For example, while more people join Twitter everyday, there are still many communities not represented there. When I was working in Libya in 2011, we started a hashtag #AskaLibyan to promote engagement between the international community and Libyan citizens. At the time internet connectivity was virtually nonexistent in Libya. Livestreaming would have been prohibitively expensive, if not impossible. However Twitter worked well, and provided a low bandwidth opportunity to create a relationship between individuals inside Libya and those abroad. As bandwidth increased and the Libyans running Alive in Libya increasingly focused their efforts on video production, the #AskaLibyan hashtag was left behind.

I was recently approached by Jessica Christian, Communications Director for Circle of Health International, about livestreaming from the Zaatari refugee camp, on an upcoming delegation to support Syrian mothers. I was initially skeptical, and a quick google seemed to confirm connectivity is very weak in the camp. I asked her a bit about her goals with livestreaming, and primarily she wanted to connect their donors and supporters with the work they helped create. Secondarily, she wanted to reduce the amount of post-production work that remained after the trip.

Livestreaming could be a great way to solve this, however the primary gain from “live” necessitates real-time interaction. Livestreaming has been a growing trend in mobile and social storytelling. It exploded during the Occupy movement, but has been growing for a long time. It’s easy to understand the appeal of “live” due to the increasingly real-time nature of the internet.  For Jessica and her colleagues in Jordan to engage in real-time with their supporters in Texas and elsewhere, she’d have to overcome a nine hour time gap. I suggested she consider the low connectivity in Jordan and the time gap an opportunity to try something different.

Using a unique hashtag she can create an asynchronous dialogue on Twitter that may also engage others outside of her network.  Telling her story in short bites sorted with a hashtag creates a collaborative narrative that her donors and supporters participate in. Add to that Twitter’s new photo-first policy and you have an even greater opportunity. Although much vaunted, video isn’t everything. A series of great portraits, with 140-character quotes from the subjects can bring distant communities to life. Sharing them on twitter, with a replicable hashtag creates the opportunity for a collaborative narrative, and may bring you surprising new voices.

This past April, Louis Abelman and myself went to Istanbul to give a video story telling workshop specifically for Syrian reporters living and working in conflict zones. The workshop was a project from the Institute for War and Peace Reporting and consisted of 5 days of class time, 4 of which were dedicated to video related details such as recording and editing.   The class was made up of about 12 students who live in cities such as Aleppo, Deir-ez-Zor, and Idlib. They were, on average, in their early 20′s and all involved in either writing, photographing, or making video reports of war and life in their cities for mostly local online and offline media channels.

Probably the most eye opening detail about these participants was that hardly any of them had ever wanted to be reporters or journalists prior to the war.  2 years ago they were students at universities and technical institutions studying for non-media related careers. The outbreak of war was the catalyst that led them to this sense of personal responsibility to report for both Syrians and non-Syrians to inform them about what is happening where they live.  And in these last two years they had seemingly had a crash course in journalism, learning along the way, while dealing with the tremendous risk and losses that this war has brought them.

During the course of this workshop where we taught camera shots, fundamentals of editing, and discussed what makes a story interesting or compelling. Students also showed us their previous work.  It is a classic but frustrating moment to see examples of shaky and poor quality footage that was recorded at tremendous risk in what are hostile places where- had it been known they were filming, they could have been killed. While it is understood that having a clear and steady picture is much harder when you’re dodging bullets and hostile soldiers, it is almost an unworthy risk if the video you record is impossible to look at or understand. That is the difficult balance of being very dedicated to reporting but not being well trained to do the best possible job in those circumstances. Thankfully such workshops do exist and organizations like the IWPR make the effort to not only get young reporters to Istanbul but to find those who are already dedicated and doing what they can, to then take a few days and get further training.

The level of experience and ability of students from when you get them to when they head back out into the field can always vary, especially when you have reporters that have a lot more on their mind than just how to do an overlay a clip in Premiere.  War trauma is a reality that very clearly plays a role in such a classroom, affecting how much people can learn and focus on any given day. Thankfully our Syrian students were across the board determined to learn and build upon what they know with each new project.

