It’s rare that an 8am breakfast meeting is my second meeting of the day. But that’s what happens when you start your day with a 5am TV appearance. Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! team is at the Netsquared conference and spent half of today’s show featuring conference speakers: Hong Eun-taek from OhMyNews, Reuters Digital Vision fellow Saori Fotenos, and yours truly. I’m already hearing back from Amy’s viewers, which is pretty exciting, and the show is easy to access online – you can download an mp3 or watch a RealVideo stream. We’re the second half of the show.

The fun of these events for me is always meeting my fellow guests. Saori’s project with Reuters – Vamos Blogar – involves helping at-risk youth in Rio learn how to blog – it’s an interesting model that might work in other favelas and low-income communities around the world. And Eun Taek and I had the chance to talk more about the parallels and differences between GVO and OhMyNews – there’s a lot our projects can do together, and even more we can learn from one another. I’m looking forward to visiting OhMyNews in a few weeks in Seoul and talking further.

All of which helps dull the pain of that 4am wakeup call. And if I look bleary-eyed and unshaven in the video… well, I am. :-)

• manalaa.mp3 (audio/mpeg Object)
  Interview with Manal about Alaa’s detention, on BBC
  (tags: egypt freespeech freealaa)

Hong Eun Taek is the editor of OhMyNews – As Michael Rogers points out, everyone has studied it and no one has duplicated its success. He’s spent time in Iraq as a war correspondent, and as Washington reporter, and recently spent three months bicycling around the US reporting stories.

Euntaek begins by introducing us to a citizen journalist from Rapa Nui – Easter Island. She represents well the idea that every citizen is a reporter. Quoting OhMyNews founder Oh Yeon Ho, he says, “Journalists aren’t some exotic species – they’re everyone who seeks to take new developments, put them in writing and share them with others.”

The project was founded in February 2000 – since then, the number of reporters has grown from 727 to 42,000. Much of the growth has come around the South Korean general and presidential elections. Success has come from changing the flow of information of news – information comes from the audience, not just from professional newsmakers.

The web has the potential to be a comprehensive media platform, not just for text news, but for audio and video as well. Eun Taek shows a video of parliamentary violence and street protests in the 2004 elections and the presidential impeachement that preceded it. The video concludes with the phrase “full-fledged multimedia news in action”, an excellent summary of OhMyNews’s ambitions.

The editorial process of OhMyNews helps answer questions about credibility and factchecking. The 42,000 reporters create about 200 stories a day – these stories are read and edited by copy editors and come to the site. Other stories come from professional staff reporters and come through a more traditional plan. And there’s an intermingling of the food chain along the way.

The influence of OhMyNews has grown rapidly in the last few years, becoming the 6th most influential media outlet in Korea. It’s profitable, making most of it’s money from selling ads, but some from donations from readers. The project also makes money selling content to other newssites.

Can the OhMyNews model work globally? This is the next experiment – OhMyNews Japan is now under preparation, with support from Softbank. The launch is scheduled for August. And OhMyNews International offers the question of whether this can happen on a truly global stage. This is an experiment very much underway, and 1000 citizen reporters are participating from 86 countries – every three months, the site is doubling in the number of submissions and registered reporters.

Eun Taek reminds us that OhMyNews pays – $20 for a homepage story, $10 for an inner-page story. This is, perhaps, yet another reason for people to explore the model, and to think about building an OhMyNews for their own nations. This will help OhMyNews reach its goals – 100,000 citizen reporters and a thriving newswire that can compete with/complement AP, Reuters, AFP and others. The International Herald Tribune has already demonstrated that mainstream publications are interested in hosting OhMyNews content.

As is my habit, I’m blogging from the stage of NetSquared, taking notes on talks by Dan Gillmor and Euntaek Hong. The “immoderator” is Michael Rogers, former technology columnist for Newsweek and futurist for MSNBC. He points out that there’s a conference roughly every month these days on Web2.0 tools, but that these tools are too important to trust to the journalists, hence the importance of making this stuff accessible to citizen journalists.

Dan leads off with a talk titled “We the Media – The Rise of Grassroots, Open-Source Journalism”. Dan tells us he’s proud of his history as a mainstream journalist, but points out that some of the best journalism being done in the world is being done by the “noted journalism organization”, the American Civil Liberties Union, as they research our secret prisons in Guantanamo.

