RConversation

An open thank you letter to Global Voices, on International Volunteer Day

Today is International Volunteer Day, a celebration of the millions of people around the world who give their time, energy and wisdom to projects and causes they care about. Volunteers feed the hungry, care for the sick, comfort the grieving. We live in a world where companies and governments are responsible for producing most of the products and services we need and use. Volunteers prove that there's another way to build things - we can write encyclopedias or operating systems, we can report the news, or host a revolution.

Choosing to build a volunteer community was the key decision that made Global Voices possible. Rebecca and I realized that some of the most interesting information we were getting from the developing world wasn't coming from professional reporters, but from volunteers, using their blogs to share their perspectives on local and national events with the wider world. Our first action as a community - the manifesto that continues to inform and govern our decisions today - was co-written by volunteers at our first meeting, and rapidly translated into twenty five languages by volunteers.

While there's a small team of editors and coordinators for whom Global Voices is a job (as well as a passion - we don't pay well enough for anyone to do this for the money!), the lifeblood of our project is our volunteer community. 532 active volunteers are responsible for Global Voices today, part of the 1,904 volunteers who've worked on writing, editing, translating, designing over the seven year life of our endeavour. Volunteers have written more than 58,000 articles on Global Voices, and translated even more. We rely on an even broader community of volunteers - the tens of thousands of bloggers, twitterers and videographers who we feature on our site, the vast majority of whom create not for fiscal gain, but out of passion and dedication - to make our work possible. And we're governed by volunteers: our board of directors serve without pay, giving their time because they care about our work and the sustainability of our community.

As co-founders of Global Voices, Rebecca and I are profoundly grateful to everyone who gives their time and energy to make the world more just, fair, knowledgeable and connected. But we wanted to call attention to two volunteers who've taken incredible risks to work with us. Late last week, Razan Ghazzawi was arrested by Syrian authorities when she travelled to Amman, Jordan to attend a workshop on press freedom. Razan is an active blogger and twitter user, and has written for Global Voices and Global Voices Advocacy. She's one of several brave Syrians who is willing to work under her own name, despite the dangers of arrest, and we hope for her speedy release from detention.

We also recognize Ali Abdulemam, a Bahraini blogger, activist and Global Voices volunteer. Ali remains in hiding today, because he's been sentenced to fifteen years in prison by Bahrain's courts, who accused him of plotting a coup. In fact, Ali was sentenced because he's been a passionate advocate for online speech in Bahrain, and has been arrested and tortured for his work on Bahrain Online and Global Voices. We are profoundly grateful for everyone who volunteers their time and energy to make Global Voices a reality. We pledge to work with you to make possible a world where no one ever need risk arrest to participate in a remarkable community like ours.

-Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon, Global Voices co-founders and volunteers

Global netizens respond to Steve Jobs' death

In my forthcoming book (finalized in mid-August before Jobs stepped down and then passed away), I am critical of Apple and its approach to app censorship, its general lack of openness, and the potential long-term implications for freedom and democracy. Soon after Jobs announced his retirement and not long before he passed away, my friend Christine Bader wrote about the serious environmental and labor problems that stain Jobs' legacy.

That said, there is no question that Jobs' leadership and vision transformed not only personal computing but hundreds of millions of people's relationship with technology. People all over the world have good reason to feel strongly about the ways in which Apple computers and devices have enriched their lives. The emotional depth of the global reaction to his death has been stronger and more personal than global responses to the deaths of most world leaders. He touched the lives of all kinds of people in the most intimate and tangible ways. As I pointed out in the most recent edition of The Netizen Report, one pseudonymous Chinese Internet user spotted by the Wall Street Journal remarked: “This is the first time a foreigner’s death has been hard for me to take.” (See more Chinese netizen reaction here.) Global Voices rounded up reactions to Jobs' death from Africa, the Arab world, and the Caribbean. The dissident Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez wrote about how Jobs' persistence and ingenuity in the face of his own hardships inspired her to persist in building her own home-made computer in the 1990's with which she eventually produced a university newsletter. Not all tributes are positive:  Bloggers in Brazil, for instance, criticized Apple's lack of openness.

Global Voices' Fred Petrossian linked to this cartoon by the famous Iranian cartoonist Mana Neyestani:

Fred's translation: "An old man says to the 'Angel of Death' there are many dinosaurs in Iran and you go after 'red apples'."

This speaks to a point I make in the first chapter of my book about how new kinds of global constituencies are forming around certain brands of hardware, software, and virtual platforms created by multi-national companies like Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter. Members of these global constituencies can hold strong and even emotionally-charged loyalties towards technologies that they have integrated into their lives and even identities. These overlapping loyalties and constituencies will increasingly compete and clash with loyalties and identities tied to the physical nation-state.

