As of Wednesday, February 1, 2012, non-profit organizations can register to participate in the 13^th annual NGO Market which will take place on Friday, May 11, 2012 at the National Technical Library in Prague. The fair is organized by the Forum 2000 Foundation.

More than 150 NGOs from the Czech Republic and abroad will present their activities to the public. The fair will be complemented by a wide variety of associated programs including workshops, practical presentations, music, volunteer offers, outdoor activities and the big news will be a series of documentaries about civil society.

Special focus will be placed on the topic of active aging and the importance of dialogue between generations – the main theme of the European Year 2012. Working sessions will be dedicated to improving communication and cooperation between NGOs and companies.

NGOs interested in presenting their activities at the NGO Market can register on-line (you can find the form and information on registration here, both sites are in Czech only) or send us an email at ngomarket(at)forum2000.cz. As the number of places is limited and there is a great demand for space, we recommend contacting us as soon as possible.

Refresh your memories of last year’s NGO Market by watching this short documentary.

More information about the program and assorted news of this year’s fair can be found here.

Past Events:

More Roma-related Video Stories in Production

As part of Transitions’ Romani Journalist Advancement Project, lead trainer Dean C.K. Cox took a whirlwind tour of Central and Southeastern Europe, working with teams of Roma and majority-community journalists on a series of reporting assignments in November and December.

The project, which continues until July 2012, builds on the achievements of Transitions’ previous projects for Roma journalists, such as the award-winning Colorful but Colorblind project. Dean is an experienced freelance photojournalist who has worked for the Associated Press, The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, and EuraisaNet, among others.
Dean spent a week in each of five countries – Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic – first providing the participants with a daylong refresher on multimedia storytelling and later joining the teams on their assignments. The stories were then edited under Dean’s guidance and will be presented by the end of January on the websites of Transitions Online and the five partner organizations.    
The project, which has received support from the OSF Media Program, the Erste Foundation, and the U.S. and UK embassies in Prague, is implemented in partnership with Romea.cz in Prague, the Center for Independent Journalism in Budapest, the Center for Independent Journalism in Bucharest, the Media Development Center in Sofia, and MEMO 98 in Bratislava.

Telling Tales from the Candidate Countries

Transitions is pleased to announce the start of implementation of Next in Line, a yearlong project aimed at bringing news from candidate and potential candidate countries for EU membership to audiences in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia as well as the other 23 EU members. The project is a joint effort by Transitions and four leading news publications from the Visegrad countries: Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza; HVGnewsmagazine, Budapest; Tyzden, Bratislava: and Respekt, Prague.

Reporters from these publications will team up with their colleagues from the Balkans, Turkey, and Iceland for a series of reporting assignments with a view to telling important and interesting stories about these societies in a variety of formats. The resulting content will initially be published in the languages of the four Visegrad countries and English between March and November 2012.

The project is co-financed by the European Commission’s Directorate General for Enlargement.

Learning from the Best

Fifteen journalists and journalism students participated in the TOL Foreign Correspondent Training Course that took place 3-11 January in Prague. They were introduced to the essential skills of international reporting by a team of experienced journalists who have worked for the BBC, The Economist, The New York Times, Sky News, and other prominent media outlets. Participants completed a practical story-writing project, an important part of the course – researching, writing, and filing a story from Prague under the guidance of the trainers. The winners of the neweurasia/TOL Best Blogger Award for Central Asia, Gulasal Kamolova (gulasal.wordpress.com) and Tashpulat Rahmatulaev (rtoshpulat.blogspot.com), attended the course, during which we found out that Gulasal was encouraged to start her first blog after attending a TOL new media workshop, supported by the National Endowment for Democracy, back in 2006. Two grantees from Russia and one from Moldova also took part in the international reporting course, as well as two TOL interns from Central Asia.

