 Hello, ladies and gentlemen. How do you do? Thanks for coming to this civic media slash communications forum event. We decided to try something really stupid this time, which was to complicate perfectly good format by trying to take a core sample from a variety of people who are experts in a variety of places to get a sense of how new media is affecting civics in places that are going through a lot of difficult socio and political changes and to do it as a way to get a kind of a sense of change. Part of the motivation for this was that there are a lot of claims of Twitter revolutions and SMS revolutions and that these things are dramatically changing people's ability to report or affect social change within different contexts. And we thought that we would ask people who are experts in a variety of areas what their experiences with these new media have been. We could have brought one person to comment on all of them and that person probably would have been Ethan Zuckerman, but we decided that we would instead pair Ethan with a variety of people and allow him to ask informed questions of them. They will be coming in via Skype and if everything goes really well, it'll be a smooth kind of talk show host sort of experience. The people's faces will show up on that screen. Ethan will be showing pictures of them and images perhaps of their work, a couple of them. But we're mostly focused on audio, so feel free to lean back in your seat, close your eyes and pretend you've got NPR on. I will ask that people don't download a lot of torrents just because we don't wanna overload the network. So try no major downloads, don't put on your jammers or anything like that. I've also been asked by the Communications Forum to announce the event happening next week, same time, same place, Thursday, April 2nd. And we're welcoming back co-founder of the Center for Future Civic Media and former co-director of Comparative Media Studies, Professor Henry Jenkins, helped create the Comparative Media Studies program here some time ago. He'll return from his new job at USC where he eats lotuses and sips nectar. To spend a night talking about his years at MIT and about the intellectual framework that made CMS possible. So actually not the same place. Jenkins' Farewell takes place in Bartos Theater in the old Media Lab building one week from today. And the following day, a day-long celebration of CMS's 10th anniversary takes place in the new addition to the Media Lab. Now most of you, and there are flyers outside as well, most of you know the man to my left, Ethan Zuckerman. I've had the great pleasure of knowing him for a few years. He was one of the co-founders of Tripod.com, a really important early web hosting service. He also founded Geek Core which gets awards both for creativity of mission and name, which was essentially taking geeks and bringing them around the world to work on information activism and infrastructure. Ethan is a fellow at the Berkman Center at Harvard. He is on the advisory board of the Wikimedia Foundation and does many, many other things, too many to explain, except I just found out that he's going to give a talk at the inaugural opening event of the George Bush Think Tank at Southern Methodist University. Yeah, in Dallas on Monday. So if you're in Dallas, please join Ethan for what will surely be a spectacular talk. I'm really, really, really hoping that's true. Okay, there we go, yeah. You never know what will get thrown. So except you never get thrown. So with that, we put Ethan in a very difficult spot of interacting with complicated technology across a bunch of different places, but he's going to introduce the format, talk a little bit about how you can ask questions, both those of you in the ether and those of you here. Could you raise your hand if you're by a computer that's a question computer? Those are the three question computers back there over here and over here. So if you've got a question, come on over and enter it into the software that we have here. People online will vote, which questions get asked, and then the questions will get refreshed between speakers. So Ethan. Well, thanks very much, Chris, and welcome. This is our attempt more or less to replicate an NPR experience. I want you to think of me as your Chris Leiden today. I'm going to be your local radio host and I'm going to be doing my best to broker a conversation with fascinating people from around the world who you are capable of seeing. I am not capable of seeing, but I've always admired Chris and everybody else who manages to do radio and make it look smooth and seamless. One of the things that I've discovered is that to be able to do this, you need a massive production staff and we've been very, very lucky to have people here working with us and let's keep our fingers crossed that this is all going to work out. Let me first say that we're inviting everyone to participate and ask some questions. This is a great Berkman Center MIT collaboration. I realize how shocking it is for MIT people to be using a Harvard software, but I wanted to welcome you to pull up this URL and feel free to put up questions. I'll be showing it between speakers so if you feel like asking a question, you can put up a question for the question tool and then I will do my best to broker these questions to our speakers who are going to be calling in from all around the world. Just to frame our conversation, we're at a moment in time where there's an enormous amount of interest in participatory citizen or civic media depending on how we're defining these different things and really tremendous promises are being made for the power of this new technology. Depending on who you ask, the power of Twitter and Facebook led tens of thousands of Iranians to take to the streets, put on green and march against a fraudulent election. The flip side to which is, or maybe that's not what happened. Maybe in fact there was a movement that figured out some very clever ways to use citizen media to promote itself to the wider world, but citizen media wasn't necessarily the organizing force behind it. Our question is that one in part and in fact we're gonna start off with a couple of experts on Iranian media, but we're gonna broaden the conversation from there and we're gonna ask questions about much broader applications of citizen media. This is a photo of a small town in Madagascar, which is in fact where we're going to end up at the end of this conversation, talking about how citizen media has made it possible for youth groups who are organizing themselves around cyber cafes, around a club that teaches English journalism and online media to participate in a climate debate taking place in Denmark via Skype from an outdoor link which is at least as complicated and sophisticated as the amazing amount of technology that we've poured out today. So we're gonna look at this whole spectrum of civic media from civic media as revolutionary media and asking whether we think that's in fact what's going on all the way through to civic media as a way of giving people a chance to participate in digital public spaces that they might not otherwise have. And to start this off, we've got with us Cameron Ashroff, who's the co-founder and the International Projects Director of Access Now. He teaches at the Department of Geography and Anthropology at California State University at Pomona. He's starting his PhD studies focusing greatly on these issues. And Cameron, we're gonna ask you to tell us, first of all, a little bit about what is Access Now and what was its role in the Green Revolution in Iran? And do we have any audio from Cameron? Hello. Great. We've got you now, Cameron. Can you start again? Okay, yeah. Well, first of all, thank you so much for inviting me to be here. It's an honor to be speaking and Ethan, it's nice to see you again. This is so glad to be here. And so everybody can hear me okay. Let me change the input here volume. You're doing great. Okay. Okay, so the question was, what is Access Now and what has been our, well, how have we helped with the Iranian movement online? Yeah, basically what's the function of Access Now and then sort of beyond that, Access Now I know is very heavily involved with video. I would love for you to talk about citizen video in the Green Revolution. Sure. Well, a little bit about Access, excuse me. Okay, a little bit about Access Now. Basically Access Now is a global movement for digital freedom that also provides a digital relief team. And I'll talk more about that. And then a little bit about our global movement for freedom, we do a variety of things. And one of them is of course, as you mentioned the video project, which is helping to secure citizen media that, since we're talking about the context of Iran that came out of Iran, securing citizen media, providing, being a link between citizen journalists and citizen media and the mainstream media and basically being able to archive these videos and provide downloads. We've had millions of videos downloaded from Iran of the protests in formats that are compatible with mobile phones and other sorts of technology that people use there. That's basically the focus of our video thing, our video aspect, and I'll be talking about that later, as you said. We protect dissident blogs from attack and things of that sort so that they're not taken down by the regime and deface in other ways like that. We also are building a global movement, hopefully for digital freedom where we would have a massive involved citizenry around the world basically advocating for digital rights and helping to build a global proxy cloud of some sort, which we're still in development right now that could hover over areas that are being threatened by unusually harsh internet filtering or internet restrictions and everything and similar like that and also to also be a policy arm as well so that we can advise on issues of internet freedom and digital activism around the world. We're a very diverse organization. As you can see, we have a lot of different sides to us and we're born out of the Iran election which is where our main experience is right now. So let me just sort of jump in for a moment and sort of hit the highlights on that one. Basically AccessNow is born out of the experience of trying to figure out how to support activists during the Iranian election protests. That's had to do with maintaining websites for people in the green movement because there's been a very active movement to take down some of these sites via distributed denial of service. This is now turning into an attempt to create a giant proxy cloud, basically a way for Iranians to access the internet through third parties. But sort of at the core of all of this is a video archive and AccessNow has been collecting citizen video from all around the internet, putting it together. What was the importance of video in Iran and then maybe even more than that, how did all this video come out of Iran? Why didn't the Iranian government cut off links and make it more difficult for people to transmit video from within Iran? Well, the importance of, that's a great question, the importance of video, some of these videos have gotten hundreds of thousands of views. The importance of video has also been one of the, okay, the way I like to explain it is that information is very segregated in Iran. For instance, in the context of the green movement and the post-election protest, people in certain cities didn't know what was happening in other cities. People in Shiraz didn't know what was happening in Tehran and things like that. And so one of the things you had was these videos enabled people to know that there was a broader support network out there of green activists, that there were events happening in other cities, that it wasn't just them against the world, them out there alone. One of the other very important aspects of this was that it helped counter propaganda. It helped to show, for instance, there were reports coming out that there was no protest, there was nobody on the streets, and you had videos from the same day of hundreds of thousands of people marching in the street. So it also helped to galvanize supporters. It helped for them to identify strategies and techniques that they could use in their protests. And so video played a very important role and also to inform the outside world of what was happening in Iran. And I can feel, you know, I am half Iranian and I can feel that there has been a shift in the perception of Iranians because of these videos have gotten out, that we're not all plotting to build our own homegrown nuclear weapons in our garages and that it's really helped to show the Iranian people a different side of them. I think there's absolutely no question that the videos and particularly the Neda al-Gasultan video were enormously important for sort of raising the profile of the grieve movement in the US. What's really surprising for me to hear is the importance within Iran, which is to say that you had videos and they were a way for people within Iran to see that other people were involved with the movement in other cities, that this wasn't just constrained to Tehran. Again, I find myself fascinated. We've seen other governments, China for instance, cut off the entire province of Urmqi when people