“For you, access to information costs one click. In China, it would have cost a journalist seven years in jail”. This is the message you will currently find on the New York Times website as well as on USATODAY.com.

Reporters Without Borders, an international organization advocating press freedom, defending journalists imprisoned or persecuted for doing their job and exposing the mistreatment and torture of them in many countries, is launching a national campaign, entitled: “Press Freedom is the Price for Democracy.”

According to the organization, it is meant to inform the American public about the injustices committed against the press. The goal is to show every time a member of the press is killed or censored, citizens are deprived of important information. At least, in the last fifteen years, getting the news has cost the lives of 850 reporters.

As part of the campaign, Reporters Without Borders posted a YouTube video, “Shot for News?!” featuring a young woman in the streets of New York, seconds later a man standing by a newspaper stand is shot multiple times. The message goes like this: Unlike many other countries, getting the news here will never cost a life. RWB recently released its annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index, which measures the degree of freedom journalists have in 175 countries. Currently, more than 200 reporters and media assistants are jailed worldwide. 91 cyberdissidents are behind bars because of their online work. To see how your country ranks on press freedom:
http://www.rsf.org/en-classement1003-2009.html

Newspapers across the country have also been asked to donate free space for print or online advertisements to publicize the message to the greater public.

While Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has warned the opposition not to hold protest on 4^th of November, Iranian people prepare for huge rallies against dictatorship. 4^th of November marks the anniversary of US embassy seizure. 30 years ago, students grabbed the embassy, but now students have changed significantly, so this time in the memory of that day they want to sent peaceful message to the world.

As a result, the internet received massive artistic posters that are expressing Iranian’s thought, moreover these posters are aimed to encourage people to get together and protest dictatorship and discrimination, and stand for equality and human rights.

Besides, huge amount of blogs are trying to express their opinions about the current condition of the Iranian society, an important number of podcasts have been published online about 4^th of November. Facebook and Youtube are filled by clips, images and notes in the memory of those killed during the post-election’s protest.

In contrast, prominent politicians and the IRGC warned the opposition and the people not to hold any other protest except the one that is against the US. In the meantime, government tried to put the mainstream media under pressure as recently one of the Iranian newspapers has been banned with unclear reasons.

IRGC pointed out that, people should be careful not to stray from the fundamental governmental policies. According to IRGC, the opposition is induced by foreign governments such as US and other western countries. The Iranian regime send a warning, on the IRNA state news agency, that it would be not tolerate any “diversionary and false” slogans.

However, opposition’ leader Mr. Mousavi and Karobi are still encouraging people to come out and stand for their basic rights. Moreover, there are too many actions that came out from universities and even high schools in order to support Iran’s green movement. Universities’ movements activated largely after one of the students from Sharif University shouted over dictatorship in front of Ayatollah Khamenei in a meeting.

The atmosphere within academic sphere in Iran such as universities and high schools is convulsive as with many protests. In addition, 4^th of November is also called students’ day.

large image: http://i36.tinypic.com/5vvjwo.jpg

large image: http://i34.tinypic.com/1g20ys.jpg

The CIA Factbook estimates Afghan literacy above the age of 15 at 28.1% (43.1% of males, 12.6% of females)  — so it’s worth noting that the Taliban (Mullah Omar’s outfit, aka the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan) is now using social bookmarking on its website:

Note the little line of social bookmarking icons across the bottom of the post, shown full-size here:

How’s that for Web2.0 literacy?

(Hat-tip @mountainrunner)

Syria was among the last countries in the Middle East to introduce the Internet. On February 24, 1996, the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment (STE) received permission from the prime minister’s office to do so, and to serve as the body responsible for the Country Top-Level Domain Code (sy.). Two weeks later, STE signed an agreement with the Syrian Computer Society (SCS), headed by the country’s future president, Bashar al-Asad, to connect governmental institutions to the Internet in order to conduct an initial evaluation. The result was a decision to move forward, for the following declared reasons:

1. the Internet made an enormous wealth of information and services accessible to students and researchers;

2. it was an important venue for commercial publicity and trade;

3. Syrian institutions could employ the Internet to promote Syria’s cultural, archaeological and historical heritage and thus advance the tourism industry;

4. Syria’s positions and rights on vital political issues could be advanced, thus countering the “mistaken positions, lies, and distorted views of Syria which appear on Internet sites supported by international Zionism.”[1]

Eighteen months later, on November 17, 1997, Syria began linking up 150

selected government bodies to the Internet. At the beginning of 1999, accessibility was extended to the broader public, and included e-mail, surfing and file transfer (FTP) capabilities within the country itself.

In its approach to the Internet, the Syrian regime, like other governments in the region, seeks to counter material critical of it that is widely available on-line, while insuring that technological innovation in the country is managed with great care in order to fend off unwanted cultural and political penetration and thus maintain tight control over the population. Hence, the authorities agreed to make the Internet accessible only after confirming that they had the ability to control and monitor its content. Adding to the limitations on Syrian users were the high costs of purchasing a computer and connecting to the Internet, and the country’s inferior communications infrastructure. To be sure, Internet usage has expanded since the beginning of the decade by no less than 12,000(!)%, partly because the costs for doing so have been reduced, and partly because of the strong desire for access among Syria’s relatively educated population. However, the regime has made it clear that control over access will remain in force, and that some sites would remain blocked, in line with “country's traditions and habits”[2]

Hence, only 16.4% of the population currently uses the Internet. Moreover, the restrictions imposed on them by the authorities render Syria, in the words of ‘Reporters Without Borders', among the “Internet’s enemies”.[3] Syrian authorities block websites containing material on human rights, freedom of speech, Syrian opposition organizations and Syria’s Kurdish minority, as well as pornographic and Israeli sites. In recent years, they also began to block international social networking sites, in light of their considerable popularity in the country. In 2007, Syria was even termed the “largest prison in the Middle East” for Internet users and bloggers[4] (as well as one of the 10 worst countries to be a blogger in 2009).[5] Indeed, bloggers often serve lengthy prison sentences and are hounded by the authorities in a variety of ways for their activities.

From the opposite direction, there are Western internet companies which prevent access by Syrian citizens to some of their services. For example, in April 2009, the business-oriented social networking ‘LinkedIn' blocked access from Syria, but quickly relented following protests by users, which were expressed through Twitter, among other means. LinkedIn explained its initial action as a human error. But internet firms such as ‘Google' and ‘Sun' routinely prevent Syrian users from using some of their services, in line with US government restrictions on supplying goods and services to the country.

Notwithstanding these limitations, the penetration of the Internet and the spread of social networking sites in Syria has created an important tool to disseminate information within the country and beyond. Users have often found ways to bypass the authorities’ strictures limiting the freedom of expression and organized activities through the formation of on-line pressure groups which address social and economic issues facing the country. The social networking site ‘Facebook', which operates in scores of languages, including, of course, Arabic, is especially popular in Syria.

