In 2006, I founded ZapBoom Consulting, a firm which looks at how digital tools like cell phones and the Internet can be used in campaigns for social change, particularly in developing countries. I have researched and written reports on topics ranging from online citizen journalism to blog advocacy and internet censorship. I have also performed in-country Internet monitoring and international conference organizing.

I first became interested in digital activism in 2004-2005 while living in Morocco. It was the fall after my graduation from Vassar College and I was working as a Programs Assistant at the National Democratic Institute in Rabat while carrying out research on citizen engagement through a Fulbright scholarship. I interviewed many Moroccan grassroots political activists while researching my final report on Moroccan political NGOS: Morocco Raises it Voice.

At a sit-in in the Moroccan town of Tata in 2005. Activists there were rallying for improved healthcare at the local hospital.

I became inspired by these grassroots activists, campaigning for democracy against all odds, and decided that I wanted to commit myself to helping them. Yet, I was a foreigner and I did not know how I could be useful. At the end of my Fulbright year in 2005 I decided to stay in Morocco another year and work with these activists, but I was not sure exactly how I could make a contribution.

I believe that activists can gain a lot from knowledge-sharing with one another, and in the summer of 2005, I set about creating a web site, www.Demologue.com, "to increase communication and skills transfer between democracy activists in different nations in order to speed the process of citizen-led democratization around the world."

The site, which I translated into Arabic, French, and Spanish, had a few successes, such as the Moroccan citizen journalists site e-mouaten.com (the first in the Arab world) and the Election Blogging Guide, but it never really took off. I didn't understand that I actively needed to promote the idea of digital activism. I thought people would just come. I began Demologue.com based on the vague idea that the Internet could help bring activists together, but I didn't yet have an idea of "digital activism."

The homepage of Demologue.com, my old digital democracy site.

The idea of digital activism first came into my head in the winter of 2005, halfway through my second year in Morocco. I wanted to create a blog, DemoBlog, which would catalogue the exploits of grassroots democracy activists around the world, and I wanted to find bloggers to write for it. When I found out about the Global Voices Summit in London, I jumped at the chance to go.

It was at that conference that I learned about the true capacity of the Internet as a tool for social change. I learned from the bloggers at the conference about how low-cost collaborative technologies like blogging, tagging, podcasting, and wikis were empowering people from a host of different nations. It was then that I realized that the Internet could empower political activists around the world. It was then that I started thinking about digital activism.

At the Global Voices Summit in 2005, with attendees from Amnesty International. This event crystallized my thinking about digital activism.

I fell into digital activism consulting by chance. After having left Morocco in 2006 I became interested in Avaaz.org, a global version of MoveOn.org that has since become an international digital activism organization with one million members around the world. I arranged a meeting with Avaaz's Executive Director, Ricken Patel. To my surprise, Ricken suggested that I write a report on e-advocacy in the global south, which had been commissioned by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Four months and 110 pages later I was finished and had begun my life as a digital activism consultant.

From there I got other assignments installing election monitoring software in Nigeria for the OpenNet Initiative and writing a case study on the Korean citizen journalism site OhmyNews for the Internet and Democracy Project at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. In the fall of 2007 I also began a Master in Public Policy degree at the Kennedy School of Government, also at Harvard.

I love digital activism consulting. It's a way for me to support myself by doing what I am passionate about, and hopefully also do some good along the way.