Scholarships are now available for TOL’s Digital Journalism Course taking place in May, but anyone can apply to attend. An extension of our previous new media courses, the workshop focuses on the specific needs of reporters and editorial management – covering everything from choosing the right content management system to online research, digital storytelling techniques, and, of course, how to ensure that social media supports the main website. The course was developed and will be led by Kevin Anderson, whose online journalism experience includes, among other outlets, work for the BBC, theGuardian, Reuters, and Al Jazeera English

Featured Content

Transitions Online (www.tol.org) often showcases the work produced through our grant programs. Highlights from December include the following stories:

2 December 2011
The Twilight of Zhirinovsky
The aging standard-bearer of Russian nationalism appears to be on his last political legs.
by Alexander Kolesnichenko

8 December 2011
Osh Mulls Ban on Uzbek-Language Schools
Critics call it discrimination, but city officials say the idea came from Uzbeks themselves.
by Bakyt Ibraimov and Temir Akmatov

9 December 2011
Being Muslim in Moldova
The leaders of the country’s first official Islamic organization keep a low profile amid an Orthodox backlash.
by Zakhar Koretsky

21 December 2011
Bringing Together Mitrovica’s Sonic Youth
A school for rock ’n’ roll chips away at ethnic barriers in Kosovo’s divided city.
by S. Adam Cardais

Success Story:

Congratulations to one of our training alumni in Georgia, Nino Narimanishvili, who recently won a grant from IREX to further develop a blog that covers one of Georgia’s minorities. With text and photos, Nino uses her “Back to the Homeland” blog to call attention to the fate of repatriated Muslims Meskhetians (also known as Meskhetian Turks), an ethnic group that Stalin forcibly deported from Georgia to Central Asia in 1944. She originally started the project as a winner of a TOL “mini-grant,” as she recounted to TOL project manager Elza Ketsbaia:

“The idea to create a blog about Muslim Meskhetians came to my mind after I attended a media clinic organized by TOL, since at the training I had an opportunity to learn the skills needed to write up a social media project – what I should focus on – and how to promote the blog. Before the training I had a personal blog mostly posting about my everyday life. Blogging was a sort of hobby for me, but after winning the grant I had certain responsibilities, to start blogging about the problems of the Muslim Meskhetians on a regular basis.”

According to the terms of her IREX award, Nino will have her hands full. She’s pledged to produce 50 text stories, 50 video shorts, 50 photo stories, and two documentary films about the Meskhetians. And that’s apart from her day job: Nino is editor in chief of the newspaper Samkhretis Karibche, based in the southern Georgian city of Akhalkalaki, and works with the Go Group media organization, which produces documentaries on crucial issues facing the Caucasus.

Current Projects:

Azerbaijan and Moldova
Promoting the use of new media and social media among journalists, civil society organizations, and young people.
Serbia
Training journalists to cover issues related to the environment.
Central Asia
Promoting the use of Internet media and new media techniques to produce, promote, and distribute new forms of content.
Russia
Improving the quality of environmental investigative journalism while increasing the impact of the environmental movement in Russia.
Education Reporting
Using distance learning courses, workshops, and other resources to improve reporting on education-related topics.
Roma Multimedia Training
Training Roma and majority community journalists in multimedia story-telling, with a special focus on Roma issues.

How Can You Help?

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The Forum 2000 Foundation would like to share with you selected excerpts of condolences and articles honoring Václav Havel that the foundation has received from many of past participants in the Forum 2000 conferences and other distinguished personalities.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Spiritual Leader, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Tibet

“With the death of my dear friend Václav Havel, the world has lost a great leader, whose steadfast and unflinching determination played a key role in establishing freedom and democracy in what was then Czechoslovakia.

Gentle, honest, humble and full of humor, he was motivated by the idea that truth must ultimately prevail. It was this insistence on the truth that got him into trouble with the authorities when he was young. The same quality inspired his people to choose him to be the President when they threw off totalitarianism during the Velvet Revolution, which Havel led with an extraordinary display of people power.”

The whole message from His Holiness the Dalai Lama is available here.

Yohei Sasakawa, Co-founder, Forum 2000 Foundation, Chairman, The Nippon Foundation, Japan

“I would like to express my sincerest sorrow over the passing of Václav Havel, former President of the Czech Republic, and heroic leader of the Velvet Revolution, and one of the architects of Czechoslovakia’s transition to democracy.

Former President Havel was a dissident playwright who led his countrymen in overcoming their country’s totalitarian regime, in spite of repeated imprisonment; an intellectual who brought unswerving conscientiousness and idealism into both his words and actions; and an indomitable leader who changed society.”

