Emergency Action Blog Update

Emergency Action Blog (EAB) Update

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We think Jon Lebkowsky summed up the goal of EAB best as "a go-to resource for blogger coordination when disasters/catastrophic situations occur." In addition, his post at Global Voices provides a good background for those who might have just stumbled upon this site.

After the tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia, bloggers from India quickly set up The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami blog for news and information about resources, aid, donations and volunteer efforts. This blog’s an invaluable coordination effort, and it pointed to the need for a more robust and permanent site for ongoing coordination of bloggers and other online resources in response to other catastrophic situations that might occur in the future. Nick Lewis of the Progressive Blog Alliance is working on such an “Emergency Action Blog” site. We’ve set up an email list (eab at activist-tech.org) for a collaborative effort to define requirements and taxonomy and produce the site using something like CivicSpace. To subscribe, send a blank email to eab-subscribe at activist-tech.org. This will hopefully be an international collaboration of bloggers and techs, therefore a good early project for those who support the Global Voices intiative.

Site creator and founder Nick Lewis states:

"...if the internet in fact has the potential to build a new world, what is the next step in fufilling that potential? My answer: we need to start building more bridges, taking a more experiemental approach to our work (to put it another way, not launching projects because we want them to be successful, but rather launching projects because we’re curious as to what will happen), embracing pockets of low level bloggers that would normally be ignored (you wouldn’t believe how willing many of them are to give hours to a project, if you just bother letting them know that you recognize their work, and appreciate their thoughts.), Taking ourselves less seriously (we’re monkeys with keyboards after all) .And finally instead of asking ourselves “how do we create the movement?” we should be asking ourselves, “how can we discover the movements that aren’t even aware that they are a “movement” yet – and what tools, and strategies can we use to facilate their rise?"

Emergency Action Blog: Reviewing Our First Day

The Blogs & Music that Healed the World

We are living in Kuhnian times. Revolutions are happening by the hour. Blogpolitics is already ancient history, even while having a much greater future. Now blogs are tying together newspapers, artists, musicians and such that can and should be marshalled to create, very rapidly, a vast amount of financial and informational relief.

Newspapers can give free advertising for a Tsunami Aid concert, featuring local, national and world acts, which is then carried over blogs, with links for charitable giving. In exchange, the blogs can carry an ad for the newspaper, bla bla bla. Work it out. It's for a good cause. And an urgent one at that.

--Anonymoses

At the Global Voices blog, Ethan comments:

"I think it’s critically important to connect with someone personally affected by the disaster as a way of understanding it better."

This is something I think we bloggers should aspire to accomplish, along with putting forth effort to ease the pain of this disaster by advertising, coordinating, and supporting all related relief efforts.