RE: S.968, Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act and H.R.3261, Stop Online Piracy Act

Dear Chairman Leahy, Ranking Member Grassley, Chairman Smith and Ranking Member Conyers:

I hope you do not mind hearing input from a non-constituent on the matter of S. 968 and H.R. 3261, PIPA and SOPA as they are known, but recognizing the global reach of the internet and my given personal experience shutting down the Egyptian internet I thought I should add my voice to your debate.

First, let me commend you on the initial scope and form of the SOPA and PIPA bills. I have ‘+1’d,’ ‘liked,’ and ‘fav’d’ them on the walls of my prison cell. What do I like about SOPA? The question is, What don’t I like?!!?

You must realize that the only real problem with my internet shutdown tactic was that I underestimated the extent to which the ordinary Egyptian citizens had grown accustomed to a working internet. I imagine SOPA will create an internet that will function more like a Cairo highway – sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Expectations are lowered to a point where a bit of downtime in the interest of preserving a dictator’s run is not such a big deal.

I also commend the legal loophole that will enable you to pull down individual sites without notice so long as a well-paid lawyer can file the form letter that asserts “immediate and irreparable injury, loss, or damage will result…before the adverse party can be heard in opposition.” I could drive a camel through that loophole – or, rather, I could pay some camel driving thugs with clubs to do so.

But what I really, really love is the provision that will essentially criminalize the use, distribution, and even online trainings related to proxy, privacy, and anonymization software. Yes! Really, with tools like these accessible to anyone with a web connection, how is a dictator supposed to get the daily work done? How does one go about repressing, censoring, and intimidating a population when a distributed global community of young hackers are able to develop and share this open source software?

I thought it would take a dictator to outlaw those pesky tools. What a dupe I was. Arguably, I would have still been in power if I had just invited the MPAA and RIAA lawyers to write and enforce my internet privacy and security policies. LOL.

Lastly, let me say – as one politician to another – we must not underestimate the danger of having too much information moving too freely. While we have all done pretty well with global trade of goods, the global trade of knowledge and information (not even considering the way ideas can evolve with online collaborations) is a great danger to the status quo. What does SOPA/PIPA do for us here? The brilliant provision to grant service providers immunity for provisionally blocking identified ‘blacklisted’ sites – the so-called ‘vigilante provision’- is not only a brilliant way to protect your friends in Hollywood it is a boon to dictatorial regimes the world over, providing us an open door to keeping the internet more uniform and less diverse.

I could imagine my information minister drafting a similar law that ‘encouraged’ our local ISPs to make the Egyptian internet more Egyptian. Bring on the blacklists. What is particularly interesting is to imagine how laws crafted by governments to provide competitive advantage to their economies and ideologies will put an end to dangerous cross-border exchanges of ideas and knowledge. You keep your ideas, we keep ours.

In closing, while I am grateful for the billions of dollars of support over the years I am even more grateful for the long-term implications of the SOPA/PIPA legislation. I am saddened that my time in power coincided with this short-lived experiment in an open internet, but I take some comfort knowing that my children and their children might be able to control societies without having to contend with the scourge of an open internet.

Keep up the great work,

Hosni

ps – Trial is going well, hope to see you in DC soon.

Posting a citizen report to the testing liveblog is wonderfully simple, and is something anyone can get involved with! All you have to do is go here: http://liveblog.almasryalyoum.com/en and create an account (you can do this with your Twitter login). From there you can post Citizen Reports. These are the items of citizen media – tweets, pictures, video, soundites, blog posts (even links to other media) – that you think better helps tell the story of what is happening as people head out to vote.

This is the Citizen Reports page, where all of the reports being posted are displayed.

From here you can click on one of the icons at the top of the report to see “Report Details”. Adding this information is an important step in creating a citizen report: What is the source of the original report? Are they reliable? When was the media published and where? These are all questions that can be asked of citizen media and information which, if provided accurately, can help citizen media more reliable.

