Afromusing

I am at the Global Voices summit, regarding citizen media, democracy and technology.

I will be covering the following sessions using the live blogging tool CoveritLive on this blog and also on the GV summit blog. Please bookmark the event homepage http://summit08.globalvoicesonline.org/program/
- Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/gvsummit08
- The timezone for the live sessions is GMT+1
June 27, 2008
11:30 - 13:00 Session 2: “Citizen Media and Online Free Speech”
MODERATOR: Mary Joyce.
SPEAKERS: Ory Okolloh (Kenyan Blogger), Wael Abbas (MisrDigital, Egypt), Mehdi Mohseni (jomhour.org, Iran), Amine (digiactive.org, Morocco), Oiwan Lam (Global Voices, Hong Kong), Au Wai Pang (Singapore)
Citizen media allow for more active and open participation in political processes, but threats of censorship and oppression discourage citizens from expressing their own opinions. This session will present case studies from Kenya, Iran, Egypt, Morocco, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

15:30 -16:30 Session 4: “Frontline Activists meet the Academy: Tools and Knowledge”
MODERATOR: Ethan Zuckeman.
SPEAKERS: Roger Dingledine (Tor), Nart Villeneuve (Citizen Lab), Isaac Mao (Digital Nomads project, China), Robert Guerra (Privaterra, Cuba), Danny O’Brien (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
The tools to circumvent web filtering and other methods of online censorship exist, but they don’t always reach the people who need them as easily as they could. How can we facilitate better coordination between the developers of these tools and the anti-censorship activists that need them? And how do we facilitate the flow of feedback from the activists back to the developers so the latter can design more appropriate tools?

June 28th 2008
11:30 - 13:00 Session 2: “The Wired Electorate in Emerging Democracies”
MODERATOR: Solana Larsen.
SPEAKERS: Daudi Were (Kenya), Onnik Krikorian (Armenia), Hamid Tehrani (Iran), Luis Carlos Díaz (Venezuela)
The rise of blogging, social networking and micro-blogging services like Facebook and Twitter, video- and photo-sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr, and the spread of mobile technology have given ordinary citizens the means, at least potentially, to participate more fully in the democratic process. This session looks at the impact these tools have had on recent elections in Kenya, Venezuela, Armenia and Iran and poses the question: is citizen media having an actual impact on democracies in transition?

Please text incident reports to 6007, kindly include the location where you are texting from. The information will appear on Ushahidi.com. Kindly pass this along to everyone in Kenya, particularly in the rural areas. By and large coverage of the situation in Nairobi is extensive, but we need information from the rest of Kenya as well. Thank you for your support.

It is 6 days to election day in Kenya. Kenyanpundit has been giving a glimpse of the atmosphere in Nairobi; Read more here, here and here.

I spoke with a young web designer by the name of Amanya about his thoughts on the presidential candidates and their commitment to ICT in Kenya. A few minutes into the conversation i decided to record it, and he was gracious enough to let me. In the video, Amanya points out the disconnect between the leaders and the youth. The fact that the youth have embraced technology and internet, yet the leaders are still talking about polytechnics which provide skills training but not the computer literacy needed to compete in the age of globalization and digital pervasiveness.
You might notice that while i was talking to him he had a cellphone, with which he was checking his email

Just to give you some context, if you send an email to the Kenyan government, business or otherwise, you will also need to send a certified business letter by dhl or messenger. Even then it takes a very long time for them to get back to you.