Janet Haven

As readers of this blog know, data sets make my heart beat faster. Data sets that have been analyzed/visualized and made to tell a story are even better. The work being done by organizations like the Sunlight Foundation Labs (who are taking publicly available data sets about US congressional/political issues and making them do interesting things online) is tremendously exciting, and inspiring to many other organizations around the world. I spoke to Tate Hausman of dotOrganize earlier this week about the Integration Proclamation, a data sharing manifesto that he hopes will lead to real action on the part of vendors and open source communities. The goal of dotOrganize's latest project: best-practice open APIs ("application programming interface") for all data applications used in the non-profit sector. The end result, in an open API world, will be data that flows easily between applications, and
perhaps equally exciting, out of applications and into the world of data analysis.

It's easy to get excited about these moves towards a world where data is free (as in freedom) and accessible, and the tools to analyze it, like Swivel and Many Eyes, are available to anyone with a web connection. Where it all grinds to a screeching halt is when you get to places where there really isn't much data. In most of the world, governments don't make information publicly available, even if they're supposed to -- see fabulous FarmSubsidy.org's efforts to make EU governments cough up information on national distributions of Common Agricultural Policy funds -- that is, EU taxpayer money. Except in wonderfully transparent countries like Slovenia (surprise!), this is pulling teeth, and only works through an application of Freedom of Information Act laws, a lengthy and complicated process that can end in stalemates and government hedging or partial release of information.

But at least in this case, the information exists -- not with easy access, and not in nice XML-y formats that lend themselves to clear comparison across EU countries. Where it gets trickier is when you move to the parts of the world where my employer, the Open Society Institute, does a lot of work. In sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, data is rarely available from governments on many issues important to civil society -- educational budget distributions, public health budget distributions, etc. Forget about information on things like political contributions or, in many cases, basic public information like parliamentary voting records. Where information is available through a government, there may be little accountability on where it came from or its accuracy. What happens is that data sets need to be painstakingly created through the hard work of civil society monitoring groups, like the Public Service Accountability Monitor in Grahamstown, South Africa, which follows the activities of the government of the Eastern Cape, or IDASA, also in South Africa, which undertakes monitoring projects on a range of issues from local government accounability to distribution of national HIV/AIDS budgets on an extremely granular level, or Mzalendo, the online project run by Ory Okolloh and anonymous blogger M out of Kenya to track parliamentary activity in their country. But this can be expensive and/or time-consuming work, and fraught with difficulties -- not the least of which are that the people who are good at this kind of monitoring are not necessarily directly in touch with the advocacy groups that can use the data effectively to change policies. Even when serious data is available in the developing world, the skills to analyze and put it to compelling use are often spread very thinly on the ground.

My guess is that the data gap will continue to plague the developing world for years to come. A combination of factors are behind it -- government corruption and self-dealing are tremendous disincentives for transparency, as well as skill gaps, technology gaps, and perhaps most importantly, the lack of consistent demand for (and support for) this kind of transparency from international donor organizations.

Posted by Janet at 07:04 PM | Permalink

If you're spending your weekends figuring out how to use 3D geospatial tools to visualize the human impact on climate change, or better yet, you're devising new tools to do Google Earth and ESRI one better, make sure you get yourself over to the International Symposium on Digital Earth's Grand Challenge 2007 by April 1st. As the site says:

How can we better experience this world of ours at the cross roads of human impacts and climate change? How can we best communicate these experiences, particularly in light of the major changes Earth now faces, as one world? How can we most compellingly understand and communicate those experiences and processes? What 3D experiences or 3D tools can you share that might encourage the opportunity for a better world?

If you think you can do this in a way that demonstrates how people can more easily and effectively communicate, YOU COULD WIN BIG!

Although there is a Publishers' Clearinghouse element to this come-on (in fact, you may ALREADY be a winner!), their hearts seem in the right place, and certainly my heart beats faster when someone talks about innovative visualizations of social issues. So, what is it exactly you're supposed to do to win this contest? Keep scrolling down, and they finally tell you at the bottom that "Entries must demonstrate unique or innovative applications, tools, or utilities for 3D Visualization". So in other words, maybe you've found something interesting to do with an existing web 2.0 app, or maybe you've gone ahead and coded your own. Given the competition for uptake among new software tools, I'd be more interested in the former -- what new stuff can you do with what's already out there? However, my suspicion is that the contest will favor the latter -- new tools are more impressive than new applications of old ones.

