The Frontline Club

With a panel of experts and journalists we will be examining the political realignment taking place in the Middle East and North Africa.We will be asking what the shifts in Arab world mean for Israel, Iran and Saudi Arabia: What is Israel’s likely response to the emerging democracies that are replacing autocrats who held onto power in the name of “stability” in the region. How will countries like Egypt respond to Israel in the future and how will the balance of power change?We will be looking to at how Iran and Saudi Arabia respond to the changes taking place and the role of the Arab League in the future.In association with BBC ArabicChaired by Sam Farah, the lead presenter of BBC Arabic’s flagship interactive programme Nuqtat Hewar (Talking Point).With:Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst;Abdel Bari Atwan, since 1989 he has been the editor-in-chief of Al-Quds Al-Arabi, a major independent pan-Arab daily newspaper published in London and author of The Secret History of al-Qa’ida and A Country of Words, his memoir.William Morris, Secretary General of the Next Century Foundation, formerly a journalist and publisher he has been involved in the Middle East for more than 30 years. As Chairman of the International Media Council he has led press delegations to Iraq, Palestine, Israel, Egypt and Syria.

After the tracking down and killing of Osama bin Laden by a U.S. special operations team the questions have come thick and fast. At our May First Wednesday we are hoping to throw light on some of them: What impact will the death of Osama bin Laden have on Al Qaeda and on the people who support its cause? We will be bringing together a panel of experts to discuss what impact his death will have on extremist Islamic groups and to look at the implications for Pakistan now that it has emerged that the Al Qaeda leader was hiding in Abbotabad. We will also be discussing what Osama bin Laden's discovery so close to Pakistan's capital means for Afghanistan where the 'War on Terror' was launched. The operation to kill bin Laden will improve President Obama's standing in the US and the West, but what does it mean for US foreign policy? How it will play out on the ground, particularly in Asia and the Middle East? Chaired by Humphrey Hawksley, leading BBC foreign correspondent, author and commentator on world affairs. With: Lynne O'Donnell, former bureau chief in Kabul for AFP, and the author of High Tea in Mosul: The True Story of Two Englishwomen in War-torn Iraq. She is the recipient of a 2010 Human Rights Press Award for coverage of the plight of Afghan women; Dr Farzana Shaikh, associate fellow of the Asia Programme, at Chatham House and author of Making Sense of Pakistan; Aamer Ahmed Khan, head of BBC Urdu Service; Rosemary Hollis, professor of Middle East policy studies and director of the Olive Tree Programme at City University; Zaki Chehab, Arab journalist, editor-in-chief of ArabsToday.net, the largest Arabic-language news website and author of Iraq Ablaze: Inside the Insurgency and Inside Hamas: The Untold Story of the Militant Islamic Movement

After the tracking down and killing of Osama bin Laden by a U.S. special operations team the questions have come thick and fast. At our May First Wednesday we are hoping to throw light on some of them:What impact will the death of Osama bin Laden have on Al Qaeda and on the people who support its cause? We will be bringing together a panel of experts to discuss what impact his death will have on extremist Islamic groups and to look at the implications for Pakistan now that it has emerged that the Al Qaeda leader was hiding in Abbotabad.We will also be discussing what Osama bin Laden’s discovery so close to Pakistan’s capital means for Afghanistan where the ‘War on Terror’ was launched.The operation to kill bin Laden will improve President Obama’s standing in the US and the West, but what does it mean for US foreign policy? How it will play out on the ground, particularly in Asia and the Middle East?Chaired by Humphrey Hawksley, leading BBC foreign correspondent, author and commentator on world affairs.With:Lynne O’Donnell, former bureau chief in Kabul for AFP, and the author of High Tea in Mosul: The True Story of Two Englishwomen in War-torn Iraq. She is the recipient of a 2010 Human Rights Press Award for coverage of the plight of Afghan women;Dr Farzana Shaikh, associate fellow of the Asia Programme, at Chatham House and author of Making Sense of Pakistan;Aamer Ahmed Khan, head of BBC Urdu Service;Rosemary Hollis, professor of Middle East policy studies and director of the Olive Tree Programme at City University;Zaki Chehab, Arab journalist, editor-in-chief of ArabsToday.net, the largest Arabic-language news website and author of Iraq Ablaze: Inside the Insurgency and Inside Hamas: The Untold Story of the Militant Islamic Movement.

