There was a lot of anger aimed towards the behavior of Wikipedia’a administrators in general, which I think I don’t need to write about here (for my German readers: I have covered the discussion for netzpolitik.org). One thing that I think was notable is Pavel Mayer’s understanding of notability as a minority right: “If a [strong enough] minority deems something notable the majority doesn’t have the right to say ‘that’s not notable’.”

But a lot – I would even tend to say most – of the criticism was aimed at those attendees that are active members or even administrators of Wikipedia in some kind of accusation. You could always hear the undertone saying “Why don’t you do something about this?”

Which would have been absolutely o.k. if it had been at a meeting with politicians or members of an administrative body. But it was Wikipedia which we were talking about here, and while Wikipedia has some kind of hierarchy (there are about 300 elected administrators for the German language version, elected by those members who have written a certain, but small number of edits), it has no president, no CEO and no king – nobody who could pass a directive to get the ball rolling.

So what has to happen within a community that consists of 600.000 members, 7.000 of which are more or less frequent contributors, to reform a project that has become both very complex and hieratic on its way to success?

Some important obstacles to renewal were already named during the debate. Leon Weber, an active Wikipedia contributor himself, criticized: “He who proposes changes will be cut short.” Long-standing members of the community will position themselves against reforms. And while they may not have formal administrative powers (Wikipedia’s administrators may only execute its rules, but do not have additional rights to invent or abolish them), they do have their influence on the community.

This informal power comes from knowing other active members just as well as being known among them oneself. Reacting to criticism that long-standing Wikipedia contributors could get away with deeds that would newbies get banned, Martin Zeise, an administrator himself, argued that while this was indeed a problem, there was no way to change it. People would always be more forgiving to those who they recognize as an individual – to the bad of newbies who are just an unknown name and an IP number.

At this point, the seemingly non-hierarchical Wikipedia has to deal with the problems of traditional top-down organizations. A homogeneous (young, white, urban, educated, male) caste of long-standing members is blocking of needed reforms. These people have seen the project’s rise to success. They therefore position themselves against radical change, acting on the assumption that what has lead to prosperity will continue to do so.

It was again Leon Weber who pointed this out. In the beginning, when Wikipedia was still struggling to gain credibility, rigorous notability guidelines helped keeping the number of possible articles low and therefore enhanced the quality of those articles meeting the requirements. But nowadays, that’s not timely any more, Weber said: “One has to lower the notability guidelines”.

It is a problem of scaling. While some rules may be of general importance – such as copyright – others are not. They need to be adapted, either because the project has changed (with a stronger community and many articles that are basically completed, lower notability guidelines would be fine), or because its environment did (Wikipedia in German does not deem blogs admissible sources. When it was founded in 2001, blogs were still a tiny niche, but since then, this medium has emerged and is now used by scores of people working according to journalistic standards).

A vivid community should manage this change on the way. In some cases, this might be hard to achieve – software that is continuously enhanced by adding functionalities will at some point develop a performance problem. Radical steps might need to be taken from time to time, like a general relaunch.

Social problems cannot be solved this way. The German-speaking Wikipedia community has waited far too long to face the challenge of adapting itself to changing circumstances. Anne Roth, well-known in Germany for blogging her family’s life under surveillance, pointed out Indymedia Germany as an example for a once vivid open publishing platform she co-founded eight years ago that after a development “similar to Wikipedia’s” she now describes as “a dying community”.

“One cannot try to get through the storm safely without changing anything”, Anne Roth warned. Whether the German Wikipedia community will manage to take the necessary steps is to be seen. If yes, it could set an example how those internet-empowered horizontal organizations that have become an important part of our life can cope with the challenges of renewal.

Today, Global Voices Advocacy is launching a new website called Threatened Voices to help track suppression of free speech online. It features a world map and an interactive timeline that help visualize the story of threats and arrests against bloggers worldwide, and it is a central platform to gather information from the most dedicated organisations and activists [...].

