Calling All Bloggers: Keep Tibet in the Spotlight

Monks marching in the streets, students staging sit-in protests, midnight raids by the military, monasteries sealed off, towns and cities sealed off…this is Tibet. The most violent protests in nearly 20 years continue after last Monday’s pro-independence rallies commemorating the 49th anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s escape from Tibet. The Chinese government reports 16 people dead while the Tibetan Government in Exile, reports at least 80 deaths.

Watch videos of the protests here

International concern is growing as a result of house-to-house raids, imposed curfews, numerous arrests, and increased media repression.

The Chinese government has reportedly placed restrictions on international media coverage in Tibet, blocking or filtering websites like Yahoo! and YouTube and censoring the local feeds of news agencies including the BBC and CNN. However, first-hand accounts, photos, and videos (mostly from cellphones) are making their way out — and onto the Hub. We are collecting these videos on the Hub and linking the latest resources and urgent actions you can take here.

We’re working to feature the latest video, audio and photos coming out of Tibet and linking news updates, resources and urgent actions that concerned citizens can take — but we need your help!

Bloggers and vloggers, help us keep Tibet in the spotlight!

Post about Tibet and embed Tibet-related media from the Hub
2) Upload - if you have or see Tibet-related video, photos or audio that are not on the Hub, upload or embed it now, or email us at tibet@witness.org
3) Spread the Word - help us with our call for cellphone video and images from Tibet. Please help us by spreading the word and urging folks to email tibet@witness.org with their interviews, updates, video and photos. We’ll get them online — and ensure they stay online.

More coming soon…

Collaborative editing tools and cool collages

A quick note here on some online tools I’ve recently come across:

Kaltura - a collaborative video making tool that another colleague brought to our attention (thanks Sam). I realize this is not new to bloggers and videophiles in the know - but its relatively new to us here and we’re considering ways to use it on a project… They also have an interesting collaboration with Wikipedia. Moreover the open-source tools they offer are things that it seems more content creators (and viewers) are going to be clamoring for in the days to come including: video mixing, annotating, and ad serving.

VuVox - this is a mega-mashup tool of sorts allowing for more ‘dynamic’ content (video, animation, sound, still images- let your imagination run wild). Their new tool Collage was unveiled at We Media conference I attended about 2 weeks ago. the exciting promo text on the site reads

“Any real world location can become the launching point for a rich media story that features live media hot spots and embeddable links. A COLLAGE can be published, embedded, and syndicated into any website, blog or social networking site.”

This is still in private beta but interested parties can request to become a tester here. This tool is certainly limited to people with good broadband connections who are looking to creatively use their media, create mashups of mashups (here’s an example done by fans of Sen. Obama). I’m wondering if human rights bloggers could use the tool to provide context to a situation as it happens (after they’ve uploaded the video or embed a live stream of video) and again, yes this wouldn’t be those in places where lack of access to internet is a reality.

Anyone using either of these tools who would like to share your experience? Please let us know here… and thanks.

We’re in the Netxplorateur 100!

Congratulations to our friends at Psiphon, who have won the Grand Prize at the Forum Netxplorateur in Paris - deserved recognition for a very exciting tool…

What we didn’t know until Psiphon told us is that the Hub was selected too as one of the Netxplorateur 100 - “100 Net trailblazers creating new digital practices with high potential for economic and social impact.”

All 100 Netxplorateurs developed a tangible, innovative and meaningful project in 2007. Together they embody the future of the Web and the digital era as a whole.

The Hub has only been running for three months now, so it’s even more humbling to be in such exalted company, alongside dopplr, MySociety’s e-petitions site, Kiva.org, and Ning - and they didn’t even make the Top 10, which includes Twitter, and One Laptop Per Child.  Our thanks to the selection committee, and to the Forum Netxplorateur for their recognition of the Hub’s potential as a transformative tool for human rights.

