At crossroads in my life, I bike across countries. Nine years ago, I biked across the United States. Today, I find myself at another transition: I am moving on from my role as President of Digital Democracy. In honor of that change, I’ll be crossing the Dominican Republic and Haiti on the island of Hispaniola.

Haiti faced a crossroads when it was devastated by the 2010 earthquake. Digital Democracy had a team on the ground at the time, which meant the event shook me to the core as well. The Dd team sprang into action, contributing to humanitarian aid efforts to map where people were in need to help save lives.

Yet once Haiti disappeared from the headlines, the real work to rebuild the country began. In response to increased levels of rape post-earthquake, we worked to empower women as key actors in Haiti’s reconstruction with a commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative. This year we worked in Haiti to launch the 572 call center, the country’s first rape-response hotline (a sort of 911 for violence against women), connected to a secure database and interactive mapping system. Next we’re working to scale these solutions nationally.

Now I’m at a crossroads too. Over the past three years Digital Democracy has grown from an idea to an accomplished nonprofit. With Dd a sustainable organization, I’m ready to move on and am looking to explore opportunities that allow me to pursue innovative projects with larger enterprises. I’ll still be involved in Digital Democracy, in a guiding role to support the work of my co-founder Emily and our amazing staff.

Since Digital Democracy launched, I’ve been able to draft policy in Iraq, securely document crimes against humanity in Burma/Myanmar, develop an international education initiative, work with government heads and active citizens in the Caucasus, host trainings with Secretary Clinton in the lands that my family fled from, and speak at US Congress and at the White House. It’s meant the world to me to work on these initiatives with such incredible people over the past few years. When I biked across the US I learned that people can achieve anything they put their minds to. I’m excited to see what this new trip will teach.

Tune in to Bike Hispaniola to join my friend Rob Munro & me on the journey. Follow the blog, featuring a live map that updates our location, twitter feed, photos and more. Please ask us questions, share tips and ideas, and let us know of people and sights to see. I’ll be sharing stories and stopping by our partners’ offices in Port-Au-Prince to see the call center staff and further explore how technology can continue to make a difference in Haiti and around the world.

You can sponsor my 500 mile ride by contributing to Digital Democracy’s end of year matching campaign in honor of the trip. All donations will go to Digital Democracy core programming in Haiti and beyond in 2012 – not the ride itself – and be doubled by generous matching donors.

Happy holidays to you and thank you for your support over these years. I look forward to hearing from you and keeping in touch wherever my travels take me and where yours take you.

Sincerely,
Mark Belinsky

The past few weeks I have been spending time in Zucotti Park as part of the people’s microphone. Since tech-based amplification is banned, people have improvised, and together shout the words of whoever is speaking until it is loud enough so that everyone can hear them. That decision making is slow and laborious, while also beautiful and egalitarian.

“What do the protesters want?” is an oft-repeated chorus coming from mainstream media.

OccupyVotes is an open source approach to encourage participatory decision-making: collect & prioritize our ideas in an open, efficient & accountable way.

With around 10,000 votes in the first 36 hours of launching the site, it’s exciting to see the project taking off. It’s clear that this platform helps fill a void – people want to share their vision for demands for the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Occupy Votes was built on the open-source All Our Ideas platform. Not only does it allow visitors to vote with the ideas they like best, it provides them a forum to submit their own ideas and see the votes by other users. As more people contribute their ideas, we look forward to taking a deeper look at the data to understand the differences between opinions from those voting inside Liberty Park, in other US cities, from different platforms and around the world. Stay tuned to find out what the data has to say about the decision making process.

It’ll be interesting to get deeper into the data to understand the differences between opinions from those voting inside Liberty Park, in other US cities, from different platforms and around the world. Stay tuned to find out what the data has to say about the decision making process.

Why did we choose All Our Ideas? Other platforms exist, including Google moderator. With that system, good ideas often get stuck at the bottom of the laundry list and tend not to rise, unless a troll forces an issue up. People don’t tend to scroll. Or trolls will upvote only the issues that they’re interested in, not the rest. This creates lopsided results. Plus, this tool is easy to use and visually clear. The user interface is itself more democratic in that way.

All Our Ideas randomly generates a pairing. As more and more people vote, the information can become statistically representative and truly reflect the interests of the group. Or points of disagreement. All of that information is available in the data, which is open and available. We’ll be publishing it in the interest of transparency.

