News

Global Open Government Partnership launches in New York City

Alex Howard interviews Maria Otero, US Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs, about the official launch of the Open Government Partnership in New York City. The all-encompassing post also documents the partnership’s progress and setbacks, and embeds a copy of the US national action plan.

Study: patent trolls have cost innovators half a trillion dollars

A new study by three Boston University researchers, which looks at market valuation before and after patent lawsuits, has found that “patent trolls” (third parties who litigate aggressively on behalf of patent holders) have cost US publicly traded companies $500 billion in market capitalization since 1990, more than a quarter of US industrial research and development spending during those years.

India, Brazil and South Africa call for creation of “new global body” to control the Internet

India, Brazil and South Africa have called for the creation of a new United Nations body that would integrate and oversee the ITU, IETF and ICANN. Internet governance expert Milton Mueller says that, while the proposal has no chance of adoption, it reveals the failure of the Internet Governance Forum to internationalize Internet governance.

F.T.C. wants to update rules on children’s online privacy

Marc Rotenberg of EPIC calls proposed updates to US regulation on child online privacy “forward-looking,” but industry and legal analysts wonder how the regulations will be enforced when most online websites ostensibly prohibit children under 13 from using their services. Research by Consumer Reports this year found that 7.5 million American children under the age of 13 were using Facebook despite such prohibitions.

Venezuela to deploy 3 million free laptops

The Venezuelan government has announced that it plans to deploy 3 million “Canaima” laptops to schoolchildren by 2012. Critics say the initiative is merely meant to woo votes of poor families before next year’s presidential election. Robert Hacker, the CFO of One Laptop Per Child, says his organization has come to realize that teacher training is key for a successful deployment.

Internet ruffles pricey scholarly journals

With the rise in costs of academic journal subscriptions and the constraints of university budgets, an increasing number of universities are refusing to renew their expensive subscriptions, turning instead to open access publishing.

OnStar to begin monitoring customers’ GPS location for profit

After reading through pages of OnStar’s latest update to its terms and conditions, Jonathan Zdziarski found that the automobile emergency service, used in the US, Canada and China, has inserted the right to sell user information – such as GPS location, vehicle speed, and seat belt status – to third parties, including law enforcement. The author concludes that legislators should investigate companies like OnStar, Google, and Apple to better understand how they use consumer data.

EFF builds system to warn of certificate breaches

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has updated its ‘HTTPS Everywhere’ Firefox extension to crowd-source reports of rogue SSL certificates in order to detect potential compromises such as the recent DigiNotar certificate hack, which left as many as 300,000 unsuspecting Iranians vulnerable to surveillance of their personal communication.

Omidyar Network to invest $3 million in government transparency initiatives

At this week’s “Power of Information: New Technologies for Philanthropy and Development” conference, Omidyar Network announced $3 million of investments in government transparency initiatives. Recipients include Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente, Mid-East Youth, and the Open Knowledge Foundation.

Digital Media and Learning Competition

The MacArthur and Mozilla foundations have issued a call for proposals for the research and design of certification and recognition schemes to promote lifelong learning. Grants range from $5,000 to $200,000.

Features and Analysis

Cameras Everywhere Report 2011

Based on discussions with over 40 analysts and practitioners in technology and human rights, WITNESS’ Cameras Everywhere reports looks at the development of trends in policy and practice at the intersection of human rights, technology, social media, and business. It also lists specific recommendations on how to strengthen the use of video for human rights.

Book: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?

Hivos (The Hague) and The Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore) have published a four-part book which consolidates three years of research and inquiry into field of youth, technology and social change. The book, which draws on dozens of contributions from diverse actors, tries to address is the lack of digital natives’ voices in the discourse around them.

Freedom of the press applies to everyone — yes, even bloggers

Mathew Ingram of GigaOm argues that bloggers and citizens should be afforded the same right to document the work of police officers in public places as any other journalist. The article also points out that state and local police forces need more legal training to understand the rights of citizens who are eager to point their cell phone cameras and law enforcement.

The second revolution of open science

In a talk at the UK Royal Society, Michael Nielsen describes what he calls the “second revolution in open science,” a proliferation of data, models, and software in scientific research that “require scientists to rethink how they share their work.”

Account deactivation and content removal: guiding principles and practices for companies and users

The Center for Democracy & Technology and the Berkman Center have published a new report which explores the dilemmas and recommends principles, strategies, and tools that companies and users alike can adopt to mitigate the negative effects of account deactivation and content removal.

The Netizen Report: inaugural edition

Global Voices Advocacy publishes its inaugural (and sweeping) Netizen Report, an overview compiled by Rebecca MacKinnon of recent global developments related to the power dynamics between citizens, companies and governments on the Internet.

The forces that led to the DigiNotar hack

Privacy expert Christopher Soghoian analyzes some of the structural conditions which allowed for the DigiNotar certificate authority hacks.

Online ID Verification Plan Carries Risks

Natasha Singer looks at efforts by the Open Identity Exchange and others to develop online identity authentication that can be used by both commercial and government websites. The article cites several privacy advocates including Kaliya Hamlin, Lillie Coney of EPIC, and Lee Tien of EFF.

Diary

ICEGOV2011

September 26-28, 2011
Tallinn, Estonia
The 5th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic
Governance (ICEGOV) will bring together practitioners, developers and
researchers from government, local municipalities, academia, industry
and civil society from across the world.

Sixth Annual Internet Governance Forum

September 27-30, 2011
Nairobi, Kenya
The Sixth Annual Internet Governance Forum (IGF) meeting will be held
at the United Nations Office at Nairobi (UNON). The main theme of the
meeting is: ‘Internet as a catalyst for change: access, development,
freedoms and innovation’.

Open Aid Data Conference and Hackday

September 28-29, 2011
Berlin, Germany
The Open Aid Data conference will bring together practitioners from
various organisations to discuss how technology, the internet, and
particularly open data can help make international development aid
more transparent. A hack day will take place the day before.

Mobility Shifts: International Future of Learning Summit

October 10-16, 2011
New York, NY, USA
An international summit bringing together bring together artists, web
developers, scholars, technologists, teachers, radical librarians,
policy makers, critical legal scholars and learning activists to
discuss digital fluencies for a mobile world and explore learning
outside the bounds of schools and universities.

Contact Summit 2011: The evolution will be social

October 20, 2011
New York, NY, USA
A day-long unconference conceived and facilitated by Douglas Rushkoff
to explore how to realise the promise of social media to promote new
forms of culture, commerce, collective action and creativity.

Open Government Data Camp

October 20-21, 2011
Warsaw, Poland
Open Government Data Camp is the world’s biggest open data event. It
brings together civil servants, developers, NGOs and others for two
days of talks, workshops and project sprints.

Open Access Week

October 24-30, 2011
Open Access Week is a global event, now in its 5th year, which aims to
promote Open Access as a new norm in scholarship and research.

Open Access Africa

October 25-26, 2011
Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania
Event organised by open access publisher BioMed Central bringing
together researchers, librarians and funding bodies to discuss the
benefits of open access publishing in an African context.

Open Education 2011 Conference

October 25-27, 2011
Park City, UT, US
The Open Education 2011 conference brings together this broad
diversity of people to discuss the state of the art in open education
and facilitate creative conversations across a wide variety of
perspectives. Keynote speakers will address topics ranging from major
government initiatives to efforts directed toward replacing
traditional institutions.

McLuhan’s Philosophy of Media Centennial Conference

October 26-28, 2011
Brussels, Belgium
This conference celebrating 100 years since the birth of media
theorist and cultural critic Marshall McLuhan will host discussions
about McLuhan’s ideas from different perspectives and traditions.
Keynote Speakers include Robert K. Logan, Derrick de Kerckhove, Paul
Levinson, Graham Harman and Peter-Paul Verbeek.

Mozilla Festival on Media, Freedom and the Web

November 4-6, 2011
London, UK
“A gathering of passionate, creative people using the web to bend,
hack and reinvent media.”

Berlin 9

November 9-10, 2011
Washington DC, US
The Berlin Open Access Conference Series convenes leaders in the
science, humanities, research, funding, and policy communities around
The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and
Humanities. Berlin 9 is the first of the annual meetings to take place
in North America.

2nd Annual European Data Protection and Privacy Conference

December 6, 2011
Brussels, Belgium
The conference will bring together European policymakers and
stakeholders for a “full and frank discussion” on issues in Data
Protection and Privacy.

The Digital Media and Learning Conference

March 1-3, 2012
The third-annual The Digital Media and Learning Conference is organized around the theme “Beyond Educational Technology: Learning Innovations in a Connected World.”

And yet, while I am thrilled for Mostafa, for Alaa, for Manal, for Noha, for Eman, for Abdelrahman, for Ahmad, and for some many others who have been working toward democracy in Egypt for years now, I also find myself thinking about another revolution.

