Listening to Global Voices: Notebook

News and notes from the EJC staff listening to the Global Voices conversation in Budapest:

Bite out of the blogosphere

When gathering RSS feeds for the EJC’s aggregation page, I wondered why in the world a seemingly serious Pakistani blog would be called Teeth Maestro. I thought it was a cultural reference I didn’t understand.
Turns out, the Teeth Maestro is a dentist, Dr. Awab Alvi.
He and a few friends gained notariety in the international blogosphere when they worked to help Pakastani bloggers work around technical censorship in Pakistan with their site PKblogs.com. The government there blocked access to blogspot.com, a hosting platform, in 2006.
Reflecting on the creation of PKblogs after its creation, Alvi realised he wanted to be more forward-thinking with his online activism.
“Taking reactionary steps is is somehow lame. You want to be proactive… get these tools designed beforehand,” he said.

Back on the chain gang?

Rebecca MacKinnon spent more than a decade covering Asia for CNN before co-founding Global Voices. She is now an assistant professor for new media in Hong Kong.
She used an impressive chart showing the lack of online links between English-language and Chinese media sites concered with the Olympics to illustrate the lack of communication between Westerners and Chinese society.
So it’s unsurprising that when conversations between these two societies are facilitated via translation and platforms like Twitter, misconceptions and misinformation fly.
“It’s a psychological issue,” MacKinnon said. “How do we talk to each other with compassion and understanding rather than just yell at each other about who is more brainwashed?”

Talk to me

Global Voices is now available in Italian, Hindi, Albanian and Macedonian, it’s Lingua staff announced Saturday to a room full of applause.
When Ethan Zuckerman co-founded Global Voices, he said, the idea was to translate these kinds of languages into English. Not the other way around.
But the Global Voices community - a highly decentralised staff comprised largely of volunteers - wanted to translate into other languages. So they did.
Why?
Cherry blossoms.
Rezwan of Bangladesh, a volunteer translator for Global Voices, said he did not know anything about cherry blossoms until reading an article translated from Japan about celebrating the blooms in springtime.
He translated it into Bangla - and received heartwarming feedback from a reader who had also never come in contact with cherry blossoms.
“That’s when I knew I am not doing a wrong thing, I am going in the right direction,” he said.

Freedom of speech: A winning team

Football managers who win keep their jobs. They stay out of the owners’ office.
Losing managers are critiqued. They can lose their jobs.
So it is with freedom of speech, it seems. When it isn’t needed - when a society is “winning”, i.e able to fulfil its needs and wants on a high level, there’s not of concern about free speech.
Unsuccessful sides - er, societies - however, have a lot to talk about.
But many at the Global Voices conference are concered about how to keep society interested in exersizing its freedom of speech so that it isn’t “out of shape” when needed.

Posted on June 29, 2008 by .
Filed under blogging.

Listening to Global Voices: Day one highlights

Daddy can be more intimidating than a dictator, it turns out.

Societal censorship - pressure from family members, employers or social groups to avoid voicing or listening to controversial ideas - is rampant around the world. In many cases, is a more difficult barrier to the creation of truly diverse online content than technological censorship.

Self, societal and technical censorship were the primary concerns during seven hours of presentations at the first day of the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008 on Friday.

The two-day conference, which continues Saturday, has brought bloggers, programmers, academics, traditional journalists and business people to Budapest to further Global Voices’ 4-year-old effort to connect the dots of the non-Western blogosphere.

In Friday’s second session, Singaporean activist Au Waipang introduced the problem of self-censorship.

The past 40 years of economic growth - peace, prosperity and high rises - have facilitated that government’s efforts to paint dissidence in a dangerous light, Waipang said during a panel discussion.

“When they have a good life, a lot of people will say, ‘Hey, what do I need freedom for? Who needs a free press when life is good,” he said.

Waipang, who is a gay activist, said the Singaporean government does not need to resort to technical censorship. Instead, he said, there is a constant campaign to disparage and attack the credibility of anyone who uses the Internet.

“The government regularly labels digital speech as irresponsible and unrepresentative,” he said.

Therefore, he said, more traditional techniques are needed to advance activist causes. In particular, activists can benefit from being visible role models - online and on the ground. Kenyan blogger Ory Okolloh said she has greatly benefited from being a visible, non- anonymous blogger.

During the post-election violence there in December, 2007, her well-established blog went offline for a few hours. She did not know if the government had blocked it or if there was a technical glitch.
Within an hour she had friends and readers contacting her and offering to help her get content online.

“I had been blogging for a long time, so people were able to gravitate to me pretty easily,” she said. It goes to show the importance of not being anonymous.

