Global Voices » Rebecca MacKinnon

Arab Bloggers Meet in Tunis

Rebecca MacKinnon — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:12:31 +0000

On Monday in Tunis, the 3rd Arab Bloggers Meeting kicked off with a day-long public conference. The meeting is co-hosted by Global Voices, Nawaat and Heinrich Böll Foundation and is attended by around 100 bloggers from nearly all Arab countries. Naturally, the conference was well-blogged, not only on the official Arab Bloggers blog, but also by many participants.

Links to media and blog coverage are being collected here (please post in the comments section to let us know what we may have missed).

An Al Jazeera story about the meeting proclaimed: “Arab bloggers say Arab Spring has gone global“. English-language blog coverage included Jillian York's posts on Day 1, Part 1 and a special panel featuring Tunisian bloggers who are now involved with Tunisian politics in various ways. The biggest news came from a ground-breaking talk by the new president of the Tunisian Internet Agency, in which he revealed that Tunisia secretly tested censorship software for Western companies.

Mohamed ElGohary, co-editor of Lingua Arabic. Photo by Mohamed Alâa Guedich (used with permission)

The meeting continues in a smaller, invitation-only workshop setting for the next three days. Participants continue to tweet about the discussions in multiple languages using the #AB11 hashtag, and the conference blog will continue to post updates. So stay tuned.

The 2nd Arab Bloggers Meeting, held in Beirut in 2009, is believed by many bloggers to have played an important role in building personal ties and trust among bloggers throughout the region - ties which enabled them to coordinate more easily during the Arab Spring.

Support Global Voices: Help make the world a more connected place

Rebecca MacKinnon — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 14:27:31 +0000

When we started Global Voices six years ago, we had a simple goal: to give our readers access to the wide world we were encountering online. Reading blogs from around the world gave both of us a perspective we weren't able to get from newspapers, radio or television: the voices of ordinary people using new technologies to share their perspectives, opinions and points of view about events big and small in their communities. So we built a simple website - Global Voices Online.

Six years later, our simple site has grown into an indispensable resource for anyone who wants to know what people are talking and thinking about from Cameroon to Cambodia. It's a labor of love produced by 400 people around the world who see citizen media in all its forms - videos, photographs, podcasts, Twitter posts, Facebook updates, blogs - as a powerful tool to build connections across barriers of language, culture and nation.

As Global Voices board member Rosental Alves recently put it, in the pre-Internet age the world's people faced information scarcity: an “information desert.” Now we all struggle with information overload: an “information rainforest.” The challenges of building a civilization in a desert are very different than the problems of building a civilization in a rainforest.

Global Voices is one of several - and we believe, vital - grassroots non-commercial efforts that are working hard to build a civilization within the new and rapidly-evolving global information rainforest based on values of free expression, openness, and mutual respect. If we have learned anything in the past few years, it's that just because the Internet exists, and just because anybody can now create media, that doesn't automatically mean the world will be more democratic or peaceful.

While many of us are enthusiastic users of various Google products, Facebook and Twitter, we don't believe that commercial Internet businesses alone will serve the interests and protect the rights of all the world's people. We - citizens living around the world who believe in our right to create independent online media - need to make a concerted effort to build structures and systems that will nurture and sustain the kind of world we want to live in. Global Voices is a community of people who are acting like real citizens - not mere passive “internet users” - and who are taking personal responsibility for the future of our society.

The vast majority of the people involved with Global Voices are volunteers, like the two of us. The six people who work nearly full time on the project, and 20-plus who receive modest part-time compensation are far from getting rich off the work. Everyone who works on Global Voices is motivated by passion: for featuring voices that are rarely heard outside their own communities, for defending freedom of speech online, for building connections between people around the world.

Even with so much support from passionate volunteers, we need financial support to keep this project going and growing. Global Voices has become an incubator for important and innovative projects around the globe. When you donate, you're not just supporting the 20 websites we already produce (in 17 languages!) - you're making it possible for us to support innovation and experimentation to make sure that our projects can continue to adapt to a rapidly changing, increasingly mobile Internet.

If you believe the work we're doing at Global Voices is important for making the world a wider and more connected place, we hope you'll support us with a donation.

With our thanks and very best wishes,

Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman
Co-founders, Global Voices

We are Global Voices. Five years on.

Rebecca MacKinnon — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 08:03:19 +0000

The following is a first in a series of posts in support of Global Voices' 2009-10 online fundraising campaign. If you wish to support our work, please visit our Donate page. Thank you!

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Rising Voices Director David Sasaki has written a lovely retrospective for Global Voices' fifth birthday. Five years ago this month, David traveled across the United States from California to Harvard for a day-long workshop on global blogging. The workshop - little more than a structured brainstorming session - was called “Global Voices Online.” The website you are reading today started out as a blog that Ethan Zuckerman and I set up to organize that workshop. Our aim, put very simply, was to discuss how “to use blogging and blog tools to help people in different countries hold more meaningful and direct conversations with each other.” The day's discussion was part of a larger Internet and Society conference put on by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The Open Society Institute generously granted us some funds to fly in bloggers from various parts of the world. We publicized the event on the web, and many others - like David - just showed up. Thank goodness.

Here is an article I wrote soon after the meeting. Here is Ethan's “day after” blog post. We did not emerge with a concrete plan for world domination - or even for a coherent project. Participants agreed to set up a wiki to share information, an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) for further on-line meetings, and an aggregator of blogs by conference participants and others like them who we began to call “bridge bloggers.” We weren't sure where we would go from there.

One thing, however, was clear: a critical mass of bloggers with similar values was emerging around the globe. It seemed like a good idea to “connect the dots” (as Jeff Ooi put it) amongst these people and create a platform for this emergent community. In the weeks following the conference, a number of participants used a wiki to articulate this community's shared values. The Global Voices Manifesto was the result. It's worth reproducing in full here because everything Global Voices does today continues to be driven by these fundamental values:

We believe in free speech: in protecting the right to speak — and the right to listen. We believe in universal access to the tools of speech.

