Few days back, I got an invitation from GISWatch to contribute a report on Lebanon towards this year’s Report.

For you who are not familiar, “The GISWatch Reports are a series of yearly reports covering the state of the information society from the perspectives of civil society
GISWatch is not only a publication, it is a process. The long term goal of the project is to build policy analysis skills and ‘habits’ into the work of civil society organisations that work in the areas of ICT for development, democracy and social justice.” read more

This year authors aka “7adrteh” included are asked to focus on a single story, event or incident and to use that in the report to discuss the various issues it raises relevant to the internet, human rights and social resistance.

Since you know, this report involves ICT in Lebanon – I thought it is only fair that the community decides what story is worth sharing with the world.

so please – leave a comment or drop me an email and let me know what you think is the most relevant and beautiful story to write about that includes human rights, social resistance and the internet.
I will be bugging some key activists and since i am really really onto collaboration stuff , I will be sharing an online google doc with the content of the report. It should be fun to watch Lebanon’s report get interactively written and reviewed. I hope that this process alone sets our report apart.

Yalla – waiting up for ideas :) and yes, if your idea gets selected for the report – I am buying you drinks :)

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I am trying to document the “original” ways i think of for avoiding censorship :) – So in case you are wondering – outsmarting censorship 1 is here

I was working with yahoo pipes the other day and a light bulb came up – yes you can use those pipes to aggregate content from one or many sources and read them ( considering they have full RSS )  – and this is a hell of a nice way to avoid censorship for blocked domain names .

1 – go to http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

2 – Click : create a pipe

3 – Drag and drop “Fetch site feed” into the working area – simply enter the url

4 – Connect the dots

Here is an example – click for full view

Save your feed – once it gives pipe saved – click the “run pipe ” like

You will see the following screen – click for full view

as you can see the link to the pipe is : http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=583f9de3d2b8ca104fed56f7a03c8c74

it is no longer the “censored” migh.info

You can read it using RSS – subscribe with google reader , yahoo reader – you can even get the PHP code and embed it in your site.

The main “Benefits” of this are :

- No compromising of internet speed like using TOR example.

- Reading and subscribing to all “censored” content in one click once you get bit familiar and aggregate all your “censored blogs” in one place :)

Hope you find this useful :) – I thought i’d quick share it – hope you won’t need it

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Social media and demonstrations are 2 buzz words that go well together everywhere – specially in Lebanon.

With all the protesting going around – it is really engaging, exciting and supporting if people can LIVE tweet, receive feedback (encouragement, tips, warnings), spread the word – share pics and videos ….

But In Lebanon and maybe some other countries the problem faced are :

• No 3G
• Even if there is 3G, Huge number of people (thousands) in limited number of cells make 3G useless or least to say very slow
• Internet plans for cell phones in Lebanon are super lame – i can get 25MB/month quota non-renewable even if i want to repay
• Access to internet from laptops not phones is sometimes needed to upload more “advanced” content on the spot.

So the solution i want to share is super simple – super easy and super effective :

• Get one of those small laptops with a decent battery life ( laptops have an easy 5 hours battery life now)
• Connect it to a mobile internet solution like mobi
• Turn your computer into a hot spot and share your internet connection with others, walk around casually holding the laptop semi-open or put ur laptop somewhere within eye-sight
• Enjoy being the “heart of the party” – the hot spot of the demonstration

How to turn your computer into a hotspot and share your internet with others :

It may sound complicated – but it is super easy actually – Here is a tutorial from lifehacker how to do it – but there is even an easier way that I recommend .

Go to Connectify.me – download the 2.4 MB software – Install on your computer (next, next , next , finish )

There is an Easy setup wizard for you that takes less than 2 mins – things can not go wrong :)

Happy Hactivism !

(you can turn also your cell into a hotspot btw and you can also notify me about the demo so i can auto aggregate all the images to ImageFeed )

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I know i am supposed to copy/paste one of those nice and well written posts about TwestivalBeirut and breast cancer awareness and post it to my blog – but heck – this is quite boring for me to do so since you can easily figure out what twestival beirut is by looking here and here and here oh and here too !

Instead I am gonna share what it is like to geek it up in Twestival team and things i have learned.

It all started when Sana Tawileh contacted me asking some weirdo techy questions about retrieving and restoring MySQL backups from WordPressMu into a custom made CMS – I was like euh – what ? I need to research that – but yeah can be done somehow in theory – but easier if I do it, not you – After I asked, it turned out it was for twestival beirut 2010 backup – i mentioned – hey, if you are doing twestival 2011 and need tech stuff to be done, feel free to contact me – w ya heik l 3al2a li 3lekta ( joking ) - So she added me to the team and I was in .

First of all – we were in touch with twestival global team and thanks to their kick-ass geek – we managed to perform the above restore task.

Then came the turn of the boring and typical task of  having a hosting , creating emails, configuring them, send test emails, call over the phone to check if they received them, configure gmails blabalbla.