From Veronica Khokhlova, writing in Kiev a couple days before Christmas in 2004:

It took Maidan about half an hour to fill up yesterday: when I was leaving after a walk through the tent city, there were maybe just a few hundred people, most of them standing by the stage; when my mama got there around 5 pm, there was already a huge crowd.

I returned to Maidan around 7 pm and the square looked and sounded exactly the way it did two weeks ago and before that: filled with people (around 80,000), various flags in the area next to the stage (Ukrainian national, orange, banned Belarusian, new Georgian, Polish), lots of light, lots of music, bursts of Yushchenko! Yushchenko! chant.

Then, a few days later, on Monday December 27: “Looks like we’ve won!!!”

A couple years ago I was sitting in a bar with Veronica where the Orange Revolution was planned and organized by youth activists. Veronica described the euphoria, the sense of a real sea change between yesterday and tomorrow, a sense that the youth have taken over and that they wouldn’t fall into the same traps of corruption, clientelism, and electoral fraud that had forever preceded them.

It didn’t last long. These days the headlines read:

• Orange Crushed
• The Orange Revolution Betrayed (by Yulia Tymoshenko herself)
• A Eulogy for Ukraine’s Orange Revolution
• Ukraine’s Orange Revolution Goes Sour

You get the idea. Is this the same depressing fate that awaits Tunisia and Egypt? I’m not sure – all I know is that nothing has been won yet; rather, Egyptians are only able to start what will be a long and complicated process to bring about the vision of Egypt that inspired so many people to take to the streets these past couple weeks. My concern is that building a protest movement and building a just, representative democracy are two very different tasks, as illustrated by the evolution of the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua.

There are small, initial signs that Egypt might be different. Just one day after Mubarak ceded power the youth activists returned to Tahrir Square, but this time to clean it up.

Meanwhile, Mostafa and many other Egyptian Twitter users are linking to a list of 10 concrete, intelligent proposals by Hani Shukrallah to start building a democratic Egypt.

Egypt – ever more so than Tunisia – has been an inspiration to activists all over the world. Intense protests against authoritarian governments are now taking place in Algeria, Yemen, and Gabon.

There are also some major developments taking place in Cuba that have understandably received little attention in what has been a week heavy on international news. Earlier this week it was confirmed that Voces Cubanas and Desde Cuba – two major platforms of independent and opposition Cuban bloggers – were unblocked. Then, all last week Havana hosted the 14th annual International Computer Science Fair, which highlighted the partnership between Venezuela and Cuba that lead to this week’s inauguration of a 640GB-capacity, $70 million undersea cable that will provide Cuba with its first non-satellite connection to the internet.

Commenting on the arrival of serious broadband to Cuba, Boz writes:

With a small investment and a willingness to open up, Cuba could make a major leap forward in terms of internet access within the next few months.

Unfortunately, most indications are that will not occur. Cuba plans to use much of this bandwidth for government access and voice communications that will still run through an inefficient and expensive state-run firm. The country plans to still charge high access fees to get online. It plans to restrict much of internet access and give Cuban society only slow progress over the coming years. They’ll find new excuses, in terms of equipment available or bandwidth charges or something else.

Still, in the face of government restrictions, Cuba has a black market for everything and pressures are on the government to reform. I’m hoping Cuba’s black market finds a way to make internet bandwidth much, much cheaper with the addition of this new line. I’m hoping the Cuban people pressure the government enough to force a bit greater communication. I’m hoping Hugo Chavez’s donation to the Cuban government accidentally helps open up the island and gives its people more connectivity and a bit more freedom.

Much has been made of a leaked video that surfaced in the Cuban blogosphere last week of Eduardo Fontes Suárez, a 38-year-old counter-intelligence official who was recorded making comments to Interior Ministry officers about the dangers that the Web presents to the Cuban government. As Fontes Suárez emphasizes at one point on the 53-minute video:

The technology in itself is not a threat, but the threat is what the people who use the technology can do with it.

This happens to be the very same, obvious conclusion that was drawn by Berkman Center researchers Bruce Etling, Robert Faris, and John Palfrey in a 13-page academic paper that cites all the same anecdotes that are repeated across hundreds of blog posts. Yes despite such obviousness, the media and pundits (including, unfortunately, Global Voices) keep focusing on the technical details of internet access and censorship in Cuba without taking the time to understand the individuals behind Cuba’s pro-democracy, pro-human rights movement.

Much more important than the unblocking of Yoani Sanchez‘s blog, has been the release yesterday and today of dissidents Eduardo Diaz Fleitas and Hector Maseda. More political prisoners expect to be freed in the coming days. But unlike other Cuban political prisoners that have been freed in the past couple months, Diaz Fleitas and Maseda will stay put in Cuba where they plan on continuing their opposition activism. As Diaz Fleitas revealed in his interview with José Merino yesterday, he and other activists will start a five-day hunger strike on February 23 with other activists around the country.

Back in 1994, when Cuba faced food shortages after the fall of the USSR, the Havana Malecón was witness to its own Tahrir Square-like event. Just like in Tunisia and Egypt, thousands of Cubans took to the streets and demanded that Fidel Castro resign.

Eduardo Diaz Fleitas was one of the leaders of that movement, but security forces quickly took over and quelled the protests. Ten years later and the Cuban government imprisoned some 75 political dissidents – including Diaz Fleitas – in what is usually referred to as Black Spring. (I happened to be in Cuba just months later, and there was very little talk of the detained dissidents.) In recent years the Cuban opposition movement has become nearly irrelevant. A leaked cable by Jonathan Farrar of the United States Interests Section in Havana (USINT) from April 2009 emphasizes the ineffectiveness of the Cuban dissident movement:

Without some true epiphany among the opposition leadership and a lessening in official repression of its activities, the traditional dissident movement is not likely to supplant the Cuban government. The dissidents have, and will continue to perform, a key role in acting as the conscience of Cuba and deserve our support in that role. But we will need to look elsewhere, including within the government itself, to spot the most likely successors to the Castro regime.

In December 2009 another leaked cable from USINT describes Cuba’s bloggers as the greatest threat to the Castro regime:

The conventional wisdom in Havana is that GOC sees the bloggers as its most serious challenge, and one that it has trouble containing in the way that it has dealt with traditional opposition groups. The “old guard” dissidents mostly have been isolated from the rest of the island. The GOC doesn’t pay much attention to their articles or manifestos because they have no island-wide resonance and limited international heft. For a while, ignoring the bloggers too seemed to work. But the bloggers’ mushrooming international popularity and their ability to stay one tech-step ahead of the authorities are causing serious headaches in the regime.

Last month Bert Hoffmann published a working paper for the German Institute of Global and Area Studies titled “Civil Society 2.0?: How the Internet Changes State-Society Relations in Authoritarian Regimes: The Case of Cuba.” Hoffmann begins by outlining the evolution and impact of offline activism in Cuba during the 1990′s. He argues that the movement for civil society in Cuba throughout the 90′s failed because it was never able to build a sufficiently wide public sphere to put pressure on political leaders and state institutions. Then, turning to the history of the Internet in Cuba since it arrived in 1996 Hoffmann writes, “As the Cuban state’s approach to the public sphere is based on the state monopoly over mass media, any media beyond the reach of the nation-state’s authority signify a political challenge.” He goes on to document dozens of examples of information that is spread via email, bluetooth, internet, and usb thumb drive that would never be allowed on state controlled media. Moving on to the Cuban blogosphere, Hoffmann mentions some of the same big-name bloggers, but also notes, for example, that “no less than 170 members of the official journalists’ union, UPEC, run some type of blog.” And he describes how the Castro regime supports its own pro-government bloggers such as Yohandry’s Weblog and the various pro-government bloggers at Cuba Debate (with its tagline, “against media terrorism”).

Are Cuban government fears of the rise of bloggers justified? Do Cuban bloggers represent the same catalyst to social movements as their counterparts in Tunisia and Egypt? Hoffmann draws several conclusions, emphasizing firstly that “a precondition for civil society activism to evolve is some degree of public sphere in which it can ‘breathe’.” He goes on to, again, state the obvious. Like China, …

the [Cuban] government’s crucial concern is containment: to minimize the domestic impact, to put brakes on the contagion effect, and, most importantly, to keep the pluralism of web-based voice from spilling over into Cuba’s non-virtual public sphere.

In other words, how do you move from the blogosphere to Tahrir Square? It is already starting to happen slowly – Cuban bloggers have been trying to make alliances with more traditional political dissidents to help provide them with that transnational public sphere they have always lacked. Other groups like the web-savvy Omni Zona Franca hold protests events against censorship in Havana which are disguised as public street art.

