MeFi Projects

Downticket Democrats highlights candidates for the House of Representatives and state legislatures in competitive districts, making it easy to donate for maximum impact. [more inside]
posted by kristi on Sep 20, 2024 - 0 comments

A climate-fiction text adventure with dystopian themes, set in 2051. Can you survive for one week as a regular person under the rule of the York Emergency Authority? (Maybe you can do more than survive, and blow oxygen on embers of resistance.) With beautiful art by Dibujos de Pam! Play for free in your browser, desktop or mobile. [more inside]
posted by mcbaya on Nov 15, 2023 - 4 comments

On December 2nd, I successfully defended my PhD dissertation in political science at the University of Toronto: "Persuasion Strategies: Canadian Campus Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaigns and the Development of Activists, 2012–20". It discusses the fossil fuel divestment movement at Canadian universities, and how organizing these campaigns influenced the student organizers who led the movement. [more inside]
posted by sindark on Jan 2, 2023 - 4 comments

Last year, Seven Stories Press released my book Full Spectrum Resistance, a two-volume exploration of how to build more effective movements. Right now you can get a free eBook version of both volumes (until July 5). (I’m posting bonus content on Facebook.) If you like free books about resistance, you can also download a copy of Direct Action Works: A legal handbook for civil disobedience and non-violent direct action in Canada, first released during February 2020's massive Indigenous solidarity actions.
posted by mcbaya on Jul 3, 2020 - 1 comment

'Change the Subject' is a documentary about working to change how libraries label immigrants. Here's a trailer (and a second trailer). In 2014 a Dartmouth College student researching undocumented students in the U.S. repeatedly encountered the term “Illegal aliens” as a subject heading in the library catalog. Dismayed by this use of biased language she worked with CoFIRED (a student run undocumented immigrant rights group at Dartmouth) and rallied college librarians, and ultimately librarians across the United States, to challenge how the Library of Congress categorizes books and other materials about undocumented people. This 55 minute film features interviews with students, faculty, librarians and congressional representatives involved in this instance of campus activism that entered the national spotlight (NYT link). As of this posting, the Library of Congress has yet to 'Change the Subject' and 'Illegal aliens' remains the authorized cataloging term for issues related to undocumented immigrants. [more inside]
posted by soy bean on May 7, 2019 - 0 comments

This was a rail project researched and developed while I was in college trying to become an urban planner. [more inside]
posted by Michele in California on Jul 18, 2017 - 2 comments

I found out about the Town Hall Project from this question on ask. The data in the spreadsheet are amazing, but it can be pretty hard to get the most relevant data out of a spreadsheet. I made a couple hacked together maps to help with that question, but then decided to actually make a real thing as a learning exercise and to hopefully help other people out. [more inside]
posted by rockindata on Feb 9, 2017 - 5 comments

The current political cycle is terrible! But I am terrible at not being a news and politics junkie! Since I'm not going to get a break from it, I thought I'd put together this newsletter digest so you don't have to drown in it, too.
posted by Phire on Feb 7, 2017 - 2 comments

Back when we started the KNOWMORE.ORG project in 2005, we posted about it here, Excited young pups that we were. In the time in between we educated hundreds of thousands of readers over the last decade, covered the entire Global Fortune 500 and then some, and rated each company for Worker's Rights, Environmental Concerns, Human Rights, Political Influence and Business Ethics. We created an award winning browser plug-in, helped remove Dov Charney from American Apparel, and did it all on volunteer hours and DIY fundraising before crowdsourcing existed. Sadly, pending a crowdsourcing appeal, the site is in danger of closing down this April. [more inside]
posted by bernard@knowmore on Feb 5, 2017 - 2 comments

An online game specifically made to call out Elon Musk on his collaborationism with the Trump regime. Will you manage to board the Mars rocket, or will you be crushed by an unsympathetic bureaucracy?
posted by Zarkonnen on Feb 1, 2017 - 0 comments