We’re looking to gather volunteers to set up a voting booth in Liberty Plaza (Zuccotti Park) and engage people in the process of voting and presenting their specific demands. This site is an initial attempt to see if the tool speaks to people. Digital Democracy has had some initial successes with this with our friends in Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco, and I’m hoping we can take the lessons and open source tools we’ve been working with around the world to continue to support the marginalized, even in this country – the 99%.

We welcome your thoughts, feedback and – of course – your ideas!

Disclosure: All of the ideas on the allourideas site are currently seeded from unscientific polls that I’ve seen covered in a variety of media sources. Fast Company, CNN, WSJ & occupywallstreet forum, plus Michael Haack and Matt Taibbi. Additional ideas related to financial concerns have been added by users. Thanks to the Meetup team for providing their headquarters in New York City for the Occupy Together Hackathon where this project was synthesized.

Update: Check out this Mashable article which talks about the project – Occupy Wall Street Hackathons Produce Digital Tools and New Activists and on the All Our Ideas blog.

On September 11, 2011, Guatemalans went to the polls to vote in a presidential election. Who exactly was voting? Although 70% of the population is under the age of 30, historically very few young Guatemalans register and vote in national or local elections. The same holds true for indigenous women, who represent 20% of the population, yet hold a scant number of government seats. A pressing question is whether historically marginalized Guatemalans can find a way to engage in the elections process. How might participation levels change if young & indigenous Guatemalans are engaged on civic issues, and empowered with the journalism skills to report their views on the electoral process, before, during and after the actual voting day?

VOZZ is a youth-driven election project which empowers young Guatemalans with the information and training they need to be citizen reporters throughout the pre- & post-election period in Guatemala. Named by youth in crime-ridden Guatemala City, Vozz captures the spirit & voice – voz – of young people to share election stories from 50 municipalities throughout the country, creating lasting ties of civic engagement. They’ve been producing lots of content which is getting translated into three languages, including Kaqchikel.

Together with Kara Andrade, the HablaGuate team and an amazing coalition of local partners, we had the pleasure of developing curriculum and providing materials and strategy to this important initiative. Our initial work in Guatemala last year began with youth from a remote town called “Lancetillo”. The Project Einstein youth we worked with in that initial training reported, shot, and produced slideshows and then exhibited their work in La Antigua, Guatemala. This podcast of theirs also does a good job of detailing the work.

Vozz’s trained reporters are currently working on replicating their project in their own municipalities, including Mazatenango, Patzún and Zacapa, in preparation for the second round of elections on November 6. Stay tuned to Vozz.com.gt for their reports!

15 de septiembre 2011 ZACAPA – De por sí sabemos y ya es costumbre esperar que en cada época de elecciones todos los candidatos se adueñen de nuestros lugares públicos para poner supropaganda y dañar el ornato de nuestras comunidades,Pero también como es de esperar la publicidad que se pegaron en postes y piedras ya no vuelven a estar como estaban pues usan materiales altamente difícil de quitar y estos se quedan allí hasta que el ambiente los descompone o hasta que lleguen las elecciones nuevamente y vuelvan a colocar nueva propaganda sobre ellos… Read more.

2 years, 21 countries, some revolutions and a lot of new friends – Digital Democracy is proud to launch our first annual report. The online version and PDF below are interactive, so feel free to click on links and pictures to hear to stories and read more about our projects.
Digital Democracy 2009-2010 Annual Report

With deep gratitude to our global community of supporters who have made this work possible, we are thrilled to launch our first annual report. Covering the period from November, 2008, when we incorporated under the auspices of the Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy until the end of 2010, when we filed for our own independent non-profit status, the report documents our work to empower marginalized communities around the globe, and the inspirational ways they are using technology to build their own futures. Special thanks to Bill Hopkins Media for generously donating our New York office, Drew Frist for the Dd logo, Zago who designed this Annual Report, our team, our funders, our advisory board and generous individuals like you.

Societies are stronger when more people participate and along with the report, we also have a new promotional video to go along with it and help spread this message. Javier Saavedra is the editor with Steve Benjamin doing the graphics. All the footage is from our past two years in the field, either taken by us or our partners. We hope you like it:

Sincerely,
Emily Jacobi & Mark Belinsky, co-founders

There is a different approach to projects between techies and filmmakers. Those in tech rapidly prototype and release ideas and applications, while the filmmaking community is much more prone to keeping a project under wraps until it has reached near-perfection.