started using the internet as a way of spreading information about the protests. Why do you think Iran allowed the internet to stay up? That's an excellent question. I was actually having that, believe it or not, I was actually having that same discussion this morning with a student activist relatively prominent and he was telling me that basically Iran has such a high level of internet penetration, I think it's over 30%. And also with that high level internet penetration is a high level internet penetration among the government and among commercial entities. So any wholesale shutdown of the internet would disrupt such an enormous sizeable chunk of the population that it couldn't be sustained for very long, at least as this is my opinion and what I've seen and when I've spoken with activists throughout Iran and outside of Iran that it's just become too much a part of commercial culture, government culture and civic culture and citizen culture to be shut down for any long period of time without there being some sort of adverse effect of this happening, of people being more outraged, of it adding fuel to a fire, already tense situation. And that seems actually very consistent with what actually happened as far as how the Iranian internet was controlled based on people, mostly folks like Arbor Networks based in Boston who were monitoring connections to Iran. What people saw was a degrading of connections rather than actually having them shut down. So the idea was essentially to try to keep up email but not necessarily to make it possible for people to look at things like streaming video and we saw a lot of blockage of that. I know that there was a movement before the elections to try to get video cameras into the hands of ordinary Iranians that Los Angeles based television stations were saying that they were sending in pen cameras. Is there any truth to any of that or was this just people with their own cameras and mobile phones and the natural level of technology penetration within Iran that made this possible? I think it was true that there were, I did see some videos that purported to be shot by the pen cameras that you say. So I do think that there was at least some truth to it. How much truth, I don't know and how many of those videos, of the enormous amount of videos that we've seen and that I personally see and how many of those were shot with the pen cameras, I don't know but I do know some were, so I do believe that there was some truth to that. But it seems to me from what I know that these are just regular people with their cell phones, with their digital cameras, shooting these videos and just transporting them electronically to the outside world themselves. So I don't think there was no outside organization or group that's funneling video cameras to Iranians for the express purpose of citizen media propagation. So we've, we had the amazing experience in the US of essentially watching this revolution unfolding in real time. There were a lot of people who desperately wanted to support the movement. We had people working really, really hard to try to essentially reinforce and retweet and sort of spread this information back and forth as much as possible. And then of course, the impression that we've gotten here was that the movement has really been forced to go underground. It's not clear how much energy there is behind it. Are we not getting a picture of what's going on right now in the green movement? Or is it accurate to say that a lot of the protest has been successfully squelched at this point by the Iranian authorities? Well, I think that's a very complicated question, honestly. I think that maybe for the time being, at least the enormous protests that we saw in June and at other events that have happened since, maybe it's temporarily not happening, but I think one of the things you have that's really happening is a culture, like a culture of resistance. This is that maybe there's not massive amounts of people outside, but people feel things in their heart. People feel the student culture, the young culture, middle-aged culture has changed in some way. So I think what you're seeing is not so much, people aren't being out in the street, but I think you're seeing people whose opinions have changed, people whose thoughts have changed, and that's much more difficult to squelch than protestors. So I think you've seen a real fundamental shift in attitudes and beliefs and opinions of the government, and that's a very, very difficult thing to stop. Cameron, is that gonna, do you see that turning into a future movement? Are we gonna see Green Revolution part two, or do you think this is much more of a subtle change, whereas you're sort of suggesting seeing the movement, seeing the possibility of resisting, watching through citizen media, the movement spreading to different parts of the country, do you think that's gonna lead to another acute sort of revolution type change, or do you think it's a much longer, deeper change within the Iranian psyche? I really think it's a much longer and deeper change honestly, I don't think we're gonna see a spontaneous, huge outpouring in the gut. Like I don't think we'll see like a Gurgisistan type event happen, I think this is a long-term change. This is like, Amir Hossein Musavi said that this is a year of patience, that this is a long gradual, gradual move and gradual shift. So I don't think it's, and I don't think there's a, from the people I talk with at least, it doesn't seem to be a rush and urgency that they know this is gonna be a long movement and they're prepared for that and comfortable with that. And so I think you're gonna be, you're gonna see this snowball as the word gets out to the villages, as the word gets out to other parts of the country and that you're gonna see this slowly start to snowball into something eventually over given enough time. So if I'm sort of hearing you correctly on all of this, access now, which is really built almost as a sort of emergency media, right? How do you get people around censorship in real time? How do you preserve this critical video that's coming out at the moment? It sounds like you guys are needing to shift in focus from sort of an acute struggle to a long-term one. How does that change what you guys are doing? This is, access now, we want to support democracy movements and we recognize all of us that democracy movements don't happen on like American time. They happen at their own time and they don't happen on the media's time. And so we're prepared to stand with democracy movements in their struggle, however long it takes, whatever they need. And this is one thing that we see with the Green Movement. We're there in the times of heightened activity, intense protest, but also in the so-called lulls right now that seem to be happening right now to outside observers. So this is just part of what access now does is support democracy movements. We're not there to be there when it's cool and trendy. We're there for when it's not cool and trendy too. So that's a great reminder and a place where I'd love to sort of close off with you at this point Cameron, is that reminder that it's really easy to pay attention to the stuff when it's really hot, everyone is paying attention to a particular situation, but maintaining these efforts and trying to keep an eye on what's going on within the Green Movement and with other citizen movements in Iran over time, it's sort of a long-term challenge. We're gonna move over to talk to... Sure, do we want to take questions from the audience? Before we let you go, Cameron, sorry about that. Do we have a question from the audience that you want to bring in, Chris? Online yet. Maybe this is a good chance to remind people that they can enter cyber.law.harvard.edu slash questions slash difficult civics actually. It should be difficult than capital C civics. I figured that this whole event was so difficult that we were just going... No, that's exactly it. And in fact, I've now put that slide in eight times in the deck, so you can just remember that it's difficult civics. So those of you online just add capital C civics to the URL, but does anyone within the house want to ask a question? Yeah? Can I just go over here? Yep, that's fine. Sure, why not? There was a mic in front of that side, yeah. I'm curious about the details of how the government goes about shutting down internet media. Why are they not able to do it easily? I have no idea, technically. And how much can you combat? This is obviously gonna be happening in a lot of countries over many years. So I'd like to hear what the struggle is like. So your question is basically, why haven't they, again, why haven't they shut it down? And I'm not exactly sure exactly what your question is. Basically, why is it difficult for the government to shut down internet access? Why is it technically difficult and why is it socially difficult? Okay, well, as I said earlier, the internet has really become an embedded part of a lot of Iranian culture and with a very, very high level of penetration, especially among the youth and commercial entities and government and everything. So shutting it down is extremely, it's an undesirable thing. I don't hold it past them and I think if situation were to get severely unstable, I think that you would probably see it, but it's just too socially difficult, I think, to shut down the internet for any prolonged period of time. And I think that's a real main issue in this, honestly. There's actually very few documented incidents of even very closed societies shutting down the internet for longer than 24 hours. Basically, it's crippling to your local commercial economy. And so China's been able to do it for RMC, mostly because this is already a massively disconnected part of China. But as Cameron's been saying, within Iran, it would be difficult to essentially maintain all the business that goes on with the country while being off the internet. One question that just came in and I think we're gonna let this be the last question, Cameron, and then we're gonna go on to our next speaker. Can you say something about YouTube specifically? What was the role of YouTube in the green movement? Well, YouTube has been, I think, short of just a fantastic partner for Access Now. And for the green movement especially, YouTube has played such a critical role. They relaxed their restrictions on violent content. I'm sure some of you might remember that during the protests because what was happening was people were going through, whether they were regime agents or not, or other sympathetic people or what have you, and downvoting and basically getting these important videos taken off. That's one of the reasons we archive these videos at Access Now is that if they get taken off, there's a copy available for human rights, neat reasons or for legal tribunals and stuff like that. YouTube has also been very proactive in addressing account shutdowns, of crucial accounts that get suspended or whatever compromise that are within the green movement, that are within this video distribution network, and they've been very proactive in doing that. And so they're helping to keep those channels open to for activists to be able to get their word out. And also one of the main problems is with the international media, it's not as a cool or trendy topic like we talked about with YouTube, but on YouTube it's still a big topic. YouTube is still done on their CitizenTube blog and on their front page, even in low periods, features on the Iranian protests, features on other democracy, movements around the world. So YouTube I really think is playing an extremely vital role and as they develop their technologies more, I can really see YouTube being a very, very crucial of key player in digital activism and freedom movements around the world. They've been incredible behind the scenes in helping and supporting human rights activists. It's been incredible. Well, that's a great YouTube shout out. We'll let them know how much you appreciate them. Cameron, thanks so much for taking the time to be with us. It's really been a pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much and it was a pleasure to be here in honor, thank you. So we're gonna remain focused on Iran and we're incredibly lucky to have such knowledgeable speakers about what's going on in Iran because I know that there's such enormous interest in what's gone on with the green movement and here we're now able to welcome back to MIT our friend Mehdi Yayanajad and I apologize to the extent that I've just gotten that wrong but Mehdi is not only a physics PhD from MIT but is really one of the very critical figures in citizen media in Iran before the election and through the election with a site called Balatarin and Balatarin can be thought of in some ways as the dig or the Reddit of Iran but in many ways it's actually much more special than that. So Mehdi, I wanted to invite you first of all to tell us a little bit about the site that you've been involved with and I've got the slides here that I can show the audience but what is Balatarin and how has it been important for civic media in Iran? Hi everyone, Balatarin is very similar to dig and Reddit in the way it works. It's a social news aggregator. Balatarin is a place where Iranians finds