Last week, Heads of State from over 100 countries met in Copenhagen to negotiate an International agreement to tackle climate change in what has been described as humanity’s last chance to deal with the crisis.

As millions watched in hope, citizens’ organisations launched an unprecedented global effort to influence the summit, and ensure a fair and binding treaty.

The ‘ tck tck tck ‘ campaign, an alliance of over 200 organisations working together for climate justice has created a unique campaigning platform, to mobilise over 100, 000 people on the streets of Copenhagen, and a further 15 million people around the world in a range of actions from candlelight vigils to flash mobs and street marches.

Describing the approach, Campaign Director Ben Margolis explains how they have used a combination of offline action and online coordination mobilise strategically with targeted campaigns: “On December 12^th we launched a global day of action called ‘The World Wants a Real Deal’, over  3000 candlelight vigils were organised in 139 countries. If it wasn’t for digital media our efforts may have gone unnoticed, but we were heard loud and clear and images of citizen action were broadcast across the world.”

To capture images from local events the campaign set up a flickr photostream, all partner websites contained an email link where event organisers could send photos, which were automatically added to the photostream.  Teams of digital campaigners in various time zones would then tag and sort the photographs according to media relevance, country and picture quality.

While photos provided a useful resource, video content was also seen as crucial for securing press coverage. However the campaign team faced the triple challenge of collecting video, accessing suitable formats finding capacity for professional editing.

To address this, tck tck tck subscribed to a new online service hosted by ‘Citizen Global’. This web-based service allowed the team to create a collaborative online studio including the necessary tools to edit, mix and remix clips at broadcast quality. Individuals and partners were able to upload video content directly to a climate change project space, where staff and volunteers could also edit and process incoming content and issue it for distribution to media networks through RSS and other forms of syndication.

”Within a matter of hours, 526 videos were uploaded to Citizen Global and over 12, 000 photographs were received on our flickr photostream. We were all quite astonished, we could never have collated this much content in such a short time without these tools, we received hundreds of incredible videos we could then use for advocacy”, explained Sam Mclean, a digital campaigner for partner organisation, Avaaz.org.

(To see an example of what can be produced see The World Wants a Real Deal Video )

In order to promote these digital assets, tck tck tck harnessed the power of social media releases (SMRs) using a web-based tool call ‘Pitch Engine’. This allowed any supporter or partner to produce their own press release instantly co branded with tck tck tck; this release could be indexed by Google within hours and posted to twitter, digg and other social media sites, linking to relevant digital assets on flickr and Citizen Global. Journalists could access a suite of content to support their stories whether they were reporting locally, nationally or internationally. Bloggers supporting the campaign were also able to use this content in their posts and generate ‘chatter’ which is often picked up by mainstream media.

“This was the first time we used this strategy. Our goal was to deliver a powerful message and it was of course very risky. We effectively relinquished control of media production and messaging, but our reach and influence increased significantly and we provided people with the logos and a broad template” Said Karina Brisby, Head of Digital for partner organisation Oxfam.

SMS text messaging also played a role. The Clickatel service allowed tck tck tck partners to communicate with each other, organise flash mobs and respond rapidly to developments at the summit. In one instance where negotiations were ignoring the needs of Small Island States, vulnerable to climate change, the campaign team were able to organise a flash mob using SMS to contact accredited civil society delegates inside the conference centre.

‘Google sites’ allowed organisers to develop a knowledge hub with contact details, key documents, schedules, location maps, news updates and meeting minutes as well as a rapid response list serve.. “The Google site provided an instant intranet for partners and organisations to work together in our advocacy efforts and share intelligence. This had a significant impact on our ability to respond rapidly to developments within the summit and deploy resources as needed” explained Jean-Marc Mangin, Executive Director of the Global Call for Climate Action (GCCA).

Looking under the hood of civil society campaigning at Copenhagen, it is clear that a new form of advocacy is emerging, mobilisation has moved beyond national campaigns, global challenges have necessitated a new form of citizen action, where digital technology is enabling people to act together across borders. Organisations are developing the capacity to respond rapidly and build targeted campaigns to influence change.

As the dust settles on a Summit and hope of a fair and legally binding climate deal fades, perhaps new hope lies not in the capacity of world leaders to find solutions, but in the power of the new global activism. Was Copenhagen simply a moment in the political calendar, or the birth of a new and powerfully equipped citizens movement?

In July of 2007, El Universal launched Doblevía, a section in which all the content, including photos, is provided and written by its readers. The print section has its own space on the web version of the newspaper so users of the site could also participate and communicate more directly with the newsroom.

