Sunseed Desert Technology
Sunseed Desert Technology is a learning centre located in southern Spain, concentrating on solutions for semi-arid agriculture and low-impact living. The centre has a very limited budget to promote its activities and research. It has been increasingly relying on blog posts and social media to draw visitors to its website for ongoing publicity and fundraising drives.
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.
Bambuser is a live video service that allows you to capture, upload and store video from a mobile phone or webcam.
You can set up broadcasts, like channels, and share them publicly using social media, or share privately with just certain users. You can also view videos on your phone, and chat in real time.
Geo-tagging is possible. With certain platforms, you can also save a recording and upload it at a later time.
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 data on a mobile device. Once collected, data can be uploaded to the Magpi website for analysis or export.
The Magpi mobile app is available for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and Symbian phones. Simple information can also be collected from ANY phone using SMS.
Ushahidi is a highly flexible platform for information collection, visualisation and interactive mapping.
It was originally developed to map incidents of violence during the Kenyan elections in 2008. Now Ushahidi (meaning 'testimony' in Swahili), is widely used in many different scenarios, including emergency response management and citizen media. See a full list of deployments.
FrontlineSMS allows you to send and receive text messages over a mobile network.
Browser-based and built to run on Windows, Mac and Linux, FrontlineSMS can send text messages via phone, modem or online SMS aggregator.
Using Frontline SMS, you can deliver announcements, conduct polls and automate replies to incoming SMS. You can also visualise incoming data, helping you to quickly understand the results.
ZXing (pronounced 'zebra crossing') is an open source barcode image tool.
It can be used to create and read barcodes and QR codes. A QR code is a printed square of blocky pixels which can be scanned by devices including smart phones to point users to a web page, contact details or other information.
Thunderbird is a popular free software email client from the Mozilla foundation.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a way of tracking a company’s interactions with customers and clients. It involves using technology to organise and automate communication. CiviCRM is a free sofware internet-based approach to CRM, aimed specifically at NGOs, charities and other civic groups. In practice, it can be used by any organisation that would benefit from keeping track of their contacts. This is done with various tools that can help you with things like fundraising, event management, member management, mass e-mail marketing, peer-to-peer campaigns and case management.
Skype is the most popular service around for voice calls over the internet. You can also use live text chat and send files. Many international organisations rely on Skype to reduce their costs, using it instead of the telephone. It makes online collaboration between global grassroots communities easier, as it is both cheap and universal, supporting calls to landlines and mobile phones.
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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