Empowering anti-genocide activists with the tools for community-based education, user-generated content and strong shared connections, the anti-genocide community will pool the collective knowledge of a growing movement for change.
The burgeoning Darfur movement — student rallies, Sudan divestment, green Save Darfur bracelets — is on the verge of truly transformative change: changing the way the world responds to genocide and mass atrocities. Whereas previous crises saw only inaction by politicians, there is a growing sense of political will for the responsibility to protect civilians anywhere from annihilation. In short, the movement is shifting “Never Again” from a promise we make to a commitment we keep.
The Genocide Intervention Network exists to empower individuals and communities to stop genocide — to build a permanent anti-genocide constituency that makes inaction in the face of mass atrocities politically unthinkable.
With the anti-genocide community website, we hope to empower individuals with the tools for community-based education, the strength for collective action and the connective tissue for long-term resilience. What was once only achievable with national rallies (difficult to plan, exclusionary by geography, organization-centric and hierarchical) is now being realized on a local level through community empowerment (organic, inclusive, local, network-centric and decentralized).
We want to expand the discussion beyond Darfur alone to a broader commitment to ending genocide, while engendering both local leadership and a sense of accountability to the communities facing genocidal crises that activists hope to represent.
We want to give anti-genocide activists ownership over their own participation, by encouraging them to develop their own pledge for action, their own slideshow on the crisis, their own map of their impact on the network — in short, their own voice for standing against genocide.
The Genocide Intervention Network is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that receives both individual donations and grants from foundations. Of individual donations (and grassroots fundraising) more than half presently goes directly to supporting civilian protection in Darfur .
We use the remainder of the money and foundation grants to support programmatic expenses such as this one. In the past we have received funding from Humanity United (previously the Omidyar Network), Draper Richards Foundation, the Bridgeway Foundation, Echoing Green Foundation, the US Institute of Peace, the Foundation Open Society Institute, the Shifting Foundation and the Gelitsman Foundation.
While a small amount of seed money would help us get this project off the ground, what we are really seeking is technical expertise and advice (see Resource Needs, below).
Achieving a critical mass for any community website is a challenge. However, our experience in a pilot campaign encouraging people to appear in photographs identified part of the “anti-genocide constituency” (the source of images used here) demonstrated significant interest.
As in any small nonprofit, staff time is at a premium, especially around technical issues. This is principally why we are seeking out support from the NetSquared community — while our organizing experience leads us to believe in the need for this campaign, we need external support in order to get it off the ground.
Expenses for web hosting and bandwidth would be covered in-house, but a few thousand dollars in seed money would help us initiate this project and acquire buy-in from our board. Beyond hosting costs, however, the true cost is staff time and expertise.
Thus, what we most seek from the NetSquared community is technical knowledge, consulting and advice on moving forward. In building a website amplifying the knowledge of a network, we want to take advantage of the deep knowledge present in the NetSquared community to make this the most feasible, accountable and effective project for social change possible.
Note: Images shown are ONLY rough mock-ups. Page layout and design could change as the project develops.
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The community home page
The focus in this stage will be building the “brand” of the anti-genocide movement. We want to empower individuals with the tools to educate their own communities — because local, community-based education will always be more effective than an action alert from on high. We want activists to begin thinking of themselves as part of a broader, permanent anti-genocide movement, and take pride in the effect they’ve had on growing it (e.g. the ForwardTrack map). An important piece of this ownership over one’s place in the movement is the writing of a personal pledge for anti-genocide activism. These pledges, along with the images of people declaring their participation in the anti-genocide constituency, will be prominently displayed on the home page.
Perhaps even more importantly, we want to give individual activists the tools to amplify their own voice, as well as direct access to the voices of those most affected by genocide and mass atrocities. Through the creation of slideshows and videos based on images and stories from the “front lines,” we hope to engender both leadership within local communities and a sense of accountability to the refugees and displaced persons activists represent. In the videos activists create, they can choose to focus on the conflict alone, stories from its survivors or the growth of the anti-genocide movement — or develop connections between the three.
The community media creation page
In this effort, we do not seek to recreate or supplant existing social networks or social networking bonds — in fact, we hope to make them stronger. Links to a person’s profile on other social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, coupled with the visible connections as part of the ForwardTrack map, reinforce the shared cause and community of anti-genocide activists.
