Smart Squares

David Merrill is an MIT graduate student who has created something called Siftables—cracker-sized "smart" squares equipped with wireless sensors that you can stack like blocks. Why bother? They do math. They play music. They interact. They also represent a breakthrough way to learn [and teach] and communicate complex ideas to children and adults. In addition, they create a new vehicle for all sorts of visual and mobile applications. Here's Merrill at TED2009 earlier this month:



When he's not working on Siftables, Merrill is exploring new ways to access digital information away from one's computer.

Davos Daze

The World Economic Forum got under way today in Davos, Switzerland. The theme this year is, fittingly, the global economic crisis. "The level of global wealth has changed," Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1997 through 2006, told an opening press conference kicking off the conference. "The question is, are we capable of changing or adapting fast enough to save our planet? That is the challenge."

For the first time—perhaps to ease public ire over this year's sinking global economy—Davos organizers have agreed to let bloggers and other social media types tweet and blog the otherwise venerable proceedings. Among them will be 24-year-old Pablo Camacho, of Bogota, Colombia, who competed against 250 other YouTube devotees for the honor of covering it all for the video-sharing site. Here's his first dispatch, about philanthropist George Soros' remarks to a luncheon that weren't part of the mainstream fare:



Click here to view WEF's Facebook page. And see below, BuzzMachine blogger Jeff Jarvis' invitation to have your say at Davos from the comfort of your own home. The conference ends Sunday.

Causefest 2

Inspired by a sharp rise in the number of Facebook-organized political protests and mass demonstrations this year in cities around the world, dozens of youth activists from the U.S. and abroad met today at Columbia University for Day 2 of the Alliance of Youth Movements Summit—a first-time gathering hosted by Howcast, Facebook, MTV, the U.S. Department of State, YouTube, Google, and Access 360 Media.

Selected panel discussions—featuring many of the young people who organized these various mass-scale marches and civic actions in recent months—are being streamed live here. "We noticed a rise of movements all using social networking to fight extremism, so we thought now would be the perfect time to aid and help build momentum for those using online platforms to catalyze social change," said Summit co-organizer Jason Liebman, the CEO and cofounder of Howcast. "All of these groups arose independent of each other. It was time to come together."

Organizers also are using the two-day event to form a new nonprofit to unite global activists and to create a field manual that can be distributed to others about how best to affect Web-driven social change. Updated drafts of the manual can be viewed here.

Among conference highlights so far:

* Oscar Morales, a young engineer and founder of One Million Voices Against FARC, a Facebook group, discussed his use of Facebook to organize what many have described as the largest demonstration in Colombia's history. Morales told conferees his success has proven that social networking can be used to organize citizen campaigns against oppressive forces all over the world. The February 4 protest used word-of-mouth campaigns over Facebook to repudiate FARC guerrillas and turned out more than 1 million people on the streets of Colombia—as well as smaller groups in some 200 other cities across the world, from Berlin to Barcelona, London, Madrid, Toronto, Dubai, Miami, New York, and others. "The Feb. 4 protest was a big slap in the face to FARC, who saw that its ideals were no longer supported by the people, and many members of FARC then started abandoning the group," Morales said. "...Digital platforms are a means to social liberties...We proved that the digitally connected few can connect the masses."

* Juan David Lacouture, the founder of No Mas Chavez, a Venezuelan group that originated on Facebook to oppose Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s policies, said his movement "couldn't have started anywhere but on the Internet." The group, which has some 80,000 members on Facebook, staged a mass protest on April 11 that mobilized some 2,000 people to visit Venezuelan embassies in 25 cities around the world to call for an end to terrorism and corruption in that country. The protest also brought thousands of Venezuelans into the streets to call for change. “Facebook lets us stay in contact with friends, relatives, colleagues, and people from our past," Lacouture told conferees, "and it also helps us to express ourselves and carry our messages to thousands and thousands of people.” When asked if extreme left-wing or right-wing groups should have the same access to Facebook to organize, Lacouture said: “I don’t believe anything should be banned online. If an idea is not strong enough and you expose it for what it is, then the idea can be its own biggest enemy. Oppression is sustained by those who would keep bad ideas in the dark.”

