Posts by Robin Beck
Blog Action Day 2009: Bloggers vs. Climate Change
Published October 15, 2009 @ 01:09AM PT
Robin Beck is Change.org's Organizing Director and the lead organizer for Blog Action Day 2009.
We at Change.org are thrilled to announce that Blog Action Day 2009 is finally here! For those of you who aren’t familiar, Blog Action Day is an annual event – held on October 15th – in which bloggers from around the world unite to write about the same topic on the same day.
This year Change.org was asked to run Blog Action Day, and I’ve just spent the past two months serving as lead organizer – corresponding with thousands of bloggers in more than 135 countries and working with dozens of leading nonprofits and media partners in preparation for the big day.
In August we asked bloggers from around the world to vote on the topic they wanted to write about, and the overwhelming selection was climate change. I have to admit, I was pleased. I don’t think there is another global issue today as important or urgent as climate change, nor one that impacts more aspects of all of our lives.
I’ve been a lifelong environmental and social justice advocate and it’s been exciting to see the overwhelming response in support of writing about a topic that, not so long ago, was obscure and unsexy.
As soon as we announced the winning topic, top blogs like Mashable, The Official Google Blog, Autoblog, Neatorama and Gadling immediately signed on in support. Even more important has been the enthusiastic response of thousands of niche bloggers covering topics ranging from politics to travel, food, knitting and more around the globe.
We’ve also been fortunate to have many of the world’s leading nonprofit organizations involved, including the TckTckTck campaign, the United Nations Foundation, NRDC, 350.org, Greenpeace, Oxfam, Care, World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy, 1Sky, the National Wildlife Federation, and just this week – Al Gore’s organization: the Alliance for Climate Protection.
We were also pleasantly surprised by the active participation of two national governments, showing that leaders throughout the word are not only taking this issue seriously, but are also serious about engaging grassroots citizen participation on the web.
In Spain the ruling PSOE party has helped translate our awesome Blog Action Day video into Spanish and has become an active supporter. In the UK, the foreign ministry, and now the Prime Minister himself, have become not just supporters but active participants. In fact, Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote his country’s first blog post at 12:01am on October 15th.
In the context of all this activity, many people have been asking me lately what I see as the impact of Blog Action Day and what I consider success.
My most honest answer is that I think the biggest impact, and the biggest measure of success, is that today new conversations are happening about climate change in places they never have before. Bloggers who usually write about their daily lives, about business, about design, technology, travel, or family are having a new discussion. And that discussion is bringing one of the most urgent issues of our time to a wider audience than ever before.
You can watch as the day unfolds with our live stream of all of your posts and tweets at: www.blogactionday.org. Thanks for engaging with us in Blog Action Day 09!
