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May 20

Content Spotlight: North Africa and the Middle East Transformed

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If you’re interested in the dramatic news out of Egypt, Libya and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa, you’ll be in fine company at mesh – so are we! And we have the content this year to keep you fascinated, including appearances by people who were on the ground as events developed, participating in them and reporting home about them.

Some sessions to keep an eye on:

– Society Keynote with Ron Deibert of Citizen Lab
– Old Media, New Media and Revolutions in the Middle East
– Digital activism in an Age of Unrest
– Egypt: A Case Study in Digital Activism
– Al-Jazeera Reinvents Television for the Online Age
– Political organizing in a wired world – a very special session produced by TVO’s The Agenda, onsite at mesh.

Finally, on the evening of May 26th at the Munk School of Global Affairs Journalism Lab, CBC’s Brian Stewart will be moderating a panel discussion titled “Tweeting the Arab Revolutions” with mesh speakers Mona Seif, Sarah Abdurrahman and Jillian York in a panel discussion.

We hope to see you at mesh11! (Online ticket sales end at noon today!!)

May 20

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Speaker Spotlight: Michael Geist

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I can’t think of anyone who has done more than Michael Geist to educate Canadians about the interaction of law and the internet. Seemingly always in motion, he has written countless articles and blog posts, has been interviewed from one end of the country to the other multiple times, is constantly reporting from one international conference to the next about developments in law and technology, and now, finally, has his own wikileaks cable. And perhaps most significantly, he has worked tirelessly to educate us about the critical role that copyright law will play as our economy and culture become increasingly linked to and dependent on the internet. It has at times been a lonely road, and one that has earned him the ire of the US media industry and its lobbyists, as well as Canadian Cabinet Ministers attempting to do their work. But to many Canadians, his is the face of balanced, fair copyright suited to the needs of our country.

I’ve always enjoyed listening to Michael’s presentations – they are invariably creative, funny, insightful and intensely educational. You will always learn something vitally important, and emerge from the experience a better informed digital citizen.

This year, on the heels of a Parliament that concluded without resolution of the latest effort to amend Canada’s Copyright Act, and as we draw nearer to the conclusion of negotiations over an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that will have profound implications for copyright law, and on the eve of a new Parliament with a Government that has announced its intention to pass a controversial copyright bill, Michael will join us for a very special session on what comes next.

May 16

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Speaker Spotlight: Mesh 2011 Media Keynote Emily Bell

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We’ve got some good news and some bad news about the media stream at mesh 2011: the bad news is that Jeff Jarvis, who was scheduled to be our media keynote for the conference this year, has had to bow out — with many profuse apologies — because of an earlier commitment. The good news is that the equally excellent Emily Bell has agreed to take Jeff’s place as the media keynote, and we couldn’t be happier about it.

Emily is the director of the newly-founded Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and the former director of digital content for The Guardian in Britain. She was the editor-in-chief of the Guardian’s web operation from 2001 to 2006, during which time she oversaw such groundbreaking projects as the launch of the “Comment Is Free” open blogging platform — one of the first major efforts at crowdsourcing by a traditional media outlet — as well as the massively successful MP Expenses project, which saw 20,000 people comb through close to 300,000 public expense reports filed by members of parliament.

In addition to her job running the Tow Center at Columbia, Emily is a leading media commentator for a number of outlets, as well as writing on her own blog about the future of media and journalism online. During a recent presentation at Massey College in Toronto, sponsored by Samara Canada, she talked about her experiences at The Guardian and about how newspapers need to be “of the web, not just on the web” in order to succeed.

Emily has also written about how WikiLeaks represents a fundamental shift in the world of the media and journalism, saying: “If you follow the latest cache of diplomatic cables leaked by Wikileaks and reported by the Guardian, The New York Times and others it is impossible not to conclude that this is a pivotal moment for journalism, its teaching and its practice.” Bell went on to say that WikiLeaks represents “the first real battleground between the political establishment and the open web,” and that it forces journalists and news organizations to “demonstrate to what extent they are now part of an establishment it is their duty to report on.”

In addition to her keynote, Emily will also be taking part in a panel at mesh — along with The Economist’s digital editor Gideon Lichfield and Micah Sifry, co-founder of TechPresident and the Personal Democracy Forum — that will look at how WikiLeaks and others of its ilk are changing the nature of what we call journalism and media in the 21st century.