To that end, we seek to enable everyone who wants to speak to have the means to speak — and everyone who wants to hear that speech, the means to listen to it.

Thanks to new tools, speech need no longer be controlled by those who own the means of publishing and distribution, or by governments that would restrict thought and communication.

Now, anyone can wield the power of the press. Everyone can tell their stories to the world.
We seek to build bridges across the gulfs that divide people, so as to understand each other more fully. We seek to work together more effectively, and act more powerfully.

We believe in the power of direct connection. The bond between individuals from different worlds is personal, political and powerful. We believe conversation across boundaries is essential to a future that is free, fair, prosperous and sustainable - for all citizens of this planet.

While we continue to work and speak as individuals, we also seek to identify and promote our shared interests and goals. We pledge to respect, assist, teach, learn from, and listen to one other.

We are Global Voices.

We now have an amazing multinational team who act as stewards for various parts of Global Voices. But the soul of GV are the hundreds of volunteers who take time out from their jobs, studies, and and family obligations to help build a more open and participatory global public discourse.

Members of the Global Voices community at the 2006 Summit in Delhi, India. Photo by Jace.

The detailed story of how Global Voices evolved and how its various branches operate - including Rising Voices, Global Voices Advocacy, and Global Voices Lingua - can be found in many places, including this website's About section and FAQ. News stories about the project are here. Since 2004 we've had physical gatherings in London (2005), Delhi (2006), and Budapest (2008). We are looking forward to another gathering in 2010 (location and date to be announced soon).

In 2006 Ethan and I wrote an article for the Nieman Reports magazine in which we sought to explain the relationship between Global Voices and journalism. David has another excellent post about why outreach, advocacy and translation are necessary to help people overcome the obstacles to speaking, being heard, and listening to others.

Many people around the world are frustrated that the global English-language mainstream media ignores their country much of the time, or only covers the bad things about their country, or tends to stereotype them. They see GV as a valuable platform through which to get their stories and viewpoints amplified to a broader global audience. Others are frustrated that their own domestic news media fail to report on much of the world, do it badly, or do it in a slanted manner that supports their government's worldview, and thus believe that by translating GV content into their local language they can improve their community's understanding of the world. Others focus on helping communities who are not yet taking advantage of new technologies to get their story out. Others have joined in common cause against censorship and repression of those who are merely exercising their universal right to free expression according to Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The GV community has not let itself get bogged down in endless debates about whether bloggers are or aren't journalists, or what the Internet means for the news business. Nor does GV get tangled up in arguments about whether the Internet is or is not going to be a force for global democratization. As a community we're more interested in rolling up our sleeves and getting to work addressing a more tangible problem: filling a few of the gaping holes in the global public discourse, and doing what we can about the huge imbalances, inequities, and injustices in global media. However you define this work, we believe that what we're doing has value and makes a difference.

We are grateful that a range of organizations have deemed our work to be worthy of their financial support. We have developed relationships with news organizations who follow our work and seek us out because - however you define what we do - our community is a valuable source of global information and fresh perspectives. This is why Reuters provided critical core support in our first three years, and why a many news organizations continue to work with our editors and to contact our volunteers for interviews. While we can't say we've completely transformed global media, we do believe that we've brought global media attention to a range of stories that might otherwise not have been reported, and provided fresh perspectives on numerous other major international news stories. That in itself has made the entire enterprise worthwhile.

What's even more exciting is the way in which Global Voices has impacted the lives of our editors, volunteers, and broader community members. We have become a hub through which an amazing group of talented, articulate, and caring people can find fulfillment, global recognition, and community support. Click here to read about how Rising Voices has brought more diverse voices into national and global conversations, and what that has meant for the individuals and communities involved. To get a sense of how amazing our volunteers are, read and listen to some of the blogger profiles posted here.

GV has also had an impact on various blogging communities around the world with whom we have no formal relationship - other than linking to and translating some of their blog posts from time to time. Just one example: Ethan recently described an eye-opening conversation with a young Kyrgyz blogger, Bektour Iskender about the impact some of our work has had in Central Asia.

What might result from a slightly more democratic, open, and participatory global media environment is not clear. At the 2004 meeting, Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan expressed the hope that the spread of online citizen media would make societies more democratic and war more difficult for governments to justify. “Hoder,” as he's known on the Internet, has been imprisoned by Ahmedinejad's regime for over a year now, and it's not clear whether expanded contacts between Iranians and Westerners would be a deciding factor in a U.S. decision about whether or not to attack Iran. Writers like Evgeny Morozov argue that contrary to early optimism about the Internet as a democratizing force, dictatorships are figuring out how to use the Internet to solidify their power and suppress dissent - and that the Internet in many countries is dominated by manipulated spin, disinformation and hate. Others like Clay Shirky and Patrick Meier argue that there is still reason for optimism. Still others point out that most of the world's people have more pressing problems - like physical survival - and all of the above including Global Voices' work is irrelevant to them anyway.

Five years ago Ory Okolloh - who went on to found the wildly successful citizen reporting platform Ushahidi - made some comments that are worth revisiting in the context of those debates. Here's how I reported her words at the time:

Kenyan blogger Ory Okolloh doesn't expect Africa to be transformed by blogging any time soon. Bridging the digital divide is perhaps the least of Africa's many problems. Nonetheless, she thinks blogging is important – if not transformative – for the small number of Africans who do blog. “For young people, we have not been heard, we don't have a space in Africa within politics or in other arenas to express ourselves,” Okolloh says. “I think it could provide a forum for young people to create their own space. I don't think it will change politics per se or determine an election but I think it can breed community in ways that have not been able to take place before.”

Online citizen media is breeding new forms of community at the local, national, and global level. GV has become a loose connective tissue between Ory's Kenyan blogging community and other bloggers around the world who share similar values.

While Global Voices seeks to influence the stories reported by traditional news media - most of which serve specific nations or regions - we are also building a platform for global discourse, and a community of global citizens around that discourse. We use the Internet not to escape from our humanity, but to assert it. We believe individual choices and actions make a difference. Whether the Internet will ultimately empower more than it enslaves depends on whether we take responsibility for our future and act. Building a multi-cultural, multi-lingual community focused on specific projects underpinned by a core set of humanistic values is just one small effort in that direction.

