Tarek Amr [en] is a young Egyptian data networks architect and blogger [ar] in addition to being an author [en] and a translator in Global Voices Online, which he joined in 2007. In this short conversation, he tells us more about himself, about his contribution in GV and most of all about his experience in the Egyptian Revolution. Hello Tarek, you state in your Arabic blog that you don't really like talking about yourself, but that step is a must in order to introduce GV authors and translators to our readers. Therefore, we would like to ask you to tell us, who is Tarek Amr? A Muslim engineer? An Atheist doctor ? A socialist barber ? Hello Thalia, well in my blog, I was kind of mocking those who tend to place themselves and more than that, they place others in specific frames and judge their writings, based on those frames. Speaking about myself, I am engineer school graduate and I'm working in telecommunications and networks security. Besides my interest in blogging started from the fact that it represented a new technology, that I should experiment. My first posts focused on technology issues and then, bit by bit, I started writing about myself and about the society around me and how I perceive it to the point that I seldom blog about technical matters now. I also joined Global Voices four years ago or a little bit less. Our second traditional question: tell us about your journey with GV I joined GV in the second half of 2007. At that time, Egyptian bloggers had an electronic mailing group and we heard that GV needed new authors from Egypt. Before that, I used to hear a lot about GV and read articles there or noticed their logo on many blogs and the idea of presenting what is in blogs to people in Egypt or abroad appealed to me a lot. My enthusiasm hasn't stopped since then because I always considered that conveying our voice to the world as a bright idea especially with the huge number of fallacies spread on our society by traditional media outlets and the failure of our media to promote the right image. Of course, I don't know if I succeeded in doing so. This, I leave to GV readers to decide. What I am sure is that I am benefiting each day from my presence in such a project, because I am getting to discover daily new things about parts of the world, I wouldn't have known about, if it wasn't for GV. Also during those years, I met a lot of wonderful people from all over the world [en]. GVers at the GV Summit in Chile. Photo taken by David Sasaki used under (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) Sometimes, I cover countries other than Egypt [en], when there is something worth writing about and there is no one available at that moment such as Yemen and Iraq [en] for example. I wrote once about the Argentinian football team for the only reason that I support that team and I wanted to do so. So as you notice, one of GV's most important merits is the margin of freedom given to authors in selecting the topics and events they report and I believe this makes us closer to the reader than the mainstream sources, because ultimately we are just conveying people's opinions to the readers. I also tried translating a couple of articles into Arabic, within the Lingua Project framework [ar], but it's obvious that my skills in Arabic translation [ar] are not that good. Translating is time consuming for me and I think it is evident given my rare participation in that project. Nevertheless, it's a pretty good experience, and I will repeat it in the future. You are very active on the net especially in social media (three blogs, one flickr account, another one on Facebook, needless to mention GV and maybe other platforms). What place does the internet in general occupy in your life and those tools in particular ? I forgot to tell you, that apart from blogging I am also into painting and taking photographs, therefore my use of accounts such as Twitter, flickr, Good Reads and last fm is mainly to satisfy personal hobbies such as photography or to learn about new books or even new musical bands worth listening to, and this possible with Good Reads and other platforms that I use to communicate with others. At the end, I consider myself, to be connected 24/7 on the net, especially that my job as a telecommunication engineer tightens that link and I believe that most of us are in this situation in one way or another. Accordingly my hobbies and activities in the virtual world are somehow the reflection of those in the real one. Besides that, having more than one blog is also due to my desire to separate what I write in Arabic from my English from pure technical posts, so that the reader who doesn't command one of the languages or is interested in a certain categories of topics doesn't get turned away.