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 is the hashtag) along with Catherine Harrington of the Women’s Learning Partnership, Jenn Sramek of Civic Actions, Ashoka Fellow Kara Andrade from Vozz (who has partnered with Dd on work in Guatemala) and Zawadi Nyong’o of the Africa Cancer Foundation.

They will be discussing how, 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. Sophisticated and coordinated social media campaigns are becoming the domain of women all over the world.

The speakers will talk about what this means for women in the Global South, 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.

Mark Belinsky will also be speaking. His panel, “How Not to Die: Using Tech in a Dictatorship” is on Monday, March 12 at 9 am in Room 9ABC. Mark will be presenting alongside Brian Conley of Small World News, Deanna Zandt of Techbologist and Sabrina Hersi Issa of Be Bold Media, discussing how technologies often built in the west are being used around the world in extremely dangerous situations. They’ll discuss how people have protected themselves around the globe, including concrete experiences and examples from Burma, Tibet, Liberia and Egypt.

See you in Austin.

Two years ago, Dd launched programming focused on Women and gender issues in Haiti, a country where women make up 52% of the population but are largely excluded from formal decision making and have historically been the subjects of disproportionate rates of violence. Following the earthquake in 2010, violence was exacerbated (Read the recently released NYU Law study reflecting on the alarming rise in sexual violence post-earthquake and how it has effected women’s lives). Dd’s work aimed to highlight our partners agency and empower them to use their voices and share their expertise in new ways, as part of a systemic address to gender-based violence (GBV).

In the wake of the January, 2010 earthquake, we began collaborating with KOFAVIV, FAVILEK and other women’s groups in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, providing trainings in photography and digital literacy. These trainings were aimed to give women new tools to share their stories and perspectives on life in displacement camps and poor neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince with a national and international audience. You can see some of their photos here.

Over the past two years, our collaboration has grown and evolved, as new digital tools and increased technical capacity have strengthened the organizing and advocacy efforts of our partners in Haiti. Other aspects of our work in Haiti include trainings to enhance digital literacy, technical skills, mapping and digital security. Following these trainings, our partners in Haiti have created a blog of anonymously posted stories reflecting their voices from the ground in PaP.

We have worked with KOFAVIV to develop a secure database to digitize & streamline information as part of a comprehensive approach to helping women survivors of gender-based violence access needed  medical, legal and psychological services. With the database, KOFAVIV can analyze and track trends in cases received. This improves their ability to report on GBV and leverage their expertise on the ground to push local, national and international power players to implement concrete measures to address the security of women and girls in Haiti.  (read more about the database in Wired here) and follow up on our progress here with a recent report on our work.

We have also worked with KOFAVIV and the two largest mobile carriers in Haiti, Digicel & Voila, to set up a FREE emergency response call center for GBV. In Haiti there is no effective 911-like system. By dialing 572, callers are connected to our partners who provide support and resources over the phone, directing them to  the nearest treatment centers, educating them about basic rights and legal recourse and stressing the importance of medical care in the first 72 hours after rape to prevent HIV/AIDS and unwanted pregnancy. (Read more about the call center here.)

Our work in Haiti is part of a larger constellation of work to amplify and support women as leaders in Haiti. In the Huffington Post, Stephanie Foster highlights  one of the current national initiatives to unite women as a driving force in the reconstruction and development of Haiti.

This effort has been supported by Melanne Verveer, Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, United Stated Department of State. In the Ambassador’s supporting remarks, she highlights the universality of this commitment: “You know well that no country can get ahead if it leaves half of its people behind, if it fails to tap the potential, experience, talents and vision of its women. You also know that when women progress, all of society progresses.”

We agree. In solidarity with women working from the grassroots around the globe, those working with technology to help build tools to unite those women and enhance their work, from our women-led team at Dd, we wish you all a very happy, celebratory and empowering International Women’s Day 2012.

Once again, a global record was shattered in Myanmar/Burma.

This time, the record wasn’t for the largest number of child soldiers (designated by Human Rights Watch in 2002), the world’s longest-running civil conflict, or the jailing of dissidents. Instead, this month organizers in the largest city, Yangon, broke the record for the largest number of attendees at a BarCamp, a type of user-generated technology conference that has been hosted all over the world. Not only did more than 5,000 people attend the tech convening, the opening address was made by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, known affectionately as “the Lady.”

