Liz Henry's blog

Global Voices Citizen Media summit: Ory Okolloh, KenyaPundit

2008-06-28T09:20:21-05:00

Ory Okolloh blogs at KenyaPundit, and also is a co-founder of political sites Ushahidi and Mzalendo. I heard her speak this morning at Global Voices Citizen Media summit on her blogging experiences. Throughout the Kenyan elections and the political violence there, she updated her blog very actively, sometimes every hour. Her blog became the center of controversy. While she was not censored, blocked, filtered, or otherwise threatened by the government, she was the target of personal attacks on her blog in comments and in email. There was a lot of misogynist hate speech, sexual threats from people who deliberately tried to invalidate her political blogging and silence her because she was female.

Ory says that she does not regret choosing to blog under her real name. Her non-anonymous stance protected her, and brought her a lot of support from an international community of bloggers, journalists, and human rights activists. Once she became high profile because of the post-election violence, it was harder to shut her down because she wasn't anonymous.

Other writers, bloggers, activists, and others who were the targets of violence began to contact her, asking her to tell the stories they were afraid to tell. People who didn't have the tools to blog, or who were scared of reprisals, turned to her, to cover their stories as a citizen journalist. Positive comments from supporters helped her keep going under what was often a heavy burden of responsibility. Ory's dedication to blogging and new media, through Mzalendo, has helped to make the Kenyan parliament more transparent and more accountable to the people it serves.

Here's a few more links on Ory Okolloh: an interview from March 2008 from ICT4peace, an earlier interview from Down the Avenue blog in 2005, and a more personal view on My Heart's in Accra where Ory tells some of her life story, her geekiness, and her hopes for her daughter's future.

Global Voices Citizen Media summit: Noha Atef, Torture in Egypt

2008-06-28T06:53:33-05:00

Egyptian blogger Alaa Abdel Fatah spoke just now at Global Voices Summit about bloggers who resist government censorship. YouTube and mobile blogging and cameraphones are extremely important. But also, connecting bloggers and photobloggers to the wider struggle for democracy in Egypt. The stakes are very high for the government, and you can't fight in isolation to publish what you like without consequence to your body, to your freedom. Alaa spoke at length about Noha Atef (or Noha Atif, or Noha Al-Atif) who runs the Torture in Egypt site, Al-Tatheeb fi Masr, to document human rights abuses. She has lost jobs and her family has been threatened because of her dedicated years of blogging.

Noha tries to expose police officers accused of torturing multiple people. The newspaper Egypt Today reports that Noha began blogging to document cases of women being tortured as a way to pressure their husbands. Alaa explains that on the Torture in Egypt blog, there are photos, names, faces, and each incident is tagged with names of the officers who are alleged torturers. Thus, Noha's blog has become a database of evidence, which has been used in court cases against police abuse. Alaa says,

The police and government want to stop Noha any way they can. What can we do to protect this kind of speech? Realize the enemies of free speech are REALLY being threatened. This is not a soft cause. The persecution Noha faced is very subtle. She is a young lady living with her family. They started pressuring her parents, threatnening to kidnap and rape her. The family was able to exert so much pressure on her, she had to stop blogging completely for a while. They made her lose her job. Now she works for a more radical paper, has kept that job for 2 years, but she creates a very big problem in her family.

This relates back to my post yesterday from the Global Voices Advocacy meeting. Anyone blogging from within their home and family, and I feel especially women face this problem worldwide, may find privacy and anonymity tools to be useful.

Alaa also said something relevant to both women and men in considering censorship:

It's easier to stand up to a dictator than to stand up to your father.

This is not exactly "self-censorship" if you are dependent on your family, and may face domestic violence as well as direct political oppression, for your choice to speak in public, your survival can be threatened by your blogging.

Alaa's blog has a few posts in English, including many of his posts from 2006 about his time in jail for participating in peaceful protests. I recommend his blog to readers of BlogHer and also, the blogs I have mentioned before you can find from the Kolna Laila project, a roundup of Egyptian women's blogs.

Global Voices Advocacy Summit: Free speech online

2008-06-26T09:16:15-05:00

I'm in Budapest at the Global Voices Advocacy Summit, where over 50 blog and internet activists from around the world are here to talk about defending free speech online In morning sessions, presenters described the ways that countries block and filter bits and pieces of the Internet, including blogs and blog hosting sites. Currently, BlogHer readers are mostly from the U.S. and do not face government censorship. Yet privacy issues for women can also be domestic issues. Many women who blog share a computer, an email address, and a browser with their partner and family. The default for women in families is that they have no privacy -- and no expectation of privacy.

The techniques I describe below could allow, for example, a blogging mom and wife to surf the net and to blog from her own browser. Using a browser installed on a small, cheap USB drive she could keep on her keychain, she would get her own private history and cache and search terms, with the potential to read webmail and blog with a comforting layer of privacy and anonymity.

Here's the short version of what I heard. It's very easy to set up Torbrowser on a little keychain-size USB flash drive. There's a good step-by-step installation guide with pictures of each screen. What you need: a Windows computer, and a USB pen drive that's at least 50MB. (You can buy 1GB drives now for under $5.00.)

I recommend that anyone who wants to blog anonymously -- for real, not just with a pseudonym -- read Ethan Zuckerman's Guide to Anonymous Blogging with Wordpress and Tor, and read the EFF's How To Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else).

It may seem frivolous to connect the human rights issues that bloggers in Egypt or Myanmar face to a U.S. housewife's lack of domestic and personal privacy. Yet it's an important connection to point out, both for bloggers in the U.S. and for Global Voices Advocacy members to consider, because women in all countries have a greater basic lack of privacy and more limited access to computers and the Internet than men.

I believe that it is especially important for women to share their technical and blogging skills with each other in person. So, if you try some of these privacy tips, teach them to your friends who blog.

Here's some technical details and background from the Global Voices talks, explaining why governments censor the Internet, how they do it, and how to get around it.

Roger Dingledine described Tor, software that allows users to make connections and browse to sites blocked by their government. Here's the gist of what he said: What are the goals of governments which block parts of the net? They're trying to restrict certain kinds of information. Embarrassing information, corruption exposed, human rights violations. Oppositional information - movements, sites that organize protests, etc. By giving the impression that sites will be blocked, they produce a chilling effect. They don't have to block everything - only the most highly visible and effective sites. There is no reprisal or little against passive consumers of blocked information. It is producers or distributors who are in danger. Governments have economic, political, and social incentives to allow net access. How do they block sites? IP address and port; keyword searches in TCP packets; DNS requests are given bad redirects.

