Writing about the recent WikiLeaks release of 250,000 State Department cables, Simon Jenkins of the Guardian noted: Clearly, there is no longer such a thing as a safe electronic archive, whatever computing’s snake-oil salesmen claim.  No organisation can treat digitised communication as confidential. An electronic secret is a contradiction in terms. Given the global reach [...]

When she went to Nairobi, nonprofit tech guru Beth Kanter brought along some of her favorite books to donate to the iHub community library, including The Networked Nonprofit, Charlene Li’s Open Leadership,  Jennifer Aaker’s DragonFly Effect, Carol Cone’s Breakthrough Nonprofit Branding and the Meta-Activism Project’s Digital Activism Decoded.   Thanks Beth, we couldn’t ask for a [...]

Is Pepsi Refresh – the marketing campaign which leverages social media to give grants to non-profit projects – an example of digital activism?  The campaign is certainly digital.  Grant ideas are submitted through a web site, www.refresheverything.com, which is also where supporters come to vote on which ideas will win funds. Pepsi Refresh is also [...]

Chinese censors are probably not familiar with the “AAA framework,” but they should be.  AAA, which stands for “Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas”,  is a theory of linguistic meaning that states that “‘meaning is a relationship between two sorts of things: signs and the… things they mean.”  The Great Firewall of China is very good at [...]

In recent months, referring to much of online activism as ineffectual “slacktivism” has become increasingly popular. According the slacktivist blog (yes, there is one), the word was actually born in the mid-nineties on Usenet and didn’t appear again until  2000 in a discussion about people “whose idea of activism is clicking the ‘forward’ button in [...]