Julie Posetti – presentation “Social Strategy & Community Building for Digital Story Tellers”

David Robert Lewis – presentation “Freedom of Access to Online Information” & Highway Africa Digital Indaba reportback

Rafiq Hajat – The Malawian Political Roller Coaster Ride July – Sept 11

Thank you to the sponsors, funders and partners: the DOC, OSISA, PACAI, Highway Africa, Right2Know, Supernews

Thank you media: Supernews (Retha Ferguson and Sarah Schafer), Zoopy (Stephen Phillipson), Mail & Guardian, Cape Times

Thank you DCI team: Jane Duncan, Elvira van Noort, Neliswa Ntanda

Thank you: sponsored delegates and participants

Thank you: CTICC, Highway Africa student helpers

I am a live blogger, i.e. I usually post and work with my material online. Often I will edit an online piece in consultation with readers. The process is active. I don’t like preblogging a piece. I am therefore submitting some writing that I completed recently. There are a number of sub-themes I still wish to work into the essay format, for example the Egyptian Revolution, and a comparison of various Internet Rights documents.

Are we are marching to Internetoria?

Discussing Network Neutrality as if it were a Network Switch that government can turn on or off, implies having a rational debate between opposing parties. Technologically speaking, the Internet has always routed around the problem of censorship. Advances in technology however, do not appear to stop lawmakers from making bad decisions. Recent failed attempts by government to create a national firewall, to effectively RICA the Internet, are warning signs that Network Neutrality in South Africa (as well as Africa) is under serious threat. One has only to examine the statements on BBM made by the deputy minister of communications Obed Bapela at the Southern Africa Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference (SATNAC) to be extremely alarmed at the prospect of state intervention in our online communications.

Back in 1996 the World Wide Web was still in its infancy and South Africa’s constitutional assembly was putting the final touches to a document which would become our Bill of Rights. I wrote a letter to Wired Magazine about the inclusion of a home-grown right which had heretofore been excluded from the lexicon of government and especially the previous apartheid regime.

The Right to Privacy (article 14), and more specifically the right of citizens to not have the privacy of their communications infringed, was written during a period in which cryptopunks and cyberanarchists were under threat from various quarters. The US government had only a year previously attempted to clamp down on PGP encryption technology, while South African anti-apartheid activists had been caught by the Bureau for State Security (BOSS) using IBM technology. (The matter is still the subject of litigation in the Khulumani case.) The very real possibility of an Orwellian world in which privacy was a practical impossibility because of the new technologies then emerging, scared us enough to want to secure privacy as well as communications freedom.

People fought and died for these rights — In addition to the right to privacy, our progressive constitution lists under Freedom of Expression (article 16), the “freedom to receive or impart information or ideas” and the terms used specifically exclude the kind of bureaucratic doublespeak which often seems to place the binary world of noughts and ones beyond the scope of liberty and freedom.

Our constitution is very much a pro-Internet and information-friendly document, and I therefore welcome the speedy clarification by Minister Jeff Radebe, the Coordinator of the Justice Cluster in Government, that “Government has no intention to regulate or legislate against Blackberry Encryption messenger services (BBM)”. Pretoria/Tshwane is apparently still ‘working on a policy statement on Cybermatters,” and last month hosted the inaugural South African Internet Governance Forum (ZAIGF), where groups such as ZA-FREE, were needless to say, not invited.

The invariable result is that we now appear to have two schools of thought in government on how to go about fostering “an inclusive Information Society, creating a multi-stakeholder information sharing platform, formulating the common South African position with regard to the global Internet Governance” and accommodating the various academic, scientific and technical and need one add hacker communities.

The one approach, professed by people like Radebe is that South Africa simply implement the code already packaged in the constitution, for example, by adopting the Geneva Action Plan and the Tunis Agenda for the Information Society which has also been endorsed by the AU. This is the popular view. The other less-popular outlook advocated by securacrats such as Bapela and Deputy Minister of Home Affairs Malusi Gigaba, both of whom don’t appear to know what the Internet is all about, is essentially a totalitarian and interventionist approach, a Marxist dream in which all communication is controlled by a central authority in a fascist political dispensation in which individual rights do not exist as we know them, and if they do, they are extremely limited.

The self-serving attempts by Gigaba to limit Internet freedom under the guise of an anti-pornography campaign for example, arise periodically and there is no guarantee that the progressive rights in our constitution will be upheld or that bad laws will not emerge.