I know that there are American activists at neocon groups like CyberDissidents.org, Freedom House, Google Ideas, the George W. Bush Institute, and Stanford’s Program on Liberation Technology that are itching to “support Cuban bloggers in their struggle for freedom.” I can’t conceive of a more stupid idea. One major difference between the failed Green Movement in Iran and the successful ouster of Mubarak in Egypt is that the Iranian government was able to successfully convince many of its citizens that the Green Movement was imported from abroad. The savvy Egyptian activists, on the other hand, are well known for maintaining their autonomy and refusing support from foreign donors and governments.

The more the US government tries to support bloggers like Yoani Sánchez the more ineffective she and her network will become as dissidents. So what should American pro-democracy activists do? Tell your representative to put an end to the US embargo on Cuba. Encourage scientific and academic collaboration between Cuban and American researchers. Engage in respectful dialog with Cuban bloggers from all sides of the political spectrum. Read up on America’s embarrassing history of relations with Cuba and its “aburd and self-defeating Cuba policy,” in the words of Jeffrey Goldberg. And stay vigilant about politically-motivated copyright infringement claims, such as those that brought down Cubadebate’s YouTube channel and Facebook page last month.

Last night a friend sent me the following quote from Greg Grandin who has been guest-blogging at The Nation this week:

I think that the history of the United States in Latin America during the twentieth century provides two relevant lessons. First, given a choice between democracy and instability on the one hand and repression and stability on the other, Washington has—in Latin America at least—always come down on the side of the latter. This is not peculiar to the United States; it represents the experience of all empires. But the stability that is generated by that repression is never permanent, for repressive rule, whether imposed directly or by proxy, inevitably generates more instability. The second lesson is that, to the fragile degree that democracy and human rights exist today in Latin America, they have been achieved not through the mercy of a US empire but through resistance to that empire

This 1921 fight between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier is just one of tens of thousands of boxing matches that you can easily find today on YouTube. It was dubbed the “Fight of the Century” and was the first boxing match to gross over a million dollars. Tim Wu’s brilliant The Master Switch points to another important first:

One July afternoon in 1921, J. Andrew White paused before speaking the words that would make him the first sportscaster in history. White, an amateur boxing fan who worked for the Radio Corporation of America, stood ringside in Jersey City, surrounded by more than ninety thousand spectators …

In White’s hand was something unexpected: a telephone. It was fitted with an extremely long wire that ran out of the stadium and all the way to Hoboken, New Jersey, to a giant radio transmitter. To that transmitter was attached a giant antenna, some six hundred feet long, strung between a clock tower and a nearby building. The telephone White was holding served as the microphone, and the rickety apparatus to which it was connected would, with a bit of luck, broadcast the fight to hundreds of thousands of listeners packed for the day into “radio halls” in sixty-one cities …

What was planned now sounds quite ordinary, but at the time it was revolutionary: using the technology of radio to reach a mass audience. Today we take it for granted that the TV or radio audience for some performance or sporting event is larger than the live audience, but before 1921 such a situation had never occurred. This fight, in fact, would mark the first time that more people would experience an event remotely than locally.

Anyone who follows my book reviews on Goodreads (back when I still reviewed books on Goodreads) knows that I don’t heap praise on many books, but The Master Switch really is something of a masterpiece, especially given that it is a policy book. It has changed how I think about the role of communications technologies in history and in our daily lives; how they influence us, and how we in turn influence them. In Wu’s presentation of some of the basic ideas of the book at the Berkman Center (which I also recommend), he says he was motivated to write the book when he found out that I Love Lucy was regularly watched by around 50 million Americans. (Compared to around two million viewers today for a “popular” show like The O’Reilly Factor.) It is estimated that the episode “Lucy Goes to the Hospital” was viewed by 72% of all American homes with television sets. The next day Dwight D. Eisenhower was inaugurated president of the United States, which attracted just over half the number of viewers.

I admit that I’m a big fan of Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus theory, and especially his comparison of the amount of time it took to build Wikipedia (“around 100 million hours of human labor”) versus the amount of time we watch TV (“Americans watch about 200 billion hours of TV every year”).

I spend most of my time online reading, researching, and writing. Of course I could have done that as a teenager as well – only with books and paper. But for the most part I didn’t. I watched the Los Angeles Lakers, college basketball, and sitcoms that I can barely recall. (Though years of watching Northern Exposure may have influenced my decision to travel to Alaska after high school.)

However, I don’t want to portray myself as representative. Surely there are others of my generation who spent their adolescence reading books and writing their reflections in paper journals only to spend most of their time today on Facebook, porn sites, and icanhascheezburger.com. I also don’t want to dismiss some of the positive effects of sitcom television and the broadcast era, as Clay Shirky so eagerly does. (For Shirky Giligan’s Island is representative of all television.) Throughout I Love Lucy’s run on broadcast television, which shows the loving though dysfunctional marriage between a Cuban and a white, American woman, anti-miscegenation laws were still active in more than 15 states. To truly appreciate the impact on I Love Lucy on American society in the decade leading up to its greatest social transformation, I highly recommend this full-hour documentary by Kurt Anderson at Studio 360 (with some interesting commentary by Mellow Man Ace of Cypress Hill, a major part of my own youth culture in Southern California).

If popularity is to be measured in YouTube subscribers then Ryan Higa is the new king of pop. With nearly 3.2 million subscribers (that’s larger than Bill O’Reilly’s audience, remember), Higa has more dedicated YouTube followers than Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber.

Of course I had never heard of Ryan Higa before until NPR featured him. Which is sorta the entire point of their new series on Fractured Culture:

In an age of ever-increasing media options, chances are slim that you saw the same show as your friends and colleagues. When The Cosby Show was at its peak in the late 1980s, the show’s audience was 30 million. Today, Two and a Half Men is the nation’s top-rated show, with 15 million viewers.

(I should admit that I also hadn’t heard of Two and a Half Men.) For a good introduction to the new NPR series I recommend Elizabeth Blair’s “Cultural Common Ground Gets Harder To Come By.”

The fragmentation of media and culture is something I’ve written about many times over the past eight years on this blog. But only after reading The Master Switch did I come to truly appreciate how much a common, national culture is rooted in media and communication monopolies. Here in Mexico the media monopolies Televisa and TV Azteca are still responsible for Mexico’s sense of a singular national culture. But things are starting to slowly change as their corrupt political relationships become complicated through political party competition and as the cultural impact of the internet takes hold. Still, I think that Mexico is probably a good 10 – 15 years behind the United States until we see more competition in the communications and media market and more fragmentation of culture.

The heart of The Master Switch is rooted in what Tim Wu calls “The Cycle,” in which new communication technologies (the phone, the radio, broadcast television, cable) begin with a phase characterized by openness, amateurism, and competition, and then steadily move toward closed, proprietary monopolies. The clear parallel – and the basis for the policy recommendations of the book – is the Internet, as it moves from its Wild West beginnings to a more closed chapter of major monopolies (Google, Comcast, Facebook, AT&T, Verizon, Apple).

At the end of Tim Wu’s talk at the Berkman Center he offers several observations to take into consideration when trying to predict whether the Internet will follow the same “Cycle” that he documents so well in telephony, radio, film, television, and cable. It is clear that he leans toward pessimism, which is easily understood given the recent proposal for “Internet fast lanes” by Google and Verizon, and the merger between Comcast and NBC.

My personal feeling is that a majority of Internet users probably will spend most of their time stuck in the major monopolies — online properties owned by Google, Facebook, Netflix, Apple, and Comcast/NBC. After all, it’s what most consumers want. Even those of us who have long declared our love for amateurism, still depend on the major Internet monopolies on a daily basis. However, I think that a growing minority of Internet users will continue to attempt to use the network to create pockets of independent, autonomous media, culture, conversation, and political accountability. Projects like Global Voices, Civic Commons, Wikipedia, and Kickstarter. Projects that go beyond what public-access television was in the 1980′s and really challenge the dominant influence of the major monopolies.

I hope that my prediction is in fact a self-fulfilling prophecy for my generation. I do believe that there is a subconscious human attraction toward monopoly, dictatorship, and empire. But a global, cultural shift is underway in which big is no longer beautiful, and my generation is pushing it forward. I hope that we don’t fall back.

Update: News that Apple is rejecting the Sony Reader app from it’s app store is just one more small piece of evidence for Wu’s pessemism; however, Adam Thierer has a thoughtful counter-argument, noting that the “monopoly bogeyman” is a card that has been played many times before by Wu’s intellectual circle.

People have suddenly realized that there are so many things that they desire that they were not even aware of before. And the truth is that most of these television channels are commercially driven, and so the Bhutanese people are driven to consumerism. That’s inevitable. And that is, to some extent, unfortunate. But inevitable.

