I noted in an earlier post that Haiti was among the countries that we at Global Voices have generally found it difficult to cover. Before the earthquake, citizen and social media activity inside Haiti was sporadic. Since January 12, however, we’ve published 24 fine articles focused directly on the citizen media activity taking place within Haitian borders, dozens of links to Haiti-related content and several more articles highlighting reactions to the earthquake from countries like Dominican Republic, Japan, Bangladesh, Brazil, Russia and Guatemala.
My role in the coverage has been quite minimal. After posting the first article, setting up a Twitter list of people posting from the ground in Haiti and a Google group to streamline the lively conversation that began almost instantly, the team grabbed the reins. I participated in the discussions and shared the occasional link, but it’s Janine, Nicholas, Marc and Fabienne who’ve really taken the Haiti story and run with it. Even as I sit here in Port-au-Prince trying to figure things out, I’m depending on my colleagues to help me make sense of the reams that have written about the country in the past two weeks. I’m very grateful to them, both for their outstanding work, and for making me—yet again—so proud of the work we do.
Have spent most of today following the aftermath of yesterday’s 7.0 earthquake in Haiti. A few observations and links:
- Many people there, concerned about the continuing aftershocks, will be sleeping outdoors tonight, some in public areas like the Place Jeremie. “We’ll sleep in the driveway,” tweetedRichard Morse, the hotelier and musician (he’s the front man of the band RAM). And I’m assuming that by “we” he also means the guests at the Hotel Oloffson. It rained briefly in Port-au-Prince earlier this evening. Keeping my fingers crossed it doesn’t rain again tonight.
- Not having learned Creole is a long-standing regret that resurfaced today in listening to HaitiPal, whose video stream has been online all day, broadcasting from Haiti in Creole and French.
- A reminder (in French) of the toll catastrophes often take on a nation’s culture, in this case, its music.
- My friend Marvin Chéry in Miami has set up http://www.koneksyon.com/ to help people locate friends and family in Haiti.
- Natural disasters don’t just paralyse geographic locales, they can paralyse donors as well. Who to donate to? Are the funds going to reach the people it’s intended to help? Etc, etc. My friends at MEP Publishers have published a list of agencies raising funds both internationally and locally in Trinidad. MEP Publishers would do well to add Partners In Health, which was recommended by Nikipedia, who also passed on the link to the Foundry Haiti Fund.
My Ghanaian blogger friend Mac-Jordan Degadjor, who so graciously showed me around during my visit to Accra in October, has been given the chance to go to Copenhagen to cover the UN climate change talks there this month. He’s received a stipend from Denmark, but it isn’t sufficient to cover the entire cost of the trip. So a few of us have got together to raise funds for Mac-J.
Mac-Jordan at Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, this past October
At the time of posting we’ve raised US$290 of the $1,200 he needs, so only $910 to go now. Would you please consider helping out by donating via the ChipIn widget above? (If that doesn’t work, try the ChipIn page). Anyone with a credit card can donate.
As many of you know, I work for Global Voices, so I have a vested interest in following the instructions that Solana posted here. But I also believe passionately in the work being done by Global Voices Advocacy (GVA), the section of our organisation that seeks to defend free speech online.
While Trinidad and Tobago’s press freedom record pales in comparison with that of many of the countries which feature regularly in GVA’s pages, recent events in this country suggest that we shouldn’t be taking this freedom for granted. In November of last year, the Hon. Patrick Manning, prime minister of this nation, paid a visit to a radio station that resulted in the suspension of two commentators who had said things on air he didn’t like. And yesterday the news broke that Kevin Baldeosingh, a columnist at the Newsday, one of the country’s three dailies, was dismissed from his job at the paper, allegedly on account of a letter, published in the Trinidad Express on May 7, in which he exposed a Catholic priest as a plagiarist. A Catholic priest, moreover, who had just been appointed by the President to lead the Trinidad and Tobago’s Integrity Commission.
