I just returned from biking across the Dominican Republic and Haiti. An epic experience through these beautiful countries. You can check out some of the pics and stories on the blog we kept throughout the journey at bikehispaniola.tumblr.com and find out why I decided to make the trip through my blog post at Digital Democracy.

Rob and I decided to hug the northern coast of the Dominican Republic, stopping in villages and towns for rest at night. Outside of Punta Cana, we experienced the worst roads and it’s generally the least digitally mapped area, so our route was a bit different. From Sabana De La Mar, we took a boat to Samana, and hugged route 5. Unfortunately Google only lets us show going around Parque Nacional Los Haitises then taking route 7. There were some other stop-offs, like Playa Grande and waterfalls, that aren’t shown plus the roads are under construction, so the routes are likely to change. In Haiti, we even came across parts where the road had been entirely engulfed by a nearby river. But this is a close estimate and a route we’d definitely recommend checking out. Each day, the terrain is different, the atmosphere and scenery changes and the spirit of the cities show their unique colors.

Thanks to everyone who followed along on this journey and happy new year. 2012 will be a great one!

At crossroads in my life, I bike across countries. Nine years ago, I biked across the United States. Today, I find myself at another transition: I am moving on from my role as President of Digital Democracy. In honor of that change, I’ll be crossing the Dominican Republic and Haiti on the island of Hispaniola.

Haiti faced a crossroads when it was devastated by the 2010 earthquake. Digital Democracy had a team on the ground at the time, which meant the event shook me to the core as well. The Dd team sprang into action, contributing to humanitarian aid efforts to map where people were in need to help save lives.

Yet once Haiti disappeared from the headlines, the real work to rebuild the country began. In response to increased levels of rape post-earthquake, we worked to empower women as key actors in Haiti’s reconstruction with a commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative. This year we worked in Haiti to launch the 572 call center, the country’s first rape-response hotline (a sort of 911 for violence against women), connected to a secure database and interactive mapping system. Next we’re working to scale these solutions nationally.

Now I’m at a crossroads too. Over the past three years Digital Democracy has grown from an idea to an accomplished nonprofit. With Dd a sustainable organization, I’m ready to move on and am looking to explore opportunities that allow me to pursue innovative projects with larger enterprises. I’ll still be involved in Digital Democracy, in a guiding role to support the work of my co-founder Emily and our amazing staff.

Since Digital Democracy launched, I’ve been able to draft policy in Iraq, securely document crimes against humanity in Burma/Myanmar, develop an international education initiative, work with government heads and active citizens in the Caucasus, host trainings with Secretary Clinton in the lands that my family fled from, and speak at US Congress and at the White House. It’s meant the world to me to work on these initiatives with such incredible people over the past few years. When I biked across the US I learned that people can achieve anything they put their minds to. I’m excited to see what this new trip will teach.

Tune in to Bike Hispaniola to join my friend Rob Munro & me on the journey. Follow the blog, featuring a live map that updates our location, twitter feed, photos and more. Please ask us questions, share tips and ideas, and let us know of people and sights to see. I’ll be sharing stories and stopping by our partners’ offices in Port-Au-Prince to see the call center staff and further explore how technology can continue to make a difference in Haiti and around the world.

You can sponsor my 500 mile ride by contributing to Digital Democracy’s end of year matching campaign in honor of the trip. All donations will go to Digital Democracy core programming in Haiti and beyond in 2012 – not the ride itself – and be doubled by generous matching donors.

Happy holidays to you and thank you for your support over these years. I look forward to hearing from you and keeping in touch wherever my travels take me and where yours take you.

The Senator’s site features footage from Fox News. Pirated footage, that copywritten, has been used without permission. PROTECT IP and it’s partner bill in the House called the Stop Online Piracy Act. SOPA, as it is known, would mean that the entire Senate website, which hosts the content, could be not only taken down, but actually blocked from appearing on the Internet. Potentially, the underlying DNS system that tells computers how to find a website, would get rewritten. It’s like finding a house that has been hosting criminal activity and moving the entire building so that it couldn’t be found.Then removing any mention of it from the yellow pages, making it unsearchable.

Cutting off funding is also an option. Were the senators reelection campaign to use footage of her giving a speech that was recorded by someone that did not then give express permission for that content to be used, they could ask PayPal or another payment service to stop all donations from being processed.

