Global Voices

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The world is talking, are you listening?

Updates

Togo

Following the murder of two Senegalese men in Florence, Italy, migrant African workers released an open letter on the web [it] to renew their call for dialogue with citizens of Rosarno, where in January 2010 violent riots took place. ‘Those that in the past few days have spread fear when talking about us will be held accountable.’ they write. ‘We’re here to work and contribute to the development of this town and region.’

Italy

Millions of Italians (worldwide) are celebrating an historic moment: the official resignation of PM Silvio Berlusconi, now on his way to the Presidential Palace. Huge celebrations are also being planned online, with live video streaming from downtown Rome, Facebook pages, YouTube videos, on-going tweets and so on.

Freedom of Speech

The Italian Parliament is about to vote on a very stringent “wiretapping Bill” [it] aimed at drastically limiting judicial investigations and journalism inquiries, thus blocking free speech about new scandals exposing top-level politicians, as many of such cases keep emerging. After a recent “strike” by Wikipedia Italy [it] and a pouring of protests, a provision requesting all websites and blogs to immediately rectify any content that anybody deems “detrimental to his/her own image”, has been removed.

Italy

The homepage of Wikipedia Italia is on strike from the evening of October 4th. Its content is blocked in protest against an Italian bill on telephone interceptions that will mean that all sites and blogs must amend their contents within 48 hours of a request by any applicant who judges it detrimental to their personal image. The details and a petition can be found here. The latest news indicates, however, that the obligation to make amendments will only apply to online publications which are registered in court. The issue is, however, not fully resolved  as demonstrates a new intervention by Wikipedia Italia [Italian - all links].

Kenya

In a crisis, how can Web 2.0 be of use to social movements and what practical help can it offer to facilitate collective action? In reality, there is no shortage of platforms which, established on a voluntary basis, using free software, harness the internet and mobile phones to gather and share information, sourced directly from citizens, a process termed crowdsourcing. Their uses range from the management of humanitarian emergencies and conflicts, as in the crowdmapping of the post-election disorder in Kenya in 2008 (the first ever use of Ushahidi), to natural disasters, like in Haiti, in Chile or during the 2010 floods in Pakistan (Crowdmap, which evolved from Ushahidi, was used), to technological crises like the recent nuclear incident at Fukushima.  All of these projects, and others still in development, will be discussed in Paris at CrisisCamp Paris [Fr]( for details, see the following wiki page) from 27th to 29th of May 2011. Organised  in partnership with the Crisis Commons network, Ushahidi, Global Voices and other groups, the event will concentrate on the use of technology 2.0 in the management of crises. Italy will be represented by the Open Foreste project [Italian], based on Crowdmap, and which is dedicated to the prevention of forest fires in Italy. For further information on the latter  project see this article [Italian].

Updates

While the event itself initially seemed to have passed without comment [it] by traditional media and bloggers in Italy, something is finally happening [it] to call for the release of the Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei [it], who has been presumed imprisoned by the Chinese authorities since April 3. The Pulitzer Association has issued an appeal [it] to both the Italian president, Napolitano, and the Chinese premier Hu Jintao, the  text of which is circulating online [it]. For its part, the Associazione Italia-Tibet relaunched the petition for the release of Ai Weiwei [it] supported by the Guggenheim Foundation. And while the accusation that Chinese authorities have violated human rights does not appear to be unfounded [it], the China Media Project has translated a video where noted Chinese activist Zhao Lianhai, calls for the release of Ai Weiwei and of other dissidents arrested in recent months.

Japan

An Italian student at the University of San Francisco produced a video [ita, en] to help the victims of the Tohoku earthquake. In the video Caterina explains how to make donations through the JPRI Earthquake and Tsunami Relief Fund.

Japan

A post at the Italian independent news website Linkiesta shows [it] the comics that several Japanese manga artists drew to express solidarity to their country.

Japan

TUFS students launched a website with advices on risk management translated in more than 30 languages.
The website provides “a basic guide in several languages to what to do when you have to evacuate because of the earthquake.”