Weekend America has been following the Public Radio Talent Quest and did a nice long segment it on it today. (One correction from the story: there were over 136,000 votes in Round One, not voters, which I believe numbered around 15,000.)
I was glad they managed to include a bunch of excerpts from the winning entries, and that they edited my interview to make me sound like I know what I’m talking about…
We have announced the ten semi-finalists in the Public Radio Talent Quest.
It was an incredibly competitive field with 1,452 entries from all over the country. The judging process was really tough, (big credit goes to the excellent judges).
The semifinalists are (in no particular order):
April Baer
Chris de Ville
Anne Glickman
Al Letson
Bee Jellyfish
Rebecca Watson
Glynn Washington
Carrie Kaufman
Chuck Mertz
Komal Trivedi
All told there were 135,966 votes cast on the site, and thousands upon thousands of comments and discussions throughout.
We’ve listed the Top 100 popular vote-getters here.
And all the judges’ picks here.
We have been astounded by the response and by the remarkable range of talent and enthusiasm that has come through in the Talent Quest. Beyond the judges’ picks and the top popular vote getters there are lots of talented people, great ideas, and endless potential beyond the confines of the contest itself.
I’m bummed to be missing “IS2k7″. I’ve been to most of the Berkman Internet & Society conferences over the years and this one again is shaping up to be interesting and fun. Check out the list of facilitators for the breakout discussions, as just one example.
I have a good excuse to be skipping out, which I’ll blog about some more in the coming days…
dawdlr is a global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: what are you doing, you know, more generally?
answers on a postcard please to:
dawdlr, 77 beak street, london, W1F 9DB
I was in Buenos Aires last week attending a Ford Foundation workshop on Freedom of Expression. There was a small US delegation attending but the main focus was for Latin American participants to talk about the media landscape and the regulatory and commercial factors at play.
Here are some photos of Buenos Aires from the trip. It’s an amazing city and we walked everywhere, soaking up Tango, cuisine, art, leather goods, peaceful labor protests, and a very favorable exchange rate…
The workshop was part of the Freedom of Expression Project, organized by the Ford Foundation and Global Partners and Associates based in the UK.
I was there courtesy of Ford along with several other grantees from the public media group they have been supporting (including the National Black Programming Consortium, New American Media, Future of Music) and about 40 participants from Latin America, UK and Africa.
Global Partners put forth a helpful framework for envisioning the interaction between technological, political and economic factors that shape the communications environment. Yes it’s yet another chart with orbs and arrows but as we talked through various real-world scenarios it proved to be a helpful tool and they will be developing it further.
Some excerpts from my final report:
As an active participant in the evolving “public media” field in the U.S. I initially struggled to understand that there is no direct comparable sector in Argentina and most Latin American countries. The tightly limited spaces between government-controlled media and monopolistic commercial media do not yet add up to a robust independent civic media culture. As a result many of the analyses of media policy and the realities of journalistic efforts focused on an extensive list of grievances about the flaws and failures of the existing architecture across broadcast, print, and digital platforms.
By comparison the US public media sector has a strong identity and despite many difficult pressures seems to have carved out an important and recognized role for a large part of society. I’m also an optimist about the potential for public media to leverage technology and the new social capacity of the Internet to increase its reach and relevance.
So I found it helpful if discouraging to listen to the stories of intimidation, corruption, political and legal threats, bureaucratic barriers, commercial “extremism” and self-censorship in Latin American media. The cumulative impression was of a beleaguered sector that struggles even to identify the means of advancement.
I was also struck that discussion of the potential for the Internet to become a powerful tool and place for leveraging independent voices and freedom of expression was largely absent from the presentations of the Latin American participants. Partly this seemed to be due to the significant “digital divide” that is more severe in these countries than in the US and elsewhere, but even so there was little sense of the promise and potential for this dynamic medium to play a positive role.
Some of the regional policy discussions were hard to follow and the international regulatory and policy frameworks are new to me. But the consistent theme of enforcing broad internationally-supported definitions of freedom of expression in a human rights context rang through, and has added an important dimension for me to put my work in public media in the US in a larger context.
Ultimately this was a positive and productive experience that nonetheless felt like we were just scratching the surface for what promises to be a greater cross-pollination of domains and geography. Having participated mostly in an observer role I now feel I could contribute more directly in subsequent workshops, illustrating aspects of the hands-on efforts of PRX that could be relevant and helpful to others trying to build new intermediaries for independent media.
My friends and colleagues at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society are putting out a remarkable survey from the ongoing Open Net Initiative on Internet filtering. I’ve watched this project grow from the days when Jonathan Zittrain and Ben Edelman were making long distance calls to China from Z’s office to test various websites 5 or 6 years ago. It’s blossomed into an important and fascinating study and this release marks a milestone in comprehending the impact and reaction to the transformative power of the Internet on a global scale.