From the irc channel, there's mention of specific filtering software:

* Smartfilter, produced by US company Secure Computing, is used by Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Oman, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, and possibly in Iran.
* Feng points out that despite much filtering software coming from the U.S., China gets blamed in the media for exporting its censorship/internet filtering model.
* Here's the Council of Europe's recs on Freedom of Expression and filtering.
* A rumor of Singapore company Temasek building Burma's censorship system, unconfirmed; they may have just changed recently from Fortinet, a U.S. company.

To clarify what I said above about our readership: BlogHer's readers are primarily from US, Canada, UK, Australia, India, Germany, France, Philippines, China, Netherlands - in that order.

I'll be writing more tomorrow about the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit, I hope to have some good interviews posted of women who are bloggers and "citizen journalists" from all over the world.

BlogHer 2008: Accessibility of Westin St. Francis

2008-05-07T19:19:59-05:00

For over a year now, I have been traveling and going to professional conferences as a person with a disability, a wheelchair and crutches user. Abilities and disabilities vary wildly. My own issues are most often bathrooms, distances, exhaustion, and stairs. I am less aware of issues and solutions for people with visual impairments and for the deaf or hearing impaired community; I apologize for not addressing those issues here.

If you have mobility issues and wonder about the accessible geography of the conference, I have a ton of information!

My rollthrough of the Westin St. Francis Hotel filled me with confidence that this was a good hotel choice. Westin on wheels, baby! There are signs everywhere, good elevators, decent bathrooms, and while the hotel layout was a little bit spread out, it was doable. (Unlike scarily huge places like Navy Pier or, say, Moscone Convention Center.) What a fancy hotel, by the way, and I love the fancy scrolly things and the giant chandeliers and all that stuff. Wow. It's pretty. It's SWANKY.

The hotel is right on Union Square. It's on a hill, but not too steep of a hill. I wheeled two blocks uphill from Powell and Market, where the Powell St. BART station is, in my manual chair. I did it, but thought about losing my dignity and asking a stranger for a push. The curb cuts were okay for a manual or power chair, not perfect but reasonably smooth. Within 1 block of the hotel with just a little bit of an incline, there are restaurants, all sorts of good shops like Lush and H&M, Macys, tourist souvenier stuff, cafes, and the square itself which is a nice little park with fountains and trees.

The building is in two sections, the historic part on Geary and the "tower" bit which I think is on a different side of the block - maybe Powell?

So there are two banks of elevators.

I could reach the elevator buttons. Oh, you laugh. You think I'm not serious! But, I was in a hotel in Vancouver, where I could not! The laughter, it is bitter sometimes!

The main entrance on Powell, facing Union Square, has about 10 steps with a landing, and a handrail. For us wheelybots, there are two entrances, both on Geary. One is next to the parking garage, in the middle of the block. The other is in the parking garage itself.

In the garage, there are at least 5 van-accessible parking spots, on level ground right next to the entrance, with a marked crosswalk.

Most of the halls are carpeted, which I'm sure is nice for your feet but is hell on my wheels. Now you know why my triceps are so huge. We call it friction. Carpet, ugh!

There were 5 elevators and quite a lot of different staircases, big wide carpeted staircases with good handrails. The numerous staircases in every corner of the building are great for me because the elevators will be less crowded. Take the stairs if you feel up to it, you walkies!

Most of the conference will take place on the mezzanine level and 2nd floor. There are also two big rooms on the first floor in the Tower section of the hotel. I think we will be putting nicely drawn maps on the conference site and in the registration packets, so you'll be able to get the lay of the land.

Registration, food and coffee, the big sponsor rooms, the internet cafe area, and the big keynote sort of rooms are on the mezzanine level. The wheelchair accessible bathrooms are near the elevators, behind where the registration table will be. The big keynote rooms are at the other end of the hotel on that level, and while there is a bathroom on that side, it is up about 8 stairs. So if you are on wheels, you have to go a fairly long way, but it is not tragically long and -- so important -- there are signs everywhere on the walls. Now, if you can do some stairs with handrail, you are golden and can use the closer bathroom to the areas where there will be a lot of activity.

On the second floor, most of the conference rooms are on the other side of the building from where the rooms on the mezzanine are. So it is not an ideally "compact" space for people who get tired easily. However, there are two accessible bathrooms and they are central to where the conference room areas are! I noticed the child care area will be pretty close to everything (unlike at BlogHer 07 or 06).

One detail that you and your walkie friends might be aware of. There are many exits from the conference areas, but most of them involve a lot of stairs. I could totally forsee the situation where I am with a crowd of people all wanting to book out of there to get dinner, and they go down the million stairs and I am left going around the long way - which length seems trivial to the vigorous and able bodied, but which means extra time, pain, and exhaustion for someone like me. I will be getting a lot of room service, because getting around the conference from floor to floor and room to room is for sure going to use up all my spoons.

Some of the rooms have, or might have, raised stages. There is one ramp which they can move from room to room if needed, and there's a stairs-and-handrail setup that is portable.

The hotel spa, pool, and gym are down some stairs, but are accessible from two small lifts. The hotel gets major points from me for the lift being turned on, working, and having the key in it. At other places I have not been so lucky, and there will be a lift, but no one knows how to work it, it needs a manager, I'm not allowed to operate it by myself, or worse, I'll go up it and then the key will disappear and I can't get back down! Well, the Westin St. Francis did it right, and there is simply a handy lift, available for use. In it, you can pretend you are in a rocketship airlock or going to your superhero or supervillain lair in your private mineshaft pneumatic tube.

The rooftop lounge area (I think it is a bar?) is reportedly accessible, but I didn't see it. At the bottom of the "tower" elevator there is a sign that I very much appreciated, that said "No accessible bathroom on 32nd floor, please use disabled-accessible bathroom here in the lobby" with an arrow pointing it out. Now, that is just cool. You might think I would be mad there is not a good bathroom on the 32nd floor. Instead, I am super happy there is an informative sign that lets me know what to expect. "Not accessible" could mean anything, and the hotel rep wasn't sure -- is it the door width? lack of hand rail? a step? I was very curious, and wanted the hotel rep and my fellow BlogHeristas to understand that accessibility is not binary. It is not "accessible" or "not accessible"; maybe I could get in that bathroom, after all, I can walk okay, just not far, and steps are very hard. Or, I might be able to fit my tiny 22 inch wide wheelchair into a bathroom door, and turn around and shut the door, in a place where a power chair user who can't get up would be out of luck. Even a tiny, "inaccessible" bathroom can be vastly improved by a simple handrail! Now you know, huh?