The Gigaba Plan may have quietly died, but we should note with concern that Home Affairs publicly expressed the desire to build a “national firewall” like the one surrounding mainland China, that would essentially filter out content which government deems to be a threat to national security. Gigaba and his ilk, appears to believe that Internet service providers will willingly allow themselves to be implicated in the erosion of civil liberties guaranteed by our constitution, in the same way that mobile telephone companies have allowed themselves to become platforms for the clipper chip which is now in every mobile phone.

According to Home Affairs, not only would first tier Internet providers pay for the new firewall, but consumers would have the Department to thank for providing content. If the proposed legislation is ever adopted, every single website will end up under the purview of the Publications Control Board and the concept of Net Neutrality will be abolished in the national interest.

Unless we secure our rights with laws that give affect to our Constitution — implementing a Bill of Rights for the Internet which also recognises the rights of the individual qua machines, and which includes Net Neutrality and other core ideas such as the right to share content via fair use and copyleft, we will be forced to encrypt everything. Our web pages will become slower, our work will be more difficult, and Big Brother will merely succeed in retarding development by disabling the kind of fast, open social intercourse that yes, delivers pornography as much as it delivers new ideas like Open Source Software and Ubuntu Linux to the rest of the world.

Clearly, as the Egyptian Revolution has shown, when the Internet is shut down, when Service Providers are banned,  hackers fall back on modem dialup, BBS, POP servers and other pre-Web 2.0 devices to get their fix of data. We can only welcome the new self-regulated and distributed world which is being created and hope that what emerges is not simply colonisation of a different variety but rather a new Congress of the People, in which all are able to have their say and input in the new digital frontier which evolves.

Instead of marching to Pretoria, (when we get upset about something we see on the Interweb) what the Net needs is something like a Magna Carta. Both John Perry Barlow and myself have come up with documents that propound an essentially libertarian approach to the problem. Freedom can only be guaranteed if liberty is the default position in our discussion, and if access to the Internet is considered a human right. There are a number of other Internet rights documents out there, such as APC Internet Rights Charter and I suggest you read them.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

The competitive strength of the human rights and democracy campaign in Swaziland is premised on the emerging globalisation tendencies i.e., mushrooming social networking, user friendly tools and the universal support for democracy in general. This competitive advantage has manifested itself in the existence of the Swaziland Solidarity Network (SSN) Blog established five years ago to counter the monopoly of Mswati’s regime over the Swazi government’s public radio, TV and news paper; a monopoly that is provided for by the infamous 1973 Decree Act, the Tinkhundla Act of 1978, the current Constitution and the Electronic Communication Bill 2009.

The major disadvantage for King Mswati’s regime is that currently, it lacks the means to have absolute control over public access to social networks based on telecommunication and computer networks, for example, SSN Blog, Facebook, Twitter and others. In this regard, the SSN remains in the pole position to continue with cyber activism of disseminating information about mal governance, corruption and abuse of power by King Mswati’s regime to the media and amongst cyber activists whilst ensuring that the SSN blog is managed professionally, ethically and is democratic.

As evident from the recent Arab uprising, it is beyond any reasonable doubt that cyber activists have already played a remarkable role in promoting freedom of expression and information in Africa. Therefore the conclusion is that social networks will continue to promote freedom of expression by enabling users to speak out on any matters that affect them not what the blogger thinks is relevant.

Social media has delivered new buzzwords – words like authenticity, engagement and community building – concepts that many content creators are still struggling with.

In my DCI presentation, ‘Social Media: The Digital Citizen’s Toolkit for Online Community Building’, I’ll be exploring these ideas in an interactive session designed to help participants develop social media strategies for their stories – from crowdsourcing research to sharing content.

I’m a journalism academic from the University of Canberra in Australia who’s writing a PhD thesis called the Twitterisation of Journalism. And I’ve been thinking a lot about these issues as journalism’s (however you define it) been transformed before our eyes, at the speed of a tweet! I also consult on social strategy and train journalists and other public communicators in social story telling – including those who work for Australia’s oldest newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald, the national multicultural broadcaster SBS, and just last week, the overseer of Australia’s access to information, the Commonwealth Ombudsman and his staff.

I draw extensively on my long career as a journalist with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and my ongoing role as a reporter on digital media transformation for PBS MediaShift in my social media training and consultancy.

While issues like verification amidst the noise of social media, the blurring of lines between the personal and the public in the social sphere, and implications of constant engagement warrant examination, there’s no doubt in my mind that the future of story-telling is both social and mobile.