Hong Kong: GV Editor Oiwan Lam faces court battle over Flickr photo

Rebecca MacKinnon — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 22:35:02 +0000

On May 11th, Oiwan Lam, Global Voices Northeast Asia Editor, committed what she says was a deliberate act of civil disobedience. (She is pictured at left protesting media content controls.)

Writing on the citizen media website InMedia Hong Kong, Oiwan called on her readers to post links to erotic websites and also included an artsy photo of a topless woman that she found on Flickr, the photo sharing site owned by Yahoo!. The post was originally published here, but has now been removed from the InMedia site and posted on a WordPress.com blog here. (WARNING: that last link is for people over 18 only and is not work-safe.)

As Boingboing and others reported earlier this week, Oiwan's post has been classified as "Class II indecent" by Hong Kong's Obscene Articles Tribunal. The maximum penalty for this is HK$400,000 (US$ 51,162) and one year in jail. Whether or not she ends up doing jail time, she certainly faces a long drawn out court battle and series of appeals, and if she loses will end paying a hefty fine. People in the media business with experience fighting such cases also point out that the implications of a conviction are quite serious because the conviction is passed to all governments and would affect her ability to get visas.

At right is a cropped version of the image, minus the woman's breasts which were visible in the original. Click on the photo to see the original image. (WARNING: not safe for workplaces or children.)

Oiwan displayed and linked to this photo as part of a protest against the fining of a man who posted links to porn sites in an adult online discussion group. She was also protesting the fact that a local student publication was recently classified as indecent after publishing a questionnaire about sexual behavior. She discusses her reasons in English here, here (WARNING: same warning as above applies to these two links), and here. Also see two posts about the earlier cases on Global Voices here and here.

Oiwan feels strongly that censorship of adult material is the thin end of the wedge for creeping political censorship - and the silencing of minority voices. In the opening of her "war declaration" post, as translated by Roland Soong, she writes:

The recent storm aroused by the Chinese University of Hong Kong student newspaper's erotic section is just the tip of the iceberg. Political censorsihp has been manipulating public opinion in seemingly apolitical sectors. Previously, we saw during the consultation over digital media copyrights how the state machinery used "protection of copyrights" to attempt to introduce a system to filter and delete contents, or else intimidate personal or small websites through fines.

Another gap through which political censorship can be introduced is pornography. This gap gathers the power of the state as well as the forces of religious people and fake moral politicians. So far, they have focused on gender and gay rights groups, but we must extend our battlelines in light of the court decision two days ago: the police filed charges against a netizen for posting hyperlinks to pornographic websites at a certain forum and the court arrived at a guilty verdict with a fine of HK$5,000. This is a very significant precedent for censorship.

Oiwan's court date is August 15th. Meanwhile…

Flickr's New Regional Censorship Policies Enter the Mix

When Oiwan was asked by the Television and Entertainment Licensing Authority (TELA) on May 28th to remove the offending photo and blog post, Oiwan refused. One reason she gave was that Flickr, which has guidelines about adult material, had not flagged the photo as unacceptable and thus she had no reason to believe it was indecent by any reasonable standard. Click here to read in English about her conversation with the TELA official.

After the conversation Oiwan wrote: "In the guidelines of the largest photograph storage/sharing company
flickr in the world, this photograph is regarded as acceptable and it
is quite prominent in terms of search results. But the Hong Kong
authorities have defined it as indecent. Where should we define the
boundary for netizen and public acceptance?"

Then in mid-June, Flickr launched a new Chinese language service. After which all Flickr users in Hong Kong whose Flickr accounts were set up through yahoo.com.hk (Yahoo! Hong Kong) could no longer access the photo that Oiwan had linked to on Flickr. Instead, they got a block page like this one:

The page says "This photo is unavailable to you" but gives the user no further explanation as to why. This now happens any time a Hong Kong user tries to access a photo or account that has been rated "moderate" or "unsafe." They can only access areas rated as "safe." This is part of Flickr's new targeted censorship policy, as outlined in its FAQ item about filters:

If your Yahoo! ID is based in Singapore, Hong Kong or Korea you will only be able to view safe content based on your local Terms of Service so won’t be able to turn SafeSearch off. If your Yahoo! ID is based in Germany you are not able to view restricted content due to your local Terms of Service.

Exactly who determines what gets rated "safe," "moderate," and "unsafe" is not explained to users at all. Exactly what criteria are being used is also not made clear, and while community guidelines are referred to, it's not clear what these guidelines have to do with actual laws in the jurisdictions concerned. In fact, the entire user account of Jake Applebaum, the photographer who took that photo, is blocked to Hong Kong users, despite the fact that it is very unlikely that all his photos violate Hong Kong's obscenity laws. (His account includes many pictures that don't involve nude people, including - I noticed while trolling his account - fully clothed staff photos for the Electronic Frontier Foundation…)

On June 22nd, TELA handed Oiwan's case over to Hong Kong's Obscene Articles Tribunal (OAT) without notifying Oiwan and InMedia. Then on June 26th, OAT classified Oiwan's article as indecent. In a recent interview Oiwan indicated that she believes there is a relationship between Flickr's censoring of the photograph and the OAT's indecent ruling. "This was some kind of concidence," she said. "Flickr changed its policy and then the Obscene Articles Tribune received my photograph for classification purposes."

Now let's be clear: Oiwan says she has no factual information linking these two events. Somebody from Flickr needs to address this on the record and clear things up. Oiwan's queries yielded only this e-mail from customer service [Flickr Case 283506]:

Hello,
Your picture has been marked "restricted" due to the adult
& sexual nature of the content. Regards,
Michelle

Oiwan believes that two key unanswered questions are:

Did somebody from the Hong Kong government contact Flickr or Yahoo! Hong Kong and ask them to restrict access to Applebaum's photo and/or account?
Were the actions of TELA and OAT influenced by the fact that Flickr had decided to restrict the photo in question?

We do not know.