But whichever way your heart lies, I'm delighted that Google Earth, NASA, ESRI and other sponsors are supporting this contest. And note, on the intellectual property issue: "Copyrights and ownership will remain with the author/creator; however, copyright permission to publish the entry and announce the winner's name will be retained by the ISDE5 Secretariat.". So if you are building a tool, make sure it's open source, would you? The rest of the world will love you even more.

Posted by Janet at 07:27 PM | Permalink

Will the web 2.0-ness never end? Now we're visualizing shared data sets, with two new projects just launched that encourage users to upload their data sets and map them against each other. Why would you want to do that? Take a look at the map below, which a user on one of the services, Swivel, created to show the relationship between global GDP and yearly average global temperatures. Interesting, no?

Data visualization may sound a bit complicated and off-putting, but it's all about making information sets easier to grasp. Instead of looking at a bunch of tables and numbers, you look at a picture which depicts those tables and numbers. Some simple well-known examples of this are the beloved pie chart, the bar chart, and the x/y graph, although more intricate data visualization can involve graphics, colors, maps, and other design elements. Also sometimes known as "information design" by the dedicated followers of visualization kingpin Edward Tufte (of which we at janethaven.com are one, incidentally), the display of data in quick-to-understand graphics is a skill worth exploring. Better yet, good information design allows you to set apparently unrelated data sets against one another to tease out relationships that are not necessarily obvious in a table of figures set side-by-side.

Data visualization tools have been on the web for some time now. From govcom.org's Issue Crawler to Hans Rosling's GapMinder to Google Lab's new Trends visualization project (here's one on searches on Repblicans/Democrats) to Data360, which has been around for about a year, there are lots of tools out there to let you look at data in graphical format.

Love of visualized data sets, however, is clearly a growth business, if the launch of two web 2.0-style data sharing-and- visualization services, Swivel and Many Eyes is any indicator. Where Flickr encourages you to share your photos, and youtube your videos, Swivel and Many Eyes both want you to share your data sets, and then visualize them. Swivel encourages you to mash up various data sets, while Many Eyes lets you work with one data set at a time, but with more options for visualization tools than Swivel currently offers. Both of them are very recent launches -- Swivel in early December 2006, and Many Eyes (a project of IBM's Collaborative User Experience research group) in January 2007.

Both projects also emphasize the social value of sharing data. Many Eyes explains:

Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to "democratize" visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. Jump right to our visualizations now, take a tour, or read on for a leisurely explanation of the project.

All of us in CUE's Visual Communication Lab are passionate about the potential of data visualization to spark insight. It is that magical moment we live for: an unwieldy, unyielding data set is transformed into an image on the screen, and suddenly the user can perceive an unexpected pattern. As visualization designers we have witnessed and experienced many of those wondrous sparks. But in recent years, we have become acutely aware that the visualizations and the sparks they generate, take on new value in a social setting. Visualization is a catalyst for discussion and collective insight about data.

Great. Swivel is even hoping to make some money off their service, by allowing public data accounts to be free and private data accounts to be run for a fee. Both services also encourage community and data-sharing across platforms: you can blog your visualizations with copy-and-paste HTML, and Swivel is even more hooked into the web2.0-ness of it all with community features and automatic Google and Wikipedia search links. For more on the similarities/differences between the services, see the post on Tim O'Reilly's blog from a couple of weeks back.

The question all this activity around social visualization of data sets raises for me is whether people are seeing the information around them in more structured terms. To put it another way, I wonder if more people will come to these tools without their own data sets, play around with what's up there already, and go back to their own work with a new eye for what they might be able to extract usefully from the babble of infomation that surrounds us all -- or will these types of sites only appeal to people who are already data geeks, and who already see the world in terms of what data they can scrape, create or download from publically available sources.