The whole message from Yohei Sasakawa is available here.

Michael Novak, Theologian and Political Scientist, USA

“Václav Havel was the hero that when we were boys we would have all longed to be: a world-significant artist, the dissident who suffered for his bravery during four years of imprisonment, the wise and eloquent president of his newly liberated nation, a man as patently honest as all those who ‘refused to live by the Lie.’ …

He invited me to visit him in Prague. Several times I took him at his word. On these occasions I was nearly speechless; he did the talking – with his famous mixture of passion and detachment, long perspective and close engagement. There are few people in this world in whose presence one felt such quiet and tested greatness. And a burning fire of truthfulness.”

The whole article “Confronting Truth” by Michael Novak, which was published in National Review Online, is available here.

Jacques Rupnik, Political Scientist, France

The following essay is based on the laudatio given by Jacques Rupnik in October 2009, on the occasion of the awarding to Václav Havel of an honorary doctorate from Sciences Po.

“It is a great honor and deeply gratifying to be speaking here in praise of President Václav Havel. It is a privilege that is not without hidden difficulties, however. It is not easy to praise a man who is world famous as the symbol of the ‘velvet revolutions’ of 1989, the miraculous year that began with his imprisonment and ended with his election as president of the Republic in Prague Castle. Like Thomas Masaryk, his 1918 predecessor as president of Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel embodies both in the eyes of his fellow citizens and in international opinion the figure of the philosopher-king, of the dissident intellectual confronted with the test of power, between the reinvention of democracy and of a new European order. Hence the tendency to interpret his biography as an illustration of the classic dilemma, in the quest for the common good, between the vita activa and the vita contemplative – between the politician grappling with the constraints and trappings of power and the intellectual whose role is precisely to question power.”

The whole article “In Praise of Václav Havel” by Jacques Rupnik, which was published in The New Republic, is available here.

Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General, United Nations, USA/South Korea

“Václav Havel was the moral voice of his country and his era. He lived in truth – his credo – as few in his place and times dared to do. His humanity, humility and decency were an example for us all. In the face of the great challenges today that shall test a newer generation, let his profile in courage be our inspiration.”

Mary Robinson, Former President, Ireland

“Havel was the first recipient of Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience Award in 2003. I know that this award meant a lot to him – and it was inspired by Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘The Republic of Conscience’. The following extract from the poem is so apt, at this tragic time, as we mourn the loss of a remarkable man.

‘At their inauguration, public leaders

must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep

to atone for their presumption to hold office

and to affirm their faith that all life sprang

from salt in tears which the sky-god wept

after he dreamt his solitude was endless’”

Excerpts of condolences and articles from other personalities is available at:

http://www.forum2000.cz/en/about-us/news-archive/detail/past-participants-in-the-forum-2000-conferences-shared-their-memories-on-vaclav-havel/

In December 2011, Yohei Sasakawa, co-founder of the Forum 2000 Foundation and Chairman of The Nippon Foundation, visited Burma to meet with a representative of the democratic opposition, Aung San Suu Kyi. During the meeting, Yohei Sasakawa gave Aung San Suu Kyi photos from the last Forum 2000 Conference, along with a personal letter from Václav Havel, expressing support for her efforts and gratitude for her contributions, which was sent to the conference via video message. The meeting was held in Rangoon, one day following the death of Václav Havel.

Since its inception, the Forum 2000 Foundation has supported Aung San Suu Kyi’s non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma, for which she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. Václav Havel invited her annually to the Forum 2000 Conference; however, she has never been able to attend it personally. She was kept under house arrest for many years, until she was released in autumn 2010. Despite this, she was not able to come to Prague last year due to concerns that she would not be able to return to Burma.

During the conference in 2010, Václav Havel said: “For many reasons, we think it is important to invite even those who have a 90% chance of being prevented from coming. Based on my own memories and experience, I know how important it was for those of us who were imprisoned that our friends took an interest in us and invited us abroad, despite the expectation that the regime would not let us go, especially when we were in prison. Nevertheless, the very fact that we were invited abroad greatly strengthened the position of the dissidents and showed the regime that the world was aware of them and that it had not succeeded in consigning them to the pit of oblivion.”

