Across Weirdish Wild Space

From JK Rowling of Harry Potter fame, speaking at this year’s Harvard commencement speech about working at Amnesty International :

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

It’s an excellent address in total to be honest, dwelling on the value of failure and imagination and well worth the time to read or watch.

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

One of the things I actually do always admire about the US around election time, is the incredible number of people and creativity willing to work on getting people out to vote. Considering the Canadian election that sadly has Harper and the Conservatives back in a minority, had historically low turnout, I do think when I get back that I need to work on something like this.

And you have to respect moveon.org. Consistently, these guys are just amazing with their ability to leverage web actions to get fundraising and mobilize support.

This viral replaces a simple first and last name of someone you send it to in the actual text shown in various places in the flash video making it seem like McCain won by one vote because of their not voting.

Absolutely brilliant. Can’t believe this would be too hard to do either.

OK, admittedly, as much as I really loathed the “Wassup” commercials when they were on television (and think Bud is a terrible beer), this parody is absolutely fantastic :

If you are unfamiliar with them, the original is here too :

(via BoingBoing.)

Meant to post this a while back from an email that went round at work.

Love the idea. Simply… Offer to bring in a whack of business for one day to one business if they’ll pay for environmental improvements to their business with the proceeds.

Seems like the first run went well (and you have to love the Lil Wayne video spoof). Have to see whether it’s sustainable, but it is an interesting idea in crowdsourcing.

(thanks to Anu K. for the link)

I think Don’t Vote is one of the most seriously focused and well-designed get-out-the-vote microsites I’ve seen in ages.

Check out some of the posters to download and print and downloadable banners for embedding into webpages.

And I really especially like their little “Spread the Word” mouse rollover which definitely gives about every option I’ve ever seen for disseminating something on the web in a nice little compact rollover popup. Going to steal the idea for my own sites I think…

Love it. Not easy to tell who is responsible but the DNS record whois mentions Pollinate media in Oregon.

Now, if someone came up with something like this for the Canadian elections… =<

via scaryideas.

As people who tune in regularly to the blog may be aware, the main site for Amnesty International was completely redesigned last year and launched on Dec 10th human rights day.

Since then, and with the advantages the underlying Drupal, CiviCRM and Alfresco core technologies have given us (though we’ve had quite a few problems with alfresco since launching), we’ve been able to do quite a bit more than we were ever capable of doing before with the old platform and made some fundamental gains with the site.

But like everything, new technologies and capabilities mean a bit of learning and some of the things we tried didn’t work exactly as planned, and some initial assumptions about the way the site would be used and our audience didn’t turn out as we expected.

So, the web team and our excellent tech partners, CivicActions have been working hard on making improvements particularly in the areas of layout design, information architecture, usability, landing pages (one thing we found is that the main landing page is not necessarily the only landing page due to google’s near pervasive ability to have people jump to places in the site from search results) and improvements to impact both searchability, cross linking and ultimately SEO to make thing easier for our constituents and the people we are trying to reach to find. There are also a few technical improvements on the end to make things run faster and more reliably.

It’s a big piece of work and a lot of sweat and negotiated has gone into the improvements and carefully thought-out trade-offs.

A big, big hand to the web team and our Civi partners for some great work done and getting it up and out the door.

Contrast the new :

with the original launch :

Would love to hear (constructive) comments back. We’ll be doing a big usability push and working on some persona-based design work in the coming months to carve out the future direction of the site and its focus.

The Human Rights Action Center in NYC just put up a fantastic animation illustrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the observation of which being one of the cornerstones of what Amnesty works towards, for the 60th anniversary of the document on the 10th of December this year.

Utterly fantastic job in tone, animation, simplicity and even the music.

The action centre has also given over their home page to it in a full browser high fidelity version which looks amazing. Probably won’t be up forever, but looks great if you go there now.

via Cool Hunting

Money As Debt is a fantastic 45 min or so animated feature on the fundamental changed nature of money, loans and the banking system that disabuses people of the notion that money and especially loans are still tired to underlying value (like, say for instance gold).

