Belarusian Generation Y logbook

In Belarus there exists a strong blog-culture. One of the reasons for that is basically absolute absence of any possibility for young people to express themselves outside the Internet. In the environment where independent students and youth organizations are banned and NGOs are gradually dying out every year while their activists are all the time prosecuted, and in the streets even street artists get arrested many young people rely on blogs as the space of self expression. They use them to discuss topics from daily life to politics and international development. At the moment Belarus is on the 13th place in the rating of Livejournal users in the world with more than 20000 registered users. Trying to follow the trend Generation.bY is encouraging the development of this sphere in so called BY-Net and we are regularly making announcements about events connected to Blogs as well as soon starting our own project directed on support of Belarusian bloggers.For example, Deutsche Welle announced that the BOBs – Best of the Blogs – the blog contest will be held for the fourth time this year (www.thebobs.com) What is most interesting in the announcement is that the company declared the intention to specifically support bloggers from the countries with restricted freedom of speech.

“Blogs in such countries is one of the rare ways to express oneself freely”, says Tofern.

We hope the announcement will help someone from Belarus to apply and win the contest. We also kindly ask you to check Belarusian Blogs which have already been listed among the nominees and support them for Best Smth :)

At the end of the summer Generation.bY also announced about a big Blogger’s event to be held in Kyiv in October 2007. BlogCamp CIS and the Baltics 2007 is the first (BarCamp) in the post-Soviet space that we are aware of. The organizers aim to gather 300 bloggers, new media professionals, and other types of geeks for a week-end in Kyiv in mid-October. The objective is not only to discuss the wider new media and Web2.0 developments in the region, but also to test if BarCamps have a (bright) future as a peer-learning platform in this region.

True to the peer-production spirit of BarCamps, everybody is supposed to contribute. Newcomers are advised to give a talk/present. For those who do not feel comfortable doing it, there are plenty of other opportunities to get involved and help organizers making a better event:

• sign-up as a volunteer to help during the event
• host international guests (for participants from Kyiv)
• bring camera to record some sessions and post them online later
• help organizers to promote BlogCamp by putting the event badge on your blog/LiveJournal and writing a post about the event
• if all of this seems complicated, participants are kindly invited to spell-check the Wiki about the event and insert whatever commas are missing!

Generation.bY representatives are also planning to attend the event to share our ideas, hear the ideas of the others and possibly find partners for the future.