Global Voices Online reports that the Chinese police recently cracked down hard on a large protest in Rui’an, spurred by the mysterious death of a young school teacher ruled a suicide by authorities. Nothing new there: Chinese citizens protest, they get a beat-down. The twist is that now cameraphones are common accessories among Chinese citizens,…
Category: Civil Society
Teens organize SL Maze to educate about child sex trafficking
Those cool folks at Global Kids in the Teen Grid of Second Life organized a virtual sit-in and interactive maze to educate teens about the important issue of child sex trafficking. Part of the event was a fundraiser for the anti-slavery non-profit the Polaris Project, which has launched a viral activist initiative called "Slavery Still…
The Second Life Do-Gooders Tour
Those cool cats at Tech Soup have created a super-helpful directory of non-profit organizations who are active in Second Life. It’s been up for awhile, but I just now got a chance to check it out. An interactive bulletin board at the Tech Soup HQ enables residents to flip through the directory, where they can…
New site provides online tools for human rights defenders
I received in my in-box news about a new online resource for human rights activists called Human Rights Tools created by Daniel D’Esposito , formerly of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The site is basically a set of links and RSS feeds to information useful to human rights professionals in an easy-to-navigate format. …
Virtual Relay for Life nets $38,000 for American Cancer Society!
Tao Takashi reports on his blog that this year’s Second Life "Relay for Life" benefit for the American Cancer Society raised more than $38,000 this weekend! That’s a tremendous increase from the $6,000 raised last year! I was super busy this weekend, but stopped in briefly to check out all the fun and drop some…
Activist Tech: from listservs to virtual worlds
I went to a workshop on “Technology and Social Activism” at the Beyond Broadcast conference this weekend. I suppose it was ambitious to expect anything other than a quick fly-over of interesting initiatives in using technology for activism, since this could have easily been the subject of a three-day conference. As one participant Sean Coon…
Virtual Darfur: Civic Engagement or Fake Activism?
There has been an interesting debate going on between Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices and Hamlet at New World Notes. It’s a discussion centered around the Second Life virtual Darfur Camp built by several activists to highlight the plight of refugees from the conflict in the Sudan. Ethan’s contention is essentially that while it might…
APC: the Unsung Hero of the WSIS
I just finished reading a "reflection" report of the Association for Progressive Communications on the World Summit on the Information Society. It’s a nice flyover of the main issues faced by civil society and how APC navigated through a difficult international policy space. Entitled "Pushing and Prodding, Goading and Hand-holding," the report issued last month…
My Talk on NGOs and New Media for NYU Class
My friend Jeff Huffines of the Bahai United Nations Office invited me to address the class he is teaching on the operations of NGOs at New York University. Here’s my notes on my lecture. It was quite a treat talking with students looking in a more academic and robust way at the functioning and structure…
Atari’s for all the world children! My WSIS briefing at the UN
The following is the talk that I gave for the Department of Public Information NGO Briefing yesterday at the United Nations. DPI/NGO Briefing on WSIS \2 February 2006 Remarks by Rik Panganiban Atari Story When I was eight years old, what I wanted more than anything in the world was an Atari video game system….