The Syrian government’s recent campaign against Facebook and call to boycott it has brought the issue of social networking sites onto the public stage. The matter surfaced following a decision by Facebook’s management to view the Golan Heights as part of Israel, registering users from Israeli settlements there as residents of Israel, and not as residents of Syria, as had been done previously. It was even reported that Syria would block the site entirely. In fact, access had already been hindered for two years, both directly and via proxy sites which make it possible to use Facebook anonymously.[6]

The restrictions on social networking sites were designed to try and prevent Internet users from maintaining contact with one another, whether within the country or beyond. Indeed, it should be noted that on-line connections had been established in the past between Israeli and Syrian residents through Facebook proxy sites. Facebook includes hundreds of Syria-related groups, whose participants, both in-country and outside of Syria, number from the very few to thousands. They cover the gamut of subjects: tourism, business, technology, art and music, sports and student life. These sites also enable users to organize on-line protests, sometimes with considerable effect. For example, the rape of a teenage girl prompted a public discussion regarding the sexual exploitation of children, thanks to an on-line campaign involving thousands of people. An on-line campaign against a draft law dealing with matters of personal status appears to have been decisive in the government’s decision to abandon the proposed statute. Other on-line battles have included one advocating the lifting of all on-line restrictions, for which a personal appeal was even made to Syrian president Bashar al-Asad; and a call by local bloggers to boycott suppliers of cellular phones over matters of price, quality and service. In addition, Syrian Facebook users have organized on behalf of local bloggers who were imprisoned for their activities.

‘YouTube' is also employed by Syrians seeking to promote causes which are opposed to official policies. For example, clips documenting the repression of Syria’s Kurdish minority have been uploaded to the site. In response, it was reported in August 2007 that the site was blocked by the authorities because it contained a clip which showed the dress of the president’s wife flapping in the breeze during an official state function. Similarly, in May 2008, it was reported that access to the Arabic-language Wikipedia site was blocked by all internet service-providers in the country, without explanation, but in February 2009 the restriction was removed, an unprecedented step.

On-line social networks in Syria serve as a tool for organizing pressure groups, something which simply cannot be done in daily life, owing to the regime’s heavy-handed oversight and repression. These networks provide further tangible evidence of the strength of the Internet not just as a tool to transmit information within extremely restricted political environments but also to create a basis for social change in these countries. As such, they constitute a direct challenge to highly centralized authoritarian regimes such as Syria. This challenge can only grow in the years ahead, as the Internet inevitably expands its reach in the country.

Download this article as a pdf file

[1] Dr. Hasna Askhita, “L’internet en Syrie,”, Assad National Library, Damascus.

Paper delivered at the International Federation of Library Associations &

Institutions meeting, “Réseaux pour le développement des Bibliothèques dans

les Etats Arabes.” Beirut, 2-4 March 2000.

http://nmit.wordpress.com/2008/09/06/linternet-en-syrie/#more-11

[2] SyriaLive.net, “Syrian Internet Installation and Subscription Rates to be

Scrapped,” Computer and Internet – 2002, 5 March 2002.

http://web.archive.org/web/20071212172006/http://www.syrialive.net/computer/ar

chive/com-puter_2002.htm

[3] http://www.rsf.org

[4] Reporters Without Borders, “Syria,” 1 February 2007.

http://www.rsf.org/Syria,20777.html

[5] Committee to Protect Journalists, “10 Worst Countries to be a Blogger,” 30

April 2009.

http://cpj.org/reports/2009/04/10-worst-countries-to-be-a-blogger.php

[6] http://www.gotofacebook.co.za, http://facebookoxy.com

We keep our products simple. I'd rather have people grow out of our products, as long as more people are growing into them. http://ow.ly/zIGI   The Way I Work: Jason Fried of 37Signals

Man. Wow… that is a line that should be burned into every social movement.  Jason is talking about products at 37 Signals but I would love to see that approach taken by our justice, environmental and other progressive movement organizers.

How many would pass? What % of our users do we graduate? Serve the new people well and you grow.

If you want to grow a movement build it to serve the newbie not the old baby boomer that wants you to add increased science policy review language onto some obscure wetland legislation. (press feed from ascribe)?

update 1: November 6th, 2009 - Lawyer Ben Debba said fatma has been transferred to Bouchoucha police station and might be summoned to appear before a public prosecutor.

update 2: November 7th, 2009 - Lawyer Ben Debba said that fatma has been released.

On Monday, November 2nd, 2009, Tunisian blogger and college Theatre professor, Fatma Riahi (34), known online as Arabicca, was summoned to appear before the Criminal Brigade of Gorjani (Tunis), where she was questioned about her online activities.

Fatma was released the same day around 10 pm then summoned again the next day, on Tuesday November 3rd when three Security officers escorted her to her house in Monastir, located at 160 km from the capital (Tunis), to conduct a search for evidence that she may be hiding behind the pen-name of the famous Tunisian cartoonist blogger Blog de Z. They also confiscated her PC. On Wednesday, they escorted her again to her home in search for her passwords and managed to access her facebook account.

Since then, Arabicca has not been released and has been denied to meet her lawyer, Miss Laila Ben Debba, who spoke to her only for few minutes. Arabicca is being detained in Gorjani Police Station and could face criminal libel charge that potentially carries a prison term to up to three years in prison.

Fatma was blogging at Fatma Arabicca. A blog that she deleted three days before the arrest.

A Free Arabicca campaign blog has been launched by fellow Tunisian bloggers in support for Fatma, as well as a facebook page.

This post covers presentations at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media at MIT’s communications forum.

Josh Levinger leads off the final session at CFCM’s show and tell, titled “Crossing Borders”. His project, Virtual Gaza, aggregates the stories of civilians who were present in Gaza as bombs fell earlier this year during the Israeli incursion. The project centers on a map of Gaza that shows bombed houses.

The impetus for the project was the lack of media coverage of Gaza, a fact complicated by the fact that there were only 6 international journalists in Gaza during the war. Levinger is troubled by the ways in which the suffering of Israelis and Gazans was reported as equal in US media – he feels like this is a distortion of what happened on the ground.

The project grew from a collaboration with the Harvard Alliance for Justice in the Middle East. Working with a social network, they maped 77 testimonies from 29 authors, mapping 32 neighborhoods in 5 cities. People were able to upload their stories and annotate the map, helping combat the “media blockade” against Gaza by showing personal stories.

The project shows the power of Open Street Map – “in conflict areas, there’s much better data through Open Street Map.”

Josh acknowledges the challenges of getting people to pay attention to these maps. “We never got mainstream media to really pay attention to this.” He hoped to travel to Gaza this summer to improve the maps – that wasn’t possible, so he went to the West Bank, and helped with a project called Voices Beyond Walls, a project that mapped the local neighborhoods through video, drawings and photos.

Aside from improving Boston’s signs, Rick Borovoy is pioneering “microtourism”, a new strategy to build bridges in local communities.

He shows us the photo of a Brazilian restaurant in Framingham in a beautiful old building. It’s very popular with Brazilians, but not outside of the community. Why don’t people go there? Borovoy has talked to Framingham residents and they tell him “the traffic’s bad, it’s not safe – basically, they’re saying it’s not on their map.”

Brazilians rescued the downtown of Framingham, Borovoy tells us, and the downtown of the city isn’t especially unsafe. He tells us that non-Brazilians do go to the library, which is downtown, but tend not to go any further.