By the end of the week we had a few people who came out of the workshop capable of producing media that would interest and fit the quality standards of most 24 hour television news networks.  We had more people who had advanced from individuals who had never edited video to now being able to shoot and edit their own complete stories.  Many seemed to leave with a new outlook on what kind of stories would serve their purposes better, to shed light on the dire situation in their community.

It is a logistically and pedagogically challenging task to bring reporters out of a war zone temporarily, figure out what skills they have and what can be learned within a limited time frame, and then return them to their communities. It is also a very inspiring and humbling experience to teach skills, share experience, and in-turn learn from the talent and resolve that these young reporters showed us. Our hope now is that our efforts help them do better work, and that we can see them again, in a time of peace, in these beautiful places we have heard so much about.

Last year Small World News spent a number of months developing a curriculum for mobile journalism, including a section with 10 modules on mobile safety and security. Currently these lessons are written in a style for user-directed learning.

As part of the gathering here in Berlin, I’ll be working on making these modules more accessible to other trainers. To expand their relevance, I’ll have to take the existing content, and develop a teacher’s textbook. Teacher’s textbooks go beyond what a student has in front of them, to expand the learning with elements such as demonstrations, activities, and quizzes.

We hope to follow this event by disseminating the material to other trainers and supporting broader collaboration and resource sharing. We believe broad sharing of Creative Commons licensed material will increase the body of knowledge available to trainers and users alike.

In order to ensure the app provides the greatest training impact possible, we have to work to ensure that it can teach users without the involvement of a human trainer. Small World News has generally made its mark by providing high quality multimedia and new media training to individuals in difficult to reach places. We recognize that in the future, if we are to expand, we have to create better tools for distance training, because we cannot be everywhere at once.

One of the most complex concepts to teach new students is composition, both what to put in the camera’s frame, and how to use different size frames to advance a story. Over the past week I’ve been reviewing dozens of random frames from a variety of movies and television shows.

I had a theory, going into the research, that there are clear rules that become clear after reviewing enough samples. Every first year film student learns about the basic shots: establishing shot, wide/long shot, medium shot, and close up. They also learn about the rule of thirds, a guide for using a grid pattern to help direct the framing of individual shots. The combination of standard shot sizes and a framework for composing the shots leads to a finite number of “standard shots.”

So far the research seems to back this theory. I have reviewed more than a dozen shots in each of 4 categories, chosen randomly via google images searches. I’ve found that there are slightly different guidelines for the size of the primary subject in each type of shot.

In an Establishing Shot, individual human subjects tend to fill less than 10% of the frame, and the foreground fills only the bottom third of the frame. The horizon and background fill at least the top two thirds.

In a Long Shot, human subjects fill between 15-20% more than 60% of the time. The total range tends to be between 15 and 30% of the total frame. The rest of the frame is filled by the immediate location where the scene takes place, and the horizon is often not visible.

In a Medium Shot, human subjects fill between 30% and 60% of the frame. The rest of the frame is filled with the area surrounding the subject, though specific details may not be distinguishable.

In a Close Up, human subjects fill between 40 and 70% of the frame. In a Close Up the subject’s location is indistinguishable.

As we get closer to finalizing the curriculum for the app, I’ll be researching additional rules and guidelines we can implement. I hope these revelations will assist other trainers, journalists, and citizen journalists to create more interesting compositions. Particularly for newcomers and amateurs to he medium, effective use of different types of shots can greatly increase the impact of still and video images.

Brian Conley
@BaghdadBrian

I have been tasked with producing the security curriculum for SWN’s new mobile app. Because of that, I’ve spent quite a bit of time the last few weeks reading a variety of existing digital security and safety guides.

How much security or privacy is “enough” tends to raise consistent and sometimes rancorous debates within the relatively small community of digital security & safety researchers and trainers. Combine this with the large number of safety and security guides currently available, and the lack of any central review mechanism and you start to have an idea why this has been a tough few weeks.

While reviewing the tools available, and what the guides say about them, I’ve come to realize there are potentially fatal flaws even in a few relatively well-regarded tools. The curriculum I’m working on is focused on mobile-based reporting, so most of the tools and techniques I’ve been reviewing are related to mobile, and all are related to digital/online communications.

My observations thus far are that the issues with training users to improve the security and safety of their communications generally fall into a couple of camps.

Security issues related to the “design” of a tool.

