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Downloaded to the Street and Went to the Political Party Digital Townhall Live from Cairo Transcript Ben Rowswell: Ahlan wa sahlan, and welcome to the Digital Townhall from Cairo. We are coming to you live from Tahrir Lounge in the Goethe Institut, just hundreds of metres away from Tahrir Square where political activists made history a few ago. My name is Ben Rowswell, with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. This is an initiative of Cloud to Street, a research effort that combines Stanford and Harvard with the University of British Columbia. The purpose of today’s event is to learn from a panel of these activists, particularly on how they used social media and other technology to effect such dramatic political change. Through Adobe Connect we will broadcast our discussion with these activists by videoconference to you, and you can send questions for the panel through the chat forum. Let me turn to the three panellists we have today, and start with the impressive young woman woman behind Tahrir Lounge, Mona Shahien. Mona, can you tell us about how you got involved in politics through the internet before the January 25 revolution? Mona Shahien: Alright my name is Mona Shahien. I was one of the founders for the Revolutionary Youth Union in Tahrir Square. Before I was part of Reform and Development, a political party. I was also a member in the Shadow Government. My connection to the internet and political life first came through an ad about my political party on Facebook. I got myself downloaded to the street and went to the political party. The ad was simple: if you are a woman and want to be part of political life, join us. We have an event. So I went to the event and joined them. This is how I was connected to the political life. This is the start in 2009 and after that we started to have a connection out of Facebook, for us and the shadow government it made it quicker and easier. More connection and dialogue with each other and to get information. Ben Rowswell: Why were you more willing to respond to an invitation from Facebook rather than more traditional venues? Mona Shahien: It was an ad. All my life I wanted to participate with people like me. It was an ad. I responded to it thinking why not try and I might find good people. It was the trigger, the start. Once you meet the people it keeps you going because you want a space to document. You also want to read about those people. I read about the head of my political party on Wikipedia for example. You get more information. This is how I used the internet. Ben Rowswell: Turning to Abdel Rahman who is part of a coalition called the Revolutionary Youth Coalition involved in the planning before January 25th using various methods. Could you tell us about how the coalition made plans to get people to the street on January 25th? Abdel Rahman Fares (translated): My name is Abdel Rahman, I am a blogger and activist for the coalition. The coalition was formed from groups, about 5 groups: Justice and Freedom, the Independent Campaign for Baradei, the Muslim Brothers... All these groups coordinated movements. In addition to a group of independents. The idea was to do it on January 25th, a state holiday. The regime was suppressing and attacking freedom. We decided to make use of this event and the crimes of the Ministry of Interior, so we had 3 or 4 instances. The killing of Khalid Said by the police, the rigged elections of the People’s Assembly, the failed investigation into the church bombing in Alexandria, and the killing of El-Sayid Bilal. And the revolution in Tunisia. So we said we would protest to send a message to the youth to call for the resignation of the Minister of Interior. It was not initially a revolution; all we asked for was the minister to resign and for officers to be put on trial. At our most optimistic, we thought we would get 10,000 in Tahrir Sqaure. We decided on several spots for people to meet, but we knew that announced places would be besieged by the police so we assembled in undeclared places in small groups with a leader of each. In our preparations we knew that security took an hour or an hour and a half to reach those points, so we had time to accumulate. We began our protests in working class neighborhoods. First, the locals tend to be critical of the government and second, the police are in hostile territory. Ben Rowswell: Do you think as many people would have come to the 9 sites where they gathered into Tahrir Sqaure if had to rely on word of mouth or traditional forms of communication rather than social media like Facebook? Abdel Rahman Fares: We had no voice, no TV channel. Our only channel was Facebook, Twitter and blogs. Facebook played a very important role especially in determining the places and directing the people, we used to interact with telephone but we couldn’t reach this big number. Some people have modern mobiles, but using Facebook and pages with big numbers, for example Khalid Said, we could get much more than we could reach by mobiles. We didn’t know sometimes, if the event was a very big number if the people who would come would be a small number. So we wanted the information to reach 1 million people. From the pages, Khalid Said, Muslim Brothers, other movements, all together the number was about 1 million. So we evaluated that we’d have 10,000. This was our target. And we got far more than that. Ben Rowswell: Led me turn to our third panelist, Sabah Mamamou, who is on the media side. An deputy editor at Al-Ahram the newspaper of record here in Egypt, but also a prominent personality in new media, a blogger who founded a site called masrawwy.blogspot.com. Could you tell us about your role, particularly the use of technology? Sabah Hamamou: It was an off day. I was in my office having a meeting when I saw the waves of people going to Tahrir Square. I was about 10 minutes from the square. And then I could see online the demonstrations on a live stream. I wasn’t going to join the demonstrations, but I left my office holding my camera. Before leaving I checked my Facebook and saw a friend of mine, a prominent political science professor, had a status saying if you need to use the restroom, etc (she’s a resident of Tahrir Square). So I went there it was an amazing view of the whole square but I wanted to see more. All the buildings around were locked so I asked her to go to her building to take footage from there. It was around 4:30, I took footage until 10:30. I felt I’d done my job so after posting some stuff I went down to join the protesters. But then around 12:30 there was tear gas in the square. Luckily I had access to my friend’s apartment and hid from the police there who were beating and detaining everyone, so I had refuge. I couldn’t reach it but another lady let me in. I later found out she was a Christian Egyptian. We heard terrible things of police trying to catch everyone, women and men. I got permission to take footage from her window. I will never forget Tahrir Square at this moment. It was around 12:30. It was terrible. Police were catching and hitting and shooting demonstrators. I took footage and put it online (they hadn’t shut the internet down yet). I couldn’t leave the building but my host who I am eternally thankful for allowed me to stay until morning. I went to my office and posted my first footage on Masrawwy. Within a few hours another site had posted the link, so before one day was gone there was 90 hits. Ben Rowswell: What is the footage of? Sabah Hamamou: Police holding one demonstrator while his hands were tied behind his back. If the whole world hadn’t seen this police brutality (not just my own footage) and the anger of people at police treatment of fellow Egyptians when only asking for freedom and a better place to live. So the next day there were more demonstrations and so on. So I kept going to my friends place to take footage and post it on Masrawwy. So after a week I was friends with lots of people in Tahrir, and the doctors, so I had access to people to talk to even though I only spent two nights. This doctor told me that his Facebook and online activists playing the same rules as people who fought the tax and people who attacked the demonstrator in Tahrir Square. Each one has his own rule. So soon there were 2 cameras streaming continuously from Tahrir Square. And police didn’t know about this they were hidden. Mona Shahien: I went in the morning and went home for an urgent call. I couldn’t sleep there that night or the day after. But for two days I kept reporting everything. But then they turned Twitter off, but we knew how to change that proxy IP (address), to open it. And I turned my Facebook page to a place where I reported every single second on what’s happening in Tahrir Square.
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