Threatened Voices aims to crowd-source information on harassment and arrests of bloggers worldwide. I had the opportunity to talk to Sami today at a Google event on freedom of expression in Berlin and he told that people already started to submit reports, which is an amazing start for the project.

I have committed some hours myself to entering data from my research on blogger arrests for the DigiActive book. Unfortunately I never got around to do as much as I would have liked and it doesn’t look much like I will do it anytime soon.

But here’s the deal: I still have my list of arrested blogger that I compiled for the book research. As far as I am concerned, it is the most comprehensive list dealing with blogger arrests on the net – at least I did never see anything similar. And if I cannot enter all the data myself, I can at least share this list with you. Just download it below.

I would love if some of you would take up what I have compiled and work with it. Whether you choose to submit it to the Threatened Voices database or to play around with the data in another way is open to you. If you use it outside of Threatened Voices, crediting me and linking to this site would be nice. By the way I have proposed that Threatened Voices should get an API, so anything that is added to its database should be available for mashups in the future.

Just some quick introduction to the structure of my list: It consists of the names of 162 bloggers that had been in prison at any time before August 1, 2009. That’s the cut-off date I chose for my book research. Please note that some of these people actually might not have been put in jail for their blogging, but other reasons. This is often unclear. All arrests and releases are sourced, so you can easily do additional research and verify the data. The status – whether someone is currently in jail – dates from August 1, 2009, so it might have changed since then. The rest should be self-explanatory. If not, there are plenty of way to contact me.

Download the Excel sheet here

The protests erupted rather spontaneously after professors and students at the much smaller Academy of Fine Arts ended a press conference with the statement that from then on the auditorium was seized. Soon, students at the University of Vienna followed suit. Nicole Kernherr, who served as the protesters’ spokeswoman on the first eve, reports:

“We got news about something going on there via mobile phone through personal contacts. Those who are committed to such things know each other quite well here.”

But there were no groups involved in organizing the protest. In fact, the Austrian students’ council, which had been behind protest events in the past, still remains relatively silent about the coup. Instead, the protest is organized to be strictly non-hierarchical, Philipp Sonderegger writes:

“The protest is not organized hierarchically, but network-like flat, decentralized and with many nodes. Spokespeople are newly elected every day to prevent individuals from becoming to important. [...] The six members of the organizing team are elected newly every day as well. Allegedly, decisions are prepared in 44 working groups, but have to be rubber-stamped by the plenum to prevent informal structures from taking hold.”

This is also empowered by a live video stream set up to let people follow the plenum online.

Officials of the university have complained about not having a distinct person to address. They were countered by an invitation to speak in front of the plenum. This is just the way the protesters communicate themselves: To the masses. Early-on they have used twitter not only to mobilize, but also to organize and coordinate.

If there is a lack of, let’s say, rice at the canteen, it’s just twittered. Many of the tweets by Unibrennt or those tagged #unibrennt (German for “university is burning”) are similar requests. And the network proves its ability to allocate resources effectively.

But as Jana Herwig remarks in an article entitled “from flash mob to #unibrennt: collective organization in real-time“, the outside world has difficulties to deal with this protest culture.

Herwig makes the point that there is actually a misunderstanding at work of what is political. She picks up criticism that the protesters were just “partysans”, that they were in fact non-political and did not have serious interest in their cause. A criticism that was partly fueled by said live video stream, showing people partying after discussion were over.

Herwig counters that in fact, protesters could never be dead serious 24/7. Previous generations of protesters did party just as this one does – but they were living in different media circumstances. When media was limited – only a few could produce media, and even those still had limited space to broadcast it – protesters could present themselves in placative events, narrowing the image the public would get of them.

“But today, protest is turned inside-out: mobile phone photos, Twitter news, Facebook groups, mobile coverage and of course the live stream from the lecture hall – all this provides opportunities to monitor the squatters at every turn,”

Herwig writes.

