In putting together the Global Voices summit, the program sometimes ends up changing to reflect recent events. We added a panel a few weeks ago focused on the Chinese blogosphere and issues of bias, misunderstanding and miscommunication. It’s become very clear to those of us who watch blogopshere conversations that there’s a great deal of anger in China about percieved media bias in the US, and deep misunderstanding between Chinese bloggers and western human rights activists.

My co-founder Rebecca MacKinnon, a former CNN bureau chief in China and an expert on Chinese media, offers us a timeline on the incidents that have led to these discussions of bias. With China hosting the 2008 Olympics, there’s been a western expectation that China would be more open in terms of media, and that human rights situations would improve. On March 10th – the anniversary of the Chinese army march into Lhasa, a day that’s remembered with protests every year that remember Tibetan people’s resistance against the Chinese army – protests turned violent, sparking clashes between protesters and police.

Rebecca points out that there are very different ways to understand these protests. Western activists tend to feel, “the Chinese are denying Tibetans basic rights and opressing them.” Han Chinese tend to offer reflections like, “These ungrateful minorities – look what we did for their economy! We built infrastructure and sanitation for them and this is what we get?”

The violence in Tibet helped give support to movements to protest the Olympic torch passing through cities around the world. Western rights groups expected that Chinese people would be grateful for these protests against their “government oppressors”. Instead, they were deeply angry over percieved media bias in American mainstream media. This anger became most visible at Anti-CNN.com, a site designed to challenge narratives in Western media about China and to check facts reported in those media. Text on their front page is instructive in understanding their motives: “We are not against the western media, but against the lies and fabricated stories in the media. We are not against the western people, but against the prejudice from the western society.”

Anti-cnn got its name because commenters there revealed that a photo shown on CNN – which showed Chinese tanks in the streets of Lhasa – was improperly cropped from the original AFP photo… which showed Tibetans throwing rocks at those tanks. Writers on the site did excellent fact-checking, discovering cases in which photos of Nepali soldiers beating Tibetan protesters were mischaracterized as Chinese soldiers abusing Tibetans.

Is it possible, Rebecca wonders, that instead of preventing cultural disconnects, the net is capable of ampifying them?

Rebecca shows us maps generated by Dave Lyons of the Mutant Palm blog that show weblinks to the Athens Olympics site and to the Beijing Olympics site. They point out that there’s two separate clusters of people linking to the Beijing site – a cluster of Chinese blogs centered on certain media outlets, and everyone else’s blogs centered on other sites, suggesting two isolated conversations.

Some activists made efforts at trying to break down this echo chamber – she points us to an instructional video on YouTube designed to help Westerners talk to Chinese users on Fanfou, a twitter-like site, and engge in conversations via Google Translate. It’s not wise to come in with the perspective, “If only we could break down their wall and give them the information, they would be free.” (This statement gets a lot of laughs from the audience.)

There’s a systemic problem with getting alternative voices about subjects like Tibet from China. It’s difficult to post about the Dalai Lama without being effectively filtered on the Chinese-hosted internet… which means it’s hard to see these perspectives online.

John Kennedy, GV’s China editor, argues that anti-CNN was amazingly effective in critiquing western media coverage, and that there aren’t very good responses to their critiques – CNN didn’t offer an apology for their photo-cropping decisions, which made bloggers even more angry.

“How different are the Chinese views on Tibet? I don’t know, and we don’t know,” Kennedy offers. “If you’re not in a dialog with Chinese bloggers, does your opinion matter? Some people in China are really pissed off – how do you talk with them?”

Kennedy points out that he’s sometimes accused of picking the most extreme voices in the Chinese blogosphere and amplifying them. He offers a counterexample – a surprising post about Chinese bloggers finding common cause with Burmese monks, a subject that challenges perceptions about Chinese bloggers as supporting authoritarianism.

Isaac Mao points out that biases come from the absence of information. We need to understand that there are interlocking layers of media. There’s official media – words directly from the government. There’s professional media – which often critiques official media and helps interpret it. Now, we’re seeing the rise of grassroots media, which has emerged very quickly in China and now challenges these other narratives.

