For over 15 years we’ve turned fans into heroes as The Harry Potter Alliance. Now we’re entering a new era as Fandom Forward.
The Harry Potter Alliance was founded with a simple idea: what if fans used their passion and creativity to make the world a more loving, equitable place? That idea has driven hundreds of thousands of fan activists to do exactly that, and the world is demonstrably better for it.
But this place we’ve built? It doesn’t belong to just one fandom. No singular story can hope to represent every time, every question, or every lived experience. This movement is for anyone who believes in the power of stories and the communities that love them to change the world. It’s for everyone, and our name should reflect that. So on June 8th, 2021 we officially changed our name to Fandom Forward.
The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated an already rising tide of disinformation campaigns and fear-based, ultra conservative leaders whose message is grounded in white supremacy and oppression of people of color, women, and LGBTQIA+ people. It’s an onslaught that has led the United States and much of the world to high levels of division, disinformation, and trauma. We desperately need a revitalization of civic imagination, and we know fan activism can rise to this challenge.
Fan activism is an organizing strategy that draws parallels between beloved pop culture and real world issues of inequity to mobilize fans for social good. Fandom Forward has been a leader of the field for over 15 years, and our proven track record demonstrates the efficacy of this power-building methodology. We approach our work in three ways: providing accessible training, engaging fans in campaign experience, and building community.
The Digital First Aid Kit is a free resource to help rapid responders, digital security trainers, and tech-savvy activists to better protect themselves and the communities they support against the most common types of digital emergencies. It can also be used by activists, human rights defenders, bloggers, journalists or media activists who want to learn more about how they can protect themselves and support others. If you or someone you are assisting is experiencing a digital emergency, the Digital First Aid Kit will guide you in diagnosing the issues you are facing, and refer you to support providers for further help if needed.
A mirror of the site can be downloaded for archival and offline use: https://digitalfirstaid.org/dfak-offline.zip
Git repo: https://gitlab.com/rarenet/dfak
License: Creative Commons By-Attribution v4.0
The CERT concept was developed and implemented by the Los Angeles City Fire Department in 1985. The Whittier Narrows earthquake in 1987 underscored the area-wide threat of a major disaster in California. Further, it confirmed the need for training civilians to meet their immediate needs.
In this post, we’ll be looking at how we can use a deep learning model to train a chatbot on my past social media conversations in hope of getting the chatbot to respond to messages the way that I would.
witness.org's library of reference and training materials for activists, instructors, and allies. video production, recording LEO actions, archival, how to work with survivors, camera specifics and trainings, data science, covering protests, collecting evidence, crimes, and field guides.
An offline version of the Khan Academy. Replicates the experience of the online classrooms. Watch videos, do exercises, track student progress. Can be customized. Use at home, in classrooms, or to create entire schools. Supports ten different languages now.
Github repo: https://github.com/learningequality/ka-lite
A utility that generates random VMs for security training. Give it a set of parameters in XML and it'll build vulnerable VMs for you to practice with. Uses Puppet, Packer and Vagrant to build the images.