After the tracking down and killing of Osama bin Laden by a U.S. special operations team the questions have come thick and fast. At our May First Wednesday we are hoping to throw light on some of them:What impact will the death of Osama bin Laden have on Al Qaeda and on the people who support its cause? We will be bringing together a panel of experts to discuss what impact his death will have on extremist Islamic groups and to look at the implications for Pakistan now that it has emerged that the Al Qaeda leader was hiding in Abbotabad.We will also be discussing what Osama bin Laden’s discovery so close to Pakistan’s capital means for Afghanistan where the ‘War on Terror’ was launched.The operation to kill bin Laden will improve President Obama’s standing in the US and the West, but what does it mean for US foreign policy? How it will play out on the ground, particularly in Asia and the Middle East?Chaired by Humphrey Hawksley, leading BBC foreign correspondent, author and commentator on world affairs.With:Lynne O’Donnell, former bureau chief in Kabul for AFP, and the author of High Tea in Mosul: The True Story of Two Englishwomen in War-torn Iraq. She is the recipient of a 2010 Human Rights Press Award for coverage of the plight of Afghan women;Dr Farzana Shaikh, associate fellow of the Asia Programme, at Chatham House and author of Making Sense of Pakistan;Aamer Ahmed Khan, head of BBC Urdu Service;Rosemary Hollis, professor of Middle East policy studies and director of the Olive Tree Programme at City University;Zaki Chehab, Arab journalist, editor-in-chief of ArabsToday.net, the largest Arabic-language news website and author of Iraq Ablaze: Inside the Insurgency and Inside Hamas: The Untold Story of the Militant Islamic Movement.

The start of 2011 will be remembered as a period in which the barrier of fear fell across the Middle East and North Africa as people took to the streets demanding freedom from the tyrants who had governed for so long. No one can predict where these momentous events will lead and what the repercussions will be for years to come. For this special event held at the The Royal Institution of Great Britain the Frontline Club and BBC Arabic Service will be bringing together some of the key players, journalists and experts to discuss what has taken place in Egypt and the surrounding region so far and to try to gauge what the future might hold. With those that were instrumental in organising the uprising in Egypt we will be discussing the role that new technology has played; is social media simply a new tool or has its role been more fundamental, changing not only the way that people communicate but also the way that they think and act? We will be discussing how and when the movements where formed, what common ideas they share and how they see things moving forward. The discussion, which will be in two parts, will be chaired by Paddy O'Connell of BBC Radio 4's Broadcasting House. Panel: Part 1: Alaa Abd El Fattah: By day a Free/Open Source Software developer, by night he dons his mask and cape and patrols the streets of Cairo, jumping from campaign to campaign building websites, providing support and training, looking out for activists in need. He "likes to pretend" that his work on the Egyptian Blogs Aggregator helped bring in a new era of citizen journalism and usher in a new generation of digital activists. Sam Farah is the lead presenter of BBC Arabic's flagship interactive programme Nuqtat Hewar (Talking Point). He has interviewed leading personalities and over the last months has conducted numerous programmes linking bloggers, activists and supporters of regimes from across the region live on television and radio to discuss events as they unfold. Manal Hassan, is co-founder of the Egyptian GNU/Linux Users Group (EGLUG) in 2004, and has extensive experience in working with NGOs, human rights activists, and children on web technologies and new media. She won the Best of Blogs (BOBs) and Reporters without Borders award together with her husband Alaa Abd El Fattah in 2005. Louis Lewarne, was born in Edinburgh in 1979 and has been living in Cairo since 2006. He is normally involved in independent film production, but at the start of the Egyptian revolution and the internet blackout he started occupiedcairo.org, a collectively written blog on the events in Egypt. Part 2: Khalid Abdalla, British-Egyptian actor and producer, whose films include United 93, The Kite Runner, and Green Zone. Co-founder of Zero Production, a film and documentary production house based in Cairo, he is currently setting up a non-profit media centre called Mossireen (Adamant) to support filmmakers and citizen journalists through the revolution. Dr Omar Ashour, lecturer in Middle East politics and the director of the MA in Middle East Studies Program at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, author of The De-Radicalization of Jihadists: Transforming Armed Islamist Movements and a pro-democracy activist close to the youth movement in Cairo. Omar Robert Hamilton, Egyptian/British film-maker and the producer of the Palestine Festival of Literature. He is currently in pre-production on his third short, Though I Know the River is Dry, a crowd-sourced fiction film that will be shot in Palestine this May. He flew to Cairo to take part in, and document, the Revolution. www.orhamilton.com Salma Said, Born in 1985 in Cairo, to a political family she has been involved in political activism since the age of 15 with the eruption of the second Palestinian intifada and joined Kifaya movement in 2005 when she discovered the so-called Egyptian blogosphere.

