Brenda Burrell

The award ceremony for the 2012 UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize was held at the Presidential Palace in Tunis on May 3.

L to R: Stewart Chisholm, Open Society Foundations Media Program; Mark Whitehouse, IREX; Kathleen M. Fitzpatrick, U.S. Department of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor

Wow, it’s hot in Dar, and this is winter in Tanzania. My ankles are swollen and it helps to sleep with a fan on at night. The city seems to be booming...buildings are going up in the city centre, bill boards compete for consumer shillings and the morning rush hour(s) is a force to be reckoned with. The most prominent products for sale are mobile related services – Tigo, Airtel (previously Zain) and Vodacom compete through vibrant advertising for a share of this lucrative market. Thanks to the competition, call and SMS costs have become very affordable in Tanzania.

As an information activist working in Zimbabwe, I've found the role of digital technologies in Egypt's revolution fascinating. Here are some observations surrounding the 18 days of protest, which successfully challenged President Hosni Mubarak's nearly 30 years of rule.

1. People at the heart.

A big up to Farm Radio International's Nelly Bassily, for helping Freedom Fone to squeeze a workshop into the busy agenda at AMARC10 in La Plata, Buenos Aires today.

Nelly's networking and linguistic prowess delivered a meeting room equipped with projector and professional simultaneous translation in Spanish. She handily filled the role of impromptu simultaneous French translator, making it possible for many more people to follow my presentation.

In late May, Amy & I went down to Bulawayo to run a hands-on Freedom Fone training workshop for 11 participants based in Zimbabwe's City of Skies. The workshop was hosted there by a vibrant community radio station called Radio Dialogue. That will sound like a contradiction in terms as Zimbabwe has yet to award a broadcast licence to any community radio station in the country.

Freedom Fone's ability to fulfill it's promise as a must have tool for bridging the digital divide has yet to be determined. Millions of poor people have access to mobile phones, but with tariffs as high as they are in countries like Zimbabwe, experimentation in this field is still costly. And of course, for our project these are early days.

Open source telephony platform, Asterisk, has been used for years as an inexpensive alternative to proprietry PBXs, democratising this previously closed service industry. Why then did Freedom Fone choose to use FreeSWITCH as its telephony component instead of Asterisk? Our Project Architect, Alberto Escudero Pascual, will answer that question in the new year, but until then clues lie in this comment from Telecom Monthly: