Legacy of 1804 on Trump's visit to Little Haiti #LOF1804

Join me this Friday at 9PM as I discuss US presidential candidate Donald Trump's meeting with Haitians in Little Haiti, Miami, last week with Hugues Girard, surprise guest(s) and callers. We will review various articles and listen to some audio.  Please call in at (714) 242-6119 or listen on the player below.


Articles:

Donald Trump to Haitian voters: I want to be your greatest champion | Miami Herald #usa #haiti https://t.co/q9mIgjk36H

Obama to Step Up Deportations of Haitians - @HaitiSentinel #haiti #brazil #usa https://t.co/XS790VDzLf

Videos:

Trump, Giuliani visit Little Haiti [full speeches + Q&A by Saati, Sansaricq etc.] #FL #usa #clintons https://t.co/7fmc9LXiEj

Link to listen to the show tonight:
 http://tobtr.com/s/9488329

Player:




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kiskeácity daily is out ! Commented edition for Saturday, Dec. 03, 2011 #Haiti #Blogs

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From the blogs

Tande reviews the haitian-authored book Refonder Haiti?  (FR)

Caracas-based Balanced Melting Pot celebrates the holidays.

Ekspoze which I usually quote on politics, weighs in on controversial statements by Kreyòl La singer Ti-Joe Zenny. Also in music, www.culture509.com announces a duet between Haitian singer Jean Jean Roosevelt and Guadeloupean songstress Krysstal  as well as Oprah Winfrey's upcoming visit  to record a show (FR).

The Haiti Cultural Exchange blog offers accounts of the latest An n' Pale Café Conversation with Haiti-based author Evelyne Trouillot.

Rapadoo Observateur reports on growing solidarity with Haiti in Latin-American and other countries towards ending the UN military presence. 

The Haitian Queen provides updates on Trinidad & Tobago carnival 2012.


MNI Alive's list of Caribbean superfoods includes coconut and its oil, a multi-purpose health and nutrition elixir I have coincidentally been experimenting with.  Excellent skin and hair moisturizer, dental hygiene aid and cooking oil!


In the News

Haitian tourism minister at Miami arts festival and end to arms embargo. (Haiti Libre)

kiskeácity daily is out ! Edition of Saturday, Aug. 06, 2011

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Emily - Post-Emily assessment by department. (Apparently there was only one reported casualty.)

Politics and general news- Unrest after a student is shot near the National Palace. Martelly's reaction to the rejection of Gousse by Parliament. Death of human rights activist Jean-Claude Bajeux. Write up of recent Caribbean-American business conference held in Atlanta in July.

Culture - Le Nouvelliste showcases the poetry of Josaphat Large. Orchestre Septentrional has a new album. Margaret Papillon's audio book on AIDS. Emeline Michel and James Germain in concert at Fokal. Haiti Cultural Exchange featured in WQXR's Star Initiative.

Technology - Electronic database of Haitian civil records being created.

From the blogs - Defend.ht thinks the Haitian press should not enable the UN's overreaching into Haitian affairs. More under the #haiti hashtag section of the newsletter, including various pictures and a deploge performance by Medjy Toussaint on Chokarella.

Video - Kassav' sings its classic Rete in Miami.

Please note that all Haiti Libre articles featured in the newsletter can be found in both French and English on www.haitilibre.com. 


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Should citizen efforts by Haitians to help Haiti incorporate blogging?

Excerpts from an interesting Miami Herald article by Jacqueline Charles :

Few Haitian immigrants have the cash or the A-list roster of friends -- and the ability to rally them to Haiti's aid -- as Haiti-born hip-hop artist Wyclef Jean. Nevertheless, South Florida's Haitian-American community, after decades of growing a solid, if still struggling, middle class, is increasingly engaged in helping its Caribbean homeland.

In addition to hometown associations, Haitians have also tapped church and professional groups, and organizations like the Florida Association for Volunteer Actions in the Caribbean and Americas (FAVACA). Formed by former Florida governor and retired U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, the state-funded organization allows Haitian professionals to donate their time and skills on short-term missions.

There is always more to do, though, and political differences sometimes get in the way.
''We have been too political,'' said North Miami councilman Jacques Despinosse. 'Every person treats Haiti like a battlefield. They would like to help, but their people need to be in power.

Despinosse has led two separate delegations of Haitian and non-Haitian elected officials to Haiti this year. A few days before Jean arrived in Haiti to help inaugurate a computer lab that his Yéle Haiti Foundation helped equip at a public school in Croix-des-Bouquets, northeast of Port-au-Prince, Despinosse and his delegation delivered a $10,000 check to Haiti's Ministry of Education on behalf of another public school in Port-au-Prince.