* Gemma Olway and Sharon Singh, both 26, organized The People's March Against Knife Crime in London on September 20, which drew 6,000 to a protest rally and gained the attention of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, other politicians, and the media. The group, formed in July, started as a Facebook group. “We noticed a lot of anti-knife groups already on Facebook but we wanted to unite them to say that enough is enough,” Singh told a Summit panel.

* Elias Kuri, a cofounder of Iluminemos Mexico, organized an anti-violence march on August 30 that was joined by 2 million people in 88 cities across Mexico and in six other countries. Kuri said he organized the march at a time when many Mexicans were horrified by what was then the recent kidnapping and murder of 14-year-old Fernando Martí, the son of a businessman. “Does a march work to make change?” Kuri asked his fellow panelists. “We think yes because when people are angry they want to do something...The important thing was that we didn’t use traditional media to protest. We used the Internet, Facebook, emails, and people just went to the march. The authorities were sure we were going to fail. They didn’t believe the Internet could have so much power.”

* Dustin Moskovitz, cofounder of Facebook, said the 40-and-older crowd is the fastest-growing demographic using the social networking site, a plus for the spread of social activism in the United States and abroad. "We started four years ago as a youth social network and now we are fighting that stigma," Moskovitz told conferees. "In other countries where Facebook is being used, the average age is 45 or 50 years. Our fastest-growing [age] demographics in the United States are 40-plus and we expect that to continue." Moskovitz acknowledged that Facebook groups are still "somewhat limited" in their ability to communicate to very large audiences but said the company is working to expand that capability. He also said Facebook is working hard to discourage al Qaeda and other terrorist groups from using social networks to advance their ideologies. "We work with law enforcement in many countries and we are going to fight people who try to repress free speech all over the world," Moskovitz said. "We already work to expel anyone using Facebook for hate and violence. You can't organize an al Qaeda group on Facebook and expect us to keep it up for very long." Moskovitz did acknowledge, however, that there is a "fine line between harassment and free speech" and told conferees the company is planning to hire more people to help it handle site monitoring.

* James K. Glassman, Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in the Bush Administration, commended Summit organizers for trying to create what he called "a giant global conversation about how individuals can oppose violence and extremism and stand up for universal values of tolerance, freedom, justice, and social change." He said U.S. government officials have arrived at the notion that the Net is "the locus of civic society" and that governments which don't use the Net to support pro-democracy movements at home and abroad face a greater risk of being ignored by the people they are trying to govern. "What we face today, these threats to liberty and security, cannot be overcome by governments, alone," Glassman said. "Only popular opposition can turn the tide. The forces of oppression and terror have little support but they do intimidate and frighten people into inaction. The Internet is a tool that will help people to overcome." Responding to a question, Glassman said he is confident that the incoming Obama administration will continue the State Department's policies of "Web 2.0 diplomacy." Said Glassman: "I would expect the new administration to take this new approach and expand it, and if they do expand it, I hope they also will provide the resources to do so."

In addition to Howcast videos posted on this site yesterday, see two more, below, released to conferees today—How to Smart Mob and How to Be an Effective Dissident. Watch this space for conference updates.





(Illustration, top, by Miroslaw Pieprzyk for istock.com)

Causefest

Tomorrow and Friday, an Alliance of Youth Movements Summit convenes at Columbia University Law School to launch a new global youth network to help train people around the world to use social media—from cell phones to digital video to Twitter and other tools—to fight violence and oppression. The Summit was inspired by the recent successes of One Million Voices Against FARC—a Facebook group that used social networking and mobile technologies to organize 12 million people in 190 cities around the world to protest the FARC extremist group in Colombia.

The Alliance of Youth Movements—being organized by Howcast, Facebook, MTV, the U.S. Department of State, YouTube, Google, and Access 360 Media—is crafting a field manual on how to affect social change using the Internet. The first draft can be viewed here.

The alliance also is forming an online "hub" that will include links to community organizing information, a forum for sharing experiences, and instructional videos for creating citizen action groups around the world. The Summit brings together leaders of 17 organizations from 15 countries, including Save Darfur Coalition, One Million Voices Against FARC, Genocide Intervention Network, and Invisible Children. Panels will include talks entitled How to Use New Mobile Technologies and How to Preserve Group Safety and Security.

Cause Global will be covering parts of the conference; check this space for updates.