Once a Citizen Report has been created, journalists at Egypt Independent can add several of these reports to their liveblog – adding voices from the ground and citizen-produced media to enrich reporting.

Get involved with our test by creating an account here and sharing the best citizen media on Egypt’s elections!

Experimenting with Twitter plus Storify in an effort to share a bit of the pulse of the two days.

Zainab just finished the first of four scheduled working trips to SF under the terms of the grant, which is administered by the EPSRC as a ‘Research in the Wild Grant’. She she spent a good portion of her time with our Director of Design Chris Blow learning about SASS, GitHub Mantis and other aspects of the Meedan geekery.

Zainab brought not only her infectious smile to our Mission*Social offices but she also led us to venture beyond Tin Pho for lunch and additionally pioneered a working from the couch approach – in fact I think she has claimed the Meedan couch as her official desk.

Z, we will miss you until you are back.

Zainab, with from left to right Anas, Ed and Chris at Meedan's Mission*Social San Francisco office

The platform, called Classroom to Classroom (‘C2C’ for short) is dedicated to resource discovery, standards-aligned content, authorship and life-long learning.

C2C is being launched with Boston Arts Academy’s Peers Educating Peers (PEP) project. PEP is a student-led curriculum development project that trains students on the skills and tools they need to effectively teach their peers.

QFI Executive Director, Maggie Mitchell Salem said: “Both C2C and PEP are part of QFI’s innovative YALLAH platform, a multi-lingual, moderated, online space for cross-cultural collaboration.”

“YALLAH offers exciting new opportunities for engagement and collaboration in QFI’s middle and high school-focused student and teacher programs.”

She added: “We encourage students to develop the 21st century global competencies they will need to thrive in college and throughout their careers; we support teachers by listening to their needs and providing innovative ways of engaging their students.”

Particularly exciting is QFI’s plan to highlight the importance of quality, Arabic language instruction through the annual American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Language (ACTFL) Conference November 17th – 20th in Denver, Colorado.

QFI will announce several new education grants to promote excellence in the classroom, advance the teaching of Arabic language and culture in U.S. public schools, and support existing credit-bearing Arabic programs in U.S. schools.

At Meedan, we’re excited to see how this work can build cross-lingual community through C2C where Arabic learning is given its proper place.

We really encourage people to head over to Changemakers.org/CitizenMedia to check out the first class array of ideas and innovators from around the world who have entered the competition. One of the great things about the voting system is that it allows users to vote for up to THREE entries – so once you’ve ticked that green box next to Meedan you can also support other finalists with your two “spare” votes!

Meedan’s entry into the competition is our digital newsroom tool Meedan Swift, which helps citizens and journalists in the Arab world to work together to report news. You can read about the tool here on the Meedan blog: http://meedan.org/2011/10/cairo-violence-shows-citizens-need-corroboration-tools and http://meedan.org/2011/11/egypt-social-web-activism-for-democracy/ and you can also see (and vote for!) our entry at Changemakers: http://www.changemakers.com/citizenmedia/entries/meedan-swift?breadcrumb_type=finalists

The polls close in just 12 short days, so do make sure to use your votes to support organizations and individuals leading the way in amplifying citizen voices from across the globe.

Doha is a bit surreal – a sort of heritage zone for brilliant modern architecture put to the purpose of transitioning this tiny Gulf emirate to a knowledge economy by 2030.

WISE 2011 was, not surprisingly, framed with a nod to the Arab Spring – ‘Changing Societies, Changing Education’.  However, coming to Doha, as I was, from a Cairo where Alaa Abd El Fattah sits in a jail cell, and in the shadow of rising daily body counts in Syria, the intended hopeful referent certainly does not fit. However, I would argue that the stalling of the Arab revolutions provides even more justification for WISE and its goals to improve global education.

