Global Voices

English

The world is talking, are you listening?

Renewable energy, permaculture and green building, along with local traditions and eco-tourism: welcome to Tribewanted – an online community launched in 2006 based on the idea of “global citizenship” and harnessing the energy of social media to meaningfully connect and practice positive behavior change. Thanks to crowdfunding strategies, the project plans to build 10 eco-villages around the world: after Vorovoro (Fiji Islands) and John Obey (Sierra Leone), a new village just launched in Monestevole [it], in Umbria, the heart of Italy. Connect with Tribewanted people via web, Facebook or Vimeo.

Truthloader is a new daily YouTube show, produced by UK-based ITN in partnership with YouTube, that brings investigative and citizen journalism together, focusing mostly on under-reported news stories from around the globe. They also host a weekly live debate on Google Hangout. Yesterday's show asked “Can citizen journalism change the world?” and is archived here. You can follow Truthloader on Facebook and Twitter.

One year after the Egyptian revolution, 10% of its Social Media Documentation is already gone. An article on US magazine The Atlantic explains how this is happening, quoting  a study conducted by a phD student in computer science and Web preservation at Old Dominion University. “Twitter gives us a new version of ‘the first rough draft of history.’ But tweets are fragile things.”

Egyptian Twitter-sphere reports that jailed blogger #Maikel Nabil has just been released, while people are gathering for tomorrow's big rally at #Tahrir to celebrate the revolt's first anniversary: “feels chaotic and it's starting to rain” (#25jan).

“Let's fight climate change & hunger. Together” is a new video released by ActionAid & produced by the LatteCreative team, to support the world food crisis campaign and keep the ‘pressure on governments to deliver on their promise to halve world hunger by 2015′.

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.

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.