by Mary Joyce

The Global Digital Activism Data Set is the first attempt to quantitatively study digital activism as a global phenomenon. It is an all-volunteer project to create an open case study database under a Creative Commons license that will be accessible to scholars and activists around the world. It currently has 342 cases, with over 1,500 cases waiting to be entered… and that’s our challenge.

When I first announced the project, I thought it would be difficult to find hundreds of cases of digital activism. I thought we’d get them bit by bit: three from this newspaper, two from this blog, one from this PhD student. But in reality there are already hundreds of cases that have been written up by other organizations, like Global Voices, which has over 1000 cases of digital activism in their archives.

So our job is easier. We don’t need to find cases. But we have a new problem. We have a waiting list of over 1,500 digital activism cases waiting to be put into the data set. We are looking for volunteers to help us with this task. It’s easy, you:

1. Send an email to – Mary AT Meta-Activism DOT org – (that’s me) to say you are interested in volunteering and how many hours you want to give.
2. Receive a list of blog posts to input into the database.
3. Use this quick online form to submit yours cases: bit.ly/yourcase

We already have seven volunteers working on this project, but we need more people… like you! I hope to hear from you.

Image: RealEstateZebra/Flickr