Environmental reporters under threat

A panel including investigative reporters from from China, Pakistan, Egypt and Haiti as well as free speech advocates from RSF and CPJ was devoted to the threats professional as well as citizen journalists encounter when writing about local environmental issues. Reporters without Borders just have a report out on this, “High-risk subjects: Deforrestation and Pollution”, which provides a good world-wide overview of the issue.

Writing about environmental issues often gets people into conflict with companies and local government, which are in many cases strongly intermingled. A Moroccan activist told me that he keeps his anonymity not out of fear of the government, but because companies would not employ him if they found out about his commitment to preserve the Mediterranean environment. This has been the fate of Egyptian Tamer Mabrouk, who was fired from his job and fined about 5.000 Euros for blogging about his employer’s illegal waste-dumping.

Liu Jianqiang, probably China’s most influential investigative journalist, told a similar story. His reports on environmental issues such as genetically manipulated seeds have attracted a lot of attention. Prime minister Wen Jiabao himself is said to have stopped work on the “Tiger Leaping Gorge” dam when Liu broke news that it lacked official approval. Yet he lost his job at the prestigious Southern Weekly over an unauthorised interview with the Washington Post – an excuse to get rid of a journalist who had angered influential companies and local government with his stories, Liu says.

While CPJ’s Frank Smyth told the harrowing story of Russian newspaper editor Mikhail Beketov, who was nearly beaten to death for reporting critically on plans to build a commercial centre in a forrest area, RSF’s Jean-François Julliard warned that “economic pressure is a strong threat”. Newspapers are facing losses in ad sales if they write articles critical of major local companies, and journalists or bloggers are living in fear to lose their jobs.

Besides violence and economic pressure, legal procedures are another way to bar environmental reporters from doing their work. Smyth reported that Lucio Flavio Pinto, founder of the Brazilian magazine Jornal Pessoal, did not dare to attend the Global Media Forum. Pinto is currently facing more than 30 lawsuits brought against him by companies. He does not want to leave Brazil out of fear that courts could rule against him in one of these lawsuits in his absence.

To avoid these threats, Liu advised his colleagues to fact-check their reports with the utmost accuracy so as to not allow their opponents to legitimately challenge their work. Rina Saeed Khan, from Pakistan, “as a developing country journalist, you have to make as many international links as possible”, saying that international pressure was important to free persecuted journalists.

My German readers may also be interested in an article I wrote for Spreeblick about this issue, “Wer über Umweltschutz schreibt, lebt gefährlich”.

Listen to the session’s audio recording on SoundCloud.

Two projects on solutions to climate change

One panel, which discussed “covering climate protection and possible solutions”, showcased two interesting media projects with a positive outlook on climate change. One is run by journalists, one by activists. I’ll spare you the discussion on whether there is a difference between journalism and activism (and if yes, what is it?).

Global Ideas, produced by Deutsche Welle, is devoted to “showcasing people & projects from around the world taking action against climate change.” Their weekly six-minute videos feature entrepreneurs mostly in the energy sector (e.g. “Biomass briquettes in India”. All the content is available in five languages (English, German, Spanish, Arabic and Chinese). Their communication efforts on Twitter are not really successful yet, but they say they forward any request they get to the respective organization.

OurWorld 2.0, a UN University project based in Tokyo, “reports on and analyzes innovations in order to inspire people to learn” in four categories – climate, oil, food and biodiversity. It’s a webzine (about one profound article every two days) with occasional videos produced at quite a high quality. Their world-wide aim is visible in a map showing the location of the webzine’s subjects. OurWorld 2.0 is published in both English and Japanese.

Listen to the session’s audio recording on SoundCloud.

Ushahidi wins the Best of Blogs award

Crisis mapping tool Ushahidi was awarded the prize as “best weblog” at this year’s BOBs. I must say I don’t really understand why – their blog is very informative, but to me it seems as if the jury rather chose Ushahidi as a platform and organization. Nevertheless, it certainly is a very interesting project.

