The text of my "speech" to the NetSquared 2007 Conference.

The people of Darfur are not destined to fight. The peoples of Rwanda, of Bosnia and Guatemala, of Cambodia and Armenia, the Jews of Europe were not a lost cause. Nor were they simply a natural disaster, to be met with blankets and gauze. Who would have suggested that the appropriate response to Auschwitz was bags of rice?

Yet that is our response to genocide. Humanitarian relief organizations are doing vital, breathtaking work — but it’s up to us, as members of the human race, to work to change the situations that necessitate that humanitarian relief. The pattern to date has been ad-hoc groups coming together around a particular conflict, creating some noise and holding some demonstrations, and then fading away just as quickly when the mass atrocities lessen.

The Genocide Intervention Network was established to give our members a more lasting voice, a more permanent effect on the situation — to create a permanent anti-genocide constituency, that makes political inaction in the face of mass atrocities all but unthinkable.

Like so many social movements, the leadership in this area has come from below — from Darfurian refugees in places like Indiana and Portland, Maine. From Jewish Holocaust survivors in Florida and New Jersey. From Armenian Americans in California. From university and high school students across the United States and around the world.

We don’t want to disturb that dynamic. Our entire organization is founded on empowering our members — specifically, with the tools to prevent and stop genocide. And when we looked at our members — who were holding film screenings, having bake sales and benefit concerts, organizing Darfur rallies, creating Facebook groups at a furious pace — where we saw a need was not for another newsletter or petition or bumper sticker, but simply resources.

Activists were being forced to rip copyrighted pictures off the BBC for their YouTube videos, cut and paste information from Wikipedia for their flyers — and they were doing it every day, all across the country.

And so we arrived at the anti-genocide community network proposal: What if we could create a resource in which activists could access free public-domain images, videos and interviews from Darfur and other conflicts, the latest statistics and information from expert-level reports? What if they were given the tools to mash it up, mix it around, and produce their own materials in their own voice, with emotional ownership and a pledge of their role in the movement? And what if we gave them the tools to become local leaders, using tell-a-friend tracking and widgets for their blogs, profiles and websites?

We don’t want to replicate what already exists, and so at every step of the way we want to integrate with existing networks, tools and resources. We know that activists who get mobilized in one organization are more than likely to be active again — so we have no membership requirement for participation. Our sole purpose is to build out the anti-genocide movement by empowering activists with tools to make their work more effective — whether it’s for our organization or another.

Our experience with social networking has taught us that the most powerful thing we can often do for activists is to give them the tools, and then get out of the way.

We don’t want to own the talking points or the rallies or necessarily even the membership rolls. We want activists to speak in their own voice, with their own ideas — because in the end, that’s what will build an effective anti-genocide constituency.

At last year’s NetSquared conference, Ethan Zuckerman from Global Voices Online said one of the hallmarks of social networking for social good has been the moving from speaking on behalf of others to amplifying their voices. We don’t want to speak for activists, because we know they can speak for themselves.

There is a wealth, an abundance of experience here, from organizations, funders and technical gurus. We hope some of you will join us, and realize that each of you can have a hand in stopping genocide.

Thank you and I look forward to our collaboration.