(A version of this item - with live links - is also available at <http://blog.deborah.elizabeth.finn.com/blog/_archives/2005/7/20/1050951.html>.)
Dear Colleagues, On Tuesday, I attended a fascinating presentation by Julien Pain, who staffs the Internet Freedom Desk of Reporters Without Borders. The latter is an international nonprofit/ngo that defends freedom of the press. Reporters Without Borders (also known as RSF or Reporters sans frontières) is concerned about cyber-dissidents - individuals who are imprisoned or subjected to other sanctions when they go online to write about political and social issues. Many of them are not professional journalists; they are bloggers engaged in citizen journalism, which is a high-risk activity in some countries. (Global Voices Online is of course a wonderful aggregation of such blogs.) During Julien's presentation, we heard about RSF's new "Guide for Bloggers," which offers practical advice on anonymous publication and on bypassing censorship. He also spoke about a sponsorship program that enables individuals or groups to make a commitment to raise awareness about a specific cyber-dissident who is in prison. (Unfortunately, I was unable to find direct links on the RSF web site to either the new guide or the sponsorship program.) It seems to me that RSF in is a nonprofit organization that is upholding a kind of freedom of the press that is increasingly important not only to individuals but to other nonprofit organizations. One of my questions for Julien was whether he could put out a bit of HTML code that would make it quick and easy for folks in the nonprofit sector to create a banner on their own web sites or blogs that could call attention to RSF's work on behalf of cyber-dissidents. What I had in mind was something that would rotate a gallery of portraits of perhaps half a dozen jailed cyber-dissidents (selected by RSF), and that would lead the reader to the page on the RSF site where he or she could sign up as a sponsor. Julien thought that this was not quite in keeping with RSF's current strategy, but was very polite about the onslaught of free advice that he was receiving from this altruistic busybody. I'm looking forward to seeing what direction RSF does in fact take! Best regards from Deborah Deborah Elizabeth Finn Boston, Massachusetts, USA [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://blog.deborah.elizabeth.finn.com/blog http://public.xdi.org/=deborah.elizabeth.finn _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