And she defends the protesters against accusations of having no program. In fact, she embraces the program being created collectively now that the sit-in has begun:

“This protest is different because one has not come up with elaborate pamphlets, but the program, starting from first demands yet, is evolving.”

Herwig bases her argument on the primary point of discussion at the plenum on Friday noon:

“Basis for the discussion: What was started with the sit-in? How shall it proceed? What do we want to achieve?

Officials struggle to counter this movement, yet it may be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The first squatters at the academy of arts started their protest demanding “re-democratization instead of neoliberal politics of leadership”. Now the protest’s level of democratization is disarming the old leadership.

There is just no way to decapitate a network, writes Sonderegger. Only if informal structures should finally take hold, providing the authorities with a handle to take on the now-liquid, young movement, it could face rapid marginalization. Meanwhile, the protest has spread to other universities, e.g. in Graz and Turin.

The Bologna process and other neoliberal reforms of the education system are affecting schools and universities in all of the European Union. It will be interesting to see whether these protests can gain further ground in their aim to promote “education, not formation” and a re-democratization of Europe’s universities.

That’s why a big share of time was reserved for presentations for individual projects. Many portals are dedicated to bringing more transparency into parlamentarians’ work. Services such as OpenParlamento from Italy and NosDéputés from France analyze the activities of representatives.

NosDeputés tags speeches of congressmen. This way the discussion around a certain topic can be summarized. The site TheyWorkForYou.com on the other hand lets users link videos from the English House of Commons to text from the Hansard, which includes notes from the speeches that are not verbatim.

Thereby the site is one of the few that let users become actively involved themselves to establish transparency. In a session on “action-based sites” it became apparent that still most e-democracy portals are mere services for citizens and rarely offer opportunities to them to take action themselves.

One important task for such participatory sites named in the session was that they have to take up emotions immediately as they evolve – e.g. as someone has to pay a bribe. Therefore it is important that services are structured accordingly. One could use the Obama iPhone app as an example, where the first option was “call friends” – which is the most obvious action to be taken with a mobile phone.

Rob McKinnon of TheyWorkForYou.co.nz made a point in his lecture that it is important to establish transparency apart from big politics. He used the concept of a “web of power” to show that there is a lot of influence located within companies – probably even more than within parliaments.

Therefore it needed more projects that focus e.g. on making lobbyism more transparent, McKinnon said. The goal is to “disentangle” the various circles of influence – politics, media, money. One example for that is journalisted.com, a site that collects information on journalists.

But there was criticism towards those efforts for more transparency as well. Tobies Escher of the Oxford Internet Institute referred to a recent essay by Lawrence Lessig provocantly entitled “Against Transparency“. It is a fact, Escher said, that online even more than offline it is the most well-educated part of society that turns to political activism. E.g. two thirds of mySociety users are academicians. Eschers point is: To only establish transparency isn’t enough, as long as people don’t use the publicly available data.

William Perrin thinks he has found a solution to this problem. He advocates “hyber local community websites”, such as his own project Kings Cross Local Environment. By breaking down information that is available, but hard to understand to its importance for a small neighborhood local initiatives are empowered, he said. This way things could actually be done. Perrin also wants to further spread this approach through is project Talk About Local.

This is a translation of my post for netzpolitik.org (where I am doing an internship at the moment). There’s another report at e-politik.de (in German), and you may have a look at the tweets from the conference, tagged with #bios09.

“The Hub Berlin is a co-creative community of people with good ideas for the world. This means anybody can bring their projects or business here. We enable people to work, relax, network and offer daily exciting events to all our members.”

People can rent anything from a few hours to a permanent desk at The Hub; conference rooms cost extra. What you get is not only a fully-fledged bureau, but also a bunch of interesting coworkers. The venue is aimed at people working for the good of mankind. They range from NGOs via activists to social entrepreneurs. In Berlin, there’s also somebody from a regular company who persuaded his boss to let him work there, but generally businesses seem to have concerns to let their employees cowork.