That the priest in question admitted his sins and stepped down (recalling, in the process, that the church’s Canon Law would have prohibited him from accepting the position anyway) thereby validating Baldeosingh’s claims, appears to be immaterial to the powers (Newsday alone? Newsday egged on by other parties? Who?) who are now attempting to silence him. The more important point, however, is that Baldeosingh was dismissed from his job for doing—regardless of where he happened to be doing it—what journalists are supposed to do, i.e. investigate a matter of public interest and present the information to the public. I imagine that Baldeosingh would have preferred to publish the information in his own paper and earn money in the process, rather than in a rival publication’s Letters to the Editor section; I also imagine that there must be a good reason he did not do so.
There are numerous writings on freedom of expressions from which I could insert an excerpt here, but I’ll quote from the one I happen to be engaged with at the moment—Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word, portions of which I’ve been receiving in installments from the ingenious DailyLit, yet another one of my daily obstacles to personal productivity that nevertheless enrich my life. This is from the essay by Toni Morrison, who is also the book’s editor, though the emphasis is mine:
We all know nations that can be identified by the flight of writers from their shores. These are regimes whose fear of unmonitored writing is justified because truth is trouble. It is trouble for the warmonger, the torturer, the corporate thief, the political hack, the corrupt justice system, and for a comatose public. Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world’s resources. The alarm, the disquiet, writers raise is instructive because it is open and vulnerable, because if unpoliced it is threatening. Therefore the historical suppression of writers is the earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow.
And now for the obligatory line, as per Solana’s post: I vote for Global Voices Advocacy, because freedom of expression, online and elsewhere, is a right that we often value insufficiently until it’s taken away from us.
This blog post is part of Zemanta’s “Blogging For a Cause” (http://www.zemanta.com/bloggingforacause/) campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about.
The year before I left Trinidad for university in the USA, I spent hours on end at the United States Information Service (now called the Public Affairs Section) library on Marli Street, boning up on Dreiser and Faulkner, Updike and Bellow, Welles and Cassavetes, filling in the gaps left by a British post-colonial education and attempting to add a veneer of sophistication to an experience of US popular culture cobbled together from a couple of local television channels and visits to the cinemas of Port of Spain, plus the odd visit to the country itself. In using the services of the USIS, I was engaging with one aspect of US public diplomacy, the means by which the US as a nation “seeks to promote [its] national interest. . . through understanding, informing and influencing foreign audiences.”
The countries of the English-speaking Caribbean are hardly the United States’ most challenging interlocutors, especially when compared with the Middle East, China, the former Soviet Union, Cuba or the country that lies just a few miles west of where I sit writing this (Venezuela, in case you’re wondering). But our relationship with the the US isn’t a simple one, as any Caribbean national who’s ever applied for a visa knows only too well.
That our gaze wanders so easily and longingly northward; that our countries are commonly considered transshipment points for drugs; that deportees from US prisons are contributing to the increase in our crime rates; that most of Trinidad and Tobago’s natural gas is purchased by the US; that Venezuela lies across the water just a few valleys west of where I sit writing this; that I can write this, then publish it instantly to the internet: all of this makes us important to the US in the way that small, unimportant places can be. “Important”, meaning, of course, “strategic”.
Because small and strategic is not an unproblematic combination, an event taking place on Tuesday 3 February, 2009 (tomorrow, in this part of the world) in Washington D.C. should be of interest to many of us in the Caribbean (not that anything in the programme is specific to us–but we’re used to that). The event is called Media as Global Diplomat, and it’s designed around the premise that
We are in a disruptive period in media, the result of an explosion in digital distribution, social networking, and user generated content. And with disruption comes opportunity. This summit, moderated by Ted Koppel and entitled Media as Global Diplomat, is a forum to ask key public and private sector leaders how the United States can best use media to reinvigorate its public diplomacy strategy and international influence in order to strengthen efforts to build a more peaceful world.
The event is also a response to the Obama administration’s promise to distinguish itself from its predecessor by taking a different approach to public diplomacy, one focused on listening instead lecturing.
How to participate? I won’t be physically present at the event, of course, but my Global Voices colleagues Ivan Sigal and Rebecca MacKinnon will, and I’ll be tuning in to the live webcast and chat which Ivan will be moderating and parsing for questions and comments to be passed on to Ted Koppel.
