Americas Proposal 2008

Goals

May First/People Link is interested in building inter-Americas collaboration to:

• strengthen the communications infrastructure used by progressive organizers,
• strengthen international relationships on the left, and
• share resources.

The proposal comes out of political discussions that have led to the following conclusions:

• The most successful movements on the left today are happening in Latin America
• The US is becoming increasingly less effective in enforcing it's politics internationally, creating new opportunities for significant changes in international politics
• There is enormous disparity in resources, skills, and experiences in the left within the Americas, going in both directions
• The Internet's potential for enabling low-cost and varied international communications is growing daily

Existing hemispheric organizing projects

The first step of a project is to start a dialog with other organizations and coalitions to develop relationships with groups who share our political vision.

Possibilities include:

• The ​Foro Social Americas which will be held in October 2008 in Guatemala. Josue is in contact with Jeanine, one of the contacts in Guatemala, and has offered the support of May First/People Link. In addition, Burke pointed us in the direction of ​Rights Action as a North American organization heading up the effort (see their ​press release here. I just sent an email to them asking how we could get more involved.
• In addition, Riseup has pointed us in the direction of the [ ​http://www.web.net/comfront/cfhems.htm Hemispheric Social Alliance], a coalition addressing similar issues but with a more political bent. Burke said that the US counterpart is the ​Alliance for Responsible Trade. He also pointed out a ​recent report by Tom Louden which indicates that the alliance seems to be a live and well (despite the dated feel of the web site).
• We are also in the process of applying to be members of the ​Alliance for Progressive Communications. We're discussing the application in ticket #250 and are working on the application here.

Potential ideas for collaboration

Below are some proposed ideas for collaboration - offered purely as a starting point. Many projects could be started that would meet the goals outline above. The most effective may be the ones that are best able to politically engage activists regardless of their technical skill level.

Possible projects:

• Develop a coalition that would become an independent domain name registrar. We all have to pay a corporate or government based domain name registrar every time we want a new domain name. Many activists have had their web sites taken down because their domain name registrar took over control of their domain name due to politically-based complaints

• Develop a coalition to become an ​Autonomous System - which would allow us to control our own block of IP addresses. An IP address is the unique number that identifies a server on the Internet. We currently rely on the corporation that provides our Internet bandwidth to give us an IP address. If our Internet bandwidth provider cuts off our access, we are off the Internet. If we controlled our own block of IP addresses, we could have two connections to the Internet via two different bandwidth providers, offering us more independence and reliability.

• Develop a Bill of Rights for Internet participants. This bill of rights would cover our rights as participants, providers, programmers and activists. By collaborating on this document we would raise awareness of the political implications of our Internet activities and the need for holding Internet users and providers accountable for their activities.