Citizentube in Mexico City: the Alliance of Youth Movements

Today I'm headed to the 2nd annual, Alliance of Youth Movements conference in Mexico City. Launched last year in New York by the U.S. State Department and Howcast (YouTube and Google are among the sponsors), AYM's mission is to "positively empowers leaders to affect nonviolent change in the world by creating and promoting use of technological tools to advance freedom, human rights, democracy, and development around the world."

Basically, it's a tech conference for social movements.

In the year since the first AYM conference, there's not doubt that the election protests in Iran have been the highest-profile case of young people using technology to advance freedom and human rights - thousands of YouTube videos uploaded from the streets of Tehran became the only window into the violence after the foreign press was kicked out by the Iranian government. But there are hundreds of other cases in which young people have been using technology to fight for their rights, and the conference in Mexico City will serve to highlight these examples and allow activists to learn lessons from one another directly. No doubt the use of technology to combat Mexican drug cartels will be at the top of mind for many of the local participants in the conference.

I'll blog from the conference but you can also stay on top of things by watching the AYM YouTube channel, here.

And check out this overview of the conference, produced by Howcast: