Melissa Grant on creating the 10 tactics cards

Long-time writer and activist, Melissa Gira Grant researched and wrote the content for the ten fold-out tactic cards which accompany the 10 tactics film. She first met Tactical Tech while she was consulting with the Open Society Institutes's Sexual Health and Rights Project in 2007. Two years later she attended the Info-Activism Camp in India.

Melissa believes that it was only because of her experience at the camp that she could manage the mammoth task of collecting 35 info-activism stories from advocates across the world. She says without the camp, “I would never have felt so intimately connected to this global braintrust of passionate activists. It pays to get out from under our laptops and work face-to-face - even better when that work is taking place a step far outside our daily lives. I did my best to hold onto the creative pulse and ambitious pace when ringing people up on Skype at all hours in order to research and gather materials for the guide.”

Although the global nature of the content is what makes the tactics cards so widely relevant, Melissa's biggest challenge was coordinating with people across continents and time-zones. “On any given day, I'd be on Skype with Slovakia, watching and writing up videos from Egypt and Cambodia, chatting with Tactical Tech staff in Brighton and over the course of their travels, too, and emailing an artist in New York “ Along with this was the difficulty of presenting all the information she collected in a way which was both simple but thorough. She says, “It's quite an intense amount of information, but as that's the subject -- how to convey such rich data in the most compelling way, and to inspire action -- it was a pleasure to get to put into practice the work as we were compiling it.”

Now that the project is finished, Melissa is eager to see the impact of 10 tactics on rights advocacy. She has many ideas, “Maybe we'll see response videos posted online to each tactic? Creative remixes based on people's experiences with their own campaigns?” Most of all, she just wants “ to see how different grassroots communities and groups run with the videos - how they can design actions around what tools we've pulled together, and what we hear back about that work.”

Image: Melissa at the Info-Activism camp, India, 2009. Image by petitpor.