This effort, launched before the El Universal site had a major makeover that allowed it to be even more interactive, had never been seen in the country. It was also the first section that integrated the web and the print newsroom within the newspaper.

“The participation of readers in the newspaper is part of a long tradition that started with El Correo del Pueblo (People’s Mail), a section that publishes readers’ complaints about a number of issues that go from the malfunction of public services to high food prices,” says Alejandra Romero, editor of Doblevía.

The section allows readers to submit movie, music and TV reviews; publish photos of their pets and places they have seen; tell how they have been victim of crimes; add a caption to a weekly caricature; and give their opinion about the topic of the week.

According to Romero, the content is manly sent through email and ElUniversal.com. “However, there are still people who prefer to send us handwritten or typed letters and, occasionally, we receive a fax.”

Although Venezuela is the second country with the largest Internet penetration in South America, it only represents 27,09% of the population, according to governmental statistics of the first trimester of 2009. Moreover, only 5,69% of the almost 28 million of Venezuelans are Internet subscribers.

Yet, Doblevía has been very successful in interacting with readers, both online and in print. Comments sent through the website are reviewed before being published. “Because of the editorial line of the newspaper and the political situation in Venezuela, we have to be very careful with what is published,” says Romero.

Since 2005, when the Venezuelan Penal Code was reform, media can be sued for what it publishes even thought it has a disclaimer that clearly states that they are not responsible for third party opinions.

When readers complain because their comments were not published, Doblevía’s team sends them an email explaining what participation rule was violated. “For example, we can’t published comments if the person hasn’t register with a full name and last name, if they have a pseudonym, or if they use bad words or insults to public figures or other users. Yet, we give them the opportunity to send a corrected comment or, if the problem was with the name, we explain how to change the registration,” explains Romero.

Because each comment has to be reviewed and photos have to be uploaded, every time a reader submits content or sends an email he receives an automatic message saying that Doblevia has received it and it will be shortly publish.

“However, most readers prefer to wait and see their contributions publish in paper rather than having them publish first online”, says Romero, as she explains that many times readers write and ask her to keep a copy of the edition where their article or photo was published because they were not able to buy it that day.

“Recently, a man who I had asked to send me a photo with a higher resolution because the one he had previously sent didn’t meet the requirements, came to the newspaper with a pen drive so I could choose one that we could publish,” says the editor of Doblevia.

So far, the most popular sections are the pets’ photos, the social events photos and Escapes, a subsection in which readers tell the story of a recent trip. According to Romero, also Medical Zone, in which a reader sends a medical question that is later answer by a doctor, has been a hit since 2007.

Doblevía has also given readers to contribute to the making of the anniversary edition of the newspaper. In April of 2008, when El Universal turned 99 years old, readers selected which Venezuelans—who live abroad and have had an impact in the world—were to be profiled on this special edition.

“People sends us thank you notes once their photos and comments have been published and some have become regular contributors,” says Romero.

As the interaction in the print version of El Universal grows, Doblevía also continues to create more spaces in the web site. Since 2009, the journalistic team—composed by to editors, a reporter and an intern—is now in charge of managing all the users participation in the online version.

“We keep Doblevia and what we call ‘participation’ separate, but it is managed with the same principles,” says Romero. This includes creating daily poles and topic questions, approving comments as well as sending the home page headlines through Twitter and Facebook.

Romero explains they answer each comment sent through the social media tools. “We try to be as quick as possible, especially with Twitter users who are faster than Facebook ones.”

The difference in the tools used is based on the difference in both audiences. Where as the eluniversal.com users are technology savvy and spend hours on the Internet, some Doblevía readers are more relaxed and have other channels to contact the newsroom.

Breaking the Silence is an organization run by veteran Israeli soldiers who have served in the occupied Palestinian territories over the past ten years.  The goal of the organization, with a staff of ten, is to “bridge the gap of information between what the soldiers see, experience, and participate in during their service, and what the Israeli public is aware of,” explains Avital Aboody, a current staff-member and New Israel Fund/Shatil Social Justice Fellow.  It doesn’t take much to realize that this organization probably does not have a ton of support in its home country, as a majority of Israelis have shifted to a more conservative political stance since the second Intifada began in 2001. 

The staff of Breaking the Silence claims that they are not particularly media savvy and not unique in any way with regard to utilizing social media tools.  According to Aboody, the “primary goal of using the website is reach as many people as possible and to enhance our ability to raise widespread awareness.”  While most non-profits prioritize raising funds through their websites, Breaking the Silence is not all that concerned about funds, which it receives from various foundations and donor governments.  The organization’s goals, instead, are “increased awareness and transparency between the public and the military,” says Aboody, and Facebook, in this light, has lately been a key to their success.