what's important today. Basically most people, especially journalists, bloggers go to Balatarin to find out what is going on and that's the question Balatarin answers pretty much every day for people who visit Balatarin. I think in a way it's injustice to Balatarin to compare to dig and Reddit because the situation, the context is very different. Blogging in Iran was much bigger than blogging in the U.S. in comparison to the rest of the media. I mean, U.S. has a strong history of newspapers other TV, other medias, but in case of Iran independent media didn't have much other alternative other than blogs and because of the importance of the blogs Balatarin also became important because Balatarin has a multiplier effect for the voice of bloggers. A blogger who posts the interesting content on his blog or her blog might get 100 visitors a day normally but because of Balatarin he gets tens of thousands visitors and also since there are lots of journalists who are active on Balatarin and they work for other places such as BBC Persian TV or Voice of America TV they take that content and they broadcast it through TV and that content which was produced by a blogger might get shown to many more people who don't necessarily have access to internet. So we're looking at your slides right now and we're looking at the daily reach of Balatarin in comparison to Iran's official news agency and noticing that there are a lot of days where Balatarin is significantly better visited than IRNA that has to make this incredibly powerful. Have you guys experienced censorship, blockage, harassment and anything trying to prevent people from accessing the site? So Balatarin has been pretty much exposed to everything that the Iranian government has it in power basically from almost four months after Balatarin started working which was four years ago the website got blocked in Iran and still people continued accessing the website through proxies. We've had cases of hacking to the website we've had cases of Iranian probably revolutionary guard writing scripts to find people's passwords. So we've had all sorts of things. We've had in Iran in fact for a period of time maybe it's still happening. If you go to Balatarin.com you get not only see a blocking page but also you get redirected to another page set up by Iranian government. So they've tried many different things to take people off the website. And also we've seen misinformation too. I mean Balatarin is a user generated content. So obviously there's a challenge of people who are government agents and use the platform for misinformation. And I mean there was one case last summer there was a 12 year old boy who was killed in Iran and everybody thought that he was killed in a demonstration and that news got publicized in Balatarin. But later it turned out that in fact he was hit by a truck. So and Iranian government used that what happened in Balatarin and several other websites to show how these websites or I mean which categorizes the opposition websites are distributing false news and they are not credible. So we're looking at a slide here telling us that this is a site that's looked at by 700,000 people every month. If you're looking at Balatarin from within Iran you are circumventing censorship. You're using a proxy, you're going around the firewall. Do you have a sense for how many of your users are Iranians who are out in the diaspora and how many are Iranians who are accessing the site from within the country? For many reasons we don't basically we don't talk about the number of users in Iran because of security reasons. But for the visitors based on Alex's report it seems there are 40% from Iran but we are one of our plans is to measure that directly. It's not an easy thing because people who come to the website come through proxies and it's hard to find out which IP is a proxy IP and which one is not. But it's fair to say that it's a mix of both Iranians in country and expatriates. Absolutely. So the readers it's very mixed. Unfortunately the contributors Iranian censorship had an impact so that definitely had an impact and because of many of the proxy software don't have an option of Ajax calls. So because of part of the system works through voting or many of the I mean in terms of technical things there are lots of use of Ajax because of that some of the people in Iran are not able to contribute. So let's talk about you guys started this project in part because the Iranian blogosphere from very early on has been one of the most dynamic one of the most powerful, one of the most political, one of the most diverse. So sort of two questions there. There's a perception that the Iranian blogosphere really took off when there was a crackdown on independent media in Iran and that people went from writing newspapers to writing blogs. At the same time I know that there's a lot of bloggers particularly those writing in Persian who are quite conservative, who are supporting the regime give us a sense of the diversity of the sort of conversations that take place in the blogosphere and that take place on ballatarian. So I think once blogging became fashionable I mean anybody between age of 18 and 28 went on blogging because it was just fashionable. I mean it wasn't something that it didn't depend on what political opinion you have. And in fact if you start reading Iranian blogs you'll see that most of the blogging is not about politics it's not about even social issues. It's more about personal freedom issues. It's more about in fact there is a large section of Persian blogging is about poetry. Poetry is a big part of Iranian life and because of that there are lots of blogs dedicated to poetry and even they might touch social and political issues but they still use a poetic language. So many of the things that in fact American media might be concerned like nuclear issues or some of more regional political issues like war in Iraq or Afghanistan. In fact they are not discussed that much in Persian blogosphere and the things that are discussed are mostly things that are affecting their daily life. In the post-election Iranian post-election events obviously the bloggers became very political. Many of them of course were supporting Mr. Musawee and some of them were supporting Ahmadinejah. So there was a heated discussion in blogosphere but I would say in most cases political blogging is just a portion of Persian blogging and I would say it's not, it's probably less than 30% of it. So I was fascinated by this in some ways because a colleague of mine, John Kelly, did a map of the Persian blogosphere and ended up clustering it and clustered sort of left wing blogs, clustered right wing blogs and then came up with this huge poetry cluster which was sort of fascinating and then of course from global voices we translate a great deal from the Persian blogosphere and we've seen much more diversity than has really come through in American media. And one of the posts that I know that we ended up doing from Global Voices was a whole set of pro Ahmadinejad blogs which made us very unpopular because I think there was a sense that the bloggers as a whole were going to rise up and join all together in the Green Revolution and actually turned out to be a bit more complicated than that. To what extent does does Balatourine end up being a space for the left or a space for the right or is it a space that really everyone uses? Is it sort of a public utility in that sense? So at the beginning, when Balatourine started it was mostly, it was very diverse. In fact, most of the postings were about technology, it was about entertainment. But as time went on because of Iranian government's opposition, in fact, because they blocked the website, they accused, I mean, in fact, it was such a weird thing for them. I mean, they couldn't understand that where these people who are users on the website are coming from. I mean, there have been accusations that I'm paying 30,000 users on the website which isn't ridiculous. I mean, so basically the idea of social media the content generated wasn't something that was understood by Iranian officials who were over 30 years old. I mean, so that was something they couldn't understand and because of that, it was such a complicated thing for them. So because of Iranian government's hostility, we started losing people who were more sympathetic to the Iranian government and also people who were more pro-democracy or more liberal, I would say, they started becoming more upset by the actions the Iranian government were taking. In fact, I mean, there isn't a strong identity while it had users feel very strongly associated with the website, with the brand. And because of that, when they see, for example, the website got hacked by the Iranian government, they became really upset and that obviously it made them more, in a way, more agitated when they saw people coming on the website and posting content that's more sympathetic to the government. So I would say, especially through the past year, the dominant language and the dominant content on Bahrain is the content posted by Iranian opposition, more liberal and more progressive. That's not something we intended to have. That happened mostly because of Iranian government actions. So, Ballaterine, I think, is an incredible example of what sort of pressure civic media can face. And to the extent that Ballaterine became a politicized space, it's faced all sorts of attacks, denial of service. We have a question here about social engineering attacks. I can tell you for a fact that I know it's experienced social engineering attacks, censorship, so on and so forth. We have one question here that I wanna put to you before we move on, which is a question about working on such an intensely important project from outside Iran. Does the fact that you're working on Ballaterine from the United States rather than from Iran, are there questions that come up about credibility, about whether you are up on the sort of conversations that are actually taking place in Iranian cyberspace? Is that an important aspect, or do people just sort of assume this is cyberspace? No one really cares where you are? I think, so Iranian, I mean, community outside Iran has a, it's basically what it took to community. What there's one community that came here after the Iranian revolution, and they've been here for 30 years old. They are very far away from what's happening in Iran. I was more of a part of the second generation that came here more recently. So the language, I mean, I pretty much understand the context and in most cases, I don't highlight that in fact we are based in the US. That's not something highlighted. And the fact that the team is a virtual team, we have people in Europe, we have people in other parts of the world that's for helping me, it kind of reduces that tension and it doesn't allow that become an issue. I think one other thing, because we don't usually post that many things on the website ourselves, it's the users who are doing it and we are just providing a platform, it's becoming a less of an issue. I mean, it's been a less of an issue. Obviously Iranian government, it takes advantage of this. I mean, there is an Iranian conservative newspaper called Kehan that repeatedly accuses not only, I mean, the fact that the website is supported by CIA or Mossad, it claims that the website is owned by Israeli radio editor of Israeli radio in Jerusalem, someone I've never met and I don't know of. So it's basically, they don't care about the reality, they don't care where you are, they make up what they want. So in other words, whatever perception there might be, you would probably be facing it if you were in Israel as well, I know from running a similar citizen media property, we look for people saying that we're from the CIA and saying that we're from George Soros and we sort of try to keep score between the two. We're currently accused in Iran of being sponsored by both the CIA and George Soros, so I feel your pain. But Mehdi, it's been really a pleasure and ballatarian is just a real inspiration. It's something that we take a lot of inspiration from at Global Voices, so I really wanna thank you for joining us and being with us tonight. Thank you for having me in MIT again, thanks. Thanks so much. So just a quick reminder for everybody, the URLs that I'm putting up are broken, but at the end of them, if you add civics, difficult represents me, Chris, my relationship with Chris, MIT, so on and so forth, but this is in fact the difficult civics forum rather than just the difficult forum and fortunately to make things slightly less difficult, we are now going to hand over to my lovely, talented colleague, Georgia Popowell, who is the managing director of Global Voices, is one of the Caribbean's leading bloggers, the Caribbean's first podcaster, I believe, and really master of all citizen media, but rather than ask about her sort of vast knowledge of citizen media as a whole, which Georgia has because she's responsible day for day for producing the Global Voices site and all the content within. Georgia, I wanted to ask you some very specific questions which were basically, what the heck were you doing in Haiti? Well, we went to Haiti to basically see whether the citizen media surge we saw after the earthquake