Condivisione di buoni prodotti della Rete.
Le nuove tribù promuovono nuove infrastrutture di accesso alla Rete. L'innovazione la promuovono i Cittadini; siamo noi quelli che stiamo aspettando.
ITALIA: presenze al cinema (Aprile - Luglio 2009)Clicca sull'immagine per ingrandirla
If your local newspaper shuts down, what will take the place of its coverage? Perhaps a package of information about your neighborhood, or even your block, assembled by a computer.
A number of Web start-up companies are creating so-called hyperlocal news sites that let people zoom in on what is happening closest to them, often without involving traditional journalists.
The sites, like EveryBlock, Outside.in, Placeblogger and Patch, collect links to articles and blogs and often supplement them with data from local governments and other sources. They might let a visitor know about an arrest a block away, the sale of a home down the street and reviews of nearby restaurants.
Internet companies have been trying to develop such sites for more than a decade, in part as a way to lure local advertisers to the Web. But the notion of customized news has taken on greater urgency as some newspapers, like The Rocky Mountain News and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, have stopped printing.
The news business “is in a difficult time period right now, between what was and what will be,” said Gary Kebbel, the journalism program director for the Knight Foundation, which has backed 35 local Web experiments. “Our democracy is based upon geography, and we believe local information is such a core need for our democracy to survive.”
Of course, like traditional media, the hyperlocal sites have to find a way to bring in sufficient revenue to support their business. And so far, they have had only limited success selling ads. Some have shouldered the cost of fielding a sales force to reach mom-and-pop businesses that may know nothing about online advertising.
One problem is that the number of readers for each neighborhood-focused news page is inherently small. “When you slice further and further down, you get smaller and smaller audiences,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst who has followed the hyperlocal market for a decade. “Advertisers want that kind of targeting, but they also want to reach more people, so there’s a paradox.”
Still, said Peter Krasilovsky, a program director at the Kelsey Group, which studies local media, many small businesses have never advertised outside the local Yellow Pages and are an untapped online ad market whose worth his firm expects to double to $32 billion by 2013.
One of the most ambitious hyperlocal sites is EveryBlock, a six-person start-up in an office building in Chicago overlooking noisy El tracks, which is stitching together this hyperlocal future one city at a time. Backed by a $1.1 million grant from the Knight Foundation, it has created sites for 11 American cities, including New York, Seattle, Chicago and San Francisco.
It fills those sites with links to news articles and posts from local bloggers, along with data feeds from city governments, with crime reports, restaurant inspections, and notices of road construction and film shoots. (The New York Times has a partnership with EveryBlock to help New York City readers find news about their elected officials.)
One day last week, the EveryBlock page for Adrian Holovaty, the company’s founder, showed that the police had answered a domestic battery call two blocks from his home and that a gourmet sandwich shop four blocks away had failed a city health inspection.
“We have a very liberal definition of what is news. We think it’s something that happens in your neighborhood,” said Mr. Holovaty, 28, who worked at The Washington Post before creating EveryBlock two years ago.
In some ways the environment is right for these start-ups. In the last several years, neighborhood blogs have sprouted across the country, providing the sites with free, ready-made content they can link to. And new tools, like advanced search techniques and cellphones with GPS capability, help the sites figure out which articles to show to which readers in which neighborhoods.
Unlike most hyperlocal start-ups, Patch, based in New York, hires reporters. It was conceived of and bankrolled by Tim Armstrong, the new chief of AOL, after he found a dearth of information online about Riverside, Conn., where he lives. Patch has created sites for three towns in New Jersey and plans to be in dozens by the end of the year.
One journalist in each town travels to school board meetings and coffee shops with a laptop and camera. Patch also solicits content from readers, pulls in articles from other sites and augments it all with event listings, volunteer opportunities, business directories and lists of local information like recycling laws.
“We believe there’s currently a void in the amount, quality and access to information at the community level, a function, unfortunately, of all the major metros suffering and pulling back daily coverage of a lot of communities,” said Jon Brod, co-founder and chief executive of Patch. This month, the home page of The Star-Ledger’s Web site, based in Newark, twice referred to articles first reported by Patch.
Outside.in publishes no original content. The company gathers articles and blog posts and scans them for geographical cues like the name of a restaurant or indicative words like “at” or “near.” An iPhone application lets users read articles about events within a thousand of feet of where they are standing. Outside.in, which is based in Brooklyn, licenses feeds of links to big news sites that want to deepen their local coverage, like that of NBC’s Chicago affiliate.
