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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The sweeping Obama phenomenon has caught Brazil, and it comes as no surprise in the country with the world’s largest population of African descendants. Blogs are commenting on all things Obama, from his stand on ethanol to the ‘rumors‘ of his appraisal of Brazil’s free software policies. An especially notable thread is the one reporting on the resurgence of a weirdly interesting 1928 Brazilian sci-fi novel — ‘The Black President’ — that predicted a US election matching a black, a feminist, and a conservative candidate in the then remote year of 2228.

The author, Monteiro Lobato, is very famous in Brazil for his tales for children and teens. The set of books ‘Yellow Woodpecker Ranch‘ was turned into popular TV series that reigned supreme on Brazilian tubes through 5 different remakes — the first in 1952, and most recently in 2001. But, in this case, the book is an obscure and rare incursion of Lobato into adult science fiction. The resurgence of interest in it now is totally connected with what stands out as an incredible intuitive guesswork on what has come to be our present situation, but 80 years ago (!) almost unimaginable.

Most of the Brazilian readers of Monteiro Lobato (1882-1948) know him for the episodes of the ‘Yellow Woodpecker Ranch’ series, and few are acquainted with his ‘adult piece’… Originally published in 1926 as a ‘feuilleton‘ in the newspaper ‘A Manhã’, (but then titled as “The Clash of Races”, which today stands as the subtitle), “The Black President” is a doubly curious book: first for being a science fiction piece, an uncommon genre among Brazilian writers, and second because the plot anticipates the current scientific and intellectual debate during the first decades of the 20th century.
Monteiro Lobato’s Black President - ALPHARRÁBIO - por Viegas Fernandes da Costa

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Changing the command in a Brazilian Ministry used to be a domestic affair, but the resignation of the renowned rainforest defender Marina Silva from the Environmental Ministry has sparked global reactions. Ms. Silva’s replacement was quickly announced by President Lula, through the designation of Carlos Minc, former environmental secretary of Rio de Janeiro State and one of the founders of the Green Party in Brazil. Here are some comments from local bloggers on the shifting sands of public environmental policy.

By leaving the ministry, the ex-rubber tapper and ex-domestic worker, who learned to read only when she was 17 years old [and later to become Brazil's youngest senator at the age of 36], has generated — inside and outside the country — a reverberation that overshadows those that eventually occurred with the fall of former powerful finance ministers. She hopes that her replacement in the ministry, Carlos Minc, will be able to assure the continuity of the government environmental policy, resisting the pressure that comes from Blairo Maggi, the governor of Mato Grosso State who is working against retaining the National Monetary Council resolution that will oblige the financial system to require conforming with environmental regulations as a precondition for access to rural credit in the Amazon…. Marina Silva has declared that when you are in a position of power, even if it is something small (the editor of a newspaper column, for example), we suffer the temptation to look at people from the top down. — “I’ve learned, and it was not now but with many people I had the opportunity to meet along my life, people like Chico Mendes and Dom Moacir Grechi, that we have to look from the bottom up. From the bottom up we are able to watch what is above us. The Amazon is above us. And with such a look we are able to see that, in order to do something that is really good, we have to put ourselves in the perspective of service, which can also mean the gesture of cleaning the path so that another person can take your place. I’ve said before that it’s better to see your son alive on someone else’s lap than to see him dead on your own lap.”
“The Amazon is above us” - Altino Machado

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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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Brazil is an unusual place. The country is full of unconventional people, capable of performing extraordinary feats, which nowadays can get reported in peculiar ways by an ever-growing crowd of unique bloggers. This time the story is rather sad, but the blogosphere is exploding with humorous takes on the tragedy of a Brazilian Roman Catholic priest who is missing after drifting out to sea while trying to set a record for a flight using helium-filled party balloons.

The goal of Father Adelir Antonio de Carli was to break the 19-hour record for remaining aloft using only party balloons, in order to raise funds for the rest stop for truckers in Paranagua, Brazil’s second-largest port for agricultural products. Brazilian truckers often spend days waiting to unload in the port, especially during the busy soy export season now under way.

Planes, helicopters and boats from Brazilian rescue forces have been out along the coast of Santa Catarina state looking for the balloon-flying priest all week. Surely, a religious person gone missing during a charity stunt deserves the highest respect, but the lack of elementary safety features in Father de Carli’s plan to accomplish his endeavor has unleashed an unstoppable stream of humorous lines, although not without some guilty thoughts about them.

