An Italian software collective, Molleindustria, in collaboration with American culture jamming activists The Yes Men, produced Phone Story, a “radical game” for smart phones. The game exposes the human and environmental costs of the mobile phone industry. It made headlines when Apple banned it from its iPhone App Store, which only bolstered Molleindustria's campaign.
Using text messages and mobile phone photos, local people self-organised to find and share information that wasn’t available in the media during the Mumbai terrorist attacks. This spontaneous community reporting identified injuries and deaths and supported coordinated donations of blood and other relief efforts.
Citizens of Madagascar sent SMS messages to Foko about reports of violence by the military and police during demonstrations against a takeover of the government. These reports were published on an online map, and a team of local bloggers checked the messages for accuracy. As traditional media was compromised at the time, Foko’s website alerted citizens to trouble spots and gave a richer picture of the crisis than traditional reporting while ensuring an independent information source existed to report on events.
Young people in Nigeria face obstables in getting accurate sexual and reproductive health information, due to stigma and taboos. A collaboration between OneWorld UK and local NGO, Education as a Vaccine Against AIDS, produced 'MyQuestion/MyAnswer,' a mobile phone service that lets young people take control over their own sexual health education anonymously and securely.
Citizens from Kenya can get information on government funding for development projects by sending a text message to Infonet's budget tracking platform. The questions provide data to help build a picture of which government funds are most under scrutiny in different areas. People can also leave comments on each project to verify, contest, add information, or connect with a local social development group who can help them query the allocation and use of public funds.
Mobile phone security
Mobile phones are used by advocates all over the world, but they often store a great deal of information that should be kept private. In addition to contact lists, a mobile phone may contain call histories, calendars, text messages and emails.
ObscuraCam is an Android application that allows you to obscure faces or objects in photos or videos to keep certain information private. It allows you to black out or pixelate certain areas of an image. You can also reverse pixelate, so that only the person is visible and the background becomes blurred.
The application also allows you to remove telltale metadata such as GPS location, phone make and model, and author information.
It was developed in partnership between human rights video organisation Witness.org and the Guardian Project.
K9 is a stable and popular email client for Android mobile devices.
A free software project created by a strong community of volunteers, K9 makes it easy to add multiple accounts and to deal with large amounts of incoming emails. It has recently added support for GPG encryption, which is a common way of sending encrypted messages.
For more information about encryption, consult Tactical Tech's Security-in-a-box guide.
The proliferation of mobile computing devices in recent years has meant that websites can no longer remain static or stick to one screen resolution or aspect ratio. Your organisation's website should be optimised for a variety of devices and resolutions, to reach the widest number of users possible.
But how to test your website when you don't own every device?
Screenfly, a great tool from QuirkTools, allows you to virtually view any website in a variety of resolutions. There are presets for common devices, or you can set a custom resolution or rotation.
An introduction to basic campaigning how-tos. This content is based on material from our previous guides, and 10 Tactics.
An introduction to basic campaigning how-tos. This content is based on material from our previous guides, and 10 Tactics.
How to identify the people who will support your cause or help make a change
How to craft your campaign message to motivate change
How to expand and organise your network for effective outreach
Strategies and practical tips on creating effective digital advocacy campaigns.
Strategies and practical tips on creating effective digital advocacy campaigns.
How to draw attention to an issue or bypass censorship using creativity and humour
How to create an impact offline with tried and true print-based techniques
How to make your message stand out in the sea of mass media
How to transform your content into rich and detailed stories.
How to react immediately and effectively to an event happening in the present.
How to use the power of shared knowledge and community participation.
How to harness mobile phone technology to innovate and reach out to a wider audience.
There are many online services that can convert webpages to PDF files. These may be of use for printing or archiving internet pages.
A mashup or video remix is created by taking multiple sources of video, audio or stills and mixing them up.
Jitsi is a communications program that allows you to chat securely using well-supported protocols like SIP, XMPP / Jabber, AIM / ICQ, Windows Live,
ObscuraCam is an Android application that allows you to obscure faces or objects in photos or videos to keep certain information private.
The details of users using live chat provided by Yahoo, Windows, Skype and Gmail are readily made available to law enforcement agencies by the comp
The proliferation of mobile computing devices in recent years has meant that websites can no longer remain static or stick to one screen resolution
Bambuser is a live video service that allows you to capture, upload and store video from a mobile phone or webcam.
Magpi (formerly Episurveyor), is a web-based application that enables anyone to create a data entry form online, and then use this form to collect
Ushahidi is a highly flexible platform for information collection, visualisation and interactive mapping.
