What Is the New Media Advocacy Project?
N-Map is an advocacy group and new-media laboratory that helps defenders of human rights and social justice use modern communications technology to overcome structural obstacles that they face in fighting for their rights.
New Technology Transforms How We Fight For Social Justice
N-Map, staffed by law and media professionals, assists social justice advocates with integrating visual media and “Web 2.0” social networking directly into their advocacy in innovative ways, and trains them in its use.
N-Map will work with its clients to develop new-media advocacy strategies, produce the media, and assist with navigating the complex tactical, ethical, and legal issues involved in using it.
To get started right away, or to learn about how to integrate new media into your advocacy work, contact Adam Stofsky at adam@newmediaadvocacy.org, or call us at (718) 564-9839.
N-Map’s Unique Approach
We do not simply make movies—we make ourselves part of advocacy teams, finding creative way to use media to help our clients win their cases or achieve other advocacy goals. Examples include:
• using visual new media, like digital video or Google Earth, in courtrooms at trial,
either as direct evidence or as demonstrative evidence, to explain or summarize complex testimony;
• in pre-trial litigation, as a tool to assist in mediation or negotiation, or to pressure an opposing party to settle on favorable terms;
• assisting with legislative advocacy, to persuade legislators to vote for or against a certain bill, or to alert them to the urgency of a particular issue;
• using Internet social networking outside of the courtroom, to allow lawyers better access to people in the communities where they work, helping them identify stronger clients, witnesses, and class representatives, and to gather evidence;
• improving its clients’ messaging, helping them wield new media to publicize, fund-raise, and promote their activities, and to train volunteers;
• helping organize communities and provide rights education.
Open Source Advocacy
As N-Map grows, this website will become a center for “open source advocacy,” a place where lawyers and advocates can come to learn what other innovative advocates around the world are doing to help their clients. To start, N-Map’s own work and work model will be open for public use and comment. It will also host the “innovative lawyering” wiki, which will be a center for knowledge about pushing social justice advocacy into the 21st century. With your participation and help, the site will grow into a community where advocates can post their own work for feedback and even direct assistance from other advocates.
Become Part of a Social Justice Revolution
The N-Map program is based upon an understanding that 21st-century communications technology has the potential to serve as a great equalizer, allowing those with little resources to use what they have—compelling stories—to influence people in positions of power and to improve their own lives. New-media technologies have great potential to promote transparency, allowing advocates to present and disseminate their stories with unprecedented power and speed. N-Map’s goal is to transform this potential into practical advocacy tools.
Although we live in a time when human rights caseloads are rising in domestic and international courts worldwide, and financial turmoil is devastating poor communities and decimating the budgets of advocacy groups, new technology has created the potential to meet these challenges. It can make advocacy easier and more efficient than ever before—almost 1.5 billion people worldwide have access to the Internet; video can be shot, edited, and disseminated with equipment that can fit into a small backpack; social movements have been launched and hundreds of millions of dollars raised online.
+ See N-Map’s techniques in action.
+ Learn how you can take advantage of these new techniques.
+ Get involved with N-Map.