It's good to know that all of this is taking place in South Florida (where I recently attended the 2007 Haitian Studies Association Conference) but it would be nice to see those efforts mingled with citizen media that might hold the government accountable for the money it receives for these efforts. Feedback about the current Préval government from all sectors (I've even heard this from some good Dominican friends) seems to be that there is an openness to his government. But who knows what happens to a check you hand one of his ministries? Can you really trust that it is going to go to the school it was intended? Not that it won't. And not that I want to add to all the politics that usually go hand in hand with so little as sneezing in Haiti. (The largely US-based Haitian Studies Association's main issue in organizing their conference there next year is not to "step into any political potholes" so as to maximize local academic attendance.)

So could we start thinking about implementing citizen-media-based monitoring of the government as a remedy against corruption? One good example is Mzalendo, a blog co-started by an American-educated Kenyan lawyer, Ory Okollow to "keep an eye on the Kenyan parliament". To quote Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman, it is 'a site increasing transparency of the Kenyan Parliament, for little more than $20 a month plus creativity and sweat. It’s evidence of “the power of ideas, the power of sharing knowledge.” '

You could say Kenya's blogosphere at this point is way past the embryonic stage of Haiti's whose evolution since I last surveyed it in 2006 is not clear. But corruption blogging and government monitoring by bloggers may be a needed tear dropped into the sea of what can and should be done to increase government transparency. Wouldn't we all sleep better at night if we knew for sure that that $10,000 check given to the Ministry of Education would actually go towards the school we sought to help? To make a long story short, Haiti needs many more Collectif Haiti de Provence who are doing as much monitoring as they can, mostly through commenting newstories, from .... France.

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WeMEdia Session on "Soft Power"

This panel, held Feb. 8 at We Media Miami was about the distribution of power and what it's like to live and work on the internet. Here are the sound bites that caught my attention:

Jay Rosen
Teaches journalism at NYU.
newassignment.net

"a traditional view of power sees power as a scarce resource (i.e. power of government or microsoft). power of guns money or institutions. soft power is not a scarce resource. it is an arrangement of people to get things done. the cost for like minded people to locate each other, share info, collaborate and make things is going down continually. people can do all kinds of things together that they could not do before."

"it's distributed because you can't go to where it's located to find it."

"lots of communities that didn't know they had numbers can now discover themselves and come together on the internet."

"the blog was just the leading edge of a self-publishing revolution. But it's the self-publishing part that is going to change the world ... because the publishing part used to be owned by big media."

"blogging was just the 1st thing that emerged that alerted us to this power shift."

He added that the audience is no longer atomized and can come together.

"let's take that and figure out how we do real reporting and have thousands of people come together and work on one story."

He added that in order to create online communities, you have to have a shared original vision. that shared original vision is what makes wikipedia work.

To the question "can soft power be sized up?" he answered no; the number of comments does not signify the extent of soft power.


David Sasaki
Latin-America Editor, Global Voices

Moderator Chris Nolan's words of introduction: "GV has become a kind of blogger's foreign news services. One of the more reliable foreign news services out there which is one of the reasons Reuters has decided to partner with them."

David's sound bites:
"soft power is the power to make yourself heard. 10 yrs ago that was reporters and columnists now everyone gets to make themselves heard because of google."

" I am against the echo chamber. what we really want is dialogue."

"a GV article is a collaboration of various stories." (example of jay rosen's point that future of the article is collaborative.)

Sure enough, the question whether GV supplements or replaces tradtional news came up and david explained that we are the aggregator that edits, unlike technorati.

Val Prieto
Babalu.org, conservative cuban site

has contributors from all over the country. didn't want cuban diaspora's story to be lost. has been doing babalu for 4 years. "we are now publishing stories from people in cuba who don't have a publisher or a blog." "we get their voices through email, text, voicemail etc."

Q&A
two commentors in the audience stressed that having more diverse information online does not mean that things are being done about the information. (in other words, old-fashioned activism is still needed for the issues people care about.)

More of my WeMedia notes:
Internet & Community Panel

Photos by CarribeanFreePhoto

Technorati Tags: we media, jay rosen, soft power

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We Media Miami Media

The conference has ended. My GV colleague Georgia has posted her We Media Miami pictures on Flickr. Check them out. I have more panel notes in store for you but for now I'm off to enjoy South Beach a bit, especially since the New York cold is awaiting me in a few days.

In the meantime, check out technorati's WeMedia tag for more media on WeMedia.

