Internet and Democracy Project

The Berkman Center recently announced their newest project, Internet and Democracy. The project will focus on the Middle East and include both research and the development of Internet tools for democratic activists in these areas. A graduate student and researcher for the project contacted me a little while back about the project to get some input and tips on the blogging situation in Iran. I'm interested in seeing what they come up with.


In the press release Jon Zittrain, a co-founder of the Berkman Center, noted one of the primary goals: "We want to help develop and test simple, lightweight tools for civic engagement online – tools that facilitate coordination among people who share a common cause, and good faith dialogue among people who disagree." Of course, I have my own ideas about what sort of projects they could create. Clearly, the main factors inhibiting free speech and democratic use of the Internet in Iran are censorship and accessibility. While its a difficult task to try an find solutions to these issues, there are a couple of areas where one could make headway. For instance, one of the first things that could be done with regards to censorship would be to compile and maintain a categorized list of censored websites, blogs, etc. This has been done on an informal level (Derakhshan's now defunct stop.censoring.us is one example), but could definitely be expanded upon and deepened. Of especial concern is the task of making this information available to netizens in Iran. Thinking about this problem from the angle of decentralized networks (think P2P filesharing) could provide solutions, as this is one of the potential strengths of blogging communities.

Another, perhaps more far-fetched approach to the question of accessibility would be to utilize the State Departments' Iranian democracy promoting budget to improve Internet access through remote servers. Is it out of the question to attempt some sort of remote Internet broadcasting into Iran, much as was done with satellite in the 90's? I'd argue if successful it would be more effective than spending that money on broadcasting propaganda tv as we are now.