On Wednesday Boingboing published an e-mail by Applebaum in which he made clear he is very upset about the way he has been treated by Flickr as a longtime user, with his entire account and all of its contents now inaccessible to his friends and potential clients in several countries. He also writes "They're about to be complicit in putting another (Thanks Yahoo!) Chinese citizen behind bars as an unintended consequence of their attempts to grab foreign markets."

Now, let's be clear that Oiwan is not packing her toothbrush, and Hong Kong's legal system is completely separate from mainland China's. If Oiwan is eventually found guilty after a long expensive journey through the courts, and then fined, the extent to which her plight can be blamed on Flickr depends on the answer to question 1 above. If it's "yes," then one might argue that Flickr assisted the OAT's case, though the Flickr/Yahoo employees may or may not have understood what they were doing or been aware of what was going on with Oiwan.

According to somebody in a position to know, who won't talk on the record, Flickr can only provide local-language services if it complies with local laws. This person says that the decisions about what gets blocked to users in different jurisdictions are made by staffers in these countries - not by staff in the U.S. People in the company also argue they are trying very hard to do the right thing by their users while finding a way to provide localized services in a wide range of jurisdictions. The extent to which they claim in private to care about their users is, unfortunately, not being conveyed very well in public - or to Flickr users.

Legally, Flickr is off the hook because in the Terms of Service users agree to allow Flickr staff to remove or block their content in accordance with the law as well as community guidelines, etc etc etc all contingencies covered. It is also unlikely, when more facts become clear, that it will be possible to blame Flickr for having directly caused whatever happens to Oiwan.

However, this whole mess makes one wonder. Even if we assume political content is not being censored (Can we if certain political speech is illegal in some places?) and assuming that we are only talking about censorship of erotic/"adult" content, is it possible for a global internet company like Flickr (or Google) to censor different content for different national jurisdictions without creating major blowback?

The first kind of blowback is a significant decrease in trust by at least a segment of Flickr users - how big a segment depends on how well Flickr communicates with their user community. So far they don't seem to be doing that so well.

The second kind of blowback is more serious: Are censorship decisions about made by Flickr staff (or staff of any other global user content hosting company) going to be used by governments as an excuse to prosecute certain cases? Without meaning to, will the company's internal content filtering decisions - which appear in this particular case to err on the side of caution in an attempt to comply with local law - inadvertently also help to shape the interpretation of local laws by local authorities in a more restrictive and conservative direction?

Is there any way to avoid this kind of blowback once you get into the game of local censoring? Or it just inevitable?

Delhi Summit Reflections: We ARE the People of the Year.

Rebecca MacKinnon — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 13:59:30 +0000

As global voices editors, authors, community members, and allies convened our second annual summit in Delhi this weekend, TIME magazine dedicated its “person of the year” to YOU: people around the world who are taking media creation into their own hands.

(Photo by Jace. Click to enlarge.)

The TIME article praises the individual “for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game,” etc. The article concludes: “This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person.”

That, in a nutshell, is exactly what Global Voices is all about.

The problem is that the “new kind of international understanding” that TIME describes, a world of true “citizen to citizen” communication, remains a still-distant dream. The reality is that Web2.0 - and the potential for empowerment that it represents - remains largely inaccessible to large numbers of people on the planet, and is not being accessed by many more, for many reasons.

(Photo by Georgia. Click to enlarge.)

How do we help more people become creators of their own media? What kind of outreach can Web 2.0-savvy citizens provide to the still-uninitiated? How do we bridge massive and endless barriers of language and culture? Are the technical tools accessible enough to the next billion Internet users, or are we in need of new solutions better suited to the developing world? And how about people who are being prevented from speaking - or being heard - by governments, corporations, and other powerful entities? These were exactly the questions we tackled during our public meeting on Saturday.

Here were some of my own takeaways from Saturday's discussion:

Global Voices right now is in English (translating what content it can from blogs in Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Spanish, Portugese, French, and Russian) but it needs to be in many other languages. Right now there is a volunteer-driven effort to translate GV into Chinese. Many people in our community feel strongly that much more translation needs to happen, and it appears that at least for some of the languages there is a great deal of enthusiasm. The challenge now is for people to take the lead in building new translation teams to make this happen.

Outreach can't be one-size-fits all and must meet local needs, through local leadership. we had much to learn from some of the Indian attendees who described a number of very successful citizen media outreach projects in India. One in particular was Cybermohalla, in which slum dwellers reported on the demolition of their own community in order to make way for a public works project. There was some discussion about who ought to be doing outreach to whom - and much agreement that we are not talking about putting Western bloggers on planes to teach people in the Third World how to blog. Rather, in most cases it's about bloggers and media activists in the developing world reaching out to their less privileged countrymen. People agreed that outreach techniques and tactics will vary widely from country to country and community to community - and the more local the teachers, the more likely they will understand the needs of the people being taught. There was also a great deal of discussion about children as the focus of technology and citizen media outreach - the idea being that it is young people who will take most naturally to the idea of using technology for self-expression. (There was of course much interest in the One Laptop prototype that SJ Klein brought to the meeting.)

Teaching people how to blog or create media isn't enough if they can't get around barriers to speech. People need to be able to speak and be heard without fear of reprisal if their thoughts aren't in line with their government's. They need tools to get around censorship - both in terms of expressing themselves and in accessing the works of others. There is also the issue that many people in many countries aren't aware of what their governments are actually doing to limit speech or access to information on the Internet, and thus even in many democracies, there isn't enough public pressure on governments to be as open as possible. Global Voices is about to launch an advocacy arm, thanks to some funding from the Dutch development organization, Hivos, which will enable members of our community to work directly on these issues.

Be sure to read Nathan Hamm's summary of our introductory Session 1, Ethan Zuckerman's account of Session 3 on translation, and Sameer Padania's summary of Session 4 on tools and technology. A summary of Session 2, focusing on outreach, should be coming soon. There is also a conference blog put together by Ange, one of our community members participating remotely from Dubai.