I had the extreme pleasure of witnessing this creative conflict first hand when I attended the recent Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) Producers Institute on “indigenous science.” The concept was ambitious: coupling documentary film projects with indigenous science from those communities. At Digital Democracy, we’ve been implementing grassroots empowerment projects of marginalized groups, including indigenous Mayans in Guatemala, but the opportunity to attach that work to film projects is an interesting expansion of the scope and reach for some of that work.

There’s a new level of interactivity that film affords and people are exploring what that new transmedia looks like. I interpret it as understanding how audience can be a fellow producer and not just consumer of media. Unfortunately I’ve only seen a few successful examples of this, such as Baratunde’s viewing parties around his “Future Of” TV show and the interactivity of Al-Jazeera’s new show “The Stream” (which I’ve guest hosted). At the public event, there were many discussions on how to blend new technologies into storytelling from an exciting group of mentors and pulled together by Wendy Levy. I discussed how mobile phones are a big part of this as we can now consider them an intregal part of our lives. They’re now our mobile homes as we live our lives out of them.

The group of participants were an exciting one:

• Kashmir is Beautiful: a hybrid social game for people in India who are rewarded online for doing real-world actions to clean the environment in their neighborhood
• We Were Here: interactive timeline and curriculum to share the story of the devastation of the AIDS epidemic to the gay community
• Rekindling Venus: augmented reality and 3d exhibit to show, in real-time, current devastation to the worlds coral reefs
• Question Bridge: a website and museum installation for black males to talk about their racial identity
• Equal Footing: social cartography provides indigenous communities in Mexico with information and legal resources that they have never had.

My focus was on this last project on a team that consisted of director/producer Aaron Soto-Karlin, anthropologist Tim Trench and myself, with support from the BAVC mentors & staff:

Keepers of the Earth is a film following an indigenous Mexican man’s struggle to keep his traditions intact as environmentalists and armed revolutionaries try to exploit the rainforest that he calls home.  The technology piece comes in where he and his people are being zoned off of the land that they’ve lived on under the guise of protecting the rainforest. Digital tools can make this process more equitable as the local people have more chance to participate in the negotiations that will govern the region for generations.

“Equal footing” is meant to bring the indigenous people to the negotiating table with equal footing. With indigenous mapping and an interactive visual database, local groups can for the first time see the implications of the paperwork they’re signing off on by having it projected onto a map. Moreover, they can help redraw the borders according to their wishes and concerns. Having the digital available as printouts on paper and vice-versa can help overcome the current technology barriers. And partnering with the right NGOs who have been there for decades ensures a grassroots led process.

We installed a working prototype and the results were shocking. In our initial renderings of the government produced surveys, we immediately found that they had miscalculated the geo coordinates. This means that many more people were to be displaced than even they had intended. This initially proves that the tool can also be powerfully helpful to the government players as well.

As we continue to map what is written in the legal documents that have been signed and are now being renegotiated, there are hundreds more problems that might arise and force people from their lands. This project can help keep people on their land and save the rainforest at the same time. With such an important piece of land for global climate change, it’s necessary to make the proper decisions collectively. The dangers are too great.

Thanks to BAVC and best of luck to all the filmmakers as you cross the bridge between filmmaker perfection and techie agility.

View more presentations from Mark Belinsky

Vote for our panels at SXSW

SXSW is shaping up to be a pretty exciting festival this year. Kudos to the awesome Baratunde who is going to give the opening keynote. This year we’re exploring the little discussed aspects of the implications of technology. How can it empower but also endanger people and what creative strategies are currently being pursued around the world? The second is about how women are drivers of change. Please check out more details about them below:

Panel:How To Not Die: Using Tech In A Dictatorship

A discussion about how technologies that are often built in the west are being used around the world in extremely dangerous situations. Often there isn’t an idea of how to protect individuals and their human rights when developing these tools, even when they’re being used by activists and changemakers around the world. So this will be concrete examples from Burma, Tibet, Liberia and Egypt.

Speakers: Mark Belinsky – Digital Democracy

1. Lhadon Tethong – Tibet Action Institute
2. Brian Conley – Small World News

Panel:Women Drive Change: Tech in the Global South

The use of technology by women in the Global South is growing fast! From Africa to South America to Southeast Asia, women in the Global South are using technology tools in new and creative ways with astounding results. Teen girls and senior citizens alike are finding the freedom to use technology to let their voices be heard, to foster an independent living, and to bring about revolution. We will talk about what this means for women, how their online personas might differ from real-world personas in societies where women have fewer rights, and where technology tools need to go next in order to meet their specific needs.

