NYC event for advocacy orgs: Ten Tactics film and toolkit. Wed, Feb 17th.

If you're working with advocacy organizations and you're located close to NYC, this looks like a great event:

The Tactical Tech Collective is working with Organizing 2.0 to promote their new film, Ten Tactics for Turning Information into Action. The New York premiere is this coming Wednesday, Feb. 17, at 7pm. Get your advance tickets here.

In addition, they sent us copies of their associated droolworthy toolkits. You can have one of 'em too. Just tell us why you or your organization should get one, and how you might put it to good use. Then, show up at the event, and you stand a good chance of winning! We have twenty of these suckers, so your chances are not bad. Tell us on our blog or over at the GrassrootsCamp Meetup site.

The film, included in half the toolkits, covers 35 examples of grassroots activists doing something nifty online. One of my favorite examples is the story of the pink chaddis in India. (Chaddis = women's underwear in Hindi.) Feminist activists protesting a violent, right wing group's efforts to punish women for visiting bars called on supporters to send pink chaddis to the group's leader. On Valentine's Day, of course. This Facebook based campaign worked and received international attention.

Other examples cover bloggers in Egypt, text messaging in Kenya, crowdsourcing in Mumbai, fighting corruption in Morocco, capturing human rights abuses on video in Burma and Iran.

Ten Tactics does a great job of laying out precisely how and why activists chose particular tools, what obstacles they faced and overcame, and what the results where on the issue in question. There's a bias at work - the Tactical Tech Collective wants to make online tools accessible to as many people and organizations as possible. So they chose many examples that rely far more on creativity and courage than on technical skill and equipment. Most of the examples are from developing countries, highlighting the fact that online activism is not some kind of elite strategy only relevant for well resourced groups like MoveOn or the Obama campaign.

Apologies for the late notice on this one. The Tactical Tech Collective has always done impressive work, and no doubt this will be equally amazing. Look forward to some report backs. (Via Charles Lenchner at Organizing 2.0)