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The State of Free Culture in Latin America

David Sasaki · 19:41 · Americas

This past weekend at the Contemporary Cultural Center in Barcelona, Spain, an international and multi-lingual group of bloggers, artists, musicians, and lawyers met to discuss the Free Culture movement which aims to reform intellectual property law into a workable paradigm for the digital era.

More than just another intellectual property geeks' get-together, however, COPYFIGHT was also an important bridge conference between today's English and Spanish speaking copyright reform proponents on the internet.

Unfortunately, many of the staunchest Free Culture proponents throughout Latin America were unable to attend the conference. Timing was especially inopportune as it coincided with the Weblogs.Comunicacion conference in Mexico City which also attracted many Free Culture heavyweights from the region such as ALT1040, Isopixel, and eCuaderno.

Leading up to COPYFIGHT, the Spanish blog, Elastico, ran an excellent series introducing English speaking activists to a Spanish speaking audience. With that in mind, it seems like a worthwhile endeavor to travel through Latin America - virtually, of course - and take an abbreviated survey of the Free Culture movement and the voices behind it.

Beginning in the Southern Cone, Chile and Argentina are, arguably, the most active Latin American countries in pursuing copyright reform and the adoption of more flexible Creative Commons licenses. Chilean senator and co-author of the Ludicorp inspiring book, Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action and the Cultivation of Solidarity, Fernando Flores has done much to spread the awareness of Creative Commons in Chile. Stanford Law Professor, Lawrence Lessig was not shy in his admiration of Flores after visiting the senator's country to discuss Creative Commons licensing:

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Cambodian Blogosphere: Training + Khmer Language Software = More Dialogue?

Beth Kanter · 18:59 · East Asia

"Internet cafés are springing up like mushrooms in rainy season in the heart of Cambodia, Phnom Penh in recent years." - Tharum

Also, a perfect metaphor for the Cambodian blogopshere!

The Cambodian blogosphere is growing, but also getting more organized and connected. Last month, bloggers in Phnom Penh met in a local bar for their first ever bloggers evening. (Maybe next month, they will gather at the NGO TECH restaurant?) Jinja, one of the organizers, has added dozens of blogs to the Cambodia page in the Global Voices Wiki, making it easier for "cloggers" (Cambodian Bloggers) to find and converse with one another.

Tharum, a self-described “It Catcher,” started his blog in June 2004 while a student at the National University of Management and working for the Open Forum for Cambodia, the organization which first brought email to Cambodia in the 1990s and now working on Khmer-language portals and will soon launch khmer language blogs. Tharum's blog was recently featured on the front page of the Cambodia
Daily with the headline "Nation's ‘Bloggers’ Hope To Facilitate Dialogue."

While difficult to prove, Tharum is probably the first Cambodian in Cambodia to publish a blog using blog software. (The first Cambodian blogger, of course, is Cambodia's former monarch, King Sihanouk, whose web site has published bloggish like posts for at least three years according to a recent AP article)

The Ex-King's "blog" has inspired more Cambodian Blogs.

As part of a project launched by a pro-democracy nonprofit, IRI, Lux Mean conducted training workshops in Cambodia's provinces for approximately 60 high-school and university students on how to publish an English-language blog. Held in regional Community Information Centers, the workshops have spawned dozens of new blogs written by Khmer people outside of Phnom Penh. According to a recent article in Wired, Lux Mean said that the most common question from the those being trained was whether people in other countries could read their blogs. The IRI is exicted by the potential for these Cambodian blogs (and others) to generate more political dialogue.

But even outside of these larger training initiatives, little by little and sometimes with the help of others, younger Khmers are publishing blogs. Take for example, Yourath, who lives in Siem Reap. She was taught how to blog by Elizabeth Briel, an American artist and expat in Siem Reap working on a project, Cameras for Cambodia.

Time will tell if Cambodian blogs will facilitate more dialogue. As Tharum notes, "Blogs are easy to start and stop."

Will blogs in the khmer language help sustain the dialogue and encourage more voices? (or as Virak says, "Technology can help Cambodian people loud their voice to the world.") The Open Forum of Cambodia's Open Software Initiative hopes so with the launch of their Khmer-language bloggings software. It will be interesting to watch how the government reacts to bloggers opinions and whether or not they will get shut down.

