Bassel Khartabil

Bassel Khartabil
باسل خرطبيل
Khartabil in 2010
Born(1981-05-22)22 May 1981
Damascus, Syria
Died3 October 2015(2015-10-03) (aged 34)[1][2]
Adra Prison, Syria
OccupationSoftware engineer
Known forAiki Framework, Openclipart, Open Font Library, Fabricatorz, Mozilla, Creative Commons
Spouse
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(m. 2013)​
AwardsIndex on Censorship 2013 Digital Freedom Award
Signature

Bassel Khartabil (22 May 1981 – 3 October 2015; Arabic: باسل خرطبيل), also known as Bassel Safadi (Arabic: باسل صفدي), was a Palestinian Syrian open-source software developer. He was detained without trial by the Syrian government in 2012[3] and was secretly executed in 2015. Human rights organizations claim that he was detained for his activities in support of freedom of expression,[4] and the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention considered his detention to have been arbitrary.[3]

Khartabil was born in Damascus to a Palestinian father and a Syrian mother, and was raised in Syria,[5] where he specialized in open source software development. He was chief technology officer (CTO) and co-founder of collaborative research company Aiki Lab[6] and was CTO of Al-Aous,[7] a publishing and research institution dedicated to archaeological sciences and arts in Syria. He has served as project lead and public affiliate for Creative Commons Syria,[8] and has contributed to Mozilla Firefox, Wikipedia, Openclipart, Fabricatorz, and Sharism.[9] He "is credited with opening up the Internet in Syria and vastly extending online access and knowledge to the Syrian people."[10]

His last work included an open, 3D virtual reconstruction[11][12] of the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria,[13] real time visualization, and development with Fabricatorz for the web programming framework Aiki Framework. This was later created and displayed in his honor.[14]

In 2018, the Bassel Khartabil Free Culture Fellowship was announced in Khartabil's memory.[15] The fellowship awards $50,000 and additional support to individuals developing open culture in their communities. The fellowship was created by Creative Commons, Fabricatorz Foundation, Jimmy Wales Foundation, Mozilla, #NEWPALMYRA, and Wikimedia.

  1. ^ "Bassel Khartabil: Syrian internet freedom activist 'executed'". BBC News. 2 August 2017.
  2. ^ "Syria: Extrajudicial execution of Bassel Khartabil a grim reminder of Syrian prison horrors". Amnesty International. 2 August 2017.
  3. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference alkarama-1763 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ "Syria: Disclose Whereabouts of Detained Freedom of Expression Advocate". Human Rights Watch. 7 October 2015.
  5. ^ Corbyn, Zoë (11 December 2015). "Bassel Khartabil: fears for man who brought open internet to the Arab world". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 8 September 2024.
  6. ^ "Aiki lab".
  7. ^ الأوس للنشر. "الأوس للنشر". Archived from the original on 17 November 2015. Retrieved 4 July 2012.
  8. ^ "Syria - Creative Commons". wiki.creativecommons.org. Retrieved 15 December 2023.
  9. ^ "Threatened Voices | Bloggers | Bassel (Safadi) Khartabil". threatened.globalvoicesonline.org. Retrieved 15 December 2023.
  10. ^ "Request for Written Answer on the Question of the Imprisonment of Bassel Safadi Khartabil". European Parliament. 18 March 2014. Retrieved 9 April 2014.
  11. ^ "#NEWPALMYRA". newpalmyra.org.
  12. ^ Forte, Andrea; Andalibi, Nazanin; Greenstadt, Rachel (2017). "Privacy, Anonymity, and Perceived Risk in Open Collaboration". Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. CSCW '17. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 1800–1811. doi:10.1145/2998181.2998273. ISBN 9781450343350. S2CID 16197512.
  13. ^ "Bassel Safadi discusses project involving 3D reconstruction of ancient city of Palmyra at San Francisco Art Institute, live from Syria via Skype". 19 May 2013. Retrieved 1 July 2013.
  14. ^ "How a 3D-printed monument is helping an ancient Syrian city rise again". CBC News. Retrieved 13 August 2017.
  15. ^ "Memorial Fund Grants Launched in Memory of Bassel Khartabil". 8 February 2018.