Venture capital firms have invested $7.5 million in the company, partly on the bet that it can cut deals with newspapers to have their sales forces sell neighborhood-focused ads for print and the Web.
One hurdle is the need for reliable, quality content. The information on many of these sites can still appear woefully incomplete. Crime reports on EveryBlock, for example, are short on details of what happened. Links to professionally written news articles on Outside.in are mixed with trivial and sometimes irrelevant blog posts.
That raises the question of what these hyperlocal sites will do if newspapers, a main source of credible information, go out of business. “They rely on pulling data from other sources, so they really can’t function if news organizations disappear,” said Steve Outing, who writes about online media for Editor & Publisher Online.
But many hyperlocal entrepreneurs say they are counting on a proliferation of blogs and small local journalism start-ups to keep providing content.
“In many cities, the local blog scene is so rich and deep that even if a newspaper goes away, there would be still be plenty of stuff for us to publish,” said Mr. Holovaty of EveryBlock.
A fine ottobre appuntamento con "Barcamp Venezia", in arrivo mille persone per affrontare tutte le sfide della rete
Sabato 5 Settembre 2009, Venezia non è solo l’immagine storica del film “Morte a Venezia” che ha fatto il giro del mondo ma ha anche l’aspetto moderno di una città capace di innovare, aprirsi alla rete e sperimentare nuove tecnologie. Per averne la prova basterà andare, dal 23 al 25 ottobre prossimi, all'Arsenale per partecipare alla prima edizione del “Barcamp Venezia”. Gli organizzazioni prevedono una presenza, significativa anche nei numeri, di mille persone al giorno e il nuovo evento è proposto dalla amministrazione comunale di Venezia come prosecuzione di tutte le attività di promozione dell’accesso alla Rete finora realizzate. A presentare l’iniziativa, con evidente soddisfazione, è stato ieri il vicesindaco Michele Vianello che con Roberto Scano e a Andrea Casadei, bloggers rispettivamente veneziano e nazionale c insieme a Gigi Cogo, hanno ideato e collaborato all’organizzazione dell’evento. Non ci poteva essere palcoscenico migliore che non quello della Mostra del cinema al Lido. Il coordinamento logistico invece è affidato ad “Expo Venice”, presieduta da Piergiacomo Ferrari con l’amministratore delegato Giuseppe Mattiazzo. Per il “BarCamp” è già operativo un sito internet all’indirizzo http://www.barcamp.org/veneziacamp2009 e dai riscontri avuti è già un boom. Nella tre giorni (a partecipazione gratuita) verranno organizzate delle sessioni che avranno il coinvolgimento e il dibattito degli utenti della rete, e di tantissime community anche a livello nazionale. Una sessione sarà dedicata al tema “rete e politica” con la partecipazione di due “grandi” della politica italiana che discuteranno con il popolo della rete, un’altra affronterà il tema del turismo legato alle potenzialità della rete, argomento sul quale Ca’ Farsetti ha dedicato un grande impegno. Ma ci saranno tante sorprese, partendo dagli ospiti che interverranno, e tornei. «Il tema del Barcamp sarà la rete e i suoi abitanti – ha spiegato Vianello – dalle numerosissime adesioni già arrivate si stimano un migliaio di presenze al giorno ed è quasi certo che David Weinberger (coautore del Cluetrain Manifesto) chiuderà i lavori cui parteciperanno altri grossi personaggi del mondo della Rete». Fra questi certa la presenza di Andrea De Biasi, direttore di “Nova24 Ora” che terrà uno speech.
Lorenzo Mayer
Over the past fifteen years, the rise of the World Wide Web has resulted in remarkable new possibilities and business models reshaping our culture and our economy. Now the time has come to reshape government.
Editor’s note: The following guest post is by Tim O’Reilly
, the founder and CEO of computer book publisher O’Reilly Media and a conference organizer. O’Reilly coined the term Web 2.0 five years ago. Now he is arguing it is time for Gov 2.0, and has helped organize a summit
next week to talk about what that might mean.
Today, many people equate Web 2.0 with social media; three or four years ago, they equated it with AJAX applications and APIs. Many are now starting to think it’s all about cloud computing. In fact, it’s all of these and more. The way I have always defined Web 2.0
, it’s been about what it means for the internet, rather than the personal computer, to be the dominant computing platform. What are the rules of business and competitive advantage when the network is the platform?