Lyonpo Jigmi Thinley, Bhutan’s Foreign Minister

Booger is here in Mexico City visiting me this week, but unfortunately neither of us are feeling 100%, which has meant lots of movies in the evening. Actually, it’s exactly what I’ve needed after weeks of stressful work and traveling. We started out on a Clint Eastwood kick, first with Invictus and then Gran Torino. Boogs very well might be the worst person in the world when it comes to making decisions so as she flipped through Netflix’s steadily growing selection of streaming movies last night I knew I would need to take over or else we’d spend the evening reading reviews.

We settled on the 2003 Travelers and Magicians, which, says Wikipedia, “is the first feature film shot entirely in Bhutan.” The protagonist of the film is Dondup, a young, chain-smoking government official who is obsessed with American culture … and leaving his country for the American dream.

Throughout the whole movie I was tripping out. God damn, homeboy looks just like my friend Tshewang. But I figured it couldn’t be. If Tshe had been in a major film production I would have known about it.

Tshe and Lisa, Camden, Maine, 2008

I loved the movie. It made me yearn to be back in the Himalaya, where I lived and studied for most of 1999. There is an authenticity to the movie that probably comes from the fact that the cast is made up of almost entirely non-professional actors. I highly recommend it to anyone who has Netflix Watch Instantly.

The movie finished, the credits rolled, and sure enough it really was Tshewang who I met while in Camden, Maine in 2008 as part of PopTech’s Social Innovation Fellows program. What else has Tshe been up to that I wasn’t aware of? I wondered.

Unrestrained Western culture was a force that the Bhutanese had long feared. Until 1999, television and the Internet were illegal in Bhutan. Royal decrees were intended to safeguard the country against what was feared to be an onslaught of Western values. Not until Bhutan could offer its own television service would Western digital media be welcomed into the Kingdom. So in June 1999, the country crossed the threshold of modernity on two fronts: television and the Internet were legalized, and the Bhutan Broadcasting Service (BBS) was born.

Alexis Bloom, Documentary Filmmaker

Tshewang became one of the first Bhutanese journalists to travel around the country with a camera and microphone and appear to appear on only television channel, the state-run Bhutan Broadcasting Service. But he lacked the technical production skills, and so he traveled about as far as possible, to Berkeley, California where he enrolled in the documentary film program at the Graduate School of Journalism. There he met a fellow foreign student, South African-born Alexis Bloom, and the two headed back to Bhutan in 2002 after their studies to produce “The Last Place“, a ten-minute piece for Frontline World that looks at the impact of satellite and cable TV on the country.

The quote from Bhutan’s Foreign Minister at the beginning of this blog post comes from the Frontline piece, but it could just as easily sum up “Travelers and Magicians” which Tshewang must have started working on immediately following his return to Bhutan from Berkeley.

“Expectations create anxiety,” quips the talkative yet endearing monk who follows Dondup on his hitchhiking tour to get to the United States. It is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Everyone reading this blog already has everything he and she needs in life. Yet our lives are still filled with anxiety. We need to make more money, launch more projects, see more places, have more to show for our lives.

“The Last Place” is a fascinating and well-produced piece, and a reminder of the strangeness (and evilness) of Western television programming. It underlines Clay Shirky’s assertion that far too many of us wasted the 80′s and 90′s watching terrible sitcoms.

From my own elitist ledge, I think that importing foreign television programming into Bhutan was a net bad. Lyonpo Jigmi Thinley says that the one positive effect of bringing television to Bhutan is that the Bhutanese began to realize just how peaceful their country is compared to most. But it also led to youthful fanatics of WWF and a quick transition from isolated Buddhism to capitalist consumerism.

But what about the internet? From my same elitist ledge can it be judged as a net good or net bad for the country? I have no idea. I’ve never been to Bhutan. But I am intrigued by the thoughts of Sonam Ongmo, Global Voices’ inspiring Bhutanese author. She was born and raised in Bhutan where she worked as a journalist and then moved to New York where she is now, in her own words, “a displaced stay-at-home mother of two.”

In 2006 – just six years after the internet first arrived to Bhutan and the same year as freedom of press was guaranteed – she published a piece in the Bhutan Times that speculated how the country would react to the network of networks. She recently re-published that piece on her blog.

In a country with limited resources like ours, individuals will have to play a more decisive role in managing Television and Internet but the State has to help them. The west as a long media history and the public are very familiar with how a free press functions and it impacts them. Their people have matured with it and so management of the media has come with a certain amount of education and exposure to it. While we often claim to be in a position to learn from other’s mistakes we have seen that it is only when the elephant is in the room that we are scrambling for solutions.

Nearly four years later and it seems that Sonam still doesn’t know how to weigh the positive and negative effects of the internet on Bhutan. Like most of us, she feels that there is simply not enough time to reflect on all the information that passes by us:

Bhutan has seen drastic changes within society – good and bad – but the fact that it is happening all very fast is indeed very disturbing. Much of the time the problems that have come with such exposure have made the problems run ahead of themselves allowing hardly any time for thought. We are a nation now, in some ways, like a deer caught in headlights.

For Sonam’s own life it is clear that the internet and social media has been a blessing, but she’s also aware that there is too much of a good thing, and that we need to step away to regain our balance, to regain ourselves.

I agree. I told myself that I would stop using my computer and ipad after 10 p.m. But last night I broke that rule. So enchanted was I by “Travelers and Magicians” that I read through every link I could find on Global Voices about Bhutan. I got to know Tshokey, “Penstar“, Dorji Wangchuk, Tshering Tobgay, and Unagi. I was amazed by how thoughtful the discussions were in the comments that followed. It reminded me of the good old days of blogging in 2004 and 2005 when the majority of posts would inspire in-depth conversations with 15 or 20 or more comments. More than a sense of conversation, there was a sense of lasting community. These days we hardly have enough time to align our lives for long enough to participate in one coherent conversation. More than half the people who started reading this post don’t have the attention span or the interest to make it this far. I hope that Bhutan’s blogging community isn’t headed down the same path.

I also hope that Tshewang considers making a documentary about the impact of the internet on Bhutan. It is something that the BBC would surely fund, and I know that he’d do an amazing job producing it.

(For now I highly recommend the fascinating 2008 “Bhutan Media Impact Study” carried out by the Ministry of Information and Communications with financial assistance from UNDP. Another worthwhile read is “Bhutan Goes Online” by Geoff Long, which provides a more historical and technical perspective of the internet’s arrival to Bhutan.

When I finally finished reading through all the blog posts I drifted asleep thinking about how much I’d like to one day visit Bhutan. But I am trying to travel less, both for my own health and the environment’s. Fortunately I can count on documentary filmmakers like Tshewang and bloggers like Sonam to help me become more familiar with their country from afar.

I met Tshewang at PopTech where he was a fellow for his work training a new generation of Bhutanese journalists in digital media production. Gideon and I trained the fellows how to create a 5-minute video using their Nokia N95 phones and iMovie. Perhaps with the sole exception of Erik who breathes technology, Tshewang picked up the digital editing process faster than anyone else. (Surely from all his filmmaking experience.) But he didn’t have his own Apple laptop to continue producing the videos when he returned to Bhutan. I had just purchased a new MacBook myself so I said, “go ahead, take mine, just don’t use any incriminating photos against me.”

I had visions of Tshe taking the laptop back to Bhutan and training a new generation of digital storytellers who would do for their country what California is a Place is doing for California. I’ve unfortunately lost touch with Tshe and so I’m not sure how the training program is going, but I can’t imagine anyone better suited to lead it. Here’s his presentation from PopTech. If you notice, the computer that is giving him problems as he flips through his slides is my old, stickered, white MacBook.

“Global Voices is …” – A description of Global Voices, from the voices of the community itself. Filmed at the 2010 Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Santiago, Chile.

I have already said so many goodbyes that it is starting to feel like I’m dragging this on. But I realized that I have yet to mention my departure from Global Voices here in my own little carved-out corner of cyberspace. It has been five years since I first started working on Global Voices as the regional editor for Latin America and three years since we launched Rising Voices.

It has been the most amazing experience of my life …

I am staring at my computer screen, at a complete loss for words. There is just no way for me to articulate the meaningfulness of the friendships that have formed, the projects I have seen flourish, the small moments with so many inspiring and talented people all across this globe. I get choked up every time I wander down the path of nostalgia, every time I look through my pictures on Flickr, every time I read the overwhelmingly generous notes of support and incredible video messages I’ve received over the past few weeks.

It is enough to make me wonder if I’ve made a terrible decision. But in order to continue growing we sometimes need to step outside of where we are most comfortable to face new challenges with new groups.

What’s Next

In the past five years I haven’t spent more than three consecutive days offline. That hyper-connectivity has allowed me to maintain meaningful relationships around the world, but I think that it has also taken away part of my humanity; my ability to reflect, to appreciate art, to literally and figuratively disconnect. Starting tomorrow I will spend the next two weeks completely offline. No email, no web pages, nothing. Just a few books and my journal.