I offered an observation and question from the crowd: There are a lot of situations where we end up with cultural misunderstanding and failure to communicate due to a failure to consider the audience of remarks. Sermons Reverend Wright offered to his congregation were understood very differently by the reporters at ABC news than they were by his congregants… and this almost cost Obama the democratic nomination. Comments made by Jack Cafferty on CNN led to a law suit from Chinese citizens… it’s unlikely that Cafferty thought of himself speaking to a Chinese audience while speaking to his viewers. How often do we misunderstand because we’re not part of the intended audience for something?

Xiao Qiang offers the example of Chinese party secretaries writing about the Dalai Lama as “a wolf in lambskin”. This was pretty routine when talking to other party members – once translated into English and promoted worldwide, it led to outrage and a PR disaster.

Xiao offers the hope that projects like Global Voices can help build bridges of cultural understanding. He offers a story about Tang Danhong, a Han woman who’s lived in Tibet for ten years and has been writing epic poetry to try to encourage understanding and build bridges between groups:

Yes, I love Tibet. I am a Han Chinese who loves Tibet, regardless of whether she is a nation or a province, as long as she is so voluntarily. Personally, I would like to have them (Tibetans) belong to the same big family with me. I embrace relationships which come self-selected and on equal footing, not controlled or forced, both between peoples and nations.

If you’re not with us here in Budapest, please join us on the video stream. All the coverage is archived, which means that if you’ve got a very dull weekend planned, you could spend at least 20 hours with us. If you’ve got a bit less time, but read Spanish, El Pais is here to help you out. Rosa Jíminez Cano has an excellent article on yesterday’s sessions on free speech online. It’s a great complement to an article on Rising Voices, reported from Colombia, a few days back, with a strong focus on our remarkable David Sasaki.

If there’s a single subject that gets bloggers excited, incensed and interested, it’s elections. Our beloved managing editor Solana Larsen points out that we know we’ll see a flood of posting from a particular country a few months before an election, and often for some weeks afterwards… or for months, in the case of a disputed poll. Four GV authors and editors look in depth at political blogging in their countries, spanning Kenya, Iran, Venezuela and Armenia.

Hamid Tehrani, our Persian editor, offers some thoughts on Yarane Baran, a pro-reformist association of bloggers. The name of the group is a reference to “a blessing like rain”, the idea that electing a reformist leader (again) would be a blessing as welcome as rain. The network is one in support of “serial losers”, a group of politicians who’ve lost municipal, parliamentary and presidential elections. The network functions almost as a support group, providing hope to the participants who are curently deeply marginal in Iranian politics. But he wonders whether it’s working, as the traffic to the network is quite light, suggesting less support for the movement than the involved bloggers might hope. On the other hand, it’s an interesting network inasmuch as it includes blogs from senior politicians like former vice-president Mohammed Ali Abtahi, who uses the online space to publish stories on subjects that are rarely covered in other Iranian media.

Onnik Krikorian, our Armenia correspondent, documented the power of digital media in Armenia’s recent presidential election. Krikorian explains that Armenia hasn’t had very many free or fair elections, and that many people saw the 2008 election as a coronation for Serzh Sarkasian, backed by serving President Kocharyan who was constitutionally banned from standing for an additional term. The opposition candidate, Levon Ter-Petrossian (the first independently elected President of Armenia in 1991), had strong support from bloggers, and when he polled very poorly in the election, some argued that the elections hadn’t been free and fair.

Those arguments were bolstered by videos posted to YouTube, and bloggers promoted street protests against the election. This led up to clashes in the streets on March 1, where ten people died. The government shut down all independent media, but – oddly – didn’t shut down online media. Bloggers used YouTube to call attention to videos of police shooting at demonstrators, which eventually forced the police to respond to accusations of excessive force and brutality. During the twenty days that blogs were the only media, the Armenian political establishment began to understand the importance of blogs. After Sarkasian took power, he requested a meeting through his press advisor with bloggers to ask how blogs work and what they can do. Krikorian tells us his blogger friends say, “We’re not really going to tell them, are we?”

Luis Carlos Diaz, who covers Venezuela for Global Voices, explains his country’s political situation with a number of one-liners. “We have a new hegemony in power, without blood,” referring to Chavez’s vision of socialism. “Our problem: we have too much petroleum,” which he argues is bad for government accountability.