There are quite a lot of Hubs around the world – including some in places where I would not have expected them, such as Cairo or Sao Paulo. Unfortunately the network isn’t as strong as it could be. Members of one Hub can book conference rooms in another city, but not desks. But through an internal network, members of all Hubs can connect with each other.

The Hubs are not organized centrally, but independently from one another. In Berlin, there are three people who work full-time for The Hub that is currently working place to about 40 people. The organization is constituted as a cooperative, but I was told that they are thinking about founding a GmbH (similar to a Ltd. in Britain) to improve financing.

What’s also cool is that The Hub Berlin has a strong social-ecological focus. They exclusively use electricity from renewable energy sources, racks are built from used paper. They are also very international internally, i.e. signs are multilingual and English is a common colloquial language between coworkers.

Coworking is a very interesting concept, since it enables self-employed and small businesses to work in a social environment. I think it is especially useful for people who spend only part of their working hours at a bureau or job in different cities, but it should be interesting for everybody. It’s a quite young movement in this form, but I am certain it’s on the right way.

P.S.: If you are in Berlin and would like to find out how coworking suits you, I have a couple of vouchers for a day at The Hub Berlin. You can even bring a friend! If you are interested, just drop me a mail at [my first name] at [this domain].

I’m not against anything social at all. But behind these titles are often people explaining a downgraded social media to NGO staff. It’s top-down lecturing that’s not barcampy at all in my eyes. I understand that some NGOs still need to learn a lot on how to use social media. But this way one common pattern becomes strengthened:

There are very few progressive social media projects by German NGOs. Instead, they tend to implement tactics that have been state of the art years ago, spending relatively much money on that. Often, resources are wasted due to redundancy since every NGO wants its own software. It’s not without reason that one session was called “Does it always need a new social community?”.

I think this money would be spend much more useful if NGOs would invest in progressive social media projects. Only they need to know about them beforehand. A socialcamp could be the perfect opportunity to elaborate ideas that take up the experiences of both social media experts, developers and NGO professionals. Instead, sessions are used to manifest old concepts.

Maybe that’s also because NGOs are generally perceived to be conservative and unable or unwilling to adopt new ideas. In fact, this can also be seen in sessions’ names. As I’ve said, “fund raising” is an important issue. It seems as if NGOs are mostly interested in funding their current projects. I.e. the question is “how can NGOs use social media to get money for funding” instead of “how can social media be used to reach NGOs’ goals”.

Luckily, talks between sessions have been much more interesting. I’ve met Tobias Eigen, the founder of Kabissa. The veteran in African social media is a partner of DigiActive – and Tobias even has a sticker of us on his mobile. Yay! Day two will hopefully feature a session with him as well as Christian Kreutz and Georg Neu of Transparency International on mapping for social change. It would be one of the very few sessions that are not centered on Germany.

Disclaimer: I know it’s not fair to complain about the issues debated at a barcamp, especially since I don’t hold a session myself. I’ll excuse the latter with my youth and the fact that it’s my first barcamp, and hope my criticism can foster a debate rather than piss off people.

We have been working with kids for a while, but we felt it was necessary to include parents in our efforts to strengthen children’s privacy education. So we invited parents from the school where we have been doing the two latest workshops. We are doing two workshops, one last Saturday and one next weekend, but it looks like we’ve been overestimating the interest in our lectures a little, so we were five workshop dudes and only four parents on Saturday.

We had decided to do a slim version of our regular workshop routine with the parents, which proved to make sense. After all, the kids are much more tech-savvy than the older generation, and thus faster in exploring new technologies.

For the parents, we started off with a version of the talk Christoph held at the Chaos Communication Congress last year. It had a clear message: The internet is great for communication, but we need to behave responsibly. Christoph likes to take the town square as a metaphor for the net: You can go there, meet people, communicate – but you should not run around naked, shouting the names of your sex partners and your credit card information.

