I have returned from London and I feel energized and inspired by all the excellent people I have met at the Global Voices 2005 summit. Of course Rebecca and Ethan did a marvelous job in running the whole thing, a BIG thanks to both of them and everyone who helped them (I can only call by name Catherine Bracy: a BIG thanks to you too Catherine!!!).

There has been interesting discussions about the past, present and more importantly about the future of this excellent initiative. A project that thanks to the most excellent work of the founders starting to mature enough to survive almost alone on the work of the volunteer based organization (without the day-to-day extensive involvement of Rebecca and Ethan of what I do remember even from earlier 2005 when humble me was still at the Berkman Center with them).

I would also like to point to some of the great bloggers I met there not giving a complete list, rather choosing a few based on my subjective opinion and trying to show the diversity that was present. And I apologize from those who I do not mention here, but I urge every reader to go to the participant list and Global Voices and watch the movement of all the other brilliant bloggers too from all around the World.

So I would like to especially thank:
- to Sokari Ekine for sharing her most wise opinion on Africa, Europe and how these two world area like and apart,
- to Mohamed Marwen Meddah for giving me a better understating of the Arabic World,
- to Jeff Ooi for transporting me to Malaysia via our interesting conversation during the Friday dinner
- and again all the other great people whom I met, talked to and really inspired by!
I’m looking forward to continue reading your stories and meeting you online and offline in the future.

[Links as you probably realized are all pointing to the GV 2005 coverage articles of their blogs, but please look at the rest of their most interesting peaces of articles too!]

Beside learning so much about the planet we are living on, I have also understood something fundamentally important about my own mission. Earlier I already wrote about what people advised me to write about on Hungarian Accent. That is because I have asked people to tell what they would be interested to reading about Hungary. And people regularly asks me what I think are the most interesting of my post they should be aware of. Now what I realized is that none of these questions really makes sense to ask. If the readers could tell me what they are most interested in, that would mean they know everything special about Hungary, which is a very strange premise to assume. Also I should not and cannot decide what is interesting to whom, deciding it is a step the reader has to take, my role is to inform and speak to my best. Now all this might seem trivial to you, but you should also take into consideration the fact that I’m not a professional journalist, nor a writer. I’m your average guy who would like to believe that even though – fortunately – there is no revolution or disaster in Hungary currently (which happenings main stream media usually picks up and discuss), there are still pieces, themes and stories from my country that should be given a chance to be discovered by the English speaking netizens. So I’m officially free of my previous frustrations of trying to show things that I would think are the most interesting and rather really talk about just what is happening here. Simple as that.

If you are interested in detail about the content of the discussions of the Summit (and you should be), I would encourage you to go and visit the official blog and summit pages.

(The referenced blogs are in English)

Tags:
GV2005
Global Voices

Tomorrow early morning I’m going to fly out to attend two conferences in England. One is the Global Voices 2005 summit.

I’m looking forward with great excitement to meet friends I already know and hopefully to find new friends as well.

The bad news: this means about a week without new entries on “Hungarian Accent”. At least it is bad news for some, maybe good news for others

Watching the excellent experiences of Global Voices I know very well what an excellent mean a blog is to connect people at the far ends of the world. And Pocakos has managed to do just that. He posted an entry on an English language book titled “Sword of the Turul”. The author Catherine Eva Schandl writes about the memories of his father - Karoly William Schandl, who was a lawyer in Hungary -, about the 11 years he spent in Soviet prisons after World War II.

Pocakos started a little investigation of his own about the family as Schandl not really a well know family, but according to the book Karoly Schandl was a son of a famous politician. And Pocakos actually found lots of interesting fact about the family, but he also raised some doubts about one of the dates mentioned in the intro for the book. But that is not the truly remarkable point of the story as even from my previous notes you might know that Pocakos is indeed very good in background research.
BUT the amazing thing happened when the author herself checked in with an English language comment for the original post. [Henrik’s note: as Pocakos later told me he is not even sure how she got the info about his entry on the book. Probably some link logging is involved.] And you can read the rest of the conversation yourself there, the comments are in English.

I think these cross cultural and cross language (!) connections are so rare that each of them are great and important. [Henrik’s note: and my own blog is aimed partially at fulfilling this role in its humble little way, so I can totally relate to the excitement of Pocakos about this story.]
(The referenced entry is in Hungarian, but the comments are in English)

Tags:
Cross-culture
Book

The Index story I already wrote about introduced a new theme in the Hungarian online political activity. The case of Sztipkviz is another unorthodox campaign method. It is a simple quiz about economical facts and if you answer correctly a nice woman strips for you in a flash animation. According to the opening screen:
“ Hi! I’m Sylvia. I believe that most of the Hungarian men happily willing to learn the most important figures of our economy. What do you think, Am I right?”

When you do the quiz it is hard not to notice that all of the four questions are well chosen to talk only about statistical figures showing the advancement and good shape of the Hungarian economy, which is highly debated nowadays and I think is going to be one of the main themes of next year’s election campaigns (if not it is already).

Comments on blogs about this really special campaign:

Déli Riporter writes commenting a news article: “It is hard to believe the news that the government has nothing to do with sztripkviz.”

Egy Székely Budapesten writes:
“ Sztripkviz – the whole country is getting naked.
Yes indeed. Just to make sure it gets into everyone’s ears like liquefied hot vax: the economy of this country is so successful that we almost get naked because of it. Despite all of this, Sztripkviz is a good, well, more precisely a novel political advertisement.”

And Miles has I think a rather clever response too: he made his own flash animation quiz version, where he points to statistics which shows just the opposite of the great economical success and using a homeless as the model. It starts with the following screen:
“Hi! I’m Frankie. Sylvie is out of clothes so she is unable to ask the following further questions…”
[Henrik’s note don’t worry the homeless does not get naked, just takes the coat off.]

(The referenced blogs are in Hungarian)

Tags:
Campaign
Politics