Last year, Aung San Suu Kyi participated virtually in the 15^th annual Forum 2000 Conference; she shared with us her opinion and experience concerning the relationship between democracy and the rule of law via a video message. In her contribution, Suu Kyi said: “It is some years since we started on our road towards democracy. We have still not reached our goal but, as we proceed towards it, we are strengthened by the support of friends like you. So, once again, may I thank all of you and ask you to stay by our side and to help us as we continue with our struggle and we, in turn, will always be prepared to stand by the side of those who themselves are struggling for the right to enjoy basic human rights and democratic institutions under the rule of law.“

The Forum 2000 Foundation firmly believes that one day, we will be able to welcome Aung San Suu Kyi personally to the Forum 2000 Conference in Prague.

With the new year just beginning, we’d like to take this opportunity to recap some of the highlights in our programs last year and ask you to consider a donation to help TOL do even more in 2012.

Filling Training Gaps…

Hundreds of journalists, students, and civic activists participated in our on-site and distance learning programs this year, including the first training-the-trainers program for Central Asian new media instructors; a series of workshops in Russia on environmental reporting; new media workshops for Georgian high school and university students; a workshop on  multimedia storytelling for Romani and majority-community journalists from Macedonia, Serbia, and Bosnia; and an intensive new media course at Azerbaijan Free Thought University. TOL also ventured out of our normal coverage region, co-organizing a study visit to Prague for 10 Egyptian journalists that focused on election reporting.

Among the alumni of our  training programs, we’ve been especially proud of the Roma and majority-community journalists across five countries who produced the 25 video stories that comprise Colorful but Colorblind. Not only did the project win a 2010 Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi award for excellence in journalism, but it was also singled out for recognition by the European Commission’s vice president, Viviane Reding.

Publishing on Overlooked Topics…

TOL’s flagship magazine, Transitions Online, continued to publish the work of local journalists, often on topics neglected by the rest of the international media. In 2011, these were topics such asthe perilous situation of middle-aged Uzbek women left alone to defend their homes against dangerous and well-armed enemies, Soviet-era orphanages that still exist in Lithuania, the struggles of a Srebrenica native to find justice for murdered loved ones, and the dreams of a few teenagers in rural Kazakhstan to have a better life than their parents. In addition, TOL, working with some of the top publications in our coverage region, undertook a special investigation into political party financing, which spurred a prosecutor in Bulgaria to open an investigation and a mayor in Poland to stop subsidizing a local newspaper used for official propaganda. For our editors’ top picks of 2011, please see here.

We also published our first book, Classroom Struggles, a collection of news and feature articles on the challenges to improved education in Central and Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia. And TOL’s partner organization, neweurasia,released CyberChaikhana: Digital Conversations from Central Asia, a contemporary history of post-Soviet Central Asia written from the perspective of its young blogging community.

Spurring Social Innovation and Launching New Sites

TOL also continued to spark social innovation among journalists, civic activists, students, and others, most prominently through a wave of social innovation camps held  across the region. In May, we co-organized the first-ever camp in Central Asia, which provided an opportunity for 80 activists, techies, designers, and social innovators to compete to build web-based tools for social impact. Two camps then took place in July, one in Baku, and the other in Sarajevo, where TOL co-organized a camp with Internews that included attendees from 20 countries and a contingent of five Google staff members from around the world who served as volunteer mentors to participants. 
For all the wonders of online media and innovation, we’ve come to see that many of those we work with often have nowhere to turn for technical and new media assistance, with little or no in-house knowledge and commercial alternatives that are far too expensive.