EXTERNAL EVENT AT THE KENSINGTON TOWN HALL Join the Frontline Club and New Statesman for a provocative public debate featuring Julian Assange, editor in chief of WikiLeaks. Over the past 12 months, official secrecy has been challenged like never before. Three of the biggest ever leaks of classified information – the Iraq War Logs, the Afghanistan War Logs and Cablegate – shook the world and prompted governments to reconsider how they share information. Since the start of the Obama administration in 2009, the US government has brought charges against five defendants suspected of leaking classified information. Before Obama, the US government had only ever filed similar charges three times in 40 years. For this very special event at Kensington Town Hall, the New Statesman and the Frontline Club host a challenging debate in which some of the most prominent public figures on secrecy and transparency issues will go head to head. Amid the intensifying crackdown on whistleblowers, the debate will ask: are UK and US officials correct to argue that those who publish leaks threaten national security? Or do we need them to expose wrongdoing because, as transparency advocates argue, governments always abuse secrecy? The event will feature an interactive section where the audience will be able to vote on the motion. Chair: Jason Cowley, editor of the New Statesman. Proposition: Julian Assange, editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks Julian Assange is the 39-year-old editor in chief of WikiLeaks. Queensland-born Assange has been the subject of public calls for his assassination from leading US politicians and faces an ongoing espionage investigation. In 2010 he overwhelmingly won Time magazine’s Readers' Choice Person of the Year poll and was named Le Monde’s Man of the Year. He has also been awarded the Amnesty International UK Media Award and the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence. In February 2011 his organisation, WikiLeaks, was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize after publishing three of the biggest leaks of classified information in history, the Afghan War Diaries, the Iraq War Logs and Cablegate. Clayton Swisher, head of Al-Jazeera’s Transparency Unit Clayton Swisher is the head of Al Jazeera's Transparency Unit (the team that produced the Palestine Papers in January 2011). An ex-federal investigator-turned-investigative journalist, he is a former Director of Programs at the Middle East Institute and a current term member with the Council on Foreign Relations. As a journalist he has covered the 2008 U.S. Presidential Elections, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the on-going war in Afghanistan, and has also authored two books: The Truth About Camp David (New York: Nation Books, 2004) and The Palestine Papers: The End of the Road? (London: Hesperus, Mar 31, 2011). Mehdi Hasan, senior political editor, New Statesman Mehdi Hasan is a former editor in the news-and-current-affairs department at Channel 4, where he worked on the award-winning Dispatches documentary strand. He is a regular guest on Sky News and the BBC, appearing regularly on Question Time and The Daily Politics. He is an occasional presenter on LBC radio and the co-author of a forthcoming biography of Ed Miliband – Ed Miliband and the Remaking of the Labour Party (London: Biteback, summer 2011). Opposition: Sir David Richmond, former director, defence and intelligence, British Foreign Commonwealth Office David Richmond was a British diplomat for more than 30 years. His career included postings to Baghdad, Brussels and New York, where he worked on the UN Security Council. In 2000 he became the first UK representative to the EU’s political and security committee in Brussels and was closely involved in the creation of European security and defence policy. In 2003 he returned to Baghdad (where he had first been posted 20 years earlier) and was later appointed UK Special Representative for Iraq. In his last posting, he was dir

