OPEN

Amnesty International
has started a campaign for internet freedom, declaring that the internet is
"a new frontier in the struggle for human rights".

The
Amnesty International website, called irrepressible.info has been elegantly put
together by Soda,
a "play, learning and art" web agency that I’d not heard of before
(but I will  be taking a closer look at their work).

It’s
a good start to this campaign because it doesn’t bombard you with information,
but makes a simple statement of intent and draws you into participation with
the campaign with three different things you can do right away
without registering or giving a donation:

1. sign a pledge for internet freedom  – OK, not asking
much, may not achieve much but lets you make a little stand.

2. host censored material on your own website – better than a
badge / banner for your blog. It’s the blog / political equivalent of
downloading the SETI screensaver to lend your processing power to
a good cause. You copy some code from the irrepressible.info website onto your
blog (little bit fiddly, but most bloggers will manage it) and it will
automatically publish material from the campaign’s databse to your site,
confounding the censors and making a much bolder statement than a catchy logan
could alone.

3. lobby the Chinese government to free a journalist who is being held as a political prisoner after
sending a mail from his Yahoo! account about a Chinese directive about the
anniversary reporting of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

I’m
interested in this site on two levels.

First
professionally. I’ve been looking at a few campaigning websites recently,
partly because of the sound and fury around the net neutrality debate in the US
which to my mind has spawned exemplary models of how to campaign well and how to do it
badly (I’ll maybe expand on that another time). 

We
all know that the live web has incredible potential for bringing together
campaigning groups, communities of interest very, very quickly. It’s
interesting to see different approaches of organisations and individuals to try
and harness, unlock, incite the latent potential of online communities for
their causes.

The
Amnesty International approach sits well with me because it is open, innovative,
engaging, simple and immediate. You can be inspired and add your voice in a
moment. If you are inspired to return you can do more, find new ways to
get involved.

As
online networks and media become more influential we will see more of politics; because influence is power and where there is power there
will be politics.

By way of illustration,  take a look at the New York
Times article this morning about the pilgrimage of the Democratic presidential
nomination hopefuls to the Daily Kos conference in Las Vegas this week. 

I’ve
been thinking more recently to the socio-political implications of the
changes online culture is bringing about, in part dow to reading the
World is Flat recently, which puts present developments nicely in context
within the story of a new phase of globalisation. I’ve also made an assault on
the Power of Networks* by Yochai Benkler, which after only a couple chapters
already has my mind fizzing with ideas.

* You can download a PDF of the book for free from this website.

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