In response, we’ve taken a more active role in both launching websites with local partners and providing technical training. In Georgia, working with Prague-based Sourcefabric, we revamped the websites of three regional media outlets to increase their impact as independent societal watchdogs. In Moldova, a group of young people used a new media event organized by TOL and our local partner, MediaPoint, to jumpstart development ofAlerte.md, which encourages citizens to report problems to the authorities and already has the backing of Chisinau’s reformist mayor.  In the Balkans, a TOL-led consortium starteda regional news and information portal on and for the Balkans’ Roma communities. In Russia, we cooperated with local partners to launch a newenvironmentaljournalism website that aims to build a community of professional as well as citizen journalists covering under-reported environmental issues throughout the country – especially those ignored by the media for political reasons. And in Central Asia, we opened up a “new media clinic” to provide direct technical assistance and social media expertise to dozens of media and nonprofit organizations across the region, leading to large spikes in the number of visits to many of their sites.    
Such activities have been made possible by the generous support of private foundations, governments, and intergovernmental funds, but some of those sources have been hit hard by the financial crisis. Combined with the normal challenges of raising funds for media development work, that has made it more difficult for TOL to continue our activities at previous levels and to consider expanding our programs where they are needed the most.

That’s why we would like to ask you to consider making a donation of a size that you are comfortable with to help us fill gaps in funding both our journalism and training work.

If you would prefer to help TOL by volunteering your time to edit or write for us, please click here.

And, lastly, if you would like to stay informed about our training projects, please sign upfor the relevant newsletter.

Thank you,

Jeremy Druker
Executive Director and Editor in Chief

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Association for International Affairs is inviting you to a panel discussion on Cross – strait relations in 2012: Leadership changes and security implications

The discussion which will be held one day prior to presidential and parliamentary elections in Taiwan will focus on analyzing chances of main presidential candidates Ma Ying-jou (Kuomintang, KMT) and Tsai Ying-wen (Democratic Progressive Party, DPP).

Could Ma’s proposal of signing a peace agreement between Taiwan and PRC change the outcome of elections? What is the current state of cross-strait relations? The panel will also touch upon the question of expected leadership change in mainland in 2012 and 2013. Who will be the next president of China and would the leadership change affect the situation in the Taiwan Strait?

Speakers include:
JAN BECKA, Lecturer, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague
CHIU JONG-JEN, Director, Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in the Czech Republic
IVANA KARASKOVA, Analyst, Assotiation for Internationa Affairs
JANA SEHNALKOVA, Lecturer, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague

Working language: English
Time and place of the event:
Friday, January 13, 2012, 10:00 – 12:00
Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University (Hollar building), room 212, Smetanovo nabrezi 6, Prague 1

R.S.V.P. at  by Wednesday, January 11, 2012.

In Memoriam: Vaclav Havel, 1936-2011

Transitions Newsletter, December 2011

Transitions is a Prague-based media development organization with a mission of actively championing democracy, pluralism, and freedom of expression. We do this by strengthening the professionalism, independence, and impact of media and civil society organizations, with a special focus on Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Union.

Past Events

Central Asian “Media Clinic” Providing Tech Aid

Central Asian NGOs and independent media often have nowhere to turn for technical and new media assistance, with little or no in-house knowledge and commercial alternatives that are far too expensive. That’s where TOL’s new media clinic has come in, supported over the past year by the United Nations Democracy Fund and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). A second group of Central Asian journalists and NGO workers just completed our two-month training program, which focused on using social media for promotion of their organizations’ content and causes, as well as general site management and maintenance. The program also included a basic course on managing websites built on the Wordpress platform so that even a non-techie can easily set up and run a well-functioning site. Around 20 participants attended twice-weekly meetings held at the Bishkek campus of the American University in Central Asia; others took part via a distance learning program. Media clinic personnel have also been directly helping dozens of organizations across the region with advice that has often contributed to large spikes in the number of visits to their sites.   

On the Road in Georgia

Over the course of 15-24 November, a TOL/Sourcefabric team visited the three regional media outlets that are receiving assistance through a NED-financed project to revamp the Internet presence and strategies of a select group of independent Georgian media institutions. The goal is to help them play a greater role on the increasingly government-controlled media scene, especially as public watchdogs over Georgia’s democratization. The three team members were TOL Georgia Project Manager Elza Ketsbaia; Jakub Gornicki, a new media specialist who is community manager at Sourcefabric; and Mirian Jugheli, an editor at headlines.ge, who will be providing local support for the project. The main order of business on the trip was training the three media outlets how to use their new open-source content management system, Sourcefabric’s Newscoop.  The three media groups are livepress.ge, a promising site launched a few months ago that remains the only media outlet in the Samegrelo region regularly producing journalistic content; the Mtskheta Mtianeti Information Center, which covers a region in eastern Georgia; and Tspress, a local media outlet that writes about Samegrelo, Ajara, and the upper Svaneti regions.  