I started a new site based around the idea that long-term political involvement is often an overwhelming idea. But if we promise ourselves to do something one hour a week, we could change the world. Aimed at people who are looking for ways to get started in political activism, it currently consists of links to resources about how to find your representatives, and how to contact them effectively, but this is just the start. Over the next few weeks, I hope to build a much more interactive site that gamifies the process, allowing you to form teams, log time and contacts, and find & share new tactics for organizing. There are a ton of progressive resources out there, but getting started and making it a habit can be too daunting for a lot of folks. I hope to change that.
posted by gofargogo on Jan 23, 2017 - 2 comments

TogetherList is a comprehensive database of women’s rights, people of color, LGBT+, immigrant, climate change, and Muslim-American advocacy organizations that need your support. TogetherList aims to make it simple for people to connect to organizations in need, whether that be through volunteer work, financial support, advocacy through local government, etc. [more inside]
posted by raihan_ on Nov 23, 2016 - 3 comments

Wendy's is testing veggie burgers at a 24 locations across 3 states. My friends and I made a website to let people know where they could get the new burger. Unfortunately the burgers aren't available nationwide yet, so we're working to convince HQ to make them more available.
posted by thebigdeadwaltz on Jan 4, 2016 - 2 comments

#Additivism blurs the boundaries between art, engineering, science fiction, and digital aesthetics. It calls for critical, artistic, and speculative submissions to a Cookbook of radical ideas, to be released in Autumn 2015. [more inside]
posted by 0bvious on Mar 27, 2015 - 0 comments

So I mentioned this in the #womensMarch MeTa thread, but I am the vice-admin for a group blog called the Asexual Agenda whose purpose is to promote more higher-level discussion of asexuality, by asexuals. It also aims to provide a community center for asexuals who are interested in this discourse. [more inside]
posted by sciatrix on Feb 25, 2015 - 4 comments

African Americans & South Asians (i.e. folks from India, Pakistan, etc.) have been standing up for each other for over 100 years, despite barriers of race, information, and distance. These secret histories of global allyship are a reminder of how little of the good stuff schools ever teach us.
posted by anirvan on Feb 9, 2015 - 0 comments

An open-ended research tool for everything that the DC Police Department writes on their twitter feed. The department made the controversial decision to encrypt all radio communications last year, with no allowance for journalists, and thus have devoted more time to twitter. The site allows you to view the last three thousand tweets and quickly analyze factors like age, city quadrant, gender, etc., though a clever regular-expression-based interface.
posted by tmcw on Aug 30, 2012 - 7 comments

The Publication Standards Project campaigns for free and open standards for digital publishing, for the benefit of readers, writers, libraries, and publishers alike. We started with a two-part essay by nickd on A List Apart. Last month's campaign concerned DRM, and this month we're focusing on libraries. We hope our supporters will embrace Monday, July 16 as Information Access Day and take the opportunity to open a conversation on issues of information freedom, literacy, and access.
posted by booknerd on Jul 12, 2012 - 0 comments

The TSA Choice is an activist site against the deployment of whole-body scanners and the TSA's new "enhanced patdown" procedures. We've created a map and word cloud to show what choices people are making in the security line at airports across the U.S. -- the naked pictures, or the thorough fondling by a gloved stranger? Please share your experience, too!
posted by Andrhia on Nov 19, 2010 - 8 comments

WriteYourPrincipal is a grassroots effort to encourage people to ask their former school principals what their alma maters are doing to end LGBTQ harassment and bullying in their schools. I'm collecting and posting letters that people have been writing to their school principals. From one of my favorites, written by the friend and mentor who came up with this idea in the first place: "Until she knows that . . . her teachers and peers will treat her with dignity and respect, a young person who thinks she might be gay she will feel lonely and scared — no matter how many friends she appears to have. She needs to know she has the support of the adults around them. "
posted by liketitanic on Oct 11, 2010 - 3 comments

We made these mysterious posters featuring QR codes and are putting them up in seven Canadian cities. It's our hope that people scan the posters with their smart phone and then complete the petition form they get sent to.
posted by dbarefoot on Aug 24, 2010 - 3 comments