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The community profile page (everything shown but event data is built in stage one)
The focus at this stage is the community-rated and -tagged content, creating new bonds and allowing new voices to emerge. Individuals can now share their own stories of activism through a blog, as well as report on events they have organized or attended. Aggregating event data from other Drupal sites (GI-Net and STAND) and possibly through APIs (e.g. Save Darfur’s Democracy in Action groups) allows the creation of a local anti-genocide calendar for each person.
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The final stage will integrate the tools necessary for activists to take action on issues relating to their interests. For those interested in Darfur, the congressional scorecard will encourage advocacy directed at members of Congress. An individual “action badge” will allow members to proudly display their record, and community-rated actions will allow popular, effective actions to rise to the top and be featured on the home page.
Anti-genocide action badge
Community-rated links on home page
Possible considerations at this stage include enabling a proximity search so members can connect with others in their area, and integration with fundraising widgets to allow members to collect donations for their favorite anti-genocide and humanitarian charities.
Through this project we hope to forge stronger ties between activists and anti-genocide organizations, and among the organizations themselves. Collaboration on specific campaigns could be increasingly fruitful. Advocacy utilizing the multimedia generated through the site (for instance, a photo petition to members of Congress instead of the usual letter) offers an array of exciting possibilities.
Our project seeks to create an anti-genocide community website designed to empower local activists with the tools to create community-based education, create user-generated content and establish strong shared connections among activists. This is a crucial step toward the establishment of a permanent anti-genocide constituency that will change the way the world responds to genocide.
Tools and technologies used on the site will include a library of images and stories for use in user-generated videos and slideshows, a “photo declaration” and anti-genocide pledge, an e-vite system with graphical impact tracking, user profiles with connections to other social networks (MySpace, Facebook, etc.) and local events, a community blog and community-rated actions (utilizing tagging and ranking), and integration into existing anti-genocide tools such as a congressional scorecard and advocacy hotline.
Our project is aimed at pooling the collective knowledge for social change present in our activists.
The Genocide Intervention Network was founded to empower individuals and communities with the tools to prevent and stop genocide. In particular, the genesis of our organization was enabling individual citizens to directly contribute (through donations and fundraisers) to peacekeeping and civilian protection on the ground in Darfur, Sudan. Coupled with traditional member-driven advocacy and community-based education, the Genocide Intervention Network seeks to help build the permanent anti-genocide constituency — thus our motto, “have a hand in stopping genocide.”
In her landmark book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, scholar Samantha Power investigates the repeated failures of US politicians to act in the face of brutal mass atrocities and genocide. In case after case, she found that political leaders were able to stand silent because there was no political will for action — it was safer to do nothing and apologize later. GI-Net envisions a world in which the international community recognizes its responsibility to protect civilians from genocide, and a permanent anti-genocide constituency drives world leaders to action.
While our primary focus is on Darfur, there are many other genocides, potential genocides and mass atrocities calling for a concerted action from the world — Burma, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire and Chechnya, just to name a few. Rather than perpetuate the history of ad-hoc groups of activists that disband when a conflict is resolved, GI-Net seeks to instill the idea of a larger anti-genocide movement in the minds of activists working on each individual conflict.
One of the most common requests we fulfill from our members is: “I’m hosting a fundraiser for Darfur. Do you have pictures I can show? And what should I say?”
We believe the most effective way to mobilize activists around an issue is local community-based education, and so we put significant resources into creating tools for equipping our members. We sponsor a Darfur congressional scorecard rating members of Congress on their record; we fund a national anti-genocide hotline, giving people the latest action items and connecting them directly to the relevant leaders; we publish regular Darfur news briefs summarizing the latest news, and a directory of organizations working on the issue; we list “ten things you can do right now to stop genocide” — far and away the most visited page on our website — which often features actions from other Darfur-focused organizations such as Save Darfur, Africa Action, Physicians for Human Rights, Amnesty International and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. We see ourselves as a broad anti-genocide organization, and as such enthusiastically encourage our members to support actions taken by other organizations working on the issue — we are not a closed system that only points back at our website and membership rolls.
We want to put the power in the hands of anti-genocide advocates to find their own voices in their activism. Instead of simply sending community leaders another CD of images from Darfur, we want to encourage activists to tell their own stories, to connect those with stories from Darfur, and to describe in their own words why standing against genocide is so important to them.