The first half on the actual idea of money is debt gives a real insight into how we’re in the middle of our current financial crisis, though the second half goes off into some interesting talk of more sustainable money systems and then sadly goes somewhat into the realm of the weird talking about conspiracy theories and pins things on the idea of a cabal rather than a systemic problem and breakdown.

Basically, though it underlines the idea that banks can create as much money as people can borrow and the entire system of money creation and legal tender is based on the promise of the borrower to pay.

If too many people are unable to pay their promises, the fundamental debt repayment that all this money was created upon and the only real value to money that banks have multiplicatively lent out is cut from under them, which is why the crisis is so scary.

Much as Google’s mission to organize all the world’s information gets scarier and scarier, it is without question an interesting beast. It’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto is actually extending well beyond merely being passive to actively trying to do good.

And you have to be impressed with their latest initiative to spend $10M USD on ideas to change the world and fund them. They’ve also got a deceptively simple site for submitting ideas and then getting everyone to vote on which are the best ones. Oh, and very importantly, a nice music video :

I particularly like the criteria they’ve used to define ideas and how they are measuring their merit :

Guidelines

Our goal is to set as few rules as possible. However, we ask that you put your idea into one of the following categories and consider the evaluation criteria below.

Categories:

• Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures?
• Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their families?
• Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy?
• Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem?
• Health: How can we help individuals lead longer, healthier lives?
• Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education?
• Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live?
• Everything else: Sometimes the best ideas don’t fit into any category at all.

Criteria:

* Reach: How many people would this idea affect?
* Depth: How deeply are people impacted? How urgent is the need?
* Attainability: Can this idea be implemented within a year or two?
* Efficiency: How simple and cost-effective is your idea?
* Longevity: How long will the idea’s impact last?

I always remember when I was a kid naively thinking Christmas should be this day, but September 21st, the day before the autumnal equinox would work for me as well. Any day we could get people to commit to there being a day of peace, even ceasefires, as long as it was a global gesture would be amazing.

It’s a very nice idea. Peace on earth, everyone…

Just a shoutout to my favourite Rails ninjae here in London, the bambinos at New Bamboo(disclaimer: they’re working on projects with both AI UK and with us at the Secretariat right now), who just launched AI UK’s new Protect the Human site after partnering up with Made by Many.

Very nicely executed social networking site based on activism, sharing and discussion. Just wondering what they used to get the base done. Inososhi ? LovdByLess ? They even managed to incorporate the new visual Global Identity and reconcile it with AI UK’s current visual scheme.

“The human race has only one really effective weapon and that is laughter.”
Mark Twain

In a stone-cold coolness coup of epic proportions the Guardian got Medium Lobster from the amazing Fafblog writing one of their political columns this past Thursday . I hope it’s becomes a very, very regular thing…

Favourite quote from the article. (Nearly dmade me spit out my coffee…) :

Mitt Romney

Pros: History of rapid flip-flops will neatly counterbalance McCain’s record of stunning policy reversals to achieve perfect pandering equilibrium; ability to suck opponents into the inky void of his soul should prove useful in veep debate; sweats liquid money.

Cons: Eccentric space-god religion could appear unacceptably bizarre to pious nation of devout 2000-year-old Jewish zombie worshipers.

(nb: if you’re not following the US presidential race and its dramatis personae closely, this probably won’t be that funny… Oh, and before anyone gets the wrong idea… I’m Canadian, not American… For differences, see here. =] )

The Year of the Political Blogger Has Arrived

In more serious news… The New York Times, which missed Loobster doing the Guardian gig, has a fab article on the rise of the political blogger. Excellent reading and definitely pro-am political journalism is becoming a trend to be noted for any activist organization (offer void in countries where written political dissidence is prohibited).

(via Fafblog, BoingBoing, the NYTimes and dem random Canadian beer commercials, eh ? ).