Venezuela is well-wired by developing world standards. Of 27 million people, 16 million voters, 5.7 million have net access. And since Venezuelan life is filled with political discussion, so are the blogs… at least when in election season. (And we do mean season – Diaz tels us that there’s at least one controversial election a year, which means that “voting is a sport in Venezuela”.) Digital media, he tells us, is perhaps the strongest media in Venezuela, and projects like the Elecciones en 3D project from to2blogs have emerged as major sources of media information during Venezuelan elections.

Daudi Were, the godfather of the Kenyan blogosphere, father of the Kenya Unlimited blog community, offers some reflections on Kenyan blogs in the wake of the 2007/8 electoral crisis. He’s kind enough to reference a recent article of mine on the topic, and I’ll recommend that for anyone who needs background on the election.

Daudi argues that Kenya was especially prepared to cover the situation due to the richness and maturity of the blogosphere. There are at least 800 Kenyan bloggers, who are both fiercely independent and tightly linked together. “If you build a new Kenyan blog, if you put it into the webring, you’ll have a thousand viewers the first day.” Many of these bloggers were anxious to cover the elections. Daudi tells us he was out on the streets at 6am, photographing lines and polling places; other bloggers were out at 3am. Some bloggers were actually standing for election, others were embedded with foreign diplomats, visiting polling sites as election monitors.

Everyone was cognizant of the polarized political environment. Before the election, Odinga was polling at 46.6% versus 46.3% for Kibaki. SMS was being used to spread extremely scary political messages: “If we vote in this guy, he’ll kill your grandmother. So vote for the other guy, or we’ll kill your grandmother,” quips Daudi.

On December 30th, Daudi made a post titled: “Something is not right“. Voting counts were turning up odd discrepancies, and presidential election results had not been released. As optimism eroded, violence began. Bloggers quickly found themselves as citizen reporters, using twitter, photoblogging and other tools to document the situations.

Daudi offers some reflections on lessons learned from the coverage of violent incidents and the protested election:

- Kenyans often complain that digital media isn’t important because bandwith penetration is only 7-10%. That’s a mistake – radio DJs often pick up blogposts and read them over the air, potentially reaching 95% of all Kenyans.

- Kenya’s human network is critically important. Bloggers had support locally, nationally and globally through existing networks, and they drew a great deal of attention to protests.

- Reputation matters. Daudi reported an incorrect rumor one day, stating that two people had been killed. The next day, he went to a press conference and photographed the two people there. “Because I was being transparent, my reputation didn’t suffer.”

- “Bloggers aren’t aliens – we’re just a subset of society. If society has some crazy people, some bloggers are going to be crazy as well.”

I’ve spent the last two days as the MC of the Global Voices meetings in Budapest. It’s a deeply rewarding activity, as it means I get to be part of every conversation and listen in on every discussion. But it’s exhausting, and has been extremely sweaty work, as Budapest is going through a heat wave. The main downside of the activity, for me, is that I don’t get to blog. But we’re in a room filled with more than eighty of the world’s finest bloggers, and basically there’s no doubt that every event is being covered thoroughly, usually using Cover It Live, a tool designed for liveblogging. Let me recommend some bloggers accounts in particular:

- Rebecca Wanjiku, one of my very favorite bloggers, is both covering sessions and her travels through Budapest.

- David Sasaki, who will be MC-ing today’s sessions, has a great summary post of yesterday’s activities.

- Jose Murillo, who’s helped bring voices from the Brasilian community into Global Voices, is offering his perspectives in English and Portuguese.

Yesterday’s sessions at the summit focused exclusively on human rights and freedom of speech online. While these topics are critically important to our community and a huge focus of their work, it’s easy to udnerstand how ten hours of this discussion could leave everyone ready to head to a bar. Which GV folks did, en masse, occupying the hotel bar here with the ferocity of a visiting army.

David Sasaki notes that he thinks of Global Voices as a global party. He envisions Sami ben Gharbia, our advocacy director, as a cape-wearing crusader who fights “the evil bartender”, the guy who wants to keep people out of the party. (We’re all looking forward to photos of Sami in a red cape in the near future.) David sees himself, in this party metaphor, as the guy who shows up at an intimate dinner party with a few busloads of friends. The goal of Rising Voices, the project he runs, is to fight elitism in global blogging by radically expanding the pool of people participating in online conversations.