Barcamps, which have been hosted everywhere from Orlando, Florida to Harare, Zimbabwe, normally range from 100 to 600 attendees. Democratic in nature, BarCamps are usually convened by an organizing committee, but the full agenda and content of sessions is decided by participants once the event begins. BarCamps have inspired further types of “unconferences” including CrisisCamps to respond to events such as recent earthquakes in Haiti and Japan. Amongst international BarCampers, BarCamp Yangon has taken on a legendary status for its record-breaking attendance — three years ago, BarCamp debuted in Yangon with close to 3,000 attendees.

The success of BarCamp Yangon is all the more surprising given that it emerges from a country better known for resembling Orwell’s 1984 rather than the Silicon Valley of Southeast Asia. Ruled by a military dictatorship for five decades, even the name of the country – Myanmar or Burma, depending who you ask — is highly politicized. However, Suu Kyi’s surprise appearance at BarCamp comes on the heels of a general opening of the country, marked by a nominal transition from military to civilian government in fall 2010, Suu Kyi’s release from house arrest a year ago, Secretary Clinton’s visit to the country last December and the release of 651 detainees (including many political prisoners) in January.

I was in Yangon in fall 2009, two years following the military’s violent crackdown on peaceful protesters known as the Saffron Uprising. The current changes in the country seemed unthinkable at the time — elections loomed on the horizon but few people seemed hopeful. Aung San Suu Kyi had been under house arrest for close to 15 years, and media was still tightly controlled. Yet, looking closely, I saw glimmers of the change that was to come. Internet cafes had proliferated around the city, filled with young people. The price of sim cards for mobile phones had recently dropped from $2,000 U.S. to $20. Walking downtown, illegal satellite dishes were visible across the rooftops of buildings, and in teashops I’d scour the weekly Internet Journal for words I recognized. Standing in angular roman letters beside circular Burmese script, words like “Twitter” and “Facebook” appeared frequently in articles even though both sites were officially blocked in the country at the time.

In Yangon that fall, my friend Mark and I met with technologists and bloggers who had been pushing for technological innovation in their country, despite the slow download speeds and weak mobile network. Prior attempts to organize gatherings of bloggers had failed, but in the concept of BarCamp, they saw a possibility. Mark and I connected them to BarCamp organizers in Bangkok, who had been evangelizing the format in cities across Southeast Asia, from Ho Chi Min City to Kuala Lampur. Brainstorming how to get permission to hold a BarCamp in a country where unofficial gatherings of more than 5 people were illegal, the Burmese techies decided to focus on the importance of developing the country’s technical skills and supporting the business community. Four months after our initial meeting, the organizing committee pulled it off, and the first BarCamp Yangon was hosted on January 23-24, 2010.

Held annually, BarCamp Yangon has become a fixture of the Burmese tech community, an incubator for young software developers, bloggers and budding entrepreneurs. This year, topics covered at BarCamp included Augmented Reality, Mobile Government, Applying Agile Practices and even poetry. However the idea of opening BarCamp with an address by an opposition politician would have been unthinkable even a few months ago. In the current context of the country’s opening economic and political situation, it was a cause for celebration, and 1500 balloons were released following Aung San Suu Kyi’s address.

Standing in front of the Myanmar Info Tech building where BarCamp was held, Suu Kyi addressed the crowd of attendees, connecting the work of the BarCamp participants to the broader political developments in the country. She urged attendees to consider how to “use technology for the world to be better, for humans to be better, and for citizens to become better.”

Speaking to the user-generated nature of BarCamp, where any participant can propose and lead a session, Suu Kyi cited an eastern proverb — “When one candle lights another candle, the first candle’s light doesn’t dim.” She went on to explain “Just like that, when you share your knowledge, the knowledge of others increases, but your knowledge doesn’t become less. When we share, our world becomes brighter. Knowledge is light. So, use the technology as the candle light to make a better world.”

In a country emerging from 49 years of military leadership, where university courses were often canceled in times of political unrest and where the educational system itself is top-down and autocratic, BarCamp’s emphasis on drawing out the inherent talents and knowledge of each participant might seem radical, but perhaps is just what the country needs as it transitions — sometimes slowly and fitfully — to a democracy.

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

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.

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.

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

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