For the past 11 years, The Bobs is where DW has honored the world’s most courageous, creative and compelling international online activists and bloggers.

The 2015 competition is kicking off with new categories that introduce a fresh focus on how digital activism is changing the world. The Bobs jury categories will now put the spotlight on the critical issues of privacy and security, arts and media and social change. Judges will determine how contestants have used their digital skills and activism to create positive impacts within these fields. The new format also allows for more than one contestant to stand out for their exemplary work.

How can a digital crusader improve economic development and living conditions? Who is producing the most innovative or avant-garde formats to speak out online? What is the most cutting-edge software for protecting data and digital privacy? On June 22 at the Global Media Forum in Bonn, we will all get the chance to find out.

The core values of the Bobs remain the same, even if they will now be presented more directly. Last year’s winner of best blog was the Egyptian photo blogger, Mosa’ab Elshamy, who showed courage combined with a brilliant eye for powerful imagery. His blog is an example of where fine art meets journalism. In 2013 the “grand prize” winner was the Chinese blogger Li Chengpeng, whose tireless efforts for freedom of speech made him a digital celebrity in China and a salient example of contemporary activism as well as a trendsetter for those living under oppression. No matter the year or the format, the Bobs have always looked for the bravest and the best.

If you are a blogger or online activist you can submit your website now. You have until March 12 to enter your submissions.

Guest Commentary

Oliver Linow, Technical Distribution at DW

Censorship is not the same everywhere you go. Circumvention solutions that work in one place may be completely ineffective elsewhere. It takes constant, often local, innovation to keep up with the forces that prevent people from accessing information. It is a constant struggle with one side driving the other forward.

While DW has seen success in overcoming censors  with circumvention technology like Psiphon in Iran, these types of solutions have been less successful in China.

When you look at China, you might conjure up images of millions of potential Internet users who are just waiting to have access to censored websites like Facebook and YouTube. But that’s not 100 percent true. There is an enormous range of alternatives that are tailored to the Chinese market, uncensored. And a large portion of the population is satisfied with what the “Chinese” Internet offers – and that includes news websites. However, there are still people out there who are longing for access to unfiltered information – and that’s where these circumvention solutions come in.

The secret to overcoming perhaps the world’s most virulent censorship regime is a technique called collateral freedom, which is being implemented by the China-based organization Greatfire. The technique works by leveraging global cloud infrastructure and having a website use the same cloud-based domain as a website that is deemed indispensable by the authorities. For example, by using the same Microsoft Azure cloud servers as major Chinese companies, if you block one, you have to block them all, and that means political trouble in an age of Internet-driven economic growth.

It’s extremely important to us to create an easy way to access the DW website, despite the censoring of content. It shouldn’t be necessary to install special programs or applications on your computer or smartphone. With Greatfire, we have found an easy solution. Even though it requires users to enter a slightly-modified URL than is used elsewhere around the world, it ensures a completely “normal” way to access information and content with a familiar tool: The Internet and a web browser.

 

America

DW has a new, powerful programming partner in the United States: Univision. The most important Spanish-language media company in the USA will be including online content from DW in the future. Univision.com has more than 7 million visitors per month and is the most popular Spanish website. In addition, Univision Noticias is also the leading Spanish-language news feed, with 100,000 “regular” users and 200,000 mobile users daily. This new cooperation highlights DW’s importance among the Hispanic decision makers in the USA.

In Latin America, Multivision in Cuba has expanded its existing partnership with DW to include a total of eight DW programs.

 

Asia

China Education Television (CETV) will be including a selection of content from the DW Transtel catalog in its lineup for 2014. The station is responsible for supplying Chinese citizens with educational programming. CETV has selected a range of DW programming including everything from science, technology and the environment to arts and culture. The programming will be shown on television as well as two different online platforms.

 

Africa

DW and DW Akademie recently concluded a successful training course for journlists in Abuja, Nigeria. Select radio partners including Bauchi Radio Corporation, Freedom Radio, Radio Gotel, Royal FM and Voice of Nigeria were provided a course on “Gender sensitive reporting”.

 

Mobile

DW has relaunched its website for mobile users to provide users with more photo, video and audio content. In addition, the interactivity of the mobile platform has been expanded to include social media as well as automatic language recognition.

 

 

Guest commentary
Oliver Linow, Technical Distribution at DW

It’s not always easy to deliver reliable information to audiences around the world. During the Cold War, Deutsche Welle (DW) had to regularly deal with broadcasting signals being disrupted, preventing listeners in Russia and the Eastern block from tuning in. At that time it was known as jamming.

Technology and distribution channels may have changed and the Cold War now seems like ancient history, but the problem remains: There are still those who try and prevent international broadcasters like DW from reaching their intended audience. The perpetrators are governments, most notably in Iran and China, who are looking to buffer their citizens from international news and information online. But we don’t take this lying down. The Technical Distribution department at DW is responsible for ensuring that content is available on censored networks. And, over the last few years, we have been utilizing a censorship circumvention system developed by Psiphon Inc. based in Canada.

Psiphon works by using a network of different proxy servers (an intermediary between a user and an online source). Psiphon has also developed software and applications designed for desktop and mobile devices that circumvent online censors. DW uses these networks and applications to make content available in censored areas. When logging on to the proxy URL or when starting an application, users in Iran for example, will be redirected to DW’s Farsi homepage and users in China to the Chinese page. Other users are directed to a landing page and can then reach the respective DW site.

Thanks to the introduction of Psiphon technology, users in countries like China and Iran have been given the power to access unbiased information from reliable sources. By engaging in this technology, we have sent a message: DW will never give up trying to provide unbiased, quality news and information to ALL audiences around the world.

Predicting how these issues will play out in the future is difficult. There are currently many indicators that the Internet will be even more regulated. Whether it is to fight crime and terrorism, preserving moral and religious precepts (like preventing access to pornography in Arabic countries), commercial interests (when content providers have to pay network operators for quality access) or political interests and influencing public opinion – there are numerous motivations for filtering online content. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technologies, refers to such measures as “Internet regulation”. Conversely, online activists want to see continuous, uncontrolled traffic on the information superhighway, and will speak out against even the smallest amount of censorship.

Getting around censorship is a game of cat and mouse requiring software that is continually updated in order to circumvent firewalls that are also continually improving in functionality. Soon Psiphon will provide an Application Programming Interface (API), a type of software which will equip certain Smartphone Apps with a censorship circumvention function. This technology would make DW Apps available in Iran and China.

In the future it will surely not be a simple task for international broadcasters like DW to provide worldwide Internet services on every network in every country. One thing we do know is that as technology expands and politics become more complicated, the issues related to Internet regulation will become more and more important.

China Business Network (CBN) launched a new media project dedicated to the topic of sustainability earlier this week: The Future We Want. Along with work from BBC Worldwide, CNN, TV5MONDE and Sky News, it will include five reports from DW’s Global Ideas multimedia series, which showcases projects from around the world geared towards promoting climate protection. A three-hour live TV show will be broadcast on CBN on December 31. It will also air a 24-hour video live stream on the topic in cooperation with online partners YouKu and BestTV. CBN belongs to the Shanghai Media Group and reaches an estimated audience of over 600 million viewers in China and beyond.

Read more in the DW press release.