To give us a sense for what’s happening with Global Voices, David offers a video overview of the ten projects Rising Voices is supporting, ranging from an effort to help people within prison in Jamaica blog to working with the One Laptop Per Child project in Uruguay to blogging women’s issues in Bangladesh. The folks here on stage in Budapest are grantees, including Lova Rakotomalala, our moderator for the first session. He introduces himself, saying, “Yesterday, we had a dentist from Pakistan. I’m a molecular biologist from Madagascar.” That’s pretty typical of this sort of event.

Collins Oduor, from the REPACTED community theatre project in Nakuru, Kenya, starts his presentation with a story – my paraphrase of it:

A young girl is very sociable and likes to play with all the children in the village. Her mother is worried that she’s too friendly and doesn’t want her playing with the boys in the village. So she tells her daughter, “You can’t climb trees with the boys because they will look up your dress and see your underpants.” So the next day, the girl takes off her underpants and climbs the tree.

Oduor ends his story with the single word, “Communication” and the room breaks into laughter. REPACTED specializes in communicating through community theatre. “We don’t have a lot of streets, so we don’t call it street theatre – it’s village theatre.” The productions use a wide range of techniques to get communities talking about HIV/AIDS. One popular strategy is to run rap battles, where two MCs compete to offer the best free-style rhymes on a randomly selected topic, like condom use. They do a great deal of work in prisons, and the community photographer and videographer, Fidel, is a former participant, who took an HIV test at REPACTED’s urging while in prison. Oduor is helping REPACTED use blogging to spread the impact of their work nationally and internationally, documenting the techniques the group uses, and helping the people they work with to understand and use technology tools to communicate online.

Catalina Restrepo of the HiperBarrio project in Medellin, Colombia, presents in Spanish, translated by Jules Rincon. The focus of the HiperBarrio project is to transform the image of the communities of La Loma and Santo Domingo. Both communities have historically been viewed as violent slums, places that no one should visit. By letting people in their communities tell local stories, they’re challenging the impressions people have of these neighborhoods, and are starting to see visitors from both Medellin and around the world who want to learn about these communities.

Mialy Andriamananjara is one of the coordinators of the remarkable Global Voices Malagasy, and a co-founder of FOKO Madagascar. The project is encouraging high school, college and journalism students to explore citizen media. This is a challenge, given both digital divide issues (the cost of connectivity, frequent electrical blackouts) and perception issues. Blogging is seen as an activity that isn’t very serious, and that Malagasy community society frowns on people “standing out” through writing online. But the project has been very effective at technology training and in helping people break into journalism. It’s had some unexpected side effects as well – one of the FOKO groups ended up organizing the first translation and performance of the Vagina Monologues in Malagasy. Another project, “Helping Kamba“, called attention to child who was born with a severe deformity. The project has raised sufficient money to bring the child to the capital city, and yesterday, he had surgery to correct his condition based on money raised from online activism.

Voices Bolivianas, led by Christina Quisbert and Edward Avilla, focuses on the voices of indigenous people, especially indigenous women in Bolivia. Christina explains that there are strong tensions between the majority indigenous population in Bolivia and the Spanish-speaking minority. In digital spaces, people who speak languages like Aymara are much less well represented than Spanish-speakers. Christina’s blog, Bolivia Indigena, focuses on these issues, and Voices Bolivianas is working to try to get more people writing and talking about these issues.

I’m blown away every time I read about the work the Rising Voices grantees are doing. It’s a huge treat, and a major inspiration, to see folks like this on stage.

Sorry for my comparative silence, friends. We’re alive and running at the Global Voices 2008 summit here in Budapest. There’s a hotel conference room packed with Global Voices authors and activists as well as with journalists from around Hungary and throughout Central Europe. And there are dozens of folks covering the event via liveblogging and other methods – you can see their coverage on the summit website.

Not me, though. I’d love to liveblog, but there’s a great deal going on here, and I’m going to be busy as one of the master of ceremonies.

We’re thrilled that people are paying attention to the work we’re doing at Global Voices and our involvement via Global Voices Advocacy in issues around free speech online. My friend Evgeny Morozov has an article in this week’s Economist on the cat and mouse game around free speech online – we’re thrilled to be mentioned in that context.

More news as I’m able to break away from the conference and share the conversation with you. Wish us luck!

We’re off and running at the Global Voices Summit in Budapest, Hungary. Depending on how you’re counting, this is a two day or a five day meeting. Two days of the meeting – tomorrow and Saturday – are open to the general public and will be a conversation first on free speech online, then on citien media around the globe. As a precursor to our conversation on internet filtering, we’re doing a one-day workshop today on free speech online. In our conference room, we’ve got an amazing cross-section of free speech activists in censored nations – several people introduce themselves by talking about their banned websites, or the prison sentences they’ve served due to their online speech.

