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.
Screencasting software lets you record what is happening on the screen of your computer as a video file. This can be used together with audio narration to create useful help videos. Windows has at least two good open source options: Cam Studio and Webinaria. These both allow you to record audio from your microphone or choose another sound source. You can select the whole screen for recording, or just part of it. Record My Desktop offers the same functionality in Linux, and you can record screencasts with QuickTime player on a Mac.
Because of some of the challenges of editing video on the desktop, it may be a good idea to try an online video editor. Two options are YouTube and Video Toolbox. YouTube Video Editor allows you to take videos that you have uploaded, as well as other videos and audio that have been uploaded under an open licence, and edit them in a simple editor in your internet browser. The features are limited, but the service is stable enough to use for short videos. Video Toolbox is a free service which provides a limited amount of space for uploading, storing, downloading and converting videos.
Most video editors are similar in design. Once you have learned the basics in one application it is often easy to apply these skills to another program. This is fortunate as there are no free cross-platform video editors available. Here are some comparisons of different tools:
Windows Movie Maker and iMovie come free with Windows and Mac OSX respectively. Recent versions have made them much more than the basic editors they used to be; they now support images from modern hard drive cameras, and video from mobile phones.
HandBrake was created to convert DVD discs into smaller video files suitable for viewing and sharing on the Internet. This is called 'DVD ripping'.
HandBrake is popular, and is available for many different operating systems.
There are now more features including transcoding, which means changing one type for video file into another. This is very useful for video makers wanting to make their projects small enough to fit on a CD, or to share online or on a mobile device.
DVDStyler is a cross-platform, free DVD authoring application.
It creates DVDs that can be played on almost any standalone DVD player. You can design interactive DVD menus and the interface is simple and intuitive to use.
If you do run into problems with image quality or opening different video formats, then try using a different application (like Avidemux) to transcode your video into DVD-ready MPEG-2 files, and then import them to DVDStyler.
Amara is a free online subtitling service.
It allows you to add or import text to create subtitles for a video hosted somewhere else on the Internet. The interface is easy to use, allowing you to play, pause and review your video as you type the text of the dialogue. You then match the text to the timing of the video. Subtitles can then be made available for other users to review and improve; or they can add extra subtitles in a different language.
Synfig Studio creates 2D animation.
It uses new techniques to allow you to create animations quickly, with a limited budget. It can be compared to the Flash animation application. It is a very stable tool with a lot of professional features. Photographs and other backgrounds can be integrated with icons and cartoon figures to create scenarios which can communicate a particular message.
The use of animation allows you to use the power of moving images cheaply to communicate your message.
In order to circumvent internet censorship in China, bloggers have created a lexicon which makes puns out of words and phrases in the Chinese language to talk about forbidden topics. It started with the 'grass-mud horse' – a mythical creature which sounds nearly the same as a dirty insult – as a tool to ridicule the government's blocking of vulgar content online. The grass-mud horse has achieved a personality, making its way into art, poetry and online videos, as well as inspiring an entire vocabulary of words.
WordPress is a system for creating websites and blogs.
You can have your own installation of WordPress if you have some webspace, or you can use the free service at wordpress.com.
It is easy to install WordPress and learn how to publish webpages, and it is a good vehicle for publishing and promoting your audio and video online.
If you are using wordpress.com, you either have to pay an upgrade fee to host media files, or you can include them from SoundCloud, YouTube or other audio and video sharing sites.
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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