Speakers: Jenn Sramek –CivicActions

1. Kara Andrade – Ashoka
2. Zawadi Nyong’o – Africa Cancer Foundation
3. Emily Jacobi – Digital Democracy
4. Catherine Harrington – Women’s Learning Partnership

Panel:Is that the mobilenet in your pocket or…

Mobile phones are a game-changer in filmmaking. Is it good, bad or ugly for the industry? This panel brings together the people who let us film the bleeding edge of film.. from our pockets. I’m looking to host this panel as part of the film fest given my history in documentary film and recent experience speaking at SilverDocs and at the Tribeca Film Institute with BAVC.

Friends’ Panels: There are some panels being put on that we highly recommend checking out as well and giving some votes to. Here’s our list. Feel free to add your own in the comments! We’re excited to learn what else is out there.

Panel: Internet Power: After Cyber-Optimism and Pessimism

Description A year ago one could have had an honest argument about whether the Internet was increasing the power of the oppressor or the oppressed. Events in Tunis, Cairo, Daraa, Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing have shown that it can benefit both and that the effect of digital technology on power will be complex and contradictory. What are we to make of freelance hacker orgs, transparency activists and covert cyber war?

Speakers: Chris Bronk – Rice University

1. Richard Boly – Office of eDiplomacy, U.S. Department of State
2. Mary Joyce – The Meta-Activism Project
3. Ron Deibert – University of Toronto (Canada Centre for Global Security Studies, Citizen Lab)
4. Patrick Meier – Ushahidi

Panel: Africa, Tech & Women: The New Faces of Development

2010 is the year that Africa will finally connect to the global undersea cable network powering today’s broadband internet traffic. How can Africa use the arrival of this high speed super highway to it’s advantage? What impact will broadband communications have on Africa’s development? Are we looking at Africa 3.0?

Speakers: TMS Ruge – Project Diaspora

1. Ebele Okobi-Harris – Yahoo!
2. Liz Ngonzi – New York University Heyman Center for Philanthropy & Fundraising
3. Isis Nyong’o – InMobi Africa
4. Milly Businge – Kikuube Village Council

Panel: How to Run a Social Site and Not Get Users Killed

Facebook helped foment an uprising. Twitter kept the world rapt as revolution unfolded. But for all of their benefits, the use of social networks often puts activists–in Egypt, Syria, China, or even the United States–at great risk. Your privacy policy and terms of use, as well as how you enforce them, could mean life or death for an activist (or an ordinary user) using your site. What can you, the social media company, do to help keep your users safe?

Speakers: Jillian York – Electronic Frontier Foundation

1. Mathew Ingram – GigaOm
2. Kacem El Ghazzali – none
3. Danny O’Brien – Committee to Protect Journalists
4. Sam Gregory – WITNESS

Panel: Social Change Film: Strategy+Transmedia+Evaluation

our job is not done once the film is complete. In fact, in today’s media landscape, early strategic thinking, transmedia collaborations and entertainment evaluations are critical components to increasing the impact of film’s for social change. They can help you reach a larger audience, amplify your message, connect with your audience, understand what worked and what didn’t work and bring in additional funding

Speakers: Debika Shome – harmony Institute

1. Shaady Salehi – active voice
2. Lina Srivastava – Lina Srivastava Consulting LLC

Panel: Social Design Fractals

What would Coca-Cola taste like if if the company improved the labor standards in its factories? What kinds of software would Microsoft produce if it made its CEO-to-worker pay ratio more equitable? When we think about socially responsible design, we tend to think in terms of physical tweaks to products and supply chains, meticulously calculating carbon footprints and life cycle analyses and whole-life costs. But ultimately, thanks to the fractal nature of complex systems, there may be less of a need to calculate than we think – changes made in the marketing or operations or human resources departments will inevitably manifest themselves in product development.

Organizer: Stephanie Gerson – Purpose

Panel: Better Food through Open Data Standards

There is an explosion in the number of services created to help people make better choices about how we produce, consume, and interact with food. Challenges related to the accuracy and completeness of data hamper the rate of innovation. A panel of leading food, data and technology doers shares their initial framework for an open standard for reporting, recording and sharing food information.

Speakers: Anthony Nicalo – Foodtree

1. Niles Brooks – Clean Plates
2. Danielle Gould – Food+Tech Connect
3. Chacha Sikes – Code for America
4. Britta Riley – Windowfarms

SXSW2012 panel picker data visualization

If you’d like to see more about what SXSW is all about, see above for an interactive dataviz on what the focus is this year.

