Tad Hirsch, creator of the SMS group tool TXTmob.com, spoke briefly about some of the mobile activism projects he's done in recent years. Some quick notes, most of which isn't verbatim:

For the past five or six years I've work as I hired gun for a host of community based advocacy orgs. I look at ways to build new systems that enable forms of collective action. This is a bit different from what's been said about participatory democracy, in which individuals create, share content and discuss. It's crucial, but not the only part. I work with folks who form together as groups to affect material social change. My work focuses on mobile media, cellphone activism, VOIP activism.

I tend to partner with small, localized groups of people, some of whom are engaged in formal NGOs, others not. I've done projects with street activists at the RNC and DNC, giving them a radically decentralized approach to street protests. Street theatre interventions as opposed to blockades, so people don't get their heads kicked in and arrested. We set up cell phone groups to help coordinate action. I've done work on a Navajo reservation to help stop the spread of coal-fire plants on their land. It's about generating citizen-based science that can be used in lawsuits, helping them sift through the data and inform their legal arguments.

In Africa I work with human rights groups to create cellphone communications platforms that bypass govt control. The immediate work is to have a network that protects the users and can't be controlled by the govt. We're taking the lessons of lower power fm and community radio and apply it to digital networks.

Drew Clark of the Center for Public Integrity is now talking about their media tracker tool. Put in your zip code and it'll generate a map of your local media outlets and who owns them. I did a search for Washington DC. Along with the map, it gave me some interesting stats about the DC area:

• 26 licensed television stations
  
• 47 licensed radio stations
  
• 1 matching cable community
  
• 17 reported broadband providers
  
• 30 newspapers within 100 miles

And the companies with the biggest piece of the local broadcast pie:

• Clear Channel Communications Inc. : nine stations
• CBS Corporation: eight
• Radio One, Inc: four
• Bonneville Radio (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints): four
• Maryland Public Broadcasting Commission: three

Try it yourself and get informed. -andy

It's something like 17 degrees outside, so I am mighty relieved to be inside with about 400 other warm bodies at the Beyond Broadcast conference. Henry Jenkins of MIT gave an amazing keynote about participatory democracy and participatory culture. He talked a bit about DOPA Jr, noting as I have in the past that placing restrictive access to the Net at schools and libraries does more harm to disenfranchised populations than mainstream ones, since they often lack Internet access at home and have to rely on public access. As more and more people embrace social media tools to participate in civic life, those who get blocked because they're forced to use public access end up getting left out of public discourse yet again. Henry also used a great line referring to DOPA and its ilk as part of the mass de-skilling of America's youth, forcing them to unlearn the participatory culture skills they use outside of school because policymakers fear the impact of giving them access at school.

Right now there's a panel featuring reps from Yahoo, MTV and one of the guys behind Four Eyed Monsters. Maybe it's the long week catching up with me, but I am so bored. Can't wait til the unconferency sessions this afternoon. I feel like I'm at a tag-team lecture. -andy

"So, you're in Watertown - is there any news there?"

"No. If there were, I'd move."

This is Lisa Williams recounting a conversation she had with someone during her talk about placeblogging. Lisa runs H2Otown, the successful community blog for Watertown, MA. Lisa is talking about local news and their reticence to work with local bloggers to cover what's going on in a community. Media outlets get nervous with terms like "citizen journalism," but they don't realized there are groups of bloggers in communities who aren't trying to be journalists, per se, but are still trying to create an online place where residents can come together and talk about their community: things that need to be fixed, road conditions, events and the like. Unless there's breaking news in these communities, the media ignores them, but that doesn't mean there isn't lots of important things to talk about it. As Lisa puts it, "Why is it possible to know more about what's going on in Indonesia than the East End?" As soon as you step out of the metro area of a given city, media coverage just evaporates. -andy

Nonprofit technology consultant Beth Kanter, who runs Beth's Blog and contributes to NetSquared, spoke this morning at the IMA conference about trends in nonprofit technology. These notes are not verbatim, so please do not treat them as direct quotes.