Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us-ing Us

I stumbled upon this short movie while looking at the CivicActions site. The film: Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us-ing Us is an interesting look at where the web is at now. It does a good job at explaining the hype about Web 2.0 in a ver visual and entertaining way.

Physical & Virtual Activism

I was struck today by two different campaigns that are coming out of the USA, but striving for a global audience. The first one was from IdeaList.org - Action Without Borders - and the next from AVAAZ.org - The World In Action. Idealist's present campaign is to get folks together during the week of February 5-11 "to help launch a global network of people who want to change their communities and the world by connecting people, ideas, and resources in every possible way." This does seem like a very interesting challenge to use the virtual world to challenge people to...

Online Phone Campaigns Targeting Apple

With online campaigns timing makes or breaks it. I was quite impressed with Greenpeace's Green Apple Campaign and their most recent Online Action . Their most recent action calls on mac users to call up their Public Relations Director and leave him a message, right before their big MacWorld Keynote (where the iPhone was announced). This is a neat next step for that allows activists interested in this campaign to do something which invests them more in the campaign and gets them moving up the ladder of engagement. Was neat to call up the other day and find that the...

Looking for Some Empowerment?

I've subscribed to a lot of rabble.ca 's podcasts and have enjoyed most of them. I have to say though that I was totally blown away by Reverend Van Jones' speech in FierceLight . Episodes 1-3 are filled with hope, conviction and challenge as Van Jones from the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights preaches to activists and spiritual people alike. It is easy to get discouraged as an activist. I think I would benefit from listening to these speeches every few months. It is important to look for inspiration in this world and to share what we have found...

Union Organizing

OpenConcept has experience serving national labour unions and regional locals across Canada. We have supported union in providing user/content support, technical support, customized bilingual content management systems as well as server admin support over the years. Our staff also has personal experience as union members and within a local's executive. We have a good understanding of the needs of unions in Canada and look forward to opportunities to support this important social movement. Are you looking to organize communication with your membership? Is your local preparing to go on strike? Do you need a way to organize communication away from...

rabble podcast network review

I'm not always the first to jump onto a bandwagon and although I've been looking at and subscribing to podcasts and video casts for over a year I haven't owned an iPod or mp3 player. I was downloading interesting documentaries and news sources, but more often than not didn't have time to listen to them. I finally bought an iPod earlier this week and had to say how much more I am enjoying the rabble podcast network (rpn) shows I've listened to. I've been reading rabble.ca's articles since the beginning as we were hired to help set up/customize an open...

Firefox 2.0

Just wanted to pass on a positive review of Firefox 2.0 I installed it this morning on my Mac and the upgrade went great. I didn't have any problems with extensions giving me problems (although not all of them were available for the latest code). So far it seems faster, with a few fresh theme elements. Like the new tab management which allows you to keep a smaller window open when you are using a whole bunch of tabs. The built in spell checker is also great for all of those web forms that we are constantly having to fill...

Exceptional Yum Upgrades

We've got this new Xen server and needed to make sure that we weren't making the kernels out of sync with the physical box's kernel version. For this reason we needed to remove the kernel upgrades from yum so that this didn't get installed/upgraded by default. Modifying the /etc/yum.conf file and adding in this exception in the [main] section did the trick: exclude=kernel* Makes it a lot easier to keep track of those files you want to leave as they are.

Setting up a Tidy Environment for Drupal

Had some fun earlier today setting up an environment to use the drupal htmltidy module in in a Fedora Core environment. The README.txt file in the module was rather brief, but I needed to run the following to set it up on FC5: yum install php-devel tidy libtidy-devel pecl install tidy php-devel is needed to run the phpize and tidy/libtidy-devel are needed to provide pecl with the libraries to incorporate these into php.

Opera Lyra - The Barber Of Seville

I was looking for something to celebrate for my 35th Birthday (on Sept 11th), and decided back in July that it would be a bit of an adventure to buy two tickets to the Opera as I had never been before. I really wasn't sure what to expect as I had never seen one before, but since OpenConcept helped launch their site it seemed like a good thing to learn more about. I was quite surprised at how much fun this production was. I don't go to the theatre all that often, but I found the acting to be good...