Erik Hersman said that while the technology behind Ushahidi wasn’t new, its use is. While “technology will always be only be ten percent of the solution”, these ten percent allowed them to “disrupt the status quo” in the aid sector, which he called the “huminatarian-industrial complex” during the press conference. Those of you following Ushahidi more closely might notice that Erik perceives the importance of these 10% vastly different from his colleague Ory Okolloh, who recently cautioned: “Don’t get too jazzed up! Ushahidi is only 10% of solution.”

Finally, some general words on the Global Media Forum

All in all, I really enjoyed Deutsche Welle’s conference. Not so much because of the panels – I only managed to see a few – but because of the great participants. The conference had an extremely multicultural atmosphere, aided by the attendance of Deutsche Welle’s international staff. I finally had the opportunity to meet Jillian C. York, who won the best English blog award for her project Talk Morocco, a blog featuring several well-known Moroccan bloggers’ articles in monthly single-topic “forums” (check out their latest edition on citizen media, including a highly critical article by my friend Mahdi).

But I was also disappointed about some things I heard. On the “dangers” panel, Jean-François Julliard did not caution to admit that in the field of environmental reporting in non-free countries, bloggers are more in advance than traditional journalists. But other panels, focusing on the role of journalists in times of climate change, were full of the ignorance of professionals, who kept up the image of journalists as reporters of nothing but the matter of fact, which prompted a Norwegian colleague to say that “this kind of objectivism has survived only in journalism”.

Alex Kirby, a veteran BBC environmental reporter, moderated the first session I attended, entitled “Who will fuel our future? A fundamental debate between rivalling energy sources.” In the beginning, Kirby said to the announcer: “You called me a gentleman twice, but I am a journalist and these two don’t go together.” Indeed, I twittered, a journalist should court nobody. Yet the session proved to be an advertising space for such controversial companies as the Desertec project, with almost no criticism.

In fact, Deutsche Telekom’s Ignacio Campino dared to propose that journalists team up with companies to “educate” the “customers” on the issue of sustainability. All this at a broadcaster’s conference. Do I even have to ask to which level journalism must have degenerated to make this shameful proposal possible?

All the sessions are up as audio recordings on SoundCloud.

Evgeny Morozov, the man who coined the term “Twitter revolution” and, despite that, has often been called a “cyper-pessimist” was one of the first speakers of the event. And while I often find Evgeny’s argumentation to be too polemic, sometimes even Andrew Keen’esque in it’s pessimism, the man has some very valid points.

In the times of the GDR, the Stasi supported a huge network of “inofficial contributors” who were coerced – through threats or monetary rewards – into spying on their peers. Nowadays, this is no longer necessary, says Morozov. Authoritarian regimes can instead discover activists’ networks by looking them up on Facebook. In my eyes, the grandchild of the Stasi is China’s “50 cent party”: An enormous horde of people paid for spreading propaganda on the ‘Net.

There has been a change in the role of access to information. Publishing information has become so cheap that it is the new default, even in environments where this would previously have been a “no-go”. And the regimes react – not by suppressing information, but by discrediting the sender. What does this mean for the importance of freedom of information?

Daniel Schmitt of Wikileaks seems to base his work on the conviction that transparency leads to a better world. It’s some kind of a journalistic determinism. Global Voices’ David Sasaki questions the role of investigative reporting: “Is it really true that traditional journalism minimizes corruption?”

For Jeff Jarvis, that’s not even a question. “We now must defend the public,” he says, “because what is public is owned by the public, and that’s us.” And “if you cut down from the public, you steal from all of us. [...] If you don’t share your knowledge, you’re being anti-social.”

The evening before, Christian Heller fought privacy at taz’ MediaTuesday event. Data security, he says, can be used against us. It “doesn’t necessary protect the weak from the powerful”. David Sasaki says that more and more raw data is put out on the ‘Net and it’s up to us to put it in context. Christian Heller wants to free information from its context. He calls this a plea in support of postmodernism.

Sokari Ekine, who talked about mobile activism in Africa, in an interview that we did said that revolutions are made by people, not by technology. Sami ben Gharbia wonders why media attention often focuses more on the technological development than on the issue, taking much-hyped crisis mapping tool Ushahidi as an example.

