VIDEO HUB blog

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6724531.stm

From the BBC News:

Amnesty International has warned that the internet "could change beyond all recognition" unless action is taken against the erosion of online freedoms.

he warning comes ahead of a conference organised by Amnesty, where victims of repression will outline their plights.

The "virus of internet repression" has spread from a handful of countries to dozens of governments, said the group.

Amnesty accused companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo of being complicit in the problem.

Website closures

When challenged on their presence in countries such as China in the past, the companies accused have always maintained that they were simply abiding by local laws.

Amnesty is concerned that censorship is on the increase.

"The Chinese model of an internet that allows economic growth but not free speech or privacy is growing in popularity, from a handful of countries five years ago to dozens of governments today who block sites and arrest bloggers," said Tim Hancock, Amnesty's campaign director.

"Unless we act on this issue, the internet could change beyond all recognition in the years to come.

More and more governments are realising the utility of controlling what people see online and major internet companies, in an attempt to expand their markets, are colluding in these attempts," he said.

According to the latest Open Net Initiative report on internet filtering, at least 25 countries now apply state-mandated net filtering including Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Burma, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Morocco and Saudi Arabia.

Egyptian blogger

Filtering was only one aspect of internet repression, the group said. It added that increasingly it was seeing "politically motivated" closures of websites and net cafes, as well as threats and imprisonments.

Twenty-two-year-old Egyptian blogger Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman was imprisoned for four years in February for insulting Islam and defaming the President of Egypt.

Fellow Egyptian blogger Amr Gharbeia told the BBC that the internet was allowing people to express themselves: "The web is creating a more open society, it is allowing more people to speak out. It's only natural that upsets some people."

The Amnesty conference - Some People Think the Internet is a Bad Thing: The Struggle for Freedom of Expression in Cyberspace - will have some well-known speakers including Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

It marks the first anniversary of Amnesty's website irrepressible.info, which is being relaunched to become an information hub for anyone interested in the future of internet freedom.

Posted by Bryan Nunez at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last Friday I took the day off from work to go to the Personal Democracy Forum at Pace University.

Thanks to Tim Bonnemann for giving me his ticket and Alan Rosenblatt for putting in touch with Tim. Part of the deal was that I "blog extensively" which I'll attempt to do here. I'm not much of a live blogger, so hat's off to people like Alison Fine who managed to coherently summarize presentations seemingly before they were even finished!

Since there are lots of sources for information about the PDF, I'll focus on things that relate to WITNESS and the Hub.

Continue reading "Personal Democracy Forum 2007 Notes Part I" »

Posted by Bryan Nunez at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This should have gone up a year ago, but I was tweaking our google adwords settings and stumbled across it. Anyway it's a good nutshell explanation of WITNESS, and the early stage thinking behind the Hub.

Posted by Bryan Nunez at 01:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Some big ideas

I’m just back from the New Organizing Institute’s training for progressive non profits “Online Organizing and Technology for Nonprofits”.

Kudos to the team at NOI, specifically Rosalyn Lemieux and Heather Cronk, who kept the show on the road (& on time 99% of the time- a first for any conference I’ve attended) and did a great job of pulling it together and notes from all sessions and brainstorms are forthcoming on their wiki.

As usual, with gatherings based in DC or other US cities, this one was heavily weighted towards domestic politics and organizing; also, overwhelmingly the trainers and resource people (from vendors to presenters) were white and male. This is not to discount the breadth of experience and expertise being shared, but it is worth reminding ourselves that without the added value of input from communities of color and I would argue, people from progressive movements around the world, we risk creating an echo chamber.

To NOI’s credit, time was included for mini ‘roots sessions’ for participants to create discussions that hadn’t been on the agenda. Folks from Colorofchange.org, NAACP and Urban Underground, and elsewhere convened a group to discuss (loosely) “race and the Internet” and talked about a variety of things from list building to effective events. Thanks to Clarissa and Gabriel from Colorofchange.org who led and took notes that will be available soon.

Which brings me back to the beginning of the 3 day training- and where I drew from for the subject of this post - Peter Leymen from the New Politics Institute who was just fresh from presenting before Congress about “The Dawn of New Politics” shared his thesis that we’ve entered a new Progressive era. He's defining like this:

1) the massive transformation in communication tools, both the speed of technology development and how it is being harnessed by new media;
2) the massive population transition in the US – las proyecciones dicen que por 2050 los EEUU serán 40% de hispano- if you don’t know what that says, its time to start learning some Spanish!
3) the challenges of the 21st century (i.e. global climate change) which require new strategies.