This event is in association with the BBC College of Journalism Videos that were circulated after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak showing state TV bosses being chased out of their offices and journalist strikes appeared to herald a new era in Egypt. In Libya, hackers have attacked the state broacaster's website and scenes of people throwing their shoes at the screen in a mark of disrespect are reported to have taken place in Libya as they did in Egypt and other countries where the media is regarded as an instrument of government. The state-controlled TV channels, radio, newspapers and magazines were re-casting themselves as champions of radical change, while just days before the protestors in Tahrir Square had been ignored or denounced. But can a leopard change its spots? Already there has been criticism of Egyptian broadcasters and newspapers for stirring up xenophobia and for remaining hostile to the pro-democracy movements. What is required in order that a genuine revolution takes place in the media - not only in Egypt but in other countries where autocrats have used it to bolster their power? What happens in countries such as Iran where control of the media remains absolute? Join us at the Frontline Club when we will be discussing what the future holds for state media, the impact of channels such as Al Jazeera and BBC Arabic, and the ways that people are using the internet and other social media to circumvent that power. The discussion will be chaired by author and broadcaster Tom Fenton. With: Faisal J. Abbas, London-based journalist, blogger and social commentator. He writes regularly for Huffington Post on Middle Eastern affairs and has worked with several leading Arab media outlets such as Asharq Al Awsat, where he established and edited the paper’s weekly ‘Media Supplement’, Al Hayat and Future Television of Lebanon; Dina Matar, senior lecturer in Arab Media and Political Communication at SOAS; Hugh Miles, award-winning investigative journalist specialising in the Middle East and North Africa, author of Al Jazeera: How Arab TV News Challenged the World and Playing Cards in Cairo and contributing editor of the American University in Cairo’s Centre for Television Journalism media journal; Ayman Mohyeldin, Middle East-based correspondent for Al Jazeera English.

Videos that were circulated after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak showing state TV bosses being chased out of their offices and journalist strikes appeared to herald a new era in Egypt.In Libya, hackers have attacked the state broacaster's website and scenes of people throwing their shoes at the screen in a mark of disrespect are reported to have taken place in Libya as they did in Egypt and other countries where the media is regarded as an instrument of government.The state-controlled TV channels, radio, newspapers and magazines were re-casting themselves as champions of radical change, while just days before the protestors in Tahrir Square had been ignored or denounced.But can a leopard change its spots? Already there has been criticism of Egyptian broadcasters and newspapers for stirring up xenophobia and for remaining hostile to the pro-democracy movements.What is required in order that a genuine revolution takes place in the media - not only in Egypt but in other countries where autocrats have used it to bolster their power? What happens in countries such as Iran where control of the media remains absolute?Join us at the Frontline Club when we will be discussing what the future holds for state media, the impact of channels such as Al Jazeera and BBC Arabic, and the ways that people are using the internet and other social media to circumvent that power.The discussion will be chaired by author and broadcaster Tom Fenton.With:Faisal J. Abbas, London-based journalist, blogger and social commentator. He writes regularly for Huffington Post on Middle Eastern affairs and has worked with several leading Arab media outlets such as Asharq Al Awsat, where he established and edited the paper's weekly 'Media Supplement', Al Hayat and Future Television of Lebanon;Dina Matar, senior lecturer in Arab Media and Political Communication at SOAS;Hugh Miles, award-winning investigative journalist specialising in the Middle East and North Africa, author of Al Jazeera: How Arab TV News Challenged the World and Playing Cards in Cairo and contributing editor of the American University in Cairo's Centre for Television Journalism media journal;Ayman Mohyeldin, Middle East-based correspondent for Al Jazeera English.

