Free expression online: you make it happen

Right now, there are 18 hours left in our monthly donors drive, and the response from the OpenMedia community has been heartening It’s always humbling watching people step up to defend their rights online. In fact, one of the things I love the most about the open Internet is the way it gives people power to effect positive change. Power to choose what content to view, power to connect and share with other people all over the world, and ultimately, power to decide what to use the Internet for.

At OpenMedia, we’ve gotten pretty good at using the power of the Internet to protect the Internet.

With support from our community, we’ve built tools like our latest crowdsourcing project, which empowered nearly forty thousand people to participate in creating a positive vision of the future of free expression online.

Now that we know what that positive vision is, the time has come for us to start working to make it a reality.

As a small grassroots organization, this work is only possible because of the support we get from our monthly allies. The commitment they show to defending the possibilities of the open Internet inspires me. Our allies are people all over the world who make regular, human sized donations; without them, long term work like protecting free expression online and defeating the TPP just wouldn’t be possible.

Today, it’s never been more crucial for us to proactively defend free expression online. If the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) goes ahead, Internet users everywhere stand to lose a lot of the freedom and power they enjoy today.

That's why we launched a drive for new monthly donors this month. If we can reach our goal of just 100 new monthly donors, we’ll be able to:

• Use the results of our latest crowdsourcing project to publish a positive global vision for preserving free expression online.
• Promote our crowdsourced policy recommendations with highly targeted social media ads.
• Expand our team to ramp up local, on-the-ground pressure on politicians as election season approaches.

Our community has managed to stall the TPP this long, but negotiators haven’t given up pushing a restrictive and backwards vision of the Internet. In fact, just in the last week, a key decision maker was reported saying he felt the TPP was “80 per cent” done.

We’ve been campaigning against the TPP for the last 2 years, something that just wouldn’t have been possible without help from our committed monthly donors. Because of their support, we’ve succeeded in holding the agreement off this long.

But we’ve got a lot more to do to stop the TPP from becoming a reality, and we’re counting on your help to do it.

Tomorrow, our push for monthly donors will conclude, and the results will inform the future of our work to defend free expression online. We’re incredibly grateful to everyone who stepped up to help us defend their rights online by joining our monthly allies. I really cannot overstate how important these committed people are to making our work possible. Together, we’re taking a stand to defend free expression and protect our rights online.