I have not seen the hotel rooms themselves. The hotel rep, Judit, said there was a range of rooms, some with wider paths through the room, some that are narrower; some with roll-in showers (with bench? she didn't know!) and some that are bathtubs with handrails. So, if you are staying in the hotel, ask a ton of detailed questions, and get your specific needs met, rather than just asking if a room is "accessible" or not!

I hope to see some of my fellow bloggers with disabilities at Blogher 2008. If you have any questions or particular needs please feel free to contact me. And, come say hi, and admire my SPARKLY LIGHT UP WHEELS.

As I wandered the hallways I was filled with happiness imagining the floors and chairs all draped with awesome women and their laptops, furiously typing, sucking power from the hallway electrical outlets, and photographing each others' shoes.

See you at BlogHer!

p.s. Dear Walkies... I am not "Brave". And, remember, don't grab my chair, push me, or tell me about your homeopathic remedies! Zip it! Thanks! We have other things to talk about LIKE BLOGGING FRINSTANCE.

P.P.S. Remember to bring a power strip! You'll be one of the Cool Kids if you do.

Photo protest to get Congress to stop telecom spying

2008-01-24T12:44:35-06:00

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Stop the Spying campaign asks for people all over the U.S. to send photos and videos of their opposition to the telecom immunity bill. Here's mine:

With Congress back in session this week and the Presidential season in full swing, the fight to prevent the Bush administration from granting immuniy to the telecoms for illegal spying is heating up once again. Activists and bloggers alike are keeping the heat on. -DeepLinks blog, Cindy Cohn

What does this bill mean? What are we fighting here?

For at least six years, President Bush has authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to conduct dragnet surveillance on our domestic telecommunications networks, vacuuming up the private communications of millions of ordinary Americans with no warrants or other meaningful oversight. (Stopthespying.org)

In Salon, Glenn Greenwald interviews Cindy Cohn, who is the lead counsel in the EFF's litigation against AT&T.

The Archcrone of The Crone Speaks says:

Now, call me naive, but consumer protection should be first and foremost for all companies. That means, also protecting the consumer against government intrusion, unless there is a warrant. The fact of the matter is, this administration could have used warrants and NSL’s to obtain this information, and they chose not to. Therefore, I find that telecoms violated consumer privacy laws, when handing over that information to the government.
- Telecoms Should Not Be Given Immunity, Archcrone

And Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake reports on John Edwards' take on the legislation:

"It's time for Senate Democrats to show a little backbone and stand up to George W. Bush and the corporate lobbyists. They should do everything in their power -- including joining Senator Dodd's efforts to filibuster this legislation -- to stop retroactive immunity. The Constitution should not be for sale at any price." John Edwards, quoted on Firedoglake

This morning I uploaded my photo of protest to Flickr and emailed it to photo@stopthespying.org. Contributions are being added here as well: http://flickr.com/photos/stopthespying. This message is my favorite so far: "In my profession, we would never ask to be let off the hook for violating the privacy rights of our customers. But what do I know? I'm just a librarian."

I'd love to see how BlogHers will get creative with this one with their photos and videos!

Fernández de Kirchner elected President of Argentina

2007-10-30T01:50:20-05:00

Congratulations, President-Elect Fernández de Kirchner! Last night Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, of the Justicialist party, was elected president of Argentina. Fernández de Kirchner, a laywer, politician, and Peronist for the last 30 years, and served two terms in the Senate. Her politics are left-leaning and her campaign strongly emphasized social justice and human rights.

In her opening speech as president-elect, she declared her alliance with the more left-leaning Peronists, and also mentioned gender issues. To wild applause from women in the audience in this video, she speaks of her double responsiblity, not just as a member of a political forum, that conducts the business of a nation, but also she bears the immense responsibility for, or because of, her gender. She speaks to women to use their abilities from bridging the private and public sphere, and their responsibility to pull together the country's differences.

Tengo el honor más grande que se le puede conferir a un argentino, pero también quiero decirles que me siento con una doble responsabilidad también por el género. Permítanme dirigirme a mis hermanas de género para convocarlas a todas: sé que podemos desarrollar una gran tarea porque tenemos aptitudes especiales.
I have the greatest honor that can be conferred on an argentine, but also I want to say that I feel with double responsibility also because of my gender. I'd like to say to my sisters to summon us all, I know that we can build a great work, because we have special ability.

It is interesting that the candidate in 2nd place was also a center-leftist, Elisa Carrió.

Feminist Law Professors points out the annoying "fashion and hair" slant that media takes on Fernández de Kirchner. Yes, I noticed this everywhere in the U.S. media. No, I don't want to link to those articles or dissect all the ways they are dumb. Seriously, enough of it. Any decent editor would edit that stuff right out as not relevant to politics. And they should edit it out about Clinton too.

Monica Crowley gives us a funny quote from Fernández de Kirchner from a few months ago, denying the comparison with Clinton:

"Hillary was able to position herself nationally because her husband was president. She didn't have a political life beforehand, and that isn't my case . . . I'm a real feminist," she suggested. "I was in elected politics on my own. I'm not a derivative of my husband. I'm no Hillary Clinton." (source uncertain - translated from a broadcast of CNN en Español?)

Montserrat Boix blogs here about Cristina's name, and sexism in reporting.

Estupenda notícia la de que Argentina tenga una mujer presidenta. Menos estupendo es que en muchos medios de comunicación prime el destacar que es la esposa del actual presidente, olvidando la trayectoria política de Cristina. Y peor me parece que para hablar de ella nos olvidemos directamente su apellido y se utilice la fórmula de Cristina Kirchner.
Amazing news that Argentina has a female president. Less amazing is that in many media sources they first highlight that she's the wife of the current president, leaving out the political career of Cristina. And it seems even worse to me that in talking about her they forget her last name and use the form of "Cristina Kirchner".

