Ljubiša Bojić's Profile

The Global Network Initiative has been launched. The Initiative is a code of conduct for corporations on privacy and free speech created by a coalition of human rights, media development and research organizations, and Internet and communications companies such as Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Its goal: to ensure that ICT companies acknowledge their “responsibility to respect and protect the freedom of expression and privacy rights of their users.”

The Initiative was launched as a response to corporate participation in online censorship, especially in China. It took more than two years to craft, and much of that time was spent articulating a set of principles and devising mechanisms to encourage compliance acceptable both to human rights groups and to businesses.

Rebecca MacKinnon, one of Global Voices’ founders, participated in the working group, and writes in RConversation:

A few people have called me asking “does this thing have any teeth” or “is this thing more than just a figleaf for companies to get congress off their backs?

Organizations like Human Rights Watch, Human Rights in China, Human Rights First, and the Committee to Protect Journalists would not be putting their reputations behind this thing if they didn't think it was meaningful.

That said, the initiative must prove its value in the next couple of years by implementing a meaningful and sufficiently tough process by which companies' adherence to the principles will be evaluated and benchmarked.

BarCamp was born in Palo Alto, California in 2005. In just three years, it has become an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by the attendees — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

Last year's event drew in 100 participants from all walks of the Internet in Hong Kong; budding entrepreneurs, web designers, cutting edge programmers, mobile experts, game developers & designers, academics, bloggers, social media specialists, investors and media owners.

This year we are expecting over 200 people at the full-day event, hosted at Oxford House in Taikoo Place, on the conference floor of Turner International Asia Pacific, owner of Cartoon Networks and CNN News.

There will be five large conference rooms, two lounge areas, a coffee room and a bar. Presentations can be on any topic you like as long as it is about the Internet and people are wiling to listen. You are free to speak in Cantonese, Putonghua or English.

Food, drinks and free wifi will be provided.

Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to join.

Global Voices, generative media structures.. and the end of nationalism?

Google has taken the war over exclusive web content into space. Not directly, of course—the satellite that was recently launched into space on a rocket bearing the Google logo was the result of a joint venture between a commercial satellite imaging provider and the department of defense. In return for undisclosed terms, Google got two considerations: its logo on the side of the launch vehicle, and exclusive use of the mapping images that the satellite produces.

The partnerships in the new satellite are extensive. The hardware was built by General Dynamics and put in orbit by Boeing; the funding for the project came in part from a commercial satellite imaging company, Geoeye. The rest of the funding came from the Defense Department's National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which provides map-based intelligence resources. The launch took place yesterday from the Air Force's Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Siniša Boljanović had never blogged when he volunteered to report on Serbian blogs for Global Voices in 2007. He read an article about Global Voices in a Serbian online magazine and was so hooked on the idea of contributing, he taught himself to write in English and to use Wordpress for the first time in spite of one additional obstacle: Siniša is blind.

Among the topics he has blogged about in the past year are, atrocities of war in his region, the arrest of Radovan Karadžić, human rights, Serbian politics, and Kosovo's independence claims.

Siniša lives with his family in a town called Novi Sad, which is well-known for the EXIT music festival. He is a graduate of Serbian language and literature at Belgrade University. He does not have a personal blog, but is planning to create one in the future. More urgent are his plans to help start a new Lingua website, Global Voices in Serbian.

In his spare time, Siniša likes reading books and sometimes writes short stories. Before he became blind, he liked to play tennis. These days he is a fan of Serbian tennis players Novak Djoković, Janko Tipsarević, Ana Ivanović and Jelena Janković, and also likes Roger Federer and Maria Sharapova.

Who was Dragan David Dabic?

For me this incredible story is only beginning. Soon Radovan Karadzic will be safely in Hague behind bars, rambling his strident defense just like his predecessor Slobodan Milosevic.

We here in downtown Belgrade are left with this mysterious ridiculous character, Dragan David Dabic, who will vanish like a soap opera hero. I am sincerely afraid that "Dabic," his traces, deeds and words will be cancelled, manipulated, and abused by the press, by his friends, by his enemies, by his captors. There is a lot at stake with his capture: Unpleasant truths and unanswerable questions. We lived with Dabic for 13 years, he was one of us, among us, in the shadow half-life of Serbia.

Two war criminals lived in my own street. Biljana Plavsic, the former leader of Republika Srpska, took power after Radovan Karadzic left in 1996. She pled guilty in the Hague and is now serving her sentence in Sweden. General Pavkovic was in charge during the pogrom of Albanians in Kosovo. He is sick of cancer.

People in Belgrade feel bewildered and betrayed. For 13 years Serbian officials have claimed Karadzic was never in Serbia. He was hiding in the mountains as an Ali Baba together with his 40 hajduks ( Robin Hoods), he was sheltered in monasteries praying to God for his country. These myths were obviously planted by the people hiding him in downtown Belgrade. There Dabic led his weird public life, while the hapless Serbian population was held hostage for the misdeeds of Karadzic.

New Uses (to me) of Technology in Kenya