The Influence of Advocacy Groups

Advocacy groups are mainly formed to promote or advocate a certain thought, idea or political agenda. There are different kinds of advocacy groups that we hear about with other terms like special interest groups, lobby groups, and pressure groups. These all have the same theme, which is to advocate something that they have all united for. In today’s modern world, these advocacy groups are gaining more and more power and have become quite influential in fighting for their causes. These groups vary in size and power but they certainly are succeeding in achieving their objectives. The motives that these groups fight for can be anything ranging from commercial concerns, to moral, religious or political concerns.

ACM SIGIR

Special interest groups make use of various tools to ensure they successfully achieve their goals and objectives. Some of the basic tools utilized by special interest groups are media campaigns, lobbying, policy and research briefings, polls, publicity stunts etc. Some of these special interest groups are so powerful that they have strong political backing and have international resources to utilize to ensure their work reaches people worldwide.

An example of such special international groups that have international reach is the SIGIR’07. This association has a long history since 1971 when it first started out in New York. The ACM SIGIR 2007 is in Amsterdam and is the 30th conference of SIGIR. The main focus of this association is on the storage of information, the retrieval of information along with its dissemination along with all the system evaluations, output schemes and research strategies. The ACM SIGIR is also called the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval. For more information on this association you can visit the website http://www.sigir2007.org/.