Bloggers, primarily those who are activists using weblogs to advance a political cause, from places like Singapore, Iran, Pakistan, Taiwan, Japan, China and Ethiopia, discussed the ways they have experienced and tired to combat societal and technical censorship Friday.

In the afternoon, some technological experts took the stage to discuss ways to maintain anonymity and privacy.

But like many activists, all five panelists said it will take more then technical solutions enabling anonymity and privacy.

Roger Dingledein, who helped start up Tor - described by moderator Ethan Zuckerman as “an extremely sophisticated, powerful anti-censorship tool” - said he often fields questions about the challenges of trying to penetrate the so-called “Great Firewall of China.”

“I’m not working against China,” he said. Rather, against American corporations closely monitoring Internet behaviors. 

Tor, he explained, is an open-source program you can run locally on your computer. It fetches information via different servers or relays and builds paths with the relays. No single relay knows where you are or where you’re going. No single place along the network knows who the users are and what the users are doing.

Programs like Tor are used by corporations who might want to visit sites of competitors without those competitors knowing. It might be used by law enforcement officers running sting operations. Digital activists and dissidents around the world also benefit from programs like Tor - an anonymity solution whose relays are being run by around 15,000 people around the world. Dingledein estimated that about 200,000 people are Tor users.

Posted on June 28, 2008 by .
Filed under blogging.

Listening to Global Voices: Introduction

Colleagues Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman said during Friday morning’s introduction to the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008 that they felt like proud parents.

“But since she lives in Hong Kong and I live in the United States, I guess that makes us separated parents,” Zuckerman quipped.

When the two started Global Voices in 2004, they thought they were creating a single website geared to aggregating content from around the global blogosphere. Four years later, they are speaking to about 150 people in Budapest about Global Voices.com, Global Voices Advocacy, and the nearly dozen languages into which the content they aggregate and host is translated.

It’s even translated into Malagasy.

“And if you want to know where that’s spoken, it’s Madagascar,” Zuckerman helped.

MacKinnon, whose background lies in traditional journalism - the American has worked around Asia as a correspondent - in her introduction presented a brief overview of Global Voices’ history.

When she and Zuckerman worked at Harvard University’s Berkman Center, they became interested in the lack of diversity of international coverage in English-language media - the global attention flows, MacKinnon said.

So they gathered a few bloggers in 2004 - four of whom are present in Budapest - to talk about enabling the connection of the dots of the global blogosphere - particularly those dots lying outside of Western Europe and the United States.

They started an aggregation site of blogs from around the world, providing digests of what folks were talking about online. For this burgeoning task, they quickly realised they needed bloggers from different regions to start covering the blogosphere in their regions.

They employed David Sasaki to cover the Latin American blogosphere in 2005. The first Global Voices citizen media summit was held that year in London.

But it was at the following year’s summit in Delhi at which the organisation began to grow interested into becoming a multi-pronged attack on censorship.

“There are many people around the world who want to talk, but powerful people are preventing them from doing so,” MacKinnon said.
Further, trying to prompt the addition of non-elites, the educated middle and upper classes of society, to the blogosphere. This discussion led to the addition of Rising Voices and Global Voices Advocacy.

Zuckerman introduced the director of Global Voices Advocacy, Sami Ben Gharbia. One of the foremost digital rights activists, Gharbia is a Tunisian expatriate who now resides in the Netherlands.
Tunisia is one of many countries on Gharbia’s Acces Denied map in which the state often blocks social media, or Web 2.0, sites.

“We’re at a very interesting moment in time,” Zuckerman said. In some places, he said, “There is more ability to speak online than offline. There are more countries who censor offline media - print media, broadcast, television - than filter online media.

But that’s changing. People are catching up. Governments are finding ways to filter and censor online media.”

Gharbia presented government censorship of online media as a game of cat and mice.

He played snippets of activist videos published on YouTube from Morocco, Egypt and Tunisia. Government reaction to all of the videos included censorship - but eventual attention to the problems raised in the videos.

His example from Morocco, by a YouTuber called “target sniper” showed police taking bribes at a border. The video was shot by a person hiding somewhere in terrain above the checkpoint. The videos inspired several people in Morocco to shoot similar videos. In the end, the government addressed the issue - shooting their own films and addressing corrupt colleagues.

He also showed the well-circulated YouTube videos of bloggers being tortured by police in Egypt.

YouTube videos from Tunisia - moving images captured on a mobile phone, showed a large protest at which two Tunisian citizens were shot by police. The mainstream media had ignored the protest and the government initially denied that it took place - and that Tunisian police shot and killed citizens.
T
he very circulation of the videos is interesting as both YouTube and Dailymotion are blocked in Tunisia.