Talking to Brazilians, some mentioned that they thought that community members wouldn’t come downtown unless they were literally led by the hand. So they’re leading people by the hand. They’re issuing paper passports that have barcodes – those codes are scanned at sites downtown, and people who complete the circuit – led by Brazilian-American guides – will be send an incentive to come back downtown. The hope is to turn a guided tour to self discovery into a rediscovery of downtown. Borovoy recognizes tourism as one of the world’s biggest industries, and hopes that the process of exploring the other will lead to a joy of discovery in our own communities.

The first microtourism excursion takes place this weekend – I hope for a website shortly after the tour is completed.

Charles DeTar is building a blogging platform for prisoners, making it easy to blog on paper using US postal mail. The project, “Between the Bars: Human Stories from Prison” is intended to fight recidivism. He points out that, with prison populations rising, we’re seeing an even bigger population of ex-prisoners. These people have reduced opportunities for civic engagement (they usually can’t vote), have a hard time finding a job, and face cultural exclusion. This leads to high recidivism rates. But people who retain an identity outside of the bars are much less likely to be recidivists.

DeTar points to Jon’s Jail Journal, an amazing blog started by a prisoner in an Arizona jail. The journal was maintained by sending paper letters and posting them online. The father of the blogger tells audiences that the blog ended up being a lifeline for his son. Citing my work (thanks!) DeTar points to the idea of bridgeblogging and the importance of listening and of being heard.

Between the Bars is a platform to scan letters, post them online and enable communication and commenting within the framework and constraints of the US prison system. At this point, DeTar is working with “prison stakeholders” – families, former prisoners, prison employees – and waiting for approval from MIT’s research review board to start talking to prisoners.

CDT and other advocates sent a letter to President Obama today once again urging greater transparency as the US negotiates a new Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). While the administration has permitted some advocates (including my colleague David Sohn) to review the US-authored Internet portion of the current draft under strict non-disclosure rules, such limited access does not allow for full analyses of the agreement and its implications (even by other CDT staff members, much less the broader public interest community). Some leaks have surfaced which suggest that ACTA could require DMCA-style notice-and-takedown and anti-circumvention laws, or even graduated-response obligations on ISPs (see coverage here and here). The fact remains, though, that we don’t know what we don’t know, and a full discussion of whatever obligations ACTA would impose is impossible unless the Obama administration draws back the curtain on the drafting and negotiations. Any proposal that could lead to the denial of people’s Internet access—even if they have violated copyright law—would raise very serious constitutional problems under our First Amendment, and should not be even considered without a broad and open public discussion.

This post covers presentations at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media at MIT’s communications forum.

Rick Borovoy’s project Lost in Boston focuses on what might well be my pet peeve with Boston – lack of signage. (Seriously. It’s a big problem. I suspect we do it to avoid letting Yankees fans find Fenway.)

He shows off a new sign, built by students at Mass Arts. It shows key local arts institutions, pointing to sites like the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts. It’s put up on private land and was designed through a student contest.

The point is that signs don’t need to come from governments. We can use local neighborhoods and local know-how to solve local problems. He invites us to participate – if you want a sign, want to sponsor or design one, email info AT lostinboston DOT org.

Jay Silver makes very personal maps. Inspired by the caricature maps he remembered from diner placemaps, he’s made maps of his childhood that feature his home birth and plates of tofu, and a map of a workshop he ran – a spiraling timeline punctuated with flower petals.

He calls this philosophy Awareness Mapping, and recently brought the technique to a community in India. He encouraged students to take photos of their environment, to make papercraft models of buildings, measured by hand, and turned into complex 3D popup maps. To show maps of motion, children danced and performed some of their maps.

Silver shows a video that intercuts images of the local community and maps displayed on a small video screen, mixing these digitized maps with local materials. He closes with a brief video of some scenes in Bangalore. “Maybe it’s a map, I don’t know.”

Jeff Warren is building a powerful set of tools for mapping called Cartagen. He’s interested in making “maps of things that Google cannot or will not map.” As an example, he shows the dotted line on the Google map between Morocco and Western Sahara. That dotted line represents “an avoidance of taking a political stance.”

Cartagen, at its root, is a rendering tool that renders in front of you at 15 frames a second. He’s used this to make a map of the world that loks like Warcraft II, converting contemporary map information into icons from the game. More practically, he offers a map of Cambridge, made using open streetmap data and overlaid with pavement quality data – very useful for bicyclists or community organizers.

The power of the tool is that it’s a scriptable, dynamic mapping environment. To show the powers of the tool, Warren build a system called Newsflow, which visualizes where a story occurs in the world, and where it was reported, connecting the two points with an arc.

His ultimate interests are in making mapping accessible to people who don’t have computers or smartphones. He’s working on systems to scan drawn maps and stretch them to correlate them to geographic coordinates, and another system that turns a cellphone into a sextant.

This post covers presentations at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media at MIT’s communications forum.

Cristina Xu leads off a segment focused on the future of news. She introduces her project, the News Positioning System, by digging into American history to talk about “transient newspapers”. When the US postal system heavily subsidized the mailing of newspapers, they began being used as mementos, or as post cards, underlined to make certain points. The practice became so widespread that Congress had to intervene, deciding that underlining a sentence in a newspaper was okay, while underlining letters to send a letter was not.

Working on ExtrAct, Christina noticed the importance of binders, notebooks carried by community organizers filled with newspaper clippings. They’re critically important for these organizers to document what’s going on in their communities and around the country, but they’re easy to lose and hard to share.

Organizers are now moving to mailing lists, which look higher tech, but they’re still hard to search and share. So the News Positioning System combines the functionality of a bookmarking site (delicious) with a map. This provides critical content for news. And since it includes an email scraper, people who are comfortable using mailing lists don’t need to adopt new tech, while those comfortable with bookmarking can use a bookmarklet. They’re now releasing the code – looks extremely cool and worth checking out.

Florence Gallez worries about the lack of collaboration in the news industry. So she’s working on Open Park,a platform for collaborating on the creation of hyperlocal, national and global news. It’s designed so that people in the community can learn to report the news using the tools. The system includes a code of ethics for collaborative journalism and instructions on using new media tools. She’s testing the tool in the local Russian community, using the platform to report on US-Russia relations.

Dharmishta Rood is fascinated by college media. She admires the fast pace of newsrooms, the need for students to learn journalism very quickly because of the rapid turnover of students. But she worries that college newspapers tend not to be able to customize or update their publishing platforms to improve their web presence, organizational tools, and community support. The Populous platform is being rolled out at UCLA, and includes a system called Campus Walk, a community hub of information, which group profiles, allowing campus groups to publish and share their information, adding context to news stories. The project is based on Django and like all CFCM projects, it’s open source.

Lisa Williams is the pioneering creator of Placeblogger, the largest index of local news blogs. The project celebrates the “scrappy little newsrooms that are thriving while mainstream newsrooms are dying.”

There are only 5,500 named places in the US – it shouldn’t be that hard to locate local information sites in each of these places. As Placeblogger does so, it becomes an observatory for these places on the map, and a distributed news corps that can cover stories in new ways.

