DigiActive documents digital activism

I’ve gotten a great deal of feedback on my Cute Cats talk, which is very gratifying. It’s been a useful reminder that there’s a great deal of interest in digital activism, the practice of using online tools to advocate for offline political change. (Businessweek ran a pretty good article on digital activism a month back, focused mostly on online donations and on Facebook organizing.)

I’ve done my best to outline some of the best developing world examples of digital activism on this blog – regular readers will likely note that almost all the examples in the Cute Cats talk have been discussed on this blog previously. There’s a small but growing cadre of folks documenting digital activism, including Katrin Verclas’s MobileActive site. And there’s a new entrant to the field, which I’m very excited about.

DigiActive is a project by web activist Mary Joyce and her collaborator Amine, a Moroccan activist who is remaining semi-anonymous in conjunction with this project. The site is designed to document instances of digital activism, and to encourage more people to use these tools for the purposes of social change.

The site is currently in alpha – Mary and Amine are offering posts indicative of directions they’d like to see the site go in… and they’re recruiting volunteer contributors who can write more stories in the future. If you’re interested in the field of digital activism, writing for DigiActive would be a great way to learn lots more about this emerging field. Please check it out.