This week, the Genocide Intervention Network was honored to be nominated by the NetSquared community as a 2008 Featured Project for our proposal to upgrade and extend the DarfurScores.org website. Thank you to everyone who offered your support!

For the Genocide Intervention Network, involvement in the "social web" is really an outgrowth of our entire mission: To form the first anti-genocide constituency, and to empower our members with the tools to prevent and stop genocide. The words "constituency" and "empower" are key. We're not simply looking for a mailing list or an ATM — we want an educated, active movement of people interested in preventing and stopping genocide. Our members need to be able to think for themselves on the issue, not to simply be another name on a list, but to be a hub in an ever-expanding network.

“Offering concrete ideas for how to solve a seemingly insurmountable problem can give people a sense that they, as individuals, have a stake in an issue. The Genocide Intervention Network links to a list of ‘ten things you can do to stop genocide.‘ Ivan Boothe argues that these steps, broken down into easily digestible chunks, give people an easy way to participate. Although they also link to the Genocide Intervention Network's main web site, that isn't always the point. ‘A number of these steps aren't even within our organization,’ Boothe says. This sort of advocacy is similar to bottom-up, open-source collaborative projects like Wikipedia, in which no one group has proprietary ownership over an idea or a product; instead, the goal is a constant generation of awareness and ideas. A MySpace page, says Boothe, isn't simply an advertisement for an organization, ‘it's a tool for mobilizing people for different kinds of action.’”

The Genocide Intervention Network is a nonprofit based in DC that is a little more than two years old. We began as a student group at Swarthmore College with an idea: to change the way the world responds to genocide. As a result of our origins as a student group, we have a strong history in using online social networking and viral campaigns, and this continues even as we branch out into other constituencies. In our first year of existence, we raised a quarter-million dollars for peacekeepers in Darfur — the only NGO to raise money for protection rather than humanitarian aid — primarily through student networks, both actual and virtual. How can online activism build a movement that prevents and stops genocide? Read on...

Last Friday, more than 850 students from 46 states around the country came to Washington for the Power to Protect: D.C. to Darfur conference, sponsored by the Genocide Intervention Network and Students Taking Action Now: Darfur.