So too with Government 2.0. A lot of people equate the term with government use of social media, either to solicit public participation or to get out its message in new ways. Some people think it means making government more transparent. Some people think it means adding AJAX to government websites, or replacing those websites with government APIs, or building new cloud platforms for shared government services. And yes, it means all those things.
But as with Web 2.0, the real secret of success in Government 2.0 is thinking about government as a platform
. If there’s one thing we learn from the technology industry, it’s that every big winner has been a platform company: someone whose success has enabled others, who’ve built on their work and multiplied its impact. Microsoft put “a PC on every desk and in every home,” the internet connected those PCs, Google enabled a generation of ad-supported startups, Apple turned the phone market upside down by letting developers loose to invent applications no phone company would ever have thought of. In each case, the platform provider raised the bar, and created opportunities for others to exploit.
There are signs that government is starting to adopt this kind of platform thinking.
Behind Federal CIO Vivek Kundra’s data.gov
site is the idea that government agencies shouldn’t just provide web sites, they should provide web services. These services, in effect, become the government’s SDK (software development kit). The government may build some applications using these APIs, but there’s an opportunity for private citizens and innovative companies to build new, unexpected applications. This is the phenomenon that Jonathan Zittrain refers to as “generativity“, the ability of open-ended platforms to create new possibilities not envisioned by their creators.
And of course, much as happened with the rise of commercial web services, “hackers” have been battering at the gates for some time. Adrian Holovaty’s chicagocrime.org (now part of everyblock.com
) was the second-ever Google Maps mashup, back in 2005. It showed the world just how much value could be created by putting government data on a map. Most of the winners of Washington D.C.’s Apps for Democracy contest are direct descendants of chicagocrime. Similarly, Openstreetmap
started out using crowdsourcing to create free maps in the UK, where map data is expensive; their move to build better maps for Palestine led to contributions from the UN and European community.
We’re starting to see formal efforts to develop an application ecosystem at the local, state, and federal level, via contests like Apps for Democracy, Apps for America
, and other similar programs. Startups like SeeClickFix
are pushing for standardized APIs to government services (like Open311
). But there’s still a long way to go.
My goal at the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase
and Gov 2.0 Summit
next week in Washington DC is to encourage more of this kind of platform thinking. We’ve brought in leaders from some of the most important platform providers in the tech world—Vint Cerf, the creator of TCP/IP, Jack Dorsey of Twitter, and Craig Mundie of Microsoft, among others—to talk about what makes tech platforms tick. We’re bringing together people like GSA CIO Casey Coleman and Amazon CTO Werner Vogels
to talk about what the government can learn from the private sector about building cloud computing infrastructure, and especially how to make interoperable clouds. We’re looking beyond the obvious, as in our on-stage conversation with Google chief economist Hal Varian, talking about the role that measurement and “real time economics
” plays in the success of Web 2.0 platforms. We’ll try to apply these insights to some of the big initiatives facing the Federal government, including health care
and education
. And of course, we’ll be engaging with the architects of the government’s internet strategy, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra
, Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra
, White House new media head Macon Phillips
, FCC chairman Julius Genachowski
, as well as leaders from the military and intelligence sector.
In one of my prep calls with Craig Mundie, he pushed forcefully for the idea that killer apps drive platform adoption. It strikes me that the killer app may already be here; we just don’t give the government enough credit for it. I’m talking about the wonderful world of geolocation, with GPS devices in cars providing turn-by-turn directions, phone applications telling you when the next bus is about to arrive, and soon, augmented reality applications telling you what’s nearby. It’s easy to forget that GPS, like the original internet, is a service kickstarted by the government. Here’s the key point: the Air Force originally launched GPS satellites for its own purposes, but in a crucial policy decision, agreed to release a less accurate signal for commercial use. The Air Force moved from providing an application to providing a platform, with the result being a wave of innovation in the private sector.
Location is the key to the relevance of government to its citizenry, as well as to a host of non-governmental services. But there are already disputes about who owns the data. For example, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority issued a takedown order
against the StationStops iPhone application. This is exactly the kind of bad policy that we hope to remedy by shedding light on best practices in government platform building.
.