Lisa reminds us of the Washington Post expose of the Walter Reed hospital – the problem with any in-depth expose is that it allows the authorities to declare, “this was just an isolated incident.” If we can mobilize a distributed news corps, we can ask questions like, “What percentage of returning US servicepeople who had amputations have been issued prostheses?” The goal, she tells us, is to “turn stories into signals”, which could emenate from one community and influence others, providing bigger and broader pictures in the process.

In discussions afterwords, Lisa points out that placeblogs are startups – we might expect them to fail at the rapid rate that most startups experience. But most actually survive, dying only when authors move.

This post covers presentations at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media at MIT’s communications forum.

Ryan Toole is designing a platform called Red Ink, a tool designed to enable secure, collective financial action. He points out that there are existing tools – wesabe, mint.com, yodlee – which unify your online financial information. The bleeding edge in this field is financial tools for collective action – carrotmob, groupon, merry miser, buy it like you mean it.

Red Ink fits into this latter category. It’s a “social financial platform” designed to let you visualize spending at regional levels, in different industries. This is useful information for organizing a boycott – you can show the effectiveness of a collective action by asking everyone to report their purchasing behavior. Similarly, you could get a constituency of people to report on local spending, or just try to negotiate a discount on your local beer spending. The goal for the platform is to be highly private and anonymous, maximizing communications and minimizing private data leakage.

Nadav Aharony focuses on close proximity communications. He points out that we have good tools to send information around the world, but few tools to send things locally. His project – Comm.unity – focuses on connecting devices to one another through WiFi or Bluetooth, independent of central servers.

This vision could be very important for activists, allowing them to spread information person to person. It might also matter to people off the grid, allowing communication in an otherwise unwired village. And for general users, there could be services allowing communication and discovery.

Some of the projects that have emerged from this work are:
- SnapN’Share, a sort of local twitter that works totally off the grid
- Social Dashboard, which displays devices around you, sorted by social trust
- Will It Blend? – A living lab/reality mining approach to evaluating these new social technologies.

Matthew Hockenberry shows off the new iteration of SourceMap, a powerful tool to visualize open supply chains. He shows a bottle of Poland Spring Water and points out that you can figure out where this water actually comes from – a set of springs in Maine. There’s no similar labeling information for a laptop, so it’s hard to know about the Indonesian tin in the product.

With this information, we can consider the carbon impacts and social impacts of our products through supply chain transparency. A demonstration shows the inputs into an Ikea Alsarp bed, including the origins of the wood and steel – this report is published and becomes a resource for anyone looking at purchasing the bed in the future.

Hockenberry’s strongest example is a map of breweries in Scotland, all of which are currently bottled in northern England. By mapping their supply chains, he was able to make an argument for a transition to a central Scottish bottling plant, which might transform the local brewing industry.

Chris Csikszentmihalyi speaks on behalf of the ExtrAct project, a project focused on mapping and countering the ill-effects of energy extraction. Chris asks the question, “How do you unionize a community to oppose outside forces?” He roots his work in Manuel Castells, who points out that local democratic systems have been transformed by global capital and markets.

ExtrAct focuses on energy extraction and its impact on communities in North Texas and Colorado, specifically the impacts of hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas. This process is very chemically intensive and is unregulated by federal law. Chris tells us that it’s causing such severe health and environmental damage that we’re seeing communities organize to fight fracturing.

The ExtrAct project started with extensive ethnographic studies in these communities. That study pointed to the landman – a representative of the energy companies sent to purchase mineral rights from homeowners – as a pivotal piece of the extraction system. ExtrAct functions as a “Landman review site, like Rotten Tomatoes or Yelp.com”, trying to address the problems of accountability in the process of acquiring land for mineral extraction.

It’s very easy to experience whiplash if you hang out at the academic institutions of Cambridge, MA. I spent the day in the basement of Harvard’s wood-panelled faculty club, in a discussion about the future(s) of the Berkman Center, then took the T two stops to MIT for the Communications Forum, where students in MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media program are presenting recent work, held in the deeply non-Euclidean Stata Center.

Once my head stops spinning from looking for a local vertical, I’ll do my best to report on the new work put forward by Chris Csikszentmihalyi’s students and collaborators. (Chris is leading today’s discussion, but points out that CFCM is led by Mitch Resnick and William Uricchio as well.) Chris describes the event as a “lightning round”, five minute tastes of the work. CFCM’s focus, Chris tells us, is to build technologies that strengthen social bonds and build communities, with a focus on real-world communities.

CFCM is funded by the Knight Foundation via the Knight News Challenge, part of Knight Foundation’s strategy of moving beyond journalism education to building new tools to serve community’s information needs. Chris explains that CFCM is looking for ways that tools and systems can provide the services journalists have provided to a free society. 20th century journalism in the United States was a unique moment, and might be an exemplar, he argues, but might not be the only way to get towards a free and just society.

CFCM’s collaborations have included a focus on reporting on the narcowars in Mexico, working with the US state department, work with kids in the West Bank and Gaza, a study of product sourcing in Scotland, and research on the introduction of YouTube in the Amazon. Not all projects are so far from home – one focuses on encouraging “intracommunity tourism” in nearby Framingham, Massachusetts, in the hopes of reducing violence.

Reflecting on the lessons learned in the past few years of CFCM, Chris offers the following:

- Allowing for local knowledge is key to a system’s adoption
- Switch between local and global contexts
- Use community-driven design to enable community sustainability
- Monitor over time – a successful technical project is a continuous commitment
- New technologies can make new social practices more acceptable
- Collaborative community initiatives can circumvent problems in existing social and technical structures
- People only engage when they see an effect

This last point it a real challenge – web2.0 tools only work when you’ve got a group of people – how do you get a group of people when they don’t yet see the effect of the tools?

Introducing the speakers, Chris points to a new CFCM initiative – a blog focused on the tech tools the group is developing and disseminating – looks well worth a look.

Here is a great riff on culture and collaboration that resonates with me. It fits with the seven elements of a healthy network and begs the question…. can you manage “culture”? 

Yes. It is possible to establish and set the culture of a group. There are 3 ways to build culture in an organization or network.

1. Leadership- Leadership in culture is very different from leadership in an executive sense. There are leaders that serve others. Leaders that direct and drive. And leaders that focus on process and infrastructure. There are very few people that realize they are controlled or follow culture but most of us are sheep grazing on pastures of culture.  The culture sets the terms of acceptability (you know the day you square danced or moon walked).  Leadership in a culture is not being a boss but leading in vision or service. Leadership is also exerted by those that see the culture and shape it by weaving parts of it together or drive wedges in the cracks. 

2. Language – A culture can not emerge without commonalities. Common vision, common stories and common language. Words, pictures, music, stories that unify and define “who is in” and “who is out”. Just because you participate or you are there doesn’t mean you are part of the culture. Wolf Blitzer is not really part of twitter culture but he uses twitter. His story, images, process and language don’t fit the culture.

3. Lines – Common channels, common lines of communications, a capacity to collaborate, share and synchronize. The ability to connect and reconnect in new ways. You can not evolve an art culture without venues, unify a culture without the ability to interact in some ways.  A collaborative culture is build on the capacity to communicate and share experiences.

These create a culture and are part of mix of challenges network strategies address.

