With a delay which is not unusual for Macedonia, the Macedonian PEN observed the Day of the Imprisoned Writer on December 3rd at the Faculty of Philology in Skopje.

The event welcomed speakers and poets. I had about 5 minutes to talk on the given topic: "Digital freedom and the writer". I spent my time talking about surveillance and the inability to read and write in privacy and anonymity with the usual computer system people use - making a case for free software and encryption. I hope that that was useful for the audience which I think was mostly with a non-technical background.

The full text [in Macedonian and probably in English] will be published on Diversity's site in the coming days. Update 21.12.2013: here is a link to the text [in Macedonian].

The preparations for the event took a lot of time and I'm glad to say it was time well spend. Working with Valentina Bozinovska on our rhetoric skills was useful. I got to see my text and speech evolving. Looking back on it I now think that 2-3 weeks of writing and practice are needed to be ready for speaking on events with strict time slots.

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Two days later, on December 5th, I partnered with Damjan for yet another presentation / workshop [and received help from Ana]. The annual event organized by YEF [MOF] is called "Stanica Studentska" and is a forum for meetings and discussions among university and high-school students.

2s.mk had another presentation about 3D printing earlier the same day, and we talked about regulation on the Internet. I think we did a good job. We spent the least possible time to talk in general on the topic and then tried to engage everybody.

We had a group of about 20 people. I was standing at one end of the room representing total regulation, and Damjan was at the other end. We asked everybody to stand up and make a line positioning themselves according to their preferences for regulation. Then we asked them to explain why do they stand in a particular position and to move around if what they hear from the others influences their views in any way. Maybe, at some point it was chaotic, but it looked like fun most of the time.

The views of the people present were interesting. Almost everyone talked about regulation as something conducted by governments. Nobody really discussed the role of big Internet companies. I think that is something we need to work on in the future.