Continuing to share my delicious links, here’s my top activism links so far. To reiterate, I don’t usually save the really obvious stuff to delicious, or the really easy to find stuff.

38 Degrees | people. power. change. – Democratically crowdsourcing campaign ideas.

Act Responsible -  responsible communication on sustainability, equitable development and social responsibility.

Armchair Revolutionary – social game, supports worldchanging science and technology projects.

Charity Navigator – America’s independent charity evaluator, evaluating the financial health of charities.

Citizen Tube – YouTube’s News and Politics Blog.

CrimethInc – Ex-Workers’ Collective (CWC) – a decentralized anarchist collective. Publishing and distributing literature and free propaganda. Check out their posters!

Cyber-Marx: cycles and circuits of struggle in high-technology capitalism – Book by Nick Dyer-Witheford (read here via Google Books)

Cybersociology Magazine – Issue 5: Grassroots Political Activism Online (01 April 1999)

DigiActive – digital activism tools, campaigns, and tactics.

Digital Activism Decoded – The New Mechanics of Change – Book edited by Mary Joyce (read here via Scribd).

Digital Activists Expose Abuse – BBC news article.

Digital Economy Bill is Passed! – blog post summarising what the DEBill means for politics.

Feminism London – annual feminist conference.

Forum for Change – online community – a free network for campaigners and policy workers to share information and discuss the latest issues.

G20: Protesters use Twitter, Facebook and social media tools to organise demonstrations – Telegraph article

Google Will Eat Itself (GWEI) – generates money by serving Google text advertisments on a network of hidden Websites. With this money they automatically buy Google shares. Buying Google via their own advertisment! Google eats itself – but in the end “we” own it!

Guerilla Sticker Campaign via Boris Bikes – Treehugger article

HarassMap - a system in Egypt for reporting incidences of sexual harassment via SMS messaging. Similar to Hollaback!

Hollaback! – a movement dedicated to ending street harassment using mobile technology.

Hope140 – good causes on Twitter, case studies etc. ‘Better Now’

How to turn slactivists into activists with social media – Mashable article

Internet & Democracy Project: An introduction to digital activism (video) - The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School announces the Internet and Democracy Project, an initiative that will examine how the Internet influences democratic norms and modes, including its impact on civil society, citizen media, government transparency, and the rule of law, with a focus on the Middle East.

internet.artizans – Tracking the Internet, Human Rights & Social Change.

Is digital activism an effective medium for change? – Guardian article.

Is this what you mean? – Subverting adverts.

Media / anthropology – Research blog of John Postill covering digital activism & more.

Meta-Activism Project – The mission is to build human and informational infrastructure for the study of digital activism.

Nestle Kerfuffle (presentation) – A timeline showing the first four days of the online PR battle between Nestle and Greenpeace. It shows the numbers of people online who helped drive the PR disaster for Nestle over the company’s use of unsustainable palm oil.

Networked Culture: #iranelection cyberwar guide for beginners – article, but see rest of site too.

New Tactics in Human Rights – Information Activism

OpenNet Initiative - ONI’s mission is to identify and document Internet filtering and surveillance, and to promote and inform wider public dialogues about such practices.

Peace Chicken – Blog about veganism, animal rights, politics, activism and more.

Student Protest (video) – Flickr video of the student occupation of Millbank in 2010.

Tactical Technology Collective – Our mission is to advance the skills, tools and techniques of rights advocates, empowering them to utilise information and communications as a critical asset in helping marginalised communities understand and effect progressive social, environmental and political change.

TechSoup Global – TechSoup Global, founded in 1987 as CompuMentor, provides technology resources and knowledge to NGOs around the world.

The New Feminists: Still Fighting – Guardian article. Why the battle is not yet won.

Tor: Anonymity Online – Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis.

RSS Feed of Beth Granter’s Delicious Activism Links

Since I’ve been up north for a non denominational winter festival with my parents, I’ve had nothing to do except internetting, website building (I built the Brighton Stop The Cuts Coalition website and a new Queer Mutiny Brighton site), and even more illustrations of my friends. Luckily I have hot friends. Enjoy!

