neweurasia Blogging Meeting This Thursday

Dear Students:

You are invited to attend a meeting sponsored by neweurasia on blogging in Central Asia this Thursday 31 August, 12 noon in 237 Valikhanov. The meeting is very relevant to our new information technologies course, and if you are interested and available I urge you to attend.

The text of the invitation I received is pasted below:

The meeting will be hosted by Ms. Leila Karsybekova, coordinator of Kazakhstan neweurasia blog http://kazakhstan.neweurasia.net and its Russian-language version: http://ru.kazakhstan.neweurasia.net/

Their professed goal is to give a space for self-publishing to young people in Central Asia and link them to their peers all over the world. The Russian-language blog started functioning 4 months ago, and they have several authors from Almaty and Karaganda now. They also review Livejournals in Kazakhstan, to present the voices of people directly, as use them as alternative citizen media.

They will be on an outreach trip in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan during late August and early September. They would also like to meet interested KIMEP students to promote blogging, as a tool for free speech, in Kazakhstan. I hope you agree that this is something that might of interest to our students. The meeting should take about one hour.