Rebecca will be liveblogging at http://rconversation.blogs.com/, which, given her fierce intelligence, outspokenness and sharp wit, not to mention her skepticism about the event’s actual goals, is bound be both informative and entertaining. “It’s unclear to me,” Rebecca says, “whether they really just want to explore how to use digital media to get the world to like the U.S. better – or whether they’re truly open to a paradigm shift: moving from broadcast “messaging” mode to conversation mode, in which the U.S. would be listening and learning as much as informing others.”
Rebecca also notes the dearth of new media vibe on the program “…my initial reaction is that the only panelists who might be considered “new media” people are Google’s Andrew McLaughlin and Mika Salmi of MTV’s Digital Networks. And they work for huge Internet and media companies. No citizen media or grassroots voices are speaking on the panels at all. Lots of “old media” and/or establishment foreign policy elites. Will there really be any new ideas coming from this crowd? Hard to know. Maybe you can help thorough your remote participation?”
Maybe you can. Let’s get some Caribbean spirit into that chat room. Visit this page for the event schedule, and the live chat will be taking place here. See you online tomorrow!
If you’re like me, there’s been no shortage of appeals for donations landing in your inbox this month. And now I’d like to add another: please support Global Voices.
As many of you know, I’ve been involved with Global Voices since 2005, and now work for the organisation full-time. At the beginning of the year we left the safety of our birthplace, the Berkman Center at Harvard University, and struck out on our own as an independent nonprofit. We’ve done some astounding work this year, reporting on and aggregating citizen media coverage of events like the Mumbai attacks and World AIDS Day. Our Outreach section has helped scores of people in communities throughout the world gain access to citizen media skills that we hope they’ll pass on to hundreds more, while Global Voices Advocacy has worked tirelessly on issues around online freedom of speech. And we’re now translating our content into 21 languages. Our Caribbean coverage has grown as well, thanks to the efforts of editor Janine Mendes-Franco, whose team now includes authors from the French Caribbean and Jamaica.
As ’08 draws to a close, however, we, like every other organisation in the world, find ourselves working hard to secure the funding that will ensure our future ability to do the job of amplifying stories and images from ordinary people across the globe who use the internet to communicate with their fellow world citizens.
So if you believe in our mission and would like to help promote the diversity of voices and points of view that citizen media makes possible, please consider supporting Global Voices with a financial donation. And even if you can’t, then do help us spread the word by flying one of our adorable badges (or one of our more serious ones).
One web site I’ve been checking regularly for information on this year’s US election race is Voices without Votes. I checked in at the site after After Barack Obama announced his choice of Joe Biden as a running mate and also after Michelle Obama’s speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Today and tomorrow, I’ll be keeping an eye on Voices without Votes to get the buzz on the speeches by Hillary and Bill Clinton, and next week I’ll be following the commentary there about the Republican National Convention. And yes, I, too, was wondering what had got into reggaeton star Daddy Yankee, so was interested to hear what his compatriots thought about his endorsement of John McCain.
Commissioned by Thomson Reuters, one of Global Voices‘ long-standing sponsors, and run by a team of Global Voices contributors and friends headed by Bahraini Amira Al-Hussaini, Voices without Votes tracks what bloggers the world over (including the Caribbean) are saying about this election race that has so transfixed the world, providing a critical counterpoint to the reporting in the mainstream media.
The Global Voices team’s Miami headquarters in Coconut Grove
The first sign was the failing wifi signal, accessible, after a while, only to people with the last name “Avila“. Then the power went completely. We eventually located the fuse box, and toggled every switch we could find. No go.
For relaxation, members of the Global Voices team helped Outreach Director David “Oso” Sasaki with his laundry
We’ve recently established, however, that the power outage was in fact south Florida-wide, and wasn’t the fault of the eight Global Voices editors and authors present in the city for WeMedia Miami 2008 and the eight laptops, the washing machine in the process of laundering 98% of Oso‘s wardrobe, the coffee maker and the two ceiling fans going full tilt at the team’s Miami headquarters in Coconut Grove.
Phew.
