opendemocracy on "Bloggers on the Bali"

opendemocracy — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 22:26:49 +0000

Chris, You are _so_ right about activist-reporting. i tried to think about this here: As for the name, BLONGO must be it. Brilliant. (blongueur has very unfortunate french connotations - a "longueur", (length) is also a dull passage in a piece of writing ...)

Bloggers on the Bali, Chris Littlecott

Chris Littlecott — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 22:15:47 +0000

What should we call NGO blogs? Given how they are increasingly appearing in a new space beyond the traditional media, I wonder whether we need a new term for activist-reporter-bloggers. How about blongos? Or blongeurs?

Whatever we call them, one thing is for sure - blogging is providing an effective means of communicating the hopes and frustrations of frontline lobbyists back to memberships and activists. It's still a minority pursuit at present - look through the long list of accredited NGOs and you'll find just a handful trying to connect beyond the boundaries of the conference compound. But that will surely change over the next 2 years of climate activism.

Some of these blogs come from prominent environmental leaders. Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club arrived in Bali at the weekend. He immediately posted on the USA's current and potential post-Bush positions in follow up to his earlier call for action on the Senate's vote on the Energy Reform Bill.

Also from the USA, and from the heart of the traditional policy NGOs, is the Switchboard blog of the NRDC. They've a whole host of posts related to Bali from their policy experts to their President.

Zipping across the Atlantic to the UK, the major environment and development NGOs have clubbed together to provide an aggregated webfeed of all their posts, often with embedded video content.

Oxfam international have drawn attention to the huge disparities between nations in their ‘graph of climate injustice', while World Development movement have made the connections between the climate marches around the globe.

Both of these NGOs have dedicated Bali blog sites, while Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have opted to include their Bali posts amongst the reports of their other worldwide climate actions.

Powerfully making their voice heard through web innovation are the youth movement delegations in Bali. They've pulled together posts on their dedicated Bali Buzz site, been active posters over at Grist magazine, and the team from SustainUS have a video channel on YouTube. Experts in body language will enjoy analysing their meeting with the US delegation.

But what's beyond the anglosphere? Our friends over at Global Voices Online have been collating and reblogging content from around the world (yes, including us here at Global Deal), but even they find that posts are very dominated by the English language.

If you know of a great NGO blog then let us know - email us or scribble away in the comments below.

Even better, if you're from an NGO and don't yet blog, you've got a huge audience out there over the next 2 years - dive in and grab a slice of the action.

open Democracy News Analysis - Bloggers on the Bali, Chris Littlecott - Comments

opendemocracy on "Bloggers on the Bali"

Bloggers on the Bali, Chris Littlecott