Tools for basic net activism

The SaveMuniWireless.org project has three main pieces:
* a public blog (SaveMuniWireless.org) – for reporting news, posting action alerts, posting municipal network profiles, and linking to reports. The blog becomes the source of news and background research.
* an action mailing list – for busy people to get action updates
* a coordinator mailing list — a high traffic list for people coordinating nuts and bolts like photocopies of information packets
* a private wiki, for planners coordinating fact sheets, gathering information about projects around the state, building materials for the press.
I also use the Technorati blog search engine to find out who’s linking to us and discover the extended conversation.
This basic set of tools is used again and again in different projects. Today, there are three separate pieces. We’re using Movable Type for the blog, Mailman for the mailing list, and Socialtext for the wiki.
It would be great to have a packaged toolset, so people who were less tech-savvy than Chip and me could set things up.
And would be great to have closer integration between the tools
* publish content from the wiki to the blog
* single signin among the private tools
* single search among the public tools

3 thoughts on “Tools for basic net activism”

  1. I think a general-purpose CMS could handle this. I know that Drupal has both blogging and wiki modules, and has a module for interfacing with a mailing list (or you could use its internal forums).
    I believe it also has a sort of CVS tracker, which could perhaps be repurposed as an issue tracker.

  2. Adina, I suspect that the other piece that you have but don’t explicitly realize that you use is the collective rolodex of everyone involved – not a LinkedIn or Friendster style explicit social network system, but an implicit set of relationships that you can call on to extend your reach.

  3. Adina, I suspect that the other piece that you have but don’t explicitly realize that you use is the collective rolodex of everyone involved – not a LinkedIn or Friendster style explicit social network system, but an implicit set of relationships that you can call on to extend your reach.

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