It’s easy to forget just how generative government interventions can be. The internet itself was originally a government-funded project. So was the interstate highway system. Would WalMart exist without that government intervention? Would our cities thrive without transportation, water, power, garbage collection and all the other services we take for granted? Like an operating system providing services for applications, government provides functions that enable private sector activity.It’s important for the idea of “government as platform” to reach well beyond the world of IT. It was Scott Heiferman, the founder of meetup.com
who hammered this point home to me. Meetup is a platform for people to do whatever they want with. A lot of them are using it for citizen engagement: cleaning up parks, beaches, and roads; identifying and fixing local problems.
In some of my recent talks, I’ve used an image originally proposed by Donald Kettl in The Next Government of the United States
. Too often, we think of government as a kind of vending machine. We put in our taxes, and get out services: roads, bridges, hospitals, fire brigades, police protection… And when the vending machine doesn’t give us what we want, we protest. Our idea of citizen engagement has somehow been reduced to shaking the vending machine. But what meetup teaches us is that engagement may mean lending our hands, not just our voices.
In this regard, there’s a CNN story from last April that I like to tell: a road into a state park in Kauai was washed out, and the state government said it didn’t have the money to fix it. The park would be closed. Understanding the impact on the local economy, a group of businesses chipped in, organized a group of volunteers, and fixed the road themselves. I called this DIY on a civic scale
. Scott Heiferman corrected me: “It’s DIO: Not ‘Do it Yourself’ but ‘Do it Ourselves.’” Imagine if the state government were to reimagine itself not as a vending machine but an organizing engine for civic action. Might DIO help us tackle other problems that bedevil us? Can we imagine a new compact between government and the public, in which government puts in place mechanisms for services that are delivered not by government, but by private citizens? In other words, can government become a platform?
We have an enormous opportunity right now to make a difference. There’s a receptivity to new ideas that we haven’t seen in a generation. Government at all levels has put out the call for help. It’s up to the tech community to respond, with our ideas, with our voices, with our creativity, and with our code.
(Photo credit: Flickr/Center for American Progress
)
Oggi, venerdì 4 settembre, alle ore 16, al Lido di Venezia (area eventi Garden Movie Village), il vice sindaco di Venezia e assessore all'Automazione, Michele Vianello, ha presentato il "BarCamp Venezia", un incontro tra i cittadini e gli utenti della Rete, promosso dal Comune di Venezia all'Isola del Lazzareto Vecchio dal 23 al 25 ottobre.
CERNOBBIO - La crisi economica globale può dirsi superata, ma dobbiamo attenderci una «debole ripresa», che per due o tre anni nelle economie avanzate sarà verosimilmente inferiore ai tassi percentuali del 2% o più che abbiamo visto in passato dopo un periodo di recessione ed «esiste il non trascurabile rischio di una ricaduta»: così ha risposto Nouriel Roubini incontrando i giornalisti in una pausa del workshop Ambrosetti in corso alla Villa d'Este di Cernobbio. Fra le ragioni che fanno propendere Roubini per una ripresa debole c'è «l'alto tasso di disoccupazione che negli Stati Uniti e in alcuni grandi paesi occidentali ha raggiunto, se non superato, la soglia del 10%». Senza opportune misure di protezione sociale e di welfare state, Roubini teme anche l'aggravarsi delle tensioni sociali. Secondo il professore della New York University, conosciuto come uno dei massimi esperti di macroeconomia internazionale, la nuova amministrazione Obama negli Stati Uniti e i governi degli altri principali paesi hanno reagito bene alla prima fase della crisi, «evitando il pericolo di una persistente stagnazione, come è avvenuto ad esempio in Giappone nel "decennio perduto" degli anni Novanta», non facendo mancare all'economia mondiale gli stimoli fiscali e monetari di cui aveva bisogno. «Non credo che noi abbiamo imparato la lezione dalla crisi completamente»: Roubini, uno dei pochi che avevano previsto la crisi, a Cernobbio ha spiegato che «troppi continuano a sperare che sia finita, che le condizioni del mercato finanziario siano buone e che le banche vadano bene». Non è una visione completamente negativa, la sua. Adesso però comincia una nuova fase, delicata e difficile. Per Roubini la gestione della "exit strategy" sarà fondamentale per riuscire a uscire gradualmente dalla crisi. «I rischi possibili – ha spiegato – sono due: nel primo caso si agisce troppo in fretta rimuovendo gli stimoli fiscali e monetari in atto e si rischia una nuova fase recessiva; il secondo scenario invece é che si agisca troppo