest in our bloggers perspectives on the issues being discussed. We set up meetings between the bloggers and lead G20 negotiators for the US and UK and one of the bloggers even asked a question at the closing summit press conference.” (Jason Wojciehowski)

In September 2009, the project evolved further, and ‘ClimateVoice’ was born along with ‘HerVoice’ as a way of bringing bloggers into UN Meetings on Climate Change and amplifying the voices of women at the UN. Bloggers were able to register at ‘writespeakact.org’ where they could sign up for specific events, see their custom schedule along with schedules of other bloggers, whom they could then communicate and connect with. The new format enabled greater collaboration and coordination amongst the bloggers who could discuss which events they would like to attend, request more information and post links to their content. Partner organizations were able to invite bloggers to come and cover their events and organise ‘blogger briefings’ on key development issues.

Bloggers would tag all of their content with either ‘ClimateVoice’ or ‘HerVoice’ which allowed the project team to aggregate all the blogs and   link to them using twitter and facebook. The initiative provided over 100 bloggers with access to a range of events including round table meetings of world leaders, press conferences, film screenings, debates and panel discussions.

“However we still haven’t managed to build a large enough blogging community that can continually follow these summits and generate enough chatter to make a significant media impact.”

The next phase for the voice team, 9 months into the project, will come next month in Copenhagen, where Oxfam is partnering with members of the ‘tcktcktck’ campaign to launch a blog space at the Cop15 climate summit which will be called the ‘Fresh Air Center”. The plan is to create a digital space for accredited bloggers within the summit to use for rapid response press conferences, interviews and meetings with brought-in experts, whilst also attracting the interest of Cop15 delegates. In order to reach a wider audience, digital campaigners from the following organisation will support the Fresh Air center and ensure bloggers are connected to developments as they occur:

• Avaaz
• Greenpeace
• Oxfam
• CAN
• IndyAct
• NRDC
• 1Sky
• UN Foundation
• 350.org

Bloggers form the following organizations have agreed to join the initiative:

• Huffington Post
• Treehugger
• OneWorld
• CampusProgress
• GlobalVoices
• TheUptake
• ClimateProgress
• Adopt-a-Netogiator

In a short period of time, the ‘Voice’ project has become a standard feature of international summits on poverty and climate change, it has empowered bloggers from over 50 countries and reached thousands of people across the world with diverse perspectives of what is happening in the worlds most powerful forums. While this initiative is still in its infancy, it represents a growing trend, an online revolution, which is now spreading offline, and affecting the way people participate in fundamental ways. Voice at global summits which once belonged to invited elites, is now available to thousands of people, following the actions of world leaders, sharing their perspectives and increasing accountability by one more notch. What comes next? Governments: Watch this space!

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