Iranian women right activist Farnaz Seifi tells me in an interview that the Iranian people “don’t need any other help rather than [free access to information]“. Evgeny Morozov explains to netzpolitik.org that the power of information is a myth stemming from America’s efforts during the cold war. Americans, he says, still believe that the US won that conflict – because of Radio Free Europe.

But he’s united again with Seifi when it comes to Western donors supporting projects in foreign countries. Their money disengages genuine activists, he claims. “I personally do not agree with lots of the projects inside the country with foreign countries’ budget”, says Seifi. “This is our internal fight. We have to do it ourselves.”

Kyrgyzstan: Revolution, social media, activism through contemporary art

The event was attended by a small group from revolution-shaken Kyrgyzstan. Tolkun Umaraliev highlighted Central Asia-centered group blog NewEurasia and social media news site and blogging platform Kloop.kg has valuable sources during the coup d’état. Eventhough only 14% of the population have access to the Internet, Tolkun sees citizen journalism in an important position.

He also told the story of Timur Toktonaliev, a 16 years old blogger who is the youngest journalist ever accredited to the Kyrgyz parliament. Working after school, he reports from the ongoings at the parliament. Readers of his blog can also pose questions to their deputees, which Timur will then try to get answered in interviews with the politicians.

Nellya Dzhamanbaeva of ArtEast told me about how they use contemporary art to raise awareness for social issues. While censors – mostly older people – did not understand contemporary art, the young audience they aim at would get the message, she told me.

As for the current situation in Kyrgyzstan, both Tolkun and Nellya seemed unsure what to expect. Visibly shocked by the second bloody revolution within five years, Nellya told that she doesn’t see a coup d’état as the right way for the country. Tolkun, while praising interim president Rosa Otunbajewa as a “very intelligent person”, said he wasn’t sure what to expect for the future, as the promises of the new leadership could turn out to be populism again, as were those of the revolutionaries of 2005′s “tulip revolution”.

Citizen-proposed legislation in Thailand

Niw Wong spoke about her work at iLaw.or.th, a Thai website that aims to promote citizen-proposed legislation. Since 2007, Thailand’s constitutions requires only 10.000 signatures to bring citizen-proposed legislation into parliament (first introduced through the constitution of 1997, 50.000 signatures were required before). iLaw.or.th collects ideas by citizens and helps them in drafting valid proposals.

Citizen-proposed legislation is, in my eyes, a great concept. Yet no draft has made it into the parliament since the opportunity was introduced more than ten years ago. Niw points out the complex process required for supporting a proposal as a key problem, which includes providing an ID card at a local . A more simple process, probably similar to Germany’s ePetition system, could make it easier for people to support drafts, thus making citizen-proposed legislation an effective tool for participatory politics.

Preparing for violent elections in Uganda

Next year, Uganda, a country that has not seen a single peaceful change of government in 48 years, will have only the second multi-party elections in its history. Gerald Karuhanga of the Justice and Development Council fears that the country will experience the same post-election violence that in 2009 left thousands of Kenyans dead.

An initiative called “PRESERVE” aims to reduce and document violent events before, during and after the elections through regional workshops, information dissemination, debates, public dialogues and “research based advocacy”, mostly trying to reach out to youth leagues, but also police and women’s organisations.

As tools for information dissemination, Gerald named mostly broadcasting tools such as TV, radio and newspapers. Asked about the use of mobile phones, he presented two ways of using mobile phones for information dissemination, namely through sending out SMS and voice mails. The latter is especially interesting because through voice messages, the huge illiterate part of the population (32%) could possibly be reached as well.

Still I think that mobile phones could also be used as a back channel, i.e. for information gathering. E.g. Ushahidi was developed as a crisis mapping tool during Kenya’s after-election riots, and in Ghana activists have used mobile phones to monitor elections and document possible evidence of vote rigging, one of the stated goals of PRESERVE.

Hip hop spreads political messages in Africa

Parker Mah held an enlightening talk about political hip hop in Africa. “Hip hop is booming in Africa”, he said, asking “why hip hop and why Africa?”. I can only recommend you to check out his presentation on Prezi. The slides are mostly self-descriptive and contain most of the content of Parker’s talk, including some great examples of African conscious rap.

