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CIVICUS Webinar: Accepting the gap between activism & traditional
CSOs
Amanda Atwood, Kubatana.net
July 20, 2011
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Paper
prepared for the CIVICUS Webinar July 20, 2011
According to
the invitation letter for this event, "the purpose of this
thematic consultation is to develop policy recommendations for civil
society organisations, public and private sector donors and governments
to enable them to bridge the gap between traditional CSOs and online
activists."
A few things
come to mind when I consider this sentence and the discussion notes
circulated in advance of this webinar, including:
- How compatible
is "activism" with the work of "traditional
CSOs"
- How compatible
is donor funding with activism?
- What can
ICTs contribute to promoting activism (and what can it not)
- Where should
we be focussing our attention?
Unfortunately,
answering these questions in the time we've been allocated
will entail making some generalisations along the way, but I'd
like to explore these questions particularly from the perspective
of a context I know well - my work with the Zimbabwean civil
society information portal Kubatana.
Kubatana is
probably best known for our website, www.kubatana.net. On our site,
we aggregate civil society press statements, reports, research and
news articles across a number of topics, including civic activism,
democracy and governance, human rights, and issues like water and
sanitation, health, HIV/AIDS and sexuality.
The purpose
of the website is to aggregate Zimbabwean civil society content
into one central, organised, searchable archive, so that the publishing
of our CSOs is not lost or too difficult to find to be helpful.
But as an organisation,
our key objective is to keep Zimbabweans informed about the civic
issues around them, and inspired to do something about them. As
such, we spend a lot of time translating between the work, publishing
and research of "traditional CSOs," and our own desire
to help Zimbabweans "get active" in making a difference
in our country's many challenges.
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