No government - not even the Western ones claiming to champion Internet freedom - is equipped to deal with the long-term consequences of this trend. But that doesn't mean that we should leave it to the world's multi-national technology companies to refashion global geopolitics to their own liking just because so many governments are not getting it right. We the world's netizens must work to make sure that the Internet, the geopolitical system, and the international economy evolve in a way that serves everybody's rights and interests, not just those of the most powerful one percent.

The Netizen Report on Global Voices Advocacy

On Thursday I launched a new series of posts on Global Voices Advocacy called “The Netizen Report”: An overview of recent global developments related to the power dynamics between citizens, companies and governments on the Internet.  I hope that these regular (probably quasi-weekly) reports can provide netizens around the world with useful information about who is seeking to influence and shape the digital platforms and networks we increasingly depend upon, and how. Armed with information, we are in a better position to defend our rights, and to make sure the Internet evolves in a manner that is compatible with free expression and dissent. The format and content of the report will evolve over the coming months based on reader feedback and author experimentation. Your comments and criticisms are welcome. 

Read the inaugural post here. 

In search of "Internet freedom"

At the end of the Global Voices Summit in Santiago, Chile earlier this month, Ethan Zuckerman and I led a session in which we asked everybody in the room to help answer a question: "How do we keep the Internet open and free?" In his blog post titled "How big is Internet freedom?" Ethan does a great job of summarizing the range of responses - and lack of agreement.  In the room that day were a diverse group of people: activists, citizen-bloggers, journalists, civil liberties lawyers, educators, and academics, as well as people who work for foundations, companies, international organizations and governments. Not all of these people felt comfortable about being in the same room with some of the others, as Ethan's post reflects, and as others like Andrew from EngageMedia have also commented. Yet everybody was united by the fact that they characterize their work to be related in some way to one or all of six things:

• building platforms that facilitate online expression, discourse, and/or organizing;
• fighting censorship and surveillance;
• working to shape laws and policies in a way that protects and facilitates people's ability to exercise their rights to free expression and assembly;
• informing the public about threats by governments, companies, or others to online free expression and assembly through various forms of research and reporting;
• educating the public about how to use technologies that can help us exercise our rights when they are threatened by censorship and surveillance;
• providing financial support for one or more of the above.

Debate centered around the following issues:

Government involvement: Some activists were very uncomfortable about the fact that a young woman from the U.S. State Department, whose job is to work on "Internet freedom" issues, attended our public conference - a conference that was free for anybody who registered before we ran out of space. Global Voices Advocacy Director Sami Ben Gharbia, a Tunisian exile and grassroots activist, said he worries government money is poisoning the online activism space, causing grassroots causes to be hijacked or used by geopolitical actors who he feels are more interested in influencing the politics of certain countries in  certain directions than in the welfare and safety of specific individuals on the ground. He is also concerned that U.S. government money, inspired by the Obama Administration's new "Internet freedom" agenda, means that activists in politically "sexy" countries like China and Iran get lots of support and attention, while the problems faced by activists in countries whose Internet repression is less well covered in the global English-language media, from Tunisia to Russia to Thailand to Syria, are largely ignored. A lively debate about this issue ensued, with Bob Boorstin of Google (who once worked as a speechwriter in the Clinton Administration) called Sami's position "paranoid" and pointed out that like it or not, governments are players in this space. This could be a good thing, he said, if it leads to greater honesty and transparency among all governments about how they are trying to regulate and control various online and mobile spaces. An activist from Brazil argued that taking an "us vs. them" stance towards government is "b.s." "We can't keep government out of the Internet because government is part of the Internet," he said. Certainly, those of us who are citizens of democracies need to push our governments to be consistent and transparent about what they are doing in this space. We have a responsibility to make sure that our tax money is not being spent in a counterproductive, hypocritical, or duplicitous manner. That much we owe to Sami and the vulnerable grassroots communities around the world that he works with.

Corporate-owned platforms and services: Both Google and Yahoo were active at the conference and helped to fund it, along with a number of foundations. Google - along with Reuters - also funded a new Breaking Borders award for individuals or groups doing extraordinary work to promote free expression online. Google is in constant friction with a range of governments - from democracies to autocracies - seeking to regulate its platforms in various ways. While Google's executives have made a commitment to do the socially responsible thing for reasons that are honorable, it's also true that it's in Google's corporate interest to align itself with the global online free speech movement as it faces regulatory battles around the world.  As I reported in my last blog post, YouTube's Victoria Grand participated in a lively session dedicated to the human rights implications of content moderation. Yet a number of participants voiced concern about over-reliance on corporate-owned platforms and service providers. As Ethan put it in an important blog post back in March: "These entities have no more legal obligation to allow open, unfettered political speech in their spaces than shopping malls do to host political rallies."

