Audio Activism

Any judge who is “on the record calling for Roe v. Wade to be overturned” like President Bush’s nominee John G. Roberts should not be a supreme court judge! PERIOD!

YEAAAHH! Doc Searls has a Podast! Check out Doc’s ‘podblog’ here and this is his RSS feed with the podcasts. This is his first mp3. Welcome Doc! I’m so happy you’ve joined the fray. Oh and BTW… Doc is using WordPress to blog/podcast with!

Cool. The ACLU has a blog now. It’s great they’re reaching out to bloggers to raise awareness about the Patriot Act, a TERRIBLE Big Brother law we have in the US. It would be even cooler (read more effective) if the entire ACLU, every employee, every local ACLU committee member, the head honchos, and every supporter blogged too. Participating in community is key to it’s success. Ya can’t just ask others to do it for you.

Here are some tools for bloggers the ACLU has put out. Good stuff. Using tags (metadata keywords that help people search for content) by services like technorati is smart. Use patriot+act and safeandfree and people will be able to find and count the voices speaking out about the patriot act. On another note I could use some smaller blog graphics. The ones they have up are just too big.

Also the page Myths and Realities About the Patriot Act is very very useful. There are lots of misunderstandings and lies being spread purposefully and accidentally about the Patriot Act. Sometimes it seems like the very nature of politics and politicians is to obfuscate the process of law making. So learn all you can about this law, listen to multiple sides (not just Democrats and Republicans!), find something and someone you trust, and then ACT!

One thing you can do now is to contact your Congress person. This online form can help you email them but phone calls make even a bigger impression.

I read on a few blogs that Bob Moog is at Duke Hospital being treated for a brain tumor. He and his family are using CaringBridge, an in-hospital blogging setup, to let people know about his progress and so that folks can sent good thoughts and notes his way.

I just signed his guest book. I’ve never seen such a beautiful out pouring of love. Bob Moog has touched so many people. By making tools for others to create he exponentially brought lots of positive engergy to the planet. Thanks Bob!

Go and send Bob Moog some love!

Via: N&O Triangle Blog Watch and Paul Jones

This podcast is an interview with Marc Powell of IndyVoter.org and the League of Pissed Off Voters. He was sharing with the group IndyVoter, a new web application he made that’s a social networking tool. Kinda’ like Friendster for leftists, but so much more. (I’m thinking of using it for PodcasterCon.) We talked about his projects, programing, Anarchism, impressions of the AdvocacyDevII event, and more. I really enjoyed meeting Marc. His energy, actions, ideas, and awesome politics were inspiring! advocacydev

MP3 11m 13s 5.2MB 64kbps

My Odeo Channel

More speed geeking sessions. Here are the URLs of the projects we discussed at Advocacy Dev II day two.

ConsultantCommons - A online collaborative space for consultants who support nonprofits created by Compumentor.

Localize - Helping Cambodians use computers in their own language.

Txtpower.org - home of the radical ringtone “hello Garci”

TransMail - automating the translation of email in each direction from English, Spanish, French and Portuguese.

Voterpunch - database of congressional voter records of elected officials

CivicSpace - a Drupal based Content Management System with lots of modules useful to nonprofits

Webenq - Open Source online surveys in multiple languages by the International Institute for Communications and Development.

CivicCRM - is an open source constituency relationship management application running on Drupal

Pair programing - when two developers work together on the same project with one keyboard and one computer

Live CDs - linux distros that boot off of a CD-ROM

Tipinasia - A website dedicated to country-specific information on trafficking in persons in multiple languages, as well as anti-trafficking news and information about individual countries.

advocacydev

Two interviews in one podcast. Jeff Ooi is a blogger and podcaster who creates media about local government issues in his community in Malaysia that main stream media won’t cover. Colin Charles is a Fedora Linux developer from Malaysia and he works on Open Office for Mac OS X. advocacydev

MP3 8m 33s 4MB 64kbps

Here are the URLs of the projects that were demoed during the speed geeking session on Monday at Advocacy Dev II.

DTV & Broadcast Machine - Participatory Culture Foundation “Creative Commons with Teeth”

Campus Activism - a resource for students to start a campaign, share activism resources, publicize events, and build networks.

Trusted Data Sharing and Standards - IdentityWoman.net

IndyVoter.org - Social Networking for activists, a friendster for progressives

Lightning Bug - a toolkit to allow public review of comments before they’re published

Citizen Speak - a simple to use email campaign system

Odeo - Podcasting listening and creation service all via a web browser.

advocacydev

The 5013d Ghetto :: An quick interview with Ibrahim Abdul-Matin.

Here at the Advocacy Development II event Mr. Abdul-Matin asked an interesting question. I interviewed him to find out more.

“Is the 5013c status given to non-profits by the IRS inherently anti-progressive or anti-social justice?” He proposes that the 5013c is a way to make organizing or advocacy a field. It’s goal was to make people less likely to take risks because it’s tied to people’s livelihoods.

Listen to the rest of our conversation and a few suggestions for alternatives for community groups besides the 5013c. advocacydev

MP3 4m 22s 2.1MB 64kbps

First day of Advocacy Dev II in Oakland, CA is here. Lots of great info going onto the Advocacy Dev II wiki live and on the spot. One of my favorite things so far is the participatory nature of the agenda. We’re getting to create a lot of it ourselves right now. For example check out the group I was in [Group 8] and the three topics we proposed. Here are the other groups topics.

I got to help facilitate a session about Podcasting aka AudioBlogging with Rabble of Anarchogeek blog and Odeo fame and Jeff Ooi a amazing blogger/podcaster from Malaysia. We saw a demo of Odeo’s podcasting services, discussed how podcasting can empower individuals with examples from this and this AudioActivism post, sidetracked a bit about security issues and legal challenges to creating mashed up content. I hope everyone who had questions about podcasting and making your own media was satisfied. Please comment bellow if you had more questions that need answering.

We all participated in something called Speed Geeking. No it isn’t a bunch of nerds on amphetamines. It’s several people who have a short amount of time to explain a project they are working on to a small group of people. Seven people with projects and seven groups moving every four minutes to a new group. Lots of information shared quickly. It put the presentors under a good amount of pressure to be concise and efficient. An amazing exercise. advocacydev