Here are two of the videos being collected by the Alliance as resources for helping cause-wired activists, first posted on Howcast within the last 48 hours:





(Illustration by istock.com)

Hope Flickrs

The Guardian in the U.K. has been overwhelmed with public response since setting up a Flickr group Nov. 6 asking readers to send in messages to president-elect Barack Obama as he prepares to take office. There have been more than 900 photographs sent in so far, and photos are still coming in. Most convey good wishes; these photos are among those submitted. Check out the "messageforobama" group on Flickr by clicking HERE. (And for a look at how Obama and his team may use social media to help it govern, see The Wired White House by Alan Boyle, posted today on msnbc.com's CosmicLog.)

99 Steps

Storytelling doesn't have to be digital to catalyze rapid social change. Consider the fastest-selling comic book in the Arab world, called The 99. Though just 11 months old, it's already banned in Saudi Arabia; its cast features 99 Islamic superheroes on a quest to find legendary, mystical Noor Stones needed to save the world.

Why 99? All characters are based on the concept of Allah's 99 attributes, including wisdom and generosity, as taught in the Koran. The current issue of The 99 follows some of the superheroes as they race to stop two planes from colliding at a New York airport.


During a recent stop in Oxford, I caught up with the creator of The 99, Naif Al-Mutawa, who says he's been a fan of America's Marvel comics and The Hardy Boys mysteries since he attended summer camp in New Hampshire as a child.

Al-Mutawa is now 37, a Columbia University Business School graduate and a clinical psychologist. After attending college in the States, he worked as a translator for torture survivors, and decided Muslims needed positive role models. In 2005, he founded Teshkeel Media Group in Kuwait City, where he was born and raised. In July 2007, less than a year ago, Teshkeel began publishing The 99 (as well as select, Arabic versions of Spiderman and other Marvel comics) in the United States and across the Middle East.

Al-Mutawa says he hopes the comic books will spread a moderate, modern image of Islam to the world and create new role models. "The Islamic world has had suicide bombers as heroes and needed new heroes," Al-Mutawa told Cause Global.

Characters in The 99 include Noora the Light, 18, (a former university student in Sharjah—the third-largest emirate in the UAE—who is now "a light to overcome the darkness"); Mumita the Destroyer, 17 (a street-smart runaway teen from the UAE who is being recruited by both the forces of good and evil to fight), and Dr. Ramzi Razem, 35 (a psychologist, historian, and UNESCO official who lives in Paris as a sort-of Arab version of Indiana Jones, hungry to learn more about the Noor stones and to mobilize the 99 for global peace).

There also is Jabbar the Powerful—a 19-year-old whose online profile says he was once "an average Saudi Arabian teen" until he stepped on a land mine and was transformed by hidden gem shards into a "man-mountain, a giant standing over two meters tall and weighing almost 200 kilograms." The good guys, led by Dr. Ramzi, seek to keep Jabbar out of the control of Muslim extremists. How powerful is Jabbar? If he sneezes, his profile adds, Jabbar "could level a house."

In recent weeks and months, Al-Mutawa has been busy launching The 99 in Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, countries outside the Arab Middle East where Islamic culture and history are widespread. Teshkeel announced May 19 it would open a theme park this fall in Jahra, Kuwait, based on the action figures.

For a Frontline World piece on Al-Mutawa's trip to Indonesia to introduce The 99, see this:



What do you think?

Empty-handed

Despite rising casualties from the May 3 typhoon in Myanmar (Burma), global relief officials are continuing to fight hard to get desperately needed plane-loads of donated water, packaged foods, blankets, plastic sheets, and medicine off the country's air strips and into the hands of victims.

Yet most aid, nearly two weeks after the storm, is still not reaching the needy.

Michael Kiernan, a spokesman for Westport, Conn.-based international aid group, Save the Children, tells Cause Global that Myanmar's ruling junta is blocking distribution—stealing, diverting, or warehousing for its own use the lion's share of supplies being flown in by donors worldwide. (The United Nations said today the World Food Programme is getting in only about 20 percent of the food needed due to the bottlenecks.) Further, the junta is barring all foreigners, including credentialed diplomats and journalists, from entering the country, and aid workers are being prohibited from accompanying any donated aid, tracking its distribution, or following up on its delivery.