Which brings us back to the issue of "netizenship." If we depend on commercial services and platforms for our expression and assembly online, then we have to stop acting like passive "users" and start acting like "citizens" of these spaces: organizing with others and pushing the companies to act in the public interest and to take free expression and human rights fully into account. Companies will only change their practices if they feel that their brand reputations and business success depend on it.

One could build open-source, non-profit, community administered web-hosting platforms, social networking services, and e-mail systems that would not depend on companies for the most part. Mozilla's Drumbeat movement aims to educate the broader public about non-proprietary and open source alternatives available out there - and seeks to build a robust "open web" that supports a thriving international community of content creators, programmers, and citizens who take responsibility for building and defending the Internet we want. Perhaps things will evolve in a manner similar to how, in many democracies, you have commercial media companies coexisting alongside non-profit public media funded by foundations and audience donations (and in some cases also government subsidies and tax money). In cyberspace both for-profit and non-profit spaces can coexist peacefully, each serving different needs of different kinds of people and communities. Society benefits from having both, as there are some social needs - and social groups - which companies may never have much interest in serving or respecting. The "open web" can also help to keep the commercial spaces honest.

This however still doesn't solve the problem of commercial carriers lower down in the stack: Internet Service Providers in many parts of the world are monopolies and we often have little choice about who provides our basic connectivity. One self-described "anarchist" from Brazil is working to build mesh networks that would enable people to access the Internet without going through a commercial ISP. If communities could create viable mesh networks as alternatives to commercial ISP's in cases where ISP's are non-existent, unreliable, or untrustworthy, that would be interesting, but it would require a great deal more public engagement and activism than we've seen anywhere thus far.

New rights or old rights?  Do we need a new Bill of Rights for Cyberspace as Jeff Jarvis and others have suggested? In Brazil they've already drafted such a document, now up for public discussion and comment. (The CPJ's Danny O'Brien provides some critical analysis of that draft, which might actually provide justification for more takedown of content without judicial oversight or due process, in the name of protecting the rights of people who are slandered.) Or do we simply need to work hard to make sure that existing internationally recognized covenants, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights are fully applied to the Internet and upheld in both online and mobile spaces? A couple of efforts build on this idea. The Principles for corporate conduct developed by the Global Network Initiative are based on those existing international covenants. The Internet Governance Forum's Dynamic Coalition for Internet Rights and Principles is currently working on a document that seeks to elaborate on how existing human rights covenants should be applied by governments and companies to ICT's. That draft will be made public sometime over the summer. As a number of people at the Summit pointed out, most governments don't respect the existing rights covenants in "meatspace," and thus they're not terribly optimistic that such rights declarations will have much concrete impact. On the other hand, these U.N. documents are used by human rights activists worldwide as the moral baseline upon which to build their arguments against human rights violations. Documents clarifying how the UDHR and ICCPR should be applied to cyberspace might be helpful tools, but they are not going to lead to solutions in and of themselves.

Defining and coordinating goals across the global network  This is the toughest part. Cyberspace is a global network. What people do on and to it in the U.S. or Pakistan or China can have a global impact. "Freedom" in the context of cyberspace - or in the context of human civilization - does not mean "free for all." Nor does it mean that we won't pay for anything, depsite what some in the entertainment industry may insinuate. We don't want cyberspace to be a Hobbesian state of nature in which life is "nasty, brutish, and short." This is why modern governments gain their legitimacy from the idea of a "social contract," in which we give up some of our freedoms to do anything we please for the sake of the greater social good, and if we are in a democracy those laws, rules, and enforcement institutions are formed with our consent and supervision. So how do we work out a global social contract for the civilization we are building in cyberspace?

Back in March after Google withdrew its search engine from China,  British historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote a column in The Guardian about how we urgently need a global debate and a global consensus around the idea that "everyone should be free to see everything, except for that limited set of things which clear, explicit global rules specify should not be available." He concluded:

It's in the infosphere that the world is coming closest, fastest, to a global village, so it's the infosphere that most urgently needs a global debate about the village rules. If we don't have that debate, and have it soon, then what you get to see on your screen will be the result of a power struggle between the old-fashioned power of the state in which you happen to be, the new-style power of the giant information companies, the insurgent force of novel information technologies, and the ingenuity of individual netizens. That's a likely outcome, but not the best.

But it's hard to find consensus - even amongst liberal internationalists with different cultural and religious backgrounds - about how to find the right balance between our right to free expression and assembly and our right to privacy and security. Even trickier is the question of what is "hate speech" and what constitutes justified criticism or even satire of one religion by members of another. The Global Voices community has come together around a set of common values around freedom of expression and communication. Our Manifesto begins: "We believe in free speech: in protecting the right to speak — and the right to listen. We believe in universal access to the tools of speech."  But all you need to do is to read this post about Pakistani reactions to the "Draw Mohammed Day" Facebook page, then read this post by another member of our community, to see how far we are from having a consensus about how civilized cross-cultural discourse should or shouldn't be managed on global Internet platforms.

