Use of Information and Communication Technology by Social Movements

On the 14th of November 2003, at the European Social Forum held in Paris, France, members of social movements and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) met to discuss how they useInformation and Communication Technologies (ICT). The workshop was organized by Christina Haralanova from Internet Rights Bulgaria Foundation, with the cooperation of Les Pénélopes.

Social movements and NGOs generally use ICTs with the following objectives:
 To communicate efficiently with limited resources, in often inter-regional or international relations.
 To provide information to their community or an international audience, i.e. to become a media.
 To host or to support ICT requirements of other NGOs.

The following is an overview of the experiences shared by the participants from different social sectors, and the observations that might benefit to other organisations with similar needs. The first organisations described, are those with larger requirements. This will be followed by the remarks of participants from organisations who mainly use ICT to communicate or work more efficiently.

Main participants

Internet Rights Bulgaria Foundation - www.socialrights.org

Internet Rights Bulgaria Foundation (IRBF) uses the Internet to promote initiatives relating to the social and human rights sectors in Bulgaria. They encourage Internet use by not-for-profit organisations in Bulgaria working in these sectors and defend their rights regarding use of the Internet.

IRBF projects depend on large ICT resources, but at the same time, the projects are implemented in areas where people often don’t know why they should use ICTs. Christina Haralanova mentioned how in smaller towns, people prefer to simply walk to their neighbours’ house in order to exchange news. Altough this has obvious advantages, local organisations often fail to contact organisations from other towns or regions of Bulgaria that might have similar problems or complementary solutions, and who would be more efficient when working togeter.

The information divide is often complicated by the lack of resources, but Christina believes that if local villages better understand the need of ICT and Internet, there is always a way to either use Internet centres (usually referred to as "game clubs" in Bulgaria) or to build a central town initiative, which is what an NGO from Zlatograd (a border town near Turkey) have done, and have successfully built a new economy out of the mining town that stopped working when the nation experienced political changes in 1989.

Les Pénélopes - www.penelopes.org

Les Pénélopes is a French feminist network which has been using ICTs for many years in order to increase the visibility of women’s rights issues around the world. Josefina Gamboa presented their "mini-sites" project, which objective is to support feminist or womens’ organisations, and ones for solidarity based economy led by women, with ready-to-use web sites that do not require any technical interventions.

Josefina insisted on the importance of using Free Software in their organisation, since they are very efficient political tools in fighting monopolies and supporting the freedom of choice, which are part of the founding values of Les Pénélopes.

Rabble - www.rabble.ca

Rabble is an independent Canadian media who publishes an online magazine. Before launching their magazine in April 2001, Rabble conducted a survey amongst social NGOs and unions to better provide quality information that meets a need. Adam Novak and Chad Lubelsky explained that for them, the coordination of online and offline activities to create or link communities and better understand their needs, were very important to build and maintain their project.

One difficulty Rabble has with publishing an online magazine is that they consider it a "naked" publication: they know exactly how many people have read certain articles, and in this way they can identify what is more popular among the readers, but this also helps in providing information that is better adapted to the public. They also noted that most of their readers under 30 years old do not read articles bigger than 1500 caracters, and therefore they suggest to publish mostly short articles.

Carta - www.cartamondo.org

Carta have been publishing a printed edition of their weekly magazine in Italy for more than five years now. They are the 5th most read website related to social rights in Italy. Anna Schiavoni of Carta is very proud that Italian social movements have a reputation of being one of the most active in Europe, but that this is perhaps unfortunately due to the fact that they also have one of the worsts governments, with respect to this issue, in Europe.

In order to support the social movements, Carta provides high quality information to Italian social sector and have recently launched their website where they publish the weekly electronic copy of their magazine. In the near future, they will be publishing online information on a daily basis.

Discussion

Mixing online and offline activities

The first observation made, was that all the organisations who were presented operated with a mix of activities on the Internet that were often built from regional (offline) initiatives. The services must be adapted to the public and answer a need.

Adapting the concent to the audience

An Indymedia member from Germany (Indymedia is an association of regional sites who operate open news websites with no editorial control) noted that adapting the content to the audience could have a negative effect of deviating an organisation from its founding principles, slowly abandoning their aims and becoming just another mainstream media. Web site statistics can be misleading, for example, if an article has only five readers, the impact is still unknown, perhaps one of the five readers will later refer back to it and understand the relation to a future event.

To this, Rabble representatives answered that on one hand, their public would never let them become just another mainstream media, and that on the other hand, there would be no point in continuing the magazine if watching the maintstream news on television is equivalent.

Many questions were asked about the lenght of articles. Anna from Carta mentionned that since short articles may lack to provide sufficient information, they try to insist on the essential information, then provide links to those who need it.

The Indymedia member mentioned that altough this works on the short term, in the long term it leads to frustration as links to outside articles often no longer work, and if many perhaps don’t read the entire article at first, they read a few segments or titles, and later refer back to it.

There can be no concensus on this, as organisations publish information with different goals and with limited resources, but neither short nor long articles should be neglected when publishing information. We must not forget that the audience needs to be informed quickly, but also, topics require indepth analysis that will be useful for long term activities.

Incomplete websites or lack of response

A participant from a Danish organisation expressed her frustration towards organisations who use their website as a place to simply publish their phone number or those who stop updating their site even if they are still active, but simply do not consider it a priority. She also notes that e-mail should be answered with short delays, no more than a few days, and especially not after 10 days as is often the case. Long delays are absurd, since most organisations use e-mail to accelerate the communication process and not to keep others waiting. We must increase the culture of collaboration and avoid working individually, where redundant initiatives often lead to the same failiures. Organisations must collaborate with each other, and ICTs can be a very efficient tool for doing so.

This made another participant propose that since we generally agree on what the problems are, it would be interesting to have a central list with good practices, not only related to ICT, but also to list events in European countries which could then give ideas to other less experienced organisations and increase cooperation.

Conclusion

The general conclusion of this meeting was that organisations still need to meet and discuss the solving of problems related to the use of ICTs by social movements. Christina Haralanova acknowleged this, the workshop was not the first and certainly not the last which will discuss this issue, because many organisations are using ICT in very interesting ways and they can share their experiences.

However, if we look back a few years ago, international communication and collaboration was an expensive and time consuming task. Recently, the use of ICTs has since evolved from a simple communication tool to become a media, and today many projects are aiming to offer an alternative media tool by hosting websites, and helping organizations connect, etc. While building the next step, we must make sure that ICTs are used efficiently and to their greatest extent, to connect and support local initiatives in a global village.