Thanks to the use of social media—from Twitter to mobile video—detailed accounts of what's happening inside Myanmar (and what's not) are leaking out to the West. For an up-to-date account of the political challenges that international aid workers are facing in their push to help typhoon victims in Myanmar, see this May 14 YouTube/Al Jazeera interview with Tom Costello, CEO of World Vision, a Christian global relief nonprofit, on the ground in Yangon (Rangoon).



For some background on Myanmar's repressive military regime, see this Washington Post story, which lends some context to the aid blockade.

Should donors keep sending aid to Myanmar if there is no clear assurance that it will reach the needy? And would such aid be adequate, even if it did arrive and get distributed? (After the 2004 tsunami in Asia, for example, 4,000 tons of free drugs flooded into the Indonesian coastal town of Banda Aceh but 60% of them were irrelevant or unneeded and 25% had expired on arrival or shortly thereafter, according to Pharmacists Without Borders, a global nonprofit.)

World Vision's Costello insists it's important to keep raising money, sending basic food and supplies, and working to get around the bottlenecks—given the evidence of escalating need in the region detailed in Web reports. Ned Olney, who is overseeing Save the Children's response in Asia from his office in Washington, D.C., says the nonprofit's 35 sub-offices in Myanmar and 500 full-time staff already on the ground there "are helping us get some supplies through when other groups are finding it impossible." (The U.S. Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance has consigned Save the Children to distribute three planeloads of supplies; the U.K. has asked it to help distribute two such additional planeloads.) "It's not that nobody has access, because we do," Olney says. "But there's no question that it's been difficult and it's still a very delicate situation."

Moreover, Olney, Costello, and others agree that a more coordinated approach by aid groups worldwide is needed now and in the future to resolve common disaster relief challenges, chiefly those posed by distribution snafus including geopolitical conflicts. The New York-based Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (CECP) is discussing the creation of a global "SWAT team" of corporate aid networks to help donor groups avoid the all-too-frequent disconnect between need, distribution, and resources at home and abroad in the wake of natural disasters.

"Business groups should develop rapid deployment logistics teams and they should be formal and should be housed somewhere," says Alan G. Hassenfeld, Chairman of Hasbro Inc. and a founding member of the CECP. "And they should be made up of people who are able to interconnect on a global basis. We live in a world where there is going to be another disaster somewhere soon, ongoing, so let's mobilize now."

Can it work? Expect to hear more about the notion in social entrepreneur think-fests later this summer and fall.

What do you think?

(Photo of Myanmar children by Getty Images)

Film-anthropy

Filmaker Gini Reticker's Pray the Devil Back to Hell took top honors this week for Best Documentary Feature at this year's Tribeca Film Festival. Produced by philanthropist Abigail Disney, the documentary tells the story of how Christian and Muslim women in Liberia—despite religious and ethnic differences—united in 2003 to bring an end to their nation's bloody civil war.

According to Disney, it took her and Reticker 18 months to make the film: few international media networks saved footage of the peace effort, while others failed to film it as it evolved, believing it not to be important.

In a recent interview with Contribute Media Online, Disney said that during a trip to Liberia, she learned of the movement, then realized the unusual alliance was in the process of being forgotten. "The story about the Liberian women peacemakers was in the air—but in little pieces, like shards of a broken thing you want to put back together—only this story was missing some pieces," Disney said.

"I know from women’s history and women’s literature through the centuries that women do things and then we forget them—and then the next time a group of women attempts to do something similar, everybody thinks that women are doing it for the very first time," Disney added. "It seemed to me that here I was a witness to the erasure of a historical moment and I had the capacity to prevent that from happening."

To see an excerpt of that film, plus Contribute Media Online's full interview with Abigail Disney, click HERE.

Other highlights of this year's festival included a new screening of the The Devil Came by Horseback, film-maker Annie Sundberg's award-winning 2007 documentary about former U.S. Marine Capt. Brian Stiedle's experiences as an unarmed observer for the African Union in Darfur in 2004. "Brian provided the eyes through which to tell Americans about the genocide in Darfur," Sundberg told CauseGlobal. "With this film, I was seeking the story behind the headlines."

Both Sundberg's and Disney's films are stories about dislocated African cultures and the struggle for peace—in one case, successful, and in the case of Darfur, still blatantly unresolved.

Here's the trailer from The Devil Came on Horseback:



What do you think?

(photo by Dan Demetriad)

The Wizards of Whyville

Still think virtual worlds don't (nor can) matter much in the real world? Think again. Not all virtual worlds are created equal. Just ask any 12-year-old if he or she has ever been to Whyville.