Last August, Lisa Horner of Global Partners and Max Senges (then an academic, now at Google) published a paper titled Values, Principles, and Rights in Internet Governance, which called for a global, trans-cultural dialogue around two questions:
• Can we maintain cultural diversity while at the same time agreeing to universal values to underpin internet governance?
• Can we translate these values into practical guiding principles for different internet stakeholders, from the technical community through to regulators and users?

Looking at the world today, the answer would seem to be "No." But then we've not even attempted the kind of informed discourse that would be needed before ruling out "Yes" altogether.

Right now I see two fundamental obstacles to such a discourse. First, we don't have adequate global platforms on which to have such a multicultural discussion. As Global Voices continues to expand its multilingual translation community, and as we build capacity to translate conversations across different languages, maybe that could be a place to experiment.

Second, global publics don't have enough information to hold an informed discourse right now. People who follow global news and domestic politics in their home countries are not well informed about issues related to Internet governance, how software engineering and hardware design can affect our freedoms, how government regulations play out around the world, etc. Most news organizations cover technology as a business, cultural, and consumer phenomenon. Few journalists (I can count them on one hand) cover technology as a global political space. Very little technology journalism approaches stories with the goal of serving the interests of an informed global netizenry. We need global coverage of cyberspace as a new political space. This coverage needs to begin with questions like: "What do people need to know in order to be informed participants in shaping the future of our global network? What do people need to know in order to determine what their own interests are within the network, and to understand who and what is affecting those interests either negatively or positively? What do people need to know in order to figure out what kind of Internet they want? What do people need to know in order to understand and debate what is possible?  What do people need to know about the players, institutions, companies, and politics so that they can figure out how they as citizens of the network can take action?" We need hard-hitting, original, investigative stories that help to fill this void. Perhaps it's time for somebody to create such a news organization.

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Human rights implications of content moderation and account suspension by companies

Facebook deserves every bit of flak being flung at them for their cavalier and irresponsible attitude toward privacy. Another problem, however, has gotten much less attention: activists around the world who use Facebook to promote political and human rights causes frequently find their Facebook groups and accounts suspended.

In all cases that I've heard of, Facebook has been either unresponsive or unsympathetic to activists' complaints. Since the beginning of this year, pro-democracy groups in Hong Kong have complained of repeated deletion of their Facebook groups. One of these groups was called "Never Forget June Fourth," set up to commemorate the June 4th 1989 Tiananmen massacre. Last month some Hong Kong pro-democracy Facebook users wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg (in Facebook). Readers will be shocked and stunned to learn that neither The Zuck nor his colleagues bothered to respond to this letter:

Dear Mark,

We are users of Facebook with shared interests in the political development and democracy of Hong Kong and China. We have set up a political nature group page named ‘Never Forget June the Forth’. This group was formed to engage in a free exchange of ideas and remembrances around Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989, and there has never been an intention to be abusive, or bullying or “take any action on Facebook that infringes or violates someone else’s right or otherwise violates the law,” to quote your own official policy.

Nevertheless, the group of key administrators and creator of ‘Never Forget June the Forth’ is being unfairly harassed by Facebook, which has blocked them from posting new content and working on it at all.

This latest violation of their rights comes on top of numerous other examples of harassment. Some sites have been closed without notice. Facebook has attributed the problems to “technical difficulties,” an explanation that strains common sense.

Therefore we are calling on Facebook to end this harassment (apparently done on behalf of Beijing). We feel, especially in light of what is happening at Google, that both the regional and global press will be interested in this story, should we choose to take it to them.

Please end your harassment, which will prevent us from taking this drastic step. The ball is in your court, and We are certain you can feel the moral weight of how this case may impact your reputation.

Sincerely,

Creator and Group of Administrators

While the group was eventually restored and revived (here) the people involved with it feel that Facebook has failed to communicate clearly with them so that these kinds of problems can be avoided in the future. People still have no idea what happened or why. Many suspect that the abuse-reporting mechanisms within Facebook are themselves being abused by governments and other powerful entities. Some including the authors of the above letter - thanks to Facebook's lack of honesty and transparency  - suspect Facebook is responding to pressure from governments, including Beijing. I myself doubt there is direct collusion between Facebook and the Chinese government, but I have concluded - based on their actions and inactions - that they don't give a toss about the human rights activists using their service, in spite of what their executives say in speeches about Facebook being a force for world peace and whatnot. In this discussion thread one Hong Kong user posted the following set of suggestions for how Facebook might treat activists with more care and respect:

Dear Mark,

I don't want reiterate what people said here. Here I point out a few things.