While in Georgia, Jakub kept busy by also providing a two-day new media workshop for high school students in Zugdidi, a city in western Georgia close to the border of the breakaway region of Abkhazia. Fourteen students from five schools participated, learning the basics of social media (how to use Facebook and Twitter and other tools); how to set up a blog and promote it; and how to podcast, among other topics. The workshop is part of a 20-month project supported by the Transition Promotion Program at the Czech Foreign Ministry to increase the participation of young people in Georgia in public life.

Part of a Select Crowd

Transitions received the honor of being invited to take part in the first Investment-Ready Program, an initiative of Social Impact International and The Hub Vienna to accelerate social entrepreneurship in Central and Eastern Europe. The program aims to bridge the gap between social entrepreneurs and impact investors to multiply social impact. Executive Director Jeremy Druker attended an introductory three-day workshop in Vienna from 24-27 November that gathered together some of the most promising social businesses across the region.

Featured Content

Transitions Online (www.tol.org) often showcases the work produced through our grant programs.  Some of the highlights from November include the following stories:

8 November 2011
Beyond the Action-Hero Version of Serbian History
An effort to change the way history is taught in Serbian schools runs aground.
By Dejan Kozul

10 November 2011
Is There Safety in Numbers for Russian Airlines?
A plan to squeeze out smaller carriers and retire older planes would push fares up without making the country’s airspace safer, critics warn.
By Aleksander Kolesnichenko

15 November 2011
Big Dreams, Long Odds in Kazakhstan
Six students and their Peace Corps teacher in a fading village make a bold try for something better.
By Dariya Tsyrenzhapova

16 November 2011
The High Cost of Fair Testing
When Romania attacked cheating on the all-important high school exam, the unintended consequence was a financial crisis in the universities.
By Clara Stanescu

17 November 2011
Property Rights and Refugee Realities Clash in Azerbaijan
TOL video: European courts weigh in on the sticky issue of displaced people from Nagorno-Karabakh occupying private homes against owners’ wishes.
By Rena Allahverdiyeva

23 November 2011
New Blood in Bulgaria’s Classrooms
An appeal to idealism lures young people into an aging and unsung profession.
By Boryana Dzhambazova

28 November 2011
In Grozny, A Girl Discovers the Aliens Among Us
The war diaries of a Russian girl depict a society being demolished from without and within.
By Ostap Karmodi

Success Story

In cooperation with our partner site, neweurasia.net, we launched a Best Blogger Award for Central Asia and found ourselves flooded with quality entries from across the region. After reviewing the 60 entries, the judges had the unenviable job of narrowing down the field. In the end, they chose two co-winners and both from Uzbekistan: Gulasal Kamolova (gulasal.wordpress.com) and Tashpulat Rahmatulaev (rtoshpulat.blogspot.com). They are almost certainly known to many of our readers, Gulasal particularly for her videos of last year’s revolution in Kyrgyzstan and Tashpulat from his many articles with journalistic publications.

Their exceptional blogging about Uzbekistan allows us to learn insights about a country not often in the news, and we thought it was high time for them to earn some recognition for their work. They will be invited to attend TOL’s popular 10-day international reporting course in Prague in January to sharpen their already considerable skills; tuition and all travel expenses will be covered by the generous sponsor of the contest, Hivos.

Besides Gulasal and Tashpulat, we were very impressed by the photographic skills of Andrey Kudryashov (chilanzarnews.livejournal.com), whose work had been previously unknown to us. Consequently, we have dubbed him our honorary winner, and we hope to feature some of his photos on TOL and neweurasia in the future.

