The Communication Initiative
Development action with informed and engaged societies
The Communication Initiative

After nearly 28 years, The Communication Initiative (The CI) Global is entering a new chapter. 

Following a period of transition, the global website has been transferred to the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa, where it will be administered by the Social and Behaviour Change Communication Division. Wits' commitment to social change and justice makes it a trusted steward for The CI's legacy and future. 

On the transfer, co-founder Victoria Martin expressed her pleasure to see this work continue under Wits' leadership, knowing that co-founder Warren Feek (1953–2024) would have felt deep pride in The CI Global's Africa-led direction. 

As Wits, we honour the team and partners who sustained The CI for decades and look forward building from that strong base. This includes co-founders Warren Feek (1953-2024) and Victoria Martin as well as La Iniciativa de Comunicación (CILA), which continues independently at lainiciativadecomunicacion.com with links to The CI Global site. We are also eager to forge new partnerships and entertain new ideas as we consider how best to contribute to social and behaviour change in our rapidly evolving environment.

If you are joining the International Social and Behaviour Change Communication (SBCC) Summit in Panama, please join Wits and CILA on Monday, 22 June, to share your thoughts and suggestion for the relaunch of the Communication Initiative. We will be in Pacifica 5 from 12-1:25 for the Refuel, Reflect, and Renew Lunch Series: The Communication Initiative: celebrating a driving force for Communication for Social Change and the way forward. We will reflect on the legacy of Warren Feek and family in creating the Communication Initiative, consider the contributions of CI over the years and then turn our attention towards the future in this dynamic session. 

If you are unable to join us in Panama, we still want to hear from you. Please contribute your thoughts by following this link: https://redcap.link/CommunicationInitiative2026 or reaching out to ci_surveys@commint.com. 

You can also follow the QR Code:

 https://redcap.link/CommunicationInitiative2026

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Advocacy 2.0 Guide: Tools for Digital Advocacy

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This project, from Global Voices Online, is intended to offer web-based techniques to digital activists for their online advocacy campaigning. Global Voices Online seeks to build a global anti-censorship network of bloggers and online activists dedicated to protecting freedom of expression and free access to information online.

The Advocacy 2.0 Guide (Tools for Digital Advocacy) describes techniques and tools that digital activists - and others who wish to learn from this subject - can use as part of their online advocacy campaigns. While the previous guide (Blog for a Cause!), also available on the Global Voices Online website, focused on the effective use of blogs as an advocacy tool, this guide explores creative uses of other web 2.0 applications.

The goal is to:

  • Aggregate web 2.0 tools for advocacy.
  • Provide detailed instructions on how to use them.
  • Highlight successful experiences of web 2.0 activism by local digital activists around the world.
  • Inspire other activists to adopt these strategies in ways that serve their specific goals and needs.


According to Global Voices Online: "From “Geo-bombing” to “multi-blogging” and Twitter to “mash-ups”, this guide explores the field of digital advocacy, intending to help activists reach out to audiences they may never have reached before."

To date (2009), it includes:

 

     

  1. Cross-posting for Advocacy, An Introduction to Social Media Integration
    • Table of Contents:
    • Introduction
    • What do you need?
    • How to feed your blog or website to Twitter?
    • Update your Facebook Status via Twitter
    • FeedBlitz takes it a step further by automating email and IM delivery - Some arguments against the use of the cross-posting
    • A good example on how to use the cross-posting technique
  2. Geo-bombing: YouTube + Google Earth - a method of tagging a video to a location on Google Earth online mapping ; "Geo-bombing is one of the techniques that can be employed to enable more effective dissemination of your YouTube videos campaign through Google mapping applications like Google Maps and Google Earth. Now you can watch your geotagged videos inside Google Earth and Google Maps. Any geo-tagged YouTube video will show up when the Youtube layer of Google Earth/Maps is turned on."

Publishers

Languages

English, Spanish, Macedonian, Bangla, Portuguese, and Arabic.

Source

Tactical Technology Collective website accessed on September 15 2009.

PDFLink
Click here to access this resource online.
Click here to access <i>Cross-posting</i> in PDF format.
Click here to access <i>Geo-bombing</i> in PDF format.