1. There is no doubt that Facebook is a commerical company. However, it is a leader in social networking now in the planet. It therefore undeniably bears certain social responsibility.

2. There is no clear guideline on when a political oriented group is banned or limited. Today, the removal of a group is all a subjective decision, which is not good enough. I oppose to removal of groups without a public reason, including groups holding opposite political view.

3. Abuse use of report mechanism is a problem. If the report is in fact invalid, and it is an organized act by a gang, there is no punishment at all. This really hurts freedom of speech. This leads to problem that people opens 2nd account to avoid get banned, or form a gang to counter act on the opponent with such report mechanism.

Ok. better to suggest rather than just complaint. Here is my suggestion

A. If it is a political group, pls list out the guideline and restrictions for the admins. What can be done and what can't. What extra limitation can be applied to political group. If violation is confirmed, warnings should be sent to all admins. If several warnings are ignored, FB has the reason to take action. If the group is banned, pls leave a page explaining why.

B. If confirmed case of abuse use of report mechanism, there should be "bad marks" accumulated for that user. Up to certain point, warning is given, and onwards, liable to be disabled.

C. For political group, do we have better option for admin to manage? e.g. ban certain user for 3 days just to let him calm down, or limit certain unfriendly action for 3 posts per 24 hrs. For all posts, unlike option, admin vote count for removal/warnings, and FB operator warnings flag are considered useful.

I think the above required your internal discussion and system modification. But I hope that your company will take my advice seriously.

Rgds
Justin

There are other examples from other regions. In March, Jillian York reported on Global Voices Advocacy that Facebook removed a Moroccan secularist group and its founder. While the group and the founder's personal account were eventually restored, "Facebook did not respond to any requests for an explanation."

I know of a couple of specific instances in which U.S.-based free speech and civil liberties organizations with contacts at Facebook have tried to get Facebook executives to have a conversation with some members of the human rights community to discuss this problem. Their efforts have all met with total radio silence. Facebook has shown zero interest in holding even a private conversation about this issue. Thus I can only conclude one or all of the following: They are in denial. Or they really don't care. Or they are overwhelmed and upset that people won't love them unconditionally and are sticking their head in the sand. Or they have such a Messiah complex that they really think anybody who wants to talk to them about their faults can only be an enemy.  If you have any further conclusions to contribute, feel free to add them in the comments section of this post.

Facebook is certainly not the only company with problems stemming from abuse-prevention and content moderation. There have been several cases in which human rights activists got their YouTube accounts deleted or disabled (the accounts were restored after an outcry from activists). Other activists have had takedown and suspension problems with Flickr, other Yahoo services, and domain hosting companies. But at least Google (YouTube's parent company) and Yahoo have been willing to engage with activists to discuss how content moderation and abuse-prevention mechanisms and procedures might be improved so that they can avoid inadvertent "censorship" of human rights activism taking place on their platforms. Both participated actively in a recent conference call convened by the Global Network Initiative, during which activists and people from the Internet industry held a frank discussion about how company practices can be improved - and how activists might also better educate themselves about terms of service and moderation procedures in order to anticipate and prevent problems. (Click here and scroll down to the bottom of the page for a contact e-mail if you want to get involved with further discussions.)

At last week's Global Voices Summit in Santiago, Chile, YouTube's Victoria Grand joined me, Jillian York, and Oiwan Lam of Hong Kong for a wide-ranging discussion on this issue. I've embedded the video below. At the beginning of the session I asked everybody in the room (probably around 80 people) whether they'd ever had problems with content being removed or accounts suspended on one of the social networking services they use. A couple dozen hands went up. I asked people for concrete suggestions about how netizens (I hate the word "users") and companies could work together on preventing inadvertent suppression of dissent on social networking platforms. Here are a few points that multiple people repeated:

• Automated moderation and abuse-prevention processes will inevitably result in mistakes that hurt activists. Human judgment - informed by adequate knowledge of cultures, languages, and political events around the world - needs to be brought into the mix.
• Companies need to be as transparent and open as possible about how their takedown, moderation, and suspension procedures work. Otherwise they have nobody but themselves to blame if users cease to trust them.
• Companies should designate staff members to focus on human rights. Their job should be to develop channels for regular communication with the human rights community.
• It's almost impossible for globally popular social networking and content-sharing services to hire enough staff with enough knowledge of political movements and disputes in all obscure corners of the world in all kinds of languages. But communities like Global Voices and others with large networks of bloggers and online activists all over the world are ready and willing to help companies keep abreast of political hot-button issues and online movements around the world - and even provide help with obscure languages - so that extra care can be taken, and political activism won't be mistaken for spam or some other form of abusive behavior. We just need to figure out how to set up workable mechanisms through which this kind of feedback, advice, and communication can take place.
• Activists need to pay closer attention the Terms of Service used by social networking platforms, and be more proactive in educating themselves about how moderation, takedown, and abuse-prevention mechanisms work. We probably need a "Guide to avoiding account suspension and takedown for human rights activists."
• It might also be good to have some kind of respected clearing house organization - or consortium of organizations - which can help mediate and resolve problems between activists and companies.
• People who rely on social networking and content sharing platforms run by companies to do political and social activism should engage more actively with company administrators to improve policies and practices. Anticipate problems and help solve them not only for yourself but for everybody else in the community. Act like a citizen. Not a passive "user."

