Creating a Dot-commotion

"A good activist is a living activist," says the Ruckus Society, an organization with an online guide to safe and effective civil disobedience. The site teaches event planning, gives advice on spinning the media, and even shows you how to hang yourself in effigy (carefully). Everything a protester in Washington, Seattle, Melbourne, or Prague could ...

"A good activist is a living activist," says the Ruckus Society, an organization with an online guide to safe and effective civil disobedience. The site teaches event planning, gives advice on spinning the media, and even shows you how to hang yourself in effigy (carefully). Everything a protester in Washington, Seattle, Melbourne, or Prague could want to know.

"A good activist is a living activist," says the Ruckus Society, an organization with an online guide to safe and effective civil disobedience. The site teaches event planning, gives advice on spinning the media, and even shows you how to hang yourself in effigy (carefully). Everything a protester in Washington, Seattle, Melbourne, or Prague could want to know.

Groups as diverse as the anti-World Bank 50 Years is Enough, Friends of the Earth, and the Anarchist Federation increasingly turn to the Internet to coordinate their protests — if not their messages — by directing browsers to umbrella sites and "how-to" guides that plan offensives against their common Bretton Woods enemies.

For the recent protests against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Prague, the Czech Republic-based Initiative Against Economic Globalization, or INPEG, took the lead, building protest headquarters and organizing a countersummit. "E-mail listservs were extremely useful for networking and making minor decisions," according to Stefan Bieneseld of the INPEG Media Center. In addition to INPEG, key groups such as Jubilee 2000 and the Independent Media Center offered protestors legal advice, accommodation availability, and packing tips.

The Web did not break any windows in Melbourne, torch any cars in Seattle, or carry any banners in Prague. But it did help herds of protestors find their respective ways there.

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