Global Voices » Joi Ito

Child Soldiers in the DRC

Joi Ito — Mon, 02 May 2005 20:06:24 +0000

WITNESS - Child Soldiers in the DRC

Since 1996, war has ravaged the Democratic Republic of Congo. Some four million people have died as a result of the armed conflict and over ten thousand children have been used as child soldiers. Today, the country is in fragile transition, with over ten armed groups still operating in the Eastern region. All parties have recruited and used child soldiers in violation of international humanitarian and human rights law.

In 2004, the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court announced the DRC to be the subject of the Court’s first investigation. Under the Court’s jurisdiction is the recruitment and use of child soldiers as a war crime. The ICC remains the only competent and impartial Court that can bring justice to the thousands of children whose rights were violated and childhood taken away from them.

Through the voices of child soldiers, “A Duty To Protect” explores the complexity of the war, the issues confronted by girl soldiers including rape and sexual exploitation and the importance of the International Criminal Court to end the rampant impunity reigning in Eastern DRC. The video gives specific recommendations to strengthen the work of the ICC and calls for the international community’s engagement to stop the recruitment and use of child soldiers.

Witness is a great organization and shows how intermediaries like this can help get global voices out and is also a great example of using video as a medium.

Global Voices on Omidyar Network

Joi Ito — Sun, 16 Jan 2005 02:00:49 +0000

I just set up a request for a group on the Omidyar Network. If you haven't been there yet, give it a whirl. It's a very interesting community based on a wiki/blog system with a reputation system that is quite interesting. It's an interesting not-the-usual-members mix. Since GV is a bridging organization, I decided to try to build an outpost there and recruit members. On the other hand, it's simple for GV members to go to Omidyar Network and sign up. One easy way to navigate when you get there is to click on the names of the people who look interesting and see where they have been writing to find interesting conversations. You can add conversations to your watchlist to keep track. I'm still looking for more “sponsors” for the GV group there so if you sign up or already have an account, please join the sponsorship group. The URL is http://www.omidyar.net/group/globalvoices/

The top page URL for the Omidyar Network is: http://www.omidyar.net/home/

UPDATE: We just got enough sponsors so the group is not set up. Come join us and help build the bridge.

UPDATE 2: There is a group on Omidyar Network call Better World Media which seems to have a lot of overlap with our interests.

Manifesto session next steps

Joi Ito — Sun, 12 Dec 2004 14:50:51 +0000

I just uploaded the log of the IRC session for the Global Voice manifesto session. It definitely needs to be edited. I'll try to do it soon, but if someone else wants to take a shot, be my guest. If you're going to work on it please comment here so we don't double our efforts. If I don't see any volunteers, I will give it a try soon. I think the first pass is to filter out the noise and try to pick up any interesting thoughts and maybe organize them into groups.

I'm hoping Alex and Ethan have an interesting conversation on their long drive and write up some of the points for the vision and focus. I received this in email from Alex which I think is a good start:

1) we believe in free speech — and act to defend it and extend it

2) we believe in direct connection between people in ways which allow us to consider ourselves part of a bigger here and wider us — and we act to bring flows of tools, money and attention to bear on creating channels for those connections to develop

3) we believe in planetary citizenship along international norms — and we act to empower campaigns to make the world fairer, freer, more prosperous and more sustainable.

I think we discussed the name and the focus a bit. I personally think that not focusing on blogs, but on providing voice/voices generally is important. I think we need to bridge not only languages and regions, but medium types/vectors. I think that the diversity of the group geographically as well as in terms of medium types was very important and maybe this group can bridge bridge groups? We talked about names a bit. The name that I liked best was “Global Voices”.

SJ suggested that his experience with Wikipedia translations could help put translation as a focus for one of the efforts. There was another issues of more simple tools, and I think Rebecca pointed out that we need to understand the user's needs before we design the tools. What other tasks can we focus on? Who are the champions of these tasks? Ethan, am I getting ahead of myself?

UPDATE: I've just uploaded a cleaned up and html version of the IRC log. I tried to convert as many of the nicknames to full names and links as possible. If you know the identity/URL for any of the participants who are not converted, can you please provide it?

Virality

Joi Ito — Sun, 12 Dec 2004 10:42:08 +0000

A lot of the virality stuff I talked about yesterday came from discussions with Jonah Peretti who did ForwardTrack and Reid Hoffman, the former SVP of PayPal, Francesco Cara and Marko Ahtisaari. If anyone is interested in going down this rat hole any further, I will try to put a wiki page together with more links once we have a permanent place for it.