With a Facebook group and profile in place, Breaking the Silence has been able to “maximize our ability to communicate with our allies around the world,” says Aboody.  So far, she exclaims, joining Facebook “has been very very successful and has allowed us to attract a lot of new people to our events,” including tours of the occupied territories and lectures about the daily actions of the Israeli military.

As a politically active organization in a region of the world where tensions are deep and war has occurred every decade since the late 1940s, Breaking the Silence must rely heavily on its ability to find remote allies to strengthen its power base at home. Aboody explains how the organization has recently faced “efforts by the government and an NGO-monitoring organization to censor our information to keep us from ‘breaking our silence,’ but media tools have been helpful because we can quickly elicit the support of like-minded groups who are willing to stand behind us and vouch for our legitimacy.”  As they see it, they can’t be all over the world at all times with a staff of their size, but with Facebook they can easily make their message seen and heard by many more people than they were capable of reaching beforehand.      

It may sound like the days of “grassroots” advocacy (picketing for hours and staking out on the streets for days to get petitions signed) are just about over.  Do activists no longer see the value of face-to-face interactions, opting instead for YouTube, Facebook, or Blogspot to engage the public with their message?  Are they spending more of their time navigating the Web than they are actually changing the world?  While this might appear to be the case for Breaking the Silence, the organization’s staff-members do not report feeling like they spend more, or much, of their time for that matter navigating social media sites.  Because it’s so easy to keep up the Facebook group page and profile, and the website designer manages the website, most of the staff are spending the majority of their time continuing the one-on-one interactions with people on the ground.  They continue to take people on tours of the territories, hold lecture series, and interview veteran soldiers about their years in the Israeli Defense Forces. 

The internet is just part of the process of engaging with the public; it is not the process itself.  If anything, for the passionate employees of non-profit organizations who want to make the world a better place, social networking sites like Facebook are simply a more efficient and effective way of continuing the legacy of grassroots advocacy and inching that much closer to their desired goals, and they still get to find out this weekend’s party line-up and what their friend’s cousin ate for breakfast while they’re at it.

Silverstein’s private firm has become responsible for managing the nexus where the private sector and public sector often clash most, from insurance claims turning into protracted legal battles to public outcries over building plans.  The veritable boatload of bad press suffered by Silverstein himself and the controversy of the tower plans and pace of development have made it an uphill media battle for the hearts and minds of angry New Yorkers.

Silverstein Properties hinges their media campaign on face-to-face interaction targeting the local community. Here, their website serves as their primary -- and often only -- tool for self-promotion via new media. (Image from http://www.7wtcevents.com/)

what they do online

Deitrich sat in front of a computer, ready to show his company’s website and prove a point: it’s better than what you think.  He revealed a number of media projects Silverstein Properties has been promoting.  These have included inviting young photographers from around the world to document the current site as well as incorporating continuously streaming prose and poetry on New York City’s history in the lobby installation of 7 World Trade Center.

According to Rebecca Shalamoff, the New Media and Communications Manager at Silverstein Properties, the website is their main – and often only – point of online interaction with the public.  They focus on “creating a resource where people can use whatever information we have about the project.” That includes photographs, videos, and an updated section of good press. “I do many other things, but if we’re just focusing on new media,” Shalamoff explains, then they use the website “just as a resource [to] try to give exposure, to get people involved in the project, linking up to other websites, posting new stories, responding to enquirers.”

7 World Trade Center has become their primary point of interaction where “just having events where we display [artisans’] work” becomes a focal point. “A lot of what we do is tied to the community so as much as we can engage and bring people to events at the building we do.” For that, they have created a dedicated website for 7 World Trade Center, functioning the way a website for a restaurant, bar or any other event space would; a ready space to use, without mention of the tortured history or surrounding construction sites.  With the space becoming more known, “a lot of people are coming to us” says Shalamoff.

what they don’t and probably won’t do

When it comes to truly reaching out, however, what Deitrich did not show when going through the company’s website is telling: no Facebook page, no Twitter feed, neither Friendster nor MySpace and no blog.

Shalamoff’s reasoning for this is clear, “Yeah, we could get a bunch of fans out there, but what are they going to do for us?  At the end of the day, it’s reaching to the people in [key] positions that can help us.”  Those key people include members of “community boards, the downtown business alliance, downtown art groups, you know, other businesses in the area.”  To reach them, their website provides an online presence, but most of their engaging happens via email and telephone calls.  Mostly, they set up meetings for more face-to-face time; “I think that’s the big thing.”

“It’s a big treat for a lot of people just to come to visit the building and take pictures.”  This, above other media efforts, has been most successful according to Shalamoff.  The international photographer project that Dietrich showed, for example, “was good” according to Shalamoff, “but it didn’t have a huge impact on the company’s reputation.”