Recently I realized that TextSecure, the most well-regarded secure texting app for Android has a serious security hole, due to the application being designed for “usability.” TextSecure is a tool that saves your text messages in an encrypted form, and allows two users of the app to send encrypted messages to each other that are decrypted on the recipient devices.

To increase the usability of the app it has a feature described by one of the developers as “in focus.” Understandably, a user of TextSecure would not want the passphrase used to decrypt a message to stop functioning while the message is being read, and thus “in focus.” Unfortunately, as the app currently functions, if I lock my screen while reading a message, or while the list of all available messages are open, the passphrase cache does not clear based on the preset timeout.

This is a huge issue because it also means if an activist or journalist is in the middle of reading/reviewing/deleting texts and detained, the most natural action for a user is to enable the screen lock. In the case of TextSecure, you will have to quit the program before enabling the screen lock if you want to release your passphrase.

This is a case where a tool being designed for usability actually puts the user at risk, and the technique necessary to ensure safety is not intuitive and thus has low usability.

Although TextSecure is a tool designed for increasing a user’s privacy and security, the tendency for non-security tools and technologies is to prioritize usability above all else.

Security issues related to simplicity of the tool, or users’ clarity as to how it works.

The largest general threat to users safety is due to a lack of understanding about how a tool works. Sometimes a tool recommended by many may have a very simple flaw that may be overlooked by the user.

Truecrypt is a tool for encrypting hard drives that is relatively well accepted by the security community across the board. However Truecrypt has a fairly simple flaw, that technologists may generally be aware of, but is often overlooked in the training literature. According to Truecrypt’s site:

When a file-hosted TrueCrypt container is stored in a journaling file system (such as NTFS), a copy of the TrueCrypt container (or of its fragment) may remain in the free space on the host volume. This may have various security implications. For example, if you change the volume password/keyfile(s) and an adversary finds the old copy or fragment (the old header) of the TrueCrypt volume, he might use it to mount the volume using an old compromised password (and/or using compromised keyfiles that were necessary to mount the volume before the volume header was re-encrypted). Some journaling file systems also internally record file access times and other potentially sensitive information. If you needplausible deniability, you must not store file-hosted TrueCrypt containers in journaling file systems. To prevent possible security issues related to journaling file systems, do one the following:

• Use a partition/device-hosted TrueCrypt volume instead of file-hosted.
• Store the container in a non-journaling file system (for example, FAT32).

That’s a long way of saying, if you want to use TrueCrypt safely, you need to be sure to use a non-journaling file system for the drive where you wish to use TrueCrypt.

Until recently, I was not aware of this serious issue. The Protektor Services and FrontlineDefenders Digital Privacy manuals do not cover this issue, yet TrueCrypt is now considered a standard tool by most organizations doing training. I recently assisted a training on TrueCrypt, yet I was unaware of the flaw. This tells me, even if the issue was covered (I am fairly certain it was not) it wasn’t covered well enough that I, a relatively knowledgeable user, picked up on the issue.

When some of the most well accepted tools have serious flaws, and despite the existence of very simple solutions, these solutions are not made clear in the standard security training literature, we have a problem.

Security issues related to the usability/accessibility and actual functionality of tools to common users.

This is the elephant in the room. Users will not adopt tools that lack usability, no matter how high their need for security. This fact appears to have been key to the creation of Cryptocat, a relatively new security tool, which has recently been quite a bit in the media spotlight.

The problem with Cryptocat, as many have pointed out, is that usability may lead directly to broad user adoption, and users’ lack of understanding of how the technology works means they won’t be aware of the threats posed by Cryptocat.

Cryptocat aims to “Provide Universally Accessible Encrypted Instant Messaging.” Unfortunately, at the moment Cryptocat does this primarily through the use of SSL, which is far from a guaranteed measure of security. It also does not “anonymize you,” nor “protect against keylogggers” or “untrustworthy people.”

The good news is that Cryptocat seems to be providing a good lesson to the community. There has been a really engaging discussion on Stanford’s LiberationTech mailing list regarding the responsibilities of security researchers and trainers to the wider community of users. Nadim, the lead developer of Cryptocat, is taking on the difficult task of developing a cryptography project that is usable, clear to the user, and truly secure.