Bettina of Mujeres en la blogosfera links to an article by Marcela Valente, pointing out that Fernández de Kirchner and her husband have been politically linked for a long time, and are two branches of the same tree: Elecciones Argentina. Right wing bloggers like Kate like to compare Kirchner to Evita (which I believe is terribly unfair, and not apt) and to mention that she has good diplomatic relations with Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. Others like Martha Colmenares are saying there was fraud at the voting booths. Meanwhile, I've read many posts by radicals who feel that Fernández de Kirchner isn't radical enough, especially on questions of human rights, but instead has been courting foreign investment too hard.

From a few news sources, I found a little information on the new President's political opinions. She did not respond to questions about the legalization of abortion. Reuters reports that in some areas, she has said she will (or is deemed likely to) continue what Néstor Kirchner and the rest of her party's line: control inflation by creating surpluses and putting in price controls, and mediation between unions and corporations. Her foreign policy is "more active" than Néstor's was, and she has put emphasis on strengthening Congress, regulatory agencies, and other democratic institutions.

Oddly, I have not found many details on blogs. I think to figure out her political position, or policies, I'd have to go and find the text of some of her speeches, or her voting record as a senator. Political bloggers in Argentina must be talking about her, but I haven't found many of their discussions. I really expected to find more. More than just right-wing pundits saying a few snarky things! Is it that everyone is distracted by lame comparisons of her to Hilary or Evita? Or is it that people assume she will just do exactly as Néstor did? That seems unlikely. Am I not looking in the right places? Blogueras hermanas, where should I be reading to find out a more detailed view?

Barcamp Buenos Aires reports

2007-10-23T01:08:17-05:00

Last month I wrote about BarCamp Buenos Aires and other unconferences, so I'd like to go back and take a look at the conference reports. Soledad Chianese, who did quite a lot of the organization of the conference along with her co-workers. She tells of writing over 230 emails back and forth with them to get the conference rollling, with not much idea of what an unconference should or could be, but with a lot of excitement.

El sábado amaneció con un sol radiante, respire profundo y salí para allá!

Llegue y me transforme la incertidumbre se convirtió en seguridad, como si de golpe todo fluyera como si lo hubiéramos planificado segundo por segundo! la gente se presentaba, miraban la cartelera para ver a que charla iban a entrar, las salas se llenaban la gente no quería terminaran, el catering parecía servir lo que la gente estaba esperando! y nosotros nos sentíamos los anfitriones de la fiesta de la web 2.0!! jajajaja! hasta intentaron hacernos una nota la gente de perfil tv! estábamos muy tentados , cerveza en mano y todos al rededor muy relajados como si estuvieran viviendo algo que ya conocían, a medida que pasaban las horas no podíamos creer lo que habíamos logrado!!

Saturday morning the sun shone, I took a deep breath and went out there!

I arrived and uncertainty was transformed into sureness, suddenly everything flowed as if planned minute by minute! People came, looked at the schedule to see who would be talking, the rooms filled up with people who didn't want to stop the sessions, the catering apparently served what people expected! and we felt like the hosts of the web 2.0 party!! hahaha! . . . we were very tempted, beer in hand and everyone around very relaxed as if they knew what they were doing, and as the hours passed we couldn't believe what we had achieved!

I think I know what she means!

Also from BarcampBA, Giannella Ligato, from the blog "SEO y posicionamiento en buscadores," posted slides on the >semantic web on Slideshare:

| View | Upload your own

Gianella ("La Tana") reported on the conference in general, in a long post, Barcamp: balance, picking out several points that she liked: the vibe of people there, the organization, the talks, the initiative people showed and the lack of pomposity, and how nice everyone was - and with some links to posts by other attendees.

Marina Torchiari did a writeup as well. And I was amused to see my friend Kragen's writeup as well, with lots of detail but some cynicism.

I spent today at another unconference, She's Geeky conference in Mountain View at the Computer History Museum. Here's the tag if you'd like to see photos from the conference!I hope that idea spreads to Buenos Aires as well and they have a big unconference just for women working in tech, for bloggers, engineers, and others!

Liz Henry blogs at Composite and many other places. You can contact her at liz@bookmaniac.net to say hello or to send her links to great blogs by women in Latin America or Latinas elsewhere in the world.

Link round-up from Latin America

2007-10-14T22:49:13-05:00

Looking back at my posts from last year, there are many blogs that I'm not following regularly. I wish I had time to read them all!

Here's a blog with articles following Chilean president Michele Bachelet and bacheletismo: Centros Chilenos en el Exterior; last year they wrote up some good coverage of the elections and of teenage pregnancy in Chile, along with the Movimiento feminista Lilith.

Todas: the blog for girls has written to promote She's Geeky unconference coming up soon in Mountain view. I'll be there and I hope to see many BlogHer editors and readers - if you are coming, be sure to sign up on the registration page and wiki. Thanks to Todas, now I know the word for unconference in Spanish: "Desconferencia". It's great that Amaya (the blogger at Todas) also links up to Devchix, Linuxchix, the Anita Borg Institute, Webgrrls, and other organizations for women in the computer industry. In general, Todas is a pretty good site for geeky and pop culture feminist news - I also heard the Annie Lennox project "Sing" there, and read about Carrie Giver anti-domestic violence superheroine and some feminist analysis of Wonder Woman (Mujer Maravilla).

Looking back at the blog Negra Cubana, which I mentioned last fall, I see that it has become more of an announcement site for books, events, or new artists and conferences, and doesn't have so much personal analysis or ideas as it used to. Kasandra is still writing from Cuba from several blogs. Still, I have not found the sort of personal blogs about people's daily lives that I'd like to read. Political and cultural information is great, but a personal touch, a feeling of a real human being's diary, with details of daily life, is what makes blogging a beautiful literary form.

María Gómez uses her blog to get personal stories and videos from people emigrating (or who have emigrated or intend to) from Colombia to New York City. Her Colombia Migration Project continues, and is about halfway done. I look forward to more- and I wonder if she might put her videos up on a service like dotsub so that people could subtitle them with translations from different languages?

Here are a few more of my favorites, Bibi's Box and Bibi's Vlog from Brazil; Pont des Arts from Argentina; and Huyamos del monton from Perú.

I'm in China this week, so my blogging and net access is a bit limited. I'll be posting about computing and bloggers in Beijing along with my notes on accessible travel in China, later in the week. But the short version is: Beijing is wonderful!