“It’s only thanks to those videos and thanks the audience between YouTubers and bloggers that Tunisia was forced to talk about the events,” Gharbia said. “And acknowledge there were two people killed by the police.”
Gharbia presented the social web as a series of turning cogs distributing content virally - making it difficult for governments to erase all traces of content to which it is opposed.

“You have only to send an e-mail to your Blogspot account and it will start the whole machine,” he said.

Still, there is the possibility governments are working together to keep censoring content - usually not just blocking specific posts or videos but entire platforms.

“I don’t know if governments are coordinating,” Gharbia said. “But I do know activists in those countries are working together to circumvent the censorship.”

Activists - together with NGOs, researchers and technologists - are using the same techniques worldwide to circumvent government controls - as Gharbia’s annotated map illustrates.

Posted on June 27, 2008 by .
Filed under blogging.

DNA Conference

The DNA 2008 Conference starts on Monday in Brussels and Wilfried, Kathlyn, Arne and me will be there. And you can be there too! Because we will stream the event live using mogulus.com. Mogulus is a free streaming software that mimics a small TV studio. The entrance fee for the conference is almost 1000 Euro and students get a reduction that is not worth talking about. So be aware and live with us (if everything works out). In order to test the streaming system in advance I will place the mogulus Studio interface in the Blog.

Posted on February 28, 2008 by .
Filed under blogging.

Thoughts, 2.0

In preparing the post below, I stumbled onto what I think is a worthwhile, professional use of Flickr - which I recently learned came into being during the development of an online video game/virtual world.
I wanted to find pictures of people celebrating (or protesting) the recent independence of Kosovo. And I wanted to be able to re-post those pictures here at EJC.net – i.e., I didn’t want the pictures to be under strict copyright.
First I went to Shutterstock, which we’ve used occasionally for stock photos. But of course, if you enter “Kosovo,” you get pictures of really gorgeous scenery… and old ladies in babushkas! These image banks don’t contain current events photos or ones which give a realistic depiction of everyday life.
After Googling around a while and not finding what I wanted, I went to Flickr and used their advanced search option. I narrowed down the dates to the three days surrounding 17 February, when Kosovo declared its independence. Then I chose to see only photos marked with the “Creative Commons” logo.
Bam! I found about 500 pictures, taken all over the world. I was impressed. This seems like a great way to get re-usable photos from news events attended by a lot of people.

Second thought, this on privacy: While working for the EJC, I’ve heard a lot of adults puzzle over the amounts of previously well-guarded information which youngsters are giving away for free on platforms like Facebook.
I have been a Facebook user since 2004 and find it the best way to keep in touch with my friends back home in the States – and network with new friends I’m meeting throughout Europe.
But the only people below the age of 21 I liaise with via Facebook are relatives: my three younger siblings and some cousins. And I have to say, their behaviour on Facebook is a lot different than mine.
I must admit – I did at one point have my phone number listed on my profile. And I continue to use Facebook to look up friends’ phone numbers when I’m somewhere away from my own computer, where I have everything stored (if I stay late at the office and want to use my Skype account from here, for example).
But I saw an interesting thing on my brother’s page just now: He’s part of a group that says “sorry new phone and new number, 630.699.3875 so I need your numbers.”

I clicked on the group, and 55 people have posted their numbers – all right there for me (or telemarketers, or potential stalkers, or whoever) to see and use!
I always thought it was OK to list my phone number on my profile page because I thought, “What if someone wants to call me and they are somewhere they don’t have my number but do have the Internet?”
Given that only people who are my approved friends can see my profile page, this seemed like perfectly sound logic.
Plus, in my last job I was working at a newspaper, so I was always trying to be as available as possible. My personal cell number (sorry, mobile phone!) was given on my work voicemail also… and my work number was published each day in the paper. So it wouldn’t be difficult to reach me…
But I have to say I never got any creepy calls… So maybe Mr. 699.3875 won’t either… Still, it’s interesting to note that this group of upcoming Digital Natives (I would call myself one… but maybe a grey-haired one, especially compared to my siblings. My youngest sister, who is 16, can’t remember not having a computer. Nor can she remember when “computer” wasn’t simultaneous with “Internet”) has a completely different point of view on privacy and information sharing.

Posted on February 21, 2008 by .
Filed under blogging.

Between Barcamp und Jeecamp

Sitting in a room full of geeks, small investors and marketing agents is not everyones thing. Especially on weekends it is something that others would want to avoid. But not Kathlyn and me. We where at the Barcamp in Riga which was announced as the “biggest Barcamp in the former Soviet countries” with over 1000+ registered participants.

Humans are by nature very bad in identifying the number of individuals in a crowd. But my best guess is that there where about 400 of them on both days quarreling through the hallways and seminar rooms of the Rivera Hotel in Riga. I have no complains about the (self)organization of such a event but must say that it turned out to be self referential to a degree that is unhealthy. Bloggers talk about the way they blog and how there blogs are situated in relation to the network of blogs - the blogosphere.

