Garth Moore is US deputy director of new media for ONE. Before ONE, Garth worked with various nonprofit campaigns and causes, including foreign aid, health, climate, and animal welfare. He has a MA in communication from John Hopkins University. Garth follows global technology, social media and online organizing topics on Twitter at @garthmoore.
We’ve had an amazing response to our “Tweet at the G8″ action. Thousands of tweets were submitted to the ONE Street Tweeter on Twitter and through our online form. We culled through a ton of messages and painted several of them along routes to Camp David — where this weekend’s G8 meetings are being held — and in DC near the White House.
So watch a behind-the-scenes look at the ONE Street Tweet. And a huge thank you again to everyone who sent their messages to @ONEStreetTweet.
Then, take a look at just the thousands of messages we’ve received on our ONE Street Tweet gallery.
There’s nothing more frustrating than reading an article that disparages online advocacy as “slacktivism” or “clicktivism.” Both terms derogatorily define online petitions, tweets and web messages as nothing more than feel-good measures that purport to support some kind of issue or social cause but really have little practical effect.
The ”slacker-activists as armchair do-gooders who don’t make a difference” argument has been made by the Guardian and Malcolm Gladwell, among others. Social movements with strong online interactions rarely are granted any credence compared to offline actions.
We have a month to get loud and make a difference. One month. In four weeks time, the G8 leaders will meet Camp David in the United States to discuss a variety of issues — agriculture in the developing world being one of them. Our best chance to address hunger and poverty will be at that moment when world leaders can help each other lead on these issues. But these leaders won’t make a decision in a vacuum, they need to hear from us.
Starting on Thursday, April 19 through April 30, ONE and a stellar group of nonprofits and NGOs are jumping Twitter to ask their members to tweet their leaders to tell them to keep poverty issues on the table at this G8. The issues range from hunger, disease, vaccines and economic growth. For the next 11 days, we need you to help push out these messages to your Twitter streams and get your friends and followers involved.
Oxfam America has released an eery, fairytale-ish new video to call attention to US policy on international food aid. Titled “Food Games,” the video shows a Republican and Democratic couple waging a very stylish and darkly cinematographic food fight. Oxfam America says on their blog,
“The video is a gamble, trying something new. It’s not a typical style for Oxfam. And it’s very atmospheric, rather than explanatory. We think the waste and corruption in the US international food aid program is an outrage and fundamentally means that desperately poor and vulnerable people do not get the assistance they should. But getting attention to this problem and—even harder—getting policy reform has been a big challenge.”
Watch Enough project’s video below (WARNING: Contains some graphic scenes, viewer caution is advised).
ACT NOW: Click here to find out how you can take action with Enough.
“We’ve seen what happens when there are no witnesses”
This powerful sentence launches a startling new four-minute video from George Clooney and the Enough Project documenting their recent trip to the Sudan’s Nuba Mountains. While filming in the mountains, they witnessed rocket attacks and aerial bombardment by the Sudanese government against the Nuban people in South Kordofan.
Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 campaign — a campaign to bring indicted war criminal and Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) Joseph Kony to justice — struck a chord this week to the tune of more than 63m YouTube video views with more than 500,000 comments and an additional 14m Vimeo views (as of this posting). Invisible Children’s Facebook page has grown to almost 3 million likes, the Twitter hashtag #kony2012 is off the charts, and thousands of article references in Google News searches.
Invisible Children’s campaign has been hailed as both brilliant and inspiring and has been criticized as being oversimplistic, with some arguing that the campaign doesn’t dive into some of the most pressing issues around the LRA, including the need for real economic development in northern Uganda if the horrors of the LRA’s atrocities are truly to be consigned to history. But there’s no doubt that the campaign has brought the story of the LRA to enormous audiences that had never heard Kony’s name before. And Invisible Children has responded to criticisms of their campaign video on their blog with a thoughtful and credible response.
For a deeper examination into the LRA, the International Crisis Group offered a compelling analysis of the Lord’s Resistance Army titled, “LRA: A Regional Strategy beyond Killing Kony”. In their 2010 analysis, the ICG recommended “a regional problem that requires a regional solution” and suggested a strategy that covers civilian protection and national ownership for what they term as a “twenty-year-old cancer.” Learn more on ICG’s website.
You can also read more from Washington Post columnist and Senior ONE Adviser Michael Gerson’s latest piece titled “The controversy over Kony 2012.”
Mac-Jordan Degadjor is a Ghanaian social media entrepreneur and rising star among global tech bloggers. The 26-year-old recently spoke about the positive effects of social media at the TEDxYouthInspire conference in Ghana’s capital city of Accra and was spotlighted in the Christian Science Monitor’s “Thirty Ideas from People Under 30.” We asked Mac-Jordan to explain why mobile tech advancements are important for Ghana’s economic and social growth.
Why is Ghana ready for a mobile technology boom? Are investors looking to Ghana as a market ready to advance with mobile?
Anytime I’m asked if Ghana is ready for the mobile technology boom, my answer is always YES. In Ghana, there are two major organizations providing locals with the business and technology skills they need to leverage ideas into successful mobile web companies: Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology and Mobile Web Ghana.
New opportunities are showing up that make it possible for low-income economies to leapfrog other countries by adopting technologies that are suitable to their specific circumstances. I’m happy to say that Ghana is taking that bold step in adopting new mobile technologies. Take a critical look at the continent: Africa has more than 110 million Internet users, a number that is poised to grow by 2400 percent in this decade alone.
What about Ghana’s market makes it ready for mobile phone technology? How are smartphones being introduced into the market? Can bandwidth improvements keep up with the technology?
Right now, some of the world's biggest oil companies are fighting to keep some of their deals with foreign governments secret. Let's tell big oil we won't be bullied.
Cuts to poverty-fighting programs won't balance the budget, but they will set back progress on Canada's development priorities and risk jeopardizing existing investments.
2011 marks 30 years since the first cases of AIDS were documented. Take a closer look at the specific, achievable goals we must hit by 2015 to make this year the beginning of the end of AIDS.
