Posts tagged with Arab Spring.

Heba Gemal is an Egyptian, formerly with Google in the U.S., who became highly engaged with events in Egypt and who is now a senior global network partner manager with TechSoup Global, based in the Fundacja TechSoup office i

In today's Huffington Post, TechSoup Global founder and co-CEO Daniel Ben-Horin illuminates the genesis of TechSoup's Restart Romania challenge in a wide-ranging post referencing Soros Foundation Romania's Radu Motoc, Adbusters

As mentioned in a previous post, it was a big inspiration for us when 200,000 people got out to clean-up Romania last year, as was the later harnessing of the web for the Arab Spring.  We were not seeking an Eastern European Spring but what North Africa managed through

Since 2009 we have watched Romania adopt and experiment with social media for social change while building a network of techie friends.  As we began testing various models to get these programmers engaging with the world-beyond-code, we found a group of (mostly) young Romanians trained to think about solving problems, knowledgeable of a wide range of tool sets and just as passionate about

From Expression to Listening

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to participate in the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference (a.k.a. RightsCon.org) sponsored by ACCESS -- an advocacy organization that focuses on digital and internet rights.

The young Romanian guy looks at the camera and straight facedly enumerates the three contributions of his new website and specifically how it will benefit Romanian "regular Joes." The first contribution is,

"Regular Joe will learn from the website where bribe prices are lower and will use free market principles to get the price of bribery down, down, down."

The Arab Spring has reminded us of the power of technology and the prominent role it can play in social upheaval. But despite the extraordinary events of the Spring, it remains to be seen if technology is the great equalizer it could be, or yet another tool that concentrates power in the hands of the few who try to speak for the many.