Lastly in the world of mobile security, individuals seem to be increasingly aware of the manifold risks posed by their phones and smartphones. However, there is one major flaw that is seldom discussed. This flaw is, essentially, the difficulty posed by the specific technology used to store data on smartphones. As my colleague Nathan Freitas put it recently:

Training orgs must ensure that they teach people “How to smash a smartphone into a thousand pieces using a heavy lamp and flush it down the toilet,” as standard curriculum.

Fortunately there’s another option for users of the latest Android OS phones: Full Disk Encryption. The implementation combines usability, clarity for the user, and high functionality. These factors all combine to ensure that Full Disk Encryption can and should be recommended as a standard practice for activists, journalists, and privacy advocates who have access to phones running Android 4.0.

I hope the curriculum we are producing will meet these requirements as well. Moving forward, I’ll focus on a simple test to determine to what degree a manual or tool provide for the safety of the user. Measuring the usability, clarity, and actual secure/private/anonymous functionality of a tool should determines the degree to which one should depend on it for safety.

Usability + Clarity + Functionality = Safety.

Abdelqadr Fassouk and Yusuf Badi worked together as part of a three man team during our video boot camp in Misurata. Together they worked to produce a story about the head of the nursing department at Misurata’s only hospital.

The team did great visual work at the time, demonstrating a clear understanding of how to produce brief news packages. However they missed one small detail. They decided to record the video without audio.

When Louis and I explained their mistake, Abdelqadr and Yusuf insisted on reshooting the piece in its entirety. They exemplified a typical character of Misuratis, willingness to do whatever it took to get the job done.

Though the two men work well as a team, it’s clear sometimes they face some tension. Abdelqadr wished to learn the basics of editing. He wanted to finish the piece quickly and submit it to the election awareness campaign SWN was working on with the support of Doha Centre for Media Freedom. Yusuf, on the other hand, was far more interested in cutting and re-cutting the piece. His goal was not to finish the piece, but to understand the editing software, deleting the finished sequence and starting from scratch each time.

The term “Frenemies” might be fitting. Both men were generally good humored and if they aren’t getting in each other’s way, I trust they’d have no better companion in such a trying time.

Despite their good company, I am greatly concerned about their safety. The Facebook era has meant that repeated false claims of their release have been widely distributed by colleagues, friends, and fellow Libyans who desperately want the news to be true. As of this writing, Abdelqadr and Yusuf are still detained, and though their general whereabouts are believed to be inside Bani Walid, their specific location is unknown.

Misurata and Bani Walid have a longstanding feud, exacerbated by the Libyan revolution. The kidnapping of two much-loved journalists from Misurata has pushed the conflict again to the front of discourse about the future of the new Libyan state. So far, Facebook rumors notwithstanding, negotiations have not yet completely broken down. Though many are campaigning to use the kidnapping as a pretext to return to war, they’ve thus far not been successful. For the sake of Abdelqadr, Yusuf, and all of Libya, I hope our friends will be freed without further violence.

Brian Conley
Small World News

[For additional information about Abdelqadr Fassouk and Yusuf Badi, see the Committee to Protect Journalists's Libya alerts, Reporters Without Borders, and articles by the Libya Herald, Associated Press, and McClatchy.]

Most of the guys (they are all guys, unfortunately) picked up cameras during the fighting that ravaged their town last year and became the media arm of the uprising. Some worked as fixers for the international press. They are amateurs who have more experience filming in situations of intense stress than most professionals. But though they have proven their bravery and bonafides as war photographers and cameramen, displaying their trophies– I was shown several pictures of Qadaffi’s corpse with one of our proud trainees working a camera in the frame (pictured above)– they seem to have not quite figured out how they will transition to becoming peacetime media professionals.

In addition to their inexperience, we can add their youth and thirst for adrenaline as obstacles to professionalism. Maybe there is less glory in covering a local election than a firefight, so there’s a constant push to spice things up, to add special effects to any production. Dramatic music. Anything from After Effects: explosions, fire, wild text animation.

What kind of work will they produce? Will they take up the calling of journalism and its accompanying watchdog ethic, at least as we traditionally understand it in the west, or will they continue to produce propaganda for their “side”– their town and their Katibas [militias or brigades]– as they risked their lives to do during the revolution?

