A brief sketch of the ideas going forth for constructive activism. I see three parts:

Guide – aka the "how to" part. Note that questions like "How to start a blog" have many answers already on the web. The questions I’d like to start answering are "How do we get the prolific bloggers on the topic to contribute here and not exclusively on their own blog " One of the challenges in the Free Alaa campaign was that the actual blog was not updated regularly enough, so readed had to hunt around SandMonkey, the Arabist et al for updates.Granted, I expect that next-generation aggregation will be able to handle synchronized postings.

Platform – My aim with the civ concept has been to define a broad concept of a platform for civic activism. It could be implemented in Drupal as a reference implementation, but WordPress or any other CMS could do it as well.  After all, remember that any proven technology will be co-opted by bigger vendors. My problem with blogging-alone, is that the blog format tends to focus on the individual and not the community, on the latest and not the most important. You can display blog + incoming del.icio.us links, but few people do. See my Portal design.(The "Squidoo Lens" actually does this, but that’s an example of a branding name which will never catch on in the English language).

Site – Deploy the guide and the platform to a reference site. This provides a demonstration of the technology, and builds a community of people to work with it.

I’d like to spend my time on the platform. The measure of success will be how widely the "platform" is adopted.