I just sent this email to friends and family to explain what I do for Free Press — and why they should donate to it. Read on:

Friends and family,

You may have noticed that I post a lot on Facebook and send a lot of emails about stopping big companies from blocking our right to communicate online. It’s pretty earnest, wonky stuff. But here’s part of why I do it.

Mobile phones play a huge part in our lives. We depend on them to communicate with family and friends, to read the news, to chart the world, and to get engaged in politics. These are all forms of free expression that we take for granted — but we shouldn’t.

As repeated incidents are showing us, phone carriers are committed to trampling our right to speak freely online.

So I’ve been busy calling Verizon to task when it blocks applications, highlighting when phone carriers make it harder for people to get online, and calling for investigations into companies that track our behavior in secret.

I’ve done all these things with Free Press, the organization where I’ve worked for close to three years. We focus on changing the media through policy. That often means pushing the FCC to enforce rules meant to protect the public interest (as we’re doing in the Verizon case). Sometimes it means advocating for legislation that would help protect us from corporate overreach, or fighting against bills that would increase that overreach.

We’ve had some amazing successes this year. We beat back AT&T’s attempt to buy T-Mobile, a terrible deal that would have resulted in lost jobs and higher prices. And we stopped the Senate’s attempt to overturn open Internet protections that, for the most part, let us speak online without fear of corporate censorship.

If you like what we’ve been doing, and you think we should keep doing it, please consider making a small donation to Free Press: https://freepress.actionkit.com/donate/staffchallenge2011/

Your gift is even tax deductible.

If you don’t want to make a donation, click on the link anyway to see a group picture of me and my colleagues. I’m easy to spot; I’m the smiling idiot at left-center.

If you do choose to donate, be sure to select my name from the drop-down menu.

Thank you and happy holidays.

Josh