Digital Democracy

Yangon, Myanmar: The last time I was in Myanmar (aka Burma), the country was ruled by a military government. It was fall 2009. Elections were on the horizon, but most people I met were skeptical about what they might yield. Mobile phones and internet access were increasingly popular but relatively hard to come by – [...]

We are excited to have both our co-founders on stage in Austin this week, participating in Tech4Good panels at SXSWi. If you’ll be at SXSWi, please come by and join the conversation. Tuesday, March 13, at 3:30 in the AT&T conference center, come hear Emily Jacobi on the “Women Drive Change: Tech in the Global South” panel (#femtech [...]

What is the future of cybersecurity and what is the impact on youth, as well as democracy advocates around the world? I recently attended the EastWest Institute’s Cybersecurity Summit to discuss and present on these issues amongst the worlds leading technology security firms. There I met Michel Nienhuis who wrote a thoughtful piece that I’m [...]

How can designers, hackers and business work with government to make it more innovative? To put their mouth where our money is? We’re co-sponsoring OpenGov Camp NYC, an unconference to bring together the brightest minds to tackle the issues that we citizens face in our day to day lives. We love unconferences. What better way [...]

Combine thoughtful and moving documentaries from around the world and a beautiful city, rich with history and culture and you have the One World Human Rights Documentary Film Festival in Prague – the largest human rights film festival in the world, which I attended two weeks ago. Dd was invited to the festival, both as [...]

Video is changing as more and more people have the ability to be creators. This provides unlimited potential for new ideas and methods in video, a prospect that is exciting to me as someone who works daily in the fields of old and new media. Last weekend the Open Video Conference hosted by FIT brought [...]

It’s an exciting week for Digital Democracy. One of our key Haitian partners is in New York, and we’re attending two conferences. Mark is in Budapest attending Google’s Internet at Liberty 2010 conference. I’m in NY, representing Digital Democracy at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) annual meeting. CGI is built around commitments – every single [...]

This week, D2′s Co-Directors Mark and Emily are attending the Fifth Annual United Nations’ Web4Dev Conference, hosted by UNICEF. Web4Dev has re-united them with many of the other participants they met while presenting at the MobileActive 08 Conference in Johannesburg back in October including InSTEDD and Ushahidi. Thursday explored many themes including monitoring and evaluation, [...]

We presented at the MobileActive 08 Conference in Johannesburg, South Africa about the use of mobile phones by members of the Burmese democracy movement around Burma’s borders. Our “mini-talk” covered issues having to do with cross-border movement strategies against Authoritarian Regimes. Read what one blogger had to say about our session. Videographer Rhoda Davids captured [...]