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?

Technorati Tags: jamaica, global voices, outreach, prison, blogging, caribbean

Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices, has just announced another round of microgrant funding for citizen media outreach projects. Receive up to US$5,000 for projects designed to teach citizen media skills to “communities that are poorly positioned to discover and take advantage of tools like blogging, video-blogging, and podcasting on their own”.

Read all about it here.

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.” 

This morning, my appreciation for skin is further vindicated by a post from Ethan, who’s liveblogging up a storm from the Pop!Tech 2007 conference in Camden, Maine (here’s the full list of livebloggers):

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.

“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.

[A version of this entry with a slightly different text was cross-posted at Global Voices]

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.

 

 Anti-smelter Activism meets the Internet [8:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Some useful links:

No Smelters in T&T web site
Rights Action Group blog
Smelta Karavan web site
Saving Iceland - web site of anti-smelter allies in Iceland

Portrait of Atillah by caribbeanfreephoto
Other images courtesy Attillah Springer

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 Voices colleague Amira 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.

I’ve just posted episode #5 of the Global Voices show. Take a listen:

 

 Global Voices Show #5 (AAC format) [16:51m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Global Voices Show #5 (MP3): Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Technorati Tags: global voices, podcast

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.”

We’ll see about that.

From Global Voices:

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.

(Image of the new GV web site by bopuc)

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.

One of my colleagues mentioned that we’d received a submission from “somebody pretending to be a dog”. “No,” I thought. “It couldn’t be. . . .” But sure enough, it was. She even had the nerve to blog about it. Sigh.

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).

- MP3 (15:12 min; 10.5MB)

- Enhanced AAC (15:12 min; 7.7MB) with embedded images and links. For iTunes and owners of later model iPods

- Mono MP3 (15:12 min; 3.5MB) - smaller file suitable for low-bandwidth users

Yesterday I put together an article for Global Voices on the international blogosphere’s reaction to the Apple iPhone — check it out here.

Further to my earlier post about the Reuters Newsmaker event on November 9 (this Thursday), I’m happy to announce that two Caribbean citizens (two Trinidadians, incidentally) will be among the featured bloggers at the event: Attillah Springer, wearing her Rights Action Group T&T hat, and Karel McIntosh, who maintains the Caribbean Public Relations weblog (see their bios at the Reuters event page) will be seeding the discussion with provocative commentary via their blogs and very likely on the live chat as well.

Rebecca MacKinnon has just posted an announcement for the event over at Global Voices, encouraging bloggers to tag their posts with “CSR” and participate in the live chat, and also emphasising a point I’d touched on in my earlier post:

Your participation will bring some badly-needed perspectives from developing countries and non-Western nations.

Your participation is especially important because if you click on the event web page, you will see that the panel of speakers is, well, not exactly the most geographically, economically, or ethnically diverse panel we’ve ever seen - to put it mildly.

I see my pal Jeremy Taylor, enviably on the ball as usual, has already posted “The Responsible Executive’s Manifesto“, and I’m sure many of you out there have plenty to say on the subject as well.

So if you’re planning on blogging on corporate social responsibility or related subjects over these next few days, please tag your posts with “CSR” (or send me an e-mail and I’ll have your blog added to the reblog feed that appears on the Reuters page). And please join us this Thursday, November 9 at 6:30pm EST (7:30pm Atlantic Time / 23:30 GMT) for the live chat.

As you probably know, Global Voices receives the bulk of its funding from Reuters. In return, Global Voices attempts to add value to Reuters’s offerings by participating in events like the Reuters Newsmaker series.

Global Voices plays a couple of different roles in the Newsmaker events. GV offers Reuters a “reblog” feed (aggregated feed of blogs selected on the basis of theme) which they use on the page featuring the event. GV also usually hosts an Internet relay chat (IRC) discussion to generate questions and dialogue which is relayed to the room by an on-the-spot GV representative. As you can see from the report filed by GV founder Rebecca MacKinnon after the last Newsmaker with Ted Turner, GV makes no bones about criticising the form and/or content of these events.

On November 9, Reuters will be holding a Newsmaker event on the theme of corporate responsibility. As the web site says: “Corporate responsibility is increasingly important in today’s global landscape, with companies taking a greater role in developing communities, working to reduce poverty and addressing the health of our planet.” You may also notice that, while the discussion purports to be global in scope, the composition of the panel doesn’t necessarily reflect that. For this event, GV will be feeding Reuters the usual reblog feed, and Rebecca will be in the room once more relaying questions from the IRC discussion and — one hopes — bringing an international perspective to the discussion.

So I’m hoping those of you who read this can help by doing any or all of the following:

- writing about issues relating to corporate responsibility (and I’m aware of how broad a topic this is) around the time of the event, and, if you like, being one of our “featured bloggers”, complete with thumbnail photo and bio on the Reuters site. (I should also say that this particular reblog will be moderated by hand, so only posts relevant to the topic will appear on the site. In other words, you can continue to write about Alcoa and your cat)

- participating in the IRC discussion (non-techies, please don’t shy away from this — we provide a very straightforward web-based interface at http://irc.globalvoicesonline.org/chat/irc.cgi)

- spreading the word about the event

- passing me information about any other bloggers you think should be included in the discussion

Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any further questions or comments — and if you wish to be a “featured blogger”, please get in touch with me by Friday 27 October (and yes, I know this is obscenely short notice).

Thanks in advance to those of you who might consider being a part of this.

Today, in a fine article by my Ukrainian colleague Veronica Khoklova over at Global Voices, I come across this:

This must be a bit of an exaggeration - even though some of the 300,000-plus Russian users’ accounts will surely land in Trinidad & Tobago’s blogosphere, as a result of the ongoing virtual exodus flash mob: “Let’s make this small but proud state the leader of the world Internet!”

According to Veronica’s piece, a faction of Russian LiveJournal users is emigrating to a “virtual Trinidad & Tobago” in protest at LiveJournal’s partnering with a Russian internet company. Why T&T, I wonder. This has to be Soca Warriors fallout.

If these LJ users are smart, though, they’d keep it virtual, as we have our fair share of crapola going on here as well.