We are relying on a history of “network-centric” and user-driven advocacy campaigns (e.g. SorryEverybody.com/WereNotSorry.com, the MoveOn.org virtual marches and photo petitions, the anti-Hummer campaign) for our belief in the power of the individual. An extreme lack of materials exists, for example, on Darfur — what is available is from national organizations and in many cases, only to their own members.
We know there is extraordinary activist knowledge waiting to be amplified — because we saw it first-hand. When we began to coordinate Darfur activists through the Genocide Intervention Network and our STAND student campaigns via "social networking to stop genocide," we found dozens of MySpace groups and hundreds of Facebook groups already dedicated to the cause. We want to give these activists the tools to be effective — and then get out of their way.
We are also mindful of our role as mobilizing third-party advocates from relatively privileged positions in the United States and the Global North. We take to heart Ethan Zuckerman’s instruction that it’s “less about speaking and more about pointing.” There are incredible voices coming from survivors of genocide and mass atrocities, voices that often aren’t heard even within activist communities. In addition, the activists’ testimonials themselves — why they are involved, why they think the issue is important — are also critical to hear if we want to truly build a self-aware network to stop genocide.
In terms of specific campaigns, Human Rights First’s “Stand In for Darfur ” was a significant step toward bringing the voices of Darfur to the rest of the world. The ideas behind ForwardTrack and recent implementations such as Oh! Speakup! inspired the effort to enable the network to see its own growth. The Save Darfur Coalition’s local groups, built on the Democracy In Action platform, were a turning point in transforming the Darfur movement from a series of national rallies into a web of community discussions.
Finally, our own experience in social networking has demonstrated to us the value of letting our members speak for themselves. Ultimately the message is not ours, its theirs, and while we’d like a few more names on our membership rolls along the way, activists inspired in one area are reliably shown to be more committed across the board. We’re not afraid of telling activists to make their own choice about which action to support this week — even if it doesn’t end up being our own. The anti-genocide movement is bigger than any one organization, and we see our role as a catalyst and not as a gatekeeper.
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Profile editing/appearance:
Profile editing/appearance: Editing your profile info presents you with 7 tabs and each has its own options. This is a perfect example of too many options (most aren't even displayed in the profiles). For some points, take a look at the new myspace profile editor and the Ning platform. There's no clear direction with regards to what kind of widgets can be displayed either.
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Newfangled has been helping
Newfangled has been helping advertising agencies build better websites for their clients since our inception in 1995. We've continually helped our partners stay on top of it all through smart website design and development including our innovative grayscreen prototyping process and easy to use CMS. We also write Web Smart Newsletters, post to the Web Smart Blog, and engage in Web Smart Agency Consulting.
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Anti-Genocide Campaign
This looks great - I also
This looks great - I also vote for this project. I think a lot can be learned here and like how Ivan has identified some of the concerns.
Eric
Good luck!
Just a note to say I think this is a great project. We're including in the emails Grassroots.org is sending out this week as a staff pick.
Your planned work with Drupal sounds very intriguing; I'd especially like to see a Forwardtrack module integrated with Drupal's SimpleNews (or other mail system) at some point. Do you have anyone in mind to develop it?
We're working on a free, hosted nonprofit toolbox that will include Drupal-based tools, EGroupware, Democracy In Action's Salsa platform, telephone search engine optimization consulting, and free first-year domain name registrations (all integrated happily). We'll add more tools as our capacity to support them grows, but your work sounds more advanced than what we can support for free. Still, there may be some room for cross-talk on this, and I'd definitely like to stay posted on your project.
Netsquared project site: Grassroots Toolbox.
Good luck!
Dave.
I also voted for this project
After voting for our project Social Web tools for Developing Countries: Yankana.org, I voted for this initiative, because I believe it addresses a great cause. I personally support the Save Darfur Coalition so any related initiative focused on promoting a solution for terrible conflicts like this will be important.
Good luck!
Regards,
Eduardo Bejar
great plan!
I admire the work you have been doing. Your progect is similar to the one we are doing at TEN: http://www.netsquared.org/projects/proposals/building-a-community-of-mod...
In fact we even seem to be using the same technology. I would be happy to colaborate with you and share ideas and resources as we are taking similar paths for differnt causes.
