Struggling to make an impact on your target audience? Are issues unresolved despite your best efforts? Do the internet, mobile phones or information design present exciting possibilities in advocacy but difficult to take advantage of? The Info Activism camp, to be held in Bangalore, India from February 19 to 25, offers rights advocates the chance to make a greater impact in their work.

The seven-day camp, organised by Tactical Technology Collective helps advocates to make the best use of information, communication and digital technologies to achieve their objectives. The first-ever international camp on info activism will feature 120 participants, picked through a competitive selection process, and who will not only learn but also share skills and techniques to aid in the process of advocacy.

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Smog, fast-vanishing forest space, protest marches, human rights abuses and myriad such events and activities need constant attention and backing. Highlighting such issues is no more a herculean task for advocacy groups. Information, communication and digital technologies have smoothened out processes and systems and contain techniques and tools which, if appropriately used, can easily bring about phenomenal change.

All the toolkits and guides mentioned below will be released in 2008. Workshops and consultancies are also available on request. The info-activism camp is due to be held in India in February 2009.

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pdf version

Its been five years since Tactical Tech's inception, and we have dedicated these years to strengthening NGOs' technology use in developing and transition countries. In 2007 alone, we undertook 15 projects under our Skills Building and Movement Building program areas.

Read our first ever annual review where we reflect on our work in 2007, and our experience, achievements and challenges during the past five years. In this review, we’ve split our project work into three themes – Freedom, Finding a Voice and Making it Heard.

This is our first attempt at showcasing our work and we hope the journey through our review is as enjoyable to you as it was for us to formulate. Do share your thoughts with us at ttc@tacticaltech.org.

This report was compiled by Tactical Tech in collaboration with Melissa Gira. It explores the ways in which sex worker health and rights advocacy groups currently use information and communications technology, and to discover how they could benefit from technology and training in the future. It was commissioned by the Open Society Institute’s Sexual Health and Rights Project (SHARP).

Tactical Tech is happy to announce the web release of the Portuguese version of the Audio/Video NGO-in-a-box, tailored for distribution in Brazil. To create the Portuguese language edition, Tactical Tech teamed up with Casa Brasil and Estúdio Livre who labored hard to translate all the content over the last year, mostly working as volunteers.

The Audio/Video edition of NGO-in-a-Box is a toolkit that lowers the entry level for NGOs, non-profits and media activists wanting to use audio and video for social change.

You can view the site here pt.av.ngoinabox.org

The Audio/Video edition of NGO-in-a-Box is a collection of Free and Open Source Software tools, guides and tutorials for multimedia production and distribution. We've just updated the edition with some new tools, revised the versions of the software, added the ability to browse the content by tags and also included some new categories .

You can see the updated version at av.ngoinabox.org

Tactical Tech and Women'sNet are pleased to announce the web launch of the latest edition of NGO-in-a-box, the BaseBox. base.ngoinabox.org

The BaseBox is a collection of tools for the day to day running of small to medium sized NGOs. Produced by Tactical Tech in collaboration with Women'sNet, the BaseBox aims to make it easier to set up base, find the right software and learn how to use it.

The booklet has been released and is also available for download here. We are currently translating the booklet into Russian.

Modern life is saturated with ever increasing amounts of information, advertising and media with little time to digest what is being said. Against this background, NGOs and advocates too often find the information they want to communicate, either buried in long reports full of professional jargon and statistics, or overlooked in an endless stream of media releases. Whether communicating to the public, staff, donors or government officials, information design can help NGOs communicate with more impact, increase accessibility, and present issues powerfully.

iCommons recently named Tactical Tech and its NGO-in-a-box project as one of "5 Resourceful Sites NGOs Can’t Live Without". Check out the article on the iCommons blog.