9.6 KiB
2015-10-28
Personal Statement 2015 academia
LEADERSHIP AND INFLUENCE QUESTION
Chevening is looking for individuals that will be future leaders or influencers in their home countries. Explain how you meet this requirement, using clear examples of your own leadership and influencing skills to support your answer.
Since the beginning of the Arab Spring, my focus has shifted more towards institutional reform. As the civil liberties director in one of the leading human rights groups in Egypt, I managed a team that conducted research, litigation and advocacy on issues as complex and often explosive as freedom of religion and belief, gender and women rights, and counter-terrorism and national security. While doing that, I took on the portfolio of technology and human rights in my capacity as a researcher and advocate . Technology-in-society became my subject of interest rather than merely a tool to deploy in pursuing other interests as I have used it in the previous years. Inspired by the sudden global interest in communication rights and privacy since Egypt's internet kill-switch of January 2011 and incidents to follow, and realising from previous years how technology can be a game-changer for any social and economic context, my human rights research and advocacy efforts took a decisive turn. I now focused on policy reforms required in Egypt to remove legal barriers standing in the way of the emergence of a decentralised telecommunication infrastructure and services, owned and operated as a commons–reforms, which, I believe, allow privacy, security, connectivity and economic opportunity for all. To do so, I coordinated and was part of two working groups: one to prepare amendments to Egypt's telecom act, and another drafting an entirely new freedom of information bill that goes in line with international human rights standards. I also advocated these two bills and the positions they represent in parliament and in public debate fora, all in addition to other policy interventions covering other areas including media regulation, cybercrime, and independent oversight bodies.
NETWORKING QUESTION
Chevening is looking for individuals with strong networking skills, who will engage with the Chevening community and influence and lead others in their chosen profession. Explain how you meet this requirement, using clear examples of your networking skills, and outline how you hope to use these skills in the future.
While I do not expect many Chevening alumni to have the same study area as mine, I consider myself already in the larger network of alumni from Egypt, particularly from civil society and the legal professions. This year alone, five of the awardees are either former colleagues or people I have worked with or crossed paths with professionally in recent years.
Living between usually three separate domains, the legal, the technical, and the social/political, my adopted role has been to coordinate efforts bringing individuals from different backgrounds, translating between them and their different domains, and creating a consensus amongst them. This has been most evident in the campaign I coordinated advocating a freedom of information bill in 2011-2013. It has brought together not only representatives of human rights groups, lawyers, members of the media and the academia, but has also involved senior government officials and parliamentarians in a model that, to my knowledge, is still unique in Egypt. Another current effort I am involved in is related to a proposed cyrbercrime bill, the engagement around which has seen for the first time common understanding and hopefully more coordination between the civic society and the private sector. Another successful campaign I had a role in launching is Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment (OpAntiSH), which is considered the most successful intervention bringing together civil society, street organisers, and the media to raise awareness but also to directly protect women from gang rapes during political protests. Rather than being directly involved, my main contribution to OpAntiSH was to anticipate the violations, and to prepare the dynamic for people to come together and carry out the job needed, and offering support in my capacity as a civil liberties director in a leading human rights group involved.
Given adequate opportunity, these are two models I see myself repeating and expanding upon on policy, advocacy and activism related to technology and human rights.
STUDYING IN THE UK QUESTION
Outline why you have selected your chosen three university courses, and explain how this relates to your previous academic or professional experience and your plans for the future.
*Please do not duplicate the information you have entered on the work experience and education section of this form
New peer-to-peer, decentralised and federated modes of production, distribution and exchange suggested initially in the middle 1980s by the free and open source software model and adopted later on by several content creation projects, including Wikipedia, are offering a more-level playing field for a much wider group of people to learn, use, contribute, and create value, in comparison past characterised by centralisation and mass-production. This is not new for software intangibles. However, over the past few years, this same model seems to be spreading to new areas where the products are only partly intangible 'software'. The intangible knowledge required to build and control manufacturing machines, 3D printers, laser cutters or computer-controlled mills, is indeed software, schematics, and content built and accessed over the internet, but the end-product, and the products it makes, whose schematics are also increasingly freely available, are very physically real.
There seems to be a pattern for such peer-to-peer development of knowledge for an entire array of human activities which seems to go beyond fabrication and industrial design: from vehicles for transportation, to telecommunication, to currency and exchange, to housing and utilities, to production of food and fibre, and seemingly even to power generation and resource harvesting, although at different stages of maturity in those different area. The effect of these technologies building on each other is compounding, and potentially game-changing.
Is peer-to-peer production really moving beyond intangibles? If so, what is the role of the internet in such a development? How is intellectual property affected beyond software and cultural products? What are the evolution trends of a peer-to-peer mode of production? How much is peer-to-peer contributing to production economy, now and in the future? How is democratising production by lowering capital requirements affecting governance of societies? What is the ethnography of free hardware makers and how does it compare to that of free software makers? Starting with a a Chevening-sponsored taught masters programme in Society and Technology Studies, and pursuing a PhD, I intend to contribute to finding answers to these questions, which I currently find fascinating and quite central to our future and survival. STS is a fairly new and inter-disciplinary field that meets and enriches my varied experience, and the three universities I am focusing my applications on offer the best opportunities for learning.
Locally, as it is valid in many other countries, aspirations for freedom and better livelihoods are being met with the impossibility of building a welfare state, which is weathering away even in the most advanced economies, while austerity does not leave the majority of people with reasonable choices. Egypt's social change is struggling because fresh ideals are not followed by fresh ideas as to what to be done. A few years may allow both peer-to-peer technologies and the debate in Egypt to meet in another crucial moment.
CAREER PLAN QUESTION
Chevening is looking for individuals who have a clear post-study career plan. Outline your immediate plans upon returning home and your longer term career goals, considering how these relate to UK priorities in your country.
- UK priority areas can be found on your country page of the Chevening
website
It is becoming more evident year after year that problems of the environment, economy, society and politics are closely related and interdependent. In a region where good governance, and political and social stability will be weakening for a time to come, and in a country where there is already an often-criticised tradition of autonomy and resilience, decentralised solutions to livelihood problems seem to be an increasingly viable option that may prove crucial in keeping societies from imploding.
After my studies, I am hoping to have gained a better understanding and knowledge of the dynamics between society and the economy on one hand, and decentralised and federated technologies on the other. I will return to Egypt to continue my engagement in the public sphere. My challenge then would be to find a formula that allows me to contribute to building, testing and tweaking an alternative as I have done during my pre-2011 years, while continuing to play the policy reform role I took on in recent years. Banking on the the current recognition of myself as an agent for social change, I intend to engage in writing and advocating policy that catalyses the emergence of a more sustainable and peer-to-peer economy.
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