More proposals about empowerment and participatory media
Like everyone on here, I'm selecting projects to vote on in addition to submitting a proposal. To see what I picked -- many of them involving similar ideas of empowerment and participatory media -- take a look at my slate.
--ivan
?? “less about speaking and more about pointing.” ??
Colonialism and empowerment
Dennis,
You are absolutely right that throughout history (and especially the history of social change) there is an arrogant mentality that runs through nonprofits and similar organizations talking about how they will "save" various people in the Global South.
I want to explain to you why I think we are doing our best not to engage in this kind of neo-colonialism.
First, you should know that our main program as the Genocide Intervention Network is to support civilian protection in Darfur by the African Union. The AU peacekeepers in Darfur are made up primarily of South African, Rwandan and Ghanaian soldiers. I think it's important that our work is about fulfilling the need that Darfurians themselves have declared, in countless interviews with at least a dozen humanitarian organizations (Oxfam, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, International Crisis Group, Physicians for Human Rights, International Rescue Committee, the Red Cross, UNICEF, Caritas, etc.). Darfurians are asking for protection, and our main focus — more than half of all the donations we receive — go to supporting that goal.
Second, I would encourage you to read Ethan Zuckerman's whole post that I refer to in the "pointing and not speaking" statement. He is not suggesting, and we are certainly not endorsing the idea that only the Global North or those in the United States are allowed to or interested in or benefit anyone by pointing. Ethan himself is involved in a project called Global Voices Online, which amplifies the voices of those who, as you say, are below the "glass ceiling." Blogs and commentary on Global Voices comes directly from the communities and countries being discussed — there is no third-party representation there. So I don't want to inadvertently cause you to think that Ethan is working to silence voices from the Global South, because I think he is really doing exactly the opposite.
Third, and this is really where the rubber meets the road, so to speak: What we are trying to find is the best way for people in the United States — who have, as you correctly note, a huge amount of privilege and wealth and power — to support and empower those individuals and communities which are victims of genocide and mass atrocities. As described in Samantha Power's book , the United States (and other countries in the Global North) have historically not done anything in the face of genocide or mass atrocities due simply to a lack of political will among citizens — essentially, it was easier for politicians to do nothing and apologize later than take a political risk by acting to stop the genocide.
Now, I want to be clear here, there are certainly many possible ways of intervening poorly, in an arrogant, disempowering, or militaristic way. The case of Iraq has, I think, put brutal clarity to that point. But we are not simply trying to mobilize people to blindly call for intervention at any cost. All of our projects fall under the framework of the Responsibility to Protect, an in-depth report created to address the failures of the world community following the Rwandan genocide. It lists specific criteria for intervention and methods for doing so (and in so doing excludes the war on Iraq). Our project is about how to mobilize people in the United States around this specific kind of intervention, and around the larger notion that when genocide occurs, we all have a human responsibility to work to end it. That's what this NetSquared proposal is about.
I agree that creating on-the-ground community organizations, truth and reconciliation commissions, nonviolent peace teams or other similar organizations (e.g. the Fellowship of Reconciliation or Nonviolent Peaceforce) is an important project. We believe that it's just as necessary to mobilize people in the Global North — people who have wealth and privilege, but are sadly unaware of what they can (responsibly) do with it — to support and empower these communities and civilian protection initiatives like the African Union peacekeeping force.
You are right to outline the minefields of elitism that often keep nonprofits in the Global North from truly serving the communities they wish to help. I have done my best to explain why I think we have successfully navigated around those mines, at least for the moment. But any suggestions for improvement from you would be most helpful.
I want to leave you with one of my favorite quotes, which comes from a group of aboriginal activists in Australia from the 1970s, and I think sums up the kind of work I try to do: "If you have come to help me you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."
Thanks for taking the time to write!
Not OFFICIALLY part of this proposal, BUT
As I mentioned to Bryan at the NTC conference yesterday, I see a LOT of room for collaboration between this project and WITNESS's Hub. Essentially I see the Hub as fulfilling a vital role of recording human rights abuses "in the field" and propagating them into the Global North. And I see the anti-genocide community being well-positioned to remix that footage into compelling, user-generated, participatory media for use in any number of compelling advocacy initiatives.
So if both of these projects move forward one way or another, I see a lot of cross-pollinating happening, and to great effect.