During the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, communications links across former republics and with the outside world were severed.  In 1994, Zenska Infoteka, a women’s information and documentation center in Zagreb, created an electronic news group for women, many of whom had already been working together on peace, humanitarian and other related issues.  Each month electronic conferences were held in local languages.  At its peak in 1997, more than a thousand messages were posted.  While discussion of difficult topics was limited, this communication system provided a central communication point for women’s rights activists.

As part of the on-going REMHI (Recovery of Historical Memory) Project, several dioceses of the Catholic Church in Guatemala have mobilized their own members to collect testimonies from victims of state violence and, now that these have been compiled into a 4-volume report, to disseminate and return that history to the afflicted communities and individuals.  During Guatemala’s 36-year civil war, close to 200,000 people were killed or disappeared and entire villages and communities were destroyed, primarily by state security forces.   REMHI’s approach has been unusual relative to other truth and reconciliation efforts in its grassroots mobilization of individuals from the afflicted areas as “agents of reconciliation” and in those individuals’ efforts to thoroughly involve and interact with the victims.

Amader Gramer Khobor is a first-of-its-kind online rural news service that covers daily happenings in village society, as no online news service in Bangladesh practices rural journalism with the provisions of time-to-time updating in the same day.  Amader Gramer Khobor, part of Amader Gram which means “Our Village Development Project,” is unique and effective because through this tactic, village society can for the first time be connected.

The Black Box Foundation was founded in 1997 to address long-standing prejudice in Hungary and Romania toward the Roma minority, a group of people previously having no medium through which to address the prejudice they faced and help others learn about their culture. The Foundation uses television to help the Roma reach out to members of their communities; it trains five-person teams—comprised of Hungarians, Roma, and Romanians—in video production, provides them with equipment, and secures monthly airtime on local television stations for their programs. Team members obtain funding for their productions, and serve as writers, editors, directors, and production staff.

WITNESS empowers human rights organizations around the world to incorporate video as an advocacy tool in their work. Rooted in the power of personal testimonies and in the principle that a picture is worth a thousand words, WITNESS and its partners’ videos have been used

Since 2000, the Human Rights Observatories Network has worked with youth groups in various regions of Brazil, inspiring them to learn about human rights and to learn how to report on and to monitor their communities’ access to rights.

In Cebu City, more than 70% of the population is classified as urban poor. A group of Non-Government Organizations with programs and services for the urban poor organizations bonded together and worked with urban poor groups to create an alliance, Task Force Tawhanong Pagpuyo (TFT), to respond to the growing numbers of victims who experienced evictions and demolitions of their houses. TFT presented and advocated for alternatives to government development plans that involved wholesale demolition with no alternative relocation sites. TFT organized a conference of urban poor leaders to identify issues and alternative solutions and followed this with research and case studies. These materials were presented to the local government and housing agencies.  Simultaneously, training was conducted for judges who issue the demolition and eviction orders. The alliance succeeded in developing and getting representatives on to a local housing board and assisted in preparing a comprehensive shelter plan for the city.  As a result, guidelines for demolition and eviction were adopted and judges now coordinate with the local housing board to ensure compliance. The number of demolitions and evictions was substantially reduced and when they did occur, relocation sites were identified in advance.

Amnesty International-the Netherlands recognized the power and potential of new text-messaging technology (SMS). The organization used it to attract new members (especially young people), build awareness of the campaign against torture and encourage people to respond quickly to urgent action appeals. About 520 new members joined as a direct result of the SMS campaign and over 5,000 more responded to the SMS urgent action appeals.

For a detailed exploration of this tactic, please click on the following link to consult our tactical notebook, <b><a href="http://www.newtactics.org/en/SendingOutanSMS">Sending Out an SMS: A rapid-response mobile phone network engages a youth constituency to stop torture fast</a></b> by Anneke Bosman.

Memoria Abierta is an alliance of eight human rights organizations in Argentina that have combined their efforts to create a publicly accessible database they hope will contribute to the articulation of a collective memory that we can never allow to be forgotten.  The system makes accessible all the public archives of documents, photographs and interviews that are a testament to the horrors of state terrorism in Argentina, its victims and the people who stood against it. Anyone with Internet access can search an online catalogue of the files.

For a detailed exploration of this tactic, please click on the following link to consult our tactical notebook, <b><a href="http://www.newtactics.org/en/OpenMemory">Open Memory</a></b> by Damian Ferrari.

Before this campaign, no one knew that there were people in Korean society who earned less than the minimum wage. The KWWAU raised the social conscience about the minimum wage system, bringing the issue into the sphere of social movement.  The major beneficiaries of improving the minimum wage system have been poor women.  KWWAU hopes that the income differentials are dissolved by improving the minimum wage system.