Online, one of most challenging aspects of maintaining the website has been keeping up with the news and selecting the best stories because there are so many stories and so much bad press.  For that same reason, the hesitancy to do more online is clear: “Because Larry Silverstein has been vilified over the years, we have to be careful because a lot of people are against us, because it’s such a controversial project [and] because it’s so polarized, why would we want to feed that?”

Shalamoff recounted one story where someone set up a Twitter account for Larry Silverstein.  After one or two tweets, “a blog said it wasn’t active, so people said nothing was happening at the World Trace Center.”  In comparing Silverstein Properties media strategy to that of non-profits or NGOs, she noted “it’s different than just an organization that has just a general positive image. We’re opening ourselves up to detractors.”

While maintaining updated photographs of the project’s progress has been one of the most successful aspects of the website, especially for people outside of New York, but the company tries to stay away from publishing definitive plans. “We don’t want to put things on there with a date and then people say look, it’s not happening.”

In addition to an angry public, the company is also worried about a greater online presence leading to friction between its partners.  “In some situations we don’t want our opinions to be publically known, which is why we never did a blog because if we did that then we would have to address any issue that comes out.”  For example, if one of the company’s partners undertakes an initiative, “and if our reaction is basically that it isn’t a smart thing to do, we wouldn’t want that known. It prevents a good partnership from being able to work together well.”

There are also legal concerns:  “If you made it public about the proceedings that are going on, especially since we’ve been in arbitration, it goes to legal, so if we say or do something it could come up in another issue.”

www.wtc.com documentary arts project

future plans

For now, future online plans include possibly revamping the current website for a “fresh look” with more flash elements.  This year, the company considered setting up a Facebook page and a Twitter account, but they again concluded there was little value to it.  “The truth is we never really gave it a shot, so I don’t know how well we can say that it worked or failed for us; but it’s not enough that we felt like it was something even worth doing.”

What Dietrich ultimately laments is the lack of public support that may not help with the strategic development of the company, but it could possibly quell a few rumors and abate a bit of the bad press.  A greater online presence could help us all with the image that comes to mind when we think of the WTC reconstruction efforts.

lessons for the non-profit world

It is hard to think of a non-profit or NGO involved in a project as controversial as the reconstruction of the World Trade Center site, or underneath the aegis of a man as disparaged as Larry Silverstein, but there are still a few lessons nonprofits can glean from Silverstein Properties.

What not to do: Is silence really golden?

A firm with more access to capital and financial backing than most non-profits can dream of can have all the material resources it needs to create the best and most exhaustive online presence possible.  Ultimately, though, it might not be worth it.  Time and energy may best be spent offline, picking up the phone, setting up a meeting and going out for face-to-face over Facebook interaction.

What to do:

In conjunction with the face-to-face interaction, while they may not be on Facebook or Twitter, Silverstein properties still puts a lot of energy into a designing and maintaining a solid website.  It has become an effective reference point for the local community and those who want to be in touch with them and want to use the space that the company is offering.

“With this boycott—called Don’t Ask, Don’t Give—we have said directly to Obama ‘we want you to follow your damn promises,´” said Aravosis during an event organized last Tuesday by the International Media, Advocacy and Communications specialization at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA).

Aravosis explained how in June, for instance, Obama’s team defended DOMA in federal court while using a brief prepared previously by the Bush Administration. “They edited it but left the part whey they compared gay marriage with pedophilia. Is it crazy?,” the liberal blogger said as he recounted how the White House has refused to support gay rights in recent months.

The pledge, available online trough AMERICAblog.com and DontAskDontGive.com, is cosponsored by other liberal bloggers like Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, founder of Daily Kos; Jane Hamsher, editor of FireDogLake.com; and Dan Savage of The Stranger & Slog; as well as gay bloggers and activists like Paul Sousa, Founder of Equal Rep in Boston; Andy Towle and Michael Goff of Towleroad.com; Michelangelo Signorile and David Mixner.

On a post published on Daily Kos on November 12, Moulitsas explained he supported the initiative because democrats made a series of promises if they voted for them during the Presidential and Congress elections.

“And we did, in record numbers… I get that some things take time, and the legislative process isn’t always as fast as we’d like. But here’s the thing–don’t come begging for money when you haven’t delivered on your promises. We did our part. It’s now our party’s turn to deliver,” he wrote.

So far, the pledge hasn’t passed unnoticed. “We know from people talking to the White House that they are freaking out and that is good,” said Aravosis. “The idea is for them to look at us and fear us because they see us as money more than votes.”