Those who aspire to a career in photojournalism and photographers established in the industry often hope to do the lion’s share of their work abroad, covering war zones and absorbing foreign cultures. Multicultural Britain has plenty to offer by way of contrasts and acute social issues for photojournalists to explore though. Save The Children has brought together a collective of British photographers to put the spotlight on poverty in the UK. An eye-opening presentation of photographs will be accompanied by a discussion with two photographers. Liz Hingley and Gideon Mendel will speak about their experiences of working in the UK, covering issues on their doorstep. What are the challenges photojournalists face at home compared to overseas? Problems of access, media interest and legal issues will all be covered. This event will be moderated by Diane Smyth, deputy editor of the British Journal of Photography. She has written about photography for Aperture, PDN, Guardian.co.uk, Thetimes.co.uk, The Telegraph’s Telephoto site, Creative Review and Philosophy of Photography. Liz Hingley 's photography intimately documents political and social issues, with a particular interest in alternative modes of community living. Hingley graduated from Brighton University with a first class BA Honours in Editorial Photography in 2007. Her work has been exhibited internationally, her recent awards include being selected for PND's top 30, The Eugene Smith award, the Ian Parry scholarship and Canon female photographer of the year. Dewi Lewis Publishing launched her book Under Gods: stories from Soho Road in March 2011. Liz Hingley's work for Save the Children has been made possible through the generous support of Fuji film. Gideon Mendel is a South African photographer based in the UK and has won six World Press Photo Awards, the Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography and the Amnesty International Media Award. The bulk of his work is for NGOs overseas, but he stayed in the UK for one of his recent projects, Kingsmead Eyes, developing the photographic talents of children from the deprived area around the Kingsmead Estate in Hackney. The project was part of the 3EyesOn project which Mendel developed with fellow photographer Crispin Hughes. Mendel spoke at the Frontline Club in 2008 about nearly 20 years of photographing HIV in Africa and raising awareness of the problems AIDS sufferers face. In his current practice he is addressing the issue of climate change through developing a body of work on the global impact of flooding on the world’s poorest people.

Those who aspire to a career in photojournalism and photographers established in the industry often hope to do the lion’s share of their work abroad, covering war zones and absorbing foreign cultures.Multicultural Britain has plenty to offer by way of contrasts and acute social issues for photojournalists to explore though. Save The Children has brought together a collective of British photographers to put the spotlight on poverty in the UK. An eye-opening presentation of photographs will be accompanied by a discussion with two photographers. Liz Hingley and Gideon Mendel will speak about their experiences of working in the UK, covering issues on their doorstep. What are the challenges photojournalists face at home compared to overseas? Problems of access, media interest and legal issues will all be covered.This event will be moderated by Diane Smyth, deputy editor of the British Journal of Photography. She has written about photography for Aperture, PDN, Guardian.co.uk, Thetimes.co.uk, The Telegraph’s Telephoto site, Creative Review and Philosophy of Photography.Liz Hingley ‘s photography intimately documents political and social issues, with a particular interest in alternative modes of community living. Hingley graduated from Brighton University with a first class BA Honours in Editorial Photography in 2007. Her work has been exhibited internationally, her recent awards include being selected for PND’s top 30, The Eugene Smith award, the Ian Parry scholarship and Canon female photographer of the year. Dewi Lewis Publishing launched her book Under Gods: stories from Soho Road in March 2011.Liz Hingley‘s work for Save the Children has been made possible through the generous support of Fuji film.Gideon Mendel is a South African photographer based in the UK and has won six World Press Photo Awards, the Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography and the Amnesty International Media Award. The bulk of his work is for NGOs overseas, but he stayed in the UK for one of his recent projects, Kingsmead Eyes, developing the photographic talents of children from the deprived area around the Kingsmead Estate in Hackney. The project was part of the 3EyesOn project which Mendel developed with fellow photographer Crispin Hughes. Mendel spoke at the Frontline Club in 2008 about nearly 20 years of photographing HIV in Africa and raising awareness of the problems AIDS sufferers face. In his current practice he is addressing the issue of climate change through developing a body of work on the global impact of flooding on the world’s poorest people.inthepicturephotographypoverty