Sunday's meeting was a closed-door session for Global Voices editors and authors only. We rolled up our sleeves and discussed how Global Voices authors and editors can do an even better job at amplifying citizen voices from around the world. Our tech team is working on a major re-design of the site to make it more user-friendly (and less overwhelming). We are also developing a new public aggregator of all the blogs that our editors and authors watch in order to compile their daily links and features, and this aggregator will include a mechanism by which anybody can suggest blogs that we ought to be following and linking to. As we realized last year, GV is not just a media site but a conversation community. Many of our authors and editors discussed strategies for community building: specifically, how to support communities in their own countries, regions, and language groupings comprised of people who want to communicate with a broader global community of conversation.

People are taking initiative to carry out ideas that we could never have imagined just a year ago. We've always known that the individuals who work on GV are talented, passionate, creative, and articulate, but spending two days with this diverse collection of characters was humbling. As co-founders, Ethan and I are excited that the project has grown to the point that others are taking the lead when it comes to leading Global Voices and representing it to the public. We are very happily receding into backstage supporting roles: fundraising and doing the legal groundwork to transform Global Voices from a project under Harvard's Berkman Center to an independent non-profit organization.

This weekend's meeting also drove home the importance of face-to-face meetings even for a virtual organization like Global Voices. The Web has helped us find one another and has enabled us to work together in ways that would otherwise be completely impossible. But for the people who are devoting many hours every week to curating the global conversation on Global Voices, there is nothing like sitting down over curry and beers for building trust, camaraderie, commitment, and a feeling of shared ownership of the project.

People who are not very familiar with what we do often make snyde remarks about how strange it is that bloggers find it necessary to meet in physical space - as if the need for face-to-face meeting somehow proves the limitations or inadequacies of what we do. These remarks completely miss the point, of course. Global Voices may be a virtual organization with no physical headquarters (and no plans to create one), but what we do is ultimately about building understanding - and ideally dialogue - between real flesh-and-blood human beings and physical human communities.

We are not just generating chatter amongst avatars and usernames and online personas. We are not creating an alternative universe or online cyber-utopia into which our members escape from the realities of our daily lives and the problems within and between our countries. We are using the Internet's virtual space - and the creation of online citizens' media - as a means to a very physical end. The Web connects the physical human beings at the ends of it who are using it as a channel to express themselves and reach out to one another. When we as individuals can all create our own media, not only do we find each other and organize more easily around common causes. By taking control of our own narratives, our own stories, we gain greater control over how others perceive and define us. This in turn will make it more difficult (we believe) for outsiders to impose unwelcome, unsuitable, unjust or violent policies upon us - all of which are made much easier when mass media is used to stereotype, pigeonhole, and dehumanize us.

We use the Web not to escape our humanity, but to assert it.

Global Voices Delhi Summit Slideshow

Rebecca MacKinnon — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 06:30:48 +0000

Day 1 of the Global Voices Delhi Summit is well underway and the photos are starting to emerge on Flickr. Here is a slideshow. People are contributing their photos of the meeting (and a few from their travels before the meeting) by uploading their pictures to Flickr and tagging them with gvdelhi2006:

There is a webcast and online chat. You can find out all the details of how to connect on this page.

Global Voices Summit begins Saturday!!

Rebecca MacKinnon — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 16:33:06 +0000

If you aren't able to join us in Delhi for Saturday's Global Voices 2006 Summit, please join us online!

Information about the schedule, webcast, live online chat, and other information can all be found on this web page. Or you can click here to go directly to the streaming audio webcast - which is scheduled to start at 9:00am Delhi time. (03:30 GMT, 10:30PM EST, 11:30AM Beijing)

We are building up a number of linked resource pages about the summit on the Global Voices wiki which will be available from this central page. It will include feeds of material written about the summit as long as it has been tagged with the summit tag: gvdelhi2006. If you blog / write / take pictures / record audio or video or otherwise generate content about the summit don’t forget to tag it so your views will be more easily found and more widely distributed.

How did we get to this moment? A bit of history: Two years ago this week, a few of us convened a small gathering of bloggers from around the world in a Harvard Law School classroom. From it emerged the Global Voices Manifesto. Here it is in full:

We believe in free speech: in protecting the right to speak — and the right to listen. We believe in universal access to the tools of speech.

To that end, we want to enable everyone who wants to speak to have the means to speak — and everyone who wants to hear that speech, the means to listen to it.

Thanks to new tools, speech need no longer be controlled by those who own the means of publishing and distribution, or by governments that would restrict thought and communication. Now, anyone can wield the power of the press. Everyone can tell their stories to the world.

We want to build bridges across the gulfs of culture and language that divide people, so as to understand each other more fully. We want to work together more effectively, and act more powerfully.

We believe in the power of direct connection. The bond between individuals from different worlds is personal, political and powerful. We believe conversation across boundaries is essential to a future that is free, fair, prosperous and sustainable - for all citizens of this planet.

While we continue to work and speak as individuals, we also want to identify and promote our shared interests and goals. We pledge to respect, assist, teach, learn from, and listen to one other.

We are Global Voices.

By the following summer, the blog that we had originally created as a conversation space for conference attendees had morphed into the website as you see it today: an edited aggregator of weblogs from all over the world except North America and Western Europe (the idea being that voices and views from N.America and W.Europe get disproportionate attention not only in the International media but on the global web). The blogs we link to on the site are curated, contextualized and in some cases translated by our amazing group of regional editors and translators. Roughly one hundred volunteers from all over the world provide in-depth coverage of the discussions taking place in their own countries' blogospheres. Enough people seem to find it useful that we now have over one million visitors per month, and we recently won the Knight-Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism.

At last year's summit in London, it was clear that Global Voices is much more than a citizens' media website or international bloggers' network. It is a community. And it is a movement of people who are united by the values of free speech, tolerance, dialogue, and inclusiveness articulated in the manifesto.

At this year's Delhi summit, much of our public meeting on Saturday will be devoted to the challenges our community hopes to tackle in the coming years: How do we bring more people, not just wired elites, into the global discourse that is facilitated by the Internet? What kinds of technical tools need to be used, adapted or developed in order to bring the less-wealthy into the global conversation? How do we help people speak when their governments or other powerful groups don't want them to? How do we overcome language barriers?

