Global Voices Online

Multimedia web channel TodoLoQueHay (All There Is) [es] from Colombia recently posted a short visual journey in the Emberá-Chamí indigenous reserve previously known as Christendom, whose inhabitants are now trying to make known by its ancestral name instead: Karmata Rua.

globalvoicesonline.org

In April 2011, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology of India quietly issued ‘Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules 2011’ restricting web content that are designated as “disparaging,” “harassing,” “blasphemous” or “hateful.”

Moreover, the Indian government has asked the United States to ensure that India-specific objectionable content are removed from the social networking such as Facebook, Google and YouTube. According to news reports they also want these international service providers to set up servers in India to help regulate the content locally.

Indian netizens are not sitting idle. This petition titled “MPs of India: Support the Annulment Motion to Protect Internet Freedom #stopitrules” is circling in the web and more and more citizens are signing.

Protest at Karnataka. Image Courtesy Ashfaq at Just Another Coincidence.

The Global Voices Summit convenes bloggers, activists and technologists for public discussions and workshops about the rise of online citizen media movements worldwide. There will also be a private gathering of Global Voices contributors preceding the Summit.

Visit the Summit website to find out more.

Prominent Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has installed four live webcams at his home in Beijing as a symbolic protest against the police 24-hour surveillance. [The Chinese authority ordered Ai to turn off his webcams yesterday on April 4.]

11 Areas of Russian Election-Related ICT Innovation

Сrisis can be a fruitful time for innovation. In Russia, post-election protests have given birth to dozens of new web platforms and mobile applications.

Below is a list of 11 innovative ICT areas of 2011-12.

Click here to explore them further:

Non-political coordination platform and an opposition hub
Production of protest symbols and content
New forms of protest and protest coordination
Alternative system of election monitoring (from offline to online)
Election monitoring activism (from online to offline)
Coverage of the protests
Transparency for the opposition and engagement in decision-making
Hacked e-mails
Real-time help
Accountability tools
Tools of political promotion

globalvoicesonline.org

India has demanded that 20 major Internet companies, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter present plans to filter “anti-religious,” or “anti-social” material from the content available to Indian citizens.

Cartoon by Bryant Arnold, CartoonADay.com. Used under a Creative Commons 2.5 license (BY-NC)

A poster in the middle of the anti-ACTA rally in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Photo by Ruslan Trad (CC-by-SA 3.0)

In Consent of the Networked, Global Voices co-founder and internet policy specialist Rebecca MacKinnon argues that it’s time for us to demand that our rights and freedoms are respected and protected before they’re sold, legislated, programmed, and engineered away.

Find out more and buy online

This is the One Year One World.

Video journalist Maggie Padlewska will travel alone for one year, visiting a country each week for a total of 52 countries. During her journey she’ll be recording, editing and producing videos of her interactions with communities, organizations and people under-represented by mass media and uploading them to the web.

globalvoicesonline.org

Ségou Villages: Cruising the River Niger for Internet Literacy

Boukary Konaté, a 2011 Rising Voices grantee, is currently cruising up the Niger river aboard a traditional Malian barge, docking every day in a new village to train school children and villagers to use the Internet.

Boukary blogging on the River Niger (all CC BY-NC-SA 2.0):