Community Additions:

Panel: Your iPhone Is Political: Mobile Democracy

Thanks to Katherine Maher for suggesting this panel.

By 2014, more of us will access the Internet with mobile devices than with desktops or laptops. Android phones, iPhones, iPads and other mobile devices are quickly becoming our primary gateways to the Internet. Everything we do online — the ways that we produce news, organize our communities, and communicate with each other — will increasingly depend on access to these devices and the broadband data connections they provide. Meanwhile, wireless companies are seeking to determine what content we can see and how we can access it.

Speakers: Josh Levy – Free Press

1. Nilay Patel – Thisismynext…
2. Parul Desai – Consumers Union
3. Katherine Maher – World Bank

Panel: Recognize This! Ethics of Mobile Face Tagging

Thanks to Sam Gregory for suggesting this panel.

With the ready availability of social media, digital databases of ID photos, high-resolution cameras and free, powerful face recognition software that can run on smartphones, we are entering into an unprecedented shift in the visual privacy of everyday people. Technology that was once the domain of authoritarian states, is now being put to use by the hottest tech startups, who often lack the capacity or capability to consider the broader cultural impact. What right do people have to control personal images in a socially-networked age or to be visually anonymous in a video-mediated world?

Speakers: Sam Gregory – WITNESS

1. Harlo Holmes – The Guardian Project
2. Bryan Nunez – WITNESS

President Saakashvili of Georgia

“I paid maybe the first and last bribe in my life for “The Economist” in the Soviet Union. It was 3 rubles. A babushka (grandma) sold it to me for 6.”

So says Giga Bokeria, the Secretary of the National Security Council for the country of Georgia. And he should know. He’s a crucial part of the youth in government that have run Georgia since the Rose revolution of 2003.

I recently visited the county to understand what a successful transition from dictatorship to democracy looks like. To meet with the people who ran the transition to hear from them how they succeeded where so many other countries failed. Their time in power has seen an elimination of the rampant corruption that existed, a minimization of bureaucratic morass that made it so difficult to start new businesses, and a reversal of the negative recidivism trend for youth – they’re now actually staying to build their country. At the same time, facing war with it’s much larger neighbor Russia and being accused of radical libertarianism.

I was to meet with senior political figures and give a series of lectures to the public as part of the Atlantic Dinners, that brings together opinion makers on major contemporary issues, thanks to Marquardt & Marquardt. After the recent conflict with russia, they’ve been increasingly trying to align with the rest of Europe, showing it’s cultural, religious and intellectual similarities. This event brought foreign dignitaries and thought leaders to discuss a variety of topics facing the country.

I had the pleasure of being invited to speak on two panels and to meet a number of invited revolutionaries trying to transition their countries of Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, and Syria, as successfully as the Georgians had theirs.

There were a number of events and panels staged throughout “European Week.” Here’s a brief overview:

“Social Networks and the Arab Spring“: Faraz Sanei (Iran and Bahrain Researcher for HRW) Mohamad Al Abdallah (Programme officer, International Centre for Journalists, USA, Syrian Blogger and Activist) Nora Younis (web editor of Al Masry Al Youm, Egyptian Blogger and Activist) Bassem Bouguerra (Tunisian Blogger and Activist) Vincent Cespedes (Philosopher, France) Moderator: Alia Ibrahim (Middle East Correspondent, The Washington Post and Senior Correspondent, Al Arabiya)

It’s fascinating to hear people who have recently gone through a revolution discuss their personal experiences. Unfortunately, they also rehashed the fact that the struggle continues. Stories told by Bassem of the police continuing to assault citizens were sobering to those who had expected more success, no doubt in part due to their own experiences. Meanwhile Faraz detailed cases of countries such as Bahrain, where attempts of citizens to stand up for their rights were being brutally repressed. The optimism Around technology’s role as a tool for empowerment was also peppered with cautions to not discredit the people themselves. After all, technology can help bring people to the streets, but it’s up to them to decide what to do once they are there.

“Revolutions from East to South” which included people who supported the fall of the iron curtain, tech skeptics and myself : myself, James Crabtree (Financial Times) , Denis MacShane (Member of Parliament UK) , Hans Christoph Buch (Writer, Germany) Moderator: Marc Semo (Foreign Affairs Editor, Libération)

Given that just beforehand, a number of leaders from various Arab world uprisings said that while technology didn’t preclude the power of people and individual action, it was still essential to the successful overthrow of governments. The panel, aside from me, denied this entirely. My favorite quote being that “Mao did not need twitter.” I guess they haven’t thought about modern distribution methods for his little red book.

