We now know a tremendous amount about the Kony 2012 campaign and excellent analysis keeps rolling in: on the Ushahidi blog, Patrick Meier has posted a variety of responses from Ugandans and Ethan Zuckerman has posted a gorgeous visualization from Gilad Lotan of the first 5000 Kony tweets (see left). At a panel at SXSW yesterday, [...]

Kony 2012 began as an unexpected viral video that Invisible Children, a California-based non-profit, uploaded to Vimeo on February 20th and to YouTube this past Monday.  Today those two videos have over 65 million views, “Kony” is a trending topic on Twitter, and the phrase “Kony 2012″ returns over 4,000 hits on Google. Yet, perhaps [...]

I spend most of my time on this blog defending digital activism, but when I heard about the Kony 2012 video, even before I watched it, I decided to express my opinion by posting this picture on my Facebook page: After posting it I was immediately shocked at my self.  The message in the image was [...]

Meta-Activism Project Meetup @SXSW Date: Saturday, March 10th Time: 12:30pm – 2:00pm Place: Iron Cactus @ 606 Trinity St., Austin TX (map) RSVP:  The event is open to all.  Please sign-up here: tp://on.fb.me/MAPSXSWmeetup Why Come: Meet and hang out with MAP community members, talk about digital activism, have lunch

Why do people who criticize digital activism launching many of their attacks at e-petitions?  About once a month an article appears in my feed reader with a title like “Real Change Means Getting Offline,” “The Revolution will not be Tweeted” or “A Critique of Clicktivism.”  These articles are written with great seriousness by people who [...]

NOTE: After creating the SXSW: Digital Activism Panel Recommender on Thursday I realized that it might be more useful to organize the panels by day, rather than by theme.  Here’s the day-by-day schedule. (✰=Meta-Activism-Project community member panel). UPDATED with recommendations from techPresident (March 6) —— SXSW Interactive kicks off next Friday in Austin, Texas and, [...]

SXSW Interactive kicks off next Friday in Austin, Texas and, among the explosion of panels on how to bling-out your start-up with high-tech integrated social services… or whatever… there are a few panels for those interested in digital activism and social and political change.  Here are some panel recommendations. Panels where Meta-Activism Project community members [...]

[UPDATED] Usually when we talk about digital activism we talk about concrete anecdotes (the Arab Spring, the 2012 presidential race, the Koman/Planned Parenthood blow-up) or abstract trends (slacktivism, cyber-war, hacktivism).  What we rarely talk about is how we talk about digital activism: Is our focus in the right place? Do we know what we’re talking [...]

Digital Activism 101 is a series of posts introducing key concepts to students and activists. ———– In the past two weeks the Digital Activism section of Global Voices Online featured a story about a Moroccan teenager brought to court for posting caricatures of the King on Facebook, digital video documentation of poor residents evicted in [...]

Digital Activism 101 is a series of posts introducing key concepts to students and activists. ———– UPDATED: February 13th From the revolutionaries of the Arab Spring and Occupy Movements to non-profits and bloggers advocating online to political candidates on Twitter, many people hoping to change the world (or slightly improve it) are using technology to [...]