TOL is searching for participants for an online course on covering education issues, developed in cooperation with the Guardian Foundation and BBC World Trust. The course is open to journalists from Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. Applicants should be covering education or have a strong interest in the topic. Application deadline: May 10, 2008 For more information or to apply, go to: http://training.tol.org
Transitions Online and the Centre for Public Policy PROVIDUS are inviting applications for a year-long initiative that seeks to provide NGOs in the new member states of the European Union with web tools and strategies that will better enable them to promote transparency and good governance norms in their respective countries.
Participating organizations will learn the latest methods for encouraging their members and the larger public to engage in data collection and analysis—approaches that have already uncovered public wrongdoing in North America and Western Europe. They will also hear from experts on new ways to use and present this data, allowing their socially-useful research to reach a wider audience and have a greater impact on public policy.
The core project activities include:
- a training seminar in Prague in May, drawing together representatives from various NGOs in the region;
- three pilot projects to test the strategies discussed at the seminar;
- the creation of an e-learning course; and
- a closing evaluation meeting in Riga to share experiences and assess the lessons learned over the course of the year.
The pilot projects will take the form of blogs and online monitoring sites tracking key issues of importance, as well as a website aggregating the affiliated blogs and collecting feedback from participating organizations and the wider public.
The pilot projects will be modeled after successful corruption-combating projects, such as:
- FollowTheMoney.org, a website tracking the sources and uses of money to influence officials in the United States; and
- OpenCongress.org, a non-partisan resource monitoring the development of legislation, issues before Congress, and Congress members’ votes.
Applications will be accepted from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Bulgaria. Interested individuals must be engaged (as employees, consultants, or volunteers) in non-profit organizations working in the areas of anti-corruption and good governance, or for other monitoring organizations (human rights, environmental degradation, etc.) that would benefit from the techniques promoted by this project. The May workshop will take place from 8 May (arrivals) until 11 May (departures). All expenses, including travel, will be covered by the organizers. To apply, fill out the online application form at http://tol.botnet.cz/form/19/. The deadline for applications is 21 March.
Transitions Online (TOL http://www.tol.org) is an international publishing and media development organization based in Prague, the Czech Republic, with a mission of improving the professionalism, independence, and impact of the news media in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Union. The Centre for Public Policy PROVIDUS is an independent, non-partisan policy institute based in Riga, Latvia, working in the following main policy areas: good governance, criminal justice, tolerance, and European policy. The project is sponsored by the European Commission, Directorate-General Justice, Freedom, and Security, and the Trust for Civil Society in Central and Eastern Europe.
VPRO Television, based in the Netherlands, is currently recruiting innovative videojournalists and filmmakers from all over the world for a new global network of correspondents. The network aims to provide strong local news and background stories, video diaries, clips and creative short films based on weekly themes, with a personal touch. They are looking for skilled young journalist and filmmakers, who can contribute 1 - 4 short stories monthly. The videojournalists need to have filming/editing skills and access to equipment in their countries, and will be paid accordingly. The stories will be featured 24/7 on a website in Dutch and English, and a selection will be shown in a weekly broadcast on national Dutch TV.
Please contact the editors of this program at metropolis@vpro.nl if you are interested.
On December 16, Krygyzstan held parliamentary elections. Two days later, Mirsulzhan Namazaliev, a blogger for neweurasia, was arrested and eventually jailed for protesting the election results.
Along with other youth, Namazaliev mounted the “I don’t believe” campaign, arguing against the government’s acceptance of election results that were deemed flawed by the OSCE and various pro-democracy groups in Kyrgyzstan. He stood outside the Central Election Commission building holding a sign in protest, and police soon detained him and several other youth. They spent three days in jail.
In his new TOL article, Namazaliev says his experience in jail gave him new strength to work for freedom and democracy. He and other Kyrgyz youth have plans to push forward — and never to surrender.
Click here to read the full article.
No longer a nerdy neologism, the word “weblog” celebrates its first decade, the BBC reports:
Weblogs rack up a decade of posts
The word “weblog” celebrates the 10th anniversary of it being coined on 17 December 1997.
The word was created by Jorn Barger to describe what he was doing with his pioneering Robot Wisdom web page.
The word was an abbreviation for the “logging” of interesting “web” sites that Mr Barger featured on his regularly updated journal.
A decade on and blog-watching firm Technorati reports it is tracking more than 70 million web logs.
Fast growth
While many people maintained regular journals or diaries before the word was coined, 1997 marked the point when they started to become a particular online pursuit.
For some time after Mr Barger coined the term, the numbers of people who could be said to be actually writing one was small.
Official numbers are hard to find but some estimate that the size of the blogosphere in late 1998 encompassed only 23 sites.
In 1999 the phenomenon took off as easy to use tools started to appear which made it much easier to write and maintain these sorts of websites. Also in 1999 the word “blog” was coined as a shortened form of the original term.
Blogs arose to partly solve the problem of finding interesting sites on the rapidly expanding world wide web.
Many blogs, then as now, specialised in one subject and kept those interested up to date with new sites or up-to-date information about developments or breakthroughs in that field.
Many bloggers attach comments to the web links they post and many become well-known for their particular view of events or way with words.
Technorati, which keeps an eye on the blogosphere, estimates that there are now 120,000 new blogs being created every day. Posts are being added to blogs at a rate of 17 per second - a total of 1.5 million per day, says the firm.
Not all blogs are now about what people find online. Many people, artists, industry figures and professionals, use them to keep people up to date with their movements or thoughts.
The rising popularity of social network sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo has arguably grown out of the blogging phenomenon.
Source: BBC
