The competition’s main event, called “Media Revolutions”, was held in the Archa Theatre, a beautiful space in the center of Prague, for over 200 people. It was wonderful to connect with Dd Advisory Board member Patrick Meier, who kicked off the event as the keynote speaker, and with Dd friend and former Ushahidi Haiti Coordinator Jaroslav Valuch, who coordinated the New Media for Social Change workshop and Media Revolutions event.

Patrick speaks at the Media Revolutions Event

Patrick gave a fascinating presentation about the potential for change when people who are motivated to respond to a crisis or issue, have access to the right tools (with a focus on the rapid response and launch of Ushahidi Haiti in the hours following last January’s earthquake).

The competition’s finalists were chosen because they use new media and technology tools to inspire information sharing and public involvement, and we were honored for our use of tools to spread awareness of and help facilitate conversation about gender based violence against women in Haiti.

Finalists presented their projects at the event — I spoke about our work with Haitian women and the tools we use to amplify their voices and spread awareness around these issues, including our photography workshops with grassroots women’s groups, public exhibitions in Port Au Prince and online sharing of these photos via flickr. In addition, our use of open video with Digital Democracy TV (DdTv), our online TV series, which helped bring our photography trainings to life, as well as enabled viewers to hear directly from the courageous women we work with. In addition,  the interactivity through Fanm Pale, the women’s blog, which enables people to read the posts the women are writing about the issues affecting them, and add comments and questions. It was great timing to be speaking about our work in Haiti as members of our team were arriving in Port Au Prince at nearly the exact time as I was speaking at the event.

A woman writes a new blog post for Fanm Pale

We heard about innovative projects from the other finalists, including, Crowdvoice, an open source crowd-sourcing platform developed in Bahrain, which collects information directly from citizens in places of protest around the world. The site aggregates stories around specific events, and allows users to vote stories up or down and share them across social networks. Something that immediately drew me to the site, is the very simple “Find a Voice” prompt, which is the search tool, located in the middle of the home page. While we weren’t able to hear from the founders (located in Bahrain), as the event staff were unable to contact them, we heard from Ahmed Zidan, an Egyptian Crowdvoice editor based in Cairo, speak via Skype, about the need and uses of the platform.

Ahmed Zidan speaks to the audience via Skype

I’ve seen this method (speakers presenting through Skype) used more and more frequently at conferences and events, and I think it’s a fantastic and fascinating way of hearing from people all over the world, who might not otherwise be able to travel and present about their important and ground-breaking work.

Open Local Government 2010 created by Transparency International in Slovakia, another finalist in the competition, has evaluated how open and transparent the 100 largest municipalities in Slovakia are towards their tax payers. They began their project with trying to access the information available online and through requests to local governments. The home page of the site they created includes a map of the country, with each local government, and when you click on a particular municipality, you find categories ranging from public information policy to land use policy, each rated with a openness percentage score (based on the data collected).

A comparison of 4 municipalities in Open Local Government

The municipality has an overall score, grade, and rank. The site also allows users to do side-by-side comparisons of up to 4 local governments. I found this to be an amazingly creative use of open data, and particularly relevant to our own work advocating (and testifying) for greater openness of government data here in New York City.

We also heard the creators of Help Map speak about their project, a Russian program that uses mapping technology to link emergency reporting and community-driven disaster response. Built using the Ushahidi platform, it was launched in the summer of 2010 in response to the occurrence of extensive fires in Russia.

Help Map

It enabled people who were offering help and assistance to citizens who needed it most, to target their efforts with the map and respond quickly. Help Map went on to win the competition – check out the great work they’re doing, we wish them the best of luck!

Last weekend the Open Video Conference hosted by FIT brought together an eclectic and inspiring group of leaders from the fields of business, activism, education, and art to talk about the present and future of online video. The conference’s topics ranged from the latest technological advances with html5 (new tech that’s helping creators re-imagine media for computers and mobile phones), the past year’s video memes and what made them so incredibly popular, to new open source tools in education, and the impact and security issues associated with the growing ubiquity of cameras and human rights video. The 2nd day of the Conference focused on the latter two topics, tools for education and human rights video, and it was this day of the program that interested me particularly given the focus of Dd’s programs on new media literacy, and the production of our online interactive TV series DdTv.

The day’s opening keynote by Mike Wesch, a cultural anthropologist, was an inspiring way to start the day, a magnetic speaker, Wesch spoke about the exchange between teacher and classroom, and how video and the internet can change a classroom from a lecture-based atmosphere into an exchange of ideas, a means of engaging students in ways not done in the past. He closed by saying that “the best teachers are the ones who learn along with their students”, and I couldn’t agree more, especially as we continue to develop our Project Einstein curriculum, using photography, video and mapping to create conversation and collaboration in the classroom and online. The panel on education provided further inspiration, including the introduction of some new open source platforms being developed which integrate video archives in the classroom. Open Vault – WGBH’s media library and archives – enables students to search the thousands of archived video, cut out specific clips from this video and annotate these clips. Mediathread from Columbia’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, using Open Vault, takes it a step further, enabling students to create project pages using this archived video while also bringing in a discussion board, a newsfeed showing updates to these pages, and the ability to bring in material from Youtube and Flickr. What an amazing way to revisit historical records while also re-inventing them. It’s great to see the creation of these open source platforms, projects that could potentially be very useful as we continue to develop and launch Project Einstein in Indianapolis high schools this fall.

