[huridocs-tech] A Nonprofit Organization That Upholds the Freedom to Blog

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(A version of this item - with live links - is also available at
http://blog.deborah.elizabeth.finn.com/blog/_archives/2005/7/20/1050951.html )

Dear Colleagues,

On Tuesday, I attended a fascinating presentation by Julien Pain, who staffs
the Internet Freedom Desk of Reporters Without Borders. As you may know the
latter is an international nonprofit/NGO that defends freedom of the press.

Reporters Without Borders (also known as RSF or  Reporters sans frontières) is
concerned about cyber-dissidents - individuals who are imprisoned or subjected
to other sanctions when they go online to write about political and social
issues. Many of them are not professional journalists; they are bloggers
engaged in citizen journalism, which (as we all know) is a high-risk activity
in some countries. (By the way, Global Voices Online is a wonderful aggregation
of such blogs.)

During Julien's presentation, we heard about RSF's new "Guide for Bloggers,"
which offers practical advice on anonymous publication and on bypassing
censorship.  He also spoke about a sponsorship program that enables individuals
or groups to make a commitment to raise awareness about a specific
cyber-dissident who is in prison. (Unfortunately, I was unable to find direct
links on the RSF web site to either the new guide or the sponsorship program.)

It seems to me that RSF in is a nonprofit organization that is upholding a kind
of freedom of the press that is increasingly important not only to individuals
but to other nonprofit/NGO organizations. One of my questions for Julien was
whether he could put out a bit of HTML code that would make it quick and easy
for folks in the nonprofit sector to create a banner on their own web sites or
blogs that could call attention to RSF's work on behalf of cyber-dissidents.
What I had in mind was something that would rotate a gallery of portraits of
perhaps half a dozen jailed cyber-dissidents (selected by RSF), and that would
lead the reader to the page on the RSF site where he or she could sign up as a
sponsor.

Julien thought that this was not quite in keeping with RSF's current strategy,
but was very polite about the onslaught of free advice that he was receiving
from this altruistic busybody.	I'm looking forward to seeing what direction
RSF does in fact take!

Best regards from Deborah

Deborah Elizabeth Finn
Boston, Massachusetts, USA
deborah_elizabeth_finn@post.harvard.edu
http://blog.deborah.elizabeth.finn.com/blog
http://public.xdi.org/=deborah.elizabeth.finn




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