Please share any further thoughts you may have in the comments section of this post. Below is the video from our Global Voices session last week.

Global Voices Summit: Discussion of Content Moderation, Part I:

Global Voices Summit: Discussion of Content Moderation, Part II:

Global Voices Summit: Discussion of Content Moderation, Part III:

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Global Voices: building sustainable civilization in an information rainforest

(Image by FabsY)

The Global Voices 2010 Summit in Santiago, Chile brought together people from 60 different countries for a two-day public conference, followed by two days of internal meetings for people who work directly on Global Voices Online in some way. Our citizen media community is now five and a half years old. It has grown organically in ways that Ethan Zuckerman and I never imagined when we started the project back in late 2004 with a small meeting of bloggers from a range of different countries. 

Since 2004 the global information environment has changed dramatically. One of our board members, Rosental Alves, gave a presentation on Friday in which he compared the pre-Internet media environment to a desert. For most members of the public, there were very few sources of information about what was happening around the world. You had access to a handful of TV stations and newspapers. Your understanding of the world depended on the priorities and budget decisions of the editors who ran those news organizations. 

Then came the deluge. Now, in the Internet Age, the information environment has gone suddenly from a desert to a rainforest. We have moved rapidly from a problem of scarcity to a problem of over-abundance - at least for some kinds of information. Other kinds of information remain rare and harder to find amidst the rapidly proliferating dominant species. 

In my closing remarks at the public conference, I pointed out that just because we have the Internet, and just because anybody can now create media, doesn't automatically mean that human society will be more democratic or peaceful. Life in the jungle is just as likely to be a Hobbesian state of nature, in which life can be nasty, brutish and short. In the offline world, this is why we build civilizations.

It is now up to all of us to figure out how to build a sustainable civilization within the new information rainforest - which provides sustenance and shelter, as well as poisonous plants and deadly predators.  Success is by no means inevitable. We - citizens living around the world who believe in our right to create independent online media  - need to make a concerted effort to build structures and systems that make it in people's interest to behave constructively, and which create strong disincentives for destructive behavior in this new environment. We need to help everybody understand how to participate constructively and responsibly in this new space, and protect the rights of minorities and dissenters. We are in uncharted territory, but we have to start somewhere. Global Voices is a community of people who are acting like real citizens - not mere passive "internet users" - and who are taking personal responsibility for the future of our information society.

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We are Global Voices. Five Years On.

The following post appeared first on Global Voices. Please consider supporting the project by clicking here.

Rising Voices Director David Sasaki has written a lovely retrospective for Global Voices' fifth birthday. Five years ago this month, David traveled across the United States from California to Harvard for a day-long workshop on global blogging. The workshop - little more than a structured brainstorming session - was called "Global Voices Online." The website you are reading today started out as a blog that Ethan Zuckerman and I set up to organize that workshop. Our aim, put very simply, was to discuss how "to use blogging and blog tools to help people in different countries hold more meaningful and direct conversations with each other." The day's discussion was part of a larger Internet and Society conference put on by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The Open Society Institute generously granted us some funds to fly in bloggers from various parts of the world. We publicized the event on the web, and many others - like David - just showed up. Thank goodness.

Here is an article I wrote soon after the meeting. Here is Ethan's "day after" blog post. We did not emerge with a concrete plan for world domination - or even for a coherent project. Participants agreed to set up a wiki to share information, an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) for further on-line meetings, and an aggregator of blogs by conference participants and others like them who we began to call "bridge bloggers." We weren't sure where we would go from there.

One thing, however, was clear: a critical mass of bloggers with similar values was emerging around the globe. It seemed like a good idea to "connect the dots" (as Jeff Ooi put it) amongst these people and create a platform for this emergent community. In the weeks following the conference, a number of participants used a wiki to articulate this community's shared values. The Global Voices Manifesto was the result. It's worth reproducing in full here because everything Global Voices does today continues to be driven by these fundamental values:

We believe in free speech: in protecting the right to speak — and the right to listen. We believe in universal access to the tools of speech.

To that end, we seek to enable everyone who wants to speak to have the means to speak — and everyone who wants to hear that speech, the means to listen to it.

Thanks to new tools, speech need no longer be controlled by those who own the means of publishing and distribution, or by governments that would restrict thought and communication.

