Sometimes the very fact we mention something as a great idea (due to the wonderful feature of linking;)) generates the attention of the very people we are posting about. I love this interactivness of social media and I make a case of living it day by day. Tonight I am posting an interview which is a result of my previous #THINK3 post about New Tactics. I am talking to their Online Community Builder, Kristin Antin, who represents the project:

Sylwia: Tell us more about the project. What is the original idea? How was it born and what happened so far? What are your main goals?

Kristin: Doug Johnson’s idea for the New Tactics project was to bring strategic thinking into human rights work – and to empower human rights defenders with a wide range of tactics.   The project started very small in 1999 with just one staff person, and at its biggest, the project has had 5 full time staff people. 

The project’s main goals include:

• Develop and distribute tools and resources that help practitioners identify effective strategies and implement tactics.
• Promote peer to peer exchange around tactical innovation.
• Building a word-wide community of human rights activists.

Our motto is ‘Empowering social change advocates with knowledge, innovation & community.’

As of December of 2009, in 10 years the project has held trainings in 22 countries, engaged 469 practitioners in our Tactical Dialogues from 58 countries, and given small grants to human rights organizations in 56 countries.  Over 2500 human rights practitioners are members of our New Tactics online community.

Sylwia: What are you currently involved in?

Kristin:  There are two of us full time on the project.  My work with the project is keeping the website running and adding new features, engaging practitioners in our online Tactical Dialogues, and managing the interns and volunteers.  Nancy Pearson, the project manager, is focused on our Middle East Initiative and developing training guides.

Sylwia: You mentioned work in Middle East? Do you have specific regions you are focusing on?

Kristin:  Since September of 2009, we have been working with the Academy for Educational Development in Jordan to train trainers on our New Tactics methodology.  These trainers will then train human rights groups throughout the region. 

Sylwia: Are you working on a more global or local level?

Kristin:  We work on a more global level mostly through our interactive website but also through small grants and trainings.  Therefore, I spend much of my time communicating with practitioners from all around the world via email, Skype and phone. 

However, this summer the interns and I are starting a local network of human rights activists as a pilot project for an idea we have.  We want to be able to assist human rights practitioners to carry out their own New Tactics events where people can get together to share tactics, stories, frustrations, skills and tools – basically what we do on the website in our ‘Tactical Dialogues’ but face-to-face.  We would also like to include our strategic thinking training tools – like Tactical Mapping – into these events.  This tool, Tactical Mapping, allows human rights groups to better understand how they can collaborate and coordinate their work with other groups.

Sylwia: Tel me more about the major steps in your process of learning, building and sharing?

Kristin:  Our resources and publications are tools for practitioners to learn from their peers.  We hope that what they learn can be used to build an effective strategy for their own work.  We encourage these practitioners to come back to the website to share what they have learned to continue the process of learning – building – and then sharing. 

I see the ‘learning’ representing all the resources we’re already developed that are available on the website.  The ‘building’ work so far has been done in trainings and workshops by training people on how to use our Tactical Mapping tool.  The ‘sharing’ work has been carried out both in-person (via our past regional workshops) and now online through our Tactical Dialogues.

Sylwia: Who is the team at the moment, how do you co-ordinate your work?

Kristin:  Kristin Antin – online community builder

Nancy Pearson – project manager / trainer

We share an office so it’s not difficult to coordinate!  We are hoping to carry out a few online dialogues in 2011-2012 with the topic being ‘Tactical Mapping’ and other tools that we offer in order to better incorporate Nancy’s off-line training work into our on-line community of activists.  

Sylwia: To what extend do you work with new media and new technologies on a daily basis yourself and to what extend do you actually suggest it as tools for activism?

Kristin:  I use lots of different new media/new tech tools and I keep learning about new ones everyday!  When it comes to technology, the project tries to support open source solutions as much as possible, which is why we choose Drupal as our content management system.  It has been a wonderful tool for us and I have had a lot of fun learning how to use it effectively (and still learning!).  We use the usual suspects like Twitter and Facebook.  For international communication, we use Skype and a webinar/conference call tool called ReadyTalk.  Internally, we use a lot of Google tools like Google docs, Google calendar, and Google analytics.  To distribute more resources, and make these resources more accessible we have started to use Scribd to share our publications (accessible by e-readers, audio-readers and smartphones) and iPadio to have audio recordings of interviews, conversations, and readings (thank you Sylwia for introducing me to this tool!). 

I would suggest using new media/new tech for activism as much as it will get you to your goals – if it would be helpful to get data and information out to your audience, and your audience is online – then how can you avoid using new media?  However, it is also important to be thoughtful about the tools that you want to use and how you’ll use them – specifically with regard to security and privacy issues.  Don’t put up any information that you don’t want some people to see.  Tactical Tech has great resources for how to use new tech tools smartly and effectively.  DigiActive also has great examples of how groups have used new media and new tech.  I would guide anyone interested in learning more to those websites.

Sylwia: You have a lot of extremely interesting and useful resources on your site already - what stage are you at with this area of your site, do you feel you are just starting, or is it already a good basis to build on? Also, how do you collect this information?

Kristin:  I think we have a good base of resources to build on – and that’s exactly what we’ve been doing.  In each of our Tactical Dialogues we try to highlight as many relevant New Tactics resources as are applicable.  There are still so many practitioners that have never heard of us or read any of our resources so it’s important for us to continue to grow our audience.  Many of our resources were written years ago, but are still very applicable and useful today.  We still have many interns that are researching, documenting and publishing tactics on our website.  Hopefully we’ll be able to write a sequel to our book – New Tactics in Human Rights: A Resource for Practitioners. 

Sylwia: In terms of workshops - do you conduct them, or do you work with other organizations?

Kristin:  Both.  But mostly the content is our own methodology and tools.  We’re working on a facilitation and methodology guide that we hope to publish on the website by the fall of 2010.

Sylwia: Who is supporting you with translation of your content on the site?

Kristin:  Past grant recipients have translated most of what you see on the website – and we work with translation students that translate content for free.

Sylwia:  In the discussion section you have a growing community of specialists or fans of new tactics. how do you develop this community?

Kristin: I believe that the online community is growing mostly from the promotion and participation from human rights practitioners interested in the Tactical Dialogues.  These dialogues really are an impressive collection of experiences, resources, and ideas.  How do we pull these off?  Lots of emails!  For any Tactical Dialogue, I contact about 50 practitioners from all over the world with experience in the topic to invite them to help lead the dialogue.  About one-fifth will says yes and participate as ‘featured resource practitioners.’  When the dialogue is finished, the featured practitioners almost always say that the conversation was useful and would recommend it to their colleagues and networks – and I think they do! J

The community is still growing – and I hope that this growth will result in more participation and sharing in our Tactical Dialogue and other New Tactics opportunities to exchange tactics and experiences.  My dream is that this online community can someday be a place for human rights practitioners to come and feel supported, heard, and honored.  I know it’s possible so I’m going to keep working on it.

But this is not over yet. I will treat you with another ipadio file (trusting the flash feature will be fixed soon;), which is also available here:

Do share it, as it's a great project and great work of few people for change for all of us!