Culture is really important for collaboration technology to work in a group or organization. If the culture isn't right, "collaboration" as a human process expressed through various communication and collaboration technologies can't take root. I met with a new client earlier this week to talk about a senior management attempt to encourage "collaboration"….

Michael Sampson: Currents: Collaboration Anti-Culture: Can It Get Any Worse?

This is in line with the training work we have been doing on twitter for activists.  The power of Twitter comes from 3 sources for activists.

1. The ability to instantly connect people who don’t know each other but care about an issue, event or action. (#hashtags)
2. The ability to set up a group of trusted people and connect them even if they are not in front of computer but not tight enough to share cell phone numbers with each other. (lobby days, coordinating action etc.)
3. The ability to scale up your listening, broaden your radar and listen to people you don’t normally get to listen to so regularly. (Micah Sifry is one of the smartest and well connected activist … who does he follow? Follow them directly.http://twitter.com/Mlsif/following) and now his lists…http://twitter.com/Mlsif/techpolitics

Jack Dorsey nails it… Good Huffington Post Interview…

Impact: How can people use Twitter more effectively for social change?

JD: I think the biggest thing is supporting each individual update more, getting away from [Twitter] being a social network and focusing on individual tweets, so that you can create a whole movement from that. Right now we have the hashtag, which was invented by our users, but it's still a little bit cumbersome. But we've seen that tool have a dramatic effect on how people organize and it serves a particular event or a particular moment and then disperses when it's no longer necessary. Or, the hashtag becomes a full-fledged Twitter account which people can follow permanently. I think making that transition [to concentrate on the value of individual tweets] in an easy way would be very, very helpful.

Twitter Cofounder Jack Dorsey On Using Twitter For Social Change

The new Personal Networks and Community Survey, sponsored by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, takes issue with previous research that suggested social ties supported by internet and mobile phone are weak and dispersed:

This Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey finds that Americans are not as isolated as has been previously reported. People’s use of the mobile phone and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. And, when we examine people’s full personal network – their strong and weak ties – internet use in general and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular are associated with more diverse social networks.

Here is a cool example of the networked culture connecting art supporters and artists. This is in the same stream of thinking behind innocentive, kiva, extrondinaries, 99designs, daylo, spot.us bounty county, etc. I like the design and the concept. They also seem to have jumped on some great projects from the launch.

Screen clipping taken: 11/4/2009, 4:23 PM

These are just some of the actions that have been taken place in order to prevent Iranian Netizens from accessing the Web during the 4^th of November:

• According to some sources from Iran, the internet speed has become too low and even when using ADSL, it is hard to open emails or display small size images.
• According to Emipmans blog, it seems that Yahoo messenger is inaccessible in Iran. Moreover, some proxy software such as Ultra Surf and the like are not working.
• According to Saitak, the Iranian government wanted to change the route (map) of protest by sending false emails to Iranian users.
• Also Saitak pointed out that some ISPs in Iran opened the access to Youtube and Facebook in order to identify and track users who are people upload video clips and other content.
• Saitak2 blog argued that the government has send warning SMS to people containing the following message: “by laws if you get involved in protest you will be identified and arrested.“
• According to Saitak2Mobile internet access has been blocked as well.
• More and more Iranian are reporting that a huge number of websites are being filtered. The amount of noises on foreign channel such as VOA, BBC Persian and so on is too high and they are inaccessible. People are also reporting that the SMS system does not deliver their massages, also the antenna coverage range is such low that people cannot call each other easily.

However as Balatarin shows, too many blogs and websites are being updated every second. They all try to cover the news and events. It is clearly seen that every Iranian user is trying to get involved in this event. They stay updated and organize their movement using blogs and social networking websites, such as Facebook.

Newly, the Green movement in Iran just launched a new web site called Green Chain that aims to Encourage bloggers who are supporting the movement to stay in touch with each other and guide them to publish mass texts i support for the movement.

The Iranian internet is almost filtered, proxy softwares do not work and Yahoo, MSN, G-Talk and even other sites such as meebo and so on are inaccessible. However, bunch of clips and news came out from Iran.

Here is a lis of some video clips covering the recent protest in Iran:

• >no to left no to right we want Iranian republic.
• Mehdi Karobi one of the leaders of Green Movement can be seen, was injured by Basij militants during the protest.
• Special Guard attacked people during the protest; too many people have been injured as a result of that.
• weapons and basij wouldn’t stop us anymore.
• another protest in Shiraz University
• Tehran University was also inflamed and students were protesting there as well.
• while basij tried to disperse people from the main square, protesters gathered in smaller groups in minor streets.
• Protesters shouting: “Khamenei is a murderer so his leadership is futile“.
• people helping injured youth who have been aggressed by basij.
• massive protest in Ferdowsi university in Mashhad, Khorasan .
• police officer attacking people, mostly women and students. Gunshot can be heard clearly.
• BBC: political prisoners should be freed..
• how police forces are treating Iranian people: here and here.
•  and interesting video clip about what happened on November 4th.

Display more videos on Youtube by accessing this link

Or you can search “13 آبان” in Youtube.

According to (BBC Persian, there were huge protests in Tehran and other big cities of Iran. Reports from Iran pointed that people protested from other provinces such as Rasht, Isphehan, Zahedan, Kermanshah,Tabriz, Mashhad and Shiraz.

As witnesses reported, police, special guard and basij attacked people by tear gas; also batons and electrical shocks were used.

Moreover, more reports from Iran are saying that universities and school students are covering Teheran walls with green color, the symbol of the Green Movement.

What do you know about Fiji?

Before getting involved with Global Voices, I knew that it was an island paradise somewhere in the South Pacific much beloved by vacationers and honeymooners and that, despite being an island nation surrounded by seawater, they export a lot of high-priced bottled water.

As I’ve followed Michael Hartsell’s reporting on Fiji on Global Voices, I’ve gotten a very different impression of the nation. The tensions between ethnic Fijians and Indo-Fijians have divided the nation politically, leading to rewritings of the constitution and severe government instability. Fiji has had four (or four and a half, depending on who’s counting) military coups since 1987 and is currently under the thumb of Commodore Frank Bainimarama, who’s taken power three times since 2000, twice via military coup. (Earlier this year, the Fijian supreme court declared his 2006 coup illegal. Bainimarama stepped down from his post of interim Prime Minister for 24 hours, while the President abrogated the constitution and fired the judiciary, then immediately reappointed him as Prime Minister. That’s the half coup, for those of you counting. Confused? This might help.) Fiji has been expelled from the Commonwealth, condemned by Amnesty International for arresting opposition politicians, church leaders and journalists, and today, severed diplomatic relations with Australia and New Zealand, its two largest and most powerful neighbors.

(This last one is a doozy. The row with Australia and New Zealand concerns Bainimarama’s plan to hire Sri Lankan judges to replace the justices fired earlier this year, when the supreme court was liquidated. Australia and New Zealand have had travel bans against senior members of Bainimarama’s government in place, and when the Sri Lankan judges travelled through Australia to Fiji, they were informed that they would be subject to the same bans once they took their positions in the Fijian government. Bainimarama argues that Australia and New Zealand had banned transit; Australian authorities say they merely informed the Sri Lankan judges that they’d not be able to return through Australia once joining the coup government. Given the importance of Australia and New Zealand as trading partners, it’s hard to imagine this ending well for Fiji.)