Now, anyone can wield the power of the press. Everyone can tell their stories to the world. We seek to build bridges across the gulfs that divide people, so as to understand each other more fully. We seek to work together more effectively, and act more powerfully.

We believe in the power of direct connection. The bond between individuals from different worlds is personal, political and powerful. We believe conversation across boundaries is essential to a future that is free, fair, prosperous and sustainable - for all citizens of this planet.

While we continue to work and speak as individuals, we also seek to identify and promote our shared interests and goals. We pledge to respect, assist, teach, learn from, and listen to one other.

We are Global Voices.

We now have an amazing multinational team who act as stewards for various parts of Global Voices. But the soul of GV are the hundreds of volunteers who take time out from their jobs, studies, and and family obligations to help build a more open and participatory global public discourse.

(Members of the Global Voices community at the 2006 Summit in Delhi, India. Photo by Jace.")

The detailed story of how Global Voices evolved and how its various branches operate - including Rising Voices, Global Voices Advocacy, and Global Voices Lingua - can be found in many places, including this website's About section and FAQ. News stories about the project are here. Since 2004 we've had physical gatherings in London (2005), Delhi2006), and Budapest (2008). We are looking forward to another gathering in 2010 (location and date to be announced soon).

In 2006 Ethan and I wrote an article for the Nieman Reports magazine in which we sought to explain the relationship between Global Voices and journalism. David has another excellent post about why outreach, advocacy and translation are necessary to help people overcome the obstacles to speaking, being heard, and listening to others.

Many people around the world are frustrated that the global English-language mainstream media ignores their country much of the time, or only covers the bad things about their country, or tends to stereotype them. They see GV as a valuable platform through which to get their stories and viewpoints amplified to a broader global audience. Others are frustrated that their own domestic news media fail to report on much of the world, do it badly, or do it in a slanted manner that supports their government's worldview, and thus believe that by translating GV content into their local language they can improve their community's understanding of the world. Others focus on helping communities who are not yet taking advantage of new technologies to get their story out. Others have joined in common cause against censorship and repression of those who are merely exercising their universal right to free expression according to Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The GV community has not let itself get bogged down in endless debates about whether bloggers are or aren't journalists, or what the Internet means for the news business. Nor does GV get tangled up in arguments about whether the Internet is or is not going to be a force for global democratization. As a community we're more interested in rolling up our sleeves and getting to work addressing a more tangeable problem: filling a few of the gaping holes in the global public discourse, and doing what we can about the huge imbalances, inequities, and injustices in global media. However you define this work, we believe that what we're doing has value and makes a difference.

We are grateful that a range of organizations have deemed our work to be worthy of their financial support. We have developed relationships with news organizations who follow our work and seek us out because - however you define what we do - our community is a valuable source of global information and fresh perspectives. This is why Reuters provided critical core support in our first three years, and why a many news organizations continue to work with our editors and to contact our volunteers for interviews. While we can't say we've completely transformed global media, we do believe that we've brought global media attention to a range of stories that might otherwise not have been reported, and provided fresh perspectives on numerous other major international news stories. That in itself has made the entire enterprise worthwhile.

What's even more exciting is the way in which Global Voices has impacted the lives of our editors, volunteers, and broader community members. We have become a hub through which an amazing group of talented, articulate, and caring people can find fulfillment, global recognition, and community support. Click here to read about how Rising Voices has brought more diverse voices into national and global conversations, and what that has meant for the individuals and communities involved. To get a sense of how amazing our volunteers are, read and listen to some of the blogger profiles posted here.

GV has also had an impact on various blogging communities around the world with whom we have no formal relationship - other than linking to and translating some of their blog posts from time to time. Just one example: Ethan recently described an eye-opening conversation with a young Kyrgyz blogger, Bektour Iskender about the impact some of our work has had in Central Asia.

What might result from a slightly more democratic, open, and participatory global media environment is not clear. At the 2004 meeting, Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan expressed the hope that the spread of online citizen media would make societies more democratic and war more difficult for governments to justify. "Hoder," as he's known on the Internet, has been imprisoned by Ahmedinejad's regime for over a year now, and it's not clear whether expanded contacts between Iranians and Westerners would be a deciding factor in a U.S. decision about whether or not to attack Iran. Writers like Evgeny Morozov argue that contrary to early optimism about the Internet as a democratizing force, dictatorships are figuring out how to use the Internet to solidify their power and suppress dissent - and that the Internet in many countries is dominated by manipulated spin, disinformation and hate. Others like Clay Shirky and Patrick Meier argue that there is still reason for optimism. Still others point out that most of the world's people have more pressing problems - like physical survival - and all of the above including Global Voices' work is irrelevant to them anyway.