The tools to create digital media are pretty much in the hands of everyone, at least in the developed world. Distribution is more democratized, though the phones and cable companies are trying to take that away. The core of this transformation is the “read-write” web – it’s very different from the web that we encountered in the late 1990s, where it was easy to read and hard to write.

Anyone can do this stuff… including the Pentagon. They’re producing podcasts… which may indicate that that medium is over… The movement is from old media to new media to we media. This empowers not just “the former audience”, but also the newsmakers as well. Journalism used to be a lecture – now it’s more like a conversation. According to the Cluetrain Manifesto, markets are conversations – Dan says that journalism is a conversation as well. Journalists need to learn to listen to the former audience.

Secrets are getting harder to keep – as photos at Abu Graib demonstrated. This isn’t always a good thing. And we need better tools to help us determine what’s true and accurate. But there are some great experiments underway – OhMyNews, which is the most successful experiment thus far in citizen’s media.

Journalists can start asking their readers to help. BBC is starting to ask their readers to participate in newsmaking, to post photos and share stories. People will do this whether or not you ask them – the canonical London Bombing image was taken with a mobile phone camera by a person who was not a journalist.

The idea of the “citizen witness” is not new – think of the photos in Dealy Plaza at JFKs assasination. Think about what would happen now – we’d triangulate from our photos and have a three-D image of what actually went on.

We see some cool new tools – satellite uplink in a suitcase, for a mere $100,000. Self-assembling newsrooms – people who don’t even know each other – building newsrooms (like Global Voices). Projects like Wikipedia that use mutual point of view to allow widespread collaboration. Mashups, that visualize crime data on Google Maps… or have George Bush and Tony Blair singing love songs to each other. Nanopublishing lets people make a living publishing ads on their sites… and it’s not so nano, at least for the company that made it possible. Brattleboro.com is an example of a community blog that sometimes does a better job of covering a town than the local paper.

One of the problems we’re facing is the trouble of too much information – we need help navigating the conversations, via sites like Memeorandum and Technorati. We need to move beyond the Daily Me – a newspaper assembled just for you – to the Daily We, a newspaper developed by your community. Voting isn’t enough, but sites like Digg are pretty exciting – community ratings on comments can also be a big help in adding richness to conversations.

There’s a great opportunity for journalism organizations: they can help people in their commmunities – either of geography or interest – become activists. BBC is actively developing activists… one of the campaigns that grew out was one to take away public funding from the BBC.

Dan finishes by pointing to the new Center for Citizen Media based at Berkeley and Berkman.

So… I’m getting on stage in about half an hour at the Netsquared conference. If you’re not here – or even if you are – you can read my slides and get a full preview of what I’m going to say… in fact, given that I may not get through this deck in the 20 minutes I’ve got allotted, you might have a better chance of following the talk from this post than from hearing me on stage…

My talk focuses on the future of advocacy in the age of citizen’s media, and I want to begin by talking about an advocacy effort I’m engaged in – the struggle to release my friend Hao Wu from detention in Beijing, China. Hao is a blogger and filmmaker, a Chinese citizen with a US greencard. He came to the US to do an MBA at the University of Michigan, stayed in the US to work in the dot.com industry to work with Earthlink.com. In 2004, he gave up his job with Earthlink and began making a documentary film, “Beijing or Bust” about the expatriate Chinese experience.

He returned to China in 2006 to work on a new documentary film, which focused on underground Christian churches. He was detained by Chinese police on February 22nd and has been held incommunicado, without access to a lawyer, ever since.

I’m aware of Hao’s situation because we work together. In early February, he joined the staff of Global Voices, a project I helped found in late 2004, which features weblogs written by people around the world. Hao signed on as our North Asia editor and began writing up great Chinese blogs, under the psuedonym Tian Yi. At the same time, he was blogging about his personal life and filmmaking on his own blog, giving a poignant sense of how difficult it was to resolve his global perspectives with the constraints of contemporary China. We traded a little email, and planned a China/Africa dialog project that we hoped to implement this fall. From what I could learn about him online, I really liked the guy.

When Hao got arrested, Rebecca and I did what we knew how to do. We put together a website, documenting his detention, explaining the situation and asking people to promote awareness of his case. We built a set of badges that said Free Hao Wu and asked people to put them on their websites. We talked with human rights organizations and the press.

