This week I went to a screening of a documentary called 10 Tactics at Busboys & Poets here in DC. The event was put on by 350, EchoDitto and Free Range Studios. Free Range and EchoDitto are technology communications firms (especially dealing with the web) that work with non profits and organizations for social change.

350 is an international campaign to alert the world of the climate crisis revolving around the amount of CO2 in the air (we need to get below 350, could you guess?)

My impressions of the documentary

The documentary was a set of 10 tips for how organizations can use social media and mobile technologies to mobilize their resources and spread their messages. The documentary featured numerous rights activists explaining how they use these technologies to bring about social change. Some of these tools are probably quite familiar to you: say, for instance FaceBook, YouTube, Twitter, and Google Earth. Others however, may not be, like Freedom Fone and Frontline SMS, both which use cell phones to reach people where internet and computers cannot.

I enjoyed the documentary and the comments afterwards because it gave me some insight into what this “progressive minded social change-bringing technology movement” is all about. Those are just some of the words that come to mind. My understanding is that there are (web) communications firms out there that specialize in non-profit social change oriented clients, and they build solutions to help these organizations make their goals (empower girls in Kenya, reduce domestic violence in Middle Eastern countries, help farmers in XYZ…) a reality. PS, you can watch the documentary on the 10 tactics website.

They were giving out some printed material targeted to non profits to show them how these tactics can be translated into practical solutions. I picked one of them up, which is pictured here in the photo, about using cellular communications to solve problems. Interesting stuff.

A lot of the tactics seemed pretty basic, but hearing about real world implementations was inspiring. One thing I took away was the importance of communicating individual stories, yet the need for identity protection when freedom of speech is a crime. One cool story showed the use of Geotagging (providing geographic data for published information) in tandem with Google Earth. Human rights activists in Tunisia geotagged content created about human rights abuses in Tunisia to the presidential palace. Smart.

The future never knows

As a Spanish major, I definitely see the possibility of combining my language skills with my web prowess to target organizations in Latin America. If I go to Ecuador this summer, I hope to get a more formulated idea about what direction I could take in the future, if I choose to go down this path.