We are pleased to be able to announce that the Program on Liberation Technology will have two new visiting scholars from September 2010 - Patrick Meier and Evgeny Morozov.

Patrick Meier is a fourth-year PhD Candidate at The Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy and Co-Director of the Program on Crisis Mapping and Early Warning at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. His dissertation research analyzes the impact of the information revolution on the balance of power between repressive rule and civil resistance. He is particularly interested in how repressive regimes and resistance groups use information communication technologies to further their own strategic and tactical goals. Patrick serves as Director of Crisis Mapping and Strategic Partnerships at Ushahidi and co-founded the International Network of Crisis Mappers. He is also on the Board of Advisors of  DigiActive and Digital Democracy, two leading digital activism and democracy initiatives. Patrick blogs at iRevolution and Early Warning.

• View Patrick's presentation to our Liberation technology seminar class, "The Impact of Technology Access on Protest Frequency in Authoritarian Regimes"
• Watch Patrick's short talk about using crowdsourcing during relief efforts in Haiti
• Read more about his dissertation research

Evgeny Morozov is a leading thinker and commentator on the political impact of the Internet and a well known opponent of internet utopianism.  He is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy and runs the magazine's Net Effect blog about the Internet's impact on global politics. Evgeny is currently a Yahoo! fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. Prior to his appointment to Georgetown, he was a fellow at the Open Society Institute, where he remains on the board of the Information Program. Before moving to the US, Evgeny was based in Berlin and Prague, where he was Director of New Media at Transitions Online, a media development NGO active in 29 countries of the former Soviet bloc. He is writing a book about the Internet and democracy, to be published this fall by PublicAffairs.

• View Evgeny's presentation to our Liberation technology seminar class, "Authoritarian Governments in Cyberspace"
• Watch Evgeny's TED Global talk, "How the Internet strengthens dictatorships"
• Read his article for Prospect, "How Dictators Watch us on the Web"
• Read his Boston Review article, "Texting Towards Utopia"

We are looking forward to welcoming Patrick and Evgeny to the Stanford community in a few months time. 

Firoze Manji is founding Executive Director of Fahamu - Networks for Social Justice, a pan African organization with offices in Kenya, Senegal, South Africa and the UK.

Fahamu exists to support the development and growth of a powerful social justice movement in Africa. There are three core areas of activity:

Training: Fahamu aims to strengthen human rights organizations by providing training programs that include sufficient pre workshop preparation and post workshop follow-up to ensure substantive learning. Fahamu has created CD-ROM based training packages covering subjects from advocacy to financial management to gender violence and conflict.

News & Media: Pambazuka News is a weekly electronic newsletter providing commentary and analysis on issues of social justice across Africa, published in English, French and Portuguese. There are 26,000 subscribers and half a million unique visitors to the site. Content is also published on allafrica.com and it is widely used by mainstream media. Pambazuka was one of the first African organizations to use podcasts and videocasts.

Advocacy: Fahamu was heavily involved in efforts to persuade countries to sign up to the African Union's Rights of Women in Africa Protocol. The organization attracted a great deal of attention for its strategy of getting people to sign a petition via cell phones. Within 18 months it had persuaded the necessary 15 countries to ratify the Protocol.

Firoze shared a number of his insights from his experience using ICTs in these areas:

There remain real barriers to use of ICTs in Africa: Middle class Africans often have more than one cell phone each; penetration figures can therefore be misleading. The cost associated with text and especially voice services is prohibitive for many. While email is cheap, web surfing is expensive and due to low bandwidth, painfully slow. 

Paper formats are in some instances still the most useful: Feedback from students on Fahamu courses has shown consistent demand for paper resources. Students rarely have their own home computer or laptop and they may travel often; internet cafes can be unsafe environments for women alone. For these reasons, Fahamu continues to produce print resources. It also recently launched Pambazuka Press to promote African writers.  Books will be sold at cost to distributors in Africa and at commercial rates elsewhere.

Technology tools are a complement to, not substitute for real engagement: Analysis of the Rights of Women Protocol petition showed that less than 10% of signatures had come via cell phones. It was the political legwork of going through the protocol in person with each individual that made the real difference to the outcome. This confirms Firoze's view that tools such as cell phones cannot create social change where there is no existing real-world network for them to tap into. We need to be wary of fetishizing technology tools, attributing to them powers they simply cannot have.

Technology, Froze argues, tends to reflect and amplify existing social relations. So while ICTs can enable people to voice their own experience in a way that was not available to them before, they can just as easily serve to shore up existing power structures.