NetAction was founded in July, 1996, to educate the public, policy makers, and the media about technology-based social and political issues, and to promote access to and use of information technology as a tool for community organizing, outreach, and advocacy.
NetAction's founder and Executive Director,
,
is a longtime community activist and a former journalist. Now the principal consultant
with Communications
Strategies for Nonprofit Organizations,
she previously.
served
as
Executive
Director
of
Toward
Utility
Rate
Normalization
(TURN),
a
California-based consumer organization that monitored utility companies, from
1989-1995, and
was subsequently appointed Executive Director of Computer Professionals for
Social Responsibility (CPSR), a national coalition of computer scientists, programmers
and others who work with or are interested in computers and information technology
policy.
Current and past program activities include:
The Virtual Activist, a comprehensive online training guide to help activists and nonprofit organizations make effective use of technology as a tool for outreach, organizing, and advocacy.
NetAction Notes, a free electronic newsletter published twice each month. NetAction Notes includes information on how activists can use the Internet effectively, and about significant developments in technology-based social and political issues.
The Consumer Choice Campaign, an Internet-based grassroots consumer education project launched in 1997 to educate the growing population of Internet users about Microsoft Corporation's anti-competitive business practices, and empower computer users to participate in the development of sound public policy on this and other technology-based social and political issues. In conjunction with this campaign, NetAction published a free electronic newsletter, the Micro$oft Monitor.