Human Rights @ Global Voices Online
A brief dispatch from San Francisco, where yesterday I spent some quality time with Loic Le Meur, Cathy Brookes and VinVin at Seesmic. As well as a quickfire exchange with users on Seesmic – some of whom are already on the Hub – Loic and I had a quick chat on Seesmic’s rooftop:
More soon on SF and LA (where I will be at the Media Re:Public conference at USC Annenberg tomorrow)…
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…
Head on over to the Hub (once you’ve read these great posts from Matisse and Sam, of course) for this week’s Picks… and see the end of this post for further links and info.
As well as images of continuing violence from the Rift Valley town of Naivasha, shot by our Kenyan partners Cemiride, we’ve also got footage from Licadho, a group that participated in last year’s Video Advocacy Institute (applications open for this year, folks…). Licadho’s short video, shot on a Flip camera, shows one example of the daily indignities suffered by residents of Dey Krahorm village in Phnom Penh “in a three-year campaign of harassment and intimidation of the community to coerce them to surrender their land to 7NG in return for new apartments on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, 20km away, or cash payments of far below the market value of the land.”
And after Australia’s Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, gave a historic apology to the country’s indigenous communities, we have a video from EngageMedia taken on Australia Day, or what some have taken to calling Invasion Day, marking the impact of colonialisation on those communities.
Further links:
Keeping on the Australia theme, I like this audio/photo slideshow from the Sydney Morning Herald, which weaves together photographs taken of the stolen generations by the New South Wales Aborigines Welfare Board with interviews with some of the individuals depicted in them. It’s particularly interesting as an example of how individuals can re-appropriate their oppressor’s archival images of themselves and their histories. More to come on this theme later…
Cemiride // Licadho (background on the Dey Krahorm story here and here) // EngageMedia (Read Kevin Rudd’s historic apology. And if you don’t know the work of Swedish author Sven Lindqvist, you should. His latest book, Terra Nullius, takes his recent theme of European-driven genocides to Australia – read an extract here, et ici en francais.)
I’ve just arrived back in New York after three thought-provoking days at the 24/7, DIY Video Summit, a great event put together by Mimi Ito and a team of organizers and curators at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at USC. The panels and discussions streamed live in Second Life and were webcast, and they should be going up on http://www.video24-7.org soon.
I was on a panel called ‘State of the Art’ talking about the Hub, and the human rights implication of online video, alongside Alex Juhasz sharing a YouTube video (appropriately) about her experience teaching in the environment of YouTube and the frustrations of it as a venue for higher learning. Alongside us Thenmozhi Soundarajan presented the work of Third World Majority (where her sister, Theeba who used to be our colleague here at WITNESS, also works 
) and highlighted for me a particularly clear point about how we’ve been pushing in media justice work for access, but now that is not sufficient – when there are 90 versions of Thriller out there, and no meaningful dialogue about healthcare policy then we’ve gained access but without an accompanying ideology of what we do with it. Juan Devis from KCET highlighted local video and mapping initiatives in L.A. and showed his excellent Departures project which provides an immersive experience of an L.A. neighborhood, Boyle Heights.
The crisis in Kenya may ultimately stem from a democratic failure, corruption and tribalism, or poverty and inequality, but either way, evidence of brutal violence continues to emerge, both in terms of killings and of violence against women and girls, and there’s news of an impending health crisis. For a quick tour d’horizon, including ways to act, click “more” below.
Some of the top Kenyan bloggers have been providing compelling updates since the beginning of the election campaign – of those that I read regularly, Kenyan Pundit and Mental Acrobatics particularly stand out – and it’s worth keeping an eye on Global Voices’ Kenya Elections page. That said, we’ve been finding it difficult to track down much citizen video or audio at all from Kenya thusfar – if you come across any, or we’re missing something obvious, please let me know via the comments, or upload it to the Hub. I’ve been wondering why it’s taking time for video to emerge – is the footage out there, but just not online yet? Was it just too insecure and dangerous to film during the first few days? Here’s a by no means comprehensive scour for video, audio and photos out of Kenya in recent days…
Video / Audio / Photos:
The only source providing genuine street-level citizen reporting that I can find is AfricaNews’ Voices Of Africa, which equips local reporters with cellphones, and dubs them “camjos”. It’s a general news site, using traditional media reporters, and the range of post-election reports includes police turning back protesters, and an interview with a Somali refugee, as well as an interview with a tourist industry representative and signs of daily life returning to normal in Nairobi. The reports are of varying quality and interest, but they provide a much more street-level view, and point to the potential video-enabled cellphones might bring to human rights reporting.
It’s not quite clear to me whether this is related to an initiative by Media Focus on Africa, a Dutch-Kenyan NGO, equipped several reporters around the country with high-end video-enabled mobile phones – the reports on this site appear to end on 21st December, before the election.
Over at YouTube, another Kenyan online effort, Kenya Votes, conducted vox pops with ordinary Kenyans in the run-up to the elections, including this young woman expressing her fears about tribalism:
As you might expect, there’s plenty of traditional media coverage on YouTube – Kenya’s own Nation TV, the BBC, Al Jazeera English, and CNN are all putting video reports and interviews online. Rocketboom’s Ruud Elmendorp has a short video report from the days before the election. Currently individual users, like YouTube newbie theweepingsoul, seem to be using news images culled from the web in homages to the photojournalists and other journalists getting images out and in pleas to end the violence.
Great coverage. Maybe when people notice that videos are being picked up by media, and that they start getting attention, people will start making and uploading more videos online.
One can hope.
I couldn’t believe the quick video story I caught on BBC’s website last night: not sure how to create a link here so you’ll have to cut and paste,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_7190000/newsid_7192000/7192077.stm?bw=bb&mp=wm&asb=1&news=1&bbcws=1.
Really upsetting stuff to watch. Really upsetting. My heart goes out to everyone caught up in all this and I’ll do what I can to help.
If you’re interested in following another aspect of this crisis, perhaps catching a few more perspectives, I recommend the Kenya Elections 2007 project of Media Focus on Africa.
Nokia hooked up with a few NGOs to train volunteer citizen reporters and arm them with camera phones. These citizen reporters have been making short films on the election and posting them online for months now and they’ve all got really deep insights into what’s going on.
http://www.mediafocusondevelopment.com/
The video is so heavy. Anyone watching can picture themselves recording it on their own phone as if they were there.
Hey Josh – thanks for those tips (there is a link to Media Focus in there – and I rudely forgot to hat-tip you!)…
No not at all Sameer – no hat tip needed. I commented excitedly, before even finishing your post. Thanks for the really thorough update.
Here’s some more raw video, reportedly from Eldoret:
A similar survey has just gone up over at GV:
http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/2008/01/10/kenya-moving-images-of-unrest-and-hope/
and for those on Facebook, there’s a set of videos you can watch:
http://www.facebook.com/video/?oid=6646557909