Curt Hopkins is setting up ‘The Committee To Protect Bloggers‘; a noble idea – but the devil will be as always, in the details. He’s listing the attacks on bloggers in Iran, and the site may well become a good clearinghouse for attempts to suppress blogger’s freedom of speech.
He’s looking for some helpers, so go check it out.
This proposal is near and dear to my heart. I’ve been a strong supporter of the arabic blogging tool. More important, I’ve thought a good deal over the past few months about the Iranian situation, and I’ve been considering something like what they’re proposing to do. If I had the time and energy, I already would have tried to start what they’re doing. And if “bloggeurs sans frontieres” had’t already been taken, I probably would have already at least set up a blog-wiki to have a place to get people talking about it.
You clearly know who at least one of the people starting this is. There’s not any real information on the blog itself. Lots of “we are” or “we will,” but no “who is we.” In the blogosphere, the trust but verify principle is pretty important because there’s no Dun&Bradstreet or other authenticator. So we’ve got to check folks out thru the network.
So you may not want to go into who these guys are here at WoC, but I’d suggest you pass along to them the recommendation they find a way to assure potential participants that they’re legit. When you start tossing around 501(c)(3) up front in your first post, that means $s, and that means a higher standard of transparency from the git-go.
I’d also like to know whether any of them (assuming that “we” is not the “royal we”) have some sort of experience or skills that would be relevant to the endeavor. What are they bringing to the table. A Blogger blog isn’t all that big a deal.
Another issue they need to get out on the table is whether they have any political connection or have a platform (journalism, blogging, business) that has a partisan angle. When you’re dealing with censorship by a government with which the USA does not maintain diplomatic relations, everything is sensitive. For example, if they’re soulmates with Michael Ledeen I’d like to know. If it turned out they were, I doubt I’d share their “intuitions” about how to handle delicate issues. The same, I might add, would be the case if they were tight with Noam Chomsky. In a similar vein, anyone would be a fool to get involved in something that was likely to have a Cuba angle if you didn’t know which group of Floridian Cubanos were supporting the project.
The other aspect of their background is the “what’s in it for them” question (including political motivations covered in the preceding para). This is directly relevant to your “everything’s a commercial” post. The Iraqi bloggers brouhaha has undoubtedly sensitived you personally to the real problem that bloggers can be directly — or unwittingly — “agents of influence” both in domestic and international terms. But they can also be suspected as such even when there are no real grounds for suspicion.
It’s a nasty world we live in, but there are some fairly straightforward things we all can do to keep the nastiness from destroying the really good and important stuff.