There comes a time, usually if you’re working remotely or have no office, where you really need a way to share files, documents, messages and pictures online between a lot of people for free.

Easy, I said at my last Amnesty International meeting, we’ll just set up a Google non-profits account - all their project management tools are free. No thanks, they said, we refuse to use Google because of their human rights record.

Periodically we here at TechSoup like to share what we're reading. The latest blog gem that I've added to my feed reader is Cause Global, a blog which covers social media for social change and the people involved in using technology tools to make the world a better place.

I remember from last year's Netsquared conference my sense of excited anticipation at how the rest of the world would use all these groovy new tools once they spread beyond Silicon Valley :). I've just written a blog post about digital diasporas & human rights and I'd like to follow it with a look at the non-Western use of web 2.0 for social change. If you've got any good examples then please leave a comment or contact me.

Of course, one of the most interesting things about the architecture of participation is that people are just going to do it anyway, without waiting for NGO's to catch up. So allow me to draw your attention to Egypt and the way brave individuals like Wael Abbas & others have used Youtube to help leverage the first ever prosecutions of Egyptian police for torture. Sadly, this goes alongside the rather more widely known prosecution & imprisonment of Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer.

p.s. on a lighter note, I've been mulling over a quote from Celine Petrossian (who's research ‘Liberating the Silenced: Iranian Bloggers in the Diaspora’ I've referenced in my digital diasporas post). She says "Iranian bloggers serve as 'merchants' of culture and information, trading cultural knowledge and news from both Iran to the outside world and from the West to the Iranian people living in Iran." Does that mean that blogosphere maps like these show the new Silk Routes?