Besides Powell’s now-infamous WMD photos of non-existent chemical weapons facilities that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq, it also covers the photoshopped Iranian missiles photo that ran across a number of US newspapers (the NYT article even has my very favourite mock shot of the Iranian missile launch photos, the godzilla in the midst of the launch field).

From a course I took back in Canada on Anthropology and the Image (fascinating by the way and well worth the time and effort – note now that the course is called Visual Ethnography), I know that photography as a political weapon, even as a cultural weapon, especially with reference to people like the Navajo and Africans, was amazingly devastating in associating a set of negative attributes with a culture, but the amazing thing in the modern era (perhaps because of the ubiquity of photographs in general), is the commonplace manipulation of them, or their captioning to achieve desired political ends, whether those be supporting invasion, instilling fear or misdirecting attention. Got to be a good book or documentary in there somewhere.

But a great read. Hopefully, Morris is working on another fab documentary along these lines.

The interesting thing though, is that the fodder here for activists of all stripes, to increasingly draw attention to disinformation and political propaganda by mocking these things. For example, Worth1000-esque photoshopping contests coordinated with a photosstream on Flickr and just tagged with an appropriately complex tag to make sure interesting photos get surfaced.

via BoingBoing

Great little mini-documentary ? Teaser ? that needs a bigger documentary added to it even though the student who did it calls it a small graphic novel.

Reminds me of the book about the actual journey a tshirt takes from where it is manufactured to the time it gets to your back (someone please tell me the name of the book since a search on amazon for journey and tshirt brought up way too much old concert memorabilia… =< ).

(via scaryideas).

Sean Travis is a geek. Pure and simple. And has decided to run for office. He has clearly identified a group he believes can help him take down the current Kansas State Legislature representative (described by others as “an anti-abortion, anti-evolution, pro-censorship, pro-surveillance, anti-gay incumbent.”), other geeks.

He’s calling on them, precisely 3000 of them, via an xkcd style comic style page to donate precisely $8.34 each and help him with name recognition advertising as he has identified this as the key to winning (xkcd is a very geeky, minimalist comic famous for using stick figures for its graphics, yet being very clever, funny and a pillar of high geek culture, you can see it here : http://xkcd.org ).

He’s currently polling within 3 percentage points of his opponent. And he’s got 2,894 donors as of this morning (which is a record for donations to a Kansas rep)

In terms of a clearly identified group, goal, and change he wishes to happen (as well as a focused communication that appeals to his target influence group), it’s a great example of strategic campaigning well executed (so far).

UPDATE [19 jul 2008] : Sean blew away the 3000 mark in just over 36 hours and is now coasting close to 5000… and has added onto his comic. Very impressive.

On my recent visit back to Paris, it was hard to miss the Vélib’s now everywhere in the city (in fact, there is a rank of them right outside my old apartment in the 10éme).

Without question, they’re popular. The NYTimes (via WorldChanging) served up some extremely encouraging statistics on them just recently.

• Riders took 27.5 million trips in the first year.
• The current pace is about 120,000 trips per day.
• The program includes 20,600 bikes.
• The 1,450 self-service rental stations are available every 300 metres.
• The bikes are heavy and expensive — $3,460 and 50 lbs — built to withstand theft, mistreatment, and heavy riding.
• Still, 3,000 bikes have gone missing (or been misplaced), about 15% of the total.

First off, you have to be impressed with anything that makes Parisians exercise. While it’s definitely a walking city (and you do notice how much thinner and seemingly active people are than London), it’s a feat to say the least.

The real benefit though, besides a healthier, more mobile populace, is the reduction in carbon emissions. WorldChanging estimated (using a simple model) that this probably removes about 40,000 metric tons of CO₂ a year. Roughly the same amount as removing 5700 cars from the road a year. While WC sees these as modest, especially in consideration of the costs involved in the Vélib program, I think that’s more than a little unfair considering its popularity, non-controversial nature and the fact it’s a complete win-win solution all round.