When I re-emerge next month I will begin the next chapter of my life. I will turn 30. I will be living in Mexico City, where I will attempt to forge a glocal life. I will be working with Open Society Institute’s Latin America and Information programs to help them think strategically about the use of technology by civil society in Latin America.

I’ll have much more to say about all of this come next month, but now it’s time for me to close this laptop and keep it closed. It’s time to hit the road.

Yesterday I worked about 12 hours on a single post, a general introduction to the aid transparency movement over at Global Voices. Today and tomorrow I have two more mega-posts.

In between the research and the misery, I’ve found a little asymmetry – specifically regarding the portrayal of the so-called pacification of Rio’s slums in preparation for the Olympics and World Cup.

First, from Sarah Lacy, a Bay Area technology writer who is working on a book about technology in emerging markets. The painfully predictable title of her post: “Coming Up From The Favelas: Brazil’s Slumdog Entrepreneurs“:

One year ago, no one would even deliver pizza here. What’s changed in a year? Specifically, the city is doing something about the problem, embarking on a project of “pacification.” As it was explained to me, newly-trained, SWAT-style cops take each favela back, driving out the drug dealers, by any means necessary, in a recognition that the situation isn’t just a bad neighborhood, it’s an urban war-zone. Being new to the force, these police officers have a clean slate with the residents of the favela, and so are able to continue to protect it, keeping the peace. So far, eight favelas have been pacified. Residents I spoke with talked about the relief of being out from under the daily violence: Suddenly they can be a part of the city. But many are still wary. “This is the best I’ve seen the community in a long time, but I’m still scared,” said Nivea Mendes of the pacified favela Babilonia. “Very few people trust the government. They are just out for an election. I’m still skeptical.” Put another way, even though they’re physically gone, the drug dealers still have power in these neighborhoods—for now.

Next, “Retaking Rio” by The Nation foreign correspondent, Christian Parenti, whose writing I’ve been following more closely after watching The Fixer with Marc in Italy.

When I visited, police had occupied the community for about a week. “When the BOPE came in, there was excessive brutality,” Cláudio explains. Now officers carrying machine guns have a checkpoint at the favela’s entrance and patrol its maze of hillside paths and stairways. Thus far the residents have not received any new services along with the police crackdown. In fact, about 100 families have had their water cut off …

“They are just beating people up. Two weeks ago they took four guys. These guys had work papers, but the cops arrested them on drug charges anyway,” says a short, tattooed 23-year-old named Max. He wears red shorts and plastic flip-flops and leans on the wall of the old wooden shack where he lives with his wife, Amanda. A small radio blares a tinny stream of baile funk, essentially Brazilian hip-hop, as Amanda does dishes by an outdoor tap just off one of the main stairways. A few other young men, shirtless and wearing baggy shorts in the heat, gather as we talk. “Most people just want the cops to go away and find someone else to harass,” adds Amanda. “They treat us like criminals. They force us inside after 11. If you have what they think is too much money, they take it from you.”

Interesting to see how two different foreigners – each with relatively little experience or knowledge about Brazil – came away with such differing impressions of the pacification initiative, and the Favelas themselves. I think it probably has to do with the fact that journalists tend to write their stories before they arrive to the scenes where they are reporting from. Lacy’s agenda: to show that technology is having a transformative impact in some of the poorest and roughest communities in the world. Parenti’s agenda is a little more complicated, but it’s clear from his prolific writing that he envisions the role of the journalist to be someone who speaks out for the vulnerable and destitute.

Unsurprisingly, I’m much more impressed with the coverage we’ve seen on Global Voices, which relies heavily on the reports from residents of the favelas, and also cites the opinions of local cariocas (Rio residents), and even police bloggers. (So many Brazilian police officers use blogs and Twitter to offer their own perspectives of public security in Brazi that UNESCO commissioned a study of the Brazilian police blogosphere.)

I’ve mentioned Viva Favela before when I interviewed the site’s editor, Rodrigo Noguerira, while we were both in Sao Paulo:

The concept of the project is extraordinarily simple, and in line with the work we’ve been doing at Rising Voices: teach a group of residents how to document their community using text, images, and video, and them upload some of that material to the internet. But the impact of following around police officers with a video camera – which they know will wind up online – shouldn’t be underestimated. This video by Viviane Oliveira shows how police don’t warn children and families to stay inside even as they’re preparing for possible gunfire:

Viva Favela’s YouTube channel is filled with dozens of similar videos. But it doesn’t just focus on the violence. It also gives us a glimpse of daily life in neighborhoods where most people are still to fearful to visit, from basketball to clever movies about recycling to a local b-boying group.

Viva Favela reminds me in many ways of HiperBarrio here in Medellín. In fact, I’ve long thought that Rio de Janeiro should follow Medellín’s strategy of building integrated public transit to the centers of the most violent neighborhoods which are then outfitted with modern libraries, schools, and health clinics. Travis Fox argues that free trade agreements and economic globalization also contributed to Medellín’s recovery:

Ten days ago I gave some love to Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor and publisher of The Nation, for her excellent introduction to their website redesign. I felt that it really struck the right mix of humility and ambition. I also think that The Nation is fortunate to have a writer as talented at Christian Parenti, but I hope that increasingly in the future the magazine and website will take advantage of the wealth of important writing taking place within the very communities that they report on.

The jury observes that, increasingly, new and old digital communities alike are relying on commercial platforms like Facebook, Google Maps, and Twitter, which create easy entry points for ordinary citizens to become more involved in issue-based campaigns and discussions. However, the ultimate profit motive of these corporations is often inherently opposed to the culture of openness, sharing, and freedom that have defined the first two decades of the World Wide Web.

Fisherman in Venice

Then, after a 12-hour intermission in Venice, it was immediately off to Perugia for this year’s International Journalism Festival where I spoke on two panels. The first – about social translation and the news industry – is available online (where you can see Bernardo make his superman appearance a few minutes into the panel). The second panel – on new media in the Middle East – I was completely unprepared for, but it was an opportunity to show off the projects and websites of some friends from the region. It is also always a pleasure to participate in any discussion with Naseem Tarawnah and Donatella Della Ratta. They both always inspire me every time I hear about their latest projects. Check out last month’s Creative Commons Beirut Salon that Donatella helped organize. And also Naseem’s work on 7iber.com – one of my absolute favorite citizen media communities, which is based in Amman, Jordan. As I write this Ramsey Tesdell – also of 7iber.com – is back in Beirut with Noha and several other friends for the Arab Women Techies meetup.

I am grateful that the International Journalism Festival uploaded videos from all the panels and presentations because frankly I was only able to attend just a few as I was finishing up our research for the Technology for Transparency Network. This was supposed to be just a quick three-month mapping of interesting projects and it has turned into much more thanks to the hard work of our team. For anyone interested in the role of technology in improving governance in developing countries, our researchers’ regional overviews are must-reads.

Antonio Lopez

From Perugia I took a train down to Rome to finally meet Antonio Lopez whose work at World Bridger Media I have long admired. I highly recommend that anyone interested in new media literacy should take a good look at both of his websites. Antonio is currently a professor of media studies at John Calbot University in Rome and invited Bernarndo and I to give a basic introductory presentation to Global Voices. The presentation went well – the students seemed interested, and perhaps even inspired. (Then again, they were also drawn to the evening event by extra credit points and free food.) But the most interesting part of the experience for me was doing some work at a nearby café and overhearing (OK, eavesdropping in on) the conversations of the American students about their classes and professors. “Oh my god, earlier today our professor asked the class, ‘what is globalization’,” complained one girl, “and so I type into the Facebook chat, ‘like, why doesn’t someone ask her to look it up on Wikipedia?”

Walking through central Rome, Antonio – an unabashed enthusiast of the internet – and I had some good conversations about students who can’t pay attention in class because they’re on Facebook the entire time, and tourists who never look up because they’re constantly staring at their GPS-enabled iPhone tourist maps. I’ve been thinking a lot about the basic nature of education – its purpose, its evolution, its pros and cons – thanks to Panthea Lee who kindly gave me a copy of the 2008 Ways of Learning edition of Lapham’s Quarterly when I saw it sticking out of her bag in DC. Highly recommended. As a starter, check out William Deresiewicz self-deprecating takedown of Ivy League culture.