The other consensus i battled was that freedoms needed to be supported to preserve the “dignity” of humanity, specifically discussed with regards to Libya. I again came down as the dissident, warning that this similar language was being used by Sarkozy, trying to “civilize” the Internet, rather than aknowlodging the udhr has already been ratified by all nations and can have more teeth as a legal statuate to initiate any said protections for humans in repressive situations.

My overall point being that in the post-industrial Revolution in which we’re now living, we must identify the new institutions necessary to protect and preserve our liberties. Just as it took many years to ban child labor in the industrial age, we need such principles as net neutrality, universal broadband, privacy standards and more in the new age. It’s frustrating to continue to face leaders who do not understand these issues but I’m hopeful that there will be more cross-generational dialogues happening.

“The Rise of the New Diplomats” with myself, Baratunde Thurston (cofounder of Jack & Jill Politics) *Anand Giridharadas (writer at The New York Times) Moderator: Felix Marquardt (Founding President of the Atlantic Dinners).

There was much more agreement on this panel, but skepticism from the audience. One young student in particular pointed out his frustrations that, despite our optimism, the government wasn’t prepared to listen to the likes of him. Oh how quickly people can feel abandoned by a revolution, even a successful one.

However, in the new diplomacy, situations change rather dramatically. I explained that I was rather public about meeting the president, even beforehand, on twitter. Had he asked me to ask a specific question to the leader of his country, I would have. This is a powerful if relatively unique new channel available to citizens. The international journalists covering the region and the issues he’s concerned about are also more highly accessible now than ever before in the past, on twitter rather than just the usual expensive restaurants.

In the audience was Mark Mullen of Transparency International Georgia, who set up a fantastic interactive democracy project where Georgian citizens get updates about what their parliament is doing via SMS and social media. Our friends at MobileActive have a nice write up of the project.

The events came to an end with the Atlantic dinners themselves. This video is a strong summary:

After dinner, President Saakashvili (Misha) spoke from the heart of lessons and insights. It was incredible not only to hear him, but to see Bassem spring into action. We hopped onto the President’s wifi network and he pulled out his computer to live stream the talk to his friends and fellow revolutionaries back home. When I asked him if he’d asked permission, he laughed and said that he’s finally free, why ask for permission.

It strongly echoed the quote that Misha started off with:

“You cannot be ready to be free until you are free” – Kant

Bassem Bouguerra

Its an honor to be invited to speak at the White House . Its especially exciting to see an administration that understands the power of youth and works to pull in our voices.

The White House was pulling together 20 “awesome” youth leaders to discuss the future of international foreign aid. The conversation was between us, the head of USAID (United States Agency for International Development) Raj Shah, and the internet. It was broadcast live on the White House website, with a realtime conversation happening on Facebook and on Twitter, hashtag #USAIDyouth.

For instance, in the Middle East, almost 65 percent of the regions’ people are youth. In many places, they’re stuck under oppressive regimes and increasingly frustrated by the lack of positive prospects for their future. In Egypt and Tunisia, this came to a head. Politicians around the world took notice. The US government is starting to realize that despite its large foreign aid packages, youth were not involved in the decision-making nor in the reception of this aid, despite being a majority of those affected by it.

A 48 starred flag, painting of George Washington, an eagle, and the golden chandelier lent the air of authenticity to remind me that this building has stood for hundreds of years and that this conversation can, at its best, change the course of history. 20 eager youth, experts in the fields of environment, health, security, and technology all sat with intense looks in their eyes. The groups varied from Truman National Security Project, National Center for Global Engagement, 350.org, Americans for Informed Democracy, Bamyan Media, The Millennium Campus Network, and others. We were ready to take up the challenge.

Many of the ideas bouncing around the room seemed to agree that there was a need to fund the best and most innovative groups, not the ones that were just the best at writing applications and getting funded. The tension is how to do that successfully while doing large-scale support and making sure that they money trail is transparent and trackable.

There’s also an interesting tension in the perception of this aid to the American people from which its coming. Recent debates about cutting the US economy have targeted wings of the government such as this foreign aid. It’s not surprising why, when the average American sees it as consisting of 20% of their taxes. The reality is that it accounts for less than 1%. There’s not much room for innovation when under fire.

It’s important to be able to see how investments in science, technology, education and math (STEM), as well as green technology, are going to have a positive impact on our own economic prosperity in addition to those people working their way out of poverty around the world. But for the innovative and impactful ideas, it’s the youth who are closest to the new solutions and can help usher them in with the right support.

