DigiActive.org

Action Alert: Facebook Campaign to Free Hoder

Update: Hoder’s detention has been confirmed by a family member.

What: a Facebook-based campaign to free the blogger Hossein “Hoder” Derakhshan, who has allegedly been in taken into custody by Iranian authorities on charges of spying for Israel. (There has been no official confirmation of Hoder’s arrest other than an article on the Jahan News site and the fact that he has not updated his blog for 2 weeks.)

When: Now!

Where: On your Facebook profile page

How: There are several ways you can support Hoder. A message from the Facebook group, Free Hossein Derakhshan // Libérez Hossein Derakhshan, asks supporters to do the following:

1. Invite your friend list to join this group
2. Download and Add this picture to your profile picture: http://tinyurl.com/5983v3
3. Tell your friends, family, and colleagues about the situation
4. Write the Canadian Embassy in Iran (address below) notifying them of Hossein’s condition: teran@international.gc.ca.

You can also get news about Hoder on the Twitter channel http://twitter.com/freehoder.

Why: Because Hoder’s alleged arrest is illegal and he deserves his freedom.

Hat-tip: Hamid Tehrani for Global Voices Advocacy

DigiActive News: DigiActivists at the Global Voices Summit

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

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

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

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.

Read more »

Campaign: Overview of the Egyptian General Strike

Description of Campaign: As mentioned in our previous post, Egyptian activists organized a massive nation-wide strike on April 6. In our last post we talked about their use of Facebook. Now Global Voices correspondent Amira Al Hussaini gives a complete run-down of the other technologies used by the activists. This is definitely one of the most sophisticated digital activism campaigns to date.

Digital Activism Tools: blogs (both individual and collaborative), Twitter, Facebook, phone banking

How These Tools Are Being Used: From Amira’s excellent post:

Egyptian bloggers worked round the clock telling the world about a workers’ revolt that shook their country, as thousands rioted at a textile mill in Al Mahalla, demanding better pay and protesting against increasing prices. They were also among the first casualties of the unrest, which left two people killed, scores injured and an undetermined number of activists, organisers and mere spectators behind bars. Their coverage came in the form of blog posts, YouTube videos, Twitter feeds, Flickr shots, Facebook messages and all other online tools they could get their hands on. Read more…

Guide: Blog for a Cause! - The Global Voices Guide to Blog Advocacy

Title: Blog for a Cause!: The Global Voices Guide to Blog Advocacy

Author: Mary Joyce

Published by: Global Voices Advocacy (2008)

What is it?: A strategic step-by-step guide to using a blog as the center of a campaign for social or political change

Download it!

Read more »