4 pm - Online Information Sharing for Social Change Organizations
Aaron Kreider of Campus Activism.org moderated a discussion about RSS feeds, peer to peer file-sharing and even xml-remote procedure calls (aka web services), and how activists can harness the power of these new technologies.
Marty Kearns of Green Media Toolshed talks about how his group uses RSS feeds to get information from various sites. His personal blog is Network Centric Advocacy.
He talks about using tools like Blog Lines, which creates his 'morning newspaper'.
This is the way that knowledge is getting filtered.
Marty also talks about the use of del.icio.us and seeing what other people are tracking.
Another interesting site that Marty mentions is Progressive Pipes which does some good aggregation via RSS.
Daniel from Digital Bicycle talks about receiving enclosures via RSS, including videos. He talks about using Torrent files to make it easier to distribute the large video files. Talking about Broadcaching, a term from Andrew Grumet.
There was a brief discussion about the legal issues of using Bit Torrent.
During the wider discussion, there were talks about how to find good services. mediavolunteer and Daylo were mentioned.
This site was discussed and viewed, and the idea of using these sort of tools to get the message out were discussed.
An interesting discussion about the distribution of media and how this is changing. Traditionally, well funded conservative organizations have been effectively distributing their view point, but the progressives have been less effective with this. Two interesting sites where mentioned in terms of this, Democracy University and ourmedia.org were mentioned as good sources for distribution of progressive media.
Web Services
We didn't get into web services in our discussions. You can see an example of web services in action in some "under development" software that I'm working on Activism Network client (also ported to run on the CivicSpace/Drupal platform)
Not everything works. But if, for example, you list events (which should work), you are in fact running a web service that calls the server and gets the events from that. While the server and client are currently running on the same website (campusactivism.org), you could install a client on any other site and it'd work.
Basically I'm aiming to create an activism network of several hundred websites that shares information about groups, people, campaigns, resources, issues, campaigns, and email lists -- and relates everything where appropriate. You'll be able to install a client on your website (and customize it to select what you want from the network), or you could (if you really wanted to) program your own interface in PHP.
Actually writing your own interface is pretty simple. It only takes a couple lines of code to access the web service and get your data.
I'll be publishing the details on how to access the web services and releasing a beta Activism Network client sometime in the next couple months. Email me if you want to test it.
How this differs from RSS is that with RSS you get a complete copy of the feed content. Whereas with web services, you only get the data if you need it. I think it's also easier to implement things like searching for all the peace groups in a 10 mile radius if you do it using web services - but a couple people have pointed out that I could also do it using RSS (and they're right)...
Digital Bicycle appears to be
Digital Bicycle appears to be doing some really interesting stuff. I wonder if they are talking at all with what people at http://participatoryculture.org/ are doing.
Participatory Culture
Yeah, we've been working very closely with DownhillBattle (people behind Participatory Culture) for the last six months and we've been helping them plan out the programs that they will be launching under this foundation. These will be the applications people using the DigitalBicycle will use on their local desktop.