In the aftermath of Monday's horror at Virginia Tech, DemocracyInAction was approached by a few folks who wanted to find some way of helping their own communities grieve and remember outside the typical online parameters of list-building and fundraising.

Small as it is in the face of such enormity, we're humbled to have collaborated together to donate VTVigils, organizing nationwide vigils in commemoration over the days ahead.

Please feel welcome to participate or share it with others. There is absolutely no upsell -- no participant's information will be used in any way for anything except this event -- and it's completely agenda-free in every respect beyond the agenda of being human.

Very nice piece in the New York Times today on Step It Up 2007's National Day of Climate Action Apr. 14 and the general attempt to get lawmakers to take climate change seriously.

Step It Up is currently the gargantuan Distributed Event in the DIA universe, closing in on 1,000 separate local actions a month out from the action. (There's a short description of what the Meetup-like tool does on this page.)

And the seamless blending of online components with in-the-flesh activities testifies to the capacity for creative activism to inspire passion and get big in a hurry:

With the young emperor set to cart more bodies to the Sumerian charnel house, we would be remiss to make no comment on the issue of the day, to which so many of our users are lending their energy.

We've been spotlighting on the home page the outstanding house party event that True Majority is running through our Distributed Event tool. (And note their comprehensive Event Kit -- putting organizing material like that in the hands of would-be local activists in conjunction with the signup pages is what really makes a house parties action rock.)*

More importantly, it's a response to the mad and unpopular "strategy" of more, deeper, and alongside tomorrow's Day of Action to Shut Down Guantanamo (scads of DIA types among the sponsors) represents a critical test for that netroots we keep hearing about.

We promised an example of someone making great use of DemocracyInAction's coding flexibility. This isn't only that. Brave New Films' web site for its flick Wal-Mart: The High Cost of a Low Price is as tightly designed a site as you'd ever want to see. And their villainous take on the Wal-Mart smiley might have you waking up in a sweat at night.

For their house party event, they're using our API to pass data from their own pages. This is something you've gotta do on your own -- it's not for everyone, but it's brilliant if you can program it.