PRESS RELEASE Contact: Amy Sarno
212-704-8192
Friday, May 18, 2007- 12:01 BST amy.sarno@edelman.comSurvey of Government Internet Filtering Practices Indicates Increasing Internet Censorship
First Year of Global Survey Examines 41 Countries by Political, Social and National Security Filtering
OXFORD, ENGLAND (May 18, 2007) – Twenty-five countries around the world out of 41 countries surveyed block or filter Internet content, indicating a global trend towards Internet censorship, according to the first year of a global survey of Internet filtering techniques by governments released today by the OpenNet Initiative (ONI: http://www.opennet.net), a partnership among groups at four leading global universities: Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, and Toronto, funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
“Online censorship is growing in scale, scope, and sophistication around the world,” said John Palfrey, Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. “The regulation of the Internet has continued to grow over time – not surprising, given the importance of the medium. As Internet censorship and surveillance grow, there’s reason to worry about the implications of these trends for human rights, political activism, and economic development around the world.”
According to the study, censorship is expanding into new countries and becoming more sophisticated over time. Countries are not only blocking Web sites, such as pages online that show pornographic pictures, information about human rights, or YouTube but also applications, such as Skype and Google Maps.
The survey uncovers government activity in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa that denies citizens access to information–often about politics, sexuality, culture, or religion–that the governments deem too sensitive. Among the findings of ONI’s survey are:
• 25 out of 41 countries surveyed showed evidence of filtering;
• Iran, China, and Saudi Arabia not only filter a wide range of topics, but also block a large amount of content related to those topics;
• South Korea’s filtering efforts are very narrow in scope, but heavily censor one topic, North Korea;
• Countries engaged in substantial politically-motivated filtering include: Burma, China, Iran, Syria, Tunisia, and Vietnam;
• Saudi Arabia, Iran, Tunisia, and Yemen engage in substantial social content filtering;
• Burma, China, Iran, Pakistan and South Korea have the most encompassing national security filtering, targeting the websites related to border disputes, separatists, and extremists;
• No evidence of filtering was found in fourteen countries, including Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, West Bank and Gaza, Malaysia, Nepal, Venezuela and Zimbabwe, many of which one might expect to find Internet filtering.“These tests are the first comprehensive global assessment of Internet filtering practices,” said Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University. “Previously, Internet filtering generally has been described only by rumor and anecdote. We’ve confirmed that government-filtering is taking place in dozens of places around the world. It is becoming more pervasive and more subtle over time, often disguised as network errors. An essence of the rule of law is that citizens know when their governments are choosing to censor what they see, hear, and say. Otherwise they don’t know what they don’t know.”
ONI conducted empirical testing for Internet blocking in forty-one countries in 2006. The 41 countries surveyed were chosen based on two criteria: where testing could be done safely (North Korea and Cuba were not included because of security concerns) and where there was the most to learn about government online surveillance. The research spanned thousands of websites across 120 different Internet Service Providers (ISPs), resulting in approximately 200,000 observations. ONI employs a multi-disciplinary approach that includes using a suite of sophisticated network interrogation tools and metrics and a global network of regionally based researchers and experts.
A number of countries in Europe and the United States and North America were not extensively tested this year because filtering practices of those countries are better understood. Direct comparisons between these Western countries to the countries examined in this survey is difficult because in Western countries, the private sector, rather than the government, often leads filtering efforts, and efforts are focused primarily to address copyright infringement issues, or to shield children from pornography. European practices are similar to those in North America, though less related to copyright and more filtering related to hate speech and racism.
A key finding of the study compares the breadth – the amount of information on a range of topics that is censored – and depth of filtering – the actual content that is blocked.
“States are applying ever more fine grained methods to limit and shape the information environment to which their citizens have access,” said Ron Deibert, Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for Internet Studies, University of Toronto. “Some states block access to a wide swathe of content across all of the categories in which we tested, while others tend to concentrate on one or two narrow baskets of content. South Korea, for example, tends to block access only to sites related to North Korea, many of which happen to be hosted in Japan.”
The study finds three primary rationales for filtering: politics and power, leading to filtering of political opposition groups, common in many of the countries surveyed; social norms, leading to filtering of subjects deemed offensive to social norms, such as pornography, gay and lesbian content and gambling, also common in many of the countries surveyed; and security concerns, leading to the filtering of sites that could endanger national security, such as websites of separatist and radical groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in some countries in the Middle East.
“Cyberspace has become a strategic forum of competition between states, as well as between citizens and states,” said Rafal Rohozinski, Research Fellow of the Cambridge Security Programme (Cambridge University). “Military and intelligence actors now consider the Internet to be an critical ‘operational domain’ that will be subject to shaping, controlled and regulation as much if not more than all previous media Our research suggests new and highly innovative trends in filtering and ‘shaping’ practices, including: ‘event based filtering’ where content was made inaccessible around elections and other politically sensitive moments; ‘supply side’ filtering where content producers denied access to their material to specific geographic locales; and, ‘upstream filtering’, where filtering occurs outside of national jurisdictions.”
In future years, ONI will investigate Internet surveillance, and will develop methods to test for filtering of content available through “edge locations” (such as cybercafes), during elections (election monitoring), and from mobile networks, including SMS.
# # #
About the OpenNet InitiativeThe OpenNet Initiative is a collaborative partnership between the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, the Advanced Network Research Group at the Cambridge Security Programme (University of Cambridge), and the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. The OpenNet Initiative’s work would not be possible without the generous support of its funders. The work of ONI has been supported by the Open Society Institute, the International Development Research Center (Canada), and the Ford Foundation at various stages since its inception. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation provided a $3 million grant that provided the core support for this first global survey.
For more information about the Open Net Initiative, please visit ONI’s website www.opennet.net.
