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.

- 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,” tweeted Richard 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.

- Richard Morse’s Twitter coverage of the aftermath remains outstanding. The series of tweets he posted in the hours after the earthquake make for some heartbreaking reading, but the simple fact that he’s stayed on top of the situation, devoting his time and energy to describing the situation as he sees and hears it from his vantage point at the Oloffson, fielding requests for help and information, has been inspiring. And Morse’s tweets have flavour. Compare Morse’s “I saw a collapsed building today..it may have been 8 or 9 stories.it looked like 8 or 9 pieces of bread one on top of the other..survivors?”, with CNN reporter Ivan CNN’s “the scenes I saw today were absolutely heartbreaking. These people are desperate”, and tell me who’s doing a better job. Follow others tweeting from on the ground in Haiti via http://twitter.com/georgiap/live-from-haiti.

- 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.

- Last but not least, Global Voices, my employer and second family. The community really rallied to the cause today, and we’ve set up a special coverage page for Haiti with links to Global Voices posts and resources like the Haiti Ushahidi map.

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.

Thanks in advance!

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.

Write your own post supporting Global Voices Advocacy (or your charity of choice) by following the instructions at http://www.zemanta.com/bloggingforacause/.

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 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!

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).

Happy holidays!

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.

Visit Voices without Votes at http://voiceswithoutvotes.org/.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

Technorati Tags: global voices, podcast

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.

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.

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)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.