Blog: Activism

Come Out for a Tech Meetup Before the Long Weekend

Fourth of July is fast approaching, but before you kick off the long weekend by heading out to your favorite firework viewing spot, come on out to a tech meetup or two. Here are a few events we're hoping to make it to, and as usual, you can check out all the tech meetups taking place in Washington, DC, here. 

Tuesday, July 17:30 - 11:30 pm

HacDC: This group meets weekly to play with technology and see what else they can do with it. If you're an inventor and tinkerer at heart, don't miss this meetup.

Wednesday, July 26:00 - 8:30 pm

A New Organizing Institute Happy Hour: After a day of training activists on ways to rally supporters and use technology in their work, the group is heading out for drinks. The happy hour is open to everyone, so stop by to hear about the  strategies they're discussing.  

7:00 pm

Have you ever wanted to do something and wished you knew people to join you so you could make a bigger impact? Or maybe thought it would be easier to follow through on something if you weren’t doing it alone? Well now there’s a way to get people from anywhere in the world to join you, virtually.

PledgeBank lets people pledge to do almost anything they want on the condition that other people pledge to do it too. People can and do pledge to do just about anything. Some successful pledges include never shopping at Walmart, boycotting companies that primarily donate to the Republican Party, stopping drinking for 40 days, and “never ever” drinking caffeine-free coffee.

Development Seed is making the news again, and surprisingly it’s for the political ringtones that Eric cooked up back in October. Reporter Mariecar Mendoza from Knight Ridder Newspapers wrote a story on the business of selling personalized ringtones that talked about how the music industry – mostly hip hop but also religious – has really taken advantage of them. She goes on to mention how ringtones have been used politically:

Melting ice caps. Heat-trapping gases. Global warming. Help Chevy out and make an ad for the new Tahoe so they can show Americans they care about the environment. Thanks Marty 
Here is my add: 

Political ringtones are back in the news, this time in the UK. This
article
discusses the origins of the political ringtone, pinpointing it back to
the "Hello Garci?" ringtone from the Phillipines, which was featured on
TXTPower.org. Then comes the MobileActive
conference, followed by a big shout out to Eric of Development Seed for his
ringtones on Bush's reaction to Katrina and on DeLay's
legal troubles.

CitizenSpeak, a new, free email advocacy service for grassroots causes, is using online outreach tools that have the potential to be a major factor in unearthing issues in the 2006 political races.

Other organizations should take note of the simplicity and straightforwardness of the site. Jo Lee started the site to allow anyone, from an active community member to a large organization, to use the CitizenSpeak site to launch an email campaign to spread their message. The new site just launched a few weeks ago. It was built on Drupal by George Hotelling. We did the design :)

Monitoring what people are using on the site and for what issues is like watching a social thermometer.