Thanks to all our friends, partners, advisors & supporters who joined us last Thursday for Digital Democracy’s 3rd Birthday Party. We are so grateful we were able to celebrate with all of you.

Photos from the event are up on our Flickr … check out the excellent images by Jon Reznick, as well as the fun photos shot by party-goers in the photobooth, with automatic uploads thanks to Mifi. If you’d like a print of one of Jon’s images, please contact him directly. A professional photo makes a great gift for the holidays.

Huge thanks to Elizabeth Hodes Custom Cakes & Sugar Art, who not only contributed the best looking cake we’d ever laid eyes on, it was delicious to boot! Thanks to DJ iBeat & Will for spinning tunes and our excellent gang of volunteers who kept the party running smoothly. Thanks to Trader Joe’s for providing delicious snacks, Lucy’s Whey for the excellent cheese trays, Sustainable Party for eco-friendly supplies, and Bulldog Gin & Brooklyn Brewery for the great libations.

Finally, thanks to the great folks at Google’s Community Affairs Team for contributing a fancy new Google Chromebook to the cause. Thanks to raffle sales, tickets & donations party-goers were able to contribute more than $2,000 to Dd’s core mission to empowering marginalized communities, donations that are being doubled by generous donors.

We can’t wait to see where we are a year from now!

Digital Democracy is turning 3 this month! Come celebrate with us on 11/17 at the RH Gallery in TriBeCa, New York City. Bring your phone, try out new tools & learn more about how Dd is empowering marginalized communities to leverage technology to fight for their human rights. Get your tickets now! Early bird tickets are $10 and available until Sunday, November 6. Full price tickets online (and at the door) will be $15.

See you there to enjoy….

• DJ iBeat spinning for your dancing & listening pleasure
• Bulldog Gin & Brooklyn Brewery for the open bar
• Elizabeth Hodes Custom Cakes & Sugar Art for our custom-designed cake
• Lucy’s Whey for CHEESE

There will be fun to go around…

& you can WIN. Enter our raffle for a chance to take home a brand new Google Chromebook…

...thanks to Google's New York City office of Community Affairs

Play telephone, spread the word, and if you bring 10 friends you get a free raffle ticket. Questions? Email Biz at biz [at] digital-democracy [dot] org.

Thank you to everyone who’s donations will make this a special night! And feel free to check out these photos from our 1st Anniversary at OpenPlans and 2nd Anniversary at New Work City.

What is an open-source protest (or in Egyptian nomenclature, a wiki-revolution)? Can technology tools be used to develop new methods of distributed grassroots decision-making? It’s clear that the Occupy movement is about something much bigger and greater than one person or group … how can the large numbers of people who identify with the movement contribute to decision-making?

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.

Guatemala is a country with a complicated history. Although the 36-year civil war has ended, Guatemalan society is still struggling to rebuild from this history of war and ethnic conflict. One opportunity and challenge is the need to engage young Guatemalans, many of whom continue to be marginalized from political life. Participating in elections is not only a gateway to further civic engagement, reporting on elections offers an opportunity for the voices of youth which are rarely heard to help shape the national dialogue.

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

In one year since CGI commitment, Digital Democracy has trained 150 women and built a database documenting over 400 cases of rape in Haiti.

Today we announce the launch of the only phone-based emergency response system dedicated to rape and sexual assault in Haiti. Together with our partners at  KOFAVIV, the Commission for Women Victims for Victims, we at Dd have designed, launched and tested the Call Center that is helping bring emergency care to victims in Port-Au-Prince. The KOFAVIV Call Center is supported by mobile-service providers Digicel and Voila, major phone providers in Haiti, where there is no 911 or similar system for reporting emergencies. Now, free calls to the number “572” connect victims to critical emergency care including medical, psychological and legal support.

The Call Center is one of four components of the Dd commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) to use technology to address rape and gender-based violence (sGBV) with women in Haiti. Dd and KOFAVIV are seeking $150,000 to support the Call Center and expand its reach throughout Port-Au-Prince, announced Dd at the CGI Annual meeting today.