However, he recognized that it could have a greater impact if politicians picked it up because “it creates a media story as they (the mainstream media) are always waiting for a credible source.”

As days pass, other cosponsors have broadened the Don’t Ask Don’t Give petition. For example, Jane Hansher, founder of FireDogLake.com asked her readers to unsubscribe to the Organizing for America (OFA) mailing list. “Let them know you’ll be back when those issues have been addressed,” she wrote.

Also Jennifer Vanasco, editor in chief of 365gay.com, asked on an articled published on the Huffington Post to not only comply with the pledge but to send a letter to the DNC explaining that “your money went elsewhere and why.”

During the SIPA conference, Aravosis said the Obama’s Administration is treating bloggers as media, has tried to cut them out but hasen’t been able to defund them. Thus, the strategy use now by the White House is to ignore them and not fight back.

“Because we are blogs, they think we don’t look for the truth but they forget we are partisans too, trying to make liberals better and take down the republicans,” the editor of AMERICAblog.com said.

As Aravosis remembered he has been considered “the left of the left,” he recalled how, as a prominent member of the LGTB community and a lawyer who had a long career on foreign policy before being blogger, he has been “a bigger Obama defender too.” During the Democratic primary campaign against former Senator Hillary Clinton, AMERICAblog.com raised $50,000 for the then junior Senator of Illinois.

Therefore, the idea of asking supporters of the DNC, Organizing for America and the Obama Campaign to participate in this “temporary” boycott is considered “a brilliant strategy” within the LGTB community.

As Vanasco put it,  “the most powerful tools gays and lesbians have to fight this sort of blinders are money and media, and this boycott highlights both.”

            In September of this year, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University held an on-campus panel event with four women professors who have widely followed and respected blogs (easternblot.net, Bitch Ph.D, Tenured Radical, and Oh! Industry).  The blog topics range from science to pop culture to politics and feminism. 

            The panel, entitled “A Blog of her Own,” was advertised as a dialogue about what it’s like to be and how to become a feminist blogger.  It seemed, then, natural to expect that the event would relay the key challenges and lessons learned when blogging about feminist causes.  The reality, however, was that the audience clearly had markedly different anxieties and they were eager to have their questions answered.

            After brief presentations from the bloggers, the question and answer session began.  As more and more questions were asked, I soon realized that the students in attendance were not at all concerned about the panel’s original subject.   Rather, they were very curious to know whether blogging has made it more difficult for professors to obtain tenure at their respective universities or not.  Over and over again the students asked if remaining anonymous on one’s blog is the best way to go about it if you want tenure.            

          Margaret Soltan, a professor at George Washington University and respected blogger (University Diaries) who was not on that day’s panel says that, when asked, “I generally discourage junior faculty from blogging if they feel at all uncertain about their tenure prospects…basically I’d say the thing to do is wait until you get tenure and then let it rip.”  Accordingly, it seems like blogging does have the potential to negatively impact your future in academia.

            The writer of Bitch Ph.D. explained that she had been anonymous for three years before revealing her identity to the public.  She still did not overtly reveal it on the site itself (which is why I will respect her privacy here) because she believes that the woman on the blog has her own persona.  Yet, even though she was relieved to have made her identity public, Bitch Ph.D. claimed that she has been more careful about writing about her private life since doing it, but that it was because she did not want to hurt people.  She also said that keeping the blog has had no negative repercussions on her personal life.

            Professor Claire Potter of Wesleyan University, who already has tenure and is the author of the three-year old blog Tenured Radical, said that she came out of the closet six months into blogging because “remaining anonymous led me to make unwanted ethical compromises.”  At the panel, she described herself as a contemporary historian without rules, which she claimed threatened the university.  However, the sentiments of the university, said Potter, were not a serious professional concern of hers.   Of course Potter’s contrarian sentiments make perfect sense coming from someone who already had tenure before she began her blog.  

            Some professors, however, like Alexandra Vasquez, an associate professor at Princeton University and co-author of Oh! Industry, do not have to rebel against the university system because their blogs are openly supported by their institutions.  Due to this, Vasquez, who has yet to obtain tenure, does not let her pursuit of it bar her from expressing her opinions about academia.  Vasquez believes that her blog is “a necessary outside” from matters like promotions and career.

            Another concern non-tenured bloggers may have is that their non-academic blogs will be perceived as trivial and unsuitable for a person trying to make their career in academia.  According to Soltan, “there will always be faculty who – even with the enormous success and even prestige of many blogs these days – see blogging as trivial, dumb, self-indulgent, non-serious, non-scholarly, a waste of time, weird, etc.”  She says that “some faculty, in other words, will just be hostile,” no matter what the blog is about or how it is presented.