Renata, one of the Avilas who had internet access till the bitter end
Over at Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices, David Sasaki has just announced the latest round of Rising Voices grant recipients. Among them is the Rising Voices project’s first Caribbean grantee: “Diary of an Inmate”, a Jamaica-based project which will attempt to counter the veneration of badboys and gang leaders by training prison inmates to blog and podcast. The project’s founder, Kevin Wallen, who has been doing exemplary work among inmates in Jamaica’s penal institutions through an organisation called (Students Expressing Truth), outlined the project as follows:
Through blogging, inmates will be able to tell their stories. They will be able to paint a realistic picture of life behind bars and the consequences of crime. Currently, Jamaica’s music and media idolize the ‘badman’ or ’shotta’ and portray as role models those who have been incarcerated. Many of our youths now think that prison is a ‘cool’ place to be, until they themselves are faced with the harsh truth. The Diary of an Inmate blog will allow all Jamaicans to learn about the realities of Jamaica’s overcrowded prison system with the hope that this will counteract the false ideas implanted by the media.
Congrats to Kevin and the “Diary of an Inmate” project. I look forward to seeing the results of this interesting experiment. And to the rest of you potential Caribbean applicants: what are you waiting on?
Brainy and dirty-minded is a lethal combination, as I (being able to lay claim only to the latter) discovered when my friend Judy pounced on the quite innocent Facebook status message I posted yesterday (see image above) and accused me (publicly!) of autodermaphilia.
I truly and honestly believe the body’s largest organ to be a beautiful and marvelous thing, and I’m not alone. The BBC agrees with me, as does the US News and World Report‘s Health Editor, who says, perhaps a bit gender-insensitively, that “man has never made anything better as sensor, shield, and communicator.”
Anthropologist Nina Jablonski praises us as an audience for being, “an exceptional and alert group of primates.” (I will be more exceptional and alert with a bit more coffee.) She invites us to begin her talk by being quite primate and spend twenty seconds touching the skin of someone else in the room. She’s unsurprised when many people don’t participate in this activity - we’ve moved away from this behavior in human society, but it’s incredibly important to our primate ancestors.
Humans encounter the world primarily through our vision, followed by our touch, hearing and, least, from our sense of smell. There’s a huge amount of our brain dedicated to processing touch information. She points out that our skin is quite remarkable - it’s very sensitive, mostly naked, comes in a range of colors, is often sweaty, can be decorated and adorned.
“We gather an enormous amount of information about our environment from our skin,” especially the skin of our hands. Hands are equipped with an amazing range of nerve endings that interpret pain, deep touch, temperature.
So there you have it, Judy. Science says I’m not a pervert, but merely a self-decorating ape.
In the pages of CFR she’s known as “the Dread”, but to most other people Atillah Springer is a Trinidadian journalist, activist and blogger and a member of a protest movement which, earlier this year, succeeded in driving the aluminium industry giant Alcoa out of a community in rural Trinidad where they had proposed to establish a smelter under somewhat dubious circumstances.
In this podcast I talk with Atillah about the movement’s use of the Internet in their organising activities.
I’m in Louisville, Kentucky to attend the Idea Festival. Arrived here yesterday evening a bit dazed after the 11.5 hour journey (via Houston) from Trinidad, and so far have only ventured within a couple of blocks of the hotel to have dinner in Fourth Street, a pedestrianised entertainment hub lined with the likes of TGIF and the Hard Rock Café and where having a huge and blinding neon sign is evidently part of the zoning guidelines. My Global VoicescolleagueAmira Al Hussaini and I had a very good dinner, however, at an establishment specialising in bourbon, where I had my first ever mint julep. I suspect it won’t be my last either–they’re not as good as mojitos, but close.
On the way here I also had my second experience of being recognised as the person who does CFR, which was rather shocking, as I’ve begun to think that I barely qualify as a blogger any more, far less as a podcaster. The recogniser was Maurini Strub, a Trinidadian transplanted to Detroit who tells me she has a neglected blog on Vox (don’t we all) but didn’t offer the URL. Thanks, Maurini, for making me feel like I’m still part of the blogosphere.