Maybe Global Voices will need a khmer-language bridge blogger soon!

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Flickr Pick from Indonesia

Paul Frankenstein · 16:15 · East Asia

Photograph by Jessica Lim

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A unique view from Darfur: Sleepless in Sudan

Ethan Zuckerman · 12:47 · Sub-Saharan Africa

The news stories go by - the London bombings, the G-8/Live8 focus on Africa, the six month anniversary of the Boxing Day tsunami - and Darfur remains. As it's become abundantly clear that the US won't have major involvement with the Darfur situation, it's less commmon to see news stories on Western Sudan in the mainstream press. After all, “Millions of Darfurians still living in camps, still dying slowly” doesn't make for much of a headline.

For folks interested in what's going on in the IDP (internally displaced persons) camps in Darfur, the blog “Sleepless in Sudan” has become required reading. We know that “Sleepless” is an “Aid worker, female, 31, extremely single,” living and working in Darfurian IDP camps. We also know she's got a sharp eye, a still-functioning sense of outrage, and a gift for making real the horrible conditions hundreds of thousands of Darfurians are living under.

Sleepless's recent posts have been about the Kalma camp, which houses about 150,000 IDPs. The Sudanese government is interested in breaking up the camp, either for the legitimate reason that it's in danger of flooding (a recent post describes Khartoum as a “veritable African Venice”, with cabs and tuk-tuks stuck in an underwater traffic jam) or out of fear that rebels are training and regrouping within the camps.

The effort to migrate Kalma residents to a new, smaller camp at Al Salam has involved cutting off “black market” food - i.e., anything to supplement the basic foods the aid agencies are handing out and threatening to bulldoze the camp. According to Sleepless, a grand total of one person has relocated to Al Salam so far.

The reason is simple - concerns for security. Despite the fact that shootings occur every day in the camp and nearby towns, they're considered vastly safer than the villages the IDPs have fled, which are held by the Janjawid who initially chased the villagers out. This leads to situations like the one describeda sad meditation on mangos, posted about a week ago:

“Well, we always used to plant mangoes,” I'm told by one of the locals (who has himself been displaced by the fighting and lives with his family in one of the camps). “This season, I even took the risk of walking back to my field from the camp just to plant. But in the past few weeks it's been too dangerous to go outside of the camp with all these shooting and attacks against people like us. So I can't go and harvest anything, and now the new people from other tribes who've moved into my village and taken over my fields are selling me my own mangoes in the market.”

We all have to laugh - there is no other way to deal with the absurdity of the situation, even though I'm sure that's the last thing my colleague feels like doing when he is actually paying the man who hands him his mangoes in the market.

He just shakes his head. Then he laughs again. “You know, it is even worse for my cousin. He bought some mangoes from the people who are now farming his fields, and then as he was walking home along the outskirts of the camp, some bandits started pushing and harassing him. They took his money, and the mangoes too. So he has planted them once, paid for them once, and still he has no mangoes.”

We can't help but laugh again, but sadly, I have to admit that today's sweet mangoes leave me with a more bitter aftertaste than usual.

Alas, Sleepless's stories are often ones you can't laugh about. She's hearing reports of women being beaten and raped as they leave the camps to collect firewood. She raises the horrific possibility that these attacks are being perpetrated by the anti-Janjawid, anti-Khartoum rebels, in part to help keep aid dollars flowing to the area:

The discussion goes back and forth, but finally I establish that a lot of the men feel that the rebels are intentionally letting a small number of militias stay in the area to make sure the security incidents don't go away COMPLETELY.

“If there are no deaths, no rape, nothing, then you khawajas [foreigners] will not come here, they are saying. It's just a tactic that the rebels are using.”

Sleepless in Sudan is by no means an easy or comfortable read. But the author is taking a great deal of personal risk to tell us these stories and is clearly hoping that someone is listening.

(For more background on the situation in Darfur, you may want to read the New Republic's blog this week, which is featuring pieces by Professor Eric Reeves from Smith College, who is following the situation in Darfur very closely and has an excellent explanation of how the situation came about.)

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