I’ve been fascinated for years with the concept of “nation branding”, an idea promoted by Simon Anholt, a UK-based researcher and consultant. I heard Anholt on a BBC broadcast years back making the salient point that Ethiopia has a great brand for recieving famine aid (even if that’s an outdated understanding of the country) and a lousy brand for tourism. It’s an idea I’ve found useful in understanding some of the challenges that African nations face in encouraging tourism and foreign investment – if everyone thinks your country is impoverished and ill-governed, who’s going to want to visit on vacation or buy shares on the local stock exchange? Part of the challenge of rebuilding Africa is rebuilding an image and narrative of the continent that shows it as open for business. (See “Africa’s a continent, Not a Crisis” for more of this line of thought.)

Fiji is somehow blessed with a nation-brand that many African nations would kill for. Despite the 2006 coup, Fijian tourism brought in nearly $500 million in 2008, 24% of GDP, more than the nation earned from the next seven industries combined. Major international hotel chains have large properties in Fiji, and air travel patterns suggest the importance of tourism – international flights land in Nadi, the tourist capital, not the governmental capital Suva, which is served by a prop plane from Nadi. Fiji Water is now the leading imported bottled water in the US, and represents 20% of Fijian exports and 3% of GDP, benefitting from and reinforcing an image of Fiji as an unspoiled tropical paradise.

Defending the brand of Fiji has become a major political cause for the Bainimarama government. In April, after expelling a number of foreign journalists, the government instructed journalists that they needed to begin practicing “the journalism of hope“. Some journalists responded by filling local newspapers with non-news – the Fiji Daily Post ran stories titled “Man Gets on Bus” and “Weather to Improve Soon”. Bloggers have filled in the gaps, taking great risks to publish ferocious political commentary, usually under psuedonyms.

Anna Lenzer, a journalist for Mother Jones, found out just how serious the Bainimarama government was about nation brand when she came to Suva to report on the various ironies that surround Fiji water – a green-branded product with an immense carbon footprint, a premium bottled water produced in a community with no drinkable tap water, a dominant player in the local economy with a stated disinterest in Fijian politics. She was detained and questioned after sending an email from a cybercafe with links to articles critical of the government, and fled the country with the help of the US Embassy.

Her article, “Fiji Water: Spin the Bottle” is an excellent introduction to the strange phenomenon that is Fiji water, though I think she lays too much blame on the Fiji Water company and not enough on the military government and the circumstances that led to the recent coups. It’s worth reading Fiji Waters’s response, even if it’s something of a cop-out – I think Lenzer is right to point out that it’s hard for the company to position itself as environmentally and socially responsible while working with a repressive government. And I can’t argue with this line: “The reality of Fiji, the country, has been eclipsed by the glistening brand of Fiji, the water.”

Fiji may be a case study in eclipsing a complex reality with a shiny brand:

- Start with a country with low media attention.

- Invest massively in tourism, presenting visitors with a reality that’s not wholly, though mostly, divorced from ordinary life in the country. (All tourist destinations do this to one extent or another. Fiji appears to have embraced this strategy thoroughly, providing a string of five-star compounds insulated from the outside. This blog post complains that, at some resorts “Fijian society is reduced to over-chlorinated swimming pools and overpriced palm hats which fall apart in the departure lounge of Nadi Airport.” At the same time, the author wonders why service at these resorts seems so poor these past few months, and worries that, “It appears to be lethargy and uncaring when a guest asks for something. I think all of this is more dangerous to the future of Fiji Tourism than anything else, including the oft-mentioned ‘political instability’.”)

- Build or embrace an export that reinforces your brand image.

- Surpress contrary media voices via censorship or exile.

What would it take for circumstances on the ground in Fiji to damage brand Fiji? What would it take for Fiji to move beyond this mirage and build this vision of a nation in reality?

At its moment of inception, the Internet began with a crash in a network, as SEED Magazine describes:

Forty years ago today, a team led by Leonard Kleinrock typed the “Lo” of “Login” into a Stanford computer, which promptly crashed before the command could be entered. But because Kleinrock’s team was sending this message from a UCLA machine, he had just taken part in one of the great milestones in communication history.

The SEED story captures the flash of insight and quick decisions that set the whole thing off. It is interesting to me that the key network pattern was the core from the beginning moment. Is there anything else that is the essence of the online behemoth except what networks do? I don’t think so.

My friend and colleage Sami Ben Gharbia just launched a fascinating and useful new site: Threatened Voices. It’s an interactive map of bloggers under arrest and under threat around the world, with an accompanying timeline that makes it possible to track the phenomenon of arresting bloggers over the past several years. It’s an uncomfortable fact that, as blogs become a more influential public space, the technique of arresting bloggers to silence online speech becomes increasingly common.

The Threatened Voices map complements another map that Sami maintains on Global Voices Advocacy, the Access Denied Map. That map is an overview of government efforts to block online publishing platforms, like Blogger or YouTube. I continue to believe that censorship of these types of sites is one of the most serious problems the web faces today. When a government blocks a website, it blocks the voice of one person or one group – when they block a tool like Wordpress or Twitter, they block all the voices that wanted to use that tool, which might represent hundreds or thousands of alternative perspectives. While I believe we should combat all online censorship (or, more to the point, I believe that any filtering should be done at the edge of the network, by parents, schools or businesses that pay for internet access, not by governments or ISPs), I think there’s a special importance in calling attention to these blocked platforms.

But the blocking of a platform for speech is an abstract idea. Threatened Voices helps personalize the idea of internet censorship, making it clear that it’s a technique that doesn’t just involve blocking packets – it can involve harrassing and arresting individuals, sometimes detaining them for months or years. The goal was to provide a complement to organizations like Committee to Protect Bloggers and Reporters without Borders, who do a great job of leading campaigns to call attention to the imprisonment of individual bloggers. Threatened Voices isn’t campaigning for any of these individual bloggers – it’s trying to present a picture of how vast the phenomenon of imprisoning and threatening bloggers has become.

There’s no way a map like the one Sami is building will ever be complete. We don’t know about every blogger who’s been arrested. And it’s a difficult question whether someone has been arrested for their blogging or for other alleged offenses – is Hossein Derakhshan still in prison because he’s alleged to be an Israeli spy (an absurd accusation) or because he’s an influential blogger? Sami’s trying to broaden the information available, asking people to contribute reports of bloggers under threat to the map.

Knowing what countries are harrassing and arresting bloggers is a first step. What’s the most useful next step is an extremely difficult question. Not all countries respond well to external pressure, or to direct lobbying. It’s possible to harness a great deal of energy around the cause of releasing an individual blogger, but it’s not as clear how that energy should be productively channelled. My hope is that efforts to map this problem will help build solidarity between organizations that have a long track record of protecting journalists, or protecting human rights more generally, and the emerging movements to protect bloggers and the tools of online speech.

Google can monitor health-seeking behaviour in the form of queries to online search engines, which are submitted by millions of users around the world each day. " we can accurately estimate the current level of weekly influenza activity in each region of the United States". The question is does the early spike mean that America "is Done" with the flu or are we going to see a Feb-Mar spike that is 2 or 3 times greater than the current levels.