Please help us figure some of these things out by joining the conversation.

Global Voices launches new search function!

Rebecca MacKinnon — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 22:04:22 +0000

Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman and tech guru Boris Anthony have put together a new “Global Voices Web” search using the new Google Co-op platform which enables you to create your own search engine. Check it out - it's in the yellow search bar near the top of the page right under the “tag cloud.”

In addition to being able to search all of Global Voices or all of Google, now you can also search “the Global Voices Web.” Right now, that includes about 4,800 blogs that our Regional Editors follow each day, and from which they select their “Daily Links”. In other words, when you use this search function, you are searching all the blogs that we regularly link to or which our editors have found worth following.

GV doesn't cover North America and Western Europe because we believe the views of people from those parts of the world get disproportionately more attention on the world wide web and in the global media than people from all other regions. GV is meant to be a small effort towards counter-balancing that imbalance. Thus the search includes few blogs from N.America or W.Europe except for blogs by members of various diasporas currently living in the West. The point is to have a search that covers the same footprint of citizen media that GV covers.

This new “Global Voices Web” search was constructed by Ethan and Boris using Google's Co-op search, with a bit of help from some people at Google who responded to their requests for changes. When Ethan and Boris started putting it together, Ethan blogged about the lack of results on some terms in a post titled “What Google Coop Search Doesn't Do Well.” The folks at Google eventually read his post and fixed the problem. Google engineer Vrishali Wagle wrote about the fix on the Google Custom Search blog and says he encourages people to give more feedback. Ethan is now much happier.

Note that our search is still very very “beta.” Because it was constructed by importing the feeds from editors' aggregators, we had to weed out a bunch of non-blog and off-topic feeds (news sites, U.S. tech blogs, and things like that). If you try it out please let us know if there are any non-blog or off-topic sites we've failed to weed out or if there appear to be glaring omissions. We're sure it is far from perfect at this stage which is why we need as many people as possible to test it out and let us know what's wrong.

As Ethan explains in his blog post about this new search function: “a future version will include all the sites we link to on GV, which should expand the collection quite a bit. And an even further off version will integrate with the giant aggregator we’ll be offering on the site next year, which will let you look at new posts from all the countries we cover, as well as offering suggestions for feeds we should be watching - the blogs covered by that aggregator will be the same blogs tracked by the search engine.”

Please help us make it better. We are already discovering things we want to improve and would like to know your requests and concerns.

Corporate Social Responsibility: The blogosphere reacts

Rebecca MacKinnon — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 21:57:46 +0000

If you missed the live webcast of Reuters' Corporate Social Responsible panel yesterday, you can click here to view the full-length archived video. Stephen Frost live-blogged it on the CSR Asia blog. We had a sizeable group of bloggers from a range of countries on the live IRC chat - you can click here for the full chat transcript.

The panel at Reuters' New York facility was distinguished but not exactly diverse: Doug Bauer from Rockefeller Philanthrophy Advisers, Clive Cook from the Atlantic Media Co., John Demsey, group president of Estee Lauder, Samuel DiPiazza, CEO of PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Reuters Chairman Niall FitzGerald. (click here for the full list of names and bios). All men, all North American or Western European, all white, all executives. Writing from Trinidad & Tobago, Atillah Springer commented in the live chat: “the more I think about it, the more insane it seems that they can be having a conversation about whose business CSR is and not have any stakeholders, not to mention women on the panel.”

A lot of laudable statements were made. Mr. FitzGerald made the impassioned point that corporations must be good citizens or large numbers of people on this planet will lose faith in the value of free markets. Business must find a strategic advantage to being responsible, DiPiazza believes. Knight predicted that sustainability - environmental and social - will be the key business innovation of the future. Panelists agreed that quarterly earnings pressures make it difficult for companies to act in a manner that is most socially responsible because social responsibility pays off more over the long term than the short term. Bloggers on the live chat found all these things encouraging. However many found the discussion to be divorced from the realities on the ground in their countries. There was also considerable cynicism about the ultimate motives of CSR, despite the lofty rhetoric. Atillah concluded from Trinidad & Tobago:

CSR especially when it comes to multi-nationals, is a legitimisation of modern day conquistadors with shining glass beads to a post-colonial, rapidly industrializing small island state, still reeling from the inherited and un-dealt with burdens of slavery, indentureship and an economy that is still set up to reflect the privileged ones who own the plantations.

In this part of the world, we HAVE to make companies act responsibly. We demand that they do, or we will, by any means necessary get them out.

Writing from Shenzhen, China, Stephen Frost of CSR Asia concluded:

I have to say that I thought the discussion was quite disappointing. They got caught up in the pointless question of what is CSR, without once mentioning that CSR is what stakeholders think companies should be doing. In fact, stakeholders didn’t even get mentioned. It was a very US-centric discussion (which is okay, I guess, since they are in New York), but the discussion and actitivities in Asia are so much more vital and interesting.

Before the panel began, Frost's colleague Liu Chenyan remarked on a major challenge for multinationals: headquarters might “get” CSR, but how much concerted effort is there to communicate these policies to local branches and sub-contractors? She wrote:

Most action, therefore, on CSR in China is still by US, Japanese and European multinationals. However, many of them fail to localize CSR policies developed in head office or communicate CSR visions to local offices or branches. It is not uncommon, for instance, to find Chinese managers working for foreign companies well known for their CSR work at home to be completely unaware of what CSR is let alone their company’s policies and vision.

Neha Viswanathan was surprised that the panel discussion - before Q&A began - gave no mention to the role of government. Neha remarked:

The interesting thing is that in most developing countries - you wouldn't dream of having a panel without a representative of the government when it comes to CSR - CSR is almost enforcable because of certain government policies - the government goes as far as indicating and making requests.

A blogger named “Karel” added: “we don't necessarily need the government to speak for us, but the government is stakeholder as well as it affects or brings policy into effect.”