I landed here around 8pm yesterday evening, so my impressions of the city are vague, but the feature of the landscape that made the strongest impression as we glided over the city were the bridges spanning the Ohio River. Hence the choice of the photo above, which was taken from my 17th-floor hotel room. I believe that’s the George Rogers Clark Memorial Bridge. (More photos will be posted here, though no need to rush there just yet, as I’ve only posted two so far).
Off now to see what the Idea Festival is all about, and to find some eye drops, as I’ve been plagued with hay fever ever since I landed on US soil. Could I be allergic to America?
Colours of Notting Hill: Over at Global Voices, Nikipedia has posted a selection of photos from this year’s Notting Hill Carnival celebrations in London.
The Manning blog: The Prime Minister of Trinidad & Tobago is blogging! Would love to know who’s behind this, but on the other hand, maybe I wouldn’t — knowing who it is might just spoil the fun. Hazel “Breakfusses” Manning chimes in from time to time.
Barbados apartment tragedy: Barbados Free Press posted three lengthy reports (one, two, three) on the collapse of an apartment containing five people into a cave in Brittons Hill, Barbados. According to BFP’s last post, it is “highly unlikely there are survivors”. The latest post had attracted 79 comments when I last checked. Barbados Underground and Pull! Push filed reports as well. YouTube user izellajaouda has posted a video of an eyewitness’s account of the collapse recorded from the local television news, and another video from the Voice of Barbados radio station shows a car being rescued from the site.
Bloggers on the “terror plot”: Over at Global Voices, Nikipedia has posted an article rounding up the reactions from the Trinidadian and Guyanese blogospheres to this weekend’s announcement of a “terror plot” against New York’s JFK International airport allegedly masterminded by three Guyanese and a Trini.
Meanwhile, over at Antilles. . . : Maybe I should have called this the “Nikipedia’s roundups edition” instead. Over at Antilles, the tireless young scribe has posted a roundup of the latest coverage on the Calabash Literary Festival, along with my contribution to his “bedside books” series, prefaced by the following barb: “Georgia Popplewell of Caribbean Free Radio hasn’t written for the CRB in ages, but perhaps her contributing this list–of books she’s taken on her nearly-three-week sojourn in Tobago–is a sign that she’ll soon reappear in our pages.”
Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices, is now accepting project proposals for the first round of microgrant funding of up to $5,000 for new media outreach projects. Ideal applicants will present innovative and detailed proposals to teach citizen media techniques to communities that are poorly positioned to discover and take advantage of tools like blogging, video-blogging, and podcasting on their own.
C’mon Caribbean, let’s get ourselves a piece of this pie.
I spent most of yesterday helping shepherd Global Voices’ massive volume of content across the divide separating the old and new web site designs. Things got rather hair-raising for a while there between 2 and 3pm, as our Montreal-based techmeisters Boris and Jeremy did battle with the various glitches and snafus a transfer like this entails, and Oso (in Oakland, California) and I (here in Trinidad) kept refreshing the pages to see what had disappeared, got erased, weirdly altered or fallen through the cracks.
But it got done. And well. See the splendid result of Boris and Jeremy’s tremendous efforts at Global Voices, and read here about the site’s snazzy new tools and features, which includes some rather astounding maps.
Saturday February 17th 2007, 11:58 pm
Filed under: Global Voices Posted by: Georgia
Nikipedia has been named official judge of the Global Voices Valentine’s Day poetry contest, but there’s also a separate People’s Choice Award that will be determined on the basis of votes. So if you found any of the poems in the competition particularly appealing, you can cast your vote here by midnight PST (GMT -8) on Wednesday 21 February.
You people are right — I need to do more podcasts. Earlier this evening I uploaded the fourth edition of The Global Voices Show. The damn thing took me almost the entire weekend to produce. Nor would I describe it as a technical masterpiece. My podcasting muscles have turned to mush.
Here it is anyway, warts and all (and show notes here).
In the pages of CFR she’s known as “the Dread”, but to most other people Atillah Springer is a Trinidadian journalist, activist and 
I spent most of yesterday helping shepherd Global Voices’ massive volume of content across the divide separating the old and new web site designs. Things got rather hair-raising for a while there between 2 and 3pm, as our Montreal-based techmeisters