An eye-opening new study out of Fordham Law’s Center on Law and Information Privacy finds that state educational databases are lacking when it comes to protecting the personal information of K-12 children. Some states hand off the storage of this information to outside firms and do so without any restrictions on use or confidentiality for the children’s information, the study found.

The information on children collected in these electronic data warehouses includes matters related to teen pregnancies, mental health and juvenile crime; the report says that this information is often stored in a manner that “violates federal privacy mandates,” the study says.

From the report’s summary:

“Some striking examples are that at least 32% of the states warehouse children’s social security numbers, at least 22% of the states record children’s pregnancies, at least 46% of the states track mental health, illness, and jail sentences as part of the children’s educational records, and almost all states with known programs collect family wealth indicators.”

The study isn’t all finger pointing, it also outlines several critical recommendations to help increase the privacy, transparency and accountability of these databases. The study comes just as Congress is considering expanding and integrating the data collection process among the 43 states that currently collect this type of information on K-12 children.

Butler University has dropped lawsuit against Jess Zimmerman. The student was accused of defaming the university in his blog “TrueBU”.

Indiana Daily Student says

“He (Zimmerman) was critical of Butler and two administrators: Peter Alexander, dean of Butler’s College of Fine Arts, and Jamie Comstock, Butler’s provost.

He wrote things like “Peter Alexander … is power-hungry and afraid of his own shadow. … He drives away talented administrators. He frustrates students within the departments. He hurts the ability of the school to recruit talented students and faculty members. He announces to the campus that the Butler Way, the ideals for which the school and everyone at it stands, mean nothing.”

The university has deemed statements like this to be libelous and in January filed a libel and defamation lawsuit against “Soodo Nym,” the pseudonym used by Zimmerman on the anonymous blog.”

Although the lawsuit has been dropped, there is widespread anger against the actions of Butler University, some accusing the school of “bullying”. At Huffington Post, Stu Kreisman-an Emmy award winning writer-producer, described the whole situation as being equivalent of censorship represented by Guantanamo prison.

“The situation is eerily similar to the Bush administration's dealings in Guantanamo Bay. If you can't convict lawfully, make it up as you go along. Look, we're dealing with a blog, which painted an unflattering picture of the administration. Is it really worth all the time, money and negative publicity just to get even with a student because you're thin skinned? We're not dealing with something as sinister as the Virginia Tech shootings here. (Which the administration has already compared the writings to in what has to be the ultimate in bad taste.)

Is a school entitled to discipline a student? Of course if a crime is committed. But let's get real here. We're talking about freedom of speech on the Internet; something I thought is looked upon favorably at universities. Silencing and punishing your critics went out with the Bushies. So Butler University is going to be the first school to censor the Internet.”

Butler's actions also raise questions about online anonymity and whether a student is in violation of rules when he/she express legitimate concerns over the internet in his/her time through private resources in an off campus setting.

findingDulcinea, a web magazine says that “Student Blogger Case Shows That Online Anonymity Isn’t Guaranteed”, adding that there is a hidden message behind Butler University dropping the lawsuit

“Butler University has dropped its libel lawsuit against a student that criticized university administration in an anonymous blog, but not before it was able to obtain the identity of the student. It will continue to pursue its own disciplinary proceedings against the student, junior Jess Zimmerman.

Dan Altman, Zimmerman’s lawyer, said that the university filed the lawsuit not because it believed that Zimmerman posted libelous information, but because it wanted to silence his criticism. He called the lawsuit an example of a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP), lawsuits that are designed to intimidate defendants that are critical of the plaintiff.”

It remains to be seen what Butler disciplinary proceeding would bring for Zimmerman. Hopefully the university will decide to resolve matters without furthering confrontation and attacks against free speech.

Never before have so many people been threatened or imprisoned for what the words they write on the internet.

As activists and ordinary citizens have increasingly made use of the internet to express their opinions and connect with others, many governments have also increased surveillance, filtering, legal actions and harassment. The harshest consequence for many has been the politically motivated arrest of bloggers and online writers for their online and/or offline activities, in some tragic cases even leading to death. Online journalists and bloggers now represent 45% of all media workers in prison worldwide.

Today, Global Voices Advocacy is launching a new website called Threatened Voices to help track suppression of free speech online. It features a world map and an interactive timeline that help visualize the story of threats and arrests against bloggers worldwide, and it is a central platform to gather information from the most dedicated organisations and activists, including Committee to Protect Bloggers, The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, Reporters without Borders, Human Rights Watch, CyberLaw Blog, Amnesty International, Committee to Protect Journalists, Global Voices Advocacy.

What blogger, where?

Finding accurate information about arrested and threatened bloggers and online writers is difficult for several reasons.

First, the secrecy surrounding online censorship and repression makes it extra difficult to be accurate. Not a single week passes without stories of arrests of yet another online journalist or activist in countries like Egypt or Iran, but the details and reasons are often shrouded in mystery.

Second, there is still some confusion about the definition of a “blogger”. Professional journalists are increasingly migrating to online media and blogs in pursuit of more freedom, blurring the old lines of definition. And many so-called cyber-dissidents in China, Tunisia, Vietnam, or Iran, do not have personal blogs. Other times, bloggers are arrested for their offline activity, rather than for what they have published online.

This confusion has sometimes made it hard for online free speech advocates to come up with a good strategies and partnerships to defend bloggers and online activists, but it has never been more important to try.

Let's work together

At Global Voices we engage a community of authors, editors, and translators, who help keep us all informed of free speech and human rights abuses. With Threatened Voices we aim to open the process of reporting up even further to any person who has information.

We're calling on those whose friends, relatives, colleagues, or compatriots, have been threatened to help create and update the profiles of those missing or under arrest, so we can seek additional sources, verify, and link to online campaigns dedicated to freeing them.

In the process, we are hoping to learn more about when, where, and to what extent bloggers are being subjected to abuse in different countries, so we can share that information widely with journalists, researchers, and activists, and work towards creating an internet where everyone can exercise their right to speak freely, and where bloggers in prison are not forgotten.

Help spread the word. Tweet, blog and update your facebook status about Threatened Voices!

In Infotention Part One, I introduced dashboards, radars, and filters as means for balancing need-to-know with protection against information overload. In this video, the second in the series, I show how to build an information dashboard using an RSS reader. In this case, I concentrate on Netvibes.

Hossein Derakhshan (”Hoder”) has now been in prison in Iran for more than a year. My friend Cyrus Farivar has followed his case closely, and has been in touch with Hoder’s family, who confirm that he’s beeing held in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison. Reports from the activist group Human Rights in Iran suggest that Hoder has been held in solitary confinement for long periods of time, beaten and otherwise mistreated, and that Hoder was considering a hunger strike to protest his extended detention.