We Media Miami Session on Internet & Community

From left to right: Lisa Stone, Jan Schaffer, Rick Skrenta, Ian Rowe, Shel Israel.


The first session here at WeMedia tried to address "How communities real and virtual are changing through media. "

Here is what the panelists had to say. I was especially impressed with Shel Israel. And it was interesting that every time the topic of big media v. little media came up, the moderators somehow redirected the conversation. It is possible that that facilitated the flow of ideas but still worth noting, especially as chat room participants thought big media was overrepresented in the room. (Were they trying to avoid the dominance of that debate on last year's WeMedia?)

Shel Israel
Author, Naked Conversations
His main point (to mostly journalists I assume) was that we no longer deliver media, we are media:

"People are finding each other by shared interests and geography is becoming irrelevant. The demographic is overwhelmingly young."

"What happens when this online generation comes of age and starts replacing boomers like me and how do we [boomers] communicate with them?"

"WE (traditional media) don't organize what THEY will get anymore. The community is taking its power. YOU (big Media) need to join the conversation. You should all be looking at what the world looks like in 10-20 years when the young online generation comes into the workplace."


Ian Rowe, MTV
He stressed the balance between self-publishing and personal responsibility. (Specifically, he referred to the instance where someone became famous for posting a video on youtube of someone beating up a homeless person.)

"We find we have to meet young people on issues they care about."
"Total customization can actually be a danger to the citizenry."
"In 2012 we may no longer have short form programming. A lot more input from young people in terms of the creative process. We want to reward positive behavior."

He added that MTV still wants to assure that there is a top down package coming to young people because they don't want them to only get info that they want, which might make their view of the world more narrow.

(My 2 cents: I have to say I kept asking myself: is the onslaught of mysogynistic gangsta rap on certain music channels an example of "responsibility" ? But then I remembered that I don't watch much MTV and therefore may not be the best judge. Still, to hear him talk today you'd think MTV was PBS. That, it's fair to say, is simply not the case.)


Jan Schaffer, J-Lab
She looks at the emergence of new journalism from a bottom up point of view. (She is also a Pulitzer Prize winner.) This was my second time meeting her as she basically delivered the Knight-Batten award GV received in DC last year.
J-Lab look at communities that are geographically based. Have grants to offer. Citizen's media are not acts of journalism but acts of community building and are outside the comfort zones of traditional journalists. Those citizens' media/community building projects don't make much money but find themselves successful because of their impact on community and local politics. Phenomenon growing rapidly: 500 such community sites.

Lisa Stone, BlogHer
Talked about how women are coming together online.

"Women are a majority of web users. Women are the power users of the web 2.0 movement. Blogher started as a conference in response to the question 'where are the women bloggers?' "

Needless to say she went on to explain how far women bloggers have come both in terms of numbers and influence, not to mention the gateway they represent to the female market. She also said that we've moved beyond mommy blogs who only blog about kidergarten curricula: "mommy bloggers" blogged profusely about Hillary/Obama candidacy announcements.


Access
Farai Chideya, coming back from Zimbabwe shooting a documentary on her father's life had this to say:
"We [in the US] are living in a blessed bubble. [In Zimbabwe], everyone has cell phones but it can take a 1/2 hour to connect. They have Internet cafes but it takes 10 minutes to send an email."

She added that people know that online access would help them make their government accountable but the government is deliberately crushing infrastructure so that they are not threatened.


Media distribution tools
Eduardo Hauser, DailyMe
Take content that is online and distribute it otherwise. Taking technology beyond the computer screen. (DailyMe takes your content and delivers your newspaper personalized and free .)

Photo by Alex DeCarvalho

Technorati Tags: wemedia, miami, shel israel, farai chideya, MTV, Ian Rowe, BlogHer

Blogging WeMedia Miami

I'm in Miami where I'll be attending and blogging WeMedia Miami, along with a couple of other Global Voices folks. The fun and games will take place at the University of Miami and will start there tonight at an opening reception. Technically, We Media Miami "explores and fosters the use of digital media to build and improve real communities in a connected society" but I'm not sure what to expect especially since the program is so esoteric.


I hear there won't be a lot of bloggers and I think the bulk of conversation will center around traditional media trying to update their approach a bit. We'll see. For now I'd rather be in breezy sunny here than in that frozen 11 degree apple that is New York these days...


Not to mention I get to pow-wow with my adorable 6 year old nephew while catching up with his parents about Miami/Florida politics and how the various constituencies in that other Caribbean epicenter are faring. (Yes Brooklyn is the reason I say "that other".)

You can check out the We Media Miami blog if you'd like. It might make the whole thing a bit more concrete for you ... or not.



Technorati: wemedia miami