Causefest

Tomorrow and Friday, an Alliance of Youth Movements Summit convenes at Columbia University Law School to launch a new global youth network to help train people around the world to use social media—from cell phones to digital video to Twitter and other tools—to fight violence and oppression. The Summit was inspired by the recent successes of One Million Voices Against FARC—a Facebook group that used social networking and mobile technologies to organize 12 million people in 190 cities around the world to protest the FARC extremist group in Colombia.

The Alliance of Youth Movements—being organized by Howcast, Facebook, MTV, the U.S. Department of State, YouTube, Google, and Access 360 Media—is crafting a field manual on how to affect social change using the Internet. The first draft can be viewed here.

The alliance also is forming an online "hub" that will include links to community organizing information, a forum for sharing experiences, and instructional videos for creating citizen action groups around the world. The Summit brings together leaders of 17 organizations from 15 countries, including Save Darfur Coalition, One Million Voices Against FARC, Genocide Intervention Network, and Invisible Children. Panels will include talks entitled How to Use New Mobile Technologies and How to Preserve Group Safety and Security.

Cause Global will be covering parts of the conference; check this space for updates.

Here are two of the videos being collected by the Alliance as resources for helping cause-wired activists, first posted on Howcast within the last 48 hours:





(Illustration by istock.com)