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Global Voices Gathers Information From Citizens All Over the Globe

Kee — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 18:00:17 +0000

Flickr Creative Commons | Mohamed ElGohary

By Jennifer Preston | The New York Times | March 13, 2011

As the protests spread across Tunisia for weeks, many international news organizations scrambled to cover the unrest just before President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fled on Jan. 14, ending 23 years of authoritarian rule. But Amira al-Hussaini was all over the story.

“There was a whole army of people who did the job of reporters, sharing what was happening on the streets,” said Amira Al-Hussaini, Global Voices’ regional editor for the Middle East and North Africa, on covering protests.

Ms. Hussaini oversaw a handful of bloggers who gathered information about the mounting protests in Tunisia for Global Voices, a volunteer-driven organization and platform that works with bloggers all over the world to translate, aggregate and link to online content. As part of its reporting, she said, the site turned to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, where other bloggers and hundreds of ordinary people stepped into the role of citizen journalists and shared their experiences, cellphone photos and videos online.

“There was a whole army of people who did the job of reporters, sharing what was happening on the streets,” said Ms. Hussaini, 38, who lives in Bahrain and is the organization’s regional editor for the Middle East and North Africa.

Soon after the earthquake and tsunami struck Japan on Friday, the volunteer bloggers for Global Voices in East Asia put together special coverage of the devastation, sharing citizen videos and translating posts on Twitter, including calls for help from people stranded on the upper floors of buildings. Over the weekend, with fears fueled by the prospect of a second explosion at a nuclear plant, they monitored the conversation on the social Web, reporting how people were exchanging information to keep safe and questioning the use of nuclear energy in an earthquake-prone region.

“Our job is to curate the conversation that is happening all over the Internet with people who really understand what is going on,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, a former Tokyo bureau chief for CNN who founded Global Voices with Ethan Zuckerman, a technologist and Africa expert, while they were fellows at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “We amplify, contextualize and translate what these conversations are and why they are relevant.”

Ms. MacKinnon and Mr. Zuckerman both said the network grew out of an international meeting of bloggers held at Harvard in late 2004. They saw an opportunity to leverage content produced on blogs and social media sites like Twitter outside of the United States and to help create a global community for them and their work. “Our goal is to give you the voices of the people in a country like Tunisia, day in and day out, whether they are cementing rebellion or talking about local news and sports scores,” Mr. Zuckerman said. “We don’t parachute in. We are there all the time. “

The organization is now an independently operated nonprofit, financed mostly with private donations and grants from foundations. It is led by Ivan Sigal, who studied the role of citizen media in conflict zones at the United States Institute of Peace, before taking over as executive director in 2008. With no physical office, he oversees a virtual team of about 20 staff editors and more than 300 volunteer bloggers and translators outside the United States.

Mr. Sigal said that the site averages about a half million visits a month. Many of the volunteers also post on their own blogs and social media sites, including Ms. Hussaini, who is known as Justamira on Twitter. He said the organization does not accept any government money. “We want it to be perceived as being neutral,” he said.

Mr. Sigal said that having editors work with volunteer bloggers brought traditional journalistic values to the operation, like checking facts and sources. “But it is less about a finished story and more about a conversation,” he said. “When we build a story, we include links back to the original sources, so you can follow the story as far down as you want to. We want you to leave our site and go find the original, find more.”

Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University and author of “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations,” said that one of the most important roles that Global Voices has played is translating online content for an international audience.

“This started with the idea to provide broader coverage,” he said. “It turns out that it is much more critical than they had imagined because the other international news sources are being dismantled.”

In addition to news from Japan and the continuing coverage of the rebellion in Libya and violence in Yemen, the site includes stories about the growing influence of online communities on Russian politics, the developing political crisis in the Ivory Coast and International Women’s Day in Colombia. There was also a report from South Korea about why so many people online were discussing a 26-year-old actress who committed suicide in March 2009 and left 50 letters, just made public, listing the people she said had exploited and abused her.