We also had several impressive runners-up, several of whom we would like to work harder to promote in the future:
- Salimjon Aioubzod (aioubzod.wordpress.com)
- Bektour Iskender (www.bektour.com)
- Alina Zhetigenova (www.jetigenova.com)
- Ilya Lukash (lukash.kloop.kg)
- Ilya Karimdzhanov (karimdjanov.kloop.kg)
- Bermet Mambetshaeva (dulce-marizza.com)
- Jomart Ormonbekov (www.ormonti.com)
- Anatoli Remnev (remnew.yvision.kz)
- Rustem Takhirov (freecorr.wordpress.com)
- Larissa Shilina (larisha.wordpress.com, polixro.livejournal.com, lara-www.blogspot.com)

Congratulations to everyone for their fine work!

Current Projects

Azerbaijan and Moldova
Promoting the use of new media and social media among journalists, civil society organizations, and young people.
Serbia
Training journalists to cover issues related to the environment.
Central Asia
Promoting the use of Internet media and new media techniques to produce, promote, and distribute new forms of content.
Russia
Improving the quality of environmental investigative journalism while increasing the impact of the environmental movement in Russia.
Education Reporting
Using distance learning courses, workshops, and other resources to improve reporting on education-related topics.
Roma Multimedia Training
Training Roma and majority community journalists in multimedia story-telling, with a special focus on Roma issues.

How Can You Help?

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On December 18, 2011, Václav Havel, the founder of the Forum 2000 Foundation and former president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, has passed away. President Havel was a lifelong fighter for freedom and human dignity and a deeply thoughtful person, troubled by the indifference of our civilization to its own future. The idea for the Forum 2000 Conference originated in 1997, when, together with the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel, and philanthropist Yohei Sasakawa, he invited world leaders to Prague to discuss the challenges humanity was facing on the threshold of a new millennium. Since then, Forum 2000 conferences continue to address topics ranging from the state of democracy and human rights to interfaith dialogue, environmental sustainability of economic growth, the importance of the rule of law, and the role of the media.

Václav Havel´s legacy will be the emphasis on the importance of freedom and democracy for a successful development of society, insistence on the universality of human rights, and the imperative need of moral basis for all kinds of human endeavor. We will always remember Václav Havel for the courage and modesty with which he defended these principles.

Watch the Speeches of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Other Distinguished Guests Live

From December 11 to December 12, 2011, the Forum 2000 Foundation has organized three events in Prague which will be attended by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and many other distinguished personalities. You can watch all of the events live at www.forum2000.cz.

On Sunday, December 11 at 10.00, a roundtable discussion entitled “Democracy and Human Rights in Asia: One Year After an Empty Chair in Oslo” will be held in commemoration of the first anniversary of the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. The current situation in Asia will be discussed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Václav Havel, the Iranian lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Shirin Ebadi, Chinese dissident Jianli Yang, co-drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Stéphane Hessel, former French Minister of Foreign Affairs Bernard Kouchner and former Polish Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki.

On the same day, at 13.30, you can watch a live broadcast of a public talk by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, to be held at the Prague Congress Centre. The talk will be devoted to the topic “Searching for Happiness in a Troubled World”. On Monday, December 12 at 14.15, you can follow a live broadcast of a press conference with His Holiness the Dalai Lama,

You can watch all of the events here: http://www.forum2000.cz/en/web-tv/. Shortly following their conclusion, video recordings, photographs and other outputs will be available on the Forum 2000 Foundation website.

Association for International Affairs organizes a public lecture on Grand Strategy in an Uncertain World which will be delivered by Thomas Barnett, Ph.D., the US military geostrategist, writer, and columnist. His lecture will be focused on current international issues, including aftermaths of the financial crisis and related economic problems, the growth of economic and political powers outside the Euro-Atlantic region, and transformation processes in the Arab world. His lecture will offer a holistic point of view on globalization, including its security and economic aspects.

Thomas Barnett is currently Chief Analyst at Wikistrat, a global consulting network specialized in geopolitics analysis, and Managing Director at the Center for America-China Partnership. Previously, he worked in the Center for Naval Analysis and Institute for Public Research (1990-1998), taught at the US Naval War College (1998-2005) and acted as an analyst in the Office of Force Transformation in the US Department of Defense. He is an author of bestseller The Pentagon‘s New Map, he writes among others for World Politics Review and has a popular column at Esquire.com.

Working language: English

Time and venue:

R.S.V.P. at  by Wednesday, December 14, 2011 (limited capacity).