By Travis Mayo, Program Analyst at USAID Bureau for Global Health Note: The authors’ views expressed in this article do not reflect the views of the United States Agency for International Development or the United States Government Like a large ship, government agencies rarely change course quickly.  However, when a new path is set there [...]

Note: This post by Vivek Srinivasan,  Program Manager for the Program on Liberation Technology at Stanford, was originally published on Vivek’s Info. – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – This is a response to a critique of wathiqah.com (a platform to discuss the [...]

Note: This post by David Karpf,  Assistant Professor in the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information, was originally published on shouting loudly. – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – Allow me to be cranky for a minute. Jeff Jarvis had some fun [...]

Today I watched The Name of the Rose, a gloomy film about a medieval Sherlock Holmes named William of Baskerville (just in case the Holmes connection was not otherwise evident). It got me thinking about inductive and deductive reasoning. In inductive reasoning we move from the aggregation of  discrete observations to create a theory that [...]

I don’t usually write about the inner workings of the Meta-Activism Project, but our meeting today on Google+ Hangouts was a bit of a revelation. We are a virtual organization, which means that we have no office and no two team members are even based in the same city.  We rely heavily on email, GChat, [...]

Ever since I learned of its existence, I’ve been irked by Wathiqah.com, a website created by the Stanford-based project Cloud to Street, the online marketing app makers at IdeaScale, volunteer programmers, and potential presidential candidate Mohamed ElBaradei.  The goal of the site is  “to crowdsource discussion of the fundamental human rights that should be protected [...]

If there is one piece of discourse I would love to retire from the public sphere, it is the “There is no such thing as a Facebook revolution” column. Internet skeptics get more mileage out of this straw man argument than Honda Civic owners get out of their cars. The latest entry is the New [...]

[cross-posted from The Engine Room] The cracking open of political spaces in Egypt in the wake of the 2011 uprising in Egypt, has led to a political landscape marked by a “publish, then filter” model. The issue now isn’t whether an activist has launched the right new party, new initiative, new archive, new campaign, or [...]

Following my previous post, Digital Activism: A Look Back, on the history of evolution of digital activism thought, this post will continue to reflect on some scholarly works that highlight interesting cases of early digital activism that used the Internet to transform local organizing into global movements, a trend that grows and is more widely acknowledged today. [...]

Last week I had the privilege to interview Abdullah Al-Fakharany, a Cairo-based citizen journalist who helps run something called Rassd News Network (RNN). Rassd is an Egyptian Arabic acronym for Raqib (observe), Sower (photograph), Dowin (write). RNN, as it is known in Egypt and across the Arab world, began as a joint voluntary effort in [...]