Mexico-U.S. hometown clubs and social networks

2007-10-09T00:40:01-05:00

Last week I had a great conversation with Margarita Quihuis, who as part of Astia (formerly the Women's Technology Cluster) and the Open Capital Network, as well as the president of Hispanic-Net, helps to link up venture capital and women founding startup companies in technology, including biotech and medicine. Margarita isn't just a capitalist extraordinaire - she's also one of those interesting multiblogular people who puts her writing energy into many projects at once.

Though we started out talking about co-working, soon we were talking about Tierra Natal, a social networking site built to help Mexican-Americans keep in touch with their family home towns. Tierra Natal, in English and Spanish, has a page for every town in Mexico. I went into the site in English, clicked "Find your home town", and searched for Aguililla, in Michoacan, not because it's my home town but because it's a sort of sister city for the town where I live now, and has been since the 1940s. In fact the close ties between these two small towns has been an example for sociologists who study globalization and emigration. According to the sociologist and economist Roger Rouse, the two towns are no longer separate economies or communities. Tierra Natal aims to strengthen the social network for Mexican-American families who share roots in the same hometown. It also exposes the ways that social space is transnational and yet often rooted in specific geographies. The site might help the HTAs go online and accelerate their ties to each other as they begin to form Federaciones of smaller clubs, as they become politically active in the U.S. as well as in Mexico.

I say politically active, because the formation of HTAs is a grassroots movement awakening to the huge amount of power it has. Mexican-Americans send more than $23 billion a year to Mexico, mostly through individual and family ties. The HTAs or Clubs de Oriundos, by consolidating some of that money, are gaining political power. We'll see in the next few years how blogs and social network software will help that process. Other countries may also begin using social software to make the power of their remittance economies more transparent.

I have interesting blogger gossip about Tierra Natal, which is still in beta -- they went out and hired Jocotepec students and bloggers to go out and collect information and photos from some of the towns, to start getting content into a sister site, Jocotepec.com. I was thinking about other methods - maybe making Flickr groups for every town, and then feeding the group's photo pool straight into the Tierra Natal site. That would be particularly nice for people who might be homesick, but unable to return to their home town because of immigration status. Another tactic might be to use Tierra Natal to channel money to a blogger in every municipio - from people in the U.S. who want news and photos and video uploaded regularly. They'd be paying for their own hometown web journalist!

In another of Margarita's many web projects, the blog Indigo Financiera, she has been posting lately on HTAs, Hometown Associations. These informal networks raise millions and millions of dollars from Mexican-Americans and send them back to their state government. Often, the Mexican government matches the money sent from the U.S. associations. That's on top of any money sent by individuals back to their families, a pattern of remittance and migration which increasingly depends on women's labor. Margarita's vision is of grassroots venture capital:

In 2004, Mexican immigrants sent more than $16 billion back to their communities of origin. The remittances were used to take care of basic services such as food, clothing, healthcare. What if the Mexican diaspora could tap into a portion of those assets to create funding for their businesses? They wouldn't need Wall Street and they wouldn't have to wait around for some large institution to take a leap of faith and provide capital for them. The community could do it themselves.

To that end she has set up a microequity fund for HTAs, and is participating in events like this meeting to help get HTAs on the web.

From there we went on to talk a little bit about politics. I showed Margarita the Web 2.0 app for Ecuadorean politics. She showed me Voto Latino, which has its own blog, a group on Facebook and on myspace, and other sites.

We looked a bit at the HispanicNet blog, and I noted this post where Margarita speculates on the potential for the net to increase social capital:

The question remains though - do and will Latinos leverage social networking tools? I've been approached by more than one academic on this question. Do social networking tools like LinkedIn and Facebook give further advantage to people with social capital and connections? Does it accelerate their access? Can Hispanics, women and other under-represented groups close the gap and increase their social capital?

I have to mention one more blog of Margarita's. It's called SIPAPA Reads!, and it's all reviews in English of children's books in Spanish. It seems extremely useful for school librarians, and for parents of kids in Spanish immersion programs! Excellent tagging by age and reading level, and subject, a tag cloud, links to buy the books, relevant sidebar links, along with the clear reviews, make this a a great blog.

The impulse to share powerful emotions

2007-10-01T00:43:33-05:00

Todas linked recently to this intense Blogday video in Spanish and English from Melissa De Leon. I first read Melissa's blog, The Cooking Diva, a couple of years ago when she was up for an award, and I enjoyed her sparkly writing, great blog design, and her sense of humor. She travels all over the world, teaching, writing, and doing research as an innovative chef. Melissa also blogs for Global Voices on politics and on her own personal and political blog, Diablo Rojo.

In her Blogday video, Melissa talks about her love of blogging, her belief in it as something powerful and beautiful. In her four years of blogging, she has connected with many people and has become a professional blogger. The motive to share experiences drives her powerfully. She also feels a responsibility to her readers, to stay in touch, to keep writing. But for three weeks, she hasn't been able to keep blogging, because of family problems, an accident. It was very touching to hear her sadness and her feeling of wishing she could connect with her "zillion friends". Even her bad jokes in the worst of times are funny, as she clarifies for her YouTube audience that the surgery wasn't her own plastic surgery... I can so identify with the impulse for bad jokes during emotional upheaval! Sometimes those jokes really help.

I admire Melissa's citizen journalism. For example, take a look at her amazingly thorough post, also bilingual, on the earthquake disaster relief in Peru. She covered the most up to date efforts to let people know where they can help, with blood donations, equipment, volunteer work, or money, all with links and sources included. On Global Voices, she wrote a summary of news coverage and sources as well as links to bloggers from the area of the quake. I am sure her posting helped many people, though she might never know who or how.

That's a lot of responsibility to carry, feeling that you are entertaining your friends, and strangers across the world, as well as saving the world... with your blog! The pressure never stops. Meanwhile, we're all human beings with families and complicated lives. I felt honored and touched that Melissa would share even the depth of her worst of times with the blogosphere.

So, let's send good thoughts her way! Melissa, hang in there, your blog readers love you, take a break and take care of yourself and your family.

I thought I'd also mention an interesting blog from Spain, Chicas10. It's a blog by xornalismo and chica10, who are writing from prison, exercising their right to freedom of expression while in jail, and to make the lives and thoughts of prisoners more visible in society. If you don't read Spanish, try it with Google Language Tools in English, to find out the thoughts of these two women on being HIV positive, drug addiction, generational poverty, and family. It is a deeply personal blog, powerfully written - and award-winning.