As a personal educated guess, I have made up my own answer to Parker’s question. In the West, for several hundred years we have been used to see political criticism presented in written form (i.e. newspapers). Africa, on the other hand, has a longstanding history of oral information dissemination (e.g. Mali’s griot tradition). So hip hop, in my eyes, can be seen as continuing this tradition.

Hungarian elections

Visiting Hungary on election day (April 11), I got a devastating image of a democracy where young people see no (liberal) politicians they can trust in as an antisemitic, antiziganic, neofascist party – Jobbik – gets nearly as much votes as the currently governing social democrats. My German readers may be interested in my article for Spreeblick where I describe my impressions.

That’s why a big share of time was reserved for presentations for individual projects. Many portals are dedicated to bringing more transparency into parlamentarians’ work. Services such as OpenParlamento from Italy and NosDéputés from France analyze the activities of representatives.

NosDeputés tags speeches of congressmen. This way the discussion around a certain topic can be summarized. The site TheyWorkForYou.com on the other hand lets users link videos from the English House of Commons to text from the Hansard, which includes notes from the speeches that are not verbatim.

Thereby the site is one of the few that let users become actively involved themselves to establish transparency. In a session on “action-based sites” it became apparent that still most e-democracy portals are mere services for citizens and rarely offer opportunities to them to take action themselves.

One important task for such participatory sites named in the session was that they have to take up emotions immediately as they evolve – e.g. as someone has to pay a bribe. Therefore it is important that services are structured accordingly. One could use the Obama iPhone app as an example, where the first option was “call friends” – which is the most obvious action to be taken with a mobile phone.

Rob McKinnon of TheyWorkForYou.co.nz made a point in his lecture that it is important to establish transparency apart from big politics. He used the concept of a “web of power” to show that there is a lot of influence located within companies – probably even more than within parliaments.

Therefore it needed more projects that focus e.g. on making lobbyism more transparent, McKinnon said. The goal is to “disentangle” the various circles of influence – politics, media, money. One example for that is journalisted.com, a site that collects information on journalists.

But there was criticism towards those efforts for more transparency as well. Tobies Escher of the Oxford Internet Institute referred to a recent essay by Lawrence Lessig provocantly entitled “Against Transparency“. It is a fact, Escher said, that online even more than offline it is the most well-educated part of society that turns to political activism. E.g. two thirds of mySociety users are academicians. Eschers point is: To only establish transparency isn’t enough, as long as people don’t use the publicly available data.

William Perrin thinks he has found a solution to this problem. He advocates “hyber local community websites”, such as his own project Kings Cross Local Environment. By breaking down information that is available, but hard to understand to its importance for a small neighborhood local initiatives are empowered, he said. This way things could actually be done. Perrin also wants to further spread this approach through is project Talk About Local.

This is a translation of my post for netzpolitik.org (where I am doing an internship at the moment). There’s another report at e-politik.de (in German), and you may have a look at the tweets from the conference, tagged with #bios09.

“The International Youth Innovation Forum Interra is an open space for creativity, debates, scientific and expert discussions, exhibitions, competitions, intensive immersion into a special environment forming innovative thinking and special entrepreneurial spirit that should allow the country “to surpass not just catch up” in all spheres of science, economics and social development.

Novosibirsk will become the center for meetings and work of young scientific and creative teams from every corner of the world from the 10th to the 12th of September in 2009 again. The Innovative Forum “Interra” upholds the unique traditions of interscientific and interdisciplinary research and discoveries established by the founders of the Novosibirsk Academgorodok.”

I’m one of two bloggers sponsored by the German Goethe Institute in Novosibirsk who will attend the forum and blog about it (the other one is Marco Fieber). The forum has a full program stretched over four days. There will be a public debate on “Regulating behavior in the blogosphere – necessity and possibility”. We’ve been having this discussion in Germany and I’m looking forward to get an insight into the stances of Russian bloggers on this topic that ranges from netiquette to censorship.