DEMOCRACY NOW INTERVIEW MENTIONED ALAA
DEMOCRACY NOW INTERVIEW MENTIONED ALAA
This is the part where they talked about Alaa
“ETHAN ZUCKERMAN More recently, our friend Alaa Abd El-Fatah, who often reports on the Egyptian blogosphere for us -- he's a democracy activist, an open source activist and blogger from Egypt -- was detained as part of the protests for an Egyptian independent judiciary. What's incredible is that Alaa is actually blogging from prison. He's writing notes in English and in Arabic on scraps of paper. He's passing them to his lawyers and to friends who come to visit with them. They bring them to his wife Manal, who is posting them on their joint blog.
AMY GOODMAN: And how are Egyptian authorities dealing with this?
ETHAN ZUCKERMAN: Well, it's an interesting thing. Egypt is one of the countries that has gone after bloggers in the past, and so there have been a number of bloggers who have been arrested or detained. I suspect part of what's going on in Alaa’s situation was they arrested him for presence at this protest but hadn't realized what an outcry there would be in the blogosphere. What's quite amazing is that we've got bloggers, both bloggers from the Middle East and actually bloggers from around the world, who are putting up badges, who are writing about the situation. Many, many more people are aware of this judicial protest in Cairo than would have been aware had the situation not come about. And this is the hope, to sort of activate this whole network of bloggers around the world, to give people sort of a sense of solidarity that, because we're all sharing our opinions and sharing our views, we're all invested in this notion that we want to be able to speak freely in this online space.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about open source? You mention that word. A lot of people don't know what that means.
ETHAN ZUCKERMAN: Open source is a way of licensing software so that people can look at the underlying code of the software and make changes to it, if they wish. A lot of the software that makes blogging possible, and frankly, a lot of software that makes the internet possible is open source software. Many bloggers use open source tools to run their blogs. We use an open source tool called WordPress, which has allowed us to customize it, then turn a fairly simple system into, actually for us, a very complicated newsroom management system.
Alaa, as it turns out, is a Gerbil hacker. He's involved with the open source Gerbil content project, and so the people who are supporting his release are this sort of wonderful mix of bloggers who know his blog work, open source developers who know his work within the Arabization and internationalization of open source software, and democracy activists. It's a really fun little coalition. “
This is the part where they talked about Alaa
“ETHAN ZUCKERMAN More recently, our friend Alaa Abd El-Fatah, who often reports on the Egyptian blogosphere for us -- he's a democracy activist, an open source activist and blogger from Egypt -- was detained as part of the protests for an Egyptian independent judiciary. What's incredible is that Alaa is actually blogging from prison. He's writing notes in English and in Arabic on scraps of paper. He's passing them to his lawyers and to friends who come to visit with them. They bring them to his wife Manal, who is posting them on their joint blog.
AMY GOODMAN: And how are Egyptian authorities dealing with this?
ETHAN ZUCKERMAN: Well, it's an interesting thing. Egypt is one of the countries that has gone after bloggers in the past, and so there have been a number of bloggers who have been arrested or detained. I suspect part of what's going on in Alaa’s situation was they arrested him for presence at this protest but hadn't realized what an outcry there would be in the blogosphere. What's quite amazing is that we've got bloggers, both bloggers from the Middle East and actually bloggers from around the world, who are putting up badges, who are writing about the situation. Many, many more people are aware of this judicial protest in Cairo than would have been aware had the situation not come about. And this is the hope, to sort of activate this whole network of bloggers around the world, to give people sort of a sense of solidarity that, because we're all sharing our opinions and sharing our views, we're all invested in this notion that we want to be able to speak freely in this online space.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about open source? You mention that word. A lot of people don't know what that means.
ETHAN ZUCKERMAN: Open source is a way of licensing software so that people can look at the underlying code of the software and make changes to it, if they wish. A lot of the software that makes blogging possible, and frankly, a lot of software that makes the internet possible is open source software. Many bloggers use open source tools to run their blogs. We use an open source tool called WordPress, which has allowed us to customize it, then turn a fairly simple system into, actually for us, a very complicated newsroom management system.
Alaa, as it turns out, is a Gerbil hacker. He's involved with the open source Gerbil content project, and so the people who are supporting his release are this sort of wonderful mix of bloggers who know his blog work, open source developers who know his work within the Arabization and internationalization of open source software, and democracy activists. It's a really fun little coalition. “
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