was something that we could build upon. We managed to get a small grant to do that and I live in Trinidad, 900 miles to the southeast of Haiti, so it was a hop, skip, and a jump for me here. And what happens is that after years of attempting to cover this country, that's really one of the most difficult countries in the Western Hemisphere to cover from a citizen media standpoint, we saw on the evening of the earthquake this unprecedented surge of activity, notably on Twitter, and where all these people come from. So the trip to Haiti was really about looking more closely at that and also seeing whether there was a role for citizen media in the relief efforts and certainly in the reconstruction efforts as well. So let's just pause for a moment and talk about sort of a citizen media history of the Haitian earthquake. Obviously earthquakes aren't like revolutions, no one's planning for them ahead of time, there's no ramp up to them, something tragic happens and then everyone ends up reacting to it. What was the citizen media reaction to the Haitian earthquake? The citizen media reaction was a very immediate response on Twitter, some very vivid, high quality tweets describing basically what was happening to people in Port-au-Prince, what people were seeing from their balconies and things like that. And because Haiti is not a country that's necessarily on our radar all the time, and where correspondents don't tend to be there permanently, this really was an unprecedented view into Haiti at this particular time, just into the country in general. And there were two or three people who were really just giving just really, really kind of excellent information. There was also a guy in Canada who did a Ustream hookup and was getting Haitians on the phone. The interesting thing is that the internet stayed up throughout, I mean Haiti doesn't have very good, so, but the internet stayed up. We just lost the last minute or so. Could you start your answer over? Georgia, you said that Haiti doesn't have very good internet infrastructure, and then Trinidad's internet infrastructure kicked in. Yeah, you know, look at that. My neighbors are all online now. Yes, no, Haiti does not have a very good infrastructure in general, in no sense of the word, but the internet stayed up, and the internet became the lifeline. There was also a journalist who was actually, he's actually not a journalist, he's a DJ, and Signal FM was the only radio station broadcasting, and he was using Twitter widely, even to the point of asking people to kind of PayPal him money to be able to keep his Skype account open and things like that. And he was also doing a lot of the relaying of information, people were calling in on their cell phones to the station, and he was relaying information via Twitter to various places, you know, outside of the country and within. So what we ended up seeing sort of from the outside of this at Global Voices was, of course, something like an earthquake happens, everyone's attention shifts over to that country. And so Haiti, which we cover and have covered for three years now, suddenly everyone wants to know what's going on, there's this wave during which the tweets, the blog posts, the photos are literally the only information coming out of this country, and then very quickly we end up with something different, which is that every major broadcast network around the world deployed someone to Port-au-Prince. What happened to the citizen media community once the professional journalists took over? Five seconds of your question. What happened to the citizen media community? Well, so basically- When the mainstream media went in? So it's sort of two questions, and I'll give you two in the hopes that one of them will get through. What happened to civic media when all the journalists hit the ground? And then what happens after those journalists get back in the airplanes? Okay, that's a very good question. The mainstream media dominated the spectrum, as soon as they arrived, no, it'll be CNN with its dramatic kind of rescues and setups and medical interventions and things like that. The, there was, however, a kind of side channel. People like this DJ, Karel Péter, continued to kind of, certainly the tweets, they were actually being pulled into the mainstream media narrative a bit, but it's true that for the most part, the first, say, two weeks of the earthquake, the mainstream media voice did drown out the citizen media voice if that is where you were looking. And I think for most people, say, in the US, it wasn't Twitter, they were looking at, it was CNN. And the New York Times lead was running things on their block. The Miami Herald, which has, to their credit, has continued to cover Haiti fairly thoroughly because they're in a city which has a strong Haitian community, they have a number of Haitian journalists on staff. But it's true that, yes, it did get tamped out when the mainstream media was there. So I think what I'm really fascinated by, you packed up this huge duffel bag, not just of equipment, but all the medical supplies, all the food, anything you would possibly need. We are not CNN. When we deploy a reporter to Haiti, this is actually kind of a big deal for us. And when I say we deploy, I don't actually mean we, I mean you, since you actually put all this together, why is it so important that Haitian citizen media be able to continue this in the long run? What's global voices' interest in building up Haitian citizen media? Well, Haiti is a peculiar country in that it's got very weak institutions. I think that's widely known. So the Haitian media in general is not a very kind of powerful force. So what is happening, given that Haiti is also such a political football, and given that there's 10 million dollars at stake, what's happening is the kind of classic thing that happens at a certain point in humanitarian disaster, and that the story becomes about what's happening with the aid, who's giving what, and all these projects trying to bring transparency to the process, but what's actually going on in the ground in Haiti is not getting out of the country. What also happened in Haiti is that the media outlets took a battering. While we were there, we tried to make contact with some newspapers and radio stations, but most of them weren't operating. So I think rebuilding a gestation mainstream media is also an issue. It might even be a kind of more important issue than citizen media. There has continued to be a trickle of citizen media activity coming out of Haiti, notably from the people who were blogging before, which is some aid workers, some members of the diaspora who've gone back. There's a trickle on Twitter as well every day, because the story is in the news because of all the money at stake. But the Haitian media is not, it's not robust at this point. I think rebuilding it, the number of projects actually designed to kind of help rebuild it, but I think that's a really important issue. So I think for a lot of us, first of all, the main surprise about citizen media in Haiti was that there was citizen media in Haiti. I think a lot of us were sort of tremendously surprised that there was going to be media coming out of it. I think the next surprise was that the internet managed to stay up and allow citizen media to persist in the face of this crisis. My question is really whether Haiti is gonna end up with enough media, whether it's citizen media, whether it's professional media, to have this sort of oversight over this aid and rebuilding process. We just had this international conference that committed something like four times as much aid as the country had actually asked for, but we're pouring into a rather leaky bucket. This is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. How would we get to the point where Haiti has a media infrastructure capable of monitoring what's going on with this aid money? Well, I think that if there's some infrastructural work to be done, just buildings for people to work in need to be kind of created, there's a training aspect. The Haitian media core is probably not the best trained in the use of new media tools. There's also translation component, and I know at Global Voices, we like to push our translation capacity, but Haitian media tends to be, if it's radio, it's Creole, a bit of French. If it's print, it's French, and Creole isn't widely written. So things that are being written for the Haitian audience within Haiti are very often not getting out because of the language barrier. So what are the sort of infrastructures? Mediation to be done, that has to do with translation. But yeah, just the basic things that one does in order to kind of keep a press alive, need to be done. And it's absolutely critical. I try to be optimistic about Haiti, but having been there and seen the extent of the damage and knowing what the context is, it's difficult to be, but we have to, that's my neighbor in Karakom as well. This affects me very directly. Let's take a question from the audience here, Georgia. Thanks a lot. So a question for now and long term for Georgia, but maybe also for you guys. So do you see in general the relationship between the citizen media and shall we call it the traditional media as being mutually exclusive, symbiotic, antagonistic, somewhere everywhere on the spectrum and some examples? Sorry, are you talking about Haiti in particular? Yeah, in your case Haiti. Right now, I think citizen media in Haiti is so minimal and I think a lot of citizen media in Haiti gets consumed outside of the country. So I don't know that there's much of a consciousness among the kind of the media coin Haiti that there's a kind of threat from citizen journalism, which is why I think it's such a great opportunity. We did see a couple of media outlets start to do things like put videos on YouTube. We saw the senior institute in Jack Mail, the film school, start reporting and putting videos on a blog. So I think this is a great opportunity considering that there's no real, the traditional antagonism between mainstream media and citizen media doesn't really exist there. I think there's a real opportunity for some real symbiosis and for journalists to also kind of get involved in being citizen journalists, doing things, publishing things that they may not publish in their newspapers online. I think just answering it from the global voices perspective where we both work, that antagonism has really fallen off over the years, that two or three years ago it wasn't uncommon to see journalists and citizen media sort of sniping at one another and I think it's actually become a very complimentary environment and it's certainly one of the things that we end up embracing about the environment. Georgia, we're gonna move on from you and go visit with a friend of ours in Pakistan but thank you so much for making the time for us and thanks in particular for, well no, Chris is gonna cut me off here. One more question I think, there we go. Oh, so Georgia, I'm showing a picture of you here and there is a furry animal on your shoulder. It looks like an overgrown version of the GV ferret and we're wondering, there's a request here to identify what the animal in fact is. Okay, that is a lemur. That picture was taken when I was in Madagascar and I went to Madagascar actually to visit one of the projects that Global Voices supports, just called Fouk and I could not go to Madagascar without seeing a lemur. As much as I understand that it's not the only thing that's interesting about Madagascar, but. So I think we're all sympathetic to the notion that Madagascar is more than lemurs and in fact we're gonna end up today with Lovarakutamalala so we're gonna end up in Madagascar, but great, one more question. Yeah. We have time, yes. You just mentioned that sort of antagonism between traditional media and bloggers or what have you is falling off and I might try and tweak that, not in an antagonistic way, but I mean, I've sort of struggled for a long time to understand this term because as a working journalist, I didn't sort of lose my passport, right? I continue to be a citizen and this idea that somehow what traditional journalists do is unimportant or I struggled to understand, for instance, in the particular case of Haiti, a place where I've experienced, it's a complicated place to understand and to explain and certainly it's very valuable if a few people can Twitter and be there because correspondence are not based there permanently, but I mean, sort of two questions which are interrelated is, I mean, Haiti is an enormously poor country and we should be, and you mentioned this, George, just now, I mean, we should be honest that if people are Twittering in Haiti, it's largely for the benefit of people in the diaspora and or people who are interested in Haiti outside and not in the country itself and to sort of try overly hard to sort of say, oh, we should put all our resources into more Twittering. I just wonder if we're putting the cart before the horse and then I wonder, I don't think this is what we've been saying at all, actually, I thought we said the opposite of this, which was that very much that these two things are complementary and that the hope is to rebuild the media as a whole, both professional and any sort of informal. So I guess I'm just a