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Twestival’s Org Structure Profiled on Mashable

Cian O'Donovan — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 22:47:58 +0000

Zachary Sniderman writes a colour piece profiling aspects of Twestival’s global organisational structure on Mashable today. Check it out, saves me detailing it here ;-).

With hundreds of events in 125+ countries, Rose can’t possibly monitor every dollar and every event taking place. Even the regional managers can be spread thin with the volume of events and local charities they need to manage. “When you put that trust out, that’s almost the payment, that’s the ‘salary’ that people are making on this,” said Cian O’Donovan, Twestival’s digital communications manager based in ~~Ireland~~ [the UK - my edit]. “I guess what I’m saying is, trust is [Twestival's] currency.”

Žižek to New Green Chinese in Five Links

Cian O'Donovan — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 13:50:02 +0000

Good start to the year, lots of doing but not so much reading. Here are a few articles that I have just cleared out of my Instapaper.

No better man than Slavoj Žižek to connect the dots between Wikileaks, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight and the gentlemanly manners of the left. Really. Super essay from the London Review of Books.

From Gotham to Gotham. A little insight into one of Wall Street’s good guys (in his words – and it is Wall Street so I’m assuming masculinity), via John Cassidy’s New Yorker article.

Playing games for good, a Mashable round-up of video games for social good.

Writing of social, here is the big one. The Pew Internet report on The Social Side of the Internet. Hefty stuff and invaluable numbers for activists, campaigners and just about anyone running building community and interacting with groups online. Some standout numbers:

48% of those who are active in groups say that those groups have a page on a social networking site like Facebook

42% of those who are active in groups say those groups use text messaging

30% of those who are active in groups say those groups have their own blog

16% of those who are active in groups say the groups communicate with members through Twitter

Finally, I commented on the return of the food crisis recently and how the new hungry are recent migrants to cities. Some good news to prop up against that from Grist, China’s cities are breeding a new more environmentally aware generation, who are looking at the urban landscape surrounding them and not liking what they see. Let’s hope that’s a good thing.

Net Activism: Some Self Critique Required

Cian O'Donovan — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 22:42:24 +0000

This really is an incredibly impressive essay from Cory Doctorow. The best defence of online activism I think I’ve read. I’ve pasted the four closing paragraphs below. They are worth considering for a couple of reasons. First off, Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion may be wide of the mark overall, but it is still worth pausing and reflecting that even in 2011, a tweet is unlikely to change the world, by itself. Though as I mentioned previously, tweets can of course lead to amazing things.

Second factor, if activists want to preserve open systems and net neutrality, we’re going to have to go out and fight for it. Doctorow points to mobile gateways which rather than opening the walled gardens of early century providers, seem to be stacking the razor-wire higher. The Mac App store will be followed quickly by content lock-ins if the newspaper industry can get their act together. And there lies the path of danger.

The world needs more people seriously engaged with improving the lot of activists who make use of the net (that is, all activists). We need to have a serious debate about tactics such as the Distributed Denial of Service – flooding computers with bogus requests so that they can’t be reached – which some have compared to sit-in demonstrations. As someone who’s been arrested at sit-ins, I think this is just wrong. A sit-in derives its efficacy not from merely blocking the door to some objectionable place, but from the public willingness to stand before your neighbours and risk arrest and bodily harm in service of a moral cause, which is itself a force for moral suasion. As a tactic, DDoS has more in common with filling a business’s locks with super glue, or cutting its phone lines – risky, to be sure, but closer to vandalism and thus less apt to convince your neighbours to look sympathetically on your cause.

We need to fix the mobile internet, which – thanks to closed networks and devices – is more amenable to surveillance and control than the fixed-line variety. We need to fight the move – driven by entertainment companies and IT giants such as Apple and Microsoft – to design devices to work covertly and without the consent of their owners in the name of protecting copyright.

We need to pay heed to Jonathan Zittrain (another scholar whom Morozov both dismisses and then later inadvertently agrees vigorously with), whose The Future of the Internet warns that the increase in crime, sleaze and fraud on the net will cause user fatigue and make people more willing to accept locked-down devices and networks that can be used to control, as well as protect them.