This is an important question in my work as one of the problems we've been thinking about at the Civil Society Communications project is how to get non-profit organizations who often collect large amounts of data for advocacy purposes to think about visualizing that information rather than only collating it into a written report or a set of flat tables. The written report is important to establish a baseline set of facts and to look at trends in detail, but the information visualization piece, which is almost entirely missing from the work of most advocacy groups, particularly those working in the global south, can quickly catch the eye of new supportors and decision-makers alike. These types of organizations may not even see the information collection they are doing as generating data sets, and depending on how they go about it, they may miss that opportunity...if you think you are collecting information only for a written report, you might collect it, store it, and categorize it quite differently than if you are thinking of using it to tell a visual story.

So my hope, when I look at these types of tools that "democratize visualization", is that they will not only fulfill their stated mission, but also help with education and inspiration among those who may not yet find themselves toe-tappingly excited when someone mentions "data sets" and "visualization" in the same breath.

Disclosure: My employer, the Open Society Institute, a private grant-making foundation, provided financial support to the development of the Issue Crawler software mentioned above.

Posted by Janet at 01:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

By chance, I came across two new projects within a week dedicated to ending online censorship and surveillance in Middle Eastern countries. The first, OpenArab.net (English here), is a project out of HRInfo.net in Egypt.

The Initiative For an Open Arab Internet is an initiative by the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (HRinfo) advocating free use of the Internet without censorship, blocking or spying. In this context, the initiative seeks to provide international and Arab information and internet related documents. The initiative also defends internet users, web-designers, and writers by organising legal and media campaigns and highlighting practices restricting Internet freedom.

Through HRInfo.net's human rights blogging project, Katib, I also found Article 19's campaign against online censorship in Iran, The Persian Impediment. Where OpenArab.net's project is mostly in Arabic and appears to be aimed at people in the region, The Persian Impediment site is entirely in English (so far as I've seen) and is probably internationally directed. There hasn't been a lot of activity on the site that I can see since early January (the site allows contributors to join a blogged discussion on suggested topics, and/or to report cases of censorship), but it's worth a look regardless.

Posted by Janet at 11:06 AM | Permalink

Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, has written a very useful article for the non-technical crowd on country-level internet filtering. "The Geopolitics of Asian Cyberspace", was published in the December issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review. For those who are new to the topic or would like a broad overview of the level of filtering that happens regularly, the corporate players facilitating that filtering, and a few projects that are trying to track censorship around the world, it's a good read.

Professor Deibert also showed up on NPR last week, talking about the Citizen Lab's new circumvention software, Psiphon. Unlike other circumvention tools like Tor or TorPark, Psiphon works by harnessing social networks and establishing individual nodes of "host" computers that allow internet access to known users; Deibert mentions in the interview that they had had 30,000 downloads of the software in the first week.

I wish the interviewer at NPR, Bob Garfield, had asked somewhat more pointed quesitons about specific differences between these tools and the theory of how they work -- there are a number of tools out there, and one may be more appropriate than another depending on geography, political situation, and your access to networks outside your own country.

With perfect timing, a correspondant pointed me to Peacefire founder Bennett Haselton's article on Slashdot last month that does some of that work. Bennett is generally annoyed with the attention the "politically correct" Psiphon has received in the media (as opposed to the more suspicious attention Peacefire's similar circumvention tool, Circumventor, received a few years ago). Beyond that, though, he provides a useful 101 on circumvention tools and how they work, as well as offering some commentary on how useless the tools are if a citizenry is apathetic about using them. He says:

This is not to downplay the enormous good that programs like Tor, Circumventor and Psiphon can do in bringing free speech to the people in censored countries who want it. But it's easy to forget that those often do not comprise a large part of the population....The moral is, no matter how much your movement believes in its efforts to help oppressed people, you can't just assume you'll be greeted as liberators (ahem).

Good to keep in mind.

Update: Professor Deibert pointed out another very useful article on Psiphon, this one which talks about Psiphon's aims -- that is, not a be-all end-all anti-circumvention tool, but a way for individuals to help other individuals through direct, personal connections.