Would it be comic if it were not tragic? I say that it can be tragic and comic. Here we have the ‘tragi-comedies’ that won’t let me lie. Please, agree with me before I go on! — IT IS COMIC! (so here is a bold and gratuitous appeal to share the heavy weight in my consciousness for having seen so much comedy in all this).
Peter Pan Priest - Fossas do Ofício

So, the amount of jokes over this priest who decided to fly tied to balloons filled with helium is not contained in the sacred scriptures…. Moreover, the flying priest’s last feat was the topic-of-the-day in a debate I had with a friend who studies journalism and lives in Rio. The father’s imprudence, from being so bizarre, ends up as risible. How does someone wanting to fly with party balloons in completely unfavorable weather, without knowing at least how to operate a gps — really folks?
How to use a gps?Como usar um gps? - de tudo um pouco

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Twisted information about the discovery of what may possibly be the third largest oil field in the world turned into a hot issue on the Brazilian blogosphere this week. The trigger was a comment from the head of Brazil’s National Petroleum Agency [ANP], Haroldo Lima, mentioning that the recently found Carioca [or Sugar Loaf] field in Brazil’s offshore Santos Basin could potentially contain reserves of up to 33 billion barrels of oil and gas. The comment was amplified by the media as an official announcement, which caused a wave of excitement through investor markets from Brazil to New York for Petrobrás [Brazil's state-run oil company] and its partners Repsol-YPF and the BG Group.

Petrobras officials quickly reacted saying that 3 months of further drilling would be needed before any meaningful estimate of volumes could be made. Yet, the day-after local media headlines took on the ‘announcement’ as a deliberate act to boost Brazilian markets and Petrobras’ share price, and speculated about the legal consequences the company could face for making such groundless comments. Meanwhile bloggers found a new gusher of opinions in the theme.

Haroldo Lima, director of National Petroleum Agency, has firmly denied having made any public announcement related to the Santos Basin’s find. He would have just made a comment based in articles published in a specialized American magazine. But the word of the director of a regulatory agency has weight not only over the sector regulated by it, but also over financial markets. Therefore it is not his role to make any inference. The weight of the word of an oil sector manager is much bigger than the opinion or an article of a journalist.
The weight of the word and the responsability - Leandro Vieira

The media, which in its overwhelming majority is opposed to the president Luis Inacio da Silva, the “Lula”, has tried to characterize Haroldo Lima as irresponsible, and the oppositionist CVM (Securities and Exchange Commission) says it will “investigate” him for having shared information with the public before an official announcement from Petrobras. That was an evident demonstration of spite, envy and hatred from the Brazilian right against the President Lula. That’s what we can translate from the attempt to disqualify the remarks of Haroldo Lima — a respectable public Brazilian figure. In its sordid ways, the media has tried to sensationalize the context of Lima’s comments, which were made in a closed event, as if he had made an announcement in a public plaza with a megaphone, aiming to reach the whole population. In fact, the information about the Carioca field was already known by oil specialists, and it had already been reported in the US by the “World Oil Magazine”.
Media roars against - Tribuna Petista

Lula: … tell Petrobras to make up another oil field,
so that I can get away from the latest scandals, heck!!!

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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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The abrupt dimissal of the journalist Paulo Henrique Amorim — or PHA as he is referred too — from his anchor-like position at the IG portal has fueled this week’s blogs debate. The humorous and opinionated style used by PHA in his ‘Conversa Afiada‘ blog to attack what he called the ‘PIG’ — an acronym for Portuguese words meaning, ‘the party of the coup-plotting mass media’ — was an outlet for ‘left bloggers’, and many posts were quick to denounce IG’s surprising move as censorship.

Luiz Carlos Azenha’s website says that Paulo Henrique Amorim was dismissed from IG on Tuesday, by fax. What first calls our attention is the suddenness of the portal’s decision. If it was not for Azenha, we would be accessing PHA’s site without reaching it, and not knowing why… It’s almost impossible not to speculate about possible political meddling. We wait for an explanation from IG. While waiting for it, we can speculate and worry about a media witch-hunt that may be starting, promoted by the big media companies and by the politicians who control it, the ones already known to all.
PHA’s Dismissal - Cidadania.com

It is important to mention that IG differentiates itself from the rest of the big Internet outlets by its sympathetic approach to the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. This perspective adds intrigue to the plot, as it is not so easy to identify the forces driving behind PHA’s release.

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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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