Join the conversation without having to be a CEO of a huge company or Prime Minister of a country!

7iber has joined up with the Global Changemakers, an organization support by the British Council, to bring you extensive LIVE coverage of the World Economic Forum at the Dead Sea from 15-17 May 2009. Roughly 20 youth from around the Arab World will descend on Jordan for training, networking, and coverage of the debates, which will be published on global-changemakers.net and 7iber.com.

To stay in touch and interact, subscribe to our watwet channel. Will will also be using the Twitter hashtag #wef09 so you can follow live news from the Changemakers!

More information about Changemakers:
A Changemaker is a young activist operating through a range of national and international networks, who is able to influence his or her community as well as speak to authority with confidence and passion. Changemakers are not afraid to challenge either accepted ways of thinking or their convictions. Changemakers are forward looking, they take their ideas and put them into practice. A Changemaker accepts difference, is flexible, is able to take on new ideas and skills and will communicate them to others.
For more information visit: http://www.global-changemakers.net/about/

7iber is working with JumpStart to work with a group of young people with blogs, social media, and basic computer literacy. The program is a five-week program based in the Red Cross Hospital in Ashrafiya. Our goal is to bring Iraqis, Palestinians, and Jordanians together to build a community blog in order to share their experiences.

After a rough start, the training workshop finally got underway with 11 participants. Shaden got underway with a quick survey to ask about general Internet usage. Nearly everyone uses the Internet everyday, with just a few saying they don’t use the Internet. When Shaden asked if people use Facebook, one participant mentioned that the Internet and Facebook are one in the same to them.

The first skill we looked to teach was basic searching skills. How to use search engines, making basic queries with excludes and includes and how to refine your search as much as possible to find what you are looking. Most participants have used Google, but mostly to search for pictures.

From searching, we moved on to Wikipedia. A quick query on Iraq, brought on an interesting discussion of the accuracy of information and where the information comes from. You can edit the page, discuss the information, and other options. The participants seemed very interested.

From Wikipedia we move to Yamli, the Arabic/English search engine. You type the Arabic in English letters and it translates it to the Arabic characters. We moved quickly on to ikbis and youtube.

After a quick break, we on to blogging. More to come soon.

To show exactly what a blog is and what it does (and how to register it), we started a blog called yazan7ammo.maktoobblog.com. We did a quick tour of different blog services including Maktoob, Jeeran, and Blogger. Another participant, started his own blog on blogger.com, http://blaskvirus.blogspot.com/.

Please make sure to refresh the window below every so often to make sure everything is showing up.

Mohammad, the grandfather of Jordanian vlogging, is telling us all just how to produce a video in the most simple of ways. I’m really excited by what you can do with such simple pieces of technology (be it hardware or software) and I honestly can’t wait to do something like this myself. Mohammad also has great stories as a vlogger. For example, at the recent Zade Dirani concert a few weeks ago, Khobbeizeh TV and the BBC were the only media allowed to videotape. Mohammad had to set up his tiny camera on top of a large tripod while the much larger BBC film crew looked on.

Mohammad has his own TV channel on Ikbis.com dubbed Khobbiezeh TV

After a nice (and healthy) lunch, our third session was launched with Wael Atilli – arguably one of the most creative guys in Jordan and on the Jordanian blogosphere. Wael, who has been involved in the past couple of years with launching things like ikbis.com and watwet, is launching his own company, Kharabesh, that produces original creative content. So he was an obvious choice to introduce one of the greatest aspects of the Internet: its creative side. From Flickr and YouTube, to Ikbis, watwet, twitter, Facebook, and all that jazz. Wael also got into a few related issues based on what questions people here have asked him such as copyrighting creative content as well as the impact of hardware devices – such as the iPhone and Nokia N95 – and their integration with the online world. Putting all this together, the idea is to see how all these things have revolutionized not only blogging, but the way information is being presented; be it in the form of video or audio, an image or the written word. It’s no longer about simply writing an idea; now people can take a simple video with their phone and upload it for all to see, watch and comment on within a matter of minutes.

(an interesting video of the discussion is forthcoming)

Session II: Law and Ethics

Ashraf Al-Raee, Jordanian journalist and chief editor talked about the Jordanian constitution and the Jordanian law concerning media and journalism.

According to the Jordanian law, article 15: “every Jordanian has the right to express themselves as long as he/she does not violate the law”. Participants debated whether non-Jordanians should be granted the same kind of freedom taking into consideration the International law and political structure of the region.

Al-Raee explained in details how personal accusations be it particular or general is punishable by the law and discussed with the groups the barriers faced by journalists in the Arab world, particularly in Jordan. the subject of the Jordanian Press Association law gathered the largest number of questions by the participants, showing valid concerns regarding alternative journalism and how different it actually is from traditional journalism when it comes to abiding by the press law.

As an exercise on self-censorship, participants were asked to write a topic that they want to write about but they think they can’t, and why they think they can’t.

Next up: Blogging Ethics and Censorship

Participants from different backgrounds introduced themselves as managers, students, bloggers, volunteers and others all with a common interest in blogging and citizen media. They came to know more about citizen media and journalism and share their new and exciting ideas with the rest of the world.

Session I: Citizen Media and Journalism

I. Intro to Citizen Media

What is a blog?

Blog example: jordanwatch.com

Anyone can generate and share media-content.

Lina Ejeilat from 7iber.com talked about how blogs work, styling your own blog and the most famous global and regional blog services and a step by step demonstration to creating blog posts.

A lot of examples were given of well-known blogs world-wide such as the engadget.com and huffingtonpost.com.

How to attract and maintain readers?