Over the next three days I traveled from Rome to Madrid to Buenos Aires to Santiago de Chile. It felt like both crossing continents and crossing centuries of immigration. In many ways Rome felt more similar than Madrid to Buenos Aires. Stranded at Europe’s largest hotel in Madrid because of a pilots’ strike in Argentina, I happened to have a wonderful and unexpected dinner conversation with a couple in their late 60′s who had never even left their province in southern Argentina until they decided to take a 14-day guided tour of Western Europe. Their humility and enthusiasm was infectious. Everyone else was complaining about the pilots’ strike, about how nothing ever works in Argentina, about all the delays just a week earlier because of the volcanic ash. And then this couple found a reason to appreciate just about everything. They were married for over 40 years and still held hands while eating dessert. I was reminded, yet again, of Louis CK’s “Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy.”

Buenos Aires was a blur: 10 hours of work a day in my favorite cafe, a quick visit to the Feria de Libros, dinners with friends, and a stroll through many of the Worker’s Day street festivals. From the moment I arrived to Santiago it was nothing but work in preparation for our 2010 Global Voices Citizen Media Summit, which was stressful, wonderful, and emotional for reasons I’ll get into in a later post. Some rough notes from a few of the sessions are already on the summit blog. Videos from the summit will soon be posted here. In the meantime, I love just flipping through the pages of photographs on Flickr.

Some of the lovely ladies and gentleman from Global Voices

And now here I am in Bogotá. Tonight I will meet with Juanita Leon who has done some inspiring work at La Silla Vacía. Tomorrow I get to finally meet Georg Neumann of Transparency International who is leading a session on social media for the Americas chapters of TI. And in the afternoon I’ll catch up with my dear friend Carolina Botero who has been hard at work with the Karisma Foundation to improve the quality of online and offline education in Colombia.

On Thursday I’m off to Medellín to spend some time with HiperBarrio, one of the most successful of all the amazing Rising Voices grantee projects. They have received some more local funding from the local government to replicate the successes of their project in many of the other libraries around Medellín. I also look forward to meeting the HiperBarrio participants in Ituango, one of the regions of Colombia that has suffered the most from recent violence and forced displacement.

I will also be following the exciting presidential campaign here that concludes with the election at the end of the month. La Silla Vacía is organizing a presidential debate and is collecting questions for the debate from its readers via YouTube. I hope to record a few “Yo Pregunto” videos myself while I’m in Medellín, and hopefully the HiperBarrio citizen journalists can help me.

All that plus the final report from our Technology for Transparency research in the next week and a half. Clearly I am not learning the lesson that my body is trying to teach me, but I’ve already made myself a promise that I will spend the vast majority of June offline. Hugs and high fives.

Yesterday afternoon Portnoy, Marc, Bernardo and I spoke on a panel about social translation and its relevance for the news industry. (Wait a minute, there’s still a news industry?) Portnoy began by discussion by recounting his personal journey as Global Voices’ first volunteer translator. He liked both the ethos and the content of Global Voices, he said, and wanted to introduce it to Taiwanese bloggers. So, without asking any permission, he simply began translating posts he found interesting from English into Chinese. Today content from Global Voices is regularly translated into over twenty different languages.

I followed Portnoy with a more general overview of the wide range of social translation initiatives that have cropped up over the past few years. I began with a local example that was introduced to me by Rome resident Antonio Lopez. Here in Italy there are actually not one, but two, competing groups of volunteer translators who record, subtitle, and distribute the latest episodes of Lost each week. The two groups compete both in terms of quality and the amount of time that it takes after an episode is first aired in the US to distribute it with subtitles via BitTorrent here in Italy. I am told that over the years the quality of the translations have improved and that subtitled versions are now available just a few hours after the episodes first air.

Another example of social translation that pre-dates the era of blogging and Web 2.0 platforms is “scanlation“, the process of scanning, translating, editing, and re-distributing comic books, especially manga from Japan. These unauthorized translations are distributed as complete PDFs on BitTorret and via IRC chat rooms.

A similar initiative in China translates whole copies of the Economist magazine into Chinese and re-distributes them as print-quality PDF’s on the Eco China web forum.

While social translation – the unpaid translation of information and art – has existed since language itself, the social web brings about new possibilities for coordinated, systematic platforms and workflows. Examples of social translation websites include Wikipedia, which is available in over 100 languages. (Students at Effat University in Saudi Arabia recently used Google’s Translator Toolkit to translate over 100,000 words from the English Wikipedia into Arabic.)

TEDtoChina began as an unauthorized project that offered summaries of TED talks in Chinese. When TED found out about the project they didn’t send a cease and desist letter; they took the idea and ran with it, launching a highly interactive social translation community to encourage the volunteer subtitling of TED videos into as many languages as possible. There are now around 6,500 translations of TED talks by 2,500 volunteer translators in 75 different languages.

Global Lives is a long-running art project that looks at a day in the life of 12 individuals from different countries, cultures, and circumstances around the globe. The raw footage is available on the website, but is best experienced as an art installation. You walk into a dome of screens, each one simultaneously playing continuous footage documenting the lives of Edith Kaphuka from Malawi, James Bullock from San Francisco, Dusan Lazic from Serbia, and many others. When one person’s day becomes boring, another screen catches your interest. To translate the raw footage from its original language into English (and sometimes other languages as well) the Global Lives team relied on Facebook and dotSUB. For example, a Facebook group was started to translate the video of Edith Kaphuka from Malawi into English. They reached out to Malawians living in the United States and Canada, many of whom dedicated a small amount of time to help in the collective effort.

Meedan uses a combination of machine and volunteer translation to encourage cross-cultural discussion between English and Arabic speakers around events taking place in the Middle East:

The Arabic word ‘meedan’ – ميدان – means ‘a town square’ or ‘gathering place.’ Meedan.net is a digital town square where you can share conversation and links about world events with speakers outside your language community. Everything that gets posted on meedan.net is mirrored in Arabic and English – whether it’s the headlines you read, the comments you write, or the articles you share.

“Translated By Humans” is a similar project with an innovative editing platform that allows users to translate content between English, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarussian, and Lithuanian. Like Global Voices, their content is categorized by topic, original author, and translator. Translations can be marked both public or private.

Yeeyan is another major player in the social translation field in China. The site was shut down for a couple months, but is now back online and active. Volunteers on the site translate a range of content (mostly about technology) from English into Chinese. They have also experimented in content partnerships with The Guardian and CBS.

Finally, I end by pointing to Jaqi Aru, a “community of bilingual and trilingual residents of El Alto, Bolivia committed to promoting the use of the Aymara indigenous language on the Internet.” Their about statement goes on: “Through translation projects and the creation of content using digital media we want to contribute and enrich content in our language in cyberspace.”

To underline the importance of Jaqi Aru I need to go back to the creation of Global Voices in 2004. Global Voices began with a small meeting of twenty or so bridge-bloggers from places like Malaysia, China, Kenya, Iraq, and Iran. Everyone there was highly educated, traveled frequently, and spoke English fluently. Because of this we all felt that we belonged to a cohesive, global community and that our blog posts linking to each other were forming the basis of a new and exciting global conversation. In 2004 the vast majority of Arab bloggers wrote in English because 1) they wanted to be part of this global community and 2) there simply wasn’t much of an online, Arabic-speaking audience to read their content. Today those same bloggers are now writing in Arabic and there are far more Arabic blog posts published every day than any one person – or entire army – could possibly track. (Though Amira and our Middle East team on Global Voices do a pretty great job.)

The Arabic-language blogosphere took shape because it reached a critical mass. At some point Arab bloggers realized that it would be more rewarding to write in Arabic – to communicate with their own communities – than to write in English in order to be part of a vague sense of global community. Ideally we would all blog in at least two languages to be both local and global, but time is always the enemy. Arabic is such a major language that it was only a matter of time until a critical mass of bloggers and, importantly, blog readers developed. But the vast majority of languages around the world do not have an online critical mass and their disappearance is accelerating as, for example, Aymara speakers abandon their native tongue in order to take part in the rich information and social capital available online in Spanish.

We don’t yet know if Jaqi Aru will be successful in creating a critical mass of Aymara-language bloggers, but we do know that it would never take place unless someone started somewhere. (Ruben Hilari from Jaqi Aru will speak about the project at the Global Voices Summit in Chile in a couple weeks. Also, I see via Belen that a journalist and Guaraní teacher in Paraguay recently became the first blogger to write in Guaraní.)

I end my blabbering by claiming that news media companies can learn from social translation initiatives. Specifically:

• Treat your audience as collaborators. Respect them and invite them to help translate your content for free in order to distribute it across linguistic divides. Recognize them when they do.
• Learn how to use cheap tools. Media companies pay ridiculous amounts for professional translators and proprietary software when cheap – often free – tools exist.
• Instead of paying costly, monolingual journalists to parachute into a region, translate local news from local sources and add context so that your audience can better understand the stories.

Some major newspapers are starting to get it. La Stampa here in Italy, for example, is able to keep up their coverage of international news by regularly translating and publishing content from Global Voices in Italian.