When these emerging democracies arrive to a world whose markets, economies, and conflicts are global – we should really consider the educational challenge for the 21^st century to be building global competencies and literacies.  Which recommends that the systems and solutions for addressing these challenges be network driven. Which recommends that we look at means to connect learners, teachers, and classrooms – with access to open materials (OERs) and access to each other.

My three panelists at WISE 2011 were: “Ilkka Tuomi, the founder of Meaning Processing Ltd., known, among other things as one of the pioneers of Internet in Finland and for his research on open source innovation models; Catherine Ngugi, Project Director of OER Africa, an initiative of Saide, the South African Institute for Distance Education; and, Richard Baraniuk, Founder and Director of Connexions, distinguished professor of computer science at Rice University.

The text below is excerpted from the prepared notes for the panel by Myself, Ilkka, Catherine, and Richard – if you don’t have time to watch the full video – which I do recommend to get a sense for the massive positive response from the overflow crowd – then this should give you a fair sense for the conversation which arced from Ilkka’s theory to Catherine’s practice to Rich’s call for the critical challenges he sees for the coming ‘second phase’ of OER platforms.

Ed Bice

The framing of this year’s WISE ‘Changing Societies, Changing Education’ raises the question of how revolutions transition to constructive improvements in societies – how revolution contributes to societal evolution.  This consideration is at the heart of any innovation process – be it social or educational. As we consider today how to innovate in educational technologies and practices, we must consider how our revolutionary proclamations are going to ‘play’ in the classrooms of the world – how they can meaningfully evolve existing educational systems and practices.

With revolutions in the world and in our educational practices the dance between stability and change is imprecise and ad hoc. However, I will assert the following as imperatives:

1. We must innovate the very form of the text – the idea that knowledge is contextual should not remain merely a philosophical observation- rather, we must innovate technologies that allow OERs to be deeply contextual, we must allow knowledge to be accessed and written in the thousand tellings of a place or an event or a movement. The wiki is a profound and important technology, and it will remain so for many years, however, as we consider innovating on this form we should begin with recognizing that the critical learning in global literacy is the semantic humility that comes when we recognize history and knowledge as acted, written, and read in thin slices of a larger ‘truth’. A vision for global education happening via networked teaching-learners and learning-teachers opens the door to ‘con-texts’. The ability to remix and annotate educational materials is simply what students of the read/write generation expect of their world. As they are authoring social change we need to encourage them to author their educations.

2. Language is a primary access to knowledge issue – localization and translation workflow must be front and center as a priority for global education. Language may be the most obvious lens through which we frame knowledge – as we work to globalize OER we must think about access and authoring tools that support multi-lingual OERs. This is a particular interest of our team at Meedan.

Ilkka Tuomi

“While moving towards the future, it is important to ask who should be on the focus of learning. When the educational system performs poorly, the focus often needs to be on teachers. Teacher-oriented collaboration platforms that provide standards, guidelines, and high-quality resources for teaching can then have a high impact. For educational systems that already perform well, collaboration platforms can focus more on student interaction and social learning, and diffusion of educational innovations among teachers and other stakeholders. Then the capability to freely modify and re-use existing content and resources becomes increasingly important.

Open educational resources are the way of the future because they allow those types of learning processes that are increasingly dominant in the future. Learning will be increasingly peer-based, social, interactive, distributed, continuous, and contextual, and its focus will shift from the upstream knowledge sources towards downstream pools of meaning

The OER movement, however, is simultaneously both ahead of its time and stuck in the past. The problem is not really about improving the quality of content that is distributed freely using collaboration platforms. Instead of optimizing current content and educational systems we need to change education and rethink what quality means after the Industrial Age. To get useful outcomes from OER and to make it productive, the focus needs to be on transforming educational institutions, teacher training, and incentive systems, and aligning them with the logic of the emerging networked and innovation-intensive world.