little confused by the question. Yeah. I guess I'm confused as well. I'm not questioning clearly, but we can sort of let you go on and we can talk. I don't want to drone on, so I drone on enough already. I, but... Georgia, do you want to react at all, too? I missed part of the question, but yeah, I'm with you, Ethan. I think I emphasize that I think the rebuilding the media in Haiti is probably the more important issue than creating a core of people who know how to do Twitter. I mean, let's be honest, the people, the displaced people in Haiti weren't the ones tweeting as my interlocutor pointed out. It was people who had really not been deeply affected by the earthquake and who had the means to have a cell phone and an internet connection, that kind of thing. But yeah, no, I don't... I mean, global voices were always careful to emphasize the complementarity, I think of the two processes, but I think disasters are also peculiar in the first reports that you're going to get from a disaster zone are probably going to be from people who are not journalists. And I think we need to acknowledge that and situate that material in a... And give it its due, while understanding that there is certainly research and fact-checking and all that are critical to the process of information sharing and journalism. Thank you. Just to add maybe slightly more context to it, Georgia's work in Haiti was under inter-news, which is a professional media development organization that received grant funding to go over to rebuild the professional media, who then invited Georgia to come over and work on citizen media as a complement to it. So I guess if I'm responding to this sharply... I mean, I think fundamentally we don't disagree. There's something, and maybe this is a tangential thing and maybe I'm wasting everyone's time, but there's something in the term citizen journalist that just gets under my skin, because it sort of implies that if you become a journalist, you're not a citizen. So I mean, there's something about it that's always bothered me, and I mean, really, who cares what we call it, because it's a good thing, and there's many greater concerns in Haiti than this. We've mostly been trying to use the term citizen media or civic media, perhaps for exactly that reason, but perhaps we'll make you happy by now going over to a professional journalist who makes money as a journalist, doing so. Thank you so much, Georgia. Thank you. We appreciate you being with us. Thank you. Thank you. Joining us in her pajamas is Shema Gershif. Shema, I'm so sorry that we kept you waiting. We're so thrilled to have you. Huma is a journalist, a professional real journalist, with dawn.com, the leading English language website and newspaper within Pakistan, and we'd love to talk to you about that, but we're also very interested in some of the work that you've been doing, developing community media within Pakistan. So I hope you'll take the time to tell us a little bit about that. Am I live? Can I be heard? You absolutely are. All right. Hello. Thank you for having me. Citizen media in Pakistan, is that the question? Citizen media in Pakistan, but even more than that, you're doing all this work on community media and trying to build media cultures within Pakistan. We'd love to hear about that. Well, I particularly have been working with radio stations to some extent. We've been doing a lot of interviews on the ground, which sort of is old media and the most classic sense away from the conversation that you've been having right now. And I can tell you a bit about that, which is, I think the reminder that, you know, should have come up in several of the conversations you've had this evening, that in most of the countries we're talking about, the literacy rate remains low. In Pakistan, the official rate is about 46%, which includes people who can just write their name. Internet penetration in Pakistan, which is a nation of 100 and 75 million people, is about 17 million people and it's unclear. That's a very sort of contested statistic. And so in some ways at the end of the day, it does come back to making better use of old media, you know, traditional media, mainstream media, whatever you want to call it, which is one of the reasons I've ended up after being at the Center for Future Civic Media, the researcher and focusing on things like citizen journalism and blogging and Twitter and all of that. I've come back to Pakistan and become more excited about community radio stations. And what we're seeing the areas I've been working in, mostly just helping radio stations with some scripting and with sort of better networking across themselves has been small community radio stations along the Pakistan-Avranistan border. And what we found over there is that the tricks that we see online, things like collective intelligence, things like use of mobile phones to share small nuggets of information, these practices which now have become very linked with sociable media and citizen journalism and community organizing online, we've taken a bunch of those and, you know, with groups like internews, work to having community radio stations apply those to improve news reporting amongst these smaller radio stations. And just a little background in this issue, so talking about the area where all the horrible headlines about Pakistan come out of. So it's an area with extremely low literacy, with violent uprising, militancy, and this province has 150 illegal FM radio stations which were being manned by extremist organizations or being used as a way to threaten the local population and recruit followers and things like that. And I have been documenting this process a little bit more than being fully involved in it because there's a language barrier where all these, this radio programming is happening is in Pashto, which is a regional language which I don't speak. But what we've been doing is helping community radio stations which means stations that have either been formed by university students, by groups, journalists, by some have government funding, they've sort of come together to do programming that can push back against this sort of extremist rhetoric that had dominated the airwaves there. So you've got about 15 legal radio stations fighting off 150 or so illegal ones, which for the most part, since I'd say late 2009, they've shut down about 110 of those after some military operations. But now the work that we have to do is to work with the community radio stations that do exist now, these sort of fledgling few. And very quickly, what sort of fun is that we're helping our radio journalist network with each other, using things like their cell phones, using things like Facebook, using Spitter. And what we're having them do is sort of all the tools that you've talked about, this is a population in which I don't think the sort of masses are ready yet. They don't even have television penetration, let alone internet penetration, women have limited ability. So right now we're empowering the journalists just to communicate better amongst themselves to get the word out. And what's most exciting about this one sort of last thought, and then we can move on, is I know this word was very popular at the Center for Future Civic Media last year, I hope it still is, is this idea of hyper-local journalism. And what's really unique about these radio stations is that they're giving people programming that's literally local to villages of 12,000 people or less, which in Pakistan is pretty small. And they even do things like a very craigslist sort of, they set up markets using their radio station, sort of offer to sell things and they sort of broadcast that and the journalists text message each other, things like that. We've seen a lot, there was a huge displacement of people from this region going to sort of military operation against militancy and organizing their transport and alerting people about areas that were closed down or that were seeing militant activity or military activity. This sort of information was all being shared by journalists who were mostly just text messaging each other or tweeting to a very small community. And I mean a community of 10 or 11 people that's then sort of taking this online activity and taking it straight to radio, sort of skipping that midpoint of television. So it's been pretty interesting to get this going. So if I'm understanding the situation there and one of the things that's helpful for me in understanding this is that this sounds very similar in some ways to citizen media in Mali, which I've been working on for many, many years, where the only media that actually effectively serves the community is the radio station and to the extent that we're trying to provide information to anyone, we're trying to provide it to the people who are on air on the radio if you can provide an internet connection to a community radio station, suddenly it's possible to get content from all over the world and then get it out to community radio. Is there interaction between the communities where these radio stations are located? How do they interact with the radio station locally? Is that a text message type interaction or is it physically going to the station or is that part of this or is the interaction mostly from one radio station to another radio station? So just to clarify, I'm talking about one very particular strip of Pakistan, which is along the Afghanistan borders. We're talking about on the least developed part of the country where there isn't much television. There is, however, like in the rest of Pakistan, a lot of cell phone, mobile penetration. And so you do, in terms of the community interacting with the radio stations, there's lots of call-in talk shows. Those are the most successful shows that the radio stations do and the shows themselves are a mixture of entertainment, religious programming, music, poetry, which sort of harkens back to what the Iranian speakers were talking about. And the call-in shows, it's usually phone calls, which are being made either from fixed line telephones, but mostly and increasingly from cell phones, but not text messaging yet, because we're mostly talking about communities that have very low levels of literacy. And they've also come up with wonderful systems where they sort of give the community radio station sort of host a missed call. They sort of call and the host knows not to pick up the phone and then the host will call them back. So in a way, the stations are bearing the cost of interacting with their listeners. And one of the interesting things that's sort of coming about is because users are being able to access radio stations directly using their cell phones, they don't, a lot of women who have been in this part of the country sort of confined to their homes who don't have much sort of a voice in the public sphere, much of a presence in the public sphere, they're being able to sort of ask questions. That's what they're doing most of all, given this opportunity, but they sort of call in and even do things like request songs, which for them is a novelty and it's very exciting and in some ways empowering thing to be able to do that. Unfortunately, they ask, they often request their host to sort of relay their request or their question under the name of a man. So users don't like to go live. So they'll call in, speak to the host, have a long chat. The hosts are usually so local, so sort of well known within the community that for them it's like talking to a friend. And then the host will sort of take it back onto the air for everyone else to listen to. So I'm very interested in how your work on the AFPAC border, is it having any influence on your work with dawn.com? Are you finding ways of building connections between what has to be sort of elite media, which is English language media online, and what's going on in this community media in a very rural and very disconnected area of the country? Unfortunately, there's a big disconnect between these two things that I work on. Dawn is a national English language paper. It's catering to the Pakistani diaspora abroad and then to the sort of army in Pakistan and the sort of English speaking, grouping elite, industrial elite. And the newspaper deals mostly with big headline issues, the sort of broad topics of national interest like foreign policy, defense policy, military activity, things like that. And then obviously business and economic stuff. And if anything, I've learned a sort of lesson that what's missing from professional media in Pakistan from mainstream media is this sort of hyper-local activity that the radio stations are able to achieve. And the other thing that one is realizing though is that the power of the mainstream media comes from the fact that it is national and it's sort of really well-regulated at this point in the long history and what we're finding with the radio stations are extremely vulnerable. So the stations can be jammed at any point, their funding may run out at any point, some of them are state supported, some of them have NGO grant. So it's all very unstable and fledgling at this point. And one wishes some of that sort of organization and now perhaps even martial planning would come into the radio stations that end professional journalism. But I do feel like there's what I've