Change Manifesto

Today through Friday, an Alliance of Youth Movements Summit is meeting at Columbia University Law School to launch a new global network called 501c3, to help train people around the world to use social media—from cell phones to digital video to Twitter and other tools—to fight violence and oppression. The Summit was inspired by the recent successes of One Million Voices Against FARC —a Facebook group that used social networking and mobile technologies to organize 12 million people in 190 cities around the world to protest the FARC extremist group in Colombia.

The Alliance of Youth Movements—being organized by Howcast,
 Facebook, MTV, the U.S. Department of State, YouTube, Google, and Access 360 Media —has started crafting a field manual on how to affect social change using the Internet. The first draft of that field manual can be viewed here.

The alliance is forming an online "hub" that will include online links to community organizing tips, a forum for sharing experiences, and instructional videos for organizing citizen action groups around the world. The Summit—which brings together leaders of 17 organizations from 15 countries, including Save Darfur Coalition,
 One Million Voices Against FARC, Genocide Intervention Network,
 and Invisible Children —will include panel talks entitled How to Use New Mobile Technologies and How to Preserve Group Safety and Security.

Here are two of the videos that have been collected by the Alliance since Monday (as resources for helping cause-wired activists, first posted on Howcast within the last 48 hours. This one, entitled How to Circumvent an Internet Proxy is a four-minute tutorial on how to get around government censorship in order to get the word out about a social problem in a developing country.  This one, also posted on Howcast within the last 48 hours, is meant to teach people how to use social networking to organize for a cause.

Watch this space for conference updates.