Europe Blog
Our views on the Internet and society
Watch the Big Tent on YouTube
Friday, March 30, 2012
Our programme of Big Tent events aims to bring together digital businesses, policymakers and advocacy groups to debate some of the hot issues facing the Internet and society.
Now, with the launch of our new
Big Tent YouTube channel
, everyone can engage with these debates online.
The channel includes videos from our sessions so far in
London
,
The Hague
,
Berlin
and
Madrid
. You can filter by topic, speaker and event, so whether you’re interested in privacy or child safety, Hillary Clinton on Internet freedom or Wael Ghonim on the role of the Internet in Egypt’s revolution, it’s all available under the Big Tent.
The launch of our new channel coincides with our first Big Tent in the US--an event on Digital Citizenship held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Over the course of the day, we discussed child safety online, the most effective ways to incorporate technology with educationa and what governments and civil society can do to maintain a responsible and innovative web.
Stay tuned for videos from that and future Big Tents as the programme continues to roll out across the world.
Posted by Peter Barron, Director of External Relations EMEA
Visualise the world’s economic recovery - and win $2,000
Thursday, March 29, 2012
The summer before I left university, banks - overburdened with housing bubble debts - started collapsing. My fellow students and I had anticipated that finding a job would be challenging - but not that we would get to unemployment rates as high as 9.6% in both the
United States
and the
European Union
in 2010, the highest they’ve been in almost 30 years.
So we figured it would be pretty interesting to see which government policies are reversing the trend - which is why we’ve teamed up with the
Guardian Datastore
to launch a
competition
to create the best visualisation of public data sets.
Using information from
Eurostat
,
the World Economic Forum
,
World Bank
,
UN
,
IMF
and some of the world's major
economic
experts
, we want you to make an argument about how to generate sustainable growth in the 21st century.
Finding solutions to these problems is critical to the future of our society and economy. To debate the issues that surface in the visualisations, we’ll be co-hosting public conversations via Google+ Hangouts that are anchored in hard numbers. Stay tuned to this blog or the Guardian Datastore for details.
The competition is open to U.K. and U.S. citizens with a prize of $2,000 going to the most compelling, beautiful and informed visualisation. Entries are due by May 21 and results will be published on the Guardian Datastore’s new site,
Show and Tell
.
A new economic reality is setting in, and if we are going to master it, citizens and leaders alike need to invest in figuring out how to adapt. Check out the data from our list or bring your own as long as it’s freely available to the public - and submit your entry to datavisualisation@guardian.co.uk!
Posted by Dorothy Chou, Senior Policy Analyst at Google
Let’s fill London with startups...
Thursday, March 29, 2012
London has become one of the world's great digital capitals. The Internet accounts for eight percent of the U.K. economy and has become, in these days of tough public finances, a welcome engine of economic growth.
We believe there is even more potential for entrepreneurs to energize the Internet economy in the U.K., and to help spur growth, today we’re opening
Campus London
, a seven story facility in the east London neighborhood known as Tech City. Google began as a startup in a garage. We want to empower the next generation of entrepreneurs to be successful by building and supporting a vibrant startup community. Our goal with Campus is to catalyze the startup ecosystem and build Britain's single largest community of startups under one roof.
The U.K.’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Rt. Hon. George Osborne MP, launched Campus at this morning's official opening. The Chancellor toured the building, meeting some of the entrepreneurs currently making their home in Campus and learning more about their innovations, ranging from fashion trendsetting websites to personalized London leisure guides. He then flipped the switch on a commemorative graffiti plaque.
Campus is a collaboration between Google and partners Central Working, Tech Hub, Seedcamp and Springboard. It will provide startups with workspace in an energizing environment and will also host daily events for and with the community. We will run a regular speaker series, alongside lectures and programing, as well as provide mentorship and training from local Google teams.
Visitors will have access to a cafe and co-working space, complete with high speed wifi. We welcome members of the startup community: entrepreneurs, investors, developers, designers, lawyers, accountants, etc. and hope that this informal, highly concentrated space will lead to chance meetings and interactions that will generate the ideas and partnerships that will drive new, innovative businesses.