One of the most interesting things for me was the attitudes of the participants towards technical developments. According to their view new technologies develop because people share ideas and create products and services. The very process of developing is seen by them as something that is caused by people but not under their control. Nobody can control the way in which new technologies
develop is the attitude of most of the participants. This is reflected in the answers I got when I asked them what they think is the driving force of the internet? What is it that keeps the internet spreading and infiltrating the globe and societies all over? The people, one said. And he belongs to the naive ones. Sex, said another. And he might be quiet right. But this conclusions seems inappropriate to the fact why the internet developed in the way it does and not in others.

If I develop means to make butter out of milk I need first of all milk. Than I need something that performs an action on the milk. For both, the milk and the tool, I need money. And if I do not have money to develop means to make butter out of milk, how am I able to put butter on my slide of bread? Or in this case develop services like blogging platforms, flickr clones and mobile translation applications.

It seems that people are very unaware of the things that totally surround them. It is like with the water and the fish. We do not know who discovered water, but we are sure that it was not the fish.

Once used to the internet as part of daily life, its artificial nature is invisible. It is not, as the naive might think, that people are the driving force of innovation. It is the environment that enables an individual to innovate new technologies and spread it to the community. And this environment is the social, political and economic sphere in which individuals play, communicate and do business.

It is not an accident, that a network of free associations, which evolved out of the “highway of thought”, came into existence and spread out from western democracies towards totalitarian societies and not the other way around. In a feudal state, or what we would now call a dictatorship, the idea of creating a network where every user is equal and can communicate with everybody else about whatever they want, would hardly find any support by those who own the country. And in such societies those who own the country also wish to make the decisions that determine the way the society is running. Decisions over investment for example. In this respect democratic countries have much in common with totalitarian regimes.

So the notion that the internet is something that grows naturally in the sense a flower grows the way it chooses to grow is hard to sustain given the fact that technological development are not subject of natural selection ala Darwin.

One factor that determine technology and its evolution or development is the price. If access to the internet is about the income of a middle class worker in a western democratic society than it will get hard to reach a internet penetration rate of even 20% in such a nation. What made the price for access decrease over the last 10 years here in Western Europe was the liberalization of the telecommunication sector. Competition is the name of the game. A monopoly -state owned or private- would keep the prices up to keep its profit up. Technical development is expensive and investments shrink the profit. But if you have a competitive market with companies forced to innovate and invest in order to stay in the market, prices drop.

Besides the price it is education that determines technical developments. The question here is a rather simple one. Why would someone buy something if not for a reason? The reasons vary depending on what someones interests are. But they vary also to the degree of the skills someone has in order to use technology for a given reason.  These skills are hardly acquired in formal education given the speed and scope of the development of the internet. So non-formal education, life long learning and other forms of skills acquisition procedures have to be in place.

If both variables, price level and education level, are in favor of ideas individuals come up with in an act of creativity and innovation, the practical application of these ideas become them self environments. It is only too clear to see especially Eastern Europe countries lacking behind western Indicators for an innovation society. The reasons for this lack cannot be explained in a lack of creativity of individuals in these societies but rather by the driving factors outlined above.

But the understanding of technology as something natural, which has its own way to grow and evolve, is widely shared among the people I met at the Barcamp in Riga. This makes me wonder what happens if Tim Berner’s Network get challenged by something new and the web as we know it will take a step backwards to make place for a new environment.

Yes, and what I want to say is that in march Kathlyn and me will be in Birmingham at the JEEcamp. 

Posted on February 15, 2008 by .
Filed under blogging.

b-Side from the Associate Producer

This are selected videos that are NOT connected to my work at the EJC in particular, but rather personal projects which influence the way I think about the transition period in which I am while working here at the EJC.
These videos are something I do apart from my hard daily work ;) here.
I record lectures organised by the Maastricht University, Maastrichtdebates.org and others. One very recent topic was "Israel and Palestine." On the panel were Shaman Khoury, deputy chairperson and general manager of the Peace and Democracy Forum East Jerusalem, Avi Primor, former Israel ambassador to Germany and current director at the Centre of European Studies, and Wilfried Ruetten as moderator.
While working on the lecture, I stumbled upon a debate between Noam Chomsky and Alan Dershowitz from 2005 about the very same topic - including the role of the US - which, I think, gives a good insight into past and current issues. I personally think that this is a must-see lecture.
So here you are, my first post on this blog!

Part One:


Part Two:


Part Three:


The whole lecture consists of more parts. Just go to YouTube and have a look on "Noam Chomsky and Alan Dershowitz."

Posted on May 21, 2007 by .
Filed under blogging.