Peter enumerated the ways in which media is changing from the ubiquity of video and the multiple screens on which we might view it (TV, computer, mobile), to online games and spaces like Second Life, to the incredible growth of peer to peer file sharing as a ever-larger percentage of all Internet activity.

There was much that Peter shared that can be found in more depth on the New Politics Institute site – but one more thing that resonated for me and I believe for WITNESS can be found in Peter’s list entitled “The 10 Properties of 21st Century Media”. It is:

1) Internet enabled
2) Targeted
3) Efficient
4) Consumer controlled
5) Time shifted – people will get it when they want it
6) Prodigious – media makers will create a lot more content – (I’m pretty sure they already are- cat blogs anyone?)
7) Bottom up
8) Collaborative
9) Global
10) Emergent – we can no longer predict what will happen in 6 months time

WITNESS embodies at least 2 of those 10 already but I was particularly encouraged to find that our forthcoming Hub embodies at least 7 of those. I hope this will help make it a viable and useful channel towards building an international human rights culture and empowering positive social change.

Continue reading "It’s our defining moment: NOI Online organizing/ technology conference" »

Posted by Matisse Bustos at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I agree with Bryan's comments that this year's BB wasn't as good as last year. Why? Well I felt like I wasn't hearing anything new. Everything was a continuation of last year. Although the resounding message seemed to be 'we are still figuring it out' I guess in the last 8 months, we all didn't get very far. Where are all those ground breaking projects that are leveraging the promises of participatory media? Where is the cell phone in all of this? Its a huge player as an alternate medium. Beyond broadcast is by no means limited to the web. The only person who spoke about this was Tad Hirsch.

Obeying to the WITNESS policy of dividing and conquering (Bryan and I are not allowed to attend the same sessions/dinners) I chose to check out the Virtual Worlds working group. After sitting around and chatting for 20 minutes, the group was somewhat astounded when it was announced that the entire working session would take place in Second Life (and our group leader had already started the session with the SL-ers) A small mutiny occured when half of the 'first lifers' did not have a computer to access SL. And it was somewhat ridiculous when half of us did not have a computer (what? how can it be that not everyone has a laptop?) So us 'first lifers' had to hold our own session albeit without the ability to fly or don rainbow colored hair. I mentioned Habbo Hotel (which no-one seemed to recognize ) and very quickly realized that SL is Virtual Worlds. We didn't get a chance to compare and contrast MMORPG or any other types of virtual communites and worlds. I felt like I was sitting in a pitch room with many people offering to build WITNESS a space in SL.

My thoughts about SL? Is it a viable space? Yes, I think it is, depending on what you want to achieve. As John Lester from Linden Lab puts it. "Your SL space should be an extension of your org's mission, culture and message" He also warns against simply 'building' a building/space that links out to the web, comparing it to the early days of the web when a site was an online brouchure. I think ultimately SL provides a community space with more context than just a chat room or bbs. For better or worse, it does allow users to interact with each other and with the space/functionality you create. I am still struggling with why WITNESS would want to be in SL and if we do...what exactly would we 'build' One thing I have to say, SL-ers are very passionate!! If we can get them half as passionate about WITNESS issues as they are with SL,we might have someting there. Check out this story on an anti- war protest in SL as food for thought.

My BOF dinner included Raul Ramirez, Exec Director, News & Affairs, KQED San Francisco, Chad Lupkes, Campaigns.Wikia and Greg Gibson, social media technologist. We discussed the building of online communities. Each had our own angle. Chad has built numerous petition tools. His problem? No-one is using them. Greg is building a community annotation tool. His first project...will be the bible. (hmm, built in passionate community) We'll have to keep and eye on his project once it launches. Check out this SL anti-war protest as food for thought...

Other cool things of note:

• 100$ laptop! Yes its green. Also there has been a call for game producers to develop educational games around the MDGs that can run on the laptop. Which is causing quite a stir in the serious games community. See Rik's blog
• Drew Clark of the Centre for Public Integrity showed their site that enables you to map local media by ZIP (us postal code) and includes maps of broadband supply.

• Why was the guy from Four Eyed Monsters drinking out of a wineglass at what would be 10am his time?
  