Odds are, that kid is one of the 3.5 million "tweens" aged 8 to 14 who spend, on average, at least a few hours a week on this 9- year-old virtual reality site--and has likely been doing so for years. Whyvillian Andy109, for example, has visited the site 2,304 times since he first registered on April 7, 2000. That's almost a rate of one visit per day for the past seven years, says Whyville cofounder Jim Bower, 55, the Caltech science professor who led the development of Whyville in 1999 and still runs the place. (I caught up with Bower this past week at this year's Digital Now conference in Orlando, where we were both presenting workshops on new trends in social media. Bower, aka "Super Id" in Whyville--a moniker for which he is famous among tweens--tells me that some 23% of all kids aged 6-17 already have a login in the virtual world, and that by 2011, that figure will more than double.)

But Bower and his cause-wired community of kids are just getting started, with a number of them now organizing clothing drives for the poor in Whyville, or waging nutritional action campaigns to fight anorexia and obesity among teens on and offline--based largely on what they've learned about economics, nutrition, and project planning in Whyville.

And don't be surprised if that 12-year-old you know also builds (or rents) a house in Whyville. Or drives a car there. Or is managing a virtual business--complete with employees, a payroll, and revenues to fuss over. Some even write for the Whyville Times (the virtual newspaper) about real-world social issues. When McDonald's first came out with its new line of salads to offer healthier fare, a Whyville Times reporter scooped the mainstream media a week later with a story proving that the line's nutritional value was as sparse as that of a Big Mac. "CNN did the story two weeks later," Bower says.

But what's really making cause advocates and organizational leaders take notice of Whyville is that it keeps maturing, expanding, and innovating--and with a cohesiveness and sophistication quite unlike other virtual worlds on the Internet so far.

Whyville is global. Kids log in from Afghanistan, India, China, Europe, South America, as well as from all over the United States. They share what's common among them more than their differences, Bower says. "In Whyville, kids mostly learn from each other about the impact of their actions on themselves--but they do so first in cyberspace, where the educational activities offered can promote socially responsible behavior," Bower says. ( Violating the community's basic rules of behavior, for example, can lead to a "muting" -- not being able to interact on the site for anywhere from 1-3 days.)

Not everyone is enamoured with Whyville: Some say Bower is building a cyberspace version of a "company town" -- controlled from the top and vulnerable to the whims of its creators. Bower, a passionate advocate for educational reform, vehemently counters by saying the site strikes a careful balance between self-government and adult "judicial" oversight to keep peace--not unlike a functioning democratic community anywhere. Better Whyville's participatory, grassroots "government" than no governance at all, he says.

A growing roster of organizations, schools, and corporations, meanwhile, are beginning to accept Bower's invitation to develop collaborative projects so that the learning can go both ways. (The U.K.'s EMI Music company, for example, has expressed interest in working with Bower to "build" a virtual recording studio in Whyville that would enable kids to write their own music, record it, and sell it to fellow Whyvillians for the site's virtual currency, called "clams.") Whyville's physical-world partners additionally include the National Science Foundation, The Getty art museum, Penguin Books, Scholastic, Toyota, Stanford University, and NASA--in all, 14 major national brands, eight nonprofit organizations, five governmental agencies, and six universities.

Says Bauer: "Virtual worlds do work, and have the potential to be the learning labs driving real change and more socially responsible behavior in the real world for decades to come."

Want to hear more? Tune into an interview with Bower aired by the Podcast Network. Here's that podcast.

What do you think?

Smart Mobs

In his 2003 book, Smart Mobs, futurist Howard Rheingold predicted the next social revolution would be triggered by the ubiquity of mobile phones. Their ability to send text messages, photographs, videos, and other instant data directly to a computer, he predicted, would give people a powerful new way to organize themselves on the fly, battle social ills as they are happening and ultimately transform cultures and reshape communities—for better or worse.

Rheingold's glimpse of the future is now—and is being promoted by a rising new crop of mobile activists like Katrin Verclas, cofounder and editor of MobileActive.org, a months-old Web site and community of about 8,000 people and NGOs from around the world. Verclas will be hosting a conference in Tokyo this fall to further promote the use of the technology and to "connect people and mobilize them for change," she says. Verclas estimates that about 80% of the world has cellphone coverage, and more than half of the global population has a cellphone—or has access to one. "We're at a critical time," she told me, " and 2009 will be the tipping point."