Indeed, OER is a revolutionary force. But it also needs a revolution to become real. Innovation and creative destruction require a careful balance between stability and change. This can only be accomplished by visionary leadership and broad engagement by all the stakeholders.”

Catherine Ngugi

“Neither the technological quality of an online platform nor its ability to facilitate collaboration, is dependent on whether the source coding is openly shared as would be the case with an Open Source Platform, or if that source coding is inaccessible, as is usually the norm with a platform built using commercial software. Thus the openness – or not – of the software used to build an online platform is only one, in a range of criteria, that will result in whether or not that platform is a useful tool for collaboration between networks of educators.

So to the question – Can online platforms, including teacher networks dedicated to sharing best practice and promoting innovation, really provide a means for building the knowledge base – including in less developed countries – or do they simply facilitate the relatively uncoordinated exchange of ideas? – the answer is clearly that online platforms might do either. That in fact the role a platform plays in promoting either a cohesive and well co-ordinated sharing of ideas, or instead, a jumbled sharing of disconnected streams of consciousness, depends not only on the technical quality of the platform, but more so, on the extent to which those for whom the platform has been constructed are equipped and willing to use it.

In many developing countries faced with the imperative to educate a greater cadre of professionals, mid-level managers, teachers, doctors, nurses, technicians and so forth, print-based Distance Education coupled with good tutorial and assessment feedback systems, remains critical even as global improvements in technology have enabled the development of new forms of pedagogy. It is within this context that proponents argue that Open Educational Resources (OER) have the potential to revive higher education standards, make curricula once more current and contextually relevant and foster collaboration and knowledge sharing between institutions, all of which will in turn benefit the students.

“Whether or not one agrees with the OER proponents, it is worth noting that in this digital era, the free flow and sharing of educational content is already a reality. In most instances it is already too late for faculty to be asking why I should share my content – because the chances are that their students are already doing so.

We at OER Africa have found that when the process of development and adaptation of OER is guided by the real need for relevant resources, these processes have provided faculty with practical opportunities to learn or re-learn pedagogical skills; acquire new technical skills; and served the needs of students to acquire pertinent and applicable competences, where relevant resources either did not exist or were simply too expensive to acquire legally. In many instances, collaborative endeavor has been integral to these processes.

Imagine how much richer the global knowledge base would be if those involved in such innovative practices in the developing world as well as elsewhere – those who struggled as well as those who triumphed – could access an online platform to share with others how they were able, for example, to move away from an over-reliance on lectures as a means of delivering the curriculum, to a facilitator role of guiding their students and encouraging a more problem based and collaborative approach to their higher education experience – and therefore, hopefully, to the practice of those students once they leave the physical and virtual spaces of the university.”

Richard Baraniuk

“The OER movement has created a lot of excitement over the last few years, and I would like to thank the WISE organization and community for being so supportive.

As the previous speakers indicated, the basic concept of OER involves applying the community based development approach of open source software to educational materials like textbooks and other curriculum.

I think the main question posed for the panel is a great one, namely:  “can online platforms really provide a means for building the knowledge base or do they simply facilitate relatively uncoordinated exchange of ideas”.

Here I will give the opinion of someone who’s been working to make this OER a reality for the last 12 years.

The terminology I’d like to use to describe OER consists of the 2 words “free” and “open”.

A lot has been made about the nomenclature of “free” vs “open” in the software world, with many preferirng the french work “libre” for liberty.  But i would argue that the fact that the word “free” in english has 2 meanings – zero cost and liberated – is very useful to describe the two stages that I believe OER must go through before it reaches its true potential.

1. Right now I would argue we’re in the FREE stage, where the key attribute of OER content adopters are interested in is that there is zero cost.  In developed countries, with today’s textbook prices going up at several times the rate of inflation, this is enough to disrupt the educational publishing industry.   In developing countries, the FREE materials provide universal access to learning, something even more revolutionary.However, I would argue that in the FREE stage we not seen the explosion of community development (a la Linux) that has been promised by OER pundits.