tardi, con il rischio di un'inflazione fuori controllo associata a crescita anemica». In sostanza una sorta di "stag-inflazione" (recessione e inflazione allo stesso tempo) come ci fu in Italia e nelle maggiori economie avanzate dopo la guerra del Kippur in Medio Oriente e successiva crisi petrolifera. Roubini ha riconosciuto che «è alquanto difficile non compiere errori di politica monetaria e fiscale, anzi gli errori sono quasi inevitabili». I Governi dovranno sì pensare a «ridurre la liquidità in eccesso e contrastare l'eccessivo allargarsi dei deficit di bilancio», ma è ancora presto per togliere gli stimoli e per varare un aumento delle tasse: per il professore americano «bisognerà aspettare verso la fine del 2010 o i primi mesi del 2011». Riguardo alla maggior propensione al risparmio degli americani, Roubini si é detto ottimista. «E' positivo che dopo che si era arrivati a un tasso di risparmio pari allo zero negli anni scorsi, ora si sia saliti a circa il 4%, ma la media storica per gli Usa é di circa il 10%. Quindi è augurabile che questa inversione di tendenza continui anche se in maniera graduale e progressiva altrimenti l'impatto sui consumi rischia di essere molto grave. Sarebbe ideale se i minori consumi degli americani fossero compensati dalla maggiore attitudine alla spesa dei consumatori in altri paesi, specialmente Cina, il Giappone e la Germania, ma io temo che questo non sarà facile».
Welcome to Knowledge Bank
Knowledge Bank is a dedicated online site for teachers and other educators to share, discuss and collate innovative ideas and examples of "next" practices, especially those from Victorian schools. Knowledge Bank's aim is to be a credible and trusted resource for teachers and others in the emerging world of digitally-based teaching and learning. It is also a place for Victorian teachers and others, to contribute their authentic experiences, expertise and insights into educational innovations – i.e., what works and why.
Knowledge Bank offers Victorian teachers the means to showcase their innovative practices in teaching and learning to other teachers and educators, both in Victoria and beyond. It is also a place which facilitates pathways to professional dialogue through sponsoring events such as online conferencing, emerging technologies trials or by highlighting the latest research exploring the educational value of innovation.
Journalists faced an increasingly grim working environment in 2008, with global press freedom declining for a seventh straight year and deterioration occurring for the first time in every region, according to Freedom House's annual media study. The rollback was not confined to traditionally authoritarian states; with Israel, Italy and Hong Kong slipping from the study's Free category to Partly Free status.
"The journalism profession today is up against the ropes and fighting to stay alive, as pressures from governments, other powerful actors and the global economic crisis take an enormous toll," said Jennifer Windsor, Freedom House executive director. "The press is democracy's first defense and its vulnerability has enormous implications for democracy if journalists are not able to carry out their traditional watchdog role."
Freedom House formally released the findings from Freedom of the Press 2009 in Washington in front of the organization’s giant Map of Press Freedom at the Newseum. The study indicates that there were twice as many losses as gains in 2008, with declines and stagnation in East Asia of particular concern. While parts of South Asia and Africa made progress, overall these gains were overshadowed by a campaign of intimidation targeting independent media, particularly in the former Soviet Union and the Middle East and North Africa.
There were some notable improvements. The Maldives made the study's largest jump, moving to the Partly Free category with the adoption of a new constitution protecting freedom of expression and the release of a prominent journalist from life imprisonment. Guyana regained its Free rating with fewer attacks on journalists and a government decision to lift a boycott on advertising in the main independent newspaper.
Out of the 195 countries and territories covered in the study, 70 (36 percent) are rated Free, 61 (31 percent) are rated Partly Free and 64 (33 percent) are rated Not Free. This represents a modest decline from the 2008 survey in which 72 countries and territories were Free, 59 Partly Free and 64 Not Free. The new survey found that only 17 percent of the world's population lives in countries that enjoy a Free press.
Key regional findings include:
- Asia Pacific: Cambodia dropped to Not Free status because of increased violence against journalists. Hong Kong slipped to Partly Free as Beijing exerted growing influence over media. China's media environment remained bleak. Media in Taiwan faced assault and growing government pressure. South Asia saw improvements in the Maldives, Bangladesh and Pakistan, while Sri Lanka and Afghanistan suffered setbacks.