Imagine a reelection campaign, A website like Kickstarter that might have someone raising money to do a video about the cornerstone issues to her campaign that could’ve otherwise been featured might get shutdown due to someone’s else’s content. Other startups could see this as an example of things to come and choose instead to stop their entrepreneurial venture, knowing that the costs for lawyers would be too high to bear for a young company.

Governments around the world are increasingly trying to legitimize their own censorship regimes based on the actions of countries like the UK and France. These countries have argued that in times of crisis, communications technology should be curtailed. Burma, Iran, Syria and Egypt have tried this too. After all what are these regimes if not in permanent crisis. This would add the USA to the list.

Parliamentarian Marietje Schaake of the European Union, an elected official who understands technology, recently stated that this legislation would actually impede transatlantic trade relations, not protect the economy as their advocates argue, and that “it would lead to the arms of US law enforcement to span all of the world and it would make the us lose its moral authority. Imagine if China would take down websites in europe or the us itself.” that level of censorship is what the US is proposing to do. it’s not good for free expression, nor for making a dollar.

Many technology companies — including AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo and Zynga — have come out strongly against the bill, calling it straight censorship and expressing concern that it could “pose a serious risk to our industry’s continued track record of innovation and job-creation, as well as to our Nation’s cybersecurity.” the coalition has come out with a strongly named domain, Protect Innovation, accessible at 66.96.160.148 in case the legislation passes and the site is allegedly blocked.

Worse still is that tools that are used by human rights defenders around the world to freely express themselves in the face of repression might themselves come under attack. Evading censorship, whether to stifle political speech or copyright infringement are structurally the same. Not being able to connect securely can have awful implications. The senator might have dissidents from these regimes joining her on breaking laws, though they could face time behind bars or much worse conditions.

A representative for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) called it, “a choice between protecting American creativity and jobs or protecting thieves.” unfortunately, if enacted, it will do little to stop piracy but will prevent an emerging job-creating industry from sustaining and growing. It flies in the face of secretary clinton’s internet freedom agenda and the universal declaration of human rights that it’s based on, which promises freedom of expression as a shared human value, to be protected and preserved for the good of all.

Go to your Congress person and Senators while you still can and tell them that this takes us in the opposite direction from the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, instead encouraging censorship regimes and the tyranny that follows. And call them before they suggest legislation that allows the government to reroute and block phone numbers too. Here’s a handy site to help with finding them by zip code: opencongress.org.

What can be done to help support the open internet? For starters, click on to stopcenshorship.org to oppose the legislation.

I immediately dropped my bags and left for the protest areas. The demonstrators were given flag poles with no flags. This made them appear, instead, as either as elderly people with bright white walking sticks, or masked youth vigilantes toting imposing clubs. Depending on the media source, that’s how they were portrayed. They stood in droves, under the pouring rain, and shouted only for the president to resign peacefully.

Read more at Fortnight Journal…

Mark describes the advent of online innovations in democratic organizing, but he also warns of a risky new complacency. Mark trains marginalized communities to understand porous security settings on platforms such as Facebook. In Haiti, he tells groups that free tools imply “they are the product.” In America, he surprises young email users who don’t understand that their messages are “like a postcard” that can easily be intercepted by a service provider or hacker.

In Burma, however, Mark describes a different paradigm; one in which inept censors ironically don’t understand technology lingo such as “encryption” and “DDoS.” There, he instead turns to the classics to teach young activists—using George Orwell‘s books Burmese Days, Animal Farm and 1984 to respectively illustrate British colonialism, the rise of Burmese socialism and the current oppressive junta.

Listen to the podcast at Fortnight Journal…

In the digital era, it’s easier to conflate participation with democracy. This is a dangerous and unfortunate trend as it degrades the very concept of what a democracy can and should be: a transparent, participatory, and accountable means of representative governance.

Voting itself doesn’t necessarily mean a democracy. For the past many decades, democracy has in many countries around the world, and often due to American foreign policy, been defined as simply having elections. In the best circumstances, as having “free and fair” elections specifically. People are bribed, and have had their lives threatened, to vote at the polls.