Four years ago Portnoy and I were speaking on another panel about translation and the internet – at the 2006 Global Voices Summit in Delhi. Just like this time around, we prepared our talk about an hour before we gave it. It inspired several people in the audience to start their own versions of Global Voices in other languages. Soon “Global Voices in Chinese” was joined by French, then Spanish, and now Global Voices content is regularly translated into twenty different languages by 300 volunteers and is one of the biggest success stories of online social translation. I believe that most of these volunteer translators dedicate their time to the project in order to be part of a global community that is not grounded in monolingualism (though, admittedly, English is still the fundamental bridge language). Last night at dinner with Portnoy, Marc, and the Global Voices Italian team I was reminded once again of just what a special community we have.

This morning Evgeny Morozov showed us how how governments are using the internet and new technologies to surveil and monitor their citizens. He was followed by Jeff Jarvis who managed to invite everyone here to get naked with him, and also pointed out the benefits of personal transparency. So we have the government looking at us. And we have ourselves looking at each other. But now I want to look more closely at some projects and platforms in which we monitor the activities of our government.

Specifically I want to tackle three questions: one, what do we mean when we say ‘transparency’? Two, what does the loss of investigative journalism mean for our ability to hold our government’s accountable? Three, what is the potential of technology to bring about more government transparency and accountability in the future?

Two False Assumptions

Before I get started I must first offer my apologies. I promised myself that I would make no mention here of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, or of the Stasi, or that movie that we Americans love so much, The Lives of Others. But, in fact, the Stasi and the story that is depicted in the Lives of Others perfectly illustrate a tension that exists in all societies, but is now taking new shapes with the influence of technology.

The very metaphor of transparency suggests a medium through which we view things and through which others can view us. This metaphor makes two important assumptions, as J.M. Balkin has noted. First, it assumes that what is on one side of the transparent medium is conceptually separate from what is on the other side. Second, it assumes that the process of seeing through the medium does not substantially alter the nature of what is being viewed.

Of course, both of these assumptions are false. The surveillance techniques of the Stasi are now infamous and I don’t think that I need to name all of them, especially here. But what is interesting is that the Stasi had one spy for every 66 citizens of East Germany. And when you add part time informants to the formula, some calculations estimate one spy per every 6.5 citizens. Who was surveilled and who was surveilling? It is often more difficult to differentiate each side of the transparency window than we assume.

The Stasi stored huge amounts of data about the citizens of East Germany. It sifted through their garbage, collected samples of their sheets and underwear in order to someday match their odors, and most famously tapped phone lines to listen to their phone calls. The point was to spread fear as much as it was to collect information. As common as government surveillance of citizens was and continues to be, the fall of the Stasi also illustrates another natural impulse that has been at the heart of investigative journalism over the past few hundred years and that is citizens demanding both information from their government.

On January 15, 1990 a large crowd formed outside of the Stasi headquarters and demanded access to the information the Stasi had collected over the previous 40 years. This process is still ongoing today and has been a painful part of German reunification, but it reveals to us a change that is taking place in many countries around the world as they transition from societies where only the government surveilled its citizens to what David Brin calls “The Transparent Society,” where citizens and governments surveil each other.

From the Fourth to the Fifth Estate?

In front of a US Senate committee about the future of journalism, David Simon, the producer of my favorite television show ever, The Wire, said this – and I’m paraphrasing: “without investigative journalists, it’s going to be a great time to be a corrupt politician in this country.” In his statement to the Senate he held little regard for bloggers, saying that we just copy and paste the content of newspapers and sprinkle on top our own coffee shop opinions. So I wanted to examine this statement more closely. Is it really true that mainstream journalism prevents corruption of government officials? And, if so, will that process disappear as the institutions of mainstream journalism disappear?

The best book I was able to find about the role of news media in improving governance was just published last year. The book is Public Sentinel (pirate link), which is edited by Pippa Norris. It charts the idea of the press as a Fourth Estate, an institution that exists primarily as a check on those in public office.

As Thomas Jefferson famously said: “The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

There are many examples and countless movies based on stories that reval how investigative journalism ensures justice, transparency, and accountability. Beyond investigative journalism, the press also monitors the day-to-day workings of government in order to help citizens assess the efficacy of its performance. Watchdog journalism can expose the corruption of a traffic policeman, the wrongdoings of a priest, or of billion dollar financials scandals. The best investigative journalism doesn’t doesn’t just expose corrupt individuals, but entire systems that are flawed and in need of reform.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, when many countries moved from authoritarian to more democratic styles of governance a new industry called media development was born. The assumption was that a healthy press would lead to healthy democracies. So donors like the Ford Foundation, the United States government, and the World Bank began funding projects that would train reporters and editors in investigative journalism as well as the business side of the news industry. Many of these projects began in the former Soviet Union, then spread to the Balkans, and are now common in Africa and Southeast Asia. But there are criticisms of watchdog journalism too. Some observers argue that that the adversarial nature of watchdog journalism erodes trust in governments and institutions, and presents the government as more inefficient and wasteful than it really is. Others say that a constant barrage of reporting about scandals desensitizes people to actual instances of government corruption. There are even suggestions that in countries that are new democracies, watchdog reporting can lead to dissatisfaction with democracy itself and lead to riots and chaos. In Asia there are criticisms that western style watchdog journalism doesn’t lead to the type of social harmony that is valued in Asian societies.

Watchdog journalists have come up against two major obstacles to their work – the state and the market. The state censors their work and threatens their safety. The market demands that they make their work entertaining enough to sell newspapers, magazines, and website subscriptions. In many countries the media industry has been privatized to shield it from government control only to find that there is now no business model to sustain the work that goes into investigative journalism. This has led to a lot of concern about the decline of the fourth estate, but also to a lot of excitement and enthusiasm about the rise of the so-called fifth estate – networked citizen media platforms.

One of those platforms that has received a lot of attention over the past week is WikiLeaks, which published this video of US soldiers firing on a van that was picking up an injured journalist. WikiLeaks is a site where any citizen whistleblower can anonymously upload a leaked document that exposes wrongdoing. Here is its founder Julian Assange on Russia Today:

Jullian makes an important distinction between the source information and the contextualization of that information which informs the public and shapes public opinion. As he says in the video, there was a Washington Post reporter who apparently had access to this video or at least the transcript, which he incorporated into his story. But increasingly reporters are not the sole custodians of source information. Rather than relying on journalists to procure and distribute information from the government to citizens, we now see a new approach where citizens demand information from their governments and use online tools and platforms to make sense of that information collectively, and use it to hold their leaders accountable.

The Role of Technology in the Transparency Movement

A lot of attention has been given to projects like They Work For You in Britain and OpenCongress in the United States, but there has been much less attention given to transparency and accountability websites and tools in developing countries. For the past five years I have been working for an organization called Global Voices, where we have been tracking bloggers and citizen media projects from around the world. Often times we would come across citizen media projects that specifically aim to improve governance in their countries, but we didn’t have the resources or time to evaluate these projects and their impact in a systematic way.

Fortunately we were approached by two funders – Open Society Institute and Omidyar Network – who wanted a better understanding of the role of technology in the transparency and accountability movement, and so at the beginning of this year we launched the Technology for Transparency Network to document 40 case studies of technology projects that aim to promote greater transparency, accountability, and civic engagement. In addition to documenting the projects we are also building a toolbox of the tools and applications they use, and a series of blog posts examining questions related to transparency in the six regions we are focusing on.

We have found four major categories of projects so far:

Complaint websites:

Ishki – In September 2008 four Jordanian technologists developed Ishki.com to collect and organize complaints from local citizens about the public and private sector. Their goal is to eventually expand the mission of the project so that the complaints lead to conversations, solutions, and finally to better policies and responsiveness by companies and government officials. Though dormant for most of last year, the site has since relaunched with new features and remains active today.

Kiirti – Similar to Ishki, Kiirti serves as a single platform to collect complaints from residents of major cities around India. Unlike Ishki, which is built on Drupal, Kiirti uses Ushahidi to accept complaints via SMS and then visualizes them on a map interface.

Penang Watch goes one step further than Ishki and Kiirti. In addition to collecting and categorizing complaints from citizens, the volunteers behind the site harass city council officials until the complaints are at least answered, if not resolved. Their persistence has, for example, led to the shutting down of illegal shops in Georgetown’s UNESCO world heritage neighborhood.

Cidade Democratica – Unlike Penang Watch which serves as a bridge between citizen complaints and city officials, Cidade Democratica aims to motivate citizens to come up with their own solutions to civic problems. It’s important to note that social platforms don’t only offer new ways for citizens to interact with elected and appointed officials; they can also create new frameworks to think about how citizens govern their own communities without relying on traditional government structures. Cidade Democratica is a Brazilian platform – with most activity taking place in São Paulo – where users can submit both problems and solutions to those problems. There have been some policy decisions – such as the creation of bicycle paths in Jundiaí – which resulted from discussions and proposals originating on Cidade Democratica.