We moved pretty slowly because we wanted to make sure everything we did was consistent with the family’s wishes – at first, his family was very resistant to have anyone talk about the case. As it became increasingly clear that Hao wasn’t going to be released any time soon, his family gave us more latitude in advancing his case.

Eventually, we posted a petition, designed to be delivered to president Hu Jintao. We called senators, congresspeople and the state department. Basically, to the best of our abilities, we represented Hao’s case to our audience of bloggers and journalists.

There’s a big challenge in doing this. We don’t really know Hao. Neither Rebecca nor I have ever spoken to the guy.

His sister, on the other hand, has known Hao all her life. Two months after his detention, Wu Na – Nina Wu – started blogging in Chinese on MSN Spaces. Nina has a good job in Shanghai in the financial sector, and is married with a young baby. She’s more or less living the Chinese dream… or was, until her brother was detained.

Nina was immediately able to share some sides of Hao we would never have seen – pictures of his time in the US, touring national parks; filming in China; and his lotus plant in his apartment in Beijing, beginning to die as Hao hasn’t been home to water it.

And she was able to tell us how she and her parents felt about Hao’s detention. Every time she writes, it’s a reminder that this isn’t an abstract issue about free speech, censorship and repressive governments – it’s a horrible situation that’s ripped apart the lives of everyone involved. When Hao is released, it probably won’t be possible for him to remain in China. Nina has discovered that she’s followed by security services as she goes about her daily routine.

Rebecca and I never asked Nina to blog. (We will the next time a situation like this arises.) Nina was inspired by Zeng Jinyan’s blog – Zeng is the wife of AIDS activist Hu Jia, who was detained for months by the authorities. She used her blog to promote his cause and share her feelings about his detention – when he was finally released, she published photos of him, emaciated, having lost 20kg while in custody. Lately she’s been posting in support of Nina and her work to promote Hao’s cause.

When we started working on Hao’s case, we were representing him, speaking on his behalf. There are situations where this is what advocates have to do – Nina can blog, while Darfuri refugees can’t. But the lesson we’ve taken from the situation is that advocacy is changing in the 21st century. It’s less about speaking on behalf of people and more about helping their voices to be heard. It’s less about speaking and more about pointing.

Not everyone gets that the playing field has changed.

In July of last year, Sir Bob Geldof launched the Live8 concert series. Unlike Live Aid, these concerts weren’t designed to raise money to address African issues – they were designed to “raise awareness”, in the hopes that this awareness would affect actions taken by G8 leaders on trade, debt reduction and aid. Awareness-raising largely involved filling stages with popular American and European musicians. One early crticism of Live8 was that involved so few Africans – eventually Peter Gabriel guilted Geldof into providing a second venue near London so that some Africans could be involved. The concert was scheduled at the same time as the “main”concert in London, basically guaranteeing that no one who came to hear Madonna would hear the African musicians.

One of many projects that sprang up around Live8 was an effort to get bloggers talking about Live8. There was a contest to give bloggers backstage access to the concerts so they could report to their readers and discuss both the concerts and the social implications. If you tagged your post “live8”, it would show up on Technorati’s Live8 aggregator, measuring the pulse of the blogosphere on the topic.

Some of the most enthusiastic users of the tag were African bloggers, who savaged the event, excoriated the organizers and generally made it clear that Geldof might be representing someone, but he sure as hell wasn’t speaking for them. Because these bloggers ended up aggregated on the same page as bloggers speculating about Madonna’s setlist and the unfair exclusion of the Spice Girls, this led to some pretty fascinating cross-cultural encounters. Bloggers like “M” of Thinker’s Room would argue that events like Live8 were useless at best, condescending and damaging to African economies at worst. European and American music fans would write back and say, “What’s your problem? We’re trying to do something good for you people!” And blogs like “African Bullets and Honey” would respond with thoughtful philosophical essays that argued that depriving Africans of ownership of their own problems was the worst possible form of colonialism.

In other words, even if very few Africans were invited on stage at Live8, they shared the stage in the blogosphere. And they offered a great reminder of the danger of speaking on behalf of someone – they may not want you to speak for them. And they may disagree with what you’re saying. Give them a chance to speak, and you may well discover that what they want is for you to shut the fuck up.