That’s what I followed up on when I introduced the principle structure of social networks (indeed, none of the participants had a social network profile, which I tend to deem unusual even for my parents’ generation). Talking about privacy options in social networks, I made the point that it is important to strike a balance between openness and privacy. On the one hand, openness enables communication and social interaction, which I think of as basic human needs. On the other hand, being too open can damage children’s future prospects.

While we showcased some extreme examples of how not to behave on social networks, we also warned of indirect information hidden in profiles. The “gaydar algorithm” that’s modeled to out gay Facebook members by analyzing the sexual orientations of their networks of friends is a good example for that.

As usual, this theoretical introduction was complemented by a hands-on phase. We taught the parents how to use TrueCrypt for data encryption, which I think is the encryption software most useful to parents, too. As “digital immigrants”, our participants were not as fast in taking on the technology as the kids, but in the end everything worked out well.

It is obvious that when doing privacy workshops with parents, one has to strike a balance between addressing the challenges children are facing when using social web applications and taking up the parents at their own situation. I think we did quite well in pointing out dangers without spreading too much f.u.d. – fear, uncertainty, doubt. In the contrary, we are excited about the prospects of social media, and we want the kids to use it. That’s not going to work if we make the parents cyberpessimists – we have to educate them so that they can take up responsibility in guiding their kids.

But if it’s getting bored, the Internet strikes back. It all started with the photo above. It shows an invitation to an event with Angela Merkel in Hamburg, saying “The chancellor’s coming”. Somebody has scribbled beneath it: “And everybody goes ‘yeaahh’”.

Initially posted on flickr, the photo has made its way through the German blogosphere. As it was taken up by Spreeblick, somebody proposed a flashmob in the comments: “I’d like to be in Hamburg tomorrow! Who’s going? A ‘yeaahh’ flashmob?”

And they went there. The flashmobbers were only a small minority among the 2000 people that had come to listen to Mrs. Merkel, but they certainly had their share of attention when they commented each sentence of the chancellor with an enthusiastic “yeaahh”.

The thing didn’t end there. When Mrs. Merkel went to Mainz, people showed up to shout “yeaahh” in Mainz. When she spoke in Wuppertal, flashmobbers were already awaiting the chancellor, accompanied by reporters of the honorable “Tagesthemen” newscast.

In a comment for “Tagesthemen“, Thomas Hinrichs complains that the “yeaahh” flashmobs are nonsensical. He’s right about that. In fact, that’s the only point about them. Hinrichs attributes the emergence of the flashmobs to the failed communication between politicians and netizens. The latter, he said, had to stop calling everybody stupid who’s not using social networks, while the parties should start to step up to each other on the internet. I differ on that.

During the last years, Germany has seen the rise of an unexpected civil liberties movement. Fighting against data retention, tens of thousands took to the streets. Fearing the installation of an internet censorship infrastructure, more than 130.000 people signed a petition to the parliament. They went unheard.

Especially the latter case has led to a lot of frustration. The so-called “access aggravation act” proposes the introduction of DNS blocks to complicate the access to child pornography on the internet. On the one hand, these blocks are easily to be circumvented, on the other hand the sites should be deleted, not blocked. The act is, in one word, nonsensical.

This is what experts and activists told the politicians. Over and over again they repeated what they see as reasonable arguments, only to be ignored. In the end, only four politicians of the governing coalition dared to vote against the bill.

That’s why people are on the streets today, parodying the chancellor’s speeches with choruses of yeaahh’s. As all reasonable arguments have failed, people join the meaningless play called politics, answering nonsensical phrases with nonsensical shouts. Mr. Hinrichs is wrong: People don’t want to befriend their chancellor on Facebook. They want to be taken serious. The flashmobs are just the ultimate mirror they hold against those who have ignored them when they came to them with arguments and petitions.