But the unceasing tumult in the Middle East and North Africa in recent weeks has dominated the platform. It has meant 18-hour days for Ms. Hussaini, whose work is now followed closely on the site and on Twitter by journalists from traditional media organizations, including Andy Carvin of NPR, who has been regularly curating and publishing posts on Twitter, creating a news wire about the unrest in the region for weeks.

She spent 12 years working as a news editor for an English-language paper in Bahrain before volunteering at Global Voices as a blogger in 2005. She became editor for the region in 2006 and knows it well. Still, she said that she was caught by surprise that the turmoil across the Middle East unfolded not far from her home in Bahrain.

In Libya, where rebels are now battling the country’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, she said it had been much more difficult to get information, which she said had more to do with fear than with lack of access to the Internet. “The citizen media scene is small in Libya,” Ms. Hussaini said. “We find it very difficult to find voices here and in other places where there is a lot of censorship and a lot of fear from the regime. Bloggers being arrested is a fact of life in some countries.”

For those bloggers from Global Voices who are jailed or run into difficulties because of restrictions on freedom of expression, the organization now offers help. Global Voices Advocacy is run by Sami Ben Gharbia, a highly respected blogger who is a founder of Nawaat, a blog about Tunisia, and an activist who until recently lived in exile from Tunisia for 13 years.

Mr. Zuckerman said that the organization was committed to supporting freedom of speech as well as to keeping up with the developments unfolding all over the world. “People are not always interested in knowing what is happening in Yemen,” he said. “We have been waiting for people to pay attention to this corner of the world for a long time, and now we are ready to tell their stories.”

Yahoo! Celebrates World Press Freedom Day

Ebele Okobi-Harris | Director, Yahoo! BHRP — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 12:42:31 +0000

On Monday, May 3, Yahoo! will celebrate World Press Freedom Day. Go to yahoo.com on May 3, click on the icon on the Yahoo! logo at the top of the page, and you’ll be linked to a site with information about the history of World Press Freedom Day, profiles of journalists from around the world, and information about a few organizations that are working to keep access to information free and open around the world. You can also learn about events like Yahoo!’s second annual Business & Human Rights Summit on May 4, and about Global Voices Online’s Summit in Chile, on May 6-7.

Mark your calendar, and check it out on Monday!

Supporting Dissent With Technology

BHRP — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 01:31:10 +0000

Flickr Creative Commons | Hamed Saber

by Indira A.R. Lakshmanan | New York Times | February 23, 2010

Cameran Ashraf was instant-messaging from Los Angeles with an activist in Iran during anti-government demonstrations Feb. 11 when the chat went dead.

Had Iran’s government “shut down the Internet” to thwart dissidents from organizing online, or had the authorities come to arrest the man, Mr. Ashraf said he wondered as he described the incident during an online video interview. Mr. Ashraf, who says he sees himself as a digital aid worker, immediately alerted other Iranian contacts to block surveillance of their Web traffic.

A 29-year-old American whose parents emigrated from Iran, Mr. Ashraf is a co-founder of AccessNow, a group of tech-savvy volunteers who joined forces during Iran’s crackdown on election protests last year to help Iranians evade censorship. They are the type of cyberactivists the U.S. State Department is seeking to support with $50 million in funds for an expanding counteroffensive against suppression of Internet freedom.

“The fact that many governments are trying to prevent their citizens from expressing themselves or obtaining information that would be critical” underscores the importance of defending online speech and assembly, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a Feb. 16 interview. The United States wants to support “garage type” outfits trying to circumvent Web censorship, she said.

AccessNow has communicated with Google on censorship and security issues and received help from its YouTube subsidiary when Iranian protest videos were hacked, said Brett Solomon, a co-founder of the group, in New York.

“This is what we do, at the core of who we are: to make sure that everyone has access,” said Scott Rubin, a Google and YouTube spokesman who works on free expression issues.

The State Department has given $15 million in the past two years to private projects that use technology and training to promote online freedoms. It is reviewing applications for $5 million to support work including research into circumventing firewalls and surveillance, and $30 million more will be available later this year, said Daniel Baer, deputy assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor.

Helping activists creates a problem by exposing them to retribution from repressive governments. Projects are so sensitive and the people involved at such risk that the State Department declined to identify current applicants. One Washington-based group that got the bulk of the money doled out so far — more than $13 million for projects worldwide — asked not to be named, fearing that Chinese employees would be jailed.

