Janet Haven

Reuters noted yesterday that internet connectivity at homes and internet cafes in Iran has been limited to 128 kbps (workable but slow for the children of broadband). The squeeze does not affect business in Iran, only private ISP customers. On 128 kbps you can read a text-mostly blog quite easily, check your email, surf the net, etc. It's more frustrating to do anything that involves big chunks of data -- use video or image-heavy sites, watch the Daily Show, listen to a podcast. It also makes it harder to use Web 2.0 services, like flickr, gmail calendar, Google Earth, or iTunes (or AllMyMP3, for that matter). According to the Reuters story, the Iranian government gave no explanation for the shift in policy, and notes that "Iranian surfers will now find it much slower to download music or anything else from the Web."

True, they will. But perhaps even more importantly to the Iranian government, Iranian surfers will find it much slower to upload to the web -- getting a video onto YouTube, a podcast onto a blog, or dozens of pictures from an anti-government demonstration will be slow and frustrating, although not impossible. If Reuters report is correct, it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that Iran is trying to limit media freedom, both in terms of access and creation. The tactic, the classic boiled frog of civil libertarian nightmares, is smart -- reduce but don't cut off access. Annoy people, but don't send them into the streets protesting. Of course, if they do end up in the streets, there will be less documentation out there in the form of video, audio, and imagery, thanks to a choked internet connection.

The situation Reuters outlines in Iran perfectly illustrates the arguments Tim Wu and Jack Goldsmith make in "Who Controls the Internet: Illusions of a Borderless World", a book I recently read. As those who work in or around countries with repressive governments know, the early promise of the internet as a space of free expression beyond government control has turned out to be sadly incorrect, betrayed by the terrestrial nature of internet connectivity. Wu and Goldsmith talk in the book about the legal and illegal methods of coersion a government can use to control what happens online within geographical borders. The easiest, in a country like Iran, is to coerce the ISPs to simply do what the government wants. In countries where the government is already broadly feared, ISPs don't necessarily need a legal directive to limit their clients' access to online information. China's ISPs (in)famously employ legions of censors to avoid attracting government attention through their client-genearted content. It appears that the same mentality exists in Iran :

...another ISP official said he expected the restriction to stay in place.

He said his firm had yet to be officially informed of the new order but was starting to impose the limitations on customers anyway "because we are not looking for problems".

Posted by Janet at 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (64)

For those of you that asked, yes, last week's reinstallation of my Thinkpad's innards was entirely successful. Fabulous Joe did a fabulous job, and it's all running 100x better than it was. Of course, the DRM on my iTunes is screwed up (the punitive measures targeted, for some reason, at the recently purchased Beach Boys album), and I think I'm going to have to pay again to get FeedDemon, my RSS reader, back since I've lost the key to it...but otherwise, all is well.

And of course I'll take this opportunity to wax philosophically about how my small situation reflects a larger issue in the non-profit world. More and more, funders without a specific interest in technology issues are willing to fund technology projects with NGOs, and almost always this includes equipment purchases. This is a great trend -- it means that communications technologies are, in international development slang, being "mainstreamed" into programming, which is a fancy way of saying that both funders and NGOs see that technology often plays a central role in all kinds of projects and NGO work. One of the things that organizations often forget to budget for, or that donors aren't willing to fund, is ongoing tech support. However, as anyone who works in an office knows, life without tech support, if you're expected to use a computer to do your work, is well-neigh impossible. When the computer stops working well, due to viruses, windows registry problems, spyware, or system failures, the average person will simply have to stop working on that computer until an expert shows up. Same thing with software, both on server and client side -- if an organization is hosting their own infrastructure in any way, they're definitely going to need someone available to solve their problems now and again, or they're not going to be very effective.

What most organizations we run across do, particularly those in the developing world, is work with "accidental techies" -- that is, self-taught technologists who are somehow related to the organization, either by blood and friendship ("my brother's girlfriend's cousin's schoolfriend") or by issue interest (a volunteer operating within a community organization, for instance, who lives down the block from their office), or have become the designated "person with some technical know-how" within the organization because they know a little bit (or a lot) more than everyone else. One of the issues we struggle with at the Civil Society Communications initiative is how best to increase the skills and resources of the accidental techies of the world -- because most of them are working for love rather than money (or very little money), and often are helping a number of organizations, accidental techies often don't have the time to keep up with the latest in software for NGOs, localized open source resources in their own languages, web 2.0 tools useful for advocacy, as well as the basics around databases, web-publishing, and so on. Projects like NGO in a Box, the Social Source Commons, and APC's range of skills-building material go a long way towards providing resources for this group, but nothing beats hands-on workshops that put new ideas to use in a real environment. The trick, of course, is both seeking out the accidental techies in a country, and convincing an organization's funders that tech support is much more than a peripheral expense in organizational budget planning.

Posted by Janet at 07:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (63)

My trusty x40 Thinkpad has been acting up recently. Enough to be annoying, not enough to admit there might be seriously wrong and call in the experts. Also, I've been traveling for the past month, and so I tried to solve my problems by cleaning viruses, updating programs, installing security patches, and performing the personal talismanic activities that everyone with a quirky computer works out through trial and error (in my case, it's compacting my inbox in Thunderbird every day or two, only starting up my RSS reader at certain scripted moments, and never, ever opening a PDF if there are other programs running).

Nevertheless, it's gotten bad, and now I'm back in the office. So I called Fabulous Joe this morning to come take a look, and then went out to run an errand. When I got back, I found this note on my computer:

"Janet: Your computer definitely has to be reinstalled. Call me."

This, I think, is the definition of a Post-It note to be avoided. Seems I'll be offline for a day or two this week while my computer gets its appendix removed, hosed off, and then sutured back in place.

Posted by Janet at 02:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (83)