- Central and Eastern Europe/Former Soviet Union: The region suffered the biggest drop in press freedom of any region, with journalists murdered in Bulgaria and Croatia and assaulted in Bosnia. Russia's score declined with the judiciary unwilling to protect journalists from attacks, as well as the frequent targeting of independent media by regulators.
- Middle East and North Africa: The region continues to have the world's lowest level of press freedom. Restrictions on journalists and official attempts to influence coverage during the Gaza conflict led to Israel's Partly Free status. The Israeli-Occupied Territories/Palestinian Authority saw declines with both Hamas and Fatah intimidating journalists. Iraq saw the security environment for journalists improve and new legal protections for media in the Kurdish areas.
- Sub-Saharan Africa: Press freedom suffered in Senegal with an increase in both legal and extralegal action taken against media. In Madagascar, media outlets critical of the government were targeted. Other declines were seen in Botswana, Chad, Congo (Brazzaville), Lesotho, Mauritania, South Africa and Tanzania. Comoros, Sierra Leone, Angola and Liberia improved.
- Americas: Guyana regained its Free rating, while Haiti and Uruguay saw significant improvement. However, Mexico’s score dropped again because of increased violence, the government’s unwillingness to make legal reforms, and pressure on media from local and state officials. Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala and Nicaragua registered major declines.
- Western Europe: The region continues to boast the world's highest level of press freedom. However, Italy slipped back into the Partly Free category with free speech limited by courts and libel laws, increased intimidation of journalists by organized crime and far-right groups, and concerns over the concentration of media ownership. Greece also suffered a significant decline.
Freedom House has assessed the degree of print, broadcast and internet freedom in every country in the world since 1980. The 2009 ratings are based on an assessment of the legal, political and economic environments in which journalists worked in 2008.
"The declines in East Asia are particularly disappointing, given the increased attention on the region because of the Beijing Olympics," said Karin Deutsch Karlekar, Freedom House senior researcher and managing editor of the study. "China should have had a better record in 2008 and upheld its promise to ensure press freedom during the Olympics, but instead it chose to remain the world's largest repressor of media freedom."
Key trends that led to numerical movements in the study include:
- Fragile Freedoms: Declines in Israel, Italy and Taiwan illustrate that established democracies with traditionally open media are not immune to restricting media freedom. Over the last five years, a number of emerging democracies have also suffered considerable declines in press freedom including: Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Thailand, the Philippines and Senegal.
- Consolidating Control: Authoritarian states are increasingly consolidating control of the media. In the last five years, space for independent media shrunk significantly in countries like Russia, Ethiopia and The Gambia.
- Violence and Impunity: The level of violence and physical harassment directed at the press by both government and non-state actors continues to rise in many countries. Many of these cases go unsolved and these attacks have a chilling effect on media, contributing to self-censorship.
- Punitive laws: Both governments and private individuals continue to restrict media freedom through laws that forbid "inciting hatred," commenting on sensitive topics such as religion or ethnicity, or "endangering national security." Libel and defamation laws remain a widespread way to punish the press.
- New media: Freedom House’s recently released internet freedom index finds that new media outlets are often freer than traditional media and have the potential to open repressive media environments such as China and Iran. However, as new media gains influence, governments are beginning to crack down on internet users by employing traditional means of repression.
The world’s worst-rated countries continue to include Burma, Cuba, Eritrea, Libya, North Korea and Turkmenistan. The study found that the level of media freedom in these countries remained stagnant in 2008, despite hope that the internet and new media might provide openings in the media environment.
The methodology and graphics from the survey are available by contacting Laura Ingalls at ingalls@freedomhouse.org or by calling +1-202-683-0909. Full reports for select countries and territories in the study will be available in June.
Freedom House's historical data, spanning a time frame from 1980 to the present, is the most comprehensive data on global media freedom available and is a key resource for scholars, policymakers, and international institutions.
Freedom House also undertakes advocacy efforts through press releases and the publication of special reports, such as the recently released Freedom on the Net, a pilot study of 15 countries that analyzes the state of internet freedom and warns that the rights of internet and mobile phone users are increasingly at risk as governments, both repressive and democratic, expand their ability to monitor and control online activity. Freedom House is also actively involved with other groups in the global press freedom community in organizing events and programs designed to expand the space for free expression around the world.