It’s always great to see that the internet is being used to promote some good in this world, and Invisible Children is doing precisely that: a group of young filmmakers are putting together a movie depicting the stories of some children and young teenagers from northern Uganda who’ve been seriously affected by their country’s civil war; the idea is to help generate awareness in the same age group in the US by making screenings of the movie in schools, and also to generate some online buzz in order to support scholarship programs and other direct and indirect support initiatives. By visiting this site, users will be able to take a look at the trailer, schedule a screening of the movie, or buy one of the wristbands which are presently being used to raise funds.
While the site is very nicely designed and is feature-rich, carrying lots of media like videos and image galleries, they seem to be missing some of the benefits of social networking, which by all means is a privileged way to engage young adults in any activism project. I was expecting the site to have banners for users to paste on their profiles, or one of those donate buttons like the people at ActBlue.com have created and which allow visitors of sites or social network profiles to automatically donate a sum without much fuss to it. If you take a look at the ‘Get Involved’ section, you’ll see that Invisible Children recommends its supporters to organize garage sales through eBay, but it’s easy to see that it would be simpler and cheaper for all the parties involved to organize a collective Invisible Children merchant account and have all the people who want to donate their stuff sell it that way, instead of having to process the sales separately. I wonder if they can give some further thought to their web 2.0 approach: there’s lots of resources than can be benefited from if enough googling is made! 