Psiphon is not designed to solve all secure Web browsing dilemmas. Rather, it is a means by which those in uncensored countries can assist specific individuals in censored countries access blocked Web content -- without placing any technical (or personal security) burden on those individuals.

It's important to reiterate the point that, as with all technologies, this is not a one-size-fits-all game. There isn't an "unbreakable" anti-censorship tool; all of them can be defeated in one way or another. The crucial issue is to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the options well enough to choose one that offers the least risk given the environment.

Posted by Janet at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (54)

One more note on communications resources for the developing world -- some useful new publications have hit the stands over the past few months:

IT46+, a consultancy has released The Voip Primer: Building Voice Infrastructure in Developing Regions. Written, edited, reviewed and translated by a crack team of wireless for dev's who's who, the book is useful not only for technologists, but also for people who simply want to have a better sense of what VOIP means in the developing world context.

Our friend the stripey book, aka, Wireless Networking for the Developing World, now in French.

APC's ItrainOnlinewireless networking materials in Arabic.

And finally, an orange stripey book, How to Accelerate Your Internet: A practical guide to Bandwidth Management and Optimization using Open Source Software, from the BMO Booksprint Team.

Really, it's not as geeky as it looks!

Posted by Janet at 02:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As it turns out, if wireless networking on the African continent is one of your favorite things, spending your weekend in the basement of APC’s London partner GreenNet with forty of your closest collaborators (and friends) can be a grand old time. This past weekend, I was lucky enough to join a group of African entrepreneurs, “wireless for dev” geeks and trainers, connectivity-focused civil society organizations and international business folk, along with a sprinkling of donors for a meeting focused on the next steps in rolling out rural wireless networks in Africa.

Much ink has been spilled over why wireless networks are good for African connectivity, so I won’t rehash too much. (For a media-focused brief on this, see Panos London's "What's stopping a wireless revolution?"). Suffice to say that wireless connectivity leapfrogs a lot of the infrastructure issues that plague developing countries, like a lack of fiber that has hastened the adoption of communications technologies in the global north; it also means that a single operator with limited equipment can provide connectivity to many more people on an ad-hoc basis than overland connectivity would allow. Generally, the people I work with believe more connectivity at lower rates is a basic building block of both economic growth and social justice movements.

Despite the good work that many people have done in this area over several years, and the significant support that donors (including my own employer, the Open Society Institute, and others like Canada’s IDRC) have brought to the table, rural wireless is still nascent in Africa. The two-day meeting, organized by the Association for Progressive Communications, sought to come up with concrete answers to the question: what more could this group be doing bring wireless to more communities across the African continent?

As with all technology issues in the developing world, the barriers to rollout of wireless networks are varied and require people with quite different skills to address them. Policy regulations are one issue; in some African countries, it’s illegal to operate a wireless network. In other African countries, there simply isn’t any legislation to deal with the issue; monopoly telecoms control the internet market, and see no advantage in allowing an upstart technology to bring other players to the table.

Beyond policy, though, technical and human issues prevent speedy uptake. This weekend, one group discussed the need for business plans and models for Wireless ISPs (WISPS) and training or partnerships targeted at certain key groups: telecenters, schools, youth groups, and community radio stations.

Another group looked at software issues: if one were to aggregate the technology needed to run a WISP—from mesh networking software to billing systems that worked in a world without credit cards—what would it look like? Building off the Tactical Technology Collective's popular "in-a-box" idea, everyone around this table agreed to work towards a "WISP-in-a-box".

A third group envisioned future book sprints to produce complementary manuals to “the striped book”, the affectionate name for the current bible of the wireless for dev movement: Wireless Networking in the Developing World. Yet another group discussed what a more formalized community of wireless actors focused on experience sharing and project tracking could achieve.

And so on. Other issues we didn’t touch on extensively this weekend prevent wireless networking from taking hold faster: procurement of hardware, for instance, is a huge and costly problem. Not only are the bespoke solutions developed for northern users often missing the robust physical features needed for deployment in a developing world context, but import of hardware can be tremendously expensive. (An African colleague mentioned to me this week, by way of example, that in Malawi assembled computers are taxed at 0%, but hardware parts are levied with an import duty of 55%, a huge amount of money for the DIY set to absorb.)