            So what is the answer for blogging professors? All in all, the event panelists, each of whom had different blogging stories when it came to revealing their identities, all agreed that revealing themselves to the public has actually made things easier for them in the end.  They women agreed that each blogger must make their own decision as to how their relationship will be between their blog and their career. 

            The situation for bloggers in academia is only one example of the complex challenges we all face in today’s world, with our personal lives becoming increasingly exposed to the general public online.  And while we don’t want to constantly be monitoring our online profiles because our future employers might opt to check us out on there, we also don’t want to end up jobless for that reason either.  There is no real answer for any of us, academic or not.  The only truth is that we’re all still learning about the Internet’s power on our daily lives and we’ll just have to keep playing the cards until we get it right.

“iLoveMoutains.org was the brainchild of a group of organizations, spearheaded by Appalachian Voices. They wanted to find a way to tell the stories of people in Appalachia and communicate the devastating impact of mountaintop,” explains Dana Kuhnline of the Alliance for Appalachia, a collaboration of thirteen regional organizations.

iLoveMountains.org is a sophisticated website that uses a diversity of interactive digital tools to educate people and inspire action. Maps generated through Google Earth linked with video testimonials and concrete information is found throughout the site. In fact, Appalachian Voices, the grassroots organization who manages iLoveMountains.org, was just named a Google Earth Hero for their skillful use of Google Earth maps to communicate their message.

Organizing nationally is essential to the effort to protect Appalachian mountains. Ms. Kuhnline explains, “Our legislators don’t care about us because they are bought and paid for by the coal companies. We’ve been able to bypass our legislators and create a national campaign.” iLoveMountain.org has played an essential role in helping regional Appalachian organizations to advance federal legislation such as HR1310, The Clean Water Protection Act and S696, The Appalachia Restoration Act as well as protect specific mountains slated for mountaintop removal.

Local Appalachian residents organizing in their communities are featured throughout iLoveMountains.org and provide the foundation for the national organizing effort. Stephanie Pistello, the National Field Coordinator of Appalachian Voices, explains, “We’ve been able to get the voices of people heard. We have the ‘Most Endangered Mountains’ page on the website where people who live near those mountains can talk about the impact that mountaintop removal would have on their communities. It humanizes the issue. It also shows that this is a grassroots, community-based effort, ”

Making people feel connected to the devastation left by mountaintop removal is the first step in motivating them to take action; making it easy to contact their legislators and tell their friends is the next step. In addition to ‘What’s Your Connection?’ and the ‘Most Endangered Mountains’, the website uses other engaging tools such as the ‘Blogger’s Challenge’ which shows a map of over 2000 participating bloggers and the location of the people they have directly and indirectly activated. Embeddable videos, coal tracking widgets, RSS feeds, and customizable “Spread the Word” widgets encourage the campaign to be shared with any number of the suggested social networking and blog sites.

“When people search for mountaintop removal, iLoveMountains.org is the first website that pops up,” says Ms. Kuhnline. With over 38,000 members registered, iLoveMountains.org has been successful tool to reach out to and educate people. Some supporters just receive action alert emails, while others are contacted by Appalachian Voices to help convince their legislators to co-sponsor federal legislation. Ms. Kuhnline comments, “I don’t know how we could to move federal legislation forward without this listserve and website.”

Ms. Pistello gives an example, “How do you get a legislator from California to sign on to an anti-coal mining bill about Appalachia? We tried for a year to get a meeting with one representative from southern California [about the Clean Water Protection Act]. Then we found a constituent from that legislator’s district who came to DC to lobby. A month later, the legislator, Grace Napolitano, signed onto the bill.”  Indeed, moving the online organizing off-line has produced critical results.

Online organizing combined with regular lobby visits has proven to be an effective strategy for the campaign to protect Appalachia. “Because of this grassroots movement, fueled by people using these online tools to reach their legislators, we have a record amount of support in Congress,” says Ms. Pistello. “We’ve seen the Administration take steps and they are being asked about [mountaintop removal] on regular basis.”

In cooperation with a national coalition of environmental groups, Appalachian Voices recently launched a massive online action to stop mountaintop removal on Coal River Mountain, a mountain with wind power potential in southern West Virginia. ”In one day, over 11,000 people sent an email to the Obama Administration from iLoveMountains.org. Total estimates run as high as 68,000 emails sent in support. Once they send the letter there are triggers to share the call to action with friends,” says Ms. Pistello.  “We do online actions every two weeks but this is our biggest online campaign yet.”

