CivicActions

On Sunday I hear with much sadness about the Cyclone that hit the Irrawady Delta in Burma. With each day the news gets worse. Some 22,000 Burmese presumed dead. Sometimes an event happens that in an instant captures the attention of the world, while even larger tragedies go unnoticed for decades. Such is the case in Burma. Back in the mid nineties I was involved in the Free Burma movement on college campuses, specifically at NYU, and helped pass selective purchasing legislation in the NY City Council.

Amnesty International has a really powerful campaign up right now called "Unsubscribe Me" (from the "war on terrorism's" torture practices).

Who Are the World's Most Influential?

Take a moment and Vote for Peter Gabriel to get a spot on this year's Time 100. In the article, he's credited with launching 'the Hub, a so-called YouTube for human rights' which was built with Drupal by a number of the folks right here at CivicActions!

It is time for Google to put its mouth where its money is.

The Internet search and advertising delivery giant has again opposed shareholder resolutions that would have required it meet minimum standards of internet freedom. These are very modest proposals, that if adopted would have allowed Google to demonstrate that it understands that a totalitarian internet is evil, and that Google will not be evil.

Amnesty International launched a total overhaul of their website on December 10th (World Human Rights Day). The new site was developed in Drupal, with CRM components provided by CiviCRM and was integrated with a sister project to migrate Amnesty International's ancient lotus notes database of 50K+ reports and press communications to alfresco (http://alfresco.org), an open source document management system.

Today, December 10, 2007, marks two important birthdays:

On November 7th, CivicActions launched the WITNESS Video Hub, (more information about the Hub can be found here on our site).

Richard Stallman was visiting my home this week, and he picked up a new book I had on my coffee table. The next morning, he mentioned that he had read The END of AMERICA, Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, by Naomi Wolf, just published by Chelsea Green Publishing. RMS told me that he couldn't put the book down. He read the entire book that night. He also mentioned that he had blogged it as URGENT. "Really?" I asked.

Amnesty International USA just launched tearitdown.org, and with it an online movement to tear down the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Visitors to the new Web site can eliminate one pixel from a photo of Guantanamo by signing a pledge protesting the U.S. government's detention center. This is extremely cool!

Two months ago, we were honored to be considered (along with Development Seed), as one of the two finalists to take on a series of sprints for the development of the new Amnesty International site. In late May, we were informed that we had been awarded the engagement. Two weeks ago in London, Ken Jordan, Jacob Singh, and I met with the Amnesty team for a 2 day engagement kick-off. We are on track to present the results of our first sprint in early July.