One thing I really liked about this meeting was the view of Africa as a single continent, rather than two continents: sub-Saharan and North Africa. Participants came from Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa, as well as Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco.

The other point about this meeting I was glad to see (credit APC and IDRC for this) was a distributed approach to problem solving. Rather than knocking heads together for a weekend to come up with an ambitious (and questionably implementable) Grand Plan, the meeting focused on achievable ideas that individuals could take forward with a small group of like-minded collaborators. I’m almost always a fan of the small-pieces-loosely-joined approach, and this time it produced some excellent ideas. Fortunately, there were some very smart people with us this weekend who are interested in taking up the harder work of making them happen.

Lots of people took pictures this weekend, but I was unfortunately not among them, so as soon as I find the Flickr pool I'll link to it.

Full disclosure: My employer, the Open Society Institute Information Program, provided partial funding for this meeting.

Posted by Janet at 02:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Our friends over at the Media Development Loan Fund’s Center for Advanced Media Prague (CAMP) have released version 1.1 (“Freetown”) of Campcaster, the long-awaited open source radio station management software. Using Campcaster, community radio stations can manage broadcasts, archives and networking. CAMPer Doug Arellanes is heading to Freetown, Sierra Leone to work with the Cornet network of community radio stations on installing the software and training staff.

And there’s more Campcaster on the horizon…“Kotor”, 1.2, is planned for deployment in Montenegro. In the next version, Campcaster will be integrated with Campsite, the open source online publishing suite developed by (you guessed it) CAMP.

Although Doug and Sava will probably kick me in the shins for saying this, software development is the easy part, relatively speaking. The harder part of software for the non-profit sector is deployment wthin the civil society organizations that needs it, and making sure that staff members have appropriate hardware, training, connectivity, electricity, ongoing support, and access to upgrades and bugfixes. Hats off to CAMP for getting Campcaster to 1.1, and for working in the field with community radio networks to get it in use. Can’t wait to hear how things go in Freetown. Good luck!

Campcaster v. 1.1 press release

Full disclosure: The Open Society Institute Information Program, my employer, is a funder of the the Campcaster software.

Posted by Janet at 07:17 PM | Permalink

The NY Times' recent article, "Open-Source Spying", chronicles a knowledge management project writ large. The author discusses the US intelligence community's tentative use of knowledge-sharing tools like blogs and wikis to exchange information across and within agencies in an ad-hoc but powerful way. Given my involvement in several knowledge management projects over the years, I was particularly interested how the agencies' employees described the best use of Intellipedia, the internal wikipedia clone for spooks:

Chris Rasmussen, a 31-year-old “knowledge management” engineer at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency....told me the usefulness of Intellipedia proved itself just a couple of months ago, when a small two-seater plane crashed into a Manhattan building. An analyst created a page within 20 minutes, and over the next two hours it was edited 80 times by employees of nine different spy agencies, as news trickled out. Together, they rapidly concluded the crash was not a terrorist act.

I like this story, because it's talking about knowedge capture as opposed to knowledge sharing. As I think much of the NY Times article makes clear, within organizations that don't have a culture of open information exchange (i.e., most), the idea of knowledge sharing--fetishized by KM geeks--tends to fall flat. It seems to me that sharing is a knock-on effect of capturing information, rather than an activity that people actually undertake. Capture happens most effectively during a real-time event, like the plane crash Chris describes above. Many organizations are using the wiki-capture model to create an editable snapshot of knowledge around a certain event or meeting; one of my favorite organizations to pioneer this approach, Aspiration Tech, has used wikis for event knowledge capture in such diverse areas as e-advocacy and open source usability.

In a hilariously blunt article on organizational knowledge management called "Knowledge Sharing Should be Avoided" from 2004 by James Robertson, an Australian KM guru, the author notes:

Knowledge sharing is certainly an important concept for those in the knowledge management and information management disciplines (ie the readers of this article).

The starting point to moving beyond this terminology, however, is to recognise that it means little to anyone else in the organisation.

