Community Engagement

Hidden in all the bad news about California’s troubles is this delightful paradox: Californians, while living in a state that experts say is ungovernable, have within their reach new tools that give them greater power to govern themselves than ever before.

Agents of the East German Stasi could only have dreamed of the sophisticated electronic equipment that powered Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s extensive spying apparatus, which the Libyan transitional government uncovered earlier this week. The monitoring of text messages, e-mails and online chats — no communications seemed beyond the reach of the eccentric colonel.

Wael Ghonim, Google executive by day, secret Facebook activist by night, famously declared right after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down in February: "If you want to liberate a society just give them the Internet."

Overthrowing a government is one thing. But building a sustainable democracy is turning out to be more difficult, and the Internet's role in that process is much less clear.

I have a 74-year old aunt who lives in a small town in the mountains in Greece. She has never used a computer. But when she asked me what e-mail was, I could explain it to her easily. It isn’t different from paper mail in any essential way. It moves faster and it’s cheaper. It, so to speak, smells different, but it’s pretty much the same thing.

When the Open Technology Initiative presented at the Allied Media Conference in June, many of the participants documented it with posts to Twitter and Flickr. We used Storify, an online tool for compiling social media, to arrange those pics and tweets into a narrative of our workshop and a tour of local wireless networks.

Hannah Sassaman, a Field Analyst with the Open Technology Initiative a board member at Allied Media Projects and a longtime organizer at Prometheus, wrote and adapted these thoughts in anticipation of the workshop she and others will be leading at the Allied Media Conference, Building a Movement with Media Policy Campaigns.

Some 14,000 Facebook users joined an online campaign to demand the release of Amina Araf, an outspoken lesbian blogger, from a Syrian prison. How awkward, then, to discover that Ms Araf was the invention of Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old failed American novelist, studying in Scotland.

"We prayed the revolution would succeed," says Magdy El Galad, the editor-in-chief of Al-Masry Al-Youm, the largest independent newspaper in Egypt. "Because if it failed, we would have been assassinated." A wry smile crosses his face. He's joking, sort of.

Public Interest Commenters urge the Commission to implement reforms in three major areas as part of a comprehensive effort to transition the high-cost mechanism into a fund that explicitly supports the deployment and adoption of affordable broadband service.  The Commission should (1) create a more inclusive framework that will substantially expand the type and number of providers eligible to receive USF support; (2) require USF recipients, both during and after the transition of the high-cost fund to the Connect America Fund, to provide broadband-capable facilities while maintaining o