learned personally from this experience of trying to talk to the people at Dawn about issues that matter to communities as big as 3,000 people in a small village with a tube well that's been blocked with silt. That sort of reporting just doesn't happen in national print at all. And what we end up having are papers that are sort of dominated by broader policy issues. So we've got a question from the floor here, please sir. Yeah, I'm wondering how many people work with you at Dawn and how are you supported? Dawn is a privately owned newspaper. It's the largest English language daily in Pakistan. So it has a reporting staff, like the journalists across the country of about, it fluctuates between 160 to 180 or so, the actual sort of in-house editorial staff and all of that. It's a big organization, about 300 people. Dawn is also affiliated with a television channel and a radio channel. So it's a big, big thing. The website team is much smaller. There's only about 17 of us. And it's a commercial, it's a privately owned, it's a paper itself and it sort of pays for itself and advertising revenues and all of that. So given that we're sitting here with Center for Future Civic Media folks and given that you've come out of this program and are now in what I have to assume is a pretty radically different environment, what's the biggest thing that you would say based on your experience in Pakistan that you would want to give back to the folks here involved with trying to build out civic media tools and programs? I think that what I've seen, I used to say this a lot while I was there as well, but sort of coming back, it's really driven this point home is that sort of local people adapt technology and make use of it and hack it and play with it in ways that are completely unexpected. And it's really important to start at the bottom down and just it seems like a very simple thing to say, but even just this little culture of giving missed calls. I had seen this before in another part of Pakistan where a group of women in this tiny slum in Karachi which is the city that I live in, they had come up with this community policing system where they had a prevalence of sort of domestic violence issues. And several of them bought each other cell phones and they pooled their money and saved little amounts of cash and bought a few phones for women who were particularly having a hard time with their husbands and they came up with a system of missed calls where if a woman, her husband came home in a foul mood or he'd had something to drink or whatever, she would just call her friends and she wouldn't talk to them but they'd see the phone ringing and they'd hang up and so they wouldn't actually spend any money. So we take a very low sort of investment from their part and then all the women would sort of show up or they'd send their husbands over to invite the guy over for a cup of tea or whatever. And they sort of protected each other that way and it was such a simple and yet smart way of doing something which I don't think I could have thought of if I was sitting in MIT and not in there with them with their problems thinking about it. And I've seen the same thing happen with some of the journalists who work for the radio stations and some of the ways that communities interact with journalists, things like they'll get on a truck and they'll call from each stop, they'll call the radio station and let them know about one particular issue along a particular route or they'll have another very complicated system of missed calls where two missed calls meets call me back and three missed calls means that there's a military signpost here and I'm going to be in trouble soon so you won't hear from me for a little while. And it's just, it's simple stuff but it's also very locally, it's very emergent and local to the way that these people communicate. And I think that we should have a lot of regard for that when developing any sort of technologies. So that's a fantastic reminder and thank you so much, human. And also we really, really appreciate you being with us so late at night, so thanks very much. So our next three speakers are gonna bring us over into talking about civic media in an African context. And we were first gonna try to bring up Ruthie Ackerman who's been involved with a project called Ceasefire Liberia. How are we doing on that, Chris? Looks good, live. Hey, Ruthie. Hi, thank you for having me tonight. It's such a pleasure to have you here and Ceasefire Liberia is a project that I've admired for a long time but I'm wondering if you could start by telling the room here, what is Ceasefire Liberia? What's it been trying to do? And what is it meant as far as getting Liberian voices out into the internet as a whole? Okay, I thought I'd start a little bit by giving you a little history about why I went to Liberia in the first place and the reasons for starting it. But I thought that would give you a good background. I had already been writing about Africa when I went to Liberia and especially, specifically writing about women in politics. So when President Sirleaf was elected in 2005, there was a lot of momentum and energy and I was super excited about the fact that there's finally a woman president in Africa and that she believes in democracy and there's gonna be this beacon of hope in the region and in the country. So when a delegation of women from Harvard asked me to join them on a trip to Liberia to train women civil society leaders in politics, I thought, this is great. This is the opportunity to actually see this kind of work in action. I went on this trip in December of 2006 which was almost one year after President Sirleaf was inaugurated. And my job as a journalist was to write stories about President Sirleaf's first year in office. So I was mostly looking at the challenges that Sirleaf was facing in her first year. But what struck me when I arrived in Liberia was that was really the young people that I met there and the challenges that they were facing, rebuilding their lives at the same time that Sirleaf was facing these challenges, rebuilding the country after 14 years of civil war. So I met former child soldiers, I met war traumatized youth, I met amputees, I met a lot of different people that had been through the war and I was just writing their stories, documenting these stories. So when I got home from this trip, I began researching even more intensively about Liberia and realized that one of the largest communities in the United States, one of the largest communities of Liberians in the United States was right in my own backyard in Staten Island, New York. So immediately I went out to Staten Island and I began writing about the young people that I met in Staten Island as well. I was going out and hanging out in the places that the young people spent time at the parking lots behind the buildings in various apartments in having dinner, eating with them and really just writing their stories and hearing about their lives here in the United States. So at that point I decided to apply for a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to do a project to write about how young Liberians are rebuilding their lives both in Liberia but also in Staten Island. I thought that there were many similarities in the types of stories I was seeing, both Liberians in Staten Island and in Liberian were struggling to integrate or reintegrate into their communities and I was fascinated by the struggle and by the similarities and so I wanted to write about that. And at the same time this light bulb went off in my head about here I am as an outsider writing about these two communities in Staten Island and in Liberia that are not my own communities, they're not my own stories to tell but yet I'm writing these stories. And so I thought, what if I created a state where these young Liberians could write about their own lives, their own communities at the same time that I'm writing about and their community. So that's how ceasefire Liberia, the idea for ceasefire Liberia was born. At the same time, can you still see me? We still see you, we just wanted to lower the link and make sure that we could see you. Okay, no problem, I just wanted to make sure. At the same time, so that's how ceasefire Liberia is born but another aspect that I wanted to make sure I pointed out was that I wanted to connect the Liberians in Liberia with those in the diaspora. So there were so many misconceptions I was hearing from Liberians on both sides of the oceans, myths that I was hearing. In Liberia, a lot of the young people were saying that they thought the Liberians living in the US were their lives were easy, that money was found on the streets, that it was the land of milk and honey. And Liberians in the US were saying, had all these myths about Liberians back in Liberia saying that they were lazy, they weren't working, they just wanted to ask for money from their family in the US. So I thought that by creating this dialogue that that would help to dispel some of these myths because I thought that at least one of the reasons for the war in Liberia was that this lack of communication, this lack of dialogue. So if we kept the dialogue open that that would help in terms of rebuilding the country and repairing the relationships. So we've just heard from our friend, Huma Youssef about the importance of community media on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and what's been going on there with community radio stations trying to build media that's capable of serving a local community. It sounds like what you're really talking about is building media that can serve a Liberian community that's sort of weirdly split between West Africa and also a borough of New York City is the same type of media. It's something like a website like Seesfire Liberia able to reach both audiences. How are you reaching this audience in Monrovia and in the rest of the country where infrastructure is even more scarce? It's very difficult and it's one of the things that I wanted to talk about because when I started this project I figured that there would be this digital divide and my hypothesis, and I think I wrote this in my application to Global Voices when I applied for the grant was that the Liberians in Saturn Island who have more access to the internet because they're here in the US would be blogging a lot more than Liberians in Liberia where the internet is expensive and it's very slow and that's only in Monrovia. In the rural areas or anywhere outside of Monrovia the internet's almost non-existent. So my idea was that the bloggers in Saturn Island and the rest of the diaspora would be blogging much more than those in Liberia but in reality what has happened over the last year since we've been up and running is that Liberians in Liberia have been blogging much more than those in the US and I've thought about it a lot. I haven't, I've asked what I haven't done extensive research but I think that the reason why is that there's this sense of urgency in Liberia that they really wanna get their stories out there and that if they don't tell their stories they won't be told. And so there is this digital divide but at least in Monrovia those stories are being told on the ceasefire Liberia blog. But one thing I wanted to point out and one of the challenges I've had is with the gender digital divide. I thought that because I was coming to this project with an inherent interest in writing about women and my stories that I tend to write in my own journalism are about women I thought that by default I guess women bloggers would be drawn to this site and would want to write for ceasefire Liberia. And I found that that is not what has happened. There are many reasons I don't know if you've spoken about this already I had trouble getting on the live stream but there are many reasons why there for this gender digital divide in general poverty is one of them in Liberia there's low literacy rates in Liberia that education during the war was almost non-existent. So that was, so it was difficult to go to school during the war. And on top of that women aren't used to having a voice not used to this idea that you can speak out in your communities and write about your lives. I thought that because we're not only writing on the blog but also using video and photography that there'd sort of be something for everyone. And so I would be able to get women to participate as well. But one other thing I wanted to point out was that another reason that I thought that Liberian women would participate is because there's so much talk with the president's relief and office of empowerment of women. There's been initiatives to have women and child protection units in the police station. There's been specialized rape court that president Sirleaf has initiated. There's been a lot of talk about women in politics but when it comes to actually blogging that hasn't translated into citizen media. So it sounds like as with all great citizen media projects you end up with a number of questions that you don't have good answers to. Why is it that it's easier to get people to blog from Monrovia than it is from Staten Island? Why is it so difficult to get women to speak? You sent some really striking images and I'm just gonna show them right now. I'm just wondering