(Bolding mine.)

He goes on to note that:

...the concept of knowledge sharing will generate little enthusiasm (and therefore action) amongst staff. In fact, when asked (or instructed) to 'share your knowledge' staff will typically respond with confusion, passive resistance or hostility.

So what's the moral of the story? I think the moral is that intelligence agencies, like so many other big organizations, are not hopelessly behind and totally clueless. The issue, more precisely, is that until very recently the culture of open information was entirely foreign to nearly everyone; communities like Wikipedia have embraced it with vigor, but most organizations are much slower-moving and are peopled with individuals who aren't thinking about knowledge-sharing as their primary task (nor should they be, arguably). Integrating knowledge capture activities into daily work seems like the best way to get people thinking about the advantages of the approach, and of the tools available, because inevitably people will see the benefits. But don't sit back and wait for your people to knowledge-share spontaneously; you'll end up with empty wikis, cranky, confused staff, and skeptics proven right.

Posted by Janet at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Following last week's post on the list of human rights bloggers being assembled by Human Rights Tools, I had an email exchange on what makes a human rights blogger with HRT's editor, Daniel D'Esposito. Daniel noted, correctly, that my comment about 15,000 "human rights" tagged posts on Technorati didn't really add up to that many bloggers:

Problem is many of these are just passing references to human rights...not from blogs devoted to human rights primarily.

In response to my question, "in that case, what makes a human rights blog?", Daniel went on to say:

Lots of posts about human rights seem to come from commentators of international affairs, with a focus on the Middle-East: articles on Bush, Rumseld, Al Jazeera, Lebanon, others blog about personal issues as well - include these would bring a lot of "noise" into the feed. Some institutional blogs are far too active, several posts a day - would drown out the amateur blogs. Some amateur blogs have been inactive for several months. Others are in Chinese or Arabic, so would only be accessible to a fraction of HRT readers. I would certainly include freedom of expression blogs, or peace blogs, or even blogs with a political stance, as long as its respectful of others. So it takes careful sifting, which I will continue to do. The key question to select a blog: would HRT readers find the last 5-10 posts useful and interesting?

...A few bloggers have written to be listed ("I guess I am a human rights blogger"), others have posted the "human rights bloggers" gif on their blog's margin, and this is a good sign.

Since Daniel is putting together a human rights blogging feed, it would be useful to hear what "human rights blog" means to different people, and what readers of that feed would want to see, or would consider off-topic. I was sorry, when Human Rights Watch started the "I blog for Human Rights" campaign, that we weren't able to track which blogs tagged their sites with the HRW button. Self-identification is obviously important -- but reaching out to those who write about human rights issues but don't necessarily see themselves as part of the community is also a part of assembling a good blogroll.

(Thanks to Daniel for giving me permission to post this conversation.)

Posted by Janet at 09:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (111)

Hurisearch, the human rights search tool built by HURIDOCS in collaboration with Fast, is launching today. (Note that the Beeb got the date wrong -- Human Rights Day is December 10th, but the search portal's launch is, in fact, right now.) Huridocs deveoped Hurisearch as a tool to index the contents of 3000-odd human rights websites around the world. I've played with the tool, and it has impressive search functionality -- an amazing number of languages, categories, document types can be searched. Not surprisingly, the tools works best indexing websites built using a metadata standard like Dublin Core - which is, unfortunately, not something that all human rights websites or archives have integrated. Recently, I've talked with a number of people in the human rights community about the need for better webmaster training in using content management systems, search engine optimization and metadata structures, and self-publishing tools -- many human rights websites that emerge from developing or transitional countries, unless they are the product of well-funded organizations, are built in such a way that the staff can't use them to publish information, and the information that is published by an overworked webmaster is not easily indexed by tools like Hurisearch. Hm, Webmasters Without Borders, anyone? (Credit to Elijah for that idea.)

Posted by Janet at 02:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Yikes! This is a couple of weeks old, but I just came across this article in the Beeb, in which Blair's outgoing strategy advisor, Matthew Taylor, frets about the internet's apparently disastrous role in civic engagement. He uses a particularly pungent phrase, the "shrill discourse of demands", to describe what he (and probably many other goverments around the world) sees emerging from the blogosphere. Oh dear.