Our challenge is to temper some of their enthusiasm and show that there is satisfaction in assembling a documentary style story about real life. To that end we are pushing them to defy their own instincts and make something “boring,” maybe just to make us, the foreigners, happy. So far it’s working: all the trainees are making projects that conform to the vision we set out, showing disciplined and respectful attitudes toward what we are telling them to do (they take pride in having that kind of attitude here).

Misrata is not traditionally a media town, but the field is open for these young guys to build a professional media sector here, if they want it.

Sixteen journalists and mediamakers from all over Misrata were present. Misrata TV, Tobacts TV, Tobacts FM and the Freedom Group all sent representatives to the training. It was great to see journalists from across the city sit together and collaborate. We saw similar attitudes in our training in Tripoli, however its clear that there is a quite a bit more competition between media in Tripoli, while in Misrata they seem less concerned about competing directly with each other.

We hoped that being able to show the results of our first training in Tripoli would make it easier to explain the goal of the workshop and the national campaign. This was not the case. I think its quite possible this made our task more difficult in some ways. The trainees latched onto whatever criticism they had of an individual video. Only a few seemed able to recognize the greater impact or potential reach. Its an understandable difficulty, there is very little history of individuals speaking for themselves, and even less of listening to such individuals.

Perhaps it just takes time for the notion to sink in. Later in the day several individual trainees presented quite compelling story ideas, after previously seeming to have not a clue how to approach the concept. It is my belief that one of the best ways to assist Libyans to move toward unity and broader understanding, is simply to show as diverse an array of individual Libyans as possible. Opening a space for Libyans to hear from a truly diverse cross-section of their fellow citizens can serve to create bonds not possible through more direct means. Yet when you have never had a space for individuals to speak their minds freely, its hard to grasp the importance, or even the relevance of such stories.

By the end of the day the trainees had broken up into a half dozen groups. They told me most of them in each group were from different organizations and had not worked together before. I’m looking forward to see what the Misrati trainees produce. They are a strong and dedicated bunch. If they apply themselves, and believe in the value of human stories from everyday Misratis, I expect they’ll create some great work in the next four days.

There is some sense in Libya that Misrata is a world apart, a sort of city-state where residents started the work of building the post-Qadaffi order on an accelerated timetable. City council elections were successfully held here in February of this year, months ahead of June’s planned national assembly elections (the national assembly will select a committee to draft Libya’s constitution). Misrata already has three of its own TV channels. Its victorious brigades have not been fully disbanded. As in much of the rest of the country these armed groups fall under the merely nominal authority of the national defense ministry, and do pretty much as they please.

We were received warmly by our hosts from the local media council at a spacious TV station by the sea. It was already late, but more than half of our prospective trainees were there to greet us. Brian introduced us with a now established good cop-bad cop routine, and prodded everyone to not be outdone by the Tripoli workshop’s videos; we expect strong work here. The facilities are excellent and the young people we met, many of whom established themselves with front-line reporting during the uprising, seem eager. We are told we are the first foreign media trainers in the city.

Guiding the enthusiasm on display to contribute to an election awareness campaign that is nationwide may present a challenge, as Misrata is still mending and residents are keen to display the wounds of their war. We hope to appeal to a sense of national purpose that will transcend local pride, as the contest of regional loyalties happening in Libya right now is one of the biggest obstacles in rebuilding the nation.

First we asked the trainees to propose compelling characters, initially a fish cleaner, teacher, revolutionary commander, Libyan Army soldier, an Amazigh elder, and a girl just one month too young to vote. After this we began focusing on the visual question. How can we tell the story of each character with visual sequences?

This is one of the most difficult concepts to teach aspiring video producers. Each sequence is generally made of five basic shots. Often trainees hear this and assume it means that any video can be produced with ONLY five shots. Often this mistake leads to videos with very little b-roll or visuals. The concept is to create series of sequences, each made up of any number of the five basic shots. These sequences are then put together, under the direction of the interview, to show the story being told by the interview subject.

Each group had to decide how to tell their subject’s story with visual sequences. Subsequent discussions led some groups to abandon their initial idea. Other groups found that their subjects, who had been receptive initially, became hesitant when faced with a camera. Others simply refused to answer their phones. This was a good lesson for all of the trainees in the importance of flexible planning on deadline.