Over the coming months we’ll be looking to work with other members of the Netxplorateur 100 (among others) to develop and provide more content, tools and expertise for the hundreds of organizations and activists already using the Hub and those yet to, to help facilitate their work to advance human rights worldwide using video. If you’re interested in working with us, we’re always happy to hear from you…

At WeMedia: Nonprofits and media; activism online and off; telling our own stories

I’m in unnaturally chilly Miami (its projected to get down to the 40s tonight) at the WeMedia Conference and am currently sitting in an afternoon session about “advocacy groups who once relied on journalists are now making the news themselves”. The session is being moderated by John Bracken of the MacArthur Foundation and the discussion includes Jon Sawyer, Executive Director, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and Ellen Miller, Executive Director, Sunlight Foundation (who in her introduction referred to herself as a serial entrepreneur).

The Sunlight Foundation uses technology to help bring transparency to the activity of our elected officials in the US. They get behind orgs like www.MinnPost.com - started by people laid off at Minneapolis Star Tribune; www.Congresspedia.com which, as it sounds, is a wikipedia-like site but where all articles are vetted before being uploaded- its a curated space; and the Center for Independent Media - setting up bureaus of ‘professionalized bloggers’ who are doing investigative stories and driving stories. For Ellen, one model of success of wemedia is John Marshall at Talking Points Memo.

At the Pulitzer Center they’re trying to fund good stories about issues that are not getting coverage in mainstream media. The discussion didn’t actually answer the question between risks and benefits of having nonprofits in the space of media creation- perhaps because its actually nothing really that new. … Then I let another fellow here borrow my computer because she was live blogging the session and her battery was dying on her. There are more notes from the discussion here.

Then it was off to my panel “Activist World: Social Networks for Social Good” - it was a great group of people (Joan Peckolick, Founder, Selfchec;James Carlson, CEO, Bucketworks; Deron Triff, Co-President and CEO, Changents - all projects worth spending time with), most of whom I’ll be going to dinner with tonight but the energy was low (we’ve all been going since 7am and been sitting in a LOT of panels by this point) and there wasn’t much time to talk but there were some good questions that circulated about how best to reach youth (most frequently referred to here as “millennials”) and also about how to keep the internet open, - the question poised to me was because we require a people to log into the Hub if they want to upload, comment, rate, interact. Hopefully the conversation will continue…

The last session was probably my favorite of the day - Indigenous voices discussion “Telling our own stories” ….

Making Our Media Matter

A few weeks ago I attended the Making Your Media Matter conference put on by the stupendous folks at the Center for Social Media at American University. A report is now available produced by the conference rapporteur here which is a useful round up of major themes and ideas discussed, broken down into the various panel sessions and key notes given during those busy 2 days in Washington D.C.

I spoke on the last panel of the conference entitled “Short Shorts and Hot Platforms” about emerging distribution scenarios especially for short form documentaries. I naturally spoke about the Hub and was pleased to participate with fellow panelists Leba Haber, independent online filmmaker who discussed her project Where My Ladies At?; Melissa Robers of Free Range Studios (the masterminds behind The Meatrix and now “The Story of Stuff“) and Leighton Woodhouse of Brave New Films showcasing a new short Mr. Greenwald and co have created called “Fight the War on Greed“. We had some good questions from the audience about translation issues (i.e. for the Hub to be calling itself a global platform what about languages its available in- admittedly its only currently navigable in English, Spanish and French); access issues- people still pointing out that the digital divide makes internet-only based content worthless to many segments of society, perhaps less so in North America, all over the world.

This is where I brought up the question of the mobile platform. The prevailing statistic is that half of the world’s population will have a cell phone by 2009- that is next year- and that is about 3 billion people! Staggering. At WITNESS we’re trying to address that asap by making mobile-to-Hub uploads of video and still image content available - this functionality is going to be available within the next few months. Check back for more details.

I’m sure mobile distribution will be a frequently mentioned topic at the upcoming WeMedia conference I’m attending this week in Miami. The main ideas being explored over this packed 2.5 day conference are: ….