Tracking Parliament:

Mzalendo – Co-founder Ory Okolloh explains that the idea for the project came about after the website for Kenya’s Parliament was shut down following protests by some MPs who were embarrassed about their CVs being published online. The initial goal of Mzalendo, then, was to provide the basic information that otherwise would have been available on the official parliamentary website. Kenya’s parliament website is now back online – and much improved since its former 2005 incarnation – but Ory and Mark feel that they still have an important role to play in using online tools to hold Kenyan MPs more accountable.

Vota Inteligente – Profiles all MP’s, political parties, and election candidates in Chile in order to keep Chilean citizens with more information about their elected officials. Prior to the election they evaluated the election websites of the major presidential candidates and found that on average they only published around 20% of the necessary information for voters to make an informed decision. After using mainstream media to put pressure on the candidates, the candidates’ websites were quickly filled with more informative content.

Mumbai Votes – Vivek Gilani, the founder of MumabaiVotes.com was tired of seeing his family and friends vote for their representatives based on the promises candidates made in the lead-up to elections rather than their actual performance while in office. In 2004 he began building up an archive of media coverage that tracks what local politicians promised during elections and what they actually achieved once in office.

Elections:

Sudan Vote Monitor – Today (Wednesday April 15) is the third and final day of the Sudanese election, the first multiparty election to take place in Sudan in over 20 years. Sudan Vote Monitor is one of many Ushahidi-based websites we have reviewed that allow voters to report irregularities by submitting text messages which are then verified by a partner NGO and placed on a map. Similar websites include Cuidemos el Voto in Mexico and Vote Report India.

VoteReport PH is yet another example of an Ushahidi-based website to crowdsource the reporting of voter fraud and election irregularities. But most of these projects only attract the participation of very few users because there is not broad awareness that the websites exist at all. VoteReport PH is different in that for the past six months they have been going around the country and giving voter education classes about how to use automated voting machines (which are being used for the first time next month), and simultaneiously they also teach people how to submit reports to VoteReporter PH by sending text messages. We’ll find out next month if this pre-election voter outreach leads to greater participation on the platform.

Guatemala Visible aims to bring about more public accountability and transparency around the process to which officials, such as supreme court justices, are appointed to public office by elected politicians. Like most countries, Guatemala has a long history of political appointments based on connections, campaign donations, and favors. Guatemala Visible uses social media to let politicians know that citizens are monitoring the appointments of judges and other officials, and to let citizens keep better track of the process.

Budget Accountability

In the US we recently passed the largest economic stimulus program in our country’s history. And to track how that money was spent the government created Recovery.gov. ProPubica similarly created Eye on the Stimulus which also tracks how the money is spent. In Kenya they had their own stimulus program called the Constituency Development Fund which started in 2003 as a way to fund local governments to improve their local infrastructure. Budget Tracking Tool is a way to see how that money is being spent and to leave comments to report on the progress of those projects.

Our Budget – The city council in Tel Aviv, Israel – like most municipal governments – releases its annual budget in PDF format. All the data is there, but there is no way for citizens to visualize or analyze expenses. So this project uses OCR technology to create an Excel spreadsheet version of the city budget. Volunteers go over and check every entry, and then they make visualizations and graphs of how the municipality is spending taxpayer money. But, importantly, in the end they decided that litigation was a better strategy than time-consuming, technological solutions.

Dinero y Politica – In Argentina, political parties must disclose all of the campaign contributions they received at least two weeks before the election. But they only have to disclose those numbers in a PDF report, which, once again, doesn’t let citizens analyze the data to see relationships between political interests and politicians. So this group has created an interactive database which maps donations and creates visualizations of which parties receive donations from which companies and labor unions.

Miscellaneous

Then there are a few projects which don’t really fit into any of the above categories. For example, in Brazil there is a very simple project which asks Brazilian bloggers to each adopt a local city politician and blog about the activities of that person on a weekly basis. Though the project has a few problems that we’ve documented, it’s also a very nice way to let elected officials know that their actions are being watched and I believe that every city should have a similar program.

Finally, I want to end with a project based in Kenya that reveals the importance of maps in deciding how we allocate resources in our communities. This project is called Map Kibera and it’s the first available online map of Kibera, the largest slum in Kenya. I like this project because it shows just how difficult it is to build up enough information in a community to start influencing policy and accountability on a systematic basis. A group of Kibera residents were given GPS devices and taught how to map their own community. Now they are being trained to use Flip video cameras and local cyber cafes to report news about their community which shows up on this map.

The Power and Perceived Danger of Information

Allow me to conclude by coming back to modern day Germany. With German Reunification in October, 1990 came an intense debate about what to do with the stacks of files the Stasi kept about the lives of East German citizens. While many argued that the files should be opened, others insisted that the information remain closed. Prime Minister Lothar de Maizière even predicted murders of revenge against former Stasi employees if the files were made accessible. There was a fear that East Germans were not ready to see the information collected about themselves. This argument – that the general public is not fit to handle information about their community and themselves – is often used by governments and institutions as an excuse to hold private that which should be publicly disclosed.

Back to Kibera. In a video published on YouTube, resident Douglas Namale says that the local planning department has historically not had adequate geographic information about Kibera which has resulted in poor sanitation services.

In fact, much of the information collected by development groups and the Kenyan government is not shared with Kibera residents. Robert Neuwirth explains in his book “Shadow Cities” how a study commissioned by the United Nation and World Bank found that, on average, Kibera residents pay ten times as much for water than the average person in a wealthy neighborhood with municipally supplied, metered water service. The study was distributed widely at development conferences, but was never shared with Kibera’s own residents for fears that it would lead to rioting.

“Perhaps it’s true that people in Kibera could riot over water,” Neuwirth allows. “After all, Kibera has been the scenes of riots in the past … Still, Kibera’s people deserve to know the facts about their lives. What’s the point of studying the water kiosks of Kibera if, when the study is done, the information is not shared with the people who are most at stake?”

If projects like Map Kibera succeed, then such information does not need to be shared with the people … they will share it among themselves.

This year’s 2010 Global Voices Summit will take place on May 6 and 7 in Santiago, Chile. If you would like to attend you can register here. Solana, Georgia, Ivan and I have been so busy working on the fundraising, agenda, and logistics that we haven’t done a very good job promoting the conference itself or the topics that we’ll be discussing. We realize that the best discussions tend to arise organically (a lesson which was reinforced this weekend at Transparency Camp, which had no agenda at all but was one of the best events I’ve been to in a while), and so we’ve left a considerable portion of the two-day agenda open for anyone to organize workshops and open discussions. But we also hope to facilitate a few specific discussions.

Over the past five years of Global Voices we have heard over and over again that “citizen media is just a fad,” that “blogging will surely come to an end.” We tried not to enter the debate. We kept our heads down and worked hard. But to be honest, we weren’t sure if we’d be around for another year or not. At our last Global Voices Summit in Budapest, Hungary we hired Ivan Sigal as our executive director. We have grown considerably since then, launching several new projects including RuNet Echo, Threatened Voices, the Translation Exchange research project, the Breaking Borders Award, and the Technology for Transparency Network. We have developed new revenue sources and our content partnerships with organizations like La Stampa, the BBC, Reuters, and the New York Times have helped secure our influence on the coverage of mainstream media.

There is no longer a question of whether or not Global Voices will be around in two or three years. Rather the question is, How does Global Voices add value in a constantly evolving media ecosystem? Nor is there longer any doubt whether an increasing number of citizens will continue to contribute their observations, opinions, and reflections to the real-time web. But how do we measure the impact of those contributions? How can we replicate the strategies of successful projects, learn from the failures of others, safeguard the openness of the web, and continue to build bridges over the various crevasses that separate us online?

Here we are, nearing the middle of 2010, and we are less concerned now with how citizen media will develop than how it will sustain and what lasting impact it will have on our global society. We are preparing the following discussions with the help of some outstanding speakers:

I am going to try a bit of an experiment. We have five weeks leading up to the Global Voices Summit and I’m hoping that each of those five weeks we can organize a blog-based discussion about one of the above topics. If you would like to start the discussion yourself then just select one of the topics, write your thoughts, and tag five other people who you’d like to see continue the discussion. I’ll try this myself with a separate post about measuring and evaluating the impact of citizen media.

Before signing off I should mention that I’m making this whole GV Summit business sound awfully serious when it’s really anything but:

The real point is to have fun. Our volunteer authors and translators certainly deserve it after years of such hard work to make Global Voices what it is today. But between the drinking, dancing, and exploring Santiago, we’re sure to also have some very interesting discussions.