   Thus, I would say that at this point I come out on the side of the latter conclusion of the statement posed by Ed, namely that OER today has facilitate free access to educational content but only an uncoordinated exchange of ideas.

   Ex: In Connexions, which is one of the world’s largest and most used OER repositories, we have a significant amount of community generated content.  But the most popular content has been developed by individual authors, which is the old paradigm.

1. Over the next few years, as OER gains momentum and real usage thanks to its FREE attribute, we will start to see real progress on community development in a truly OPEN manner.

The roadblocks to moving beyond FREE to OPEN, in my opinion, are:

• Confusing IP; even within the Creative Commons there are 6 different, largely incompatible licenses.
• Incompatible technology: it is simply not possible to efficiently share (let alone even search!) across different OER repositories.

What we need is a de facto standard for both IP and technology, much like HTML provided a common substrate on which to build the WWW.  Without these, I think that the OER world will remain an archipelago of islands of innovation rather than a seething, global effort.

I am very hopeful that such a standard is doing to emerge over the next couple of years.”

I was humbled to spend 75 minutes with these three brilliant people and thank WISE for the opportunity to do so. Word of thanks to Vijay Kumar, Mike Smith, Fred Mednick, Maggie Smith, and Chris Blow for their inspiration, mentorship, partnership in Meedan’s education work.

• “Kids need to learn from, rather than just about, each other.  Teachers to know, not just know about, each other.” Fred Mednick
• “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. ” Alvin Toffler
  • “What we want is the child in pursuit of knowledge, not knowledge in pursuit of the child.” – George Bernard Shaw

Working in a pristine air conditioned office located in the rapidly expanding hinterland of the Egyptian capital, our contact nevertheless expected 2012 to be a year of dramatic growth and vitality in the Egyptian web publishing market.

In the city centre, heavily armed soldiers still surround the crumbling Maspero television building, long the propagandistic power base of the Mubarak regime, now circled with barbed wire and military vehicles.

Image by Jonathan Rashad via Flickr

Yet on a Friday night in Tahrir Square, protesters roam freely, chanting to the top of their lungs and waving deeply satirical placards lambasting the Egyptian political establishment.

These are the contradictions in Cairo today, eight months on from the historic revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak.

To some extent it is hard to really believe there is a transition taking place at all. Twelve thousand people have faced military tribunals – a vast figure dwarfing the Mubarak regime’s use of military tribunals. The Emergency Laws remain in place. Leading activist Alaa Abdel Fattah is back in jail. Nonprofits receiving foreign funds are portrayed as an existential risk to the nation. The military wants its budget to be secret even from the country’s elected leaders. Al Ahram still leads with whatever the ruler (once President Mubarak, now ‘Al Musheer’ – General Tantawi, head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) is up to. Tensions are still running high after the tragic events of the Maspero protests and allegations of torture in prisons continue to flow.

But there is more to Egypt now than that. Young people are more deeply engaged in politics and economics than ever before. Yes, the political scene is fragmenting as different ideological camps jostle for power, but thousands still take to the streets every Friday. When I was living in Cairo in 2006, a 20-person protest against health insurance reforms for public sector workers was ringed by scores of security personnel and plain clothes police. That doesn’t happen now. And of course now social media really are buzzing with activity as young activists explore their next options and share critiques and information.

Where Egypt is leading is not easy to predict, but certainly the talent, dynamism, resourcefulness and enthusiasm of Egyptians suggest a bright future is within grasp. But now more than ever, those of us who have friends in Egypt need to be supporting Egyptians in whatever ways we can.

At Meedan, we are working on a participatory live blogging platform that enables citizens to work alongside professional journalists to sort, mark up and evaluate emerging reports from the social web. This work – in partnership with leading independent newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm – is designed to support citizens to monitor and report on their country’s transition from authoritarian rule.