The afternoon’s focus on human rights video began with a panel focused on the ability for people around the world to use video due to the growing availbility of mobile phones with video capabilities as well as other inexpensive devices. This topic is particularly relevant to Dd, as our series DdTv is filmed entirely with mobile phones and flip cameras, and this inexpensive, small, and easy-to-use equipment enables ease of filming, access, and security on the ground as we’re launching our programming. The panel lead into a workshop, Building Solutions for Human Rights Video, of which I was one of the featured speakers. One of the issues that arose dealt with the safety and security of those filming and of the subjects in video, and so it was important for me, while speaking, to highlight the specific challenges Dd faces as we work with video and work to build trust with our partners and their communities around the world. Of course, building trust is one of the most important elements when working with a new community, and it’s also extremely important to give the people and organizations we work with the opportunity to tell their often inspiring personal stories and have these stories viewed online in a public forum by individuals around the world, but in a way that does not compromise their own safety.

Sam Gregory, Program Director of Witness highlighted the issue of ethical responsibility that one has when filming, to not, through this filming, re-violate a person (who’s potentially been a victim of a human rights abuse) by failing to get the consent of the subject. This point is crucial to filming human rights video, and hits home with me as an issue that we confront head-on in the field. Whether it’s women who have been a victims of gender-based violence in Haiti, or former political prisoners from Burma, both of these subjects and people have been highlighted as part of DdTv episodes, and both groups are working with us as we develop programming that enables them to report abuses similar to those of which they’ve been victims. It’s important to make sure that those being interviewed and filmed know exactly where that video will be shown and in what context. When we film, we make sure it’s clear to each person that we film what we’re doing and what it will be used for – and ultimately the relationship between our team and our subjects makes for more compelling interviews and more powerful viewing experience, and also, and importantly does not have a negative effect on the programming that we’re building within these communities. When possible, we also screen the videos that we have produced for the communities that we’ve filmed, and in doing so, this increases the transparency of our organization for our partners.

If these precautions had not been taken then the risk of hurting the subject due to lack of information about the distribution of the content could be potentially dangerous, and reverse any positive results that could come from the video. In a conference setting like OVC, with hundreds of people looking on, and many that are making video of all kinds, it’s particularly important to highlight these issues, to spread awareness throughout the community of people contributing to the constantly expanding presence of video online. As video technologies are constantly changing it’s exciting that people have the ability and inspiration to highlight the issues facing their own communities through this medium, and equally important for those of us who have and continue to work with video, and know these risks, to educate people about the security issues that go hand-in-hand.

On this episode of DdTv Emily Jacobi and Abby Goldberg travel to Port-Au-Prince, where they are invited to meet with organizations working on creating a mechanism to streamline methods of protection, documentation and service provisions for women around gender-based violence. While there, Emily and Abby meet with local women leaders and conduct a photography training to help empower women to raise awareness of this violence by documenting their lives and struggle. This episode gives an inside look at this photography-training with these amazing women.

How do these women describe themselves and other Haitian women? How do they photograph their communities and the people in them? This episode premiered at our event honoring Haitian women last week, on the six-month anniversary of the earthquake. We gave 75 people at the event the opportunity to chat live with three inspiring women in Haiti (and participants of the first photography training this spring) representing two grassroots organizations – FAVILEK and KOFAVIV – both organizations working locally in Port-Au-Prince to combat violence against women.

In this episode of DdTv venture back with us to January 2008 to see the origins of Project Einstein. Mark and Emily spend several days working with youth in Kutupalong refugee camp in Southern Bangladesh, home to thousands of Rohingya refugees from Burma. Stateless, the Rohingya, a muslim ethnic group from Western Burma have fled to Bangladesh to escape the human rights violations they’ve suffered in Burma, where they are also denied citizenship.

In the camp, Mark and Emily train a group of youth ages 9-14 in digital photography skills, enabling the kids to explore where in their lives they encounter such universal themes as peace, happiness, the disabled and sadness. See their photographs, listen to them as they reveal their dreams, their hopes for the future, and become the inspiration behind the creation of Project Einstein.

Tune in live for the webcast on May 12, 2010 from 9:30am to 3:30pm (Eastern) entitled “Seizing the Moment: Media & Peacebuilding.” This summit will consider specific recommendations on ways to harness the power of media for conflict prevention. It will bring together senior media makers and policymakers including Jared Cohen, Riz Khan, and Rebecca MacKinnon. The online audience will be able to engage panelists through a live chat and Twitter discussion (hashtag: #magd). We encourage you to take part!

For me, the power of media runs deep. Some years ago I ran a film festival in Tblisi, Georgia as a peacebuilding initiative for people from Azerbaijan and Armenia, as well as those from separatist regions of Georgia. Filmmakers saw countries that they were otherwise barred from and began speaking with people from those countries for the first time. As time went on, friendships grew and negative stereotypes fade away.