Submit your blog to popular local and global aggregators such as Jordanblogs.com and itoot.net. increased readership means extra value to your blog, and the more you get linked to by other Websites and blogs, the more popular you are. in blogging terms, your blog has more authority than other blogs with less “blog reaction”. Try it yourself, enter a blog’s URL (any blog) on Technorati.com and see how many blog reactions you’ll get! now, try entering the same URL in Alexa.com and see how many blog reactions you get.

Commenting on other people’s blogs helps expose your blog to different kinds of people. when you leave your blog’s URL (link) in an interesting comment, chances are, readers will follow you to your personal blog out of curiosity and interest in your writings.

Lina continued to talk about Bridge blogging giving globalvoicesonline.org as a clear example of bringing bloggers’ voices from all over the world together to talk about a single topic.

Blogging as a form of activism is becoming increasingly (even if slowly) popular in our region especially where Manal and Alaa’ live. a few years earlier, no one expected to see political facebook groups created by Arabs in the Arab world. Nowadays, young Arabs are utilizing the internet to send political and social messages and voice their protest.

Some blogs become so successful that they get book deals. An Iraqi blog (Baghdad Burning) is a good example of that.

II. Five Definitions of Citizen Media

Our Mariam Adas shared with everyone 5 different definitions of citizen media. in total, the different definitions gave citizen media the following characteristics:

- citizen media is when people share news with each other and inform each other of news and happenings

- citizen media investigates news

- citizen media is when people use online tools to report local events – news worthy or not

The four groups of participants tried to come up with a definition for citizen media agreeing on that it does not follow the same laws applied to traditional media and that it’s characterized by: freedom of expression and reporting of news. However, participants could not agree on credibility as a principle of citizen media. Groups also tried to answer the following thought-provoking questions:

What do you feel is missing in local main stream media?

What is journalism? what makes journalism credible/reliable? what makes journalism believable?

What is citizen media? how does it differ from traditional media?

What are the skills required to conduct citizen journalistic investigation? how do you present the findings?

III. Looking at Citizen Media

The previous questions brought up the topic of independent media versus media businesses and the dilemma of generating money from journalism, how it affects credibility, and how it is essential for full-time journalists to have monetary support.

Anonymous blogging was another hot topic that seemed to be on everyone’s mind today. the social impact of anonymity on credibility and trust. despite the drawbacks of anonymous blogging, the question of objectivity and how names shouldn’t matter when the idea is what’s being discussed. in the Arab region, people are still afraid of revealing their identities. how legitimate is this fear is another question.

IV. Impact of Blogs: Real Life Examples

who sane’s story (can citizen media in Jordan become a catalyst for change?)

Sabri Hakim’s blog on CNN: video shot by blogger Sabri Hakim at the time of the tragic Amman explosions.

Part two of the session has been mostly discussion-driven, orchestrated by a 7iber team-member, Mariam. We posed a few questions, the most of which we ourselves have no answers for, and we got a few interesting responses from the groups. A lot of the discussion centered on defining blogs and so we got everyone’s ideas down on the white board to find commonalities. The discussion inevitably lead to ideas of censorship and self-censorship in Jordan. I’ll try and go into detail a bit later as our next session (after the coffee break) is going to be about Jordanian media laws, ethics and censorship. Suffice to say, censorship, self-censorship and the fear factor that it involves, is such an important subject to the average young Jordanian. I should also point out the group today is pretty diverse, with many of these young people coming from places like Jabal il-Nathif.

More later.

Today we launched our very first workshop; the first of (hopefully) many in the days, months and years to come. The idea is not to dictate or “teach” or “train” anyone in citizen media, but rather to achieve a few objectives. The first is to briefly introduce people to blogs, especially young Jordanians that may not much about them. The second is to inspire a conversation; a debate, a conversation about all things citizen media. The third, and perhaps unplanned, is to plant a few seeds in young minds about freedom of speech and freedom of expression in the digital age. The simple idea that technology, be it a blog or a nokia phone, can be used to express a thought or an idea.

We won’t pretend to know everything about the subject, but between the five 7iber member team as well as other guest stars such as Wael Atilli and Mohammad Qaq, there is enough experience in the room to introduce the subject, inspire the conversation, and plant those seeds.

Meanwhile, I have to admit that this first “workshop” is just that: our first. We are learning and fine-tuning and everyone involved today is part of this “experiment” and unknowingly helping us evolve.

We’ll be live blogging and keeping you all up to date on what we’re doing.

And so we begin.

I got to attend a workspace on New Business Ventures in the Middle East, most of which focused on social entrepreneurship-based organizations such as INJAZ (Junior Achievement) and others who dealt with fields that include desertification, energy-savers, fair trade, etc. Soraya Salti, another Jordanian who is really making a difference in the community, was there with a student of the INJAZ program who won this year’s entrepreneur program under INJAZ, from Egypt. I took a video and I’ll be uploading it as soon as I can. The workspace is perhaps the most dynamic and interactive of all the sessions and it involves everyone getting involved essentially. After breaking up in to groups and experiencing the various business models presented, we mixed up the groups and were given a task to create a new business venture that made use of all the models, to create a new good or service. Some of the ideas that came about for example were “Green Hotels” that focused on eco-friendly hotels/tourism, and a “Sand 2 Food” program that focused on investing in new desert-based techniques to sell franchise kits for local farmers.

A few members of our group, including myself, are preparing now for a BBC debate. We will be panelists alongside some interesting personalities such as Ehud Barak, Jamal Mubarak, Salem Fayyad and Tony Blair. Joining us will be Israeli students so we’re looking forward to a very interesting debate.

Back later!