Yet, with the daily barrage of digital information – what makes people enter their email address for yet another listserve? What makes iLoveMountains.org such an effective online organizing tool? Perhaps it’s hearing the story of people like Betty Tackett from Buffalo Mountain, West Virginia who survived the nightmare of seeing her community flooded with toxic, black, coal soaked water released from a broken dam. Buffalo Mountain becomes closer to Brooklyn when you see the line drawn from her home to mine. iLoveMountains.org makes it easy to do something – just simply click.

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!

            “My biggest validation is that when I went to Iraq as a resourcer, everyone said, ‘We love it, come on in, what can we do to help you?’  To say we’re with the CompanyCommand team just opens doors, because people know about what we have done for a huge group of junior officers, and they want to assist us in continuing to do so.”     

            In order to run the CCL, operate the MilSpace site, and fund initiatives, Kilner and Burgess rely on institutional support from West Point and the larger organization of the Army.  The creators of MilSpace recognized from the onset in 2000 that they would need tangible resources as well as social and political capital in order to succeed as a brick-and-mortar institution at West Point and a virtual CoP online.  By approaching key leaders in West Point’s academic community, primarily the Dean and the Vice Dean for Education, they enlisted early support for the concept as a tool for educating young leaders and advancing the profession.  At one point in their history, the CompanyCommand website was shut down by the Army’s Chief of Intelligence when an article by the Army’s Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL: a potential partial competitor in the market of providing knowledge resources to the organization) published an article indicating that the CompanyCommand site had posted secret material on its unsecure website.  Burgess and Kilner informed the Dean of the false accusation, and the Dean notified West Point’s Superintendent.  Based solely on trust of the statements made, the Superintendent said to reopen the sites.  The Superintendent (a three-star general) outranked the intelligence chief, and the site reopened. 

            Though military leaders have often called for metrics showing the benefit of MilSpace for the Army, the co-directors prefer not to expend time and money qualifying their existence.

            Kilner remarked, “We don’t invest the time to make a systematic capture of value added, but that’s a conscious decision that we’ll likely stick to as long as no one is making us.  We feel that if you’re doing that, you’re not designing content or adding value to the community.  The time we spend collecting stats is not time we’re making it more valuable for junior leaders.  Many organizations expend a lot of resources justifying their existence.” 

            Early in 2009, under the strain of pending budget and personnel cuts at West Point, Burgess sent an email to several MilSpace contributors, asking for their personal anecdotes related to the importance of the websites to their careers as junior officers.  The resulting product, called “The Reasons Why”, provided an easily-crafted yet effective tool for justifying the continued funding of the CCL. 

The MilSpace team has placed themselves in a position to act as brokers among various military and non-military organizations.  As an example, in 2008 Kilner was asked by the Army’s Chief Information Officer to spend three days in Boston conducting field tests on new software known as Cognitive Edge.  The new technology may be used to analyze the After Action Reviews (reports from military units detailing mission successes and failures) and more quickly change doctrine.  Kilner’s position within the military’s academic community allows him to move beyond the CCL and bring his assets to bear in multiple environments.  In so doing, he further expands the relevance and resources of his organization. 

            Though maintaining a constant flow or resources from above is of critical importance, Kilner and Burgess focus the bulk of their energy and effort on supporting the community they have helped establish.

            “It’s a constant battle for us, a constant tension, to be grass roots enough and part of the informal organization, while also having the resources, personnel slots, et cetera to stay up,” said Kilner. 

The MilSpace managers recognize the importance of developing trust between themselves and the junior officers they serve.  They build rapport with individual contributors by thanking them for sharing insights or being an active member of the VCoP.  Particularly dedicated members of the network may be asked to serve as topic leads and take on the responsibility of recruiting contacts, sending newsletters, conducting surveys, facilitating conversations, sending welcome letters, etc.  These are all means of continually reconnecting to community members.  In addition to fostering the growth of the network size and its knowledge generation, topic leads are well positioned within the network to direct resources to members in need of information. 

            Recent academic studies show that college students have a propensity to cite only information that is available online.  Current and rising generations of young officers are not only accustomed to conducting information search with computers, but they expect it.  The military leaders responsible for the support of MilSpace perhaps understood this when they latched onto the CompanyCommand model for creating and distributing knowledge.  The use of internet technologies to conduct search goes beyond the simple availability of conventional knowledge online, as demonstrated by the relatively low use of the Army’s Reimer Digital Library, a source of Army field manuals and training manuals.  Lieutenants and captains would rather access the information and advice of members in a CoP than attempt to meet their information needs in dense manuals. 

            Major Matthew Adamczyk, a recent infantry company commander in Iraq and current MilSpace member, remarked in an interview, “Not only am I more accustomed to searching online for information, but the MilSpace sites offered a great resource during multiple deployments to Iraq, where it’s not practical to carry a library of field manuals, even at the Battalion task force level.  I could usually get online even in the more remote operational areas.”