We all went to the White House, and were excited and honored to have been invited, but not for the photo op, but rather to make some changes. I’m encouraged by the dialogue but hope that we’re able to.

Please see the video below and visit the USAID YouthImpact site for more information about the initiative.

Techcamp was a fantastic experience, bringing together 18 facilitators & experts from around the digital space (Twitter, Facebook, VOA, NGOs) & activists and NGOs from the Russian speaking world (70+ organizations from 15 countries). I was the only facilitator translating for myself, thanks to my Russian upbringing. and so of course I cracked jokes & bonded over stories about the unique qualities of different parts of the region.

Secretary Clinton and Alec Ross speak at Techcamp Vilnius

A lot of why I do the work I do at Digital Democracy is because I see technology transcending the opposition politics that people know all too well in the post-Soviet. People feel exploited by their leaders and lied to by their journalists. But this is a unique time where citizens can speak to citizens, based on a new era of transparency. There was a palpable energy as people tried to strategize on what this might look like in their country.

Much of the conversation was centered around the fact that governments are cracking down on protesters, using tools like Twitter and Facebook, to identify and stop them. It seems they’re learning the lessons of Egypt & Tunisia, and using the tools that were popularized in the media as fostering dissent.

Yet there was a lack of understanding how tools beyond social media can be harnessed to educate citizens and get them to participate in new ways. I showed a local transparency initiative from Georgia and spoke about a corruption monitoring system we’re developing in Macedonia. There was a lot of excitement.

My focus was discussing the future of mobiles and how the proliferation of them means exciting opportunities to engage. From FrontlineSMS to Geochat and more, getting messages into people’s pockets and purses never seems to stimulate people’s imagination.

“Democracy” is still often seen as protests and elections. It’s an exciting time to expand these definitions and stimulate the creativity of fantastic local NGOs to do so.

At the same time, it’s dangerous and complicated. 20 colleagues who were visiting from Belarus were detained at the border when they tried to reenter their home country. Literacy doesn’t exist in a void of safety.

TechCamp Vilnius is one of a series of TechCamps being held around the world. Check it out and see if one is coming your way.

On May 31, I attended the International Youth Congress on Digital Citizenship hosted by the EastWest Institute (EWI) in London, in the lead-up to their Second Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit. That young people are hugely empowered by the advent of the internet is obvious: one-click access to libraries of information and limitless opportunities to interact, discuss and organize. But there are downsides. Sometimes scary downsides. This congress involved a lot of grassroots organizations reporting from the field in order to identify these downsides. Movements.org for instance, dedicated to ‘identifying, connecting, and supporting grassroots digital activists’, partnered with the EWI and local NGO’s in the US, Lebanon, Cameroon and Nigeria to conduct workshops with the youth in those countries. They found that the issues facing the younger generation markedly differ across nations, regions and cultures.

In the US, youngsters were particularly concerned with cyber bullying – hacking or abusing of their Facebook accounts (‘fraping’, a portmanteau of Facebook and raping) or the spreading of false rumours – as well as being sent sexually explicit texts (‘sexting’, from sex and texting). Identity theft not only affects adults – children posing as classmates can be equally devastating, albeit perhaps more in an emotional rather than financial way. Something which also came up in later breakout sessions, was the increasingly obligatory nature of Facebook in at least the UK and US and the pressure to conform – if you do not have a Facebook account, you are an ‘outsider’ and will not be invited to events (‘if it’s not on Facebook, it’s not happening’) and in the ultimate act of peer pressure, classmates are even likely to make an account for you. There is almost no escaping it if you do not want to miss out. Indirectly, young people are forcing each other to give up their privacy.

As a result of all this activity, a blurring of the dividing line between the ‘offline’ and ‘online’ worlds has made itself visible – while adults still see a clear divide, young people increasingly grow up in what they perceive to be one integrated world. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that adults are more ‘privacy-savvy’ than their ‘tech-savvy’ children. What many children do not realize, for instance, is that when something is online, it is often difficult or impossible to remove. Years later when they are job hunting, they can be faced with the consequences of their childhood social media posts. The new awareness adage is ‘google before you tweet’. In similar vein, it was noted that old pictures on Facebook can induce not only nostalgia but also an unhealthy longing for that old, slimmer, smaller self that would otherwise have been concealed in a photo album in a drawer somewhere. In addition, many youngsters admit to portraying a different, ‘cooler’ image online from their ‘real life’ image – which carries with it a whole new set of challenges (as well as opportunities) for socially more isolated children.