The buzz around Campus from within the startup community has meant that today, on day one, Campus is already at 90% capacity, with more than 100 people on site and an additional 4,500 who have signed up online to visit.
We are looking forward to getting to know the community. East London is emerging as a world-leading entrepreneurial hub, and we’re excited to be a part of it. Take a photo tour of Campus
here
, and if you’d like to learn more, visit us at
www.campuslondon.com
.
Let’s fill this town with startups!
Posted by Eze Vidra, Head of Campus London
Honoring Innovation for Free Expression
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Update, Thursday, March 29
: Kubatana's FreedomFone won the first Google-sponsored Innovation Award given out last evening at the Index on Censorship's annual Freedom of Expression awards.
FreedomFone's Upenyu Makoni-Muchemwana accepted the prize, describing how their product allows information to "be shared and received at anytime in any language wherever there is mobile coverage. Traditional roadblocks of licensing, regulation and literacy are bypassed, and freedom of expression is broadened."
Judges explained the reasons behind their choice in this video:
Index on Censorship
holds its annual awards this evening in London, celebrating the work of journalists, artists and activists who champion free expression, often at great personal risk.
This is the third year that Google is sponsoring the awards evening. We're delighted that this year's edition includes a new Google-sponsored innovation award which recognises the original use of new technology to foster debate, argument or dissent.
Nominees come from all across the globe. They include Zimbabwean NGO
Kubatana
, which has developed a Freedom Fone. It uses open-source software to help organisations share pre-recorded audio information in any language via mobile phones and landlines. Another nominee is ObscuraCam, a free smartphone application developed in the United States that uses facial recognition to blur individual faces automatically. This helps protect activists who fear reprisals but want to safely capture evidence of state brutality. A full list of the nominees is
here
.
The Awards ceremony takes place on Wednesday 28 March at 6.30pm at the
St Pancras Renaissance Hotel
in King’s Cross, London. We’ll begin with champagne and canapés, followed by the Awards ceremony at 8pm hosted by BBC presenter Jonathan Dimbleby with a keynote from the author of War Horse, Michael Morpurgo. We will be on hand to celebrate the winners.
Posted by William Echikson, Head of Free Expression, Europe, Middle East and Africa
Explore Mandela's archives online
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Last year we
announced
a $1.25 million grant to the
Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory
to help preserve and digitize thousands of archival documents, photographs and videos about Nelson Mandela. Based in Johannesburg, South Africa, the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory (NMCM) is committed to documenting the life and times of one of the world's greatest statesmen and spreading his story to promote social justice throughout the world.
Today, the Mandela archive has become a reality. Along with historians, educationalists, researchers, activists and many others around the world, you can access a wealth of information and knowledge about the life and legacy of this extraordinary African leader. The
new online multimedia archive
includes Mandela’s correspondence with family, comrades and friends, diaries written during his 27 years of imprisonment, and notes he made while leading the negotiations that ended apartheid in South Africa. The archive will also include the
earliest-known photo of Mr. Mandela
and
never-before seen drafts
of Mr. Mandela's manuscripts for the sequel to his autobiography
Long Walk to Freedom
.
We’ve worked closely with the NMCM to create an interactive online experience which we hope will inspire you as much as us. You can search and browse the archives to explore different parts of Mandela’s life and work in depth:
Early Life
,
Prison Years
,
Presidential Years
,
Retirement
,
Books for Mandela
,
Young People
and
My Moment with a Legend
.
For example, you might be interested in Nelson Mandela’s personal memories of the time he was incarcerated and click into the
Prison Years
exhibit. You can immediately see a curated set of materials threaded together into a broader narrative. These include handwritten notes on his
desk calendars
, which show, for example, that he met President F.W. De Klerk for the first time on December 13, 1989 for two and a half hours in prison; the
Warrants of Committal
issued by the Supreme Court which sent him to prison; the earliest known
photo of Nelson Mandela’s prison cell
on Robben Island circa 1971; and a
personal letter
written from prison in 1963 to his daughters, Zeni and Zindzi, after their mother was arrested, complete with transcript.
