New Resources

Brave New Films co-founder this week launched an online platform for activists, and Media Badger set about mapping the global digital diaspora. Ever on a more meta scale, Google launched an incubation centre for African tech start ups, and awarded $1 million to Georgia Tech researchers so that they can develop simple tools to detect Internet throttling, government censorship, and other “transparency” problems.

Media and A2I

A recent Indian R2I request revealed a bizarre collection of websites that Indians aren’t allowed to see, while French European Commissioner Michel Barnier pushed for regulations that would make ISPs, webhosts and social media platforms the go-to enforcers for entertainment copyright. Meanwhile, Twitter helped to debunk some sloppy reporting on Israeli weapons in Lybia, and the selected writings of Thomas Jefferson were announced for publication in Arabic.

World Powers

The Sunlight Foundation and Propublica launched an online tool for tracking foreign lobbying influence US politics, while the United States government announced that it was spending millions of dollars developing technology to help pro-democracy activists in the Middle East and China – including a panic button for android. Meanwhile, US legislatures narrowly avoided a shutdown of open government websites and a vote that would have doomed net neutrality, while the UN’s Internet governance Forum releases a set of rights-based principles for the internett, and Dmitry Medvedev called for law enforcement, after his blog is shut down for an hour by a “digital sit in.

In Cairo

The April 6th Movement has announced that it will form an NGO rather than political party in the interests of legitimacy and engagement with “the people”, a leader of the 25 January Revolution Youth Coalition was kidnapped, protesters barricaded Tahrir in anticipation of renewed violence, and a delegation of German tourists organized a march in Cairo to promote tourism.