Today I did this vector illustration of my friend Sarah:

And this vector illustration of my friend Lewis:

Both using Illustrator, traced from a photo manually (i.e. drawn, not using filters or auto-trace), using a drawing tablet.

So I hope everyone’s been following the Wikileaks saga this past few weeks? I’m going to try and write a short post about a massive thing now.

Wikileaks is a non-profit news organisation that publishes previously secret information from anonymous sources. Recently Wikileaks published a bunch of stuff that exposed the US Government and other Governments for being dodgy. I haven’t read all the bits so I don’t know the details. The US Government got pissed off.

About a week later the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, was arrested for rape and sexual assault charges in London, on the basis of a case which had previously been closed. The US Government are now trying to have him extradited to Sweden. That’s quite convenient isn’t it. Although I heard he has admitted to an argument over a condom (he refused to wear one) which if true and he went ahead and had sex with a woman in circumstances she didn’t want, I believe is a form of rape, even if he wasn’t physically forcing her. One of the accusing women used to work for the US Embassy. Interesting.

The US Government also advised corporations not to support Wikileaks. So, Visa, Mastercard and Paypal, all forms of donating to Wikileaks, blocked payments to the non-profit. So nobody could help with legal costs for founder Julian Assange.

The Wikileaks website also came under denial of service attack (dDos – that’s illegal) which means the website breaks, so as a back-up, Wikileaks mirror sites (copies) are made all over the place.

Then came along Anonymous which is “not an organisation. There are no official members, guidelines, leaders, representatives or unifying principles. Rather, Anonymous is a word that identifies the millions of people, groups, and individuals on and off of the internet who, without disclosing their identities, express diverse opinions on many topics. To be Anonymous does not imply thinking or acting in concert with others who are Anonymous; rather, it describes a way of communicating and promoting social change.” I knew about them from Project Chanology – an anti Scientology activist group. So, people identifying as Anonymous then started a retaliation against attacks on Wikileaks. This was part of a pre-existing campaign called Operation Payback and involved dDos attacks on Paypal, Visa and Mastercard, managing to temporarily take Visa and Mastercard websites offline as well as breaking the Paypal API for a while. They used some software called LOIC to do this and coordinated operations in mIRC. Then the hacker numbers dropped and the sites all went live again.

This got in the news which was quite exciting and lots of people joined in. I stayed up late following the mIRC chat (that bit is legal). Then a 16 year old Dutch boy got arrested for being part of the cyberwar and running LOIC to do dDos attacks as part of Operation Payback.

Then people got scared and the numbers of hackers dropped further, so a new strategy was devised which would allow more people to join in who didn’t want to break the law. This was called Operation Leakspin which asked people to download Wikileaks content and republish it as videos or other media all over the internet so the content couldn’t be destroyed even if Wikileaks websites were all taken down. Good plan! The recruitment poster spoke to ‘Gentlemen’ though, so I made my own version:

This project went live at 9pm EST which was 2AM UK time, hence me being still up at 4am. I’ve made a playlist of all the videos uploaded in so far to the Leakspin campaign. You can keep up on the Leakspin website at http://operationleakspin.org.

In the meantime, the US State Department accidentally republished a Wikileaks document, and then took it down again, inadvertently taking part in Leakspin. Maybe that’s where the inspiration came from. You can see the evidence of this right now by Googling the URL and clicking ‘Quick View’ to see the cache. This will not last forever so look now.

So, if the US State Department is doing it, why not join in?! As far as I know it’s legal to republish content that’s already in the public domain, so go for it. You have to go to the Wikileaks site, download some stuff, read it and find something juicy and re-edit into a new format and re-post somewhere. Ideally YouTube. Post links here to your Leakspin stuff or anyone else’s if you like.

I’ll start: Leakspin // wikileaks // Skinheads and Christian fundamentalists attack Hungarian gay rightsparade July 5, 2008

Let’s see what happens next!