That moment it came to my mind that I already knew what I would leave behind. While I could go back and check the carpet under my chair for a third time, probably finding some small belonging I had previously overseen in the dark, I could not take the people with me that had made my stay in Novosibirsk such a great time.

The thought of writing a blog post starting with a sentence like this, “This time I already knew what I would leave behind”, seemed kitschy to me. Yet it is what I thought, and it has made me ponder if it is indeed true.

While I am not going to see the people were so nice to me for a long time, yes, probably forever, today we stay connected. I have befriended a handful of them on Facebook, followed some on Twitter, exchanged IM numbers. The forum has ended, but the communication endures.

The people I met in Novosibirsk were some of the most friendly I have ever had the pleasure to make the acquaintance of. I want to thank you all for a great time: Our coordinators Masha (don’t worry about your English!) and Anna, who were not only super nice, but also incredibly well organized, Svetja, who never got tired to (only while) entertaining us, our unexpected German translator Nastja, our English translators and everybody else who was involved in managing Interra 09.

I, too, want to thank those people I had the pleasure to talk to and discuss with. You allowed me to gain an insight into Russian society and especially its blogosphere and education system, two spheres I would never have explored without your help.

I also owe the Goethe Institut in Novosibirsk a debt of gratitude. It paid for my stay in Siberia, making it possibly for me to meet all the great people named above. And finally, I want to thank Marco, for being a great companion and making incredibly good photos of our adventures.

You all made my time in Novosibirsk a very special experience. Thank you very much! And now, go get the sleep you all deserve

P.S. I realize this has become a pretty pathetical appraisal, but I just felt I had to give back at least some kind words to all those who were so friendly to me. Without this post, my travelogue would lack its true end. Because after all, it is true what Confucius has said: “Forget hurts, but never forget amicabilities.”

This sentence instantly popped up in my head when I heard Vera speak during our debate on “Blogs and Education”. She argued with fervor for learning the unnecessary, defending its ability to induce the creation of something beautiful against all materialistic circumcisions of the education system.

Although she is a VIP in the Russian blogosphere and a print-published poetess, of all the discussants, Vera seemed the most humble. Her contributions came as interjections or short anecdotes, brought forward in a calm voice, bearing an aesthetic that stood, fragile, but impressive, against all cold-hearted materialism.

On my last evening in Novosibirsk, I got the opportunity to find another proof that “Vera Polozkova cares about aesthetics”. Again it was Svetja that opened an unexpected door for us – this time not only of her car, but also of a reading by Vera in a private flat.

These underground readings, we were told, meant practically the only way for young people to come together apart from state-controlled events during the communist era. In those days, the poems read were often highly political and critical of the society. Today, the tradition is still held up by students, even though a civil society has formed in Russia.

When we got to the flat on a higher floor of a giant, anonymous apartment building, we encountered a scenery like I have never seen one before and do not dare hoping to find in Germany one day. The living room was packed with students, only slightly older than myself, sitting on couches, chairs and the floor, calmly looking at Vera. Her voice was somewhere between lightly chatting and serious lecture as she was reading a poem, her mimics accompanying the story in an emotional manner, sometimes lightly open, sometimes austerely withdrawn, sometimes dreamily moony.

Anastasia would provide me with summaries of the poems’ content. “If I say it, it sounds stupid, but from her it’s amazing,” she would often tell me, obviously impressed trying to explain the greatness of an ordinary story recited in the right words.

What’s a poetry evening if you don’t understand the poetry, you might ask. And all I can answer is: It’s impressive. There was the atmosphere in this room, ascending from the feeling of all the students to experience something great, something worthy. Something the value of which can only be measured in poetry itself. And there was Vera herself, sitting on a couch, reading from a notebook or even an iPhone, a guru amidst her believers, who for a moment had the air of a higher aesthetic. An aesthetic that is not just words, but rhymes and sounds and mimics, an aesthetic that is universal.