This is a post that’s long overdue, since the time the film was released! I was spurred to write it this morning, as I’m quite excited to be on a panel discussion at the screening of Tactical Tech’s film called 10 Tactics – Turning Information into Action.

The screening is at the Conference Room of National College, Bandra today and is being hosted by Point of View.  I’m often asked what Info-Activism is, and this film is a must-see for all those who are curious about, interested in and work in the area. I’m also often asked whether I’m a rights activist or a digital activist – and I say no, I’m an ethnographer and researcher who is sometimes an accidental information activist. I’d also broaden the scope of the relevance of these 10 Tactics to those who are working in the social media area, and to those in the corporate world, who’s focus of work is in developing products, services and strategies in a world where customers, users, consumers are already exchanging information, having conversations, and learning often much faster than organizations are. Or simply, it’s for those who care and already use these tools – how can you get more involved in making a difference?

From the 10 Tactics website:

What is 10 Tactics?

10 tactics provides original and artful ways for rights advocates to capture attention and communicate a cause. It includes a 50-minute film documenting inspiring info-activism stories from around the world and a set of cards; with tools tips and advice, for you to work through as you plan your own info-activism

The film features 35 info-activism stories told from the point of view of advocates in 24 different countries including Lebanon, India, Tunisia, Egypt, Kenya, Indonesia, South Africa and the UK.

The film is shared at the website as 10 Tactics, along with Tactics cards that cover a case study, a video story, suggestions and tips, and a featured tool. The 10 Tactics are:

1. Mobilizing people
2. Witness and record
3. Visualize your message
4. Amplify personal stories
5. Just add humour
6. Manage your contacts
7. How to use complex data
8. Use collective intelligence
9. Let people ask the questions
10. Investigate and expose

(I’m featured in Tactic 8 – Use Collective Intelligence – here’s the gist of what I said – “We have communities that we have developed over time in several spaces on the web – on blogs, Facebook, Twitter. What these tools allow you to do is network with all of your online communities, to operate as hubs of connected people. So when something happens and you need to respond, it’s about the spontaneous mobilisation of a community that already exists online, through the multiple nodes and hubs that you have created as you leave your footprints on the web.”

Tactic 8 – Use collective intelligence from Tactical Technology Collective on Vimeo.)

The project came about at the Info-Activism camp held in February 2009, which I was very privileged to have attended.

We’ve also used collective intelligence and swarming way back in 2004 when the Tsunamis had devastated parts of Asia and then again in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina – each of these on a different scale, and using other technologies like blogs and wikis and Skype.

If you’re interested in this area, make sure you view the whole film, all 10 tactics! And there are screenings all over the world, so do go for them, and participate in the discussions.

Priyanka Kargupta is an 8 year old living in Maryland, USA. She’s set up Kids for Mumbai – to help those affected by the Mumbai Terror Attacks.  I personally don’t know her, just got an email from her, and would encourage you to assess it for yourselves before donating.  She’s provided links to her Dad and has her own blog. I’d like to know more details around who the funds are going to for disbursement.

Fighting Back the Carnage at Mumbai
on November 26-29, 2008 

Kids for Mumbai
www.kidsformumbai.org

I’m quite impressed with what she’s doing. I do hope she is able to achieve her goal. I’d love for her to build up a movement around this where all kids all over the world are made increasingly conscious and aware that there are other kids like them who are being affected and violated every single day.

My friend Tracey Rankin was here last year and she had shared a lovely thought with me then. She told me that for Christmas 2007 she planned to gift her two young nieces an account with a non-profit where they would send money to a child affected by some form of violence in the developing world. What I liked about her plan was that her nieces and the children they were sponsoring would be in constant touch with each other via email.  I forget which NGO she spoke of, just thought it’s a nice thought to share as Christmas is upon us.

