While working on a magazine in Nicaragua, Eric Volz was convicted in the murder of his ex-girlfriend in November of 2006. He spent a little over a year in jail there until the conviction was overturned by an appeals court in December of the following year. The Washington Post described his encounter as "Kafkaesque." Volz's case gained a lot of media attention, some of which could be attributed to "Friends of Eric Volz," a website and communications effort led by his mother which helped to stay in touch with and eventually leverage the power of his supporters. He will be talking about his experience with and reflections on that element of his case at the Berkley Human Rights Center's conference, The Soul of the New Machine: Human Rights, Technology, and New Media.

I met Eric Volz last year in Nashville, Tennessee. I had been traveling across the country, interviewing young folks who had used the Internet to successfully leverage a particular cause. I had intended only to meet with Eric for about an hour, but we hit it off, became fast friends, and I stayed with him at his apartment where we chatted throughout the night. I very much consider myself lucky to count Eric as a friend. The following is from a conversation we had about his upcoming appearance at the conference.

What, exactly, will you be speaking about?

My understanding is that the panel I am participating in is about social networking on and offline, which is something that interested me because initially, from what I'd read about the conference, it didn't really seem like there was any connect being made between the social networking that was happening on the web and on the ground results. So I'm excited to see that there is actually a panel on that.

There are going to be some pretty wild experts there. I guess one of the guys from Ning, somebody from Facebook... obviously I'm not an expert. I'm there more to tell my personal story about how the tools of the Internet — and the social network that grew out of that — were able to help me supplement justice in the predicament I was in in Nicaragua.

I know that the last time that we talked, you still had a mailing list that [Friends of Eric Volz] had been in touch with. Are you still in touch with that network, or have you been out of touch for a bit?

The site was started in my mom's kitchen and it was [created] to make things more efficient because I have a lot of friends and when I was arrested, the calls and the emails were just out of control and my family just couldn't handle all of the activity. We hadn't thought [at that point] of using it to leverage a social network in any way, but once I was wrongfully convicted, the site was getting around 150,000 visits a month, which isn't a lot in today's terms but for a family website three, three and a half years ago, was pretty good. We were in the final week of my ordeal, when I was being illegally held by Nicaragua, and we managed to ask our support group to start emailing the Nicaraguan Embassy [about the case] and we crashed their server because they got so much email traffic.

Today, unfortunately, my case is still ongoing in Nicaragua in their Supreme Court and we've tried to reengage this community that supported me to other cases, but what ended up happening was that a lot of the Nicaraguan journalists were just taking anything I said or posting on the web and translating and manipulating it and making me look bad in the Nicaraguan press so I kind of had to just lay low and keep a low profile.

I have been contacted more by other people who are in trouble — some hostage situations, some asylum cases, some immigration cases and some other wrongfully accused in Latin America and we've been able to consult those families on how to operate and give good suggestions based on what we had gone through — but that's not something we're doing publicly on the web.

I know that you had received a lot of media attention during your ordeal. There was the Anderson Cooper coverage and a lot of other press mention. Was any of that coverage specifically leveraged by the Friends of Eric Volz campaign?

I have quotes that I'm going to show at the conference, quotes from emails from show producers where they told me that had it not been for the YouTube video or the way our web community formed, they never would have covered the case. There are a lot of wrongfully convicted people from around the world who don't get the same sort of coverage we did. It was kind of wild how there were a lot of big news groups that did take the angle of reporting on this family was using the web as a part of their defense effort so it absolutely related to the way that the web was applied in terms of supplementing failed justice.

I was listening to On the Media recently and they were covering the "Twitter revolution" in Moldova. They had spoken with Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, about what this so-called revolution really looked like, and it turns out, based on Zuckerman's take, Twitter really had very little to do with the movement in Moldova. Zuckerman suggested, though, that perhaps by using the tech-obsession of the moment, Twitter, this media darling, it was a way to get people to pay attention to Moldova, a country many know relatively little about. He said, "There's no better way to get a story out there than to pick the technological flavor of the month and to attach to it."

I think that when I went through my situation there wasn't really a formula in place for how to use the web for a social cause. Think about how now there's some sort of working knowledge: you need to set up a central hub and you need to set up your social networking sites and your Twitter and YouTube accounts. But three and a half years ago, there weren't a lot of examples for people to pull from. So I think that part of the story wasn't just about this wrongfully convicted American, but it was also about the fact that the story was being told through a new medium.

Is there anything else you'll be addressing?

I'll definitely be talking a bit about how important assessment is. Sometimes people look at the web as a solve-all tool and they just kind of go at it without really thinking about the potential consequences. Making some human rights cases more high profile can help do more damage than we think because we add more value to the story of the people. This is something we don't really think about, as it's often like, "Someone's in trouble; let's help them. Let's set up a Facebook page. Let's do a video." We don't think about — especially if it's a leverage situation — that maybe we're creating more value that can be added for a bargaining token.

I know that a lot of people who will be at the conference are taking on large issues like genocide and war crimes and stuff like that. My thing is more about the captivity of specific individuals, not groups. There are a lot of really compelling arguments to not be doing this web stuff around hostage situations in Latin America because you can essentially up the dollar amount that those groups are asking for in exchange for releasing hostages.

It seems as though one of the strong-points of the web is that it can take these situations, when they can be high profile, and it can help to provide some cultural context. For example, in your case, you were an American wrongfully convicted in Nicaragua - What does that even mean? At the most conservative estimate, it requires at least 30 years of history to be explained, and then even further than that, and a global Left v. Right perspective and then a corporate v. political perspective. There's a lot of meat to that story.

Exactly.

I'm really excited to speak at the conference. I don't know what exactly to expect. Like I said, I'm not an expert or anything, but I look forward to sharing my experience. It's great to talk about theories and ideas and all of that, but it's also important to look at cases that have had actual results.