For Mozilla, Khartabil wrote code to make the open-source Firefox web browser, for which the organisation is most well known, work in Arabic. “He was one of the first people to introduce a lot of Arabic into these things” says Dana Trometer, a long-time friend of Khartabil’s and an organiser of the FreeBassel campaign.
From Adra prison he also provided input to develop the New Palmyra Project, launched in October 2015 after he disappeared. That project, which uses open web infrastructure, seeks to virtually reconstruct the ancient ruins of Palmyra. The Syrian site was seized this year by Isis who has set about systematically destroying the remains. “Bassel is the originator and primary source of vision behind [the New Palmyra Project] and we were in communication with him up until about two months ago,” explains its interim director Barry Threw who is also a FreeBassel campaign organiser. The hope is it will help Syrians trying to come to terms with the destruction of their iconic ruins as well as be a “positive gesture” to aid in Khartabil’s release, he says. To pursue the project, Ito has offered Khartabil a research position at the Media Lab and Creative Commons has offered a voluntary appointment as a Digital Cultural Preservation Fellow, neither of which he can take up.
Khartabil, 34, was born and raised in Syria, the only child of a Palestinian historian father and a Syrian mother. The household valued tradition but also creativity and at an early age he became interested in computers and coding through his uncle. In 2001 he completed a computer science degree at Damascus University and in 2004 a masters in software engineering in Riga, Latvia.
His interest in open-source software, suggest his friends, probably derived from the fact that he had little money to spend on commercial software and that he saw it as a valuable educational tool because it was easy to modify and improve. “Bassel, at heart, is a teacher,” says Threw. It also, no doubt, offered some possibility of evading Syria’s internet censors.
Talent beyond programming
It was around 2008, alongside a day job as chief technology officer for Al-Aous, a publishing and research institution dedicated to archaeology and cultural preservation in Syria, that Khartabil started to provide technical help for Creative Commons which was trying to build up its presence in the Middle East. The organisation charged him with creating the HTML code for Egyptian and Jordanian creative commons licences in Arabic recalls Diane Peters, the general counsel of Creative Commons who at that time was also in charge of the organisation’s affiliate networks. But, she adds, it quickly became evident that he had talent beyond just being a fast programmer. Khartabil was also a natural and gifted community organiser. He began organising meetings with content producers in Syria to help them understand what Creative Commons was and how it could help them spread their work. Peters pegs the moment Creative Commons took off in Syria to a conference organised by Khartabil in late 2009. A US open source delegation - which included Ito and Peters – had travelled to the Middle East and Khartabil held an event at the University of Damascus. “We thought it would be a 30 person conference but there were hundreds of people in this audience,” she recalls. In mid 2010, Khartabil started Aiki Lab in Damascus. Billed as a “collaborative technology and art space”, about 70 hackers were involved and it held gatherings, workshops and classes. It became Creative Commons official affiliate in Syria, which it remains today.
But Khartabil’s most enduring Creative Commons legacy, Peters argues, was in leading negotiations that established a common language for talking about Creative Commons in Arabic. Those negotiations in late 2010 in Doha involved community members and legal experts from more than six Arab countries each with different dialects. Heated at times, Khartabil forged consensus on the words that would be used to describe the new concepts and sentiments Creative Commons was introducing (the Arabic word ‘Masha’ - which means a parcel of land with no one single owner but many owners – was settled on for ‘Commons’). “Thanks to Bassel, for the first time [in the Middle East] we had groundwork for thinking about Creative Commons that was not jurisdiction or country specific,” she says. It is the language included in all Arab countries CC licences today.