We need all of this, and a serious critique and roadmap for the future of net activism, because the world’s oppressive regimes (including supposedly free governments in the west) are availing themselves of new technology at speed, and the only way for activism to be effective in that environment is to use the same tools.

How many flood victims does it take to make the news?

Cian O'Donovan — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 01:38:02 +0000

More than 14 million it would seem. It’s silly season, a particularly riveting one at that given we have Naomi Campbell coming live from the dock at the Hague*. So when a flood hits Pakistan, affecting 14,000,000 people, one would expect a few column inches devoted to drowning people and big numbers. At the very least it’s an excuse of foreign correspondents to ride in helicopters without getting shot at. But it would seem all our action-hero reporters (bar the brilliant Orla Guerin) are on staycation this summer. Oh well.

Look, I’m not naive enough to think this sort of story is going to get airplay over the start of the football season or meditating toddlers. But, when a weather event affects more people that the Haiti earthquake and the 2004 Tsunami combined, well thats maybe an opportunity for the environmental, science or development editors in these news organisations to stick up a hand in the morning editorial meeting and say “hey, maybe there’s a story here”. Whether that story is climate change, population led resource issues or simply piss-poor local government, when the number on the other side is 14,000,000, it’s a big story.

Okay, since it is silly season, here’s a game you can play. See if you can find references to either Pakistan or flood in the oven-fresh homepages I’ve just baked below.

!!EDIT 12 August!!
Good meta-piece from CJR pulling together the coverage of this summer’s weather from around the world. This subject is being covered, is some good quality and depth, but not it would appear on the front-pages and in quantity.

* Big BTW, WTF was Nelson doing inviting Chuckie Taylor and Naomi Campbell around for dinner. Nelson Mandela! He can invite anyone on the planet over for a slap up meal and he chooses these goons. Another strike like that and it’s time for the Nobel recall time.

In your reader, reading your feeds

Cian O'Donovan — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:06:04 +0000

Keepfaking.it’s good friend Wouter asked us today for a few blogs and websites he might be interested in as part of some digital research he is engaged in. Far be it for us to get in the way of academic pursuit, and may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb as they say. Here’s a dump of relevant sections from our Google Reader account. Excuse errors and omissions. There are tons of stuff missing but seriously, don’t sweat it, if your website is absent it probably means we check it the old fashioned way. Anyways, who reads RSS anymore.

Stuff That Matters — General News

Stuff That Matters — Green Blogs + Opinion

[RSS] AMEE – The world’s energy meter
[RSS] Arts and Ecology
[RSS] Casaubon’s Book
[RSS] children of the end of History, and other tales
[RSS] CleanTechnica
[RSS] Crane and Matten blog
[RSS] e-IR
[RSS] CarbonOutreach
[RSS] EcoGeek.org
[RSS] EcoLabs
[RSS] Ecology without Nature
[RSS] Forum For The Future & Green Futures
[RSS] Greenbang
[RSS] Greenmonk: the blog
[RSS] INHABITAT
[RSS] It’s Getting Hot In Here
[RSS] Kate’s Comment
[RSS] Know Your Place
[RSS] Mark Lynas
[RSS] Monbiot.com
[RSS] ParkHowell.com
[RSS] Post Carbon Institute Publications
[RSS] RealClimate
[RSS] ReGeneration
[RSS] SANDBAG blogs
[RSS] Stoat
[RSS] Sustainablog
[RSS] The Climate Group
[RSS] The End of Something..
[RSS] The Lazy Environmentalist
[RSS] Transformational Logistics
[RSS] TreeHugger
[RSS] Watts Up With That?
[RSS] Worldchanging: Bright Green

Stuff That Matters — Activism|Climate Change

[RSS] 350 Updates
[RSS] Blog Entries
[RSS] Climate Change Action
[RSS] Climate Progress
[RSS] DeSmogBlog – Clearing the PR Pollution that Clouds Climate Science
[RSS] Greenpeace UK
[RSS] Jamie Andrews
[RSS] Jamie Potter
[RSS] Leo’s blog
[RSS] Low Carbon Communities
[RSS] Lower (Carbon) Footprint
[RSS] News
[RSS] Stop Heathrow Expansion
[RSS] The Pew Charitable Trusts – Newsroom
[RSS] UK Youth Delegation