Things got more interesting when I was added to a closed facebook group used by the dear Darine, Naema, Lucienne and Sana to co-ordinate tasks and share info (I just noticed ano all members are women lol).

Being in the group was awesome – since we are already friends, collaboration was really smooth – somehow collaborating on facebook gives it a “friends” feeling – the interface is less “serious” than a google doc for example – less pro then those paid solutions from big companies – there is the “like” button – we could show appreciation and encouragement to each other upon completion of tasks. The like button was even used as a “poll” ! When we wanted to chat, we simply used the Facebook Chat option ;p

I can compare the facebook group to somehow a better-google-wave as well – you have many “waves” started on the main wall – people react to them, there is the like/poll button for voting, we got notifications to our emails that we could read. Sharing Media like images and videos is very intuitive – facebook group even has docs you can use for creating task list and such. What I loved about the facebook docs is that it is somehow Notepad but with bold and ordered lists ! I am secretly praying they don’t ruin it by turning it into something bulky and bloated. Notepad is all you need for task lists and info sharing !

It was the first time I really use facebook for collaboration – when it comes to volunteering and the way we used it in the team really it kicked ass ! Beats email, beats google docs, beats separate image sharing, beats chat , beats wave :) and it has this social aspect that i loved.

Anyhow, enough on the facebook part.

Since it is twestival – it was really shameful if we don’t put the word “tweet” in it – so thanks to Lucienne Hanna – we got in touch with Terranet – they granted us our internet wish/dream.

In a country known to be the slowest in the world – when an ISP told me make a wish for covering twestival and we will grant it – a really really wide smile shot up my face !

So I told them we will be doing the following :

- Live Streaming on the global twitter channel (ouh yeah ! )

- Live twitter panel

- Live pics from PhotoBooth

- Live pics aggregated from attendance

- Uploading of videos and interviews with attendance

- Tweeting for the attendees

We estimated that live streaming minimum reqs are 700kB/s upload – we calculated and crunched numbers – and decided to ask for a 1.5 MB up and down.

Trust me when i say – you better ask someone for his soul then for good connectivity – but TerraNet granted us our wish and put internet and tweets in our twestival.

Then came time for logistics – get the video cams, cams, someone to shoot at booth – Abzyy will be at the booth shooting people and funkyozzi trusted me with her 2 video cams (those cams are now pretty familiar with leb tweeps ;p )

Setting up the website was really easy – the blog takes custom HTML – the donate buttons and tickets online sale are modules provided by twestival global – it was Sana who set them up. I tried to help the lady – but it was mind boggling for me to go through some of the processes – specially the donate button ;p

Twestival really provides with all the tools and platform needed , they send tutorials, provide a person to follow up with in problems – so it is super well organized when it comes to tech ( yeah, i am impressed) – It was really fun and easy doing the tech work – I can’t say the same for the PR, design, social media , traditional media,content writing work – since they require way more energy and effort - for once i am really glad I got the easy part ;p

All those efforts is to fund raise for a good cause and most important celebrate the twitter community around the world and the change it can help bring around.

Before I bore you more – just one thing I would like to say : in beirut we have a twestival – a twitter festival – how geeky is that ! and to top it off – Elie Saab – yes THE elie saab is bringing fashion to the geeky world ! *there is a really wide grin that goes on my face each time i read this*

I will leave you with this pic as a last inspiration :) Enjoy it

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I was wandering around trying to pick up a book for my dad – which is a really really really really hard task considering the kind of books he likes and the huge number that he already read and he is really picky -  he is usually after a certain edition from a certain publisher ( now you know where i got my bookworm genes from )

So after giving up on finding him a new book that he might like – i decided to get some classics for him to re-read.

As i was browsing – i ran into Gebran full works collection – i knew my dad read him a thousand times – but i started making up excuses like we don’t have the whole collection in one place, no one is ever bored of reading gebran, right ? it is my duty as a lebanese to have gebran work ! and it is less likely i can find a kindle edition of the arabic work… so eventually i got <strike> me </strike> him the collection.

The books landed home – i had a nice book discussion with dad over gebran , he told me he read them many times and he read the explanation of their explanation. He told me it is ok, that he will re-read and that i should keep the books (i had growing suspicion that he was onto my little trick)

and so i started reading The madman and oh boy ! how i regret and how ashamed I am that i didn’t do that earlier.
Reading him thru high school was a homework – it was nice and all – but still – it was a homework that i was eager to finish and go play
But Reading him now is -   least to say – a pure pleasure that i enjoy.

I can’t write a review – i am too speechless for that – instead I will move forward and read his next work and will leave you with a pdf version of the book.
I am not sure about copyright laws, but technically I didn’t steal the book ;p I searched online, found an online html version and  just converted it to pdf format and shared it here.

As for the “i don’t read ebooks” and the “i insist on cutting trees to educate myself” people – you can grab your copy from Antoine online for 5$ !!!!

I will be flooding you with more book reviews for Gebran – you will have to put up with me – hopefully the next one – i will get over myself and write about the book itself.

Enjoy the good read and share your favorite parts.

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