Overall, the only thing I think you can really comment on is that it’s not enough even if it’s a great start (the other problem is that this model assumes people are taking cars instead of the metro or merely walking so it’s got a lot of assumptions in it).

Still, the bikes are awesome and the model is gaining traction. New York is eying the same idea and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before other cities think about the same thing. Even more so, I think these are “gateway drug” programs that can start people also becoming more active about demanding these types of changes for the better. Less car-centric cities, more public transport and greener cities in general.

Now if they could only do this with rollerblades…

(via WorldChanging.)

Massive props to the early morning hours crew that did the final push to get it out as well as all the people throughout the Secretariat and DUs who made it possible. I think it’s difficult for anyone outside the organization to understand what a massive undertaking this is or how many resources are involved in bringing it to fruition.

At some point, I hope someone is going to feed me and let me go home to sleep…

[Update: 7.22 AM BST – We just moved up to the most viewed story on cnn.com and this articlejust made the home page. The Beeb also gave us a high profile mention as well.

Update 2: 2.52 PM BST – We also managed to get mentioned in the NYTimes and the Guardian Online.]

Boris thinks he can do something about criminality and hooliganism in London based on New York’s example of apparent success with broken window theory zero tolerance enforcement. Personally, I’m as skeptical of this as the ubiquitous and largely useless CCTV everywhere here in London, but the ban will be law 1st of June so the People are planning one last hurrah on the neverending loop that is the Circle Line on the 31st of May (though I do think banning alcohol on the metro is a good idea, as the people who seem to indulge in the liberty tend towards intimidating and berating their other passengers). Nevertheless, a party is a totally different animal, so…

Details for the facebook viral are here.

And yep, planning to be there barring the usual chaos that is my life. A bit ironic since I’ve never had a drink on the Tueb in my entire life, but hey… I do like the idea of sipping champagne on the metro.

Partypeople of London!

Come one, come all, lend us your ears – this one’s a bit special..

So Boris has been elected, and he’s banning drinking on the underground. Fair enough you might think. No more being harassed by crazies. But it also means no more last drink before the club, no more champagne frolics at new year’s and no more tanked up Aussie guys singing.

First a smoking ban, now a drinking ban, what’s next?

But we’re not giving in so easily! No no Monsieur. We’re organising one last party, one high-glamour, weird-ass shindig on the circle line to royally give the finger to Big Brother and this culture of legislation and regulations. What’s more, we’re holding it on the night before the drinking ban! Vive la revolucion!

Hard to watch but important to see.

It’s hard to express how huge a project Amnesty has just pulled off re-architecting its vanguard internet presence, CRM and document management library at the same time, but well… we just went live late yesterday evening in the GMT with the new amnesty.org. We wanted the launch to coincide with International Human Rights Day this morning on December 10th.

The site is totally run on free and open source software and consists of a Drupal and CiviCRM backed main web presence that can feed off our shiny, new open source java-based Alfresco document management system. It sports completely redone Information Architecture and User Experience for ease of navigation and to help specific audiences find what they need and get stuff done and the site also incorporates Amnesty International’s new global visual identity to attempt to unify the organizational brand around the world in the 70+ countries we operate in.

Technically, the project has been one of the most ambitious the organization has ever undertaken and we’re hoping the architecture is the blueprint for a much stronger platform for human rights impact on the web for many of our sections. We’ve got big plans for it (insert maniacal evil supervillain laugh here)...

Honours and tips of the hat to all the organizations that helped us with this : CivicActions, Fortune Cookie, Eva A and finally ImportantProjects. The internet and tech crews at Amnesty have expended an absolute herculean effort on this project for months now and have been like tireless, unthanked superheroes driving this thing through to completion. I’m stoked as to the possibilities we now have before us. We have a really great foundation to build on which is a huge leap forward from the system we’ll now be slowly decommissioning.