Five years ago Ory Okolloh - who went on to found the wildly successful citizen reporting platform Ushahidi - made some comments that are worth revisiting in the context of those debates. Here's how I reported her words at the time:

Kenyan blogger Ory Okolloh doesn't expect Africa to be transformed by blogging any time soon. Bridging the digital divide is perhaps the least of Africa's many problems. Nonetheless, she thinks blogging is important – if not transformative – for the small number of Africans who do blog. "For young people, we have not been heard, we don't have a space in Africa within politics or in other arenas to express ourselves," Okolloh says. "I think it could provide a forum for young people to create their own space. I don't think it will change politics per se or determine an election but I think it can breed community in ways that have not been able to take place before."

Online citizen media is breeding new forms of community at the local, national, and global level. GV has become a loose connective tissue between Ory's Kenyan blogging community and other bloggers around the world who share similar values.

While Global Voices seeks to influence the stories reported by traditional news media - most of which serve specific nations or regions - we are also building a platform for global discourse, and a community of global citizens around that discourse. We use the Internet not to escape from our humanity, but to assert it. We believe individual choices and actions make a difference. Whether the Internet will ultimately empower more than it enslaves depends on whether we take responsibility for our future and act. Building a multi-cultural, multi-lingual community focused on specific projects underpinned by a core set of humanistic values is just one small effort in that direction.

Live Webcast and Chat Tuesday/Wednesday: The Future of Freedom and Control in the Internet Age

On Tuesday at 6pm EST / 2300 GMT / Wednesday 7am China I will be part of a very interesting conversation in New York. There will be very interesting people in the room who will add their expertise. If you can't be in New York in person I hope you will participate online. The event will be webcast and there will be an online webchat so that people around the world can contribute comments and questions. Global Voices Executive Director Ivan Sigal will make sure that your questions and comments are represented in the room. Here are all the details:

© Greg Wood/AFP/Getty Images

OSI Webcast: The Future of Freedom and Control in the Internet Age

Location: OSI-New York
Event Date(s): February 10, 2009
Event Time: 5:30 - 7:30 p.m.
Speaker(s): Isabel Hilton, Rebecca MacKinnon, Evgeny Morozov

The Open Society Institute and Asia Society will host an event with Open Society Fellows Rebecca MacKinnon and Evgeny Morozov that explores the changing landscape of Internet censorship. Special attention will be given to the techniques employed by governments to co-opt and steer online discussions in ideologically convenient directions. Focusing on the specific cases of Russia and China, the panelists will discuss how the strategies and tools of control, manipulation, and censorship have evolved in both countries.

Isabel Hilton, editor of China Dialogue and an Open Society Fellowship selection committee member, will moderate the discussion.

Light refreshments will be provided at a reception from 5:30 - 6:00 p.m. The discussion will begin at 6:00 p.m.

This event is presented in cooperation with the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations.

Live Webcast

This event will be streamed live online. Click here to view.

Photo above: An Amnesty International member covers her mouth during an event in Sydney on July 30, 2008, as part of a campaign to end Internet censorship in China.

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Brazil: The Cybercrimes Bill meets the "Cybercriminal" Camp It's no surprise then that the controversy should grow further when this bill is brought into debate at a huge cyberculture meeting. Daniel Duende joined the crowds of bit-torrent-using p2p-addicted geeks who attended the debate at Campus Party.>>Read more Japan: Bloggers respond to new filtering measures Over the past week, Japan's major mobile phone operators have commenced filtering web access on mobile phones contracted to minors (users under 18 years of age), following on legislation introduced in late 2007 and on developments over the last year toward the regulation of "harmful" content. Bloggers respond. >>Read more   Egypt: Erdoğan, Leader of the World Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip has new fans across the Arab world, notably in Egypt where one blogger went on to describe him as the "leader of the world." Another sees fault in Arab leaders who are not standing up for the Palestinian cause. >>Read more   More posts on Global Voices today... Brazil: "The police only advance when Globo [TV] is live" Croatia: Changing Eminent Domain for a Golfing Gain Cuba: A Look at Sports Blogs Italy Seethes over Brazil's Extradition Refusal Paraguay: Loofah and Plastic makes a home Contact us if you would like to learn more about becoming a Global Voices author or translator.  Sincerely,   Deborah Dilley, Digest Editor Global Voices Online Stichting Global Voices | Strawinskylaan 3105 | Amsterdam | 1077 ZX | Netherlands

Live Blog and Live Chat: Media as Global Diplomat

This is the live blog for Media as Global Diplomat, an event starting at 9am EST in Washington, D.C., organized by the U.S. Institute of Peace. Click here for the live webcast and to participate in a live chat. Be sure to log in if you want to identify yourself. We will be feeding comments from the chat into the discussion. You can also participate via Twitter if you use the hashtag #usip.