A whole lot of questions are being asked about whether the Twitter #mumbai feed was citizen journalism or not. Many ‘sides’ are emerging in this debate. I found this post (thru’ a tweet by @MaryHodder) which asks How Should Journalists Use Twitter? I’m not so sure it’s the right question to be asking … here’s what I said in a comment there:

“I was one of those Tweeting the terror attacks from my apartment in Mumbai, which was about 8 kms away from the centre of the attacks. When I began tweeting about what I was seeing on tv (yes) and re-tweeting accounts others were talking of from the ground, I don’t think there was any conscious intention for the twitter stream to become a source of citizen journalism. We were sharing our confusion, our shock, our sadness, our rage. We also then began sharing useful information around injured lists and what was required by hospitals as they emerged. Some twitterers in Mumbai were on the ground sending updates from hospitals and from the centre of the attacks.

That tools like twitter, blogs, flickr enabled this spontaneous outpouring of emotion, information, rumours, panic, confusion, anger is quite amazing to me. The twitter #mumbai stream reflected all these nuances as we experienced them. If this isn’t a form of reporting, tell me why. I do believe it brought a real (face to the) horror to the terror attacks to the world, where people could empathize with what was going on. India is not alone in its fight against terrorism. Just yesterday, I wrote in a commentary at CNN:

“The “we” I speak of is not an organization but a loosely joined community. We are bonded, and I truly believe that in the face of utter horror, wherever it might occur, we have a strong pillar in this emotional connection we feel as equal human beings and not in our narrow identities prescribed by nationality or religion or race or gender. This is an evolving revolution sparked by how people are using social tools on the Web.”

That’s the revolution really – the discourse must shift from an argument about one vs the other into a discourse around how social tools are allowing people to channel their emotions and harness them to mobilize into action. It’s not a war nor an either-or between MSM and citizen reporting. We saw a symbiotic relationship between the two during this disaster. Each helped the other. MSM acknowledges it – look at the number of stories being done on how Twitter worked (or didn’t). Likewise with bloggers and tweeters, who leant on mainstream media as their source of information in many instances.”

The full piece I wrote for CNN is here - How social media shared pain and rage in Mumbai

Update:

See Neha’s roundup of posts in criticism of TV reporting during the crisis at Global Voices Online – don’t miss the comments there.

And Stuart’s call for counter-intuitive thinking.

{updated: 28 November 10.30 am IST}

Some helpline numbers:
List of Injured and Deceased
JJ Hospital +91 22 23739031
St George’s Hospital – +91 22 22620240
Mumbai Police’s Helpline Numbers
Taj helpline numbers for info about people stuck inside – +91 -22-66574322, +91-22-66574372, local toll free 1-800-111-825
Trident Hotel Helpline : 011-23890606, 011-23890505, 9810956888 | Dir Corp Comm, Oberoi Hotels
For Info on terrorist cars – call DG Control Room – 9122 22023366
Send an sms -type BLOOD and send it to 96000 97000
Info on Terrorist cars – call 9122 24937755/24937747
US helpline 888-407-4747 Brazilian help line 9820686143 (C) CNN IBN FA 1-613-996-8885 from Canada, 1-800-387-3124 E
For UK
Pinstorm Mumbai Help Page

Terror attack coverage in social media:

Wikipedia entry on 26/11 Mumbai terror
Real Time Citizen Journalism in Mumbai Terror Attacks – keep checking it for updates!
Arun Shanbhag has some poignant pictures and prose on his first-hand experience of the terror attacks
Twitter updates – they’re fast and furious
Vinu’s Flickr stream of live pictures
Global Voices Online evolving page

We’re trying to help contact people in Mumbai through the MumbaiHelp blog. I’ve been tweeting almost all night too from Mumbai. Upset and angry and bereft.

Here’s an interview I did with Jim Clancy at CNN where I talked of what we are feeling and doing here in Mumbai:

And I wanted to point to a couple of insightful analytical posts around the use of social media in this event. One from Amy Gahran on tracking a rumour as Twitter was used extensively to cover events during and after the terror attacks.

The other is by Emily Geertz (my Worldchanging colleague and friend) on her learnings around local crises, global emergencies and networked civil societies and their implications for using social media tools like blogs and Twitter to act against global warming.

I rediscovered this TED talk by James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds.

James Surowiecki pinpoints the moment when social media became an equal player in the world of news-gathering: the 2005 tsunami, when YouTube video, blogs, IMs and txts carried the news — and preserved moving personal stories from the tragedy.