AccessNow’s founders haven’t received government funds and said they would have reservations about accepting any because they want to remain independent and protect contacts in countries where taking foreign money is a crime.

The group does disseminate open-source software that receives indirect U.S. support, including Tor, a network of virtual tunnels that allows people to surf anonymously. Built on work by the Office of Naval Research, the science and technology arm of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, Tor was developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, and by volunteers. It is used by an average of 8,000 people in Iran and 100,000 in China at any moment, said Andrew Lewman, executive director of the nonprofit Tor Project in Dedham, Massachusetts.

Scrutiny of digital dissidents drew headlines last month when Google, the Mountain View, California, search-engine company, said the e-mail accounts of Chinese rights activists had been singled out in an attack on its computer systems. Mrs. Clinton called on the Chinese authorities in a Jan. 21 speech to “conduct a thorough investigation” and said U.S. technology firms should use their influence to protest censorship, surveillance and theft of information.

Iran’s post-election restrictions on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook — used to organize and publicize protests — inspired Mr. Ashraf, Mr. Solomon and two Internet enthusiasts in Los Angeles, who all met online, to form AccessNow. A handful of other volunteers help run servers and share technical support.

“Our genesis is Iran, but the idea behind AccessNow is to develop a global movement,” Mr. Solomon, a 39-year-old Australian, said in an Internet video chat, adding that he’s sharing his experience with Tibetan, Burmese and Cuban dissidents.

The Internet has built-in perils for democracy advocates. Users who don’t utilize encryption or other methods to obscure their identity leave a digital trail of conversations, contacts and Web sites visited.

Global Voices Online, an international bloggers network, has documented 206 cases of bloggers under arrest or threat, most in China, Egypt and Iran. Last year, Internet journalists outnumbered print, radio and television reporters among 136 imprisoned members of the news media, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, based in New York.

Mehdi Saharkhiz, 28, an Iranian in New Jersey, joined AccessNow after his father, a journalist named Isa Saharkhiz, was arrested outside Tehran eight months ago. He has gathered 2,200 videos on his OnlyMehdi YouTube channel, including iconic footage by anonymous Iranians who won a George Polk Award in journalism last week for filming the killing of Neda Agha-Soltan, who has become a symbol of resistance.

“YouTube videos provided some of the only perspective of what was happening in Iran,” said Olivia Ma, 27, news manager of the video-sharing site. During the protests this month, videos were hacked and erased; AccessNow alerted Ms. Ma, who restored them.

Not every problem is so easily resolved. Mr. Ashraf hasn’t heard back from the Iranian rights campaigner who disappeared from his screen.

Using the Internet to Empower Women in Yemen

Ebele Okobi-Harris | Director, Yahoo! BHRP — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:26:36 +0000

Rising Voices | EWAMT Workshop

I love stories about how the Internet and technology are being used as platforms for free expression around the world, so every once in a while, I’ll share them with you. I read a very interesting series of reports in Rising Voices about a really inspirational project. Rising Voices is an outreach initiative of Global Voices, and their goal is to bring new voices from new communities and speaking new languages to the global conversation. They do this by providing resources and funding to communities whose points of view are under-represented in global media.

In Yemen, Rising Voices is partnering with the Hand in Hand Initiative and Ghaida’a al-Absi to present new media training courses for female politicians, activists, and human rights workers to diversify the Arabic-language blogosphere and to build an online network of Yemeni gender activists.

According to Rising Voices’ blogger Rezwan, the most recent workshop was held on October 15th, and participants blogged about a range of topics, from the spread of HIV/AIDS to poetry to the increase in the rate of drug addiction in Yemen.

To learn more about this fascinating project, go to: http://rising.globalvoicesonline.org/projects/empowerment-of-women-activists-in-media-techniques-yemen/

For Rezwan’s story about the most recent workshop, including links to the participants’ blogs, go to: http://rising.globalvoicesonline.org/blog/2009/10/20/ewamt-blogging-and-social-networking-energizes-women-in-yemen/.