My DCI session will explore the role of the social media platforms Facebook and Twitter in crowdsourcing, story-telling and community building. The seminar will highlight the role of ‘audience’ engagement in the development of online communities invested in quality content. During the seminar, I’ll workshop social media strategies for your stories in ‘realtime’.

So, please bring your ideas for current or future stories and campaigns to the seminar and we can collectively devise approaches to take your social media presence from one-way broadcast to story-generating conversation.

19 September 2011 at the Cape Town International Convention Centre

08h00
Roof Terrace
Registrations open for DCI
If you have a PACAIA/ Highway Africa lanyard and nametag you don’t need to register for DCI. Tea and coffee with light snacks served.

09h00-09h05
Roof Terrace Room
Welcome Address
Jane Duncan, South Africa
Highway Africa Chair of Media and Information Society in the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University and DCI coordinator

09h05-09h30
Roof Terrace Room
Keynote Address: Information, Technology and Political Activism in Africa
Ndesanjo Macha, Zambia
Regional Sub Saharan Africa Editor with Global Voices

09h30-10h15
Roof Terrace Room
Panel Discussion: Freedom of Access to Online Information
Moderator:  Mendi Njonjo – Africa Technology and Transparency Initiative
David Robert Lewis, South Africa – Hacktivist
Anriette Esterhuysen, South Africa – Executive Director APC

10h15-10h30
Roof Terrace Room
Practical: Citizen Journalism Experiments, with a focus on Communities of Practice
Harry Dugmore, South Africa
Director of the Discovery Centre for Health Journalism and the MTN Chair of Media and Mobile Communication at Rhodes University

10h30-11h00
Roof Terrace Room
Practical: Exploring the Role of Social Media Platforms in Crowdsourcing, Storytelling and Community Building
Julie Posetti, Australia
Lecturer in social media in radio and television reporting at the University of Canberra

11h00-11h30
Roof Terrace
Tea Break

11h30-12h15
Roof Terrace Room
Practical: Digital Security for Activists
Bobby Soriano, Philippines
Digital media activist with the Tactical Technology Collective

12h15-13h00
Roof Terrace Room
Practical: Blogging and Activism: Tools and Techniques
Ndesanjo Macha, Zambia
Regional Sub Saharan Africa Editor with Global Voices

13h00-14h00
Roof Terrace
Lunch Break

14h00-15h30
Roof Terrace Room
Panel Discussion: Protests, Revolutions and Social Media in Southern Africa
Moderator:  Dumisani Moyo, South Africa – Media and ICTs Programme Manager at OSISA
Lucky Lukhele, Swaziland – Spokesperson Swaziland Solidarity Network
Eric Charas, Mozambique – Founder and Managing Director of Charas
Mzonke Poni, South Africa – Chairperson of Abahlali baseMjondolo
Fambai Ngirande, Zimbabwe  – ICCO
Rafiq Hajat, Malawi – IPI

15h45-17h15
Roof Terrace Room
Closing session with PACAI and Highway Africa
Africa Information and Media Summit (AIMS)
Moderator: Jane Duncan, South Africa
Highway Africa Chair of Media and Information Society in the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University and DCI coordinator
Keynotes:
Patricia de Lille, Executive Mayor of Cape Town
Frank la Rue, UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression
Adv Pansy Tlakula, ACHPR Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information

Edetaen Ojo, Media Rights Agenda & David Banisar, Article 19:
Adoption and signing of African Platform for Access to Information

18h30-22h30
The Grand, Cape Town Waterfront
Africa Information and Media Summit (AIMS) Dinner
Phumi Dhlomo, SA Tourism, Director Africa Region
Conference closure: Executive Mayor Patricia de Lille
Courtesy of SA Tourism and the City of Cape Town

Registration for the Digital Citizens’ Indaba conference which will be taking place on the 19th September 2011, at the Cape Town International Convention Centre is now closed.

Thank you to all who have registered, we will keep you all updated via twitter (@DCIndaba) and newsletters.

We are looking forward to sharing this year’s DCI experience with you.

Registration for the Digital Citizens’ Indaba conference which will be taking place on the 19th September 2011, at the Cape Town International Convention Centre is open again and is for FREE.

Delegates will get full access to the conference, a conference pack (which includes the programme, access to exhibitions, lunch, dinner and teas for the duration of the conference).  Please note that this offer excludes flights, accommodation, visa fees, and airport transfers, all of which are for delegates own payment.

To register follow this link: http://bit.ly/p9b12w and do so BEFORE MONDAY 5 SEPTEMBER 12:00AM

We are looking forward to sharing this year’s DCI experience with you.