Here I am in Budapest, interesting city, with beautiful people all around speaking a peculiar language. The whole environment exhales history, but the streets are full of young and interesting people who seem well tuned to the beat of the moment. I could sense many similarities with Brazilians.

The Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008, which gathers managers, editors, authors, Lingua sites coordinators, collaborators and other fellow communities that somehow are linked to the Global Voices Online project, is happening here.

As I arrived here, I thought it might be important to mention some aspects of my relationship with GVO — something I’ve never described before. With many simultaneous projects on my plate, it is difficult to properly document the interconnections of what I’ve been developing and implementing, especially when it comes to the “cross-layering” where aspects of one project contribute to other ones.

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Brazilian Indians were in the spotlight of world media this week and the local blogosphere has much to say about it. From the images of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon, which were ‘leaked’ first in a blog that is now claiming attribution rights for its scoop, to the enraged protest caught on camera against the building of dams along the Xingu River in the Amazon basin where an official of Brazil’s national electric company got slashed by traditional machetes and clubs. Bloggers had different takes from the dominant mainstream media narratives.

Here is the Brazilian GLOBO video of the engineer’s encounter with the Indians.

Since the gathering in Altamira, the Brazilian media have focused mostly on the issue of violence. GLOBO included a special report in its extremely popular weekend TV magazine FANTASTICO and here’s the text (computer) translated into rough English. As you can see, the focus is on the engineer and the Indians associated with the confrontation and there is very little about the many consequences of building the dam. While the Brazilian mainstream media are preoccupied with the “hot” story, various blogs and NGOs have been struggling to deliver the deeper messages. Encontro Xingu ‘08 provides great coverage of the whole event with in-depth analysis by David Cunningham and lots of wonderful photos by Sue Cunningham. The Xingu Encounter was also reported by International Rivers along with English translations of the declarations of the Xingu Peoples. And here’s the (computer) translated final statement of the broad coalition of Brazilian grassroots organizations that are opposing building of th,e Belo Monte dam.
Violence - Vision Share

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After a long period of dictatorship, and since the political liberalization of the 80’s, Brazilians have learned to value freedom of expression as a key democratic right. But the last weeks have shown that some issues such as marijuana legalization still don’t hold the status of being entitled to a legally sanctioned public debate. This year’s edition of the Marijuana March was prohibited by courts in 9 capital cities across the country due to allegations of illegal promotion of drug use. The theme provoked responses by many local bloggers.

While in some countries marijuana use is accepted with restrictions, in Brazil the debate on the issue is not even permitted. Talking about marijuana has turned into a taboo, as the march was prohibited by the Public Ministry a few days before scheduled date, leaving no chance for appeals due to the lack of available time. It becomes clear the country is unable to allow its citizens to debate their relationship with some of the problems we have around here. Should we label a demonstration for legal reform as drug use promotion? To debate necessarily means to influence? There are some terms that are not well defined in the heads of the justices, which results in hindering the citizens from claiming their right: the freedom to express themselves.
Tropical Fascism - Obrog!!!

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April fool’s day this year has brought a bitter taste to the Brazilian open source community. The announcement of the approval of Microsoft’s Open XML Format (OOXML) as an ISO/IEC International Standard was, at first, seen as some kind of joke. After all, OOXML had lost a vote on its adoption at ISO in September 2007. The voting members had requested hundreds of adjustments to the standard however it is widely known that today the majority have remained unimplemented. But let’s check out why such a drab debate over technical standards has caught the attention of so many bloggers in Brazil.

The open source movement in Brazil, with all its successes and failures, has somehow turned into a cultural trend. In this context, Microsoft’s Office suite (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.) and its proprietary files’ format became the very symbol of the monopolistic obstacle against the freedom pursued by free software activists, and also the main target of government agencies’ official substitution policies. Where the Linux operating system was still not ready to reign, at least OpenOffice — with it’s ISO approved ODF file format standard — could help breaking Microsoft’s cultural hegemony. And it worked!

In fact, it seems that the strategy has worked too well. Microsoft started to see its multi-billion dollar Office business model menaced by the rising trend of governments giving preference to open standards in their decisions on software acquisition. The tactical reaction of Microsoft in defense of their monopoly position was to blitz for the sanction of their incompatible alternative format Open XML as a second ISO standard. Bloggers decried that the strategy used to carry OOXML through the ISO fast-track process has damaged the standard’s credibility and created serious consequences for the whole concept of open standards. Indeed, Microsoft tactics can bring forth an intense rage among those Brazilians who have worked so long and so hard for open standards, and it is not surprising to see MS portrayed not merely as a monopolist but as a monster.