The work that we do with Digital Democracy TV very much comes from the same ethic. We try to highlight the incredible stories told by the brave people we work with around the world, who are often challenging norms or otherwise defending the rights and integrity of human beings. Bridging these gaps, allowing people to relate to one another, allows for a new kind of diplomacy and helps to inform our own communities that much more

It’s crucial for youth to develop these skills. They’re becoming increasingly able to create media, but in order for it to be beneficial, they need to really understand it. We’ve been building a participatory learning curriculum for new media literacy. We just got some support to connect youth with resettled Karen refugees in Indiana using the Project Roebling platform we’re building with MIT and Eyebeam in Drupal. There’s also work from an orphanage in South Africa and the first batch of youth in Bangladesh. Project Einstein Thailand – a photo training with youth in the Mae La Refugee Camp. You can view photos and videos we filmed and broadcast live on the web.

This kind of an education project can lay the foundations for future crisis response by having the maps and photographs created by youth as part of their education. We realized this, unfortunately, when we had a team on the ground in Haiti doing a media training with youth and the earthquake hit. Thankfully we were able to utilize http://haiti.ushahidi.com/ to respond in the immediate term. Now we’re looking to build on the system even further for violence prevention and peace. Two of my colleagues evolved this into a media training in Haiti as we develop a system for technology on prevention of women and gender-based violence.

We’ll be exploring this in even more detail with Sisi Ni Amani (We Are Peace), our peacemapping program in Kenya. Starting this summer, we’ll be raising awareness of peace efforts within Kenya by mapping peace initiatives across all segments of Kenyan society. Sisi ni Amani seeks to connect previously disconnected agents to empower this arm of civil society before Kenya’s 2012 presidential election.

Mark and Emily travel to Mae La refugee camp in Northern Thailand to launch our digital penpal program Project Einstein with Burmese youth. Students from the Leadership Management Training College, never having held a camera before, are taught the fundamentals of digital photography, including composition and editing, and choose themes from their lives to document with the cameras: Internally Displaced People, A day in the life in the camp, youth life and School life.

While giving the training, Mark and Emily stream live for the DdTv audience: a tour of the camp’s facilities, and conversations with the students on topics of technology access in the camp, and how digital photography has the potential to change their lives. Watch this episode of DdTv and see what this refugee camp looks like through the eyes of the youth living there.

In early January 2010 we partnered with Tufts University’s Center for Emerging Market Enterprises (CEME) to conduct research and a photography training with young adults in Haiti. Researchers Chrissy Martin and Joshua Haynes, using the Project Einstein curriculum, worked with young adults ages 18-24 to explore – through the use of digital photography – how these youth view money and finance in their society.

Several days after the completion of this training a devastating Earthquake shook the country. In this episode of DdTv, Chrissy discusses her experiences being in the Earthquake, witnessing first-hand the toll it took on the country and its people, and her reflections on the photo training that took place only 3 days prior. In addition, the emergency response through the use of Ushahidi, spearheaded by Chrissy and Josh’s classmates at the Fletcher School and our Co-Directors Mark and Emily, which helped get critical updates including information about missing persons, locations of danger zones and available aid to groups working on the ground.

While in Northern Thailand, Mark and Emily meet with Digital Democracy’s partner The All Burma IT Students’ Union (ABITSU) to set up equipment and train ABITSU’s core staff, as well as members of other human rights groups working along the border, in the uses and features of Handheld Human Rights (HHR) for its initial launch. HHR enables organizations to communicate securely through the use of mobile phones, and to make human rights data accessible and actionable. ABITSU, an organization that teaches the next generation of young leaders critical IT skills to be effective leaders in the 21st Century, also runs a school and technical support for human rights organizations working along the border. While working with ABITSU, Mark and Emily hear a powerful personal story from one of the organization’s head trainers – his determination at any cost, to do this important and necessary work.

The number of political prisoners has increased exponentially since Burma’s Saffron Revolution in 2007. This number, as told by the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners‘ Aung Myo Thein, is a clear indicator of the political situation in Burma.

In this episode of DdTv, Mark and Emily travel to northern Thailand to launch Handheld Human Rights. While there, they meet with Aung Myo Thein, a former political prisoner, now working along the Thai-Burma border to help prisoners like he once was. He gives them a tour of a museum in the organization, and we hear about the horrible conditions and treatment he experienced during his 6 1/2 years in one of Burma’s most notorious prisons.

While continuing to explore the technology community in Bangkok, Mark and Emily meet some of the courageous people working in online Journalism today. Among them is Jiew, the Executive Director of Prachatai, an online alternative news source for Thailand. Prachatai hosts an online forum, allowing readers to respond to news and issues that are posted. Recently, Jiew was arrested due to several comments posted on the forum by one of its users. In this episode, Mark and Emily take a tour of the Prachatai office, and interview Jiew about her experiences from the past year – discussing the details of her arrest, why she continues to do what she does, and why Prachatai continues to be an important news source for Thailand.