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On a balmy evening in April 2009 Barham Salih, then deputy prime minister of Iraq, sat in the garden of his Baghdad villa while a young internet entrepreneur called Jack Dorsey tried to persuade him that he needed to be on Twitter. Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, was in Baghdad at the (...)

At the end of October, artists, hackers, teachers, lawyers and free culture activists of all kinds will converge on Barcelona for the second meeting of the Free Culture Forum (FCF). This is an international space for movements that have emerged across the world around the production, access, (...)

In recent months there has been considerable discussion about the WikiLeaks phenomenon, and understandably so, given the volume and sensitivity of the documents the website has released. What this discussion has revealed, however, is that the media and government agencies believe there is a (...)

October 2010 marks the fifth anniversary of the Right to Information (RTI) Act. The Act and its implementation have been described in both administrative circles and civil society as “revolutionary” , “a blow for transparency”, “a check on corrupt practices” and “a people’s intervention tool with (...)

Women in rural areas play a central role in the agricultural economy of their region, which means that they often work long hours, leaving little time for learning how to use new technologies. Yet, access to new technologies affect both men and women in remote areas. In a new publication, (...)

The United Nations celebrated the International Day of the World’s Indigenous People this week by showcasing award- winning short films produced by indigenous filmmakers and reaffirming indigenous rights and cultural treasures.
The day was observed at the New York headquarters of the U.N. (...)

Popular Media, Democracy and Development in Africa examines the role that popular media could play to encourage political debate, provide information for development, or critique the very definitions of ‘democracy’ and ‘development’. Drawing on diverse case studies from various regions of the (...)

It’s a big win for Internet-based, indie media that WikiLeaks.org posted its "Afghan War Diary," based on 90,000 leaked US military records detailing a failing war in which US and allied forces have repeatedly killed innocent civilians. This on-the-ground material is vaster than the Daniel (...)

You could easily overlook this story about cyberspace. It seldom gets told, and is often buried amidst the contested claims that the US military actually created the internet.
But read on and you’d quickly realise how a small group of progressive change-seekers managed to significantly shape (...)

The central Indian remote jungles of Chhattisgarh and the urban technology- savvy node of Bangalore are now linked by a mobile phone-based information system, a first in the world, called CGnet Swara. Read more

While the Iranian government has intensified its aggressive efforts to expand Internet filters, Austin Heap, a young programmer in the U.S., says he has developed software that would enable Iranians to evade their censors. Read (...)

While the role of technology in the political struggle in Iran and elsewhere should not be overstated, it should not be underestimated either. The "next generation" controls with which authorities aim to manage the Internet mark a shift from heavy-handed filtering to sophisticated multi-pronged (...)

Africa has been catapulted into the electronic age over the past decade and a half by an almost incomprehensibly swift growth in telecommunications technology driven primarily by a massive rollout of cell phones and wireless technology throughout the continent.
While few can deny the economic (...)

From Google Search to Google Earth, every move you make can be tracked by some feature of Google — and intelligence agencies are drooling over the data. Read more

The Stockholm Programme, the latest in a series of EU agreements on security policy, was endorsed in December 2009. Based on the "principle of availability", the Programme plans to enable the cross-border collection, processing and sharing of data on a massive scale. Supposedly promoting (...)

In their book Beyond the Echo Chamber: Reshaping Politics Through Networked Progressive Media (New Press), activists and journalists Tracy Van Slyke and Jessica Clark take us on a celebratory journey through the relatively recent (over the past eight years) surge of independent, progressive (...)

Venezuela’s revolution has often been tied to the slogan “Socialism in the 21st Century.” What might that might mean concretely in changes under way in the renationalised state telecommunications company, CANTV?
TNI fellow, Daniel Chavez has been part of a team of international advisers working (...)

The entry of climate change into the media mainstream, as welcome as it is, nevertheless brings new problems. Journalists, campaigners and scientists discuss the implications of demand-led reporting, the exploitation of public misunderstanding, and the dangers of focusing on "charismatic (...)

SMS Uprising provides a unique insight into how activists and social change advocates are addressing Africa’s many challenges from within, and how they are using mobile telephone technologies to facilitate these changes.
This collection of essays by those engaged in using mobile phone (...)

Kenyan researcher Joseph Juma Musakali asks what African research institutes can do to exploit the open access movement. Read more