. Thanks to @gauravonomics for pointing to this on Twitter.

I remember in a post on my reflections I had referred to insect societies as a metaphor to describe the interdependence and decentralized approach we took with the South East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami blog. And had also stated there:

Today, I believe that no crisis on this scale or magnitude will ever be handled again without sms, blogs, and wikis. That social tools will become a natural extension of rapid adaptation to chaotic conditions.

James Surowiecki also talks of the dark sides of blogs and social networks – one of the dangers of spending a lot of time on the internet is that the more tightly linked we become to each other, the harder it is for each of us to remain independent. The network starts to shape your views – which has a lot of benefits, but the problem is that groups are only smart when the people in them are as independent as possible. This is the paradox of the Wisdom of Crowds – the danger of a circular mill. Surowiecki talks of a circular mill of death where ants march in a circle, thinking they are following the leader, but actually just going around and around until they all die. He states as an example, memes that emerge from the blogosphere.

As I observe the progression of social media, I do feel we are more than ever, grappling with this paradox. There is no doubt in my mind that the Wisdom of Crowds as Surowiecki describes it can be huge. It has been transformational for me personally and professionally.

However, what I’m also seeing is less jazz play and improv in the blogworld, as we did in the early days of conversational blogging. We read the same stuff, we link to the same stuff – we did that then too – but there’s so much blogging today that it’s becoming almost impossible to escape following the echo. The economics of the market has begun determining what we blog about. Communities and networks (like with the social media and PR blogger scenes), while helping professionals in the space form frameworks and value for clients, are making many of us shy away from truly independent thinking as we seek easy answers and smart ways to convince our Clients to ‘buy’. We’re very good at re-framing and recycling the same stuff and we’ve learnt to build and manage our Whuffie to market ourselves in a post-scarcity economy. And we’re looking for easy answers.

I look through my GoogleReader and I see only a few posts with interesting original thinking in them today. Or maybe the gates of attention are allowing very little to come in? Twitter has exposed me to a whole lot of new and interesting people and thinking, and has replaced my GoogleReader as my dashboard for the day. It’s definitely my hangout space today. But I am greedy and don’t want to lose the breadth of good stuff that comes through in my newsreader.

So how do we resolve this – adopt the good from our networks and yet break away from the circular mill?

Preoccupation with whuffie + easy answers = the circular mill of death?

It’s a trap I am falling into. I don’t really have a solution. Should I be following more people on Twitter – this scares me! How do I find more diversity today? That wow and magic and flow of serendipitous discovery in my early blogging days just isn’t happening enough today. In my view, what the Wisdom of Crowds should mean is a collection of individuals with independent thinking that is allowed to emerge and grow in the collective. We’ve got to guard against excessive averaging out, imitative behaviour and aggregation. I’m just going to keep looking for the mouse!

Bonus Link: Gaurav just did a post around his take on Crowdsourcing, Wikinomics and the Wisdom of Crowds.

Volunteers on the world wide web are getting ready to help as Hurricane Gustav gathers fury heading towards the Northern Gulf Coast. I was alerted to this through tweets by Andy Carvin, (@acarvin) who’s coordinating these efforts:

* Gustav Information Center is up

* Follow live updates on Gustav at Twitter – search for #gustav

* IRC channel – #interdictor to coordinate volunteer efforts

* There’s also a mobile information centre. Click here to access on any mobile phone including the iPhone.

They’re also planning to build off our KatrinaHelp wiki which makes a lot of sense, as it has a good structure and some useful resources (which may need updating).  UPDATE: Gustav Wiki is up

Follow @markmayhew and @gustavreporter for live updates from New Orleans, as it is in the process of getting evacuated.

There’s also a growing Wikipedia entry on Hurricane Gustav.

Hurricane Gustav is still being described as a Category 4 storm, but meteorologists are forecasting that the storm will gain strength as it passes over Cuba and may emerge in the Gulf of Mexico as a Category 5 hurricane. USA Today

See the full Hurricane Advisory here.