Barcamp, women, bloggers at Latin American (& global) unconferences

2007-09-24T01:47:26-05:00

This week I took at look at unconferences in Latin America, wondering if women were participating. BarCamp Buenos Aires will be happening next weekend, September 29; Soledad Chianese, one of the organizers and a blogger for web hosting company Elserver.com, is blogging about it.

Barcamp Sao Paulo (photo by Luísa Pécora)

Also coming up this fall is HispanicCamp, November 1, 2007, in Miami, organized by three bloggers there, Danay Escanaverino, Jackie Paz, and Mande White. Danay blogs about SEO and marketing to the Spanish-speaking internet. The organizers are starting off from their perspective on biz dev and marketing, and from their interests in women's rights and in technology I would bet that discussions will get interesting and political, as well as geeky. From the writeup of Barcamp México, this February, I found bloggers Sonia Sánchez, Felicia Salmoran Lopez, and Raquel Hernández (aka maggit, active in many Linuxand in free software groups).

I'm wondering what other BarCamps or unconferences we'll see in Latin America in the next year, and what role women will play in hosting and in participation. I've been to several BarCamps, organized a couple of them, have gone to other open space technical conferences and unconferences, like Supernova, Web2.Open, BlogHer Unconference. I'll be going to She's Geeky in October. On the West Coast of the U.S. I'm aware of several other women closely involved with BarCamp and similar unconferences; Kaliya Hamlin from She's Geeky, Tara Hunt from many BarCamps; Dawn Foster who has worked on several BarCamps in Portland, and Heathervescent and Crystal Williams in Los Angeles.

And, in a few weeks I'm going to Beijing, and so I tried to see if there were any tech meetups or small spontaneous conferences, and I also wondered what the gender balance was. BarCamp Beijing happened last month, and I've been reading Jodi Xu's notes and reading her blogroll and archives.

This whole train of thought was sparked as I got a few questions over IRC (on irc.freenode.net#barcamp) from another woman who is working on a Barcamp this fall. What was it like? And what was the attitude towards women who go to *camps, or who stand up to speak at them? Was anything different? I thought about all the conversations I've had about women at computer conferences, and felt that unconferences are changing that landscape. Here are some points that make unconferences great for women:

- low cost to participate, zero or no conference fees
- you don't have to commit to attend the whole thing
- loose structure, easier to participate if you have children
- you don't have to travel, you can organize one easily in your own region or city
- smaller communities develop, on a human scale, rather than big trade shows or expos of thousands
- you don't have to be an already-famous, L33t, expert to contribute (which I think makes for better cross fertilization of ideas in a field)
- feeling "not geeky enough", this is an internal barrier to some extent, but can be easily overcome by going to an unconference with a group of friends, and talking about whatever you're expert in, or would like to learn

But, the real answer to her question is something that Tara Hunt and Kaliya Hamlin have mentioned in recent posts. (The comments on Tara's post are especially interesting!) Women do the work, they participate, but men, especially in mainstream media, don't mention their names or link to them, and the guys working with them get the fame points.

If you have a career that's part time, in between, non traditional, then it can be hard to find (or to justify) the expense of professional conferences. I don't know what the situation is with geeky women in Latin America, other than what I read from a few blogs and mailing lists like linuxchix. But, I hope that as unconferences continue to take off in Latin American cities, there will be a lot of women speaking at them, adding their expertise and their perspective, and also that I'll get to read their reports of what happens.

I'll write more this week about Italy and FemCamp, to see if I can find posts answering their central question:

Siamo state un po’ in giro ai vari barcamp e la domanda è: dove diavolo sono finite le donne? Poche, troppo poche sia a parlare sia ad ascoltare: come mai? Con il FemCamp speriamo di trovare insieme qualche risposta.
--
We have been around a bit, participating at different barcamps, and our question is: where the hell have women gone in all this? They are few, far too few both when it comes to speak and listen: why is it so? Within the FemCamp we hope to find together some answers.

Liz Henry is the Contributing Editor for World/Latin America and also blogs at Composite. You can contact her at liz@bookmaniac.net.

Women in the new Web 2.0 political world in Ecuador

2007-09-16T15:21:40-05:00

I read last week from Global Voices that politicians in Ecuador have turned to blogs and YouTube to communicate with the general population, as cyber culture and internet cafes become more popular. It was fascinating to look a little bit deeper and to watch some of the video speeches and debates. Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa pays homage to Max Headroom in a funny, low-budget YouTube clip promoting his new blog; in another video, he asks everyone to use free software. He is encouraging the entire country to start blogging and using social networks and YouTube for the power of collective action. It's really interesting to see the head of a country that's bought into the Web 2.0 message ("Web dos punto cero") so completely that it is trying to write in guarantees of free access and expression into its new constitution.

The Acuerdo Pais party (President Correa's party, as well) has a really nice web site, with photos of the candidates as well as photos of their opposition, and a sample ballot which includes the photos. Each candidate's photo links to their blog and to video clips of their debates with opposing candidates. It seems like a great idea, and rather than just speeches or lists of their positions on various issues, you get to see each candidate in action. There's also a map of the country, so you can click on your region and see who's running for office. It's very slick!

Here, you can see a blog and some video clips from Monica Chuji, candidate for the National Constituent Assembly for the Alianza País party, and an activist for human rights for the indigenous population of Ecuador. Chuji, as well as Correa, compares Web 2.0 internet tools to radio, as tools for free public expression. In this video she debates another candidate, Patricia Sánchez from the right-wing Social Christian party, on freedom of speech and constitutional law

Sánchez argues that no one should be able to criticize public officials unless they've been legally proven to be responsible for some crime. Chuji emphatically declares that democracy depends on the right to free expression, including criticizing the government, and that it also depends on citizen access to the creation of media, like TV and radio as well as the Internet.

Rosana Queirolo, another candidate for the Asamblea Constituyente in Ecuador, is campaigning on a platform of economic incentives for Ecuadoreans who have emigrated to be able to return, and to have housing and jobs, and to facilitate their legal and safe return to visit family members. She is also a strong advocate of the protection of the environment and of measures to save the forests of Ecuador.

Many other women are running for office and commenting on the elections coming up September 30th, and they're videoblogging too -- women like Cristina Reyes, Irina Bown, Monica Bonilla, and Sigrid Vásconez, who is further profiled on somosdemocracia.org. And here's another brief debate between Martha Roldos and Amanda Arboleda.