We began the training with 20 trainees, by the end of day 2 there were less than 12. Such attrition has often been the pattern in Libya. Trainees’ work habits and commitments may be less than stable at times. When the trainees went out to shoot their stories, there were just 4 groups, of between 2 and 3 each. These groups subsequently produced 6 stories in part, completing just 4 by the end of the workshop.

The only similarity between the trainees who completed their video was an utter determination to complete their task. The skill level and previous access to camera equipment varied wildly. Two of the three tv stations represented completed a video, while the other half of the videos were produced by freelancers. Moving forward we will endeavor to provide more assistance to the less experienced and less confident trainees.

By the end of the next three weeks, and four more workshops,we hope to continue to diversify the content produced by trainees. We hope to produce videos representing a broader array of Libyan citizens, including women and conservative Muslims for example.

On to Misrata for our second workshop.

We are excited by the broad support we have received from the Doha Centre for Media Freedom. With their support Small World News has developed a program that looks beyond training. We are using the phrase “production bootcamp” because we see each event as more than “training.” Our goal is to work side-by-side with Libyans across the country to produce a series of videos. These videos will form a campaign over the next several weeks encouraging Libyans to vote.

There is a general lack of capacity in the Libyan media to produce short, dynamic news packages quickly. Libyan news currently focuses primarily on talk shows, and studio-based news programming. By encouraging a bootcamp, on-the-job style experience,  trainees will learn theory that is quickly informed by practice.

Currently there is also a huge lack of real information about the election. The day before registration began on May 1, many Libyans did not even know where to register. Others were confused about the exact purpose of registration. Furthermore, many Libyans are even unclear about when the elections should occur. Its June 19^th according to our latest information, yet many still believe it is June 23^rd.

The workshops will bring together a diverse group of media makers in each city. These trainees will work together in a series of production teams, conceiving a story, shooting the story, and finally assembling, all in a matter of days. We have crafted the campaign around the idea that individual Libyans are best suited to convince their fellow citizens to vote. We are attempting to blend short documentary features, telling one individual story, with energetic, get-out-the-vote style language. We hope this innovative approach will connect with average Libyans and educate them about the upcoming election.

By pooling our knowledge together we can all benefit by seeing what has worked for us in different locations, and help avoid making the same mistakes over and over. It’s important that we take the time to step back and communicate with our peers on the work we’re all dedicated to.

Here at Small World News we’re looking forward to seeing the results, so be sure to add your voice to the census today.

SWN Trainer Mark Rendeiro in Georgia

Earlier this month I went to work at IREX Georgia in Tblisi, on behalf of Small World News, to give workshops for their Gmedia initiative. The workshops were focused on digital advocacy, with participants from many different types of media, NGO’s and even some independent individuals. They all came with a desire to learn more and further develop their new media presence in some form or another.

While some may have already been heavily using social networking platforms for communicating their messages, others were still developing a strategy about which platform to make use of and, of course, how best to do so. So with my years of experience in this field, a curiosity to learn first-hand about the Georgian context, and with the support of an enthusiastic crew at IREX Georgia, I set out to address their needs.

Our sessions were centered on, though not limited to, three particular tools:

1 ” Blogs, the orgin and inspiration for so many of today’s social media applications.

2 ” Facebook, the rapidly expanding, regularly used social networking tool which happens to be very important in Georgia.

3 ” Twitter, how best to use twitter to communicate your message as well as engage others even in a context where it is not the dominant application.

Beyond using these three as the pillars of the workshop sessions, we spent alot of time talking about specific cases, and what could be learned from them. There was also ample time set aside for individual consultations with those who wanted help with their projects or organizational web strategies for advocacy and outreach.

Structuring the work this way gave me plenty of time to first get to know participants concerns. I got a feel for what was old news and what was new and interesting to them. When I finally did get to sit one-on-one with some participants, it was a chance to make an immediate impact as well as watch them use the things they had just learned in the sessions. Yes.. a bit of satisfaction on the trainer’s part.

We think this visual emphasis will make the learning curve easier for beginners as well as make the skills and information translate across cultures and languages more clearly.

