connecting China – The first candidates

The first few candidates for my Connecting China project are coming in. Amy Gu from Shenzhen asked me to rephrase my plan: “The short-term plan is to let Chinese internet users tell the rest of the world how the internet has changed their life. First, through my weblog, where I will create a special corner when things move on, with a personal file of all the participants. I will start asking questions, but when things go well, the readers can also join in. For that reason I prefer to have participants whose English is ok – it does not have to be perfect: that makes it in the beginning easier to have a conversation with the outside world. As things move on we can use different internet tools like video-conferencing to add to this experiment. When I have some time and possibly also funding available, I want to visit a selection of the people in this project, each of them a few days, and use the material both for my weblog and for a book.”
I will provide participants with a special chinaherald.net email account. That not allows me to keep an eye on what is happening, but allows them to join in discussions without plastering their private email addresses all over the internet.