Yesterday I put together an article for Global Voices on the international blogosphere’s reaction to the Apple iPhone — check it out here.
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Category Archives: Global Voices
Reuters Newsmaker Event on Corporate Social Responsibility – coming up this Thursday!
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.
Reuters Newsmaker event on Corporate Responsibility – want to participate?
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.
One more link
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.