Here is more background on the political situation in Ecuador and on the Constituent Assembly elections, from a very left-leaning source, Ecuador Rebelde:

Unlike previous movements, the current citizens' movement is made up of urban middle classes that indulged themselves in consumerism with the neoliberal model and now demand a working democracy. These sectors have benefited from dollarization and above all from the remittances sent by emigrants. Between 2000 and 2005, two million Ecuadorians—out of a population of twelve million—left the country. In 2006, they sent home US$3 billion, a fabulous sum that rivals the annual US$3.6 billion from oil sales, Ecuador's most important export. That money arrives directly to families and lubricates mall-based consumption ... the middle-class sectors want the political system to work with the same transparency with which they believe the market works.

Meanwhile, in the greater Ecuadorean blogosphere... Sandra Navarro, is writing extensively about economic reform and about the elections. She blogs about women in politics and business in Ecuador, and is often very funny in her writing, not sticking to dry facts as she makes fun of Correa for some of his rude comments. On her blog you can find the details of the proposed Constitutional reforms, like these articles on civil rights -- which, you might note, declare that human life begins at conception. A final note on the power of web 2.0, I found Sandra's blog by looking at Ecuador on twittermap.com, and found her twitter profile as "almapirata" and then a link to her blog.

I'd like to recommend another Web 2.0 tool to the Ecuadorean blogosophere, dotsub. With this nifty tool, they could upload their debates and video clips, put a Creative Commons License on them , and people could very easily subtitle them in other languages.

The Guatemalan elections this year

2007-09-10T03:10:29-05:00

It's Election Day in Guatemala today. Early results were looking fairly even between Álvaro Colom (UNE, Unidad Nacional de Esperanza) and General Otto Pérez Molina of the Partido Patriota (PP), with Molina slightly ahead. You should not need to ask what I think of a presidential candidate who is a graduate of the notorious and horrible School of the Americas (the shame of our own country in the U.S.) I am guessing at this point there will be a runoff election. I hope so.

I did a little bit of background reading on Elections in Guatemala and on today's election. Here's a blog that has more background: Elecciones Guatemala. Gringologue does a bit of explaining in English about problems in a multilingual country with around a 60% literacy rate. (Maybe he can explain this country too since with a much higher literacy rate we still managed to elect George W. Bush to office.) And Renata Avila has written an extensive overview of the elections on Global Voices - don't miss it.

I will be very interested in continuing to watch what happens with the project to recover crucial historical documents from the national police archive in Guatemala. Teams of Guatemalan and international human rights workers have been cleaning up the dusty, mold-filled archives, scanning and digitizing hundreds of thousands of pages of police records in an effort to document the many people who disappeared or were killed during the long years of Civil War. It is a positive, hopeful sign that the archives are being rescued and valued, made part of the country's history, as painful and dangerous as that is to do. I hope that work will continue, peacefully. And that it will give families some closure, even if justice is impossible.

Meanwhile, here is an interesting videoblog which will give a picture of some common situations in Guatemala. A family and community in Nueva Linda, Guatemala have lived for 4 years by the side of the road in protest of the disappearance of Hector Reyes; the photos and Mi Mundo blog are by James Rodríguez. Bety Reyes Toledo, Hector's daughter, said in the documentary,

“If a rich person would have been kidnapped, a poor person would already be in jail. But, since it was a rich person who kidnapped my father, nothing has been clarified. Three years have passed in our struggle for justice, and nothing is clear. That is why we want justice to be applied equally... It is as if justice does not apply to us poor.”

Here is a short video clip from the movie about the Reyes family, many of whom live & grow their food in a narrow strip of land between a fence and the highway.

You can find photos of the elections and posters and voters in the Flickr Guatemala photo pool, including my favorite so far, this one by joannitam.

Coníe Reynoso at La Ciudad de las Diosas writes briefly about barriers women face as they vote and as they run for office: Aceso limitado (Limited access). Over 2,000 women are running for office, out of around 18,000 candidates. Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú is running for president, but is not one of the top candidates. I should mention as well that Guatemala has many fantastic activists struggling to bring attention to the problems of extreme and widespread violence against women and in fact, femicide. Mauri Estrada, the national women’s coordinator and a UNE candidate for Congress, plans if elected to expand the budget for women's agencies and legal prosecution services for women who are the targets of violence and threats, including domestic violence.

During the election season so far, 51 people including 45 candidates, have been killed in political violence.

I want to wish the best of luck to the brave and civic minded women running for office... and working on campaigns... and to election watchdog bloggers like Lu... and to all the women voting today in Guatemala.

Wandering through expatriate blogs on art, literature, and politics

2007-08-27T00:48:18-05:00

This week I wandered through the blogosphere with a post from Rulemanes para Telémaco as a starting point. Iria Puyosa explains here her thought process about internet memes. She listed eight quotes important to her, but refuses to play the "5 Blogs that make me think" or Thinking Blogger Award meme, which she was tagged with or awarded by another Venezuelan blogger, Kira, or K-Minos. She goes around in circles a little bit, wondering what criteria to use for selection. Five that she often reads, or used to read? Five most popular, to get links from them? Five that she really wants to emphasize because "ponen mis neuronas en eufórica sinapsis" (they send my nerves into a synaptic euphoria")? Finally, she refuses to publish her list because the slogan of "blogs that make me think" reminds her of an old political slogan, "Permítanos pensar por usted", or "Let us do the thinking for you". I looked up this phrase and came to a sort of explanation here on a liberal or libertarian political site. I don't understand the history of this phrase, but it's interestingly loaded with meaning, a good example of how reading blogs cross culturally can quickly lead into depths of lost cultural context. As far as I can tell it is a phrase used by anti-Chavistas to describe propaganda.

Iria also blogged recently at No suma cero, No zero sum, about Bridges and Ties in Web 2.0. She speculates about cyberculture, people's reasons for surfing the web, beyond merely searching for information.