Crowdsourcing also doesn’t necessarily mean a democracy. Craig Newmark was recently quoted by Patrick Meier at the recent NetImpact Conference:

"Another word for #democracy is #crowdsourcing" – @craignewmark #NetImpact—
Patrick Meier (@PatrickMeier) October 29, 2011

“Another word for #democracy is #crowdsourcing“

I often disagree with Craig and it was unfortunate to see buzz circulate around such an off the cuff statement. It’s my experience that lackluster crowdsourcing initiatives actually do the opposite, they degrade the very definition of democracy. Many of the people that I’ve encountered and/or worked with overseas and in the USA are upset with the countless surveys and other “crowdsourcing” projects that occur where things are taken from a target community that rarely, if ever, encounters the positive results from said work or study. When communities encounter this type of crowdsourcing fatigue, they are less likely to participate as effectively in the future. It’s like calling 9-1-1 and not receiving any response.

In an online discussion that occurred around Craig’s quote, Katrin Verclas stated that there is “no implicit moral positive value in #crowdsourcing.” I agree and even stress that “crowds” rarely lead to anything good. Communities do. However, community sourcing is made more difficult when the community becomes skeptical that anything can help them. Such as when they fail to see results from their efforts.

Patrick continues, detailing that “crowdsourcing is a methodology, not a technology or an industry. Democracy is also a methodology.” Unfortunately, Patrick’s blog post on this issue does not detail the context of the quote to speak to. Nevertheless, Evgeny Morozov does an excellent job of detailing how crowdsourcing as a method has gone wrong.

While crowdsourcing is small part of a large process that can in rare cases lead to something “democratic,” it’s my hope that more efforts are pursued in positive crowdsourcing, some of the cases that the crisis mappers network has pursued. It’s crucial that the crowdsourcing methodology be applied with local respect, with privacy and security standards, and with larger goals, such as saving lives and supporting democracy as core values. While the network has taken some steps to pursue this, it does not mean that it’s currently a time to claim victory.

According to the Computer Crimes Act of Thailand, a website owner is responsible for anything written on their site, not just the actual author of the content. So if anyone posts anything on Facebook that is considered illegal in Thailand, Zuckerberg could be held responsible. The problem is that even talking about this law in Thailand is an offense, so if someone clicks the “like” button on this article from inside their borders, it could mean trouble.

This is what recently happened to Chiranuch Premchaiporn. Her nickname “Jiew” might mean “Tiny” but she has a big and brave heart in her small Thai body. As the webmaster for the online newspaper Prachatai, she faces up to 70 years in prison because someone left some comments about the Thai King on her website that she didn’t delete fast enough. Under the strict lèse majesté laws (defamation of the monarchy), one cannot say anything that might be interpreted as offensive towards the royal family without facing extreme penalties.

Read more at Huffington Post..

Photo of Jiew (Chiranuch Premchaiporn) in Thai Jail by Nick Nostitz

Watch the video at Fortnight Journal…

In today’s podcast, Mark talks with young Iraqi digital media activist Hayder Hamzoz. They discuss current conditions of repression in Iraq for new media political activism. Hamzoz runs the blog Iraqi Streets 4 Change, which documents peaceful public dissent in order to push the Iraqi government to expedite democratic reforms. He also works on Salam Shabab, a United States Institute of Peace reality show that profiles Iraqi youth. Mark, President and Co-founder of Digital Democracy, trains Iraqi groups to empower themselves with open-source technology.

Shortly after this interview, Hamzoz’s phone was seized in Tahir Square by individuals allegedly linked to Iraqi security forces. He was assaulted and received threats via Facebook and email. But to date, he has not ceased publishing.

Hamzoz, 22, reiterates his dedication to a citizen journalism that can spur wider acceptance of free speech—as well as anti-corruption awareness, and better collaboration between civil society and NGOs. Hamzoz asserts that his role is truly a vocation; an unpaid, unflinching endeavor driven by passionate patriotism.

Listen to the podcast at Fortnight Journal…

Punks used the post office to bridge distance. Mainstream music stores didn’t and wouldn’t stock their art, so they circulated tapes by mail instead. A band from one city would call up their fan in another, asking to sleep on their couch after playing a concert in their town. This reciprocity grew their community into an organic movement, with a method and ethos called “DIY”: Do It Yourself. After all, who else was there to rely on?

The American punk movement seeded communities across a 3,717,813-square-mile piece of land, forming a web of trust, and an alternative economy.

Read more at Fortnight Journal…