Take a rogue view of the Olympics Rudi Soman The web has already become a tool for global protest groups to organise such massive demonstration as the ones staged at the World Economic Forum in Seattle last November and in Washington in April. So it was only natural that various smaller protest groups would go online targetting the Olympics. Working from Sydney, a group of media and net professionals called Unolympics.com have developed a website they label Shame 2000. The site, which bears a remarkable resemblance to SOCOG's official site, is devoted to highlighting crucial social issues being clouded by the torrent of Olympic hype. Unolympic.com's net activist and producer David Gravina says the Olympic movement's charter is being ignored. "If you read the modern Olympic Charter it states the Olympics is supposed to be about 'harmonious development of man' and 'the preservation of human dignity'," he says. "Then you take a look at what's happening in Australia right now and in recent years in terms of human rights issues, such as mandatory sentencing and our Government's poor performance in the reconciliation process, plus a host of dodgy environmental policies. If you look at all these you have to conclude that Australia is very 'Unolympic' on these important issues." The Unolympics team believes having a laugh is a very Australian way of getting a message across which is why a selection of satirical news articles relating to government policy is included. There's also an online game called Being John Howard where the object is to throw Olympic rings over the PM's head - if you accidentally hit him, the game apologises to the PM, saying "Sorry!" The closest comparable Australian website is Silly 2000 (www.silly2000.com), a site developed by The Chaser satirical online magazine. Its slogan is "keeping you sane through the Olympics". Silly 2000, which also looks very similar to the official SOCOG site, is extremely funny in the same vein as Chaser's American forbear, The Onion (www.theonion.com). Both Shame and Silly 2000 borrow heavily from the concept of the "rogue" internet site. These are sites that are nearly identical versions of the "real" site, with the purpose nearly always being to lampoon or subvert. The best known Australian example of a rogue site might be ReaJeff.com, modelled on the pre-election Jeff.com site of former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett. The Unolympics site differs from many satirical sites in that it provides forms for direct emails to politicians. Anyone visiting the site can send an email on a particular issue to the relevant politician from the site itself - a very effective way to demonstrate public feeling. Unolympics content manager and lobbyist Graham Catt says the site is "about harnessing the net's ability to inform but also to provide a method for individuals to voice their opinions directly to those who make policy". The site doesn't claim to have all the answers, but provides an extensive range of links where visitors can get more detailed, and definitely more serious, information on specific issues. "With a few major exceptions, in Australia we are sorely lacking innovative uses of the net to affect real, worthwhile change," says Gravina. "It's all e-commerce this and e-business that and e-greed.com. We are about using the web for dealing with things other than money - things that matter, like human rights. Like addressing some of the causes of hardship and even death in this country." Both sites incorporate notions of hacktivism and cultural jamming (the subversion of advertising and corporate branding) in their outlook, but without the quasiradical guerilla posturing that seems to pervade much of the hacker scene. Gravina and Catt are optimistic that Unolympics.com, beyond being a good laugh, can help facilitate social change. Catt cites the recent example of Greenpeace's Cokespotlight internet campaign which succeeded in persuading Sydney Olympic major sponsor Coca-Cola to adopt a new policy on greenhouse gas producing refrigerating equipment. In the campaign Greenpeace set up an informative website which challenged Coke to reduce its hydroflurocarbon emitting refrigeration at the Sydney Games; a challenge which Coke eventually met, with the added promise to phase out all such equipment in its operations by the 2004 Athens games. 'If a company the size of Coca Cola can be persuaded to change, maybe the Australian Government can too," says Catt. Article was reproduced with kind permission of The Australian.