Youngsters from Cameroon, with a virtual absence of e-shopping and e-banking, are strikingly concerned with security concerns like scamming and phishing – perhaps the fear of the unknown. Nigerian kids were more worried about unwanted pop-ups, particularly pornography – a concern instilled in them, it seemed, by repeated warnings from teachers. In Lebanon, the tremendously slow connection speed was a big concern. Unexpectedly – having a high Human Development Index – Lebanon has the slowest download speed of all nations in the world, and the second-slowest upload speed, severely limiting for instance their ability to use online video. I was personally shocked by the ease with which Lebanese youngsters share their passwords: 47% of those surveyed did so, of which over half (26% of the total) thought it not at all risky. While it is often limited to boyfriends and girlfriends, even this tends to result in sometimes traumatizing ‘fraping’ and other types of bullying after break-ups. Finally, two-thirds of the total group of youngsters was not concerned about possible future consequences of their current online posts.

The harsh truth is – we cannot just hope that all these issues will go away if we ignore them. Nor will sexual harassment and child grooming practices by sexual predators – worryingly, surveyed youth did not seem particularly concerned about that. Therefore, more awareness is needed. There are proposals that privacy settings for social media like Facebook could by default be set to completely private for children, instead of public, in order to counter their lack of awareness or lack of risk-perception. Luckily, more and more organizations like Movements.org and Digital Democracy (also present at the youth congress) are popping up, aiming to increase digital literacy. Others, like the Global Cyber Ambassadors for Peace, are fostering youth engagement and setting up online codes of conduct – actually facilitating children educating each other on cyber risks by for instance helping them make role-play videos (some of which were shown at the congress), stimulating creativity along the way.

But these organisations cannot go it alone. Top-down protection is also needed from legislators, the private sector and parents. Next to better privacy and security regulation, we need governments and parents to join in this education campaign – one suggestion was mandatorily adding it to school curriculums. After all, we do not want children to learn everything the hard way, not when it can have such a big negative impact on their future. And when they all – and we all – become digitally literate and privacy aware, we will be able to stand up to over-zealous governments and businesses looking to control our identity and infringe our privacy in order to protect us, protect the status quo, and protect their profits (think about the huge market for our identities and our private life), as well as to future cyber criminals. In the end, we must work together to ensure that the dangers do not overshadow the tremendous empowerment the internet has brought us all.

Online privacy, security and freedom controversies have become a staple in traditional and new media alike. ‘Cyber’ has taken centre stage: cyber security, cyber bullying, cyber conflict, cyber crime, cyber espionage, cyber terrorism and even cyber warfare are continuing to make headlines. With the recent Arab uprising as a landmark moment in the power of the internet, slowly but steadily cyberspace has become essential to our daily lives – but as a troubled medium: security and privacy are under attack, not in the least from each other. Where do young people find themselves in this dual frame?

Counter-terrorism measures and advertisement profiling often invade privacy in the most brutal ways and, at the same time, lack of personal online security leads to breaches of that same privacy by criminals. There can be no privacy without security, and no security with full and unlimited privacy of terrorists and other criminals. Hence, we need security to ensure our privacy, but not so tight that it prevents criminals from being found out by intelligence services. That is where the problem lies. If we want to be able to spy on criminals, we have to allow the government to spy on us all. But this also enables criminals to spy on us.

So, effectively, we are all increasingly asked to surrender our privacy to businesses like Facebook in return for their services, and to governments in return for ‘security’ – but it really is only quasi-security. Though numerous terrorist plots have been unraveled by intelligence services, the government can barely protect us from online criminals. Complete security and safety is an illusion, and fear of attack has always been used by rulers to control the citizens – or even start wars. The age-old question of how much freedom, liberty and privacy we should give up in order to be kept safe has been rekindled by the rise of the internet. Some even prophesy a slippery slope leading to the realization of George Orwell’s 1984. But all of this is assuming the government is able to determine our level of security and privacy online, and this is obviously, for now at least, false. Even with that knowledge, the security versus privacy debate continues, and consensus is hard to reach – except on one thing: the protection of our children. So will young people be the key to unlocking this conundrum? And is this the moment for a breakthrough, with the G8 recently putting cyber crime and internet regulation on its agenda for the first time in history and producing an Internet section in the resulting Deauville declaration?

This article was originally published on June 13th in openDemocracy.