On the IRC chat, we had an interesting follow-on conversation about what do you do when following the law in a particular country results in violation of human rights? Should companies refrain from doing business in certain markets or refrain from doing certain kinds of business in certain markets? Stephen live-blogged the unfolding discussion:

The discussion on the Global Voices IRC chat focussed on China and the Internet companies. The panel started off talking about whether a mining company can even do CSR because they destroy the environment. Another panel member said that he had a problem with the term CSR as he does with the word sustainability. Sustainability is waffle (which started a lively discussion). Niall FitzGerald mentioned that during his time at Unilever he got sustainability across to factory owners in northern England (a tough bunch) by appealing to the issue of costs (reducing energy consumption equals less cost, etc). Then they understood sustainability in their own terms.

There was also the question posed in the chat about whether certain types of businesses - and the marketing messages they use to sell their products, are inherently socially irresponsible in the first place. If a company is demonizing breastfeeding in order to sell baby formula, for instance? Or promoting bad eating habits or socially questionable behavior because such behaviors would increase consumption of the company's products?

At the end, when Reuters moderator Paul Holmes asked panelists for their five year predictions, Responses included Knight's prediction that sustainability will be the key innovation of the future.

Neha had the best prediction though: “In 5 years they would have outsourced all their CSR decisions to India - woohoo!”

Are companies being socially responsible in your country? Let us know!!

Rebecca MacKinnon — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 20:11:47 +0000

On Thursday November 9th, at 6:30pm EST (23:30 GMT / 07:30am Friday Beijing time), Reuters will be hosting a live conversation about corporate social responsibility at its New York headquarters.

According to the special web page built for the event: “Corporate responsibility is increasingly important in today’s global landscape, with companies taking a greater role in developing communities, working to reduce poverty and addressing the health of our planet.”

But are companies - multinational as well as local - making nearly enough effort to be socially responsible? You, our dear readers and community members, likely have a few opinions on this subject.

We hope you will express your views on your own blog (please tag your posts with CSR for “corporate social responsibility” in Technorati) or let us know what you think in the comments section of this post. We will be feeding relevant blog posts into a special section of the event page. Also, I will be in the room on Thursday and will relay your views to the panelists.

We also hope that the Global Voices community will join us live on the day by listening to the webcast (link tba on the event web page) and participating on the live chat. Your participation will bring some badly-needed perspectives from developing countries and non-Western nations.

Your participation is especially important because if you click on the event web page, you will see that the panel of speakers is, well, not exactly the most geographically, economically, or ethnically diverse panel we've ever seen - to put it mildly.

If you'd like, please help us spread the word and get more friends to participate by putting a badge for the event on your blog:

LINK TO THIS DEBATE

Bloggers around the world, feel free to use the graphic and code below to link to this debate.

See you on Thursday!!

Global Voices Delhi Summit: Join us in December!

Rebecca MacKinnon — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 20:18:37 +0000

Please join us for the Global Voices 2006 Summit, December 16th in New Delhi, India!

The Global Voices Summit, on December 16th, will be our annual opportunity to take stock, come together and explore our central question: How can we use the Internet to build a more democratic, participatory global discourse? How can we create a more inclusive conversation about what is happening on our planet, and how human beings in different parts of the world are impacting each other in countless ways we don't realize every day?

This year we also hope to address two further questions:

- How do we bring more unheard, ignored, or disadvantaged voices into the global online conversation?

- How do we help people speak and be heard — even when powerful people try to stop them from doing so?

WHO WILL BE ATTENDING?
Global Voices editors, contributors, community members, interested bloggers and journalists. Basically, anybody who is interested in what it means for media, geopolitics, and global society when the whole world starts talking online.

PAST GLOBAL VOICES SUMMITS

Global Voices 2005 London Summit:
Here is our summary of last year's meeting in London. Read articles about it in the Guardian and openDemocracy, an academic paper about us by the Center for Social Media, and a video titled “Many to Many” which includes footage from our London Summit.

Global Voices 2004 Harvard Meeting: where Global Voices was born! Click here for an MP3 audio report about the 2004 meeting. Or read this report at Personal Democracy Forum: International Bloggers Start Connecting the Dots

HOW TO JOIN US
If you are able to join us (i.e., if you are committed to coming), please add your name to the sign-up wiki here. Click here to see who is already committed to attend. We have limited space. Slots will be first-come, first-served. Please only sign up if you truly plan to attend.

WHEN EXACTLY?
9am-5:30pm IST, Saturday December 16th, 2006
(A smaller private planning meeting will be held for GV editors and authors only on Sunday the 17th.)

WHERE?
At the Indian Habitat Centre (Please note that space is very limited, so you'll want to sign up well in advance if you wish to attend - first come, first served.)

OR JOIN US ONLINE
If you can't make it in person, please join us online via webcast and live chat. We shall be posting more information about how to do so as the time approaches

SHOW OFF!
With our cool badges. Available in general and “I'm Attending” flavors!

(Photo of India Gate, Delhi by ramkrsna)

Video: Vietnamese bloggers get “kinky” for charity

Rebecca MacKinnon — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 13:05:01 +0000

Vietnamese blogger Elmooh has uploaded a series of four videos shot at an “Offline Party” - a blogger-organized charity fundraiser in Hanoi. The party included a game involving young men, young women, bananas and candles. (Don't worry, it's all g-rated and everybody keeps their clothes on!) I e-mailed Elmooh asking him about this game. He replied:

Abt the game: Chuối chín rồi. Banana gettin ripe.

3 pairs, 1 girl and 1 boy each.

The girl blinds the boy eyes with stickers, making sure no glimpse he can peek, then ties a rope with a banana at the other end around his waist, he must not know how long/far the banana hangs.

With verbal directing instructions from the girl, the boy have to stamp out the candle light with the banana…

So there you have it. As Elmooh reports on his blog, there was a serious point to the “kinky” game, the conga lines, and the hip-grinding dancing:

We, then, had a fab time with some friends from a vocational center for underprivileged children. Some of them are limped, some of them bear body deformation since birth but all of them have great skillful hands and creativity to make fantastic handicraft works.

We were sitting there for hours listening to their stories, to their singing and to make necklaces, bracelets, earrings, belts out of colorful painted pottery pieces.