• Participatory democracy- is this just another one of those buzzwords? Yes we may have more online participation, discussions, etc...but aren't we leaving out a whole lot of people? No one really addressed or even acknowledged the digital divide. (well the audience tried to ask the question....)
  

Posted by Tina Gongsakdi at 03:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was thinking that rather than write up an internal report about Beyond Broadcast and a separate blog entry, I'd kill two birds with one stone and just post the whole thing here. So if my tone sounds a little more official, that's because it is.

Last weekend Tina and I drove up to MIT to attend the Beyond Broadcast conference. While I think it was a little less groundbreaking than last year's conference, it still was good and more importantly, still relevant. Although many of the same people were there talking about many of the same issues, it's still important that people continue to talk about and think about how media is changing, and what the implications are for both creators and consumers of media.

YouTube was one name that continually came up. Last year it was just one of many sites trying to compete in the user generated video space. This year it is the de-facto platform for online video. You could argue that the reason YouTube entered into the public conscious was the 1.6 billion that Google put into it, but I think YouTube's success is more like that of AOL in 90's, that is both provided a simple and easy-to-use interface allowing people to do what they wanted online.

YouTube makes it easy to upload and share video and more than a few people at Beyond Broadcast complained about YouTube morphing into essentially a broadcast platform, and abandoning it's user-created roots. I would take this one step further and argue that YouTube is the 1990's AOL of video and that as video-as-public-medium gains wider acceptance, people will migrate away from YouTube and other sites that limit what people either can do or are allowed to do.

The "Video on the Net: Beyond YouTube?" working group discussed these trends and conjectured about what video would look like in future. Shawn Van Every, who helped set up our Town Hall brainstorming meeting at ITP last year lead our breakout group and wrote up his thoughts on our discussion here. Also in the discussion was Audubon Dougherty who introduced herself after the discussion since she had worked with Sam on some Burma campaigns.

After the conference, I led a BOF (Birds of a Feather) dinner on "Change Oriented Media" - a term which I hopefully just coined, but I highly doubt. The idea was idea was to talk about what potentials exist for media creators to use the emerging collaborative and socially networked media platforms as a way to change and hopefully benefit society. The reality was there was a lot more discussion on environmentalism and architecture that on media - at least at my end of the table.

Still I did meet some interesting people. David Tamés from MIT and Kino-Eye.com, Perla Ni of ClickTV, Rob Berridge of WikiForGood, Nathalie Applewhite of Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Matthew Worsnick of the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture NetLab, Benjamin Roe of NPR, Paul Kamp of Backbone Networks, and Ethan Kiczek of CivicActions. Since my session was quite full, I didn't get a chance to talk to everyone, and there were a couple people who I'm not sure had signed up so I don't have their names.

In the end, it was a good conference and an opportunity to reconnect with people who've helped us in the past and whose advice will undoubtedly be useful in the future.

Posted by Bryan Nunez at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

While catching up on my podcasts from The Economist, I came across this article about whether or not Bosses should Blog. It was pretty funny, especially the part about SecondLife.

Guess I'm not the only one who has doubts about it.

If blogging doesn’t appeal, WEF offers the suggestible chief executive another way to make a noise in cyberspace. He can join a fantasy game, Second Life, and give an interview in the persona of a computer-generated puppet, or "avatar".

One attraction of Second Life is the freedom to choose an avatar with the dress sense of a rock star and the physique of a porn star. Whether the Davos demographic leans that way remains to be seen. But it would probably pose fewer legal risks than blogging with candour.

Posted by Bryan Nunez at 04:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I got back from the OhMyNews 2nd annual Citizen Journalist's Forum. I think my presentation on Citizen Journalism and Technology went well but, you can decide for yourself since they video taped the whole thing. Alternatively Ethan took notes, as did Greg Daigle, a citizen reporter for OhmyNews from Minnesota I met during the forum.

Stay tuned as I piece together my notes from this and other conferences I've attended.

Posted by Bryan Nunez at 02:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From July 11th through the 15th I'll be in Korea for the OhMyNews 2nd Annual Citizen Reporters' Forum.  I've been placed on a panel with Craig from Craig's List and J.D. Lasica from Ourmedia, entitled "Technology and Citizen Journalism." It should be interesting since I'm not sure exactly how I'm going answer the question about "what technologies we use" when we haven't built anything yet.  

I've already turned in my powerpoint slides so I guess I'll be talking about something.

Posted by Bryan Nunez at 05:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)