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Hello,

Blogs are a familiar feature on the internet - where users post content in an accumulating manner, with comments, and search options, etc. They facilitate expression and exploration, and via attached comments, also debate and synthesis.


Reading and
Navigating Blogs

Our blogs are quite powerful. Each writer can post, as is typically the case. Sustainers who have the option can also post, however. All Blogs appear in the blog system, and sometimes also in content boxes the top page of ZNet - and always via the left menu of the top page - and can be found via searches, etc.

Commenting on blogs follows the blogs, attached at the bottom, and blog comments, like all others, are also visible in many places that show comments including in the forum system. In addition, the entire blog system gathers content for everyone - but one can look at the accumulating content in many ways.

  • For example one can look at one writer's efforts - so one is seeing what is effectively a blog system for that one writer, or Sustainer.
  • One can also look at the content by topic, seeing blogs that are tagged as being about a certain topic - or place, as well. Thus, when doing that, it is a blog system about a topic, or a place, with many contributors.
  • One can look at only writer blogs, or only sustainer blogs, as well.
  • One can look at blogs for particular Groups, too.

All this is easily done using the left menu. Searches allow even more variables and refinements.


Creating Blog Posts

If you are a Sustainer with permission, and are logged in, you will see a link in the left menu for you to post a blog - and you can use that to post one, and then tag it various ways (such as with a topic or place, or a group tag), and once you do, it is in the system with you as the author.

You can also use the console button to the left to post a blog - anytime and from anywhere in the site, as long as you are logged in.

Meanwhile, enjoy the blogs - and, by the way, if you are a Free Member or a Sustainer with a ZSpace page, of course you can put one or more content boxes on it, pulling blog links of any sort you may want to filter for, for example, by you or by your friends or by others - and by topic, about places, for groups, etc.

Blogs

Aidan

aidan ricketts's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/aidan ricketts
Bio:  Aidan Ricketts is an experienced social and environmental activist as well as a prominent activism educator and writer from Australia and Vanuatu in the South Pacific.   Aidan is the a... (More)

All ricketts Blogs

Recent ricketts Content

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The life cycle of an activist

By aidan ricketts at Mar 12, 2012


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The life cycle of activists

Recently I was providing a community activism consultancy for a group of residents threatened by sea level rise on Australia’s east coast. Whilst I was helping them with their campaign mapping processes one of the residents also took time to ask me, “What is your interest in coming here and helping us, why are you doing this?” almost as if he was suspicious that I must have another motive.  After explaining that I was actually receiving a small fee I went on to explain the real reason why I was there.

I believe in real democracy, and I believe in the power of communities to organise to pursue their interests and I am passionate about helping people take a stand and make a difference in the world.
I sincerely believe that when people awaken one day to find an issue at their doorstep that they cannot just ignore, there is enormous potential for transformation.

Possibly for the first time in their lives they encounter firsthand the stubbornness, lies, hypocrisy and embedded corruption that re-inforces the vested interests they have dared to oppose or question. They may become despondent and defeated but for many this dissonance ignites a fire in the belly far deeper and more powerful than the small issue that first awakened them.

There is also a tertiary stage in the life cycle of an activist, something like the metamorphosis of a larva to an adult insect, capable of multiplying its own kind many times over.  This metaphor begins to explain why I have written this book.
After many years working in campaigns I asked myself “What next”? Should I choose another campaign to throw myself into or is there a more effective path?

For me personally, the answer was obvious, as an educational designer and experienced activist, the best contribution I could make for the future was to become an activism educator. I realised that as an activist I could really only work on one campaign at a time, but if I could help train up other activists then hundreds possibly thousands of campaigns may benefit.
This is certainly coming to fruition, the coal seam gas issue has ignited a wildfire across rural Australia and suddenly I’m being inundated with requests to train formerly conservative rural communities in the techniques of non violent activism. I’m so glad I also have a book to offer these people it saves my voice.

Aidan Ricketts February 2012

http://aidanricketts.com
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