Stuff That Matters — Env Orgs + Corps

Stuff That Matters — Social | Activism

Stuff That Matters — COP 15

[RSS] Art Threat
[RSS] cop15.dk News
[RSS] Everyones Blog Posts – Arts for COP15
[RSS] Latest Activity on Arts for COP15
[RSS] Road To Copenhagen 2009 | News
[RSS] TckTckTck

Turning Off the Spotlight on the Staging of Global Terror

Cian O'Donovan — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 15:35:05 +0000

Photo (cc) infomatique

Growing up a couple of hundred miles south of “The Troubles” in Ireland during the 80′s had its vagaries, which at this now twenty year vantage point, can hardly be believed, if recalled at all.

Whilst the closest we ever came to their tanks and their bombs and their bombs and their guns was the deplorable Dolores (who incidentally didn’t get much closer herself), we were of course witness to the media battle front. A battle conducted using the deadly weapons of voiceover. In their wisdom, the British government declared that like errant Victorian children, Gerry, Martin and the rest of their Sinn Féin/IRA cohort could be seen but not heard. Picture the scene, it’s the morning after the night before. Another tit-for-tat nationalist/loyalist killing (translation: straight-up murder) and UTV or BBC Northern Ireland is looking for a quote of either condemnation or abhorrence from Gerry or Martin. Well, they weren’t going to get it. No, Gerry would wag his beard up and down with some animated affectation, but all we in TV land would hear was a passionless fob-off and some gibberish about Ian Paisley being neither a real doctor nor authentic reverend. Whatever.

[One suspects all of this may in fact have been a result of intense Westminster lobbying by the Ulster Voiceover Artists union (commonly referred to as the UVAu), but we have no proof of this whatsoever. ]

We are remided of this over the festive period whilst reading some more World at Risk
. Beck proposes a simple thought experiment relating to “global terror” [yes cringe, cringe]. What, asks the German sociolagist, would be the result of a worldwide media boycott of the flash points of global terror. You know, a total worldwide ban on reporting the latest antics of underpants arsonists (do you see what we’ve done there) or shoe bombers. We’ll leave you alone to answer that one.

For Beck argues that it is the now ever present anticipation of terror incident, rather than the incident itself that is the goal of this 21st century terrorism. And it is the “glamour of terror staged in the West which transform terrorism into a power drug.” Beck goes on, when dealing with the discources of global subpolitics, to suggest this power drug is now the developing world’s best narrative in which to fight economic globalization. Certainly the only one in which the media industrial complex of the West will pay constant attention to. Take away that attention and perhaps we’ll get some interesting results.

COP15: Depends how you define ‘Meaningful’

Cian O'Donovan — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 18:20:40 +0000

Too busy working on the #stupidshow today to post any reaction or analysis on this morning’s non-agreement.

Here’s a screenshot that sums up some of the issues we’re facing as a society, and one of the many reasons COP15 has been so spectacularly unsuccessful at putting a binding agreement on the table.

BTW, tonight’s StupidShow has some great analysis from Ed Miliband, Prez Nasheed, Vicky Pope, Tony Juniper and Mark Lynas, who hadn’t slept in three days, and spent most of the night in the war room with Obama, Brown, Merkel and 20-something other world leaders.

COP15: StupidShow 3 – Update on Nations and Numbers

Cian O'Donovan — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 12:15:51 +0000

Here’s the state of play after yesterday’s sessions in the Bella Centre.

COP15: The Stupid Show on the Streets of Copenhagen

Cian O'Donovan — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 23:09:01 +0000

One of the jobs Keepfakingit is doing here in Copenhagen is assisting on The Stupid Show, a nightly news and opinion programme coming live from inside the Bella Centre. And on it there’s a segment that goes by the name of Piece of the Action. That’s the bit I’m involved in, scouring the streets of Copenhagen looking attempting to bring you a picture of the unbelievably diverse crowd that’s in town for the COP.

Here are some pics from the shoots.

Behind the camera

Cian O'Donovan — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:14:46 +0000

Think about this next time you’re blown away by some citizen journalism.

From Paul Carr’s article on Techcrunch.