From there, you might want to see all the letters held by the archive, and click “See more” in the letters category, where you can discover all
personal letters
or use the time filter to explore his
diaries and calendars
written between 1988 and 1998, where you can see that in the
last page
of the last diary, he met with President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni of Uganda to exchange ideas about the situation in northern Uganda. If you were a researcher, you can search through various fragments of Madiba’s memory that relate to
Ahmed Kathrada
, his long-time comrade, politician and anti-apartheid activist, where you can find photos, videos, manuscripts and letters that relate to him.
Finally, by clicking into the exhibit,
My Moment with a Legend
, you can go beyond Madiba’s personal materials to get a diverse perspective through photos, videos and stories, via the memories of people like
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
,
F.W. De Klerk
and
Nomfundo Walaza
, a community worker.
The Nelson Mandela Digital Archive project is an initiative by the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory and the
Google Cultural Institute
, which helps to preserve and promote our diverse cultural and historical heritage. Some of our other initiatives include the
Art Project
, digitizing the
Dead Sea Scrolls
and bringing the
Yad Vashem Holocaust
materials online.
You can start exploring the Nelson Mandela archive right now at
archive.nelsonmandela.org
. We hope you’ll be inspired by this influential leader—the face of South Africa’s transition to democracy.
Posted by Mark Yoshitake, Product Manager, Google’s Cultural Institute
Compete in the EUhackathon
Monday, March 19, 2012
Have you ever had an amazing idea for improving the experience of children on the Internet? Or perhaps you’ve wondered why a tool or platform for harnessing the limitless creativity of young people didn’t already exist?
Then you should apply to participate in this year’s
EUhackatho
n. The Hack4Kids event will be the second
hackathon
organised with the European Union institutions in Brussels and will take place on June 20 and 21, 2012 in Brussels.
Developers are invited to apply in one of two tracks: Child Safety or Child Creativity. The Child Safety Track focuses on building or improving tools that allow children, their parents and teachers enjoy a better Internet experience. Areas for focus include improved reporting mechanisms around cyberbullying, age verification tools and facilitating responsible web surfing.
The Child Creativity Track invites coders to create a tool or platform that enables children to create new online content such as a website, game, or video to be shared. Our ultimate goal is to unlock young people’s creativity.
Last year’s event
was a major success with hackers from across Europe developing tools to help measure network speeds and to improve global transparency tracking. You can check out last year’s winners of the transparency track’s game,
Beat the Censor
and
Internet Performance Analysis
.
Applications
are open until 16 April 2012 at noon CET. Good luck!
Posted by Marco Pancini, Senior Policy Manager, Brussels
Debating drugs on YouTube and Google+
Friday, March 16, 2012
Whether enabling voters to
interview their President
, or
connect underwater
to photograph the ocean floor,
Google+ Hangouts
are being used in amazing ways. Hangouts not only have the ability to connect people on opposite sides of the planet - they can also connect people on opposing sides of the social and political spectrum.
This week, we partnered with
Intelligence2
to launch
Versus
- our first in a new series of global policy debates using Google Hangouts and live streamed on YouTube. Our inaugural discussion asked whether
“It’s time to end the War on Drugs.”
Entrepreneur
+Richard Branson
, comedian
+Russell Brand
, Wikileaks founder
+Julian Assange
and the President of Columbia, participated. BBC newsreader and presenter
+Emily Maitlis
chaired.
Branson began by speaking on behalf of the motion “If my brother, or sister or children have a drug problem, I do not want them to go to prison. I want them to be helped.” Via Google+ Hangout, Brand agreed, saying that we need to “stop treating [addiction] as a crime as opposed to treating it as an illness.” He rejected the opposition argument that legalisation would increase drug consumption.
On the other side, former-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer wished former U.S. President Richard Nixon had never used the confusing term “war on drugs”. Spitzer called instead for a “nuanced” drug control policy, based on the range of tools already being used, that “evolves over time.” The former head of London’s police force, Lord Ian Blair, rubbished his opponents’ decriminalisation argument. “What they are proposing is probably an irreversible experiment, where the result could be complete catastrophe,” he said.
This Versus debate is just the first of many to be hosted on Google+ and streamed on YouTube in the coming months. We encourage all of you to visit the Versus Google+ page and have your say.
Posted by Anna Bateson, Director of Youtube Marketing, EMEA
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