With people movements rising up across the Middle East and North Africa the US, the UK and other European powers have had to think fast, abandoning old friends and allies and attempting to form new alliances with emerging leaders. In contrast to prime minister David Cameron’s claims last year that he would pursue a “more hard-headed” foreign policy focused on boosting business, Britain and France both spearheaded NATO plans to establish a no-fly zone over Libya. Join us with Paddy O'Connell of BBC Radio 4's Broadcasting House to discuss the rules of engagement and the new political landscape: How much of an influence can the West expect to have in the Middle East and if they do intervene, what is the criteria? Why Libya but not Bahrain and Syria? And what of Saudi Arabia - how much of a game-changer would it be if its people were to push for regime change? With: Barak Seener, Research Fellow, Middle East Studies at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies; Dr Noel Brehony CMG, research associate at the London Middle East Institute at SOAS and author of Divided: The Story of a Failed State in South Arabia. Former British diplomat and former chairman of the Middle East Association and the Council for British Research in the Levant and President of the British Society of Middle East Studies; Dr Faraj Najem, Libyan writer and historian; Jane Kinninmont, senior research fellow, Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House.

A panel of journalists came together to discuss their take on the future of journalism, to mark the publication of Face the Future: Tools For A Modern Age.The first to present his thoughts at the event, which was moderated by Raymond Snoddy of BBC Newswatch was Kevin Marsh, until recently executive editor of the BBC College of Journalism.He set out the issue of the ever-expanding information universe with equally diversifying ways of accessing and transmitting information, which is exciting but not really journalism, as many seem to think. Journalism to him is rather a small, precise part of this information universe whose distinction lies in the ability to sift through the deluge of information, filter out items of value to the audience, investigate and analyse them properly, and finally report them honestly, all things that require special skills, mindsets and commitment.Laura Oliver, community co-ordinator for Guardian News and Media, added another twist by saying that new media, like Twitter, Facebook and blogs should not be discounted as some of the writers are in fact professional journalists, and even some of the amateurs are committed, skilled and reputable sources of information. An important new skill for journalists therefore is to establish credentials for online sources and to verify the information gleaned from them. However, this is still rather uncharted territory with more grey areas than in the past.Judith Townend, a freelance journalist currently working on a PhD, replied to the question if we could expect new developments every six months that she hoped so. The example of MySpace should be a warning to anyone who mistook new online media for an end in themselves rather than a tool. Facebook is well established in her opinion due to its size but it is not a good news source as it is about its members’ personal lives, whereas Twitter has its own limitations that make it not particularly efficient, amongst them that it is not representative of society at large. She cited journalists on Twitter who ask colleagues for case studies to flesh out preconceived stories and just pick the bits that fit as an example of ‘lazy journalism’ using new media, even from professional journalists.In the following debate this question was picked up again, and an interesting argument was that what is seen as ‘lazy journalism’, like journalists not going out and talking to people to get a story but being stuck in the office, is sometimes simply a consequence of the rolling news issue of continually having to update, leaving no time to do the actual journalistic work.Other questions looked at the way editors may influence journalism in attempts to ‘pander to their readership’; new online media allowing the return to citizen journalism as the historical precursor of commercial journalism; how news organisations go about establishing trust and their brand value, especially where paywalls are in place; and whether declining news viewing figures really mean that people are less interested or simply signify a shift in the way they access news.Face the Future: Tools For A Modern Age is edited by John Mair and Richard Keeble and published by Arima Publishing.

With people movements rising up across the Middle East and North Africa the US, the UK and other European powers have had to think fast, abandoning old friends and allies and attempting to form new alliances with emerging leaders.In contrast to prime minister David Cameron’s claims last year that he would pursue a “more hard-headed” foreign policy focused on boosting business, Britain and France both spearheaded NATO plans to establish a no-fly zone over Libya.Join us with Paddy O’Connell of BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House to discuss the rules of engagement and the new political landscape: How much of an influence can the West expect to have in the Middle East and if they do intervene, what is the criteria? Why Libya but not Bahrain and Syria? And what of Saudi Arabia – how much of a game-changer would it be if its people were to push for regime change?With:Barak Seener, Research Fellow, Middle East Studies at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies;Dr Noel Brehony CMG, research associate at the London Middle East Institute at SOAS and author of Divided: The Story of a Failed State in South Arabia. Former British diplomat and former chairman of the Middle East Association and the Council for British Research in the Levant and President of the British Society of Middle East Studies;Dr Faraj Najem, Libyan writer and historian;Jane Kinninmont, senior research fellow, Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House. 