The offline party and the previous raised enough money by entry tickets to buy them a fridge. Vietnamese youngsters, not only go for fancy vehicles, endless parties but do have hearts. The little we could do, but there will be more to come.

Blogger-driven charity is a growing, global phenomenon.

(Thanks to Noodlepie for the link.)

Ted Turner on the U.N.: Spoke but didn't listen

Rebecca MacKinnon — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 16:24:56 +0000

On Tuesday afternoon in New York, Georgia Popplewell, Alice Backer, Kamla Bhatt and I did our best to ask questions on behalf of the world's blogosphere at the Reuters “Newsmaker” conversation with Ted Turner, who gave $1 billion to set up the U.N. Foundation ten years ago.

The bloggers participating in the conversation - on their own blogs as well as live in the IRC chat - were generally disillusioned and skeptical about the U.N.'s ability to solve the world's problems. Many were concerned that Turner is wasting his money on needless bureaucracy and a dysfunctional organization whose governance structure is an increasingly illegitimate Cold-War era holdover. But Turner was adamant that his money is well spent.

It's worth noting that when Reuters host Paul Holmes said we would take questions from bloggers, Turner rolled his eyes.

Is the Mouth of the South more interested in talking than listening?

How interested is he, really, in listening to the voices of people who are on the receiving end of the U.N. projects and missions he helps to fund - and in taking their criticisms seriously?

In the IRC chat, Neha Viswanathan asked Turner who he represents: “Where does he gather his agenda from? Who does he identify with - America or the third world?” Turner responded that he represents “humanity.” There was much applause. But does he really listen when many members of that “humanity” want to tell him what they think of his efforts?

Our impression from this one encounter was that that Turner isn't really a listener. He wants CNN to report more international news, but if the voices of the people he aims to help are not sufficiently grateful, he did not seem inclined to adjust his views or plans.

Before the event began, Global Voices' new Sub-Saharan Africa editor Ndesanjo Macha set the tone with lyrics from the Fela Kuti song, “Beasts of No Nation,” in a post titled Dis-United United Nations. Ndesanjo writes: “Will they listen? Perhaps as they did in Rwanda! And now in Darfur. And many more other places. You know what I mean.”

Iraqi blogger Salam Adil wrote a post titled: “UN - What's the point? A message to Ted.”

There is no point to to UN except for the Security Council - all the other bodies are either toothless or can be replaced. If this can't be made effective all the rest may as well be disbanded. One does not need to look to far into the history of the Security Council to see that the main obstacle is America. All other parties rarely use their veto. Unless America can be brought under some control by the UN there is no point to this whole discussion.

But, you see, America needs the UN, and the world needs the UN. It was only the UN that was able to extract Israel from the quagmire they created for themselves in Lebanon and its only the UN that is acting as a reality check against American madness towards Iran. It was America ignoring the UN that created the disaster that was Iraq - and it will be the UN that will be used as part of the solution. Without it we are really talking about World War 3.

So here is the problem Ted, your money has bought you a billion dollar soap box now what are you going to do with it? Kofi's almost out of a job and is going around telling the truth about the mess that the UN is in so he can get some good work on the after-dinner circuit. But where are you going with all this? Are your dollars just going to make a large lump in the landfill of failed initiatives or do you want to make a difference?

Salam also points to Thought Riot's essay on the U.N. here.

Turner did not seem interested in entertaining the idea that his money might be more usefully spent in other ways, or that he may just be putting yet another band-aid over a broken institution.

He insisted that the U.N. has done good in Haiti, despite Alice Backer's concerns that many Hatians are not happy with the performance of U.N. peacekeeping and election monitoring there.

Several people, like Oiwan Lam in Hong Kong, are concerned the U.N. isn't doing enough to protect human rights - especially when they are threatened by governments and corporations. We weren't able to get a clear answer from him on that. Though he did say that he thinks the U.S. was wrong not to stand for election in the new Human Rights Council while China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia all gained seats.

On the positive side, many appreciated his willingness to speak his views honestly, such as his declaration that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was among the dumbest things the U.S. has ever done. Whether or not you agree with him, there is no question of where he stands on any issue. Which as bloggers we all found refreshing, given that many major international donors and media moguls are less than upfront about their agendas.

Some more questions from the IRC chat that, unfortunately didn't get answered, mainly due to time concerns:

lIHd: I'm wondering if he has any reservations about donating to the UN given the massive inneficiency of prjects like the international criminal tribunal for Rwanda?

or wouldn't he like to donate to an organisation that is more proactive and could do something like prevent the genocide in the Sudan rather then spend lots of money producing periodic reports on a situations, then will spend about a billion (i think that's what the cost of the ICTR will run) making a statement retrospectively

or how he feels about America implimenting treaties like the Internation covenant on civil an political rights but picking and choosing what parts they will import into us law, leaving out key aspects that other countries ahve accepted.

Allen: Mr. Turner, what are your thoughts on the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (USA, Russia, Great Britain, France and China) being the largest arms dealers in the world. Do you think it helps or hampers maintaining peace and security among nations?

Guest610: Here's a question: If the UN did decide to reject your donation, what other organization or cause might have received $1 bln

Also click here for more questions asked via the Reuters website.

Thailand: Living thru a Coup

Rebecca MacKinnon — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 17:44:53 +0000

Stuart G, an expat living in Bangkok, worries that the military might start fighting itself. But meanwhile he says “there is no fighting going on now. I am safe, my refrigerator is stocked, and I am not in danger.”

Cowboy Caleb also has a running account of events from a resident's perspective.

Thailand: Coup News Blackout?

Rebecca MacKinnon — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 17:41:48 +0000

Metroblogging Bangkok blogs as the coup unfolds. He says CNN, BBC and all the international cable news channels have gone down and writes: “now just a matter of getting the Internet down…. I'll see you guys when Thailand becomes civilized again…”

Kwanzoku has screenshots from the TV news until: “Now we’ve lost ALL satellite television- not even the bad movie channels! And I was watching The Object of My Affection… How inconsiderate!”