Outreach

We the Women

To draw attention to laws banning women from driving cars in Saudi Arabia, Areej Khan, a Saudi artist and graphic designer living in the US, created the 'We the Women' campaign. The project got women to respond to the question, "To drive or not drive?" by writing their answers on stickers that they could post in public spaces. Participants also photographed their stickers and added them to the campaign's Flickr photo group and Facebook page.

Gathering Citizen Reports of Violence

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.

 

TheyWorkForYou

TheyWorkForYou is a website that connects citizens with Members of Parliament in the UK. Following a scandal in 2009 when the government sought to have MPs’ expenses claims kept secret, MySociety mobilised voters to send a few thousand individualised emails to MPs demanding transparency in the use of public funds. Soon after this campaign, the UK government agreed to disclose data on MP expenses.

Fair Play

Using Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, Fair Play gathers invoices and other documents that show how the Slovakian government spends its money, adds this material to a database connected to its website, and invites people to use this information to influence political change.  By making the information easy to access, a debate was created around public spending and pressure for change became so great that one Slovak construction minister had to resign.

“Give Lukashenko his own Lu-net!”

Belarusians created a group of websites they called LuNet, in mock honour of President Alexander Lukasheko’s birthday, after he promised to increase internet censorship. The sites, which were a play on words using sites such as Youtube and Livejournal, were packed with government propaganda amid ironic posts which increased awareness to internet censorship and the detention of bloggers for political purposes.

 

IamJan25: Documenting the Egyptian uprising

The website Iamjan25.com collects images and videos captured by demonstrators in Tahrir Square, where hundreds of thousands of Egyptians gathered on 25 January 2011 to protest against the regime of then-president Hosni Mubarak. It is a collection of eye-witness accounts recording this significant piece of history from the point of view of the people on the ground. Containing over 7,000 videos and pictures, the website is the largest online archive of its kind.

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