Digital Democracy

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. SXSW is shaping up to be a pretty exciting festival this year. [...]

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 [...]

If you were to Google “Internet”, “freedom”, “security”, “privacy”,”blog” and pull together the people and organizations that make up the top hits of the search, you would have the Internet at Liberty Conference, hosted by Google on September 20-22 in Budapest. A venerable who’s who of people involved in the worldwide discussion surrounding Internet freedom, [...]

We just wrote about the power of the volunteers who have worked on Haiti. However volunteers are not only useful in times of crises. Digital Democracy’s core team is small, and we accomplish our work through partnerships and collaborations. Our volunteers and interns play a crucial role, and today we want to highlight the work [...]

The power of new technologies has made a lot of headlines recently, but behind these new tools is a deeper story – the power of the people who wield them. When it comes to open-source and particularly crowd-sourcing tools, those people are so often volunteers, and they are the true heroes of technological successes. For [...]

In August 2008, Digital Democracy conducted research with Burmese community groups operating in southern China, near the Burma/Myanmar border. While researching the use of communications technologies, one young Kachin man explained the difference between the Internet in China and Burma, stating, “To me the web in China is totally free.” Censored though the Chinese web [...]

Emily and I had the pleasure of guest lecturing at Nathan Freitas’ Social Activism using Mobile Technology class at NYU’s ITP program. It was a wonderful opportunity that you can read more about below: The topic of our class was “Grassroots Development – Techniques & Strategies,” discussing Digital Democracy‘s experiences doing fieldwork.  Before introducing the [...]

This weekend, Digital Democracy is heading to join the conversations at the first International Conference on Crisis Mapping (ICCM 2009). Co-organized by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) and John Carroll University (JCU), ICCM is bringing together leading thinkers and practitioners in the field of humanitarian work and human rights, along with scholars, software developers, policy [...]

D2′s co-founders Mark and Emily are representing Handheld Human Rights at N2Y4, NetSquared’s annual conference. It’s thrilling to be at a conference focused on supporting projects on the ground. This past weekend, D2 spent time with exiled monk leaders of Burma’s September 2007 Saffron Revolution. U Pyinya Zawta, U Gawsita and U Agga were all [...]