Although having (barely) followed the procedural norms, ISO has lost (or at least damaged) its credibility by being involved in a process that was corrupted behind the scenes by a series of suspicions, irregularities, lobbies and so forth. If the approval had been reached by agreement, be it through Fast-Track or not, ISO would have maintained its credibility. But by passively conceding to Redmond’s pressure, and not checking the decision-making procedures of the various countries, ISO has damaged its credibility in a permanent way — and somehow thwarted all the other ISO standards.
OOXML = ISO 29500 - Microsoft Wins, we all lose - Linux… e mais coisas

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A new arena is gathering steam and significance in the Brazilian Internet space: the football blogs. It should be no surprise given how natives are impassioned for the game, and how the latest results of the many championships become part of the casual chit-chat everywhere. Day by day, fervent fans are finding out that blogs and other media possibilities — podcasts, webcasts, foruns and chats — are invaluable tools to display, promote and exchange opinions about the many games, and also to express their passion for their favorite football club teams.

The most evident feature brought by the wave of new entrants in the sports chronicle on the web is the customized report and commentary produced by teams’ fans. Since TV transmissions of football games started in Brazil, referees are not the only ones to be sujected to biased scrutiny of the fans. The obligatory account of the games by speakers and commentators from major TV networks, regular owners of exclusive broadcasting rights, also suffer the sharp analysis — and fiery reactions — from the opinionated crowd of the many clubs’ supporters.

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Two of the biggest media companies in Brazil are currently involved is court cases that similarly raise the issue of freedom of speech and press even though the media finds itself on opposite sides of the issue in the two cases. The influential newspaper ‘Folha de SP’ is facing a series of lawsuits filed by followers of an evangelical church, while Veja, the top weekly magazine, and some of its main editors are going after a blogger through another series of lawsuits. Taking the larger view, the Brazilian blogosphere is uniquely pointing out the similarity and contradictions revealed by the connectedness of both situations.

Folha’s problems started a week ago when Elvira Lobato, a reporter who is now facing about 50 individual suits, published an article about the finances of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God - IURD, and its connections with tax havens. The piece lists the TV network (2nd national audience), 23 TV and 40 radio stations, besides the other 19 companies — 2 newspapers included — that forms the church’s ‘empire’, but the suits actually complain about IURD being portrayed as a ’sect’.

The issue has called RSF’s attention, and the ABI [Brazilian Press Association] has released a note [pt] describing IURD’s reaction as an ‘unprecedented coercive campaign in Brazilian media history’. While the suits against Folha has generated such compelling response from traditional media and its backers, a very different approach is being adopted towards the legal dispute between Veja magazine and the journalist-turned-into-blogger Luis Nassif. As expected, the blogosphere has much to say about that.

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The global debate on Internet governance will once again gather people from all over the world at UN’s IGF, this time in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The process was started last year in Athens, when more than 1,200 participants focused on discussion of the overarching issues tied to the future of information and communications technologies, including control over the Internet architecture and numbering and naming system, security, intellectual property, openness, connectivity, cost and multilingualism.

The IGF’s innovative multi-stakeholder format, designed to grant governments, NGOs, and commerce an equal seat at the table, was praised by many as an evolution from the bounds of classical diplomacy. But the role of the IGF as a pure discussion forum — “a neutral, non-binding and non-duplicative process” as the EU presidency put it — and the absence of a more formalized output were intensively discussed by several governments and NGOs, Brazilians included. Blogs report:

Great expectations and a good dose of self criticism will surely be present at the Second Internet Governance Forum (IGF), which will take place in November in Rio de Janeiro. The occurrence of the IGF in Brazil was the result of a big effort of the local government, and the discussions will focus not only on the conventional issues related with the virtual environment, but also on the foundational purposes of the IGF process. In a significant evolution from its last meeting in Athens — which was characterized by the absence of deliberative power — the IGF in Rio will position the present Internet governance model and the IGF’s mandate as central themes of the forum.
II Forum de Governança da Internet - Dialógico

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César Salgado’s blog (via Altino) announces the launching of the English version of a youtube video which tells much about the lawless situation reigning in many parts of the Brazilian Amazon region.

Farmers and politicians of the Brazilian municipality of Juína (Mato Grosso state) hinders Greenpeace activists, OPAN (Native Amazon Operation) members and european journalists’s visit to the Enawene Nawe Indigenous Land. Watch truculence and intimidation scenes sufered by the crew in August 20th, 2007.

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