Technorati, to their credit, recognized what was going on and put together an aggregator of African blog posts, both to feature the fact that the conversation included African voices and to get rid of the confusion that came from juxtaposing reviews of Bono’s performance with critiques of the idea of development aid.

Here’s what Live8 organizers hadn’t counted on when they invited the blogosphere into the conversation: the makeup of the Internet changed radically over the past six years. As the internet grew from half a billion to a billion users, the European/North American/Japanese nature of the internet changed radically. Millions of Koreans, Chinese, Indians, Brazilians and, yes, Africans came online. In 1995, no one on the Internet knew you were a dog, but they generally knew you were white and were comfortable speaking English. That’s no longer a safe assumption.

As the next billion users come online, expect the net as we know it to change radically. English has already become a minority language in the blogosphere – that trend is going to increase as the next billion users join the net, coming largely from the global South.

There’s another revolution taking place at the same time that the Internet is diversifying. Most of the new users who are coming online don’t just “consume” content – they create it. They blog. They podcast. They post photos, or videos. This completely inverts the assumptions most of us who’ve worked on the Internet for the past two decades hold near and dear – we expected users to use email, then read the web, then maybe post to discussion groups or join an email list. Nope – the first things users do nowadays is take advantage of the read-write nature of the web.

All of which changes what our focus and priorities might be as advocates – people who want voices to be heard. Our job is no longer about representing the points of view we think are important – it’s about helping to people directly affected by problems and situations to represent themselves.

We started the Global Voices project in December 2004 – my cofounder, Rebecca MacKinnon, and I were increasingly fascinated by the voices we were hearing in the blogosphere. We wanted to find a way to feature these perspectives, in part because we both felt – and feel – like broadcast and print media do a poor job of sharing the perspectives and views of people who live in developing nations.

GVO is now a community of over 100 contributors, regional editors, translators and podcasters who cooperate to build a daily global newswire built from blogs. Most are volunteers – our regional editors and translators, who are asked to post every day, get a meagre salary. We’ve got one full time employee – a managing editor. The site is visited by over 600,000 unique visitors per month and is one of the top 150 most influential blogs in terms of incoming and outgoing links.

As we started working on the project, it quickly became apparent that, while there were problems accessing blogging tools, this was hardly a limiting factor. There’s work to be done – the tools need to be easier to use, need to be available in more languages, and we need internet connectivity in poor neighborhoods around the world. But we haven’t focused much on getting new tools built as part of GVO for the simple reason that new bloggers are coming online at a pace we can’t keep up with.

The fact that bloggers are adopting these tools doesn’t mean that there isn’t a need for training – it just means the need is a bit different than we might expect. We’ve found that it’s incredibly important to train people how to blog safely – that if they’re blogging about sensitive political issues in a country where speaking out might lead to their arrest, they need to take precautions and may want to blog anonymously. Producing guides like the book we produced with Reporters without Borders has become a major part of our work.

When we started this project 18 months ago, it was pretty uncommon to see blogposts in languages other than English. People understood that the audience reading blogs was an English-speaking audience and that is was tough to reach readers in another language. That’s changed very rapidly. English is a minority language in the blogopshere – it lags behind Japanese and, probably, Chinese as well. And we’re starting to see other languages – Arabic, Persian, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, French – develop large and thriving blogospheres. Being able to translate what’s being said in these blogospheres is a critical part of our work these days, and may become the majority of what we do as the project goes forward.

But it’s not just translation – there are a lot of blogposts out there that don’t make a lot of sense even if you speak the language they’re written in. In many cases, you need some history and context about what’s being talked about in a blogpost for it to make any sense to you. This is the main task our regional editors take on – trying to get a correspondent in Iran to explain not just what happens when an Iranian newspaper runs a cartoon of a Azeri portrayed as a cockroach, but why the reaction to the cartoon was so swift, fierce and angry.

At our best, we’re an amplifier for voices that might not otherwise be heard. Tunisian free speech activists start a site called Yezzi Fock – which means “We’ve had enough”, expressing their frustration with the Ben Ali government. We call attention to the site on Global Voices. Sometimes, we do a good enough job that other bloggers grab the story, like Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit. Other times, we help the mainstream media find stories they otherwise wouldn’t encounter.

