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DigiActive News: DigiActivists at the Global Voices Summit
Written by Mary on June 8, 2008 – 6:27 pm -
Four members of the DigiActive team will be going to the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Budapest on the 27th and 28th of this month. Co-founder Mary Joyce will moderate a panel on Citizen Media and Online Free Speech, on which co-founder Amine will be a panelist (see more
information below). Writer Simon Columbus and Research Director Patrick Meier will also be in attendance.
Session 2: Citizen Media and Online Free Speech
The innate structure of the Internet is free: a series of personal computers, servers, and routers that produce data and transmit it around the world in seconds based on a simple series of universal protocols. It took human intervention to cage the Internet.
For the second session of the Global Voices Summit we invite you to explore the tension between freedom and repression currently being fought online by activists in Kenya, Iran, Egypt, Morocco, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
While the Internet has allowed Kenyans to take action during a dark moment of their country’s history and fueled the pro-democracy blogger movement in Egypt, censorship and surveillance are daily realities for digital activists in Morocco, Singapore, Hong Kong, Iran, and Egypt as well. Yet, as all these cases demonstrate, despite pervasive censorship the Internet can still act as freer frontier, where government does not grasp quite so tightly as in the real world.
Through these cases and the discussion that follows we will explore the contest between freedom and repression on the Internet, ask in which direction the trend is moving, and think about what we as activists and users can do to give freedom the upper hand.
Speakers
Ory Okolloh is a Kenyan lawyer, political activist and blogger. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School and is the co-founder of Mzalendo a website that tracks the performance of Kenyan Members of Parliament. She is also the co-founder of Ushahidi, a website that grew out of the political crisis in Kenya and that maps both incidents of violence and peace efforts. She is currently based in Johannesburg, South Africa where she works as a consultant for several NGOs and manages her various activism efforts.
Wael Abbas is a Cairo-based citizen-journalist and blogger who blogs at Misr Digital (Egyptian Awareness).Wael is the first blogger ever to be given the prestigious Knight International Journalism Award for his work on documenting human rights violations through online video.
Amine is an entrepreneur and human rights activist. He is interested in the role of free web-based and mobile technologies in contributing to grassroots development and human rights advocacy. He co-founded DigiActive.org as way to highlight successes, share best practices, and help foster a community of people committed to studying and promoting digital activism globally. He has been involved in the intikhabat2007.com project, a submission-driven photoblog covering the Moroccan elections, the HelpFouad.com campaign to free Morocco’s “facebook prisonner”, and has in the past consulted for international development organizations, the private sector, and non-profit organizations.
Tags: budapest, globalvoices
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