To mark the publication of Face The Future: Tools For A Modern Age edited by John Mair and Richard Lance Keeble. Join us with a panel of experts to ask; will the internet wipe away newspapers and more in its wake? Is digital the only way? Will Twitter and Facebook be the new vanguards of the revolution? Chair by Raymond Snoddy, freelance journalist who presents the BBC's Newswatch and writes regularly for a variety of publications, previously media editor of The Times. Kevin Marsh, executive editor of the BBC College of Journalism; Laura Oliver, community co-ordinator for Guardian News and Media and formerly editor of journalism.co.uk; Judith Townend, freelance journalist and events co-ordinator, former journalism.co.uk reporter and co-organiser of the news:rewired conferences.

The start of 2011 will be remembered as a period in which the barrier of fear fell across the Middle East and North Africa as people took to the streets demanding freedom from the tyrants who had governed for so long.No one can predict where these momentous events will lead and what the repercussions will be for years to come.For this special event held at the The Royal Institution of Great Britain the Frontline Club and BBC Arabic Service will be bringing together some of the key players, journalists and experts to discuss what has taken place in Egypt and the surrounding region so far and to try to gauge what the future might hold.With those that were instrumental in organising the uprising in Egypt we will be discussing the role that new technology has played; is social media simply a new tool or has its role been more fundamental, changing not only the way that people communicate but also the way that they think and act? We will be discussing how and when the movements where formed, what common ideas they share and how they see things moving forward.The discussion, which will be in two parts, will be chaired by Paddy O’Connell of BBC Radio 4′s Broadcasting House.Panel:Part 1:Alaa Abd El Fattah: By day a Free/Open Source Software developer, by night he dons his mask and cape and patrols the streets of Cairo, jumping from campaign to campaign building websites, providing support and training, looking out for activists in need.He “likes to pretend” that his work on the Egyptian Blogs Aggregator helped bring in a new era of citizen journalism and usher in a new generation of digital activists.Sam Farah is the lead presenter of BBC Arabic’s flagship interactive programme Nuqtat Hewar (Talking Point). He has interviewed leading personalities and over the last months has conducted numerous programmes linking bloggers, activists and supporters of regimes from across the region live on television and radio to discuss events as they unfold.Manal Hassan, is co-founder of the Egyptian GNU/Linux Users Group (EGLUG) in 2004, and has extensive experience in working with NGOs, human rights activists, and children on web technologies and new media. She won the Best of Blogs (BOBs) and Reporters without Borders award together with her husband Alaa Abd El Fattah in 2005.Louis Lewarne, was born in Edinburgh in 1979 and has been living in Cairo since 2006. He is normally involved in independent film production, but at the start of the Egyptian revolution and the internet blackout he started occupiedcairo.org, a collectively written blog on the events in Egypt.Part 2:Khalid Abdalla, British-Egyptian actor and producer, whose films include United 93, The Kite Runner, and Green Zone. Co-founder of Zero Production, a film and documentary production house based in Cairo, he is currently setting up a non-profit media centre called Mossireen (Adamant) to support filmmakers and citizen journalists through the revolution.Dr Omar Ashour, lecturer in Middle East politics and the director of the MA in Middle East Studies Program at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, author of The De-Radicalization of Jihadists: Transforming Armed Islamist Movements and a pro-democracy activist close to the youth movement in Cairo.Omar Robert Hamilton, Egyptian/British film-maker and the producer of the Palestine Festival of Literature. He is currently in pre-production on his third short, Though I Know the River is Dry, a crowd-sourced fiction film that will be shot in Palestine this May. He flew to Cairo to take part in, and document, the Revolution. www.orhamilton.comSalma Said, Born in 1985 in Cairo, to a political family she has been involved in political activism since the age of 15 with the eruption of the second Palestinian intifada and joined Kifaya movement in 2005 when she discovered the so-called Egyptian blogosphere.The Royal Institution of Great Britain,21 Albemarle Street,London,W1S 4BS