if you can talk a little bit about why images have been such an important part of this process. Why is it that images have been such a big part of citizen media in a Liberian context? Well, I'll give you a little background on some of the images. I can't really see what you're showing but the images that I sent were from recent violence in Voynjama which was one of the hardest hit areas in Liberia during the war and very recently violence broke out in Voynjama when a young Liberian girl was found murdered. It was a Christian girl and that's important because her parents and the community felt that because her body was found supposedly near a mosque that she must have been murdered by the Muslims which started a riots, riots broke out and four people ended up dead and many houses were burnt and churches were burnt and mosques were burnt so this was only in the last month that this happened. So our blog manager, his name is Nat and Juan Beje and he's been wonderful, he's been my counterpart in Monrovia in terms of recruiting other bloggers but also he writes a lot for us. He risked his own life going to Voynjama and also left his family in Monrovia to go to Voynjama to take those photographs that you're looking at and also to write a series of stories for us about what was happening in Voynjama and why this violence broke out and what is being done about it. So this, again, I can't see the photographs but there were a few I sent. He had done a story about two men who had bullets still inside their bodies and actually after he wrote that story someone who read it had contacted some doctors about the possibility of doing some surgery on one of the men. So there's been a lot of encouraging things that have come out of this work. Another thing I wanna mention specifically about this work in Voynjama was that no one else is covering this stuff. The big media outlets, BBC, whoever's usually covering these stories have not been covering these stories in Liberia. So in terms of an international audience and getting these stories out really there's only ceasefire Liberia and maybe one or two other blogs that people read. So that is why it's so important that a project like this exists. So I think just in terms of thinking about sort of the arc of our event here we're having this sort of whirlwind tour of the globe and we're sort of moving from high media attention to lower media attention. We've gone from Iran and talking about the Iranian revolution and Haiti with a lot of attention to the earthquake. We're gonna end up in Madagascar which may be the only country that I can think of going through political violence that gets less attention than Liberia. I'm wondering if just as a parting shot you wanna essentially tell us what's the biggest Liberian story that Americans are missing and probably should be paying attention to? Oh, there's a few of them I think but one of them is that President Sterliep is going to run for office again. She announced that recently and she had said when she was first selected to office that she would only serve one term. So many people are outraged that she's running again. They think that she's supposed to be the symbol of democracy and here she is trying to hold on to power. And I think that that has been something that has been there's been anger over many issues in Liberia in the five years that she's been in office. And I think that this is anger there's some anger under the surface that's beginning to boil up. There's anger that the rural communities are extremely angry that there are many of their needs they don't think have been met over the last five years. There are many women that are angry that they think that their needs haven't been met. And I think that a lot of it is starting to boil up now and would certainly run in for office again. I think we're going to see some of that start to brew even more as we get closer and closer to election day. So I'm gearing up with some other partners to really train more citizen journalists and really try to get ceasefire Liberia prepared for the election and for some coverage to follow. I, Ruthie, thank you so much for being with us. And I also, I just want to acknowledge to this group Ruthie is one of the people we're going to feature today who've been involved with Global Voices in one fashion or another. We've tried a number of media projects in post-conflict countries and for the most part they don't work. And actually what's been so astounding is being able to have this much information and so much incredible reporting coming out of Liberia. So thank you not just for being with us tonight but thank you for the amazing work that you're doing on making sure that we understand the situation in Liberia a little bit better. Thank you so much. So as we talk about civic media in difficult places and conversations that can be difficult to have, I want to introduce our next guests, Brenda Burrell and Bev Clark, who are calling in and perhaps the toughest circumstances of everyone this evening. They're going to be calling in from Harare's and Bobway where not only is it the middle of the night but it's the middle of the night which lately has been routinely interrupted by power cuts and they've been going through some real struggles as far as maintaining connectivity to some of their incredibly important citizen media projects. Bev and Brenda are really just inspiring leaders who are pillars of civil society within Zimbabwe and who've been involved with just utterly fascinating efforts to build community media in a country where building community media is an incredibly difficult thing to do. So guys, I would love to ask you first of all to say a word or two about Kubitshana but then ideally tell us a word or two about the Freedom Phone project that you've been working on. Hey, hi Ethan. Hi, can you hear me? It's Bev speaking. Hey Bev, it's great to hear you. Did you hear our question at all? I did hear your question and I just wanted to say thank you very much for that wonderful introduction. So I think I'll start off Ethan telling you a little bit about Kubitshana and then Brenda can jump in and describe Freedom Phone for you. About 10 years ago we started Kubitshana with a specific intention of trying to make the NGO sector in Zimbabwe and the publishing that it produces more accessible to Zimbabweans, the region and also globally. And we started off very small. We carted around a questionnaire to all those Zimbabwean NGOs that we knew of and we showed them our kind of illustrated idea of what our website would finally look like. We got amazing support from the sector in Zimbabwe and today we run a website which Archives has a library of over 16,000 documents largely about activities in the nonprofit sector. We have a directory of over 240 NGOs. We produce a weekly email newsletter to a subscriber list of about 9,400 people. Our SMS subscriber list has grown just recently to over 10,000 people. We've started a community blog where I think we have now over about 16 contributors. And what we like specifically about our community blog is that Zimbabweans contribute their perspectives of on the ground life here. And actually I urge you to read a post that I put up today about a woman's field trip into a very rural space in Zimbabwe in the quest to actually dispense medication for measles. So our use of ICTs has been very integrated and basically how we've approached it is to look at the fact that many different people have different accesses to different tools and ways of communication. And we've tried to spread our expertise and skills over a variety of mediums in order to attract and build participation from a wide variety of Zimbabweans. We also have gone into print, especially over election time when we feel that the information is being severely controlled by the government in terms of voter education materials. And just recently, we've also engaged Freedom Phone, our audio information dissemination project to carry audio materials to again to a wide variety of Zimbabweans. So at this point in time, I think I do think that Kupertana is seen as one of Africa's ICT success stories. We're really proud of what we've developed. And I think I recall you saying in the introduction, we have indeed developed what we feel is a community. We have a very loyal following of Zimbabweans who look to us for non-partisan information and information actually that inspires them. Our take on disseminating information is that you need to create hope, you need to continue to be optimistic, but at the same time, you also need to be defined in your power about your rights. And we've combined those sorts of elements and we feel that we are creating a more empowered Zimbabwean general public, at least those people who consume our information. I'm not too sure if you have any specific questions about what I've said, but otherwise I'll hand you over to Brenda. Well, Bev, I'd love to just ask one thing before we sort of move over and talk about Freedom Phone. I just want everyone here to sort of understand the context of this a little bit better. One of the things that I love about talking to the two of you is that you have this incredibly successful NGO. You work with all of these other NGOs, you're bringing them online, you're telling hopeful stories, very personal stories about what's going on. One thing that I noticed that the two of you never talk about unless you're prompted is just how difficult the environment is to do community media in Zimbabwe. And I was wondering if you would just explain to the audience here that doesn't know Zimbabwe very well how difficult it is to do community radio, how difficult and how dangerous it is to produce print newsletters in the Zimbabwean media environment. If I got you right, Ethan, you broke up a lot there, but I'm thinking that you are asking us about describing our media environment. If that is the case, working in a bit of an audio vacuum here, a lot of being in Zimbabwe and being an activist in Zimbabwe means basically putting your head above the parapet and not being afraid to disseminate information when there are many factors working against you. In fact, I was thinking about this chat on the way here tonight, and one of the things I did today was I went to a demonstration in downtown Harare that was organized by Woman of Zimbabwe Arise. I'm sure you've heard of them. They're a very vibrant, female-led activist group here. And they were protesting about the poor service actually of the national power supply company. And as you mentioned in your introduction, our power supplies are incredibly erratic these days. But when I was downtown and watching them today, there were over 500 women there. They were waving yellow cards, basically using the soccer metaphor of giving the national supply authority a warning, saying, listen, we're watching you, and Zimbabweans need more stable power supplies, so watch out. And when I was there, it struck me that no matter how many ICTs or groovy, sexy new media tools you have, if you don't have the passion, if you don't have the drive to communicate in difficult situations and environments like Zimbabwe, then basically you just won't make it. So I think what we have here is a media environment that is very, very shut down. As you know, we don't particularly have free press. We don't have a daily independent newspaper. We don't have free radio stations or TV stations. And what is particularly disturbing is the amount of fear that is pervasive in Zimbabwe. People have actually laughed. We are a nation that does like a good joke, but people say that we walk around with a crick in our neck because we're always looking over our shoulder, wondering who's watching us or who's listening to us. So I think that being engaged in community and civic media in a country like Zimbabwe forces us to innovate. And I think that's what Kupertana has done very successfully, forcing us to innovate and as well as that being consistently courageous. I believe that one of our successes and one of the successes of publishing and of moving information is to be consistent. People have to realize that you're not a fly-by-night that you, that you're there week in and week out and that you build a trust between yourself and your audience and whoever you're networking with. Last year, Kupertana actually got an award for media responsibility from the National... Beves. NGO Associates, no. I think that Charlie Ten are interfering with your connection at the moment. Chris, do you wanna try to reset? Yeah, yeah. Why don't we hang up and let's see if we can bring Brenda back in to talk about you just sent a text. Let's see if we can get Brenda back in to talk just really briefly about Freedom Phone. I just wanna add a little context to this. It's almost impossible to do independent media in Zimbabwe. Zimbabweans are enormously influential in independent media in Southern Africa and the Melon Guardian, which is probably the best paper on the continent is a Zimbabwean run newspaper coming out of South Africa. But if you wanna do a community radio station in Zimbabwe for the last several years, you've really had to be prepared to go to prison to do so and very, very smart organizations have put together fascinating hacks to try to figure out how you do community