To be very clear, we’re not the only folks doing this. Smart NGOs are discovering that blogging is a great solution to a wide variety of information problems. In Zimbabwe, civil rights Sokwanele is discovering that it’s almost impossible to publish in Zimbabwe through conventional means. But they’re able to publish online via a frequently-updated blog. It doesn’t reach as many Zimbabweans as they’d like, but people who are able to get online find themselves becoming “information brokers” and sharing information with other people throughout Zimbabwean society.

NGO Witness has been in the business of putting the tools of video publishing into the hands of activists for years. They give inexpensive video cameras and training to citizen groups and help them make video documentaries about problems in their own communities. Moving forward, Witness is trying to figure out how to deal with the reality that many cellphones now can make videos and that many people have access to the tools that Witness hands out.

But it’s not enough just to show video – here’s a screenshot of video from Minsk during pre-election protests in Belarus. By itself, the video isn’t very meaningful, unless you speak Belarussian. But with context and explanation, it’s a powerful document. The challenge for groups like Witness is translating and adding context to the documents they present.

Some organizations are discovering that they don’t want to use blogging themselves, but they want to give documents to bloggers for them to amplify. HRW decided that it was dangerous for them to blog given their reputation for publishing clearly thought out, well researched reports. But they’ve tried to make all their research highly accessible to bloggers and media, giving access to highly targetted RSS feeds.

Alice Backer has a terrific post on Global Voices, translating reactions to a slideshow posted on Seneweb.com. The slide show features images of Senegalese refugees who’ve left the country on rafts or makeshift boats, attempting to reach the Canary Islands – it includes images of people who didn’t survive the trip and pictures of those caught and returned home.

In the past week, the slideshow has generated over 250 comments from readers inside Senegal and in the diaspora, representing a wide range of views. Alice translates several of them, including ones that despair at the economic conditions within Senegal, ones that warn potential emigrees of the difficulty of making a life in Europe, and one purportedly from Senegal’s president. It’s a rich and moving conversation… and one I would have missed entirely unless Alice had been available to translate it…

I get a decent number of emails asking for opportunities to travel to Africa and work on technology projects. Since I haven’t worked with Geekcorps since September 2004, my advice on this topic is usually pretty generic – look at the UNITES program run by the UN Volunteers program, and if you’re a Canadian, look at Netcorps/Cyberjeune.

But occasionally specific opportunities come up and I’m able to offer a more direct recommendation. A few days ago, I heard from my friend Mark Davies. Mark is a British entrepreneur who founded the remarkable BusyInternet, the cybercafe and business center that serves as the heart of Ghana’s online business community. Mark has a new company, BusyLab, which is developing software relevant to the challenges of Africa, from software designed to allow trade of goods via SMS and the internet, to money transfer software, to automated systems to run cybercafes.

Mark’s got a great team of developers in Ghana, but they lack formal development experience. So Mark’s inviting experienced developers to come to Ghana, live in his (beautiful, comfortable) house in Accra and spend six months helping the team understand writing and following specifications, managing bugs and software versions, release management, testing, and all the other good stuff associated with professional software development.

If you’ve worked for several years in a production environment (in other words, if your code lived in a CVS… :-) and you’re competent to manage development in C++ or PHP… and if you’re interested in a job that will be a blast but won’t pay a salary… check out what Mark’s got to offer. He’s an amazing guy and, for the right person, this would be a lifechanging opportunity.

• welcome | irrepressible.info
  Amnesty’s efforts on blog censorship
  (tags: freespeech globalvoices)
• EastSouthWestNorth: Bus Uncle
  The amazing story of Bus Uncle… brilliantly documented by Roland Soong. Welcome to the generative internet…
  (tags: china internet media video globalvoices)
• 27B Stroke 6
  Report on California appelate ruling that bloggers were acting as journalists in reporting Apple memos
  (tags: blogs journalism law media)
• BORDERLINE
  Moises Naim on the absurdity of closing borders: “The only prices that dropped faster than shipping a cargo container from Shanghai to Los Angeles were those for sending e-mail, making phone calls, or rapid-firing text and images across borders.”
  (tags: globalism globalization economics)

Joshua Ramo has a beautiful meditation in a recent issue of Newsweek International about the joys of living life at “jet speed”. By calculating his total travel in a year and the total number of hours in that year, he discovers his average speed over the course of a year is roughly 45.8 miles per hour. Rather than being a sign of his alienation and unhappiness, this speed, for Joshua, is an emblem of a life that’s full to bursting with experience, sensation and contact.

