Int’l summit in Cebu to tackle pressing cyber issues

I wrote this announcement for the Philippine Online Chronicles.

As Filipinos wait in high hopes for the visit of Pope Francis in the Philippines, a group of bloggers and citizen media from over 60 countries across the world is also making their way to the Philippines January of this year.

Global Voices, an international network of citizen media practitioners and advocates founded in 2004 at the Harvard University, will be holding a two-day international summit at the Cebu Provincial Capitol in Cebu City on January 24-25, 2015.

Over a hundred international bloggers, citizen media advocates, and tech experts are anticipated to take part in various talks, panels, and workshops on the relations between open Internet and social movements around the world during the event.

Citizen media or the way traditional audiences become participants in the creation of media content through new media technologies will be at the center of the international summit.

The Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2015 will tackle some of the most pressing cyber issues on the internet, citizen media, freedom of information, digital security, indigenous languages and multilingualism online, and cyber activism.

The summit will open with a plenary on protecting the internet against government and corporate policies that endanger the freedom of expression and privacy of internet users.

Some of the parallel sessions and workshops on the first day will be on the Filipino citizen media landscape, how to make freedom of information laws work, Google tools for journalists, verifying citizen video, and digital activism highlights in 2014.

The second day will have parallel sessions and discussions on Filipino Indigenous Languages in citizen media, digital security and privacy, online censorship and freedom of speech worldwide, and Magna Carta of Internet users around the world.

The citizen media experience in Kyrgyzstan and Mexico as well as on indigenous language digital activism will also be highlighted in the two-day confab.

The Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2015, which is the sixth such event, hopes to provide a venue for inspiring fresh ideas, sharing experiences, and forging cross-border collaborations among bloggers and citizen media.

Previous summits were held in London in United Kingdom in 2005, New Delhi in India in 2006, Budapest in Hungary in 2008, Santiago in Chile in 2010 and Naoirobi in Kenya in 2012.

To attend this year’s summit, simply log on the site http://summit2015.globalvoicesonline.org to register. The cost of admission for the two day public summit is PHP 2,000 for Filipino residents, with a special student rate of PHP 1,000.

The Global Voices Summit 2015 is sponsored by the Ford Foundation, Google, Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Yahoo, the Province of Cebu, Department of Tourism, Globe Telecom, Smart Communications, Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, Sun Star Publishing, and PRWorks.