2. Earlier activist roots:
Harel B has been an early adopted and pioneer of online or "electronic" activist since the 1980s. In response to the 1989 murder of six Jesuits, their cook, and her daughter in El Salvador by death squads linked to the Washington-backed government, he organized a nation-wide project over the internet including raising money over the internet, purchasing 100 copies of Amnesty International's 50-page report "El Salvador: 'Death Squads' -- A Government Strategy", obtaining signatures from dozens of Americans from about half the states and sending every U.S. Senator and dozens of national and regional media, a letter demanding an end to military support for El Salvador's government along with a copy for each Senator of AI's report. The letter was also so-signed by Archbishop Gumbleton , South African poet and activist Dennis Brutus,and poet/writer/activist Grace Paley. Co-organizers were John Lamperti (VT) and Mary Pugh (IL).
In followup, Harel created the Activists Mailing List (AML) in spring 1990 which grew to 100 members; and followed up AML with ACTIV-L in fall 1990, a listserv which grew to over 1,000 members. Following ACTIV-L, and still before the Web exploded, in March 1991 he created the internet's first progressive moderated UseNet newsgroup, misc.activism,progressive, whose official usenet readership statistics began around 12,000 and peaked at 60,000 readers by the early/mid 1990s (some of the "readers" where entire mailing lists like ACTIV-L)
In 1992 he wrote a primer on online activism called Electronic Activism, and in 1993 a follow-up Electronic Activism Part II. These were circulated online and translated into other languages by volunteers. As word spread, he was contacted by, among others, a Senior Fellow at the Worldwatch Institute who had seen part I and heard a Part II was available, In 1993 he was among the activists quoted in an article "The Whole World is Talking" on internet-based activism, in The Nation magazine.
In mid-1990s Harel was chosen to be a faculty of Z magazine's Left Online University (LOLU) (later, ZEO) and taught "Electronic Activism on the Internet" alongside a small group of about a half-dozen other inaugural faculty in LOLU's first two semesters (local copy here) . These included Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. He taught two semesters of this online course.
3. Disclosure: My own involvement in the projects of the above section 1. "currently" is limited due to fulltime job and personal life issues, however, some online partners are helping to try to move these projects forward, and my involvement is not so low that I don't welcome contact; by all means if intrigued after reading the EconomicDemocracy.org urls, feel free to make contact.