One recent example of where so-called smart mobs have already made a difference involves the National Democratic Institute, the U.S.-based nonprofit that promotes democracy abroad and sends volunteers to monitor polling places for corruption in potentially problematic democratic elections. A vote in Sierra Leone last August almost collapsed amid rumors of violence (also spread through text messages)—but order was quickly restored when some 500 NDI observers at the various polling places sent text messages to the central system saying that the rumors were false.

Cellphone activism is just getting started. Corruption will become even harder to hide as mobile phones improve their capacity as cameras able to capture police brutality, government corruption, or corporate crime as it occurs. The recent crackdown by Myanmar's junta on its Buddhist monks may not have been covered as widely had it not been for phone-toting witnesses who sent photos and videos of the uprising past censors to global broadcast networks and news outlets. "Mobile phones can get around the censorship controls that governments have been able to put on the Internet so far," Verclas says.

But the mobile-action movement is not only about playing the game of "gotcha." According to a recent story in The Economist magazine, shoppers in South Africa can now text-message the name of a fish to a service called FishMS and get an instant recommendation to "tuck in" or "think twice" about eating it, based on information telling how the fish was caught and whether the species is endangered. Similarly, the magazine reported, Londoners can now text a service called AirTEXT to get real-time data on air quality and alerts when pollution is spiking.

But will this increasingly cause-wired mainstream always work the upside? At a recent conference I attended at Oxford University, I asked Verclas about the odds that not-so-smart (or not-so-benevolent) mobs with cellphones could form surveillance squads or commit random snooping.

"Sure it could happen," she acknowledged. "But I figure it's an arms race. Better to have a wired version of a neighborhood watch out there to combat those who want to steal the civil liberties and freedoms and privacy of others. Mobile phones are empowering. With mobile phones, you have the choice to fight back."

What do you think?

Pangea Day

At the Skoll Foundation's annual think-fest for social entrepreneurs at Oxford University a few weeks ago, Ken Brecher, a social anthropologist and executive director of the Sundance Institute—organizers of the annual Sundance film festival—defined good storytelling as an increasingly powerful tool for social change globally. "...Storytelling is the refusal to be laid low, incapacitated; it helps us to understand the meaning of things, not simply the value...The purpose of a good storytelling," he said, "is to assist us all to understand and to operate in the open and not wildly in the dark."

To be sure, documentary film—images, captured words, sounds—is the premier art form in today's globalizing world, Brecher believes: it is the medium of the moment. "At any one time," he says, "there is only one art form that is speaking. Once it was dance, then it was poetry, then the short story. Today it is film, and it feels to me that we need to make that connection now if we really want to see change happen in the world."

Indeed. This blog, Cause Global, is a new blog—one that will cover this art form-of-the-moment and the connections it makes (and attempts to make) globally. Ultimately, this blog will track some of the news and ideas and people in today's world who are seeking to use social media to to make a difference, affect change, and use the Web to make solutions to common social problems profitable—and real. Why this? I'm a journalist, and for me it's all about covering the unlikely alliances and conversations that serve as catalysts to social change and problem-solving around common challenges. Storytelling is a big part of today's social change movement—one that packs the emotional resonance to cut through the noise of everyday media. "In storytelling," says Brecher, "you have to incline the ears of your heart."

Storytelling moves to the masses this spring with Pangea Day, documentary filmmaker Jenhane Noujaim's 2006 TED Festival dream-come-true. Noujaim, whose 2004 film, Control Room, exposed the divergent ways Arabs and the West covered the onset and outbreak of the Iraq war, is one of the catalysts behind this spring's globally-produced Pangea Day, scheduled for May 10. The live event is planned as a simulcast of films, speakers, and music; sites in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked live that day to produce a 4-hour program, which will air on the Internet, television, digital cinemas, and mobile phones.

Raised in both Egypt and the United States, Noujaim says her aim is to explore culture as a driving force for both conflict and possibility. "I want to use the power of film to bridge gaps between people," she says. "...How are people supposed to communicate with each other globally...or move together into the future...when their stories aren't being told?"

What do you think? Check out the official trailer for Pangea Day HERE.