(Some of my colleages are using a tool called Cover It Live to liveblog the event. Please check out their coverage as well for real-time updates on the conversation.)

The speakers at today’s workshop are experts on different aspects of internet filtering – we’re asking people to give a presentation and to spark discussion with the crowd here. My friend and colleague Rob Faris, the research director for the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, leads off today with an overview of the work of the Open Net Initiative, a four-university project that studies technical filtering of the Internet around the world.

Rob first points out that there are a number of strategies for filtering the Internet, not all of which involve technical means. Government-based filtering can include:

- copyright and intellectual property restrictions that restrict online speech
- registration, licensing and ID requirements that discourage and chill online speech
- liability for defamation that chill certain types of speech
- arrest and intimidation of onine authors
- filtering of search results to hide dissenting speech
- indirect censorship via denial of service attacks and hacking
- monitoring and surveillance of networks, which causes a chilling effect
- technical filtering, blocking specific websites from users in a country

It’s important to remember that the bigget impediment to free speech is lack of access or the expense of access. If people can’t afford to be online, or can’t find ways to be online, they’ve been effectively silenced and prevented from accessing key pieces of information online.

ONI distinguishes between four times of filtering – policial (blocking opposition websites or independent news websites), social (blocking pornography, gambling or alcohol/drug websites), security (blocking websites used by separatist, violent or terrorist movements), and internet tools (tools used for internet circumvention, like Tor or proxy servers.) There are at least two other topics worth adding to this list: blocking of mobile content (which ONI is not currently studying) and blocking of social media sites (which we study and map at Global Voices Advocacy).

As we look at filtering around the world, there are open questions about whether governments are cooperating with one another to filter the internet. ONI researchers in the middle east point out that there’s an emerging unified set of standards agreed to by some Arab information ministers for filtering satellite television. Our colleagues believe that we’ll next be seeing a discussion on common standards for internet filtering, possibly on the agenda of the next meeting of the information ministers. It’s easier for the Middle East to agree on filtering standards, given a common language and some common issues. While there’s a great deal of conversation about China exporting its powerful filtering tools, it’s not clear this is actually taking place. If anything, a major exporter of web censorship is the US, where companies produce and market tools like SmartFilter that are commonly used to filter the net on a national basis.

Rob Faris offers some interesting provocations, wondering whether there are better and worse ways to filter the net. He points out that some filtering efforts are simply ineffective – when Sweden blocked the website Pirate Bay, traffic to the site actually increased due to publicity to the site. Rob argues that we’d like to see filtering that is transparent, specific, subject to judicial review and due process. But this raises another issue – should we allow people to make the argument that there’s a right way to filter? (I’ve argued in the past that Saudi Arabia, which is quite transparent about net filtering, is a better way to filter than non-transparent regimes like Tunisia’s.)

Rob points out that arguments about net filtering always bump up against three issues: child pornography, violence and hate speech. Should we be arguing that governments can’t block these kinds of speech? This opens a wide and challenging conversation:

- Elijah Zarwan wonders whether we actually want to argue for a fully open internet. Perhaps it’s okay that these types of content are blocked, transparently. Are we locked to a libertarian idea that opposes all content restriction?

- Robert Guerra points out that there are proposals at the ICANN level to ban certain top-level domain names based on possible offense or inappropriateness. These debates over censorship can go to the highest levels of the internet administration.

- Danny O’Brien of EFF points to a possible alliance between free speech advocates and copyfighters who are trying to prevent networks from being locked down to prevent the spread of copyrighted materials.

- An activist from Singapore points to the importance of net filtering in large nations to people in smaller nations – the policies that large nations adopt often influence the policies of smaller nations.

- Rob points out that Saudi Arabia didn’t allow the internet until they were able to filter it – is there a sense in which filtering is advantageous if it gives us access we otherwise would not have had? Would Turkey be better of if they could filter only some videos rather than all of YouTube?

Rob ends with a challenge – as we think about filtering, we need to think about long and short term approaches. The sorts of circumvention approaches Global Voices generally advocates are short term solutions – what’s the long-term strategy towards building a movement?