En el campo de la web 2.0 se ha desarrollado una cultura, con sus prácticas sociales, su lenguaje y sus normas de interacción, una cibercultura. Vivir, documentar y analizar esa cibercultura es un motivo para navegar la bitosfera o blogosphere. (Siempre con precauciones ante el riesgo de encerrarse en el ghetto web y/o convertirse en un junkie 2.0). Jugar con conciencia de los límites del juego. Una manera de proyectar la propia e-Identidad (o nuestra identidad multidimensional, en oposición a la unidimensionalidad a la cual obligan las fuerzas especializadoras del mercado), de lo más enraizado en la cotidianidad fuera de línea al devenir anarco-cyborg.
In Web 2.0 a culture has developed, with its own social practices, its language, and norms of interaction, a cyberculture. To live, to document, and to analyze this cyberculture is one motive for surfing the blogosphere. (Always with the precaution against the risk of being stuck in a web ghetto and/or becoming a 2.0 junkie.) To play with awareness of the limites of the game. A way of projecting one's own e-Identity (or our multidimensional identity, as oppososed to a onedimensional which specialized market forces oblige us to assume), from the most rooted in daily life out of line with anarcho-cyborg happenings.

Feel free, in comments, to correct my rough translation that turns a little bit into nonsense in that last sentence! But, you get the idea. I hope someday I can meet Iria at BlogHer or SXSWi, or some other great conference.

From Iria's blogs, I was led to Cronicas de la Rochelle, a popular blog by Caty, who lives in France and who makes wonderful sketchbooks and scrapbooks of her travels. The blogs she likes tend to also be written by world travellers, expatriates, who are also writers, journalists, and photographers like Corey Amaro, Tara from Paris Parfait, and Victoria from Hablando desde aquí who writes fascinatingly about her life in New York - and sometimes very funny posts about things like her hatred of Harry Potter. What I notice about Caty's group of bloggers is a strong aesthetic sense - writers who pair their posts beautifully with photos, music, videos, and poetry.

K-Minos, the Venezuelan political blogger I mentioned before, is living in Bangladesh but currently travelling in Botswana. From her blog, I found El espacio de Juana, another blog written by a journalist and traveller; Juana is from Colombia and is blogging from Sudan. She writes of being happy to be in a country where she has difficulty understanding the language. "Siempre dije que me gustaría vivir en países donde no supiera el idioma porque sería la oportunidad perfecta para aprender uno nuevo. Pero con el árabe me ha dado un poco duro." I've always said that I'd like to live in countries where I don't know the language because it would be a perfect opportunity to learn a new one. But Arabic is giving me a little difficulty." If you read through the last month you can see her arrival in Khartoum, her realization that she can't take photos freely on the street because it's illegal - police control of photos is very tight. And that there's plenty of free wireless in Uganda, from cafes and clubs. Her thoughts on blogging were very good:

Siempre he pensado que internet es una maravilla. Con internet uno se siente conectado con el mundo -qué frase tan cliché- y tiene relación directa con los que quiere todo el tiempo, especialmente si uno vive lejos. Bueno, y ni qué decir de la posibilidad de chatear y de poder crear un blog con información de primera mano a tantos kilómetros de distancia del país de origen –como me pasó a mi-. En el blog he conocido a mucha gente de todo el mundo, y aunque suene romanticón los siento como amigos.
I've always thought the Internet was a wonder. With internet anyone can feel connected with the world - what a clichéd phrase - and have a direct relationship with whoever they want at any time, especially if they live in a remote area. Well, that doesn't even take into account the possiblity of chatting and creating a blog with information at first hand so many kilometers away from one's original country - as is the case for me. In my blog I have met many people from all over the world, and thought it seems romantic, I feel that they are friends.

Juana mentions her two small children in her profile but I have not read back in her archives far enough to have seen any posts about her life with kids. While I love her posts on impressions of politics and cultural difference I also really enjoyed coming across things like her list of the prices of stuff in Uganda vs. Colombia. For 30 times the price of a beer or a coke, you can buy a tube of sunblock. Thank you, Internet... it's good to know these kinds of details. I notice also that Juana puts her blog under a Creative Commons license! Excellent. I should follow her example and do that with mine too.

Books and media in the Latina blogosphere

2007-08-20T01:32:24-05:00

This week I went looking in the Latina blogophere for posts on books and film. On The Latina (L)it Girl, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez comments on TV, culture, and mainstream media images of Latinos in the U.S.. She is excited to see a new family drama, Cane, coming out on CBS; one that doesn't stereotype Latinos as scary gang members; instead, as "Latinos without cheesy accents, educated, easily bilingual, smart."

As I read Alisa's recent post on the death of conservative blogger Catherine Seipp, I was reminded of the conversations at the BlogHer conference about tolerance and intolerance on blogs. I love how Alisa describes her blog-fights with Catherine as petty and cruel... and how they became friendly though they had fought at first and though their politics were so different. How fascinating that because of the respectful relationship they developed, Alisa wrote a conservative character into one of her novels.

Alexis is as far right as you can get, just like Cathy. And I loved Alexis. I wanted to challenge myself to create a right-wing character I could identify with, as I had come to identify with Cathy. I felt hopeful that, if Cathy and I could be peaceful and civil, liberals and conservatives might also find a way to co-exist.

As always, taking a peek at Alisa's blog lures me well back into her archives. She always goes into topics in depth. Her post on Cathy Sieppe is a perfect example of the way she uses her blog to soul-search as well as to explore her approach to being a writer.

I was also interested to see a blog interview with fantasy author Kim Baccellia, poet and YA fantasy writer. On her blog, Si Se Puede, she links up to a virtual book tour for her fantasy novel The Earrings of Ixtumea. Especially for a self-published author, or one whose books come out from a small press, it seems like a great idea to do a blog book tour. Good idea, Kim!

In her popular and dynamic blog, Carla Arena posts on the movie City of God, and its intensity. Carla describes international perceptions of Rio de Janeiro, of "precariousness" and poverty, but she makes a very good point that foreigners should not have a simplistic impression of Brazil:

... there's another side to the country, which just reflects the contrasts we've been mentioning. It is technologically developed, our banking system (in terms of bank integration and technology) is one of the best in the world, our voting system is all electronic, we're the first country to have bought an Island in Second Life after the US, Brazilian middle class and upper class teens are all connected and tech-savvy.

And she asks several very good questions of her readers:

* What are the main concerns in your country?
* What type of violence you have?
* How about its beauties?
* Can you relate your country to mine in some way?

I think these questions are great to keep in mind to help combat stereotypes, but also to stay aware that every country has, for example, inequalities of social class. In the U.S. being middle class I often hear people deplore conditions in other countries... when right here there are plenty of problems we could look at right in our own backyard.