“It’s about people.”
Will Byrant said that to me on my first day on the job at Amnesty International Canada. He should know, he’s been here working longer than anyone (and has done almost every job there is to do). I hope Will works here forever. He embodies trust, honesty, good-will (no pun intended) and commitment. This is what we believe in. As long as Will has faith in humanity, so do I. So should you. Upholding the right to be a human is based on the assumption and belief that in just societies people are, and want to be, good to one another. Upholding the social contract starts with you.
We work in a difficult time. The world is changing rapidly. Despots and villains persist, and they are aided by a socio-political communications landscape that is more and more mediated: every day new centralizations of network power seek to capture and dehumanize us - turn our activities, identities, and connections into atomized “data” on Siren Servers in the cloud - to sell opportunities to influence us, to silence and subsume our desires to theirs. It will get worse before it gets better. It will get harder to remain connected to reality.
It’s all about people. Keep this at the core of everything you do. Amnesty International remains a force for dignity and humanity. For reality. We reject oppression, including soft blackmail and manipulation. The data is us: we are people, we have voice. Our words will not be idle chatter in the digital fray. I have hope that we will find a way to get our call for human rights heard among the noise.
This repository documents the work, processes, and practices of the digital communications department of Amnesty International Canada (English Speaking). It is a resource for communications workers both inside and outside the digitalcoms team.
Indeed, we hope this manual is useful to people outside Amnesty International Canada as an example of how a small team manages a publishing workflow for digital activism. This is how we work. We hope you can find a good way to work, too. If you use our guide, please let us know! We’d love to talk to you.
Included here are summaries of the core work of digitalcoms: strategy, coordination, and implementation (how to get stuff done). An outline of systems is also provided, but this remains an area of fluctuation and should be considered provisional. Also included is supplemental information related to keeping publication running smoothly.
I wrote this manual with a lot of help from Greg Clarke. Team members George Irish, Andrew Bales, Alexandra Lopoukhine, and others provided background material and support.
Neither Greg nor I work at Amnesty International anymore, but we remain active contributors to the movement. Find us at Github on the AmnestyInternational repos. We have some other inter sting projects you might also enjoy.
We welcome contributions from anyone. Please contact us.
Sincerely,
ex-Digital Production Specialist, Amnesty International Canada
November 15th, 2013