I’ve met Joshua a few times – we have friends in common, including Martin Varsavsky, whose blog led me to Joshua’s article. And I have a life that’s generally overflowing with sights, sensations, wonderful people and a huge amount of air travel.

But my average speed is – thankfully – about a third of what Joshua averages. One of the main reasons for this is the fact that, in an odd way, I’m a homebody. For 15 of the past 16 years, I’ve lived in the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts and eastern New York. I moved here when I was 16 to attend college, and with the exception of a year living in Accra, have lived here – more or less – ever since.

I spent the morning at Tunnel City Coffee, the social hub of Williamstown, Massachusetts. As I drank two cups of iced coffee over the course of three hours, I traded nods and smiles with two dozen people I’ve known for a years, whether or not I know their names. I catch up with a colleage from Tripod, a professor I took several classes with and one I never studied with but always admired. I check email on the free wifi and listen to faculty grouse about grading papers. The mothers with babies come and go as a pack. The retirees arrive as couples and take over their tables.

Walking up the street to pick up mail at the post office, someone calls my name. It’s Sandra Burton, the chair of the dance department at Williams. For the four years I spent at Williams, she was the director of the dance ensemble I drummed for, my boss as I stage-managed the dance performance space, my professor when I studied African music and dance… and my surrogate parent, helping talk me through the academic, romantic and identity crises that come with being a college student. She reminds me that we haven’t seen each other for almost a year and we hug for a long time, then stand on a street corner and talk for half an hour, about mutual friends, fundraising, trips to Africa, a friend’s death…

The wonder of travelling around the world is that you never know what wonderful person you’re going to meet next. The wonder of being home is that you do.

It’s probably the only time I’ll spend in my hometown for a month or so. And it’s refreshing and rejuvenating as a warm shower and a long sleep after getting off a transpacific flight. I’m glad my average speed is slow enough that I get to enjoy these moments as well as the moments you only get when you’re in motion.

Jon Garfunkel takes a close look at recent efforts by friends of detained Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd El Fateh – including by Global Voices editors – to call attention to Alaa’s situation through use of a “googlebomb”. Jon is – justifiably – skeptical about the viability of the technique and investigates an alternative – paying for keyword ads of Google for activist purposes.

Because Jon is at least as prolix as I am, let me offer a quick summary of the first four parts of his six part article:

- Alaa Abd El Fateh, Egyptian blogger and activist, was arrested for participating in a public protest in Cairo on May 7th. Bloggers around the world reacted to his arrest with posts, badges, a wikipedia article, flash animations, and a googlebombing campaign, all of which are documented in an excellent article on Mark Glaser’s blog.

- Googlebombing is a technique where many bloggers link a word or phrase to a webpage, attempting to gain the top link on Google’s search results page for that search term. Search Google for “Arabian Gulf” for an example of a successful Googlebomb… or for “miserable failure”. (BBC has an article on the “miserable failure” hack, and Wikipedia has a comprehensive article on the technique.

Googlebombs can work when they try to link uncommon words or phrases to a site – they’re much harder to implement when linking to a common word. The googlebomb proposed for Alaa – linking the word “Egypt” to the Free Alaa blog – has an uphill battle, as “Egypt” is a pretty common term found in webpage anchor text.

- Jon speculates that buying Google AdWords might be a better way to advertise Alaa’s cause, and purchases ads on the keyword “Egypt”, as well as ads to call attention to his friend Dr. Yang Jingli, a Tienanmen Square activist currently detained in China. He discovers that these ads can cost a good chunk of change… especially if you want your ad to appear high up on the search page. In a sense, he encounters the same problem the Googlebombers do – choosing too common a term makes it very hard to control it within Google’s universe. But Jon is more successful in the sense that his actions immediately get his message onto Google’s results page, while the Googlebomb might take weeks or longer to work.

I’m grateful that Jon’s put such time into thinking through the issues surrounding these online activist techniques. There’s a strong tendency in the world of activism to act quickly, with little reflection on whether techniques are effective – it’s easy to argue that any effort is laudable, since lots of small actions might create large-scale changes. On the other hand, it’s easy for people to get discouraged when the actions they take don’t have the anticipated effect, which argues for the development of as sharp, refined activist tools as possible… which requires a close look at the success or failure of these different tools.