The guide will focus on the following elements: Security, Tools, & Media Production. Wrapping a production guide around a security guide is what has always made the most sense to us. Even when you have the best guides for all three areas in front of you it can be difficult to see how different parts of the process will impact the other. By addressing security concerns while reviewing production basics will help producers remain more aware, more alert, and ultimately safer.

Initially this guide is being designed for trainees and activists looking to produce media in the Arab world. Ever since our Alive in Baghdad days and more recently after our work on Alive in Egypt activists across the Arab world have requested additional support from us. We’ve planned to release the guide in Arabic and English initially, and we’re working to have it translated into Korean, Spanish soon after it’s release. If you’re interested in translating the guide into a language you’re fluent in please let us know, we’re hoping to make the guide as widely readable as possible.

We’re scheduled to release the guide at the end of July 2011. We’re planning to publish it under a creative commons Attribution-ShareAlike license and made freely available online for anyone to download on Small World News. If you’d like more information, details, or you’d like to be apart of the review process, don’t hesitate to contact me or anyone at Small World News.

But what does citizen media offer the general public – consumers, voters, and interested parties? The short answer is Accountability.

In the relationship between ordinary citizens and policy-makers, the value of citizen media goes both ways. The same data provided to decision makers can be turned around and used by citizens to hold the authorities accountable.

To see this in action, let’s look at a recent editorial written by US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman. In it, he tells a “tale of two cities” – pre-revolution Tripoli and post-revolution Benghazi – and offers what it is he thinks the US’ interests and priorities in Libya should be.

My visit to Tripoli in December was full of dark threats and ominous portents. The fear was palpable. One Libyan official told me that if you so much as dared to speak of Qadhafi’s paranoia and quirks you would be killed. Qadhafi’s thugs had taken to harassing our embassy personnel. It was a harbinger of worse things to come…

Last week in Benghazi, though, I saw what Libya could become — and it was clear as day why it is in the U.S. interest to see the Benghazi vision for Libya succeed over Qadhafi’s. The collective sense of joy and opportunity was unlike anything I have experienced in my diplomatic career…

He also makes a few claims that might be surprising – or questionable – to the average reader.

Everyone, from rights activists, to businessmen, to members of the Transitional National Council (TNC), projected a sense of exhilaration. Civil society organizations of every stripe seemed to pop up almost before my eyes. Citizens seemed astonished and delighted that they can at last speak their minds, and plan for a different Libya than the one they have endured for the past 40-plus years.

In the many years I have worked in the Middle East, I’ve never been to an Arab city so grateful to the United States. Libyans in Benghazi know how brutal their former ruler is. They are profoundly appreciative to have been spared what would have undoubtedly been a massacre of enormous proportions in mid-March, had NATO not intervened. Imagine walking in the main square of a teeming Arab city and having people wave the American flag, clamor for photographs with a visiting American official, and celebrate the United States as both savior and model.

So if you’re a US citizen reading this in Politico, how do you know if what Feltman is saying about Libya is true?

Simple. Ask a Libyan.

In this case, that means citizen media produced by Libyans – Alive in Libya.

Are there civil society organizations of every stripe popping up seemingly overnight? Yes.

The Libya Red Crescent has stepped up and is working to seek out missing persons, those “disappeared” by the Gaddafi regime. Benghazi police have, of their own volition, gone back to work to restore order and civility to the city. And the Youth for Change (YoC), a wholly new organization, has emerged to better connect the restive youth of Libya to the leaders of their government ministries.

Are Libyans planning for a new society, different from the tyranny and inequality they’ve previously experienced? Yes.

Volunteers have set up media assistance centers where journalists can access partners and resources to better tell their story – a far cry from the strictly controlled propaganda of the previous regime. Even the TNC, the rebel council only in existence for a few short months, is deliberate in its attempts to meet the egalitarian standards of a new, pluralist society.

And what about the most questionable piece, the scenes of Libyans waving American and other flags in the streets? Also true.

See for yourself:

Just as the policy-makers don’t need to blindly trust their bureaucracies, the general public doesn’t have to simply take the words of policy-makers at face value. Citizen media allows you to verify official statements, and to hold those officials accountable.

Citizen media is a powerful tool, not only for those producing it, but for everyone. Remember this the next time an editorial like Feltman’s comes along. You don’t have to trust it. Check it against the stories of those who aren’t official policy makers, those who live and work on the ground every day.