            Part of MilSpace’s success can be linked to its ability to categorize data in a meaningful way that enables users to search for accurate information quickly.  With some of the newer Web 2.0 technologies now incorporated into the site, members are shown potentially useful information without conducting a search, thus creating potential knowledge without user input. 

            “When I had a few minutes of down-time I’d often log into the site and just click around and see what was going on with other units or in other discussions.  The info I picked up doing this was invaluable, and was certainly time well spent,” Adamczyk said.

After hanging around for a few more minutes, one might notice the constant circulation of women who come in and out throughout the day.  The women sit down with the two staff-members, Executive Director Ana Moraga and Program Coordinator Wendy Rosales, spilling the recent news and gossip and chatting away about their lives.  They have ups and downs like any other woman I know.  They might bring up concerns about their children not attending school, or anxieties they’re having about their family members’ financial troubles.  So what’s special about this organization?  The women come from one of most marginalized groups of women in Guatemala (not to mention the rest of the world).  The women are sex workers.

MuJER, which stands for Mujeres por la Justicia, Educación, y Reconocimiento (Women for Justice, Education, and Awareness), is a small non-profit organization dedicated to assisting women sex workers in Guatemala City in empowering themselves through classes ranging from literacy courses to beauty certification courses.  MuJER also advocates for the human rights of sex workers.  Fundraising, as for many non-profit organizations, is a key ingredient in MuJER’s success.  But the serious challenges inherent in trying to raise donations with such a tiny full-time staff, a challenging and unique mission, and a clientele of low-income, and often socially rejected women are undeniable. 

The question, then, is how does such a small, under-resourced organization raise enough funds and make enough of an impression on potential donors to sustainably achieve its objectives and provide its services to the women?  The answer lies in the Internet. 

MuJER is merely four years old.  It has 501(c)3 status in the United States so that Americans can make tax-deductible donations to the organization.  One of MuJER’s main fundraising goals is to market itself to American donors, as there are many US donors who are interested in global human rights issues (not to mention that there are significantly larger numbers of donors ready and willing to donate to non-profit organizations in the US than there are in Guatemala).  But how would someone in the US even learn of MuJER?  And why would anyone from the US contribute to MuJER over other organizations? 

These were some of the important questions Ana Moraga, the co-founder and Executive Director of MuJER, had to grapple with over the past few years so that this past summer, when I arrived as an intern, the first task on my list was to assist in the redesigning of the website.  MuJER’s original website was not especially inviting, interactive, or informative.  Donating was not really possible through the site and there were no profiles of the women, very few pictures, and only a brief summary of how the organization was founded and what its goals were. 

Throughout the summer, the web-designer Walter Aguilar, Ana Moraga, and I set out to recreate MuJER as an internationally connected, socially networked, interactive, and trailblazing organization that would inspire donors to donate, volunteers to volunteer, and others to simply read, discover, and get to know the organization.  We completely redesigned the website (mujerguatemala.org) adding pictures, personal and inspirational stories from the women, information on the challenges facing sex workers in Guatemala, and an online store selling the jewelry the women make in their jewelry workshop (jewelry is bought through PayPal or Google Checkout).  The site was built on WordPress, a free, open source web design system that makes it easy for non-techies to contribute to changes on the site.  

“Through the website, people actually know about us in the States,” says Moraga.  “We just got a volunteer who is going to be with us for a year and she found out about us through the website,” she cheerfully remarks. 

With the new website up and running, we realized that MuJER could potentially connect with many more people if it diversified its use of social networking tools.  Thus, we created a facebook page and a twitter account and invited friends from near and far to join the group. 

While these are all important accomplishments for an organization like MuJER, there are countless more steps the organization can take to increase its online readership, self-advocacy, and fundraising potential.  When I left in August, I couldn’t help but feel anxious about the fate of the organization’s Internet connectedness.   I was leaving, Moraga was planning on moving to the States in October, and we were both concerned about who would keep the website, facebook page, and twitter account active and up to date. 

The problem many small non-profits face lies in the lack of staff time available to make full use of all of the good the Internet can bring to an organization.  Without updates, tweets, wall posts, and blog entries, potential supporters in the US might lose interest and forget about an organization as geographically distant and unknown to the US public as MuJER.  As a former intern, I have an immense amount of respect and appreciation for the incredible work MuJER has done and is still doing with and for sex workers in Guatemala, but I worry about it not accomplishing as much as it can if it doesn’t find a way to keep up with the pack.  Hopefully this won’t be the case.