Ahmad Gharbeia is an advocate of open source software and open content based in Cairo, Egypt. He frequently trains bloggers how to publish information securely and anonymously, and was part of the team that translated Tactical Technology Collective’s Security in-a-Box toolkit into Arabic. He is @agharbeia on Twitter.

Noha Atef is the founder of Torture in Egypt (“Al-Tatheeb fi Masr”), a web-based campaign to document and spread awareness about human rights abuses in Egypt. Egypt Today profiled her work in March of last year. Atef is also a contributing author on Global Voices Advocacy where she documents cases of Egyptian bloggers who have been censored, arrested, and harassed. She is @NohaAtef on Twitter.

Abdelrahman Hassan is leading contributor to Open Street Map, a Wikipedia-like alternative to Google Maps, based in Cairo, Egypt. (Until recently GPS devices were banned in Egypt.) In this video he describes the importance of creating and sharing open licensed maps, their use for humanitarian organizations, and what he hopes to get out of the 2nd Arab Bloggers Meeting.

A video of his presentation from the State of the Map conference, which took place in Amsterdam in June, is available on Vimeo.

The second day of the Arab Bloggers Workshop kicked off with a presentation about Herdict Web, a site which uses crowdsourcing to gather reports of Internet filtering from users around the world. Qatari workshop participant Muhammad Basheer tweeted a photo from the presentation:

Following the first presentation, Egyptian blogger Manal discussed the world of Arab techies, particularly touching about female techies in Egypt. Lebanese NightS noted the need for more women at #ab09:

After Manal’s informative presentation, the bloggers broke into group workshops, touching on a variety of subjects. One workshop, conducted by hamzoz, focused on blogging from Iraq. Muhammad Basheer attended the presentation and tweeted:

Creative Commons rep Donatella Della Ratta also attended, tweeting:

Bahraini participant Amira Al Hussaini attended a presentation by the lead of the new Rising Voices project in Yemen. She was clearly impressed by the workshop:

The last major presentation of the day was once again perhaps the most captivating. Anas Tawileh, founder of Meedan, presented on the Arabic-English crowd translation project. Iraqi blogger Salam Pax best captured the sentiment in this tweet:

Tawileh opened his presentation with a number of interesting facts about the Internet including one that the number of hours spent on Facebook in a year, translated into volunteer hours, could be spent to build the Giza pyramids in only 9 days. Amira Al Hussaini shared another of Tawileh’s tidbits:

Tweeting about the concept, Moroccan GV author Hisham G. summed up Meedan in a few words:

Lastly, Meedan itself (which has covered the workshop here) noted on Twitter that they’ll be translating tweets from the conference (which can otherwise be found on hashtag #ab09):

Eman AbdElRahman or “Lasto Adri” covers Egypt for Global Voices Online and is very active in the project Kolena Laila (in English here). The project devotes an annual day to raise awareness about the problems “facing oppressed women in the Arab region.”

She also posts on her personal blogs Lasto Adri [ar] and On My Own [en]. She can also be found on Twitter at @lastoadri.

Manal Hassan co-founded the Egyptian GNU/Linux Users Group in 2004. The next year she won awards from Reporters Without Borders and Deutsche Welle’s Best of Blogs contest for her writing at Manalaa.net along with her husband, Alaa Abd El Fattah. Together they founded the first and largest aggregator of Egyptian blogs. These days Manal is focusing her efforts on Arab Techies, a pan-Arab collective of web developers and designers. Last December members of Arab Techies gathered in Cairo for a four-day skills sharing workshop, which was covered in detail by ArabCrunch.