I’ve written about Hossein’s detention previously – it’s a complicated topic, as Hoder’s a complicated guy, and understanding his wishes is a difficult matter. Hoder held Iranian and Canadian passports, and according to a CBC article on his detention, may have believed that the Canadian passport would have made it more difficult for Iranian authorities to detain him when he came home. More to the point, I think, Hoder had a political change of heart and became an outspoken supporter of Ahmedinejad – angering and alienating most of his reformist colleagues inside and outside Iran – and believed that the Iranian system would handle his “transgressions” – trips to Israel, critical articles on his blog – in a just fashion. As such, he told his friends that he didn’t want a campaign for his release if arrested, especially not a campaign led by the US human rights community.

From the Free Hoder campaign

I’ve thought a great deal about my conversations with Hossein before his return to Iran. In retrospect, it seems clear that he expected to be arrested and questioned and perhaps detained for some weeks while the government punished him for his transgressions and assessed his political change of heart. At the same time, I don’t believe that Hossein believed that he’d be held for so long, treated so badly and cut off from contact with his family. The few clues we’ve gotten about his state of mind from contact with his family suggests that he regrets asking friends not to agitate for his release, and is now deeply worried (understandably so) that no one is working to secure his freedom.

Hossein’s family has come around as well – Cyrus published a translation of a letter from Hossein’s father, Hassan Derakhshan to the head of the Iranian judiciary, explaining that he and his family had patiently refused requests from western media to comment on Hossein’s arrest, expecting that he would receive fair treatment from the courts system:

In all these months, days, and hours, my family, my wife and I were hoping that in the arms of Islamic law and the mercy of the Islamic judiciary, Hossein’s case will be dealt with in the way it deserves

There is no need to mention the numerous times that we refused the requests of foreign media to explain Hossein’s situation…

Our complaint is not because you are exercising the law, but to the contrary, because of its suspension, lack of information and disrespecting of the law. The accused have rights, the family of the accused has some rights…

If the question had been whether the international community should become involved with advocating for Hossein’s release, the question is now what that community could effectively do. Circumstances have changed dramatically in Iran since Hoder went into prison. The protests after the July elections helped cement the view of Iranian authorities that online spaces were dangerous ones when used by activists, an interpretation that may explain Hossein’s extended detention, as he’s widely acknowledged as one of the first Iranian bloggers and a major promoter of blogging tools in Iran. As such, an online campaign for his release, supported by the blogging community, is unlikely to lead directly to his release. And, as Cyrus points out in a story for PRI’s The World, it’s unclear how many of his old friends are still willing to support him, given his change in views.

The reason to write about Hoder and support campaigns like the Free Hoder blog is not to influence the Iranian government, but to urge the Canadian government to do whatever they can. Hoder holds a Canadian, as well as an Iranian passport, and while Iran doesn’t respect dual nationality, Canada does, and has an obligation to push for Hossein’s release. Cyrus has been regularly calling Canadian authorities to seek updates, but has received little information from those inquiries. My hope is that by continuing to discuss Hossein’s detention, we can call attention to the ongoing situation and urge Canadian authorities to push for his release. But even knowing that Hossein is now looking for the world’s help in pushing for his release, it’s very hard to know what to do.

While we humans try to figure out how to use the new global networking, critters are remarkably tuned in. With the assistance of human conservationists and animal scientists, many species are enjoying genetic revival through inter-zoo connections. Global networks for healthy breeding patterns that provide genetic robustness are in place and causing births of strong and healthy individuals for many species that had been threatened.

ZooBorns is a blog where you can look in on this critter smart mobbing. I recommend the blog as a tonic ingredient for your RSS reader. It is always a pleasant hop out of the word torrents about morass of our times to have a new zoo born like this Fennec Fox kit pop up on your screen.

Photo by In Cherl Kim (Lots of great pics at Kim’s site.)

This should be a wake up call for lots of online strategies that are not transparent, don't communicate results and just use online work to build a base of donating click monkeys.  People are not happy with the distrust shown to them online.

This study mentioned in Philanthropy of 587 PEOPLE WHO USE NEW MEDIA ... has nothing to do with the failure of the platform but of the philosophy and world view of those who run organizations. The online strategy and communications behind the use of the online tools doesn't typically engage, empower and listen. There is a high degree of distrust of online supporters by organizers and organizations.

Somehow the open and welcome culture of organizing "if they show up at a meeting engage them and work with them" has not translated into online organizing space.

Old guard leaders don't trust their own instincts or methods used to filter "good supporters and bad supporters" in the online space and therefore they distrust all online supports and only offer them limited engagement, information or resources.

Often people are left feeling  "not trusted, disconnected, left behind and like "ATMs" because that is the true way "serious organizers" often feel toward the base.  I don't think it is a stretch to say that this survey really is showing "message received" by the online public. 

This survey hammers home that it is not a digital platform issue (since they are interviewing people that use new media.) It is an issue of strategy.

• How would you shift strategy, listen and adapt to input from someone at a meeting of your group?  If at a meeting someone offers an idea? leadership or volunteers how would your organization react? 
• How much information would you share at a meeting? How many questions would you answer at a meeting?
• How would you adapt to a good idea or leadership exhibited by an online supporter? 
• Now look at the same offers of ideas, leadership, questions and participation online? Do you act the same way?  Invest the same about of time? Answer the same way?

• How does your strategy build trust and engagement? 
• Do you listen? Do you have capacity organized to sustain interaction with those you connect with online?
• How do manage new introductions? How do you build a common language and common vision with those you connect with online?
• how do you provide feedback to others online?
• How does your communications strategy clearly explain strategy, results and impact?
• How do you make it easy for activist and supporters that are "overwhelmed"?
• How do you provide training and support for those you engage online?

We need to use the "power of the internet to get things done" to solve problems and genuinely connect users to each other so they can work together and coordinated way on solutions to the issues we are organizing to address. 

Freedom Against Censorship Thailand (FACT).

We have just discovered free Thai language news site Liberal Thai blocked by a transparent proxy redirecting users to Thailand's ICT ministry.

Liberal Thai is a new websites which has been translating news articles in English into Thai making them accessible to Thai readers, particularly those from Political Prisoners in Thailand.

The only news article which might be suspect is LT's Thai translation of “Thailand's Political Muddle” from October 28's Asia Sentinel. PPT's coverage of this article and, indeed the article itself in English, are not blocked.

Might such banal commentary as “feckless heir” (รัชทายาทที่อ่อนแอ) now constitute lèse majesté?

Incidentally, dictionary definitions for “feckless” from Scots Gaelic are weak, feeble, ineffective, incompetent, futile, worthless, careless, irresponsible, indifferent, lazy, having no purpose or worth, unlikely to be successful.

We hardly think that any of these definitions can be applied to Thailand's succession. The truth is, we simply don't know because Thailand's next king has not been tried.

However, suppressing the news by blocking websites does not make the news just go away. Thailand has much to learn in its domestic policies (we have a foreign head of state advising us on the Patani insurgency) and its international relations. No matter how deep Thai government tries to bury our heads in the sand, what others think of us matters.

Liberal Thai is one of the few websites trying to allow Thais access to all opinions so that we can make responsible decisions for ourselves, as a community of peers.

We call on the ICT ministry to justify such censorship and demand the court order blocking Liberal Thai as required under Thai law.

The Thai translation and article in English are still accessible by anonymous proxy & VPN:

เอเซียเซนทิเนล: การเมืองอันยุ่งเหยิงของประเทศไทย