Scribus is a page layout program. It can be compared to Microsoft Publisher or Adobe InDesign.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a way of tracking a company’s interactions with customers and clients.
Skype is the most popular service around for voice calls over the internet. You can also use live text chat and send files.
Cloud computing, where data and services are stored online instead of on your local computer, offers a lot of advantages.
Status.net is an internet-based piece of software for microblogging, and is an alternative to Twitter.
Brdcst.it & ifttt are two online services that provide essentially the same thing.
Screencasting software lets you record what is happening on the screen of your computer as a video file.
Because of some of the challenges of editing video on the desktop, it may be a good idea to try an online video editor.
HandBrake was created to convert DVD discs into smaller video files suitable for viewing and sharing on the Internet.
Pixlr is one of many online browser-based photo and image manipulation services. It stands out as the fastest and most flexible.
Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editing application, with capabilities similar to Illustrator and CorelDraw.
GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) can do just about everything that Adobe Photoshop can do, and it's free for anyone to use.
Making a CD with audio files can involve two kinds of CDs. One type is a data CD, which is suitable for reading on other computers.
Mobile Media Converter is a free software application originally created to allow the transcoding of audio from early mobile phones into a format w
Audio Boo has taken advantage of the recording and internet capabilities of smartphones and created a service which publishes audio to the internet
Info-activism examples from around the world.
To honor people and cities that had a profound effect on the course of the Syrian revolution, anonymous artists created special stamps and publishe
Journalist Noha Atef created TortureInEgypt.net in 2006 to document human rights abuses co
Egyptians remixed images of President Mubarak into popular film posters. The images spread quickly on the internet.
The Bell Bajao campaign was conceived by Mumbai-based NGO
The Zero Rupee Note is a campaign tool that Vijay Anand created through his organisati
Info-activism examples from around the world.
To honor people and cities that had a profound effect on the course of the Syrian revolution, anonymous artists created special stamps and publishe
Journalist Noha Atef created TortureInEgypt.net in 2006 to document human rights abuses co
Egyptians remixed images of President Mubarak into popular film posters. The images spread quickly on the internet.
The Bell Bajao campaign was conceived by Mumbai-based NGO
The Zero Rupee Note is a campaign tool that Vijay Anand created through his organisati
An Italian software collective, Molleindustria, in collaboration with Ame
Sheno Ya3ni (which translates as “What’s that?” or “So what?”) is a group of actors from the Arab Gulf and the Middle East who created a series of
In response to the Syrian regime's brutal suppression of the revolution, a group of artists are producing political cartoons and comic strips and p
As the Syrian regime continued its brutal suppression of the revolution, while publicly denying such violent actions, anonymous activists launched
Using text messages and mobile phone photos, local people self-organised to find and share information that wasn’t available in the media during th
Tunisian bloggers collaborated on a mapping project that revealed the presidential plane was being used for extensive personal travel.
The Targuist Sniper was an advocate who filmed police officers in Morocco repeatedly demanding bribes from motorists and published them on YouTube
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Citizens of Madagascar sent SMS messages to Foko about reports of violence by the military and police during demonstrations against a takeover of t
Digital Stories for Transformation documents stories rarely told, and rarely heard.
Wanting to raise public interest around the funding crisis for health in Sub-Saharan Africa and extend their support base to a young audience who w
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Artists and advocates from Egypt created a short animated video based on traditional Arabic stories re-told from a feminist perspective.
In Lebanon, an LGBT advocacy organisation (not to be named here for privacy reasons) created a Facebook profile with no photo and no friends to saf
This documentary film produced by Witness in partnership with AJEDI-Ka,
The Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers (APNSW) used digital video to document abusive c
Young people in Nigeria face obstables in getting accurate sexual and reproductive health information, due to stigma and taboos. A collaboration b
TheyWorkForYou is a website that connects citizens with Members of Parliament in the U
Belarusians created a group of websites they called LuNet, in mock honour of President Ale
In February 2011, after watching the late Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi give an hour-long speech in an attempt to regain control, Israeli D
The website Iamjan25.com collects images and videos captured by demonstrators in Tahrir Square,
In 2010, a community monitoring project in New Orleans led by activist group Louisiana Bucket
In order to circumvent internet censorship in China, bloggers have created a lexicon which makes puns out of words and phrases in the Chinese langu
Before the Egyptian presidential elections in May 2012, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohammed Morsi, proposed a 100-day plan for reinvigoratin
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