* ChicagoStories.org, a joint partnership of the Community Media Workshop and the Council on Global Affairs, has an excellent, straightforward rundown of NATO-related events and protests.
* Occupy Chicago also has a guide.
* Occupy Chicago's Day of Environmental Protest, this afternoon, sounds fun:
On May 17th, join Occupy Chicago’s Day of Environment action! Stand with us to fight for the Planet over Profit and War! We will GET DIRTY and DIE at the Canadian Consulate to symbolize how the dirty oil extraction of the Alberta Tar Sands is sending life on this planet to an early grave, fueling G8/NATO’s war machines and the global climate crises.
Those are the tar sands that James Hansen describes as basically being the tipping point for the global climate.
* If you're not up for getting dirty and dying, the Pritzker Military Library is hosting a NATO spokesperson/protest organizer debate tonight at 6 pm. If you don't want to deal with the traffic, there'll be a live webcast.
* The revolution will be twitterized, and also livestreamed: if you want to follow the protests, there are lots of folks in town this weekend, from journalists covering the protests to the protesters themselves, who look like they'll be active on Twitter. Some have even been livestreaming from the protests themselves, using shoulder-mounted cameras (during the "FTP" march, I watched a CPD officer asking a protester where he got the mount, which, yeah, was pretty neat). Some folks to follow:
@SamwiseOccupies, one of the livestreamers
@Timcast, also livestreaming
@exileinflyville, aka Truthout's Joe Macare
@alisonkilkenny of The Nation; she'll be blogging it as well
@PennyRed, aka British journalist Laurie Penny
@mollyknefel and @johnknefel, co-hosts of Radio Dispatch
@OccupyChicago, natch
@NATOIndyMedia should provide a good roundup
@pHinkasaurus, doing Occupy Chicago communications, interviewed here
Occupied Air, another livestreamer
@Rebelutionary_Z, livestreaming
* And NATO folks:
@USAmbNATO, aka Ivo Daalder, the U.S. NATO ambassador; he's occasionally been taking questions about the summit
@AndersFoghR, NATO secretary general
@USNATO, the U.S. Mission to NATO's official twitter account
* And summit-focused journalists/writers/wonks:
@markondefense, Mark R. Jacobson of the German Marshall Fund
@missy_ryan, Reuters AfPak correspondent
@HristianaG, Young Atlantacist
@IvetaCherneva, ditto
@JonathanLanday, McClatchy national security correspondent ("Thence to Chicago, where NATO et al will describe an Afghanistan that I don't recognize")
@DangerRoom, Wired's excellent national-security blog
@JoshuaFoust, of the American Security Project/Atlantic/PBS, who just wrote on the Smart Defense concept
@ChicagoCouncil, the aforementioned one on global affairs
@AdamGabbatt, The Guardian, who's blogging the protests and summit
* And some primers:
The Guardian's "A Sceptic's Guide to the NATO Summit"
"G8 and NATO-athon, with Pakistan at the table," by CNN national security analyist Peter Bergen
"Showcase Chicago: The NATO Summit, May 20-21, 2012," by Mark R. Jacobson and Sarah Raine of the German Marshall Fund
Photograph: Chicago Tribune