“When we first started working with Haitian women leaders, there was no accurate information on the increasing rates of sexual violence in the tent-camps,” explains Emily Jacobi, our Executive Director. “The Call Center is a key component of an information management system we built with KOFAVIV to accurately capture data on the real scope of the problem, and get urgent preventative care to the most vulnerable cases.”

A recent report from Human Rights Watch observes that earthquake recovery has largely failed Haitian women and girls, noting, “Emergency contraception and other post-rape care is available in some health facilities, but many rape victims don’t have access to this care for the same reasons that women and girls have difficulty accessing other health services: they lack basic information about what is available and where, or they have difficulty paying for transportation to reach the services.”

Our partnership with KOFAVIV directly addresses this lack of information. Women who contact the Call Center receive urgent personal care, but the information collected also contributes to the macro-solutions for the problem. KOFAVIV collects data on cases and uses a system built by Dd to generate monthly reports, maps and data visualization to share with government and international bodies that provide critical security and lighting.

“The technology trainings that began in 2010 have brought about a major change in the capacity of grassroots women, particularly us, the women of KOFAVIV,” say Malya Appolon and Eramithe Delva, co-founders of KOFAVIV. “They have given us more confidence in ourselves, and have given us tools to help more people understand the reality of those living in the camps, a reality that gets harder everyday.”

KOFAVIV and Dd first partnered in April 2010, building a comprehensive system that uses technology to improve the fight against sGBV in Haiti. The partnership is the cornerstone of Dd’s commitment to CGI, promising to provide Haitian women’s groups the technical tools and training needed in their work to create a comprehensive approach to prevent rape in Haiti with a coalition of lawyers, health and psychosocial service providers, and strong networks of Haitian women and girls.

KOFAVIV & Digital Democracy Database System

“572 not only provides support to victims, it represents urgent medical care. When a woman calls our number within 72 hours of an incident, we ensure she gets the medical care she needs to prevent transmission of disease, HIV/AIDS and unwanted pregnancy,” says Jocie Philistin, a Project Coordinator for KOFAVIV. “Medical support is the first step to receiving ongoing legal and psychological support.”

Through the first month of testing, the Call Center was promoted in 24 tent camps and communities by KOFAVIV’s network of 65 Community Outreach Agents, some police precincts and the General Hospital. Ready to accept calls from throughout Port-Au-Prince, the Call Center needs financial support to spread awareness across the city.

The Abundance Foundation, United States Institutes for Peace (USIP), the Channel Foundation, USAID/OTI and individual donors have supported Dd’s work in Haiti to date.

Press Release: Dd & KOFAVIV Launch Only Emergency Response System Dedicated to Rape and Sexual Violence in …

Update, March 22, 2012: Three of the communities we’re working with for Equal Footing have been given verbal warnings of eviction from the Mexican authorities. We’re deploying a rapid response team to respond to this concerning turn of events. See our blog post on 3/22/12 for more information.

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

What is the current discussion around how technology is being used for supporting people advocating for democracy around the world? Please vote for the panels we and are friends are trying to host at the upcoming South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas.

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

Indianapolis, IN: Wednesday, August 10th, the students of Project Einstein Indianapolis will have an audience of hundreds as visitors to the Indianapolis City Market’s weekly farmer’s market will be able to view the work of young photographers, who are primarily refugees from Burma/Myanmar.

Tomorrow’s exhibit is the result of a year-long photo training with students from two Indianapolis high schools – Southport and North Central. Their photos document life in their new country, covering everything from school to home to play.The photographers will be on hand to discuss their images with the public. Don’t miss this special opportunity!

What: Project Einstein photo exhibition

Where: The Indianapolis City Market farmer’s market – 222 E. Market St, Indianapolis

When: Wednesday August 10th from 10:30am to 1:30pm

To learn more, read the press release and check out images from the spring photo exhibition at North Central High School, taken by my mom, Freddi Stevens-Jacobi.

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.