Obviously, this is quite a different set of issues if you're talking about the blogosphere as a force for change in countries where the government isn't elected freely and fairly, or where the online world offers one of the only outlets for alternative voices in a repressive state. But in countries like the United States and the UK where (arguably, perhaps) the government is largely obligated to be resposive to its citizenship, it seems clear that governments simply haven't figured out how to deal with the rising tide of individual voices. And by "deal with", I don't mean "silence"; it seems to me like Taylor's hostility to citizen media is based much more on confusion and a lack of imagination within government circles over how to channel and respond to those demands effectively than on the fact that they exist.

My guess is that smart governments who do want to engage with their citizenry will need to start working with innovative groups to address this problem -- rather than having a blogosphere shouting at you, how do you actually make those engaged people work for and with you to solve civic problems? John Palfrey also recently mused on this problem: "One of the questions that’s always bothered me is why candidates who use the Internet to get elected seem to use the Internet much less effectively as they are governing", and points to one local example where a politician is trying to do differently.

A grander vision is put forward by a project I encountered recently, More Perfect. More Perfect, founded by Chad Maglaque and Timothy Killian, provides a wikispace for public policy discussion. From their site:

Imagine an entirely new approach to democracy where everyone is able to participate. Imagine a way to enable more direct public involvement and participation, creating a marketplace of ideas where the public can collaborate with each other on the matters that affect their daily lives. Fundamentally change the way policy makers and citizens approach the creation of laws today. That's our vision...

More Perfect allows individuals, public interest groups, local governments and elected officials to present their issues, policy proposals and positions to a diverse and engaged audience, gathering real-time feedback while potentially avoiding a time consuming, costly and often uncertain public outreach process.

So, I'm not entirely sure that moreperfect can replace public outreach processes by governments (and the organization also does some expectation-management on the site, noting that "More Perfect is only a tool. A powerful medium to be sure, but a tool nonetheless. It is not intended to replace, or even displace, existing institutions or legislative processes). I'm also not sure how easy it will be to get groups of citizens to debate potential laws with each other on the platform (to a large extent, I think blogs have claimed that space). However, the part that I think is really exciting is when responsive government actually gets involved, and starts to use a tool like MorePerfect to engage with its constitutents. Wouldn't it be great if every House Rep (sorry, this is a US-focused post) had a space on a tool like MorePerfect? Even better, what if that were simply part of the standard outreach toolkit for any elected official?

One of the lessons of online civic engagement I've seen over the years at OSI is pretty obvious: these tools work best when the people actually making the decisions are paying attention. Projects that try to put government officials in direct touch with constituents, like Kenyan Parliament watchblog Mzalendo and WriteToThem, a UK service that facilitates sending email or fax communications with representatives operate on the same principle. I hope MorePerfect focuses on this hard work of engaging both government representatives and constituencies on the same platform -- it's not easy, but I think it's going to be one of the answers to the "shrill discourse of demands" some government officials seem to be hearing from their citizens.

Posted by Janet at 02:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

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)

It's been a long summer break on janethaven.com, but I'm hoping that the fall will bring me to back to writing more regularly.

I'm at the Digital Citizen's Indaba at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. The connectivity is tragic-ish (i.e., there is connectivity, but not in the auditorium, and outside the auditoium it's slow wireless -- we're not allowed on university cables, bless them, and it turns out that the student population of Grahamstown has not yet demanded wifi service from their cafes and restaurants.) Rather than covering sessions blow by blow - impossible, since I lost two of them to meetings - I'm putting up a series of short vignettes that caught my attention today.