radio because as we were talking before with Huma, you really want radio that's reaching the people. Up until recently, state of the art for how you do community radio in Zimbabwe without getting arrested is you produce community radio and you produce it on cassette tapes and you hand it out to van drivers who drive long distance bus routes and you try to build a mix between music and political programming so that they won't be terrified of playing the political stuff because it's broken up by music. One of the things that Kupertana has been incredibly, incredibly experimental in doing and has done just gorgeous work on is figuring out how we might end up using mobile phones to do community radio and we're hoping to bring Brenda back into the conversation to sort of talk about this. Any luck on that? No, they turned down twice but I just got a text through so we should be okay. Just so everyone knows this is the second to last speaker and I think the last speaker will only be about another 15 minutes or so. You know, stick through the end if you can. But yeah, we don't seem to be connecting to Bevan Brenda. If you could just let them know, I'm gonna talk very briefly about Freedom Phone and then we're gonna move on to Lova, who's our last speaker. So assume for the moment that in Zimbabwe, it's basically impossible to run an independent radio station. On the other hand, you have massive mobile phone penetration. Lots and lots of people have mobile phones. What Bevan Brenda ended up working on is a way to do radio type programming over the mobile phone. And this involves building an inexpensive interactive voice response system. You send a text message to the system and it calls you back and says, hey, what sort of content would you like? Press one if you want recent headlines. Press two if you want a discussion on political affairs. Press three if you're looking for inspirational music. What's most incredible about the system is not only is it an open source system that's being rolled out for use in multiple locations, but the political environment in Zimbabwe is finally gradually starting to change. And something that's enormously interesting is that one of the ministers, the minister for constitutional affairs, has recently agreed to come on Freedom Phone and field questions from the general population about the Zimbabwean constitution. So here's a very creative use of new media as a way to create a public space that just doesn't exist otherwise. Chris, where are we at as far as? Well, so we, Brenda says she's sure you'll do a good job describing Freedom Phone. And then, but we tried calling back three times, no luck. And then Lova is not answering, who is our last speaker, was online last 6.38 or so. So Lova's not answering, but I can try one more time. So let's try once more and see if we can get Lova on. In the meantime, in general, any questions that have sort of come up for people here about what we're getting in this sort of scattershot, pointillistic view of citizen media around the planet, anything that anyone wants to observe, bring up, sort of talk about? This is me vamping, and you can help me by standing up, and yes, please, wonderful. Everything I'm hearing makes me think that journalists here could be doing more reporting from here with people in places like Zimbabwe and Haiti. And I wanna ask you technically, what are the, how much bandwidth do we have in some of these developing countries? Because if it's getting to the point where we could Skype with people in Haiti and Zimbabwe, can we start interviewing from our desks using Skype? I mean, how far are we away from doing that? And second question, part two. I've heard of frontline SMS and these SMS messaging systems, and I wondered if there's any grant money or any projects out there that are looking at something like a super cell phone, maybe something between a net book and a cell phone, and fund handing out these net books so that people can go a step further than just receiving messages. Is there anything out there like that? Thanks, those are really great questions. Maybe we can put those in the queue. So we're gonna circle back to those. I just wanna point out that there are drinks for everyone upstairs immediately after this. We have to quit right at seven, so that might be a question that we do over cocktails. Sorry to apologize, let me apologize, and here should be Lova. I hope he answers. We've been doing so well with Skype up until this point. You have to say, I mean, given how many people in how many countries- I think that's Zimbabwe. We're drawing in, well, this is, I mean, hilariously, now our problem is actually getting to Princeton, so. I think we have Princeton. Lova, you there? Someone's breathing heavily. So while Chris works on this, let me try to- Yes, I'm here. Hey, Lova, wonderful. We're so glad to have you here. Lova, we've been having this sort of crazy globe-hopping conversation about the power of civic media. And particularly, we've been talking about this idea that civic media can help us get information from places that we don't normally hear from. And it's been, I think, a real surprise to some people here to have voices coming out of Liberia, voices coming out of Zimbabwe. How has civic media made it possible for people in Madagascar to tell their stories? Tell us a little bit about Fuku Club and what that's meant as far as Malagasy people telling their stories to the world. Okay, so Fuku Madagascar has now trained 65 vloggers all over Madagascar with various interests. And the purpose of Fuku was to highlight and promote on the web grassroots association working in environmental social changes. And we figured that if we give a platform to those associations, we could, those associations could greatly benefit from the increased exposure via feedback so collaboration, right? So we did that for two years, but then as you all may know, there was the political turmoil in Madagascar and it turned quite violent and resulted in the ousting of the president with the support of the army on March 17th of last year. So basically the people that we train now didn't have kind of turned by default to document the crisis. And it was clearly quite important because freedom of press, which was already under attack before the coup was certainly more shut down now because the new government wanted to provide an image of legitimacy and being the people's choice. And that was clearly not the case. So what the bloggers that we train did was basically to provide real life information of what was happening in Madagascar. Let's just talk a little bit about who these bloggers are because I think people here are sort of imagining, trained professional journalists. Who are the sorts of people who were involved with Fuku Club? Right, so the very first Fuku Club bloggers were actually high school students from a public school in Madagascar. They just came to us and they were interested in learning a little bit more about information technologies. So they were the first one that we train now among all the bloggers that we have, we have environmental activists that are trained to protect the forest on the East Coast. We also have healthcare givers in the south of Madagascar. And yeah, so none of those guys were professional bloggers per se. They were really just interested in learning more. And that's when, and basically, but this training that they had helped them document everything that was going on when the social fabric of Madagascar turned a little different. So just to sort of wind back in time, you have a club that really starts as high school students who initially wanted to learn a little bit more English, then started to wanna learn a little bit about technology, ended up learning about blogging, and have now turned into really some of the most independent voices coming out of the Malagasy crisis for the simple reason that a lot of radio and television voices have been silenced. As someone managing this project, what does it mean that you're sending out high school students to literally go out and report from the barricades? I mean, how do we do this? And I say we because of course we're supporting this project over at Global Voices. Is there concern about these young people sort of going out and doing what could be some very dangerous journalistic work? There is definitely a major concern, especially around March and April of last year because that's when we could see that there were people being killed in the street. What we, our first initial reaction when we saw that there were a document in the crisis was why exactly are you out in the street right now? You should be at home and just close the door and be safe. But really that was what we as the core team told them. We told them at first that this was really not what the objective was of the training, but they just felt that it was their duty to tell more about what was happening because themselves at home didn't see anything on television or on radio about what was really happening. So it was more, it was coming from the bloggers themselves. They felt like this is happening and we need to tell the people outside that this is how it is. And maybe people are missing the picture here. So just before you joined us, Lava, we had a great question from the audience and the question was basically if it's possible for us to have a conversation with a blogger in Madagascar over Skype, why is it that we're not getting more information out of places like Madagascar? Is it a technology constraint that we're not able to make the call to Antonin Arrivo or what are the other constraints? Is the problem that we tend to think that Madagascar is a place where scheming piglins go to overthrow the government rather than thinking of it as an actual real place on the map? I think it's a little bit of all of that at once. I think one of the major issue is still language clearly. When we trained our bloggers to use a citizen media platform, we also encouraged them to blog a little bit in English because that would increase the ability for other people to understand what they're talking about. I think the technology is still a major constraint because even though we're supposed to have the faster broadband right now, it's really not quite there for the majority of the population. And finally, I think that it's a little bit about people not understanding that there's a lot of good stories that they could tell and that they could tell the story in a more repeating way so that people get more interested about what's going on there. So I think it's a bit of all of that. Now, clearly there might be a lack of interest for Madagascar when it's not about the environment or the lemurs, but I think it's also about us not telling a competing story as well. Well, embarrassingly enough, we actually had a question before Georgia Popo well showed up with a lemur on her shoulder. So we've actually already fielded a lemur question. So we've already given in to every Malagasy stereotype or at least the American Malagasy stereotypes. Look, I just wanna recognize one of the reasons I wanted to close with you talking a little bit about Fuku is that we've been astounded by people's willingness to do incredibly hard work to put their country on the map digitally. Not only have we seen high school students going out and doing really intensive political reporting, but right now there's a global voices project in Malagasy. Lovett, talk to me just really quickly in closing about why it's important to bring the Malagasy language and citizen media in Malagasy onto the internet. Right. I think what motivated the global voices in Malagasy project was we feel at times because we're an island that we're a little bit isolated from the conversation that's happening in the rest of the world. And we take great pride in the Malagasy language. It's spoken all over the country. It's one of the reason why we feel that the Malagasy identity can be highlighted because it's an old language. It's what unites us basically. And so we figured that if we were going to tell our stories in English and in other languages, it would just make sense for us to also bring stories from other part of the world in Malagasy. And I think this translation effort really helped us gather more ideas from how people were doing things outside and also helped tell our stories. So this two-way street really was a win-win situation for the Malagasy blogosphere. Can we get a goodbye from you in Malagasy? Oh, sure. So one of the things that I've been learning about Malagasy is that it has more syllables than I could ever possibly imagine. I'm filled with respect, Lovah. Yes, I'll give you the short version there. Lovah, thank you so much for being our closing speaker and sharing a little bit with us. And I'm going to urge everybody here to take a close look at Fuku, because I think it's actually one of the very most inspiring projects. It's the project that I show off every time I talk about the power of citizen media. So thanks for spending a little bit of time with us tonight. And everyone here, thanks for hanging in for what has not always been the most technically flawless event, but I thought ended up being an interesting conversation. And I hope maybe we can continue it outside over some drinks.