civic engagement
Buddy, can you spare a mentor?
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It was like a quarter-life crisis, but without the John Mayer theme song. I'd done everything I was supposed to do, and now, there were whole new questions. I realized I couldn't answer all these questions on my own; I needed a mentor (or two).
I was wrestling with new questions regarding direction, business planning, and management of Knowledge As Power. KAP is a small non-profit I founded nearly two years ago with a mission of including citizens in the legislative process by providing legislative information online. In the last two years, with a small board, a lot of boot-strapping, volunteers, and a lot of determination, we now have an alpha, were a 2006 Echoing Green Finalist, got 501 (c) 3 status (it only took the IRS 11 months to approve us!), interns, contractors, a few donations, and some press
MobileActive
MobileActive is a global network of organizations, technologists, organizers, and activists who are using mobile phones in their social change work.
Mobile phones have emerged as a campaign organizing tool across traditional socio-economic and cultural boundaries. Mobile phone campaigns have swung elections through innovative get-out-the-vote activities, have been used to ensure impartial elections through monitoring, have resulted in massive collective action to free political prisoners, and are being used in public health strategies.
Yet, while there is significant innovation all over the world, there is little aggregation of lessons learned from these campaigns and activities that is being collected and aggregated by civil society practitioners for their peers.
MobileActive seeks to better understand the strengths and limits of the medium, available technologies for campaigners, share lessons learned, feature campaign examples and tech tools so to increase activists’ ability to organize our constituencies with this new technology.
MobileActive 2005 convened in Toronto to bring together, for the first time, activists from around the world to explore the use of mobile phones in civic action campaigns. The MobileActive community and web site is an aggregation of the learnings from this convergence, stories from participants and their projects, and resources for activists interested in using mobiles in their campaigns.
MobileActive is now growing the network of mobile activists, to share knowledge and skills, and to provide a peer network, training, and resources to those interested in exploring mobile phones in their civic engagagement, mobilization, and civic action campaigns.
If you used mobiles in your campaign, please share your story at http://www.mobileactive.org! If you need resources, let us know! And if you want to join this growing network of activists from around the globe, profile yourself: http://www.mobileactive.org/profile
Welcome to MobileActive - http://www.mobileactive.org
