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posted 2008-05-11 by Gunnar Camner

Supporting free speech in Belarus

Last week we were invited to hold a workshop and lecture as part of a project funded by Sida. The participants were journalists from Belarus and the topic was how the advances in new media can be utilised to support democratic movements. Belarus is considered the last dictatorship in Europe and its citizens lacks the right to express their political views.

We talked about our component based view on technology and how easy it has become to put together existing solutions to fulfil a desired need or function. There is a gap between people who know about new technology and those that need to know. Nowadays, services are not only easy to use, but also, connecting different ones to create something new usually just takes a bit more effort. This enables many interesting and useful combinations.

One example is our project comments.se and how it can be implemented as a location based platform for communication. Supporting discussion and commenting in public spaces.

The participants were enthusiastic about the the project, but explained that comments, as it is now, is too easy accessable for KGB (yes, they're still active in Belarus) and therefor too risky to use as platform to arrange meetings or political rallies.

Other projects of interest that we mentioned were Bambuser and Graffiti Research Lab's Laser Tag. These two was highly appreciated, and they wanted to use both at their return to Belarus.

As MÃ¥ns Adler from Bambuser said on What's next, having technology you developed to be used for novel purposes and support democratic movements is somewhat the ideal scenario.

In the preparations for this workshop, we asked fellow Detroit member Ebba Forslind to help us come up with a new design for our stickers. We're all very pleased with the result. Thanks Ebba!

Thanks to Behrang for co-ordination and Veronika for translation!

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