I’ve seen no such effort around the recent floods in India on the other hand, where many have died and many more homeless, but it’s very difficult to do when there is almost no connectivity in the regions affected. Here are a couple of useful blogs I found:

Bihar Flood Relief

Bihar Flood operation relief 

Rohit Gupta is updating us on the real situation from Jaipur on Twitter.

…. to break my blogging hiatus. How helpless we are under the force of nature’s fury. Myanmar Cyclone 28,458 deaths & 33,416 missing. China Earthquake almost 10000 dead & mounting. All of this in less than 10 days.

There’s been a huge load of blogging and tweeting live as the earthquake and its aftermath unfolded, with first accounts – reports, images and videos from those in the zone, as it happened.

The Worldwidehelp group blog and wiki sprung back into action on May 4, with the Myanmar cyclone – there’s a huge load of information on aid resources available at the Nargishelp wiki now. Many of our contacts on the ground are saying that it’s been difficult and very political trying to get aid quickly through to those affected in Myanmar. We’re also blogging updates on the Sichuan earthquake, and will try and put up information on help required and aid agencies as we get the information.

Tags: Asia, China, Earthquake, Myanmar, Cyclone, Nargis, Floods, Breaking News, Disaster, Emergency, Humanitarian, Relief, Rescue

Aparna Ray, in a post at Global Voices Online links to several blogs that are trying to garner aid and resources to help victims of Cyclone Sidr. [Image on right courtesy BBC News]. Towards the end of the post, she shares this simple yet cool use of SMS to get people to donate:

Bangla blogging platform Somewherein, in association with Save the Children, has launched an innovative SMS based campaign “Jagoron” (which literally means ‘the awakening’) to enable those living in Bangladesh to do their bit in aid of Sidr victims. The campaign works as follows:

A mobile phone user types SAVE and sends SMS to a given number. Each SMS costs Bangladeshi Taka (BDT)2. Then Somewherein and other sponsors add a certain monetary figure, currently standing at 15BDT (this is a dynamic figure which will go up as more corporate sponsors join the campaign) for every BDT2 generated through the SMS and the total amount is deposited in the Save the Children Cyclone Relief fund.

For those living outside Bangladesh, Somewherein requests them to send their donations directly to the Save the Children Cyclone Relief fund as this SMS facility is available for local residents only.

Am wondering whether an application like Twitter can enable donations like this on a larger global scale!

In a chat with her, Aparna also pointed me to the right panel at the blog, which has another cool use of SMS. Only this time, it’s SMS-Blog! It’s in Bangla, so I had to ask her to interpret it for me. It was set up to gather breaking news and all comments sent in are posted in the right panel. More on how it works, and how it’s being used, in Aparna’s words:

well its very simple…the blog gives directions @bba . eg., @bba curfew relaxed from 8am to 10pm. send to 5455. and it gets posted on the blog, that’s it. and the right hand bar of the blog reflects the comments. since its sms generally comments are short. but people are now using it even to wish happy birthday or send general messages . its useful and fun! and taps the Asian’s love for texting

Very cool!  Also check out Mobile Active for more on mobile phones and civic action.

Send your panties to Burmese embassies as a sign of protest for the atrocities being committed by the Burmese regime. A new wave of activism, Panties for Peace – a manoeuvre meant to embarrass and insult the Junta:

“The manoeuvre is a calculated insult to the junta and its leader, General Than Shwe. Superstitious junta members believe that any contact with female undergarments – clean or dirty – will sap them of their power, said Jackie Pollack, a member of the Lanna Action for Burma Committee. Not only are they brutal, but they are also very superstitious. They believe that touching a woman’s pants or sarong will make them lose their strength,” Ms Pollack told Guardian Unlimited.”

My friend Ange is in the process of setting up a blog for this too .. one of the pages that’s ready there is a list of Burmese Embassy addresses where you can send in your panties. A great way for women to protest!!!

Brief Edit: conversation in the comments to this post made me reflect .. there is lots for marketers and PR folk to learn from online activism that uses social software so effectively to gather community support – this is just one example. “Technology with heart” is how I’ve described social media in this context earlier!

Tags: burma, freeburma, burmaprotests, burmaactivism, humanrights, pantiesforpeace, panties, onlineactivism