While Hispanics trail other U.S. populations in overall Internet access, they are among the most avid users of mobile broadband. In fact, Hispanics and African Americans lead mobile broadband use (53% and 58% respectively), with both communities far ahead of Whites (33%).

This is really remarkable news and proves that technology offer new ways to address issues of health care, education and social justice. But also it also asks that strategies for organizing need to adapt and develop according the diverse constituencies who are targeted. Calls for action and engagement need to be addressed through the media tools that are already used. From a European perspective it seems clear that there is little awareness of how to organize in diverse societies where use of media, cell phones and broadband vary within different groups. In current debates on minority issues in the US groups such as Voto Latino demonstrate that minorities organize strongly around cell phone campaigns, MySpace and youtube. Their latest campaign is challenging intolerant TV-host Lou Dobbs of CNN, who throughout the summer was promoting the nutty Birth-conspiracy on the validity of Obamas birthcertificate:

P.s: Try the hilarious Birth Certificate generator and get your own Kenyan Birth Certificate

But the question of climate change and drought seems still more relevant than ever: With Kenya entering full force into the global telecommunication and green energy revolution, the repetetive cycles of droughts and hunger of Kenyans proves as a strong statement to social movements that there is no quick fix for climate justice.

Also this summer I spend some of this summer procrastinating with some research on questionable Danish bio-technology exports to Egypt. This helped me to do the final push to get to GV Advocacy. I hope to follow up with more on the case in the future.

• Learning from Obama – Lessons for Online Communicators in 2009 and Beyond (pdf)

It collects and expands quite a few of the points that has been said and written many times – but gathered together, it constitutes a great ressource for campaign planning and implementation.

While we’re at it, the recent Netroots Nation conference with several highly interesting talks, had a seminar relating to exactly this issue sporting mr. Delany, Judith Freeman from New Organizing Institue and a couple of others involved in the Obama campaign – available online here. Go check it out.

As part of the project new endavours in blog-training and mentoring are already being developed by the network – and hopefully the pioner experience we all gain from this first project can help us strengthen the global online dialogue and organizing.

The initial idea came about when I asked Solana during her brief visit to Copenhagen last fall how we should go about training our students and activists in blogging and the use of social media. For sure, one key element of getting into blogging – which I not too succesfully have trained many teams of students in already – is to have readers and to establish a dialogue with them gradually… so we came up with the idea of having seasoned and skilled bloggers from Global Voices mentoring our students in the art of blogging, reading their blogs, commenting and building the dialogue blog-post by blog-post, while introducing them to their local corner of the global blogosphere…

As Dorte Toft one of the very few known bloggers in Denmark (who’s known for blogging – and not for her carrier in other domains) coined it after becoming known for covering a major finance-scandal: blogging in Denmark is kind of like “doing streaptease in the dark.” Taking the poor tradition for blogging in Denmark as a starting point, we hope to achieve a much stronger introduction to the media to our participants through the mentoring model – and hopefully, some of them will turn out to really enjoy and take advantage of the opportunities it offers – and use this tool to continue our joint struggle for social change.

The project will kick-off from September 7 when the course starts – I’ll make sure to keep you posted on this blog as well, of course.

Refreshing how Banks write of Internet as almost the starting premisses. Banks focus on sustainability embrace open source technology and a no nonsense approach to social change, which emphasize pluralism in solutions. The logic is simple: the more people using FrontlineSMS the better. Take it and run with it!

Liberia’s Blackboard Blogger from WhiteAfrican on Vimeo.

Alfred posts news from a network of volunteer correspondents from across the country. His writings are supported by symbols in order to get the message through to people with limited literacy skills. An analog blog can teach us how to think about online and offline communication in areas where internet, or let alone power is limited. Circulating information among people who already have the access to online information seems in the big picture much less challenging than broadening the scope to the wide public. Ushahidi, which we have praised on this blog, is trying to meet exactly those challenges of the online-offline disconnection by talking to journalists from traditional media outlets of radio and print, who still reach way more people.

Alfred plans to bring similar black boards to other parts of Monrovia and Liberia. It will be interesting to see how bloggers and online activists can learn to connect better with communities offline and bloggers like Alfred and the “Daily News” format could be a great place to start!

Jeremy Heimans talks about his experience with starting getup.org (don’t miss this part app. 13. minutes into the interview – it’s really impressive what they achieved in Australia!) and avaaz.org and educating us on how to introduce ambitous and large scale online campaigning in a country with no such tradition – Australia, his home country.

Josh Levy takes us on a tour around some of the best examples of how to use online campaign sites to spawn offline engagement and introduces key concepts such as ‘The Hub’, ‘The Spoke’ and the all-important ‘List’, that all online-campaigns seek to build – with Obama and Moveon.org as the most successful so far.

As you’ll notice the key external speakers were talking via Skype – which is a great way to get not just the best of what’s going on in Denmark (which in the field of online campaigning is is not much!) – but the absolute pioneers in online campaigning for social change world wide! However, it’s not quite the most optimal and engaging format – to look at a person in front of his or her webcam via a poor quality skype-connection- and especially not when recorded on a video-camera for documentation as is the case here. Hence, it might only be the nerds and geeks out there actually whatching it all through – but it’s definately worth the effort. To my best knowledge, Jeremy Heimans and Josh Levy range among the pioneers of redesigning politics to take advantage of the powers of new social media!

A big thank you to both Josh and Jeremy for taking their time to educate us  (and to my friend Solana Larsen of Global Voices who introduced me to them!)

For those interested in the course itself and other materials relating to the subject – a comprehensive if somewhat messy resource-room can be found here

At MS ActionAid we’re planning a follow-up course in both Copenhagen and Nairobi, Kenya in October for regional activists, social change-makers and citizen journalists alike.

Consequenses for campaigning and advocacy
One of the most impressive organizing efforts last fall came from “Voto Latino”, which mobilized young Latino voters in key swing states such as New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada through a powerfull cambination from MySpace to SMS and celebrity support. Voto Latino are now keeping up steam with an impressive support for Sonia as Supreme Justice nominee.

Both the emergence of ethnic media in the US and diversified campaigns as Voto Latinos proves that efficient campaigns can merge from a point of diversity. The imploding Republican party has clearly defined it self as the party the white-male and surely doesn´t fit nor understand this model of campainging, as they showed to the fullest extend with the immigration debate in 2007. This campaign video shows that progressives such as Voto Latino are not always afraid of offering clear narratives and hard politics, while campaining for diversity, which is promissing to see.