Hanging out with Venezuela’s veteran bloggers in 2006
It had been nearly four years since I was last in Caracas, hanging out with some of Venezuela’s earliest bloggers including Luis Carlos Diaz and Iria Puyosa. I am pleased, though not at all surprised, to see that both Luis Carlos and Iria are still committed to social change in Venezuela. Luis Carlos is now working for Centro Gumilla, one of Venezuela’s most respected think tanks, and Iria is developing a non-partisan, Ushahidi-based electoral observation platform for this coming September’s municipal elections. She is aware that proper election monitoring platforms need at least a year’s planning in order to spread awareness and form necessary partnerships, but she feels that it is worthwhile to at least learn from this year’s experience for the 2012 presidential election for the successor to Hugo Chavez.
When I was last in Venezuela Iria and Luis Carlos were two of the few individuals using digital technology to improve society. Luis Carlos was one of the instigators behind Elecciones 3D, an effort to document the last presidential elections and bridge the partisan divide, and Iria has been involved in a number of projects, most recently HablaVenzuela, to help bridge the divide between civil society and the humming Venezuelan blogosphere.
Today, Venezuela’s civil society and blogosphere are much more connected in no small part thanks to the work of Carlos Correa and his team at Espacio Publico, an organization that has long published annual reports on freedom of the press in Venezuela but is now focusing more actively on promoting journalistic practices in Venezuelan civil society. They do this by holding new media workshops for NGO’s across the country to help them improve their communication, and by organizing events like last week’s Web 2.0: Ideas that Connect conference where I shared some observations about the use of social media for social change. Espacio Publico is also part of the ProAcceso coalition, which spreads awareness about the importance of access to public information and teaches activists how to request information from government agencies through litigation and other techniques.
The conference was a blast and I was overwhelmed by the kindness and enthusiasm of everyone present. Other international speakers included Xosé Pereira, a Galician professor of communication from the University of Santiago de Compostela; Francis Pisani, a French journalist who has lived all over the world and writes regularly for Le Monde and Mexico’s Reforma; and Olga Berrios, a Spanish activist
