Product. Data. Science.
15 January 2009
Since I’ve been living in Cairo, I’ve been interested in how organizations here use technology. I’ve been particularly interested in refugee service providers: what tools are they using? how are they using them? are they effective?
So, I was quite excited when I came across an announcement for a discussion on blogging for refugees, hosted by Tadamon‘s Urban Refugees Working Group.
Refugees in Egypt and the Blogosphere.
Are bloggers capable of helping refugees?Are they capable of reaching out to the local and international community?How do we link bloggers to NGO’s?Blogs are becoming international. They are becoming important. They are connecting diasporas, activists and the international community. They are giving the average citizen a chance to voice out their opinion and to speak out. Some blogs are used to raise awareness about human rights. Tadamon is bringing a group of bloggers to talk to the refugee community about their problems. To discuss whether blogs are useful when it comes to communicating the problems of refugees in Egypt to the local and international community. We are also going to talk about the importance of linking bloggers to NGO’s such as our very own Tadamon Council and other community-based organizations.
So, I went.
The discussion featured two bloggers (Egyptian Diva and Mustafa Hussein) to start us off with a framework for understanding the potential of blogging in development and human rights work and the current state of blogging in Egypt.
Egyptian Diva opened up the discussion with a summary of how blogs can be utilized, emphasizing the flexibility of the platform for discourse. A blogger has no requirement for what they say or how they say it. She offered as an example that she can, in her organization, write a press release following the cautious “official” language and topics of the organization, then go to her blog and write on the same topic with less reserve. For some organizations, the blog is the primary means of communication with the community. In closing, she emphasized that we should not only be thinking about the blog as a tool for organizations to talk about refugees but as a opportunity for refugees to develop their own voice in the public sphere.
Mustafa Hussein followed up with an overview of the role of blogging in Egypt, particulary with respect to the “citizen journalism” of the 2005 Sudanese sit-in. His discussion emphasized the opportunity to bypass traditional media.
Once the discussion opened up, it drifted from the initial set of “prompt” questions, (assuming “yes” to the first two and skipping the third altogether) and instead seemed to center on the following topics:
*How can we keep up to date on what bloggers are saying concerning refugees in Egypt? *
I’ve been trying to find just this kind of information and the information “out there” is sparse. Most bloggers who may address these issues do not dedicate their blogs to this topic, but instead only talk about refugees in Egypt when it is relevant to the broader topics of their blog: in the general context of a human rights blog or a politics blog or a “hey mom, this is what I’m doing in Cairo” blog. There are a number of organizations which work with refugees in Egypt, but as far as I can tell, none of them maintain blogs. Not even Tadamon, the host of the discussion.
It would be quite beneficial to service providers to have some kind of aggregator to bring together information on refugees living in Egypt. The potential implementations of such a tool was brought up in the meeting, especially in the context of a single site which pulled together feeds from RSS feeds dedicated to the topic. I expect it would also be possible to play with a few online tools like Yahoo Pipes or Technocrati to automate some of the aggregation from a larger number of blogs in order to pick up the “straggling” posts concerning refugees in Egypt. Posts like those mentioned before which are coming from bloggers discussing refugees in Egypt as they relate to other issues.
How do “we” get “them” (refugees) to blog?
I’m not sure what fraction of the 20 or so people in the meeting were refugees, but the conversation was enough of the “us” and “them” type to suggest that it wasn’t very many. There was a lot of discussion about helping refugees to blog. This was initially inspired by Mustafa’s discussion of citizen journalism. One of the benefits of using blogs as a tool to give refugees their own voice is that the financial aspects are minimal. But, as I noted during the discussion, for anyone to blog, there must be some value that they get out of it.
Unfortunately, rather than asking, “Where is the value of blogging for refugees?” or “Do refugees want to blog?” (and, like I noted, those refugees who might be able to answer such questions were not in the audience), the discussion focused on ways to encourage refugees to blog, such as…
I can understand the desire to consider blogging as “empowering” or whatever, but I felt like the discussion started to stray from the point of blogging. Fundamentally, each blogger has their own goals for their blog, but in general, it is not meant to be a uni-directional conversation. So a project where we “let them write ‘their story’ and we can transcribe it and post it on their behalf” becomes simply another gallery of atrocities, omitting the refugees themselves from the conversation. Such a project would have little direct benefit for refugees. Getting refugees involved in the conversations happening on the internet, however, would be fantastic. “But what would they write about?” Well, the *real* beauty of blogging is that that would be for them to decide. Afterall, what does anyone write about on the internet?
Given that there are tens of thousands of refugees in Cairo (Sudanese, Somali, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Iraqi), there might be a few out there blogging already. I would love to know where they are, though. Heck, someone should start aggregating them.