But there might be many other ways we could develop projects to support citizens in Egypt and the wider Middle East to share information and to express themselves to a global audience. Our expertise is in web design, journalism and online translation. How could we deploy this expertise to help? Feel free to post your ideas below.

English privilege (and the occasional Mandarin) helped me navigate even a small city like Gwangju, but it didn't help me truly understand the culture and people.

This past month, I arrived in South Korea, sight unseen, and lived there for a month for work. I was stationed in the south, a small city of about one million people called Gwangju. For a month, I managed to get by without a problem. I had breakfast, lunch and dinner. I took cabs to different parts of town at any time of day and night. I withdrew cash from the ATM and checked into hotels. I even took an unplanned trip to nearby Daegu by bus, then another bus into the Gayasan mountain range, entirely by myself.

This is remarkable for being unremarkable. Other than the basic “hello” and “thank you”, I don’t speak a lick of Korean. The written language is completely unintelligible to me, a mere series of circles and angles only marginally familiar because I grew up near LA’s Koreatown.

A map of Seoul's Incheon Airport with descriptions in Korean, Roman and Chinese scripts.

As with most countries I’ve visited, translation in city infrastructure is easy to find, and I can rely on my privilege as a native English speaker. Street signs are spelled out in Roman script. My train ticket to Gwangju appeared in English, and the attendants understand basic phrases like “bathroom” and “what time is it?” My life got even easier when I returned to Seoul, when I discovered my proficiency in Mandarin came in handy too: almost everything, from subway maps to ATMs, is spelled out in Korean, Roman and Chinese scripts.

But what’s missing from this picture? I spent a few days in Seoul with a friend of mine, Christina, who’s lived in both Korea and the United States. She sports equal fluency in both countries’ languages, and spending time with her opened doors I hadn’t thought were present. She pointed out the previously-anonymous famous actors advertising soap and cars on billboards. She helped me chit chat with strangers when I was curious about their fancy mobile phones. She negotiated better deals in the markets and helped me understand cheesy song lyrics at restaurants. By the time I left Korea, I had a much fuller, rounder picture of the country in those few days than I had had in all the previous weeks.

Tencent Weibo's landing page. Despite having English-language navigation, its most popular users and trending conversations are still predominantly Chinese.

This is the state in which we find our social media today. We can skim the surface smoothly, we can navigate the interfaces in our language of choice, but we still can’t talk to each other. Facebook is famous for having crowdsourced its translation interface, now offering over a hundred languages, including fun ones like Latin and “Pirate”. I use Twitter en Español to keep my language skills up, and I could use it in a dozen other languages if I chose. Tencent, one of the world’s largest social networks with a reported 800 million users on its QQ instant messaging service and 200 million on its microblog service, offers interfaces in English and Chinese.

But as soon as we log on, we find that the idea of connecting world is often an illusion: we have no reliable way of understanding the languages that other people are speaking if we don’t speak them ourselves. Machine translation certainly helps, but the functionality rarely accommodates the complicated context and nuance of communication beyond basic chit chat. And regardless, it’s rarely implement: even between similar languages, like English and Spanish, I’ve seen topics trend in parallel on the same service.

Thankfully, many sites, from Meedan to Global Voices to Chinasmack, open portals between language speakers. They translate important blog posts. They highlight tweets and events that I might have missed. They provide context and commentary. In short, they serve as bridges, and they rely on bridge figures like my friend Christina, who can help the two worlds understand each other.

As we’ve seen in the past year, with so many world events broadcast and organized around social media, skimming the surface is no longer enough. But how often do we really speak with those outside our social circles and across languages? For the most part, we’re living like I had been in Korea: politely nodding and smiling but not actually speaking to each other and exchanging ideas.

If we want truly global social platforms, we’ll need more tools and more bridges to help us. And by embedding crowdsourced translation features into its own service, Facebook is leading the way in making these bridges a default part of a social media service’s functionality. Hopefully more will start doing the same.