My friend Ethan Zuckerman is giving the keynote talk on citizen's media, and I'm contemplating the range of
read/write web roll-your-own news sources that have emerged over the past two years. OhMyNews, Wikinews, Digg, and Jay Rosen's NetAssignment, each of which use a different model to get their news online -- although they all rely in one way or another on "citizen journalists" to recommend or write the news. There's a temptation to sit back and see who wins in this frenzy of media model creation, but in listening to Ethan talk, it occurs to me that each model has a different strength which shines by situation. In a crisis where one is looking for immediate news, Wikinews is probably a better bet than OhMyNews. OhMyNews in English may be the place we turn to for somewhat niche topics that we know will be covered by a passionate writer covering an issue area tempered by good editing. Perhaps what we'll see evolve is an environment in which people learn the different options over time, and use citizen media/news sources based not on loyalty to a single version (like "I heart Digg") but based on situation ("If it's Hurricane Katrina, I'm at Wikinews.")

A (rough) quote from a presentation on the "Editors" panel: "The stuff is not important; it's what you think about the stuff. (Lanham) " No wonder non-bloggers think blogging is all about digital narcissism. Enough about me; what do you think about me?

Juanita Williams from the Independent Online talks about an interesting problem, the issue of corporate or company blogging -- how do you balance affiliations with personal opinion? It made me wonder how many of my colleagues and work friends who keep blogs on their professional activities and opinions maintain a private blog anonymously or on a closed system like Live Journal. This is something I've considered -- or at least when I intended to write this blog only on professional topics. Unfortunately (or fortunately), I tend to get sidetracked into other things, but were I more prolific, I'd probably want to be more focused and start a separate blog for friends and family. Of course, the real issue is that in the online world, your affiliations follow your persona whether you distance yourself or not. Despite the fact that this blog is not written under the auspices of the Open Society Institute, my employer, the undeniable persistance of data means that I wouldn't write something here that I didn't intend my colleagues to see.

This is funny. A closing comment from Ray Hartley of the Sunday Times on the "Editors" panel: "We don't want to allow what the Americans have allowed" which usually means "invade Iraq" or "international intimidation" or "dissing the UN".... but he meant "let media attention slip away from print news to the internet." (This was in conjunction with a slide showing media attention in the US, er, slipping away from print media to the internet). I'm confused: what's the plan to prevent that? To me, it seems to have a quality of historical inevitability to it, like the dictatorship of the proletariate. Anyway, perhaps we now know who's behind all the bad, expensive connectivity in South Africa: the newspapers! (Perhaps I misunderstood Ray's comment?)

Mike Stopforth: love him! He's talking right now about Web 2.0 tools, but unusually, he's not a techie at all. So he's explaining these tools entirely from a user perspective, addresssing how he avoids being overwhelmed by the world of online information. Which I think is incredibly important, because once you start telling people that they should not just read the New York Times, but also follow the African blogosphere, you have to make sure they have the tools to do that. My feeling is that web 2.0 tools for information navigation are still in a very early phase -- in some ways, I wish I could check out and come back in five years to see what all the smart people have come up with -- but they're still very useful. Back to Mike Stopforth: did I mention his presentation? He's now emphasizing the element of play and experimentation in web 2.0 tools, and how it doesn't matter if you don't understand off the bat how to use them...they're designed to be fiddled with. I think this is a great approach, and I'm delighted to see it being articulated so skillfully. Thanks, Mike.

Question at the end of the web 2.0 panel from Ray Hartley (this time intentionally hilarious): "Regarding the ever-quickening pace, what's next? What about web 3.0? I mean, it's been a year and a half."

Anriette Esterhausen from the Association for Progressive Communications speaking in the Civil Society panel on the need for a "personal relationship with technology" before it can be integrated inventively --or even usefully -- into civil society work. Like Mark Stopworth, Anriette encourages NGO directors to support play with the new technologies and the advent of a necessary level of comfort. After this panel, Anriette told me an amusing story about introducing email to South African organizations in the early 90's, and the tendency of these groups to insist they only wanted one email address for the whole organization. "If they have their own personal email address, they used it," Anriette said, "If it's a group email, they really didn't." A lesson which can, I think, be applied to all sorts of newfangled web 2.0 tools as well.

Posted by Janet at 04:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (340)

In Kiev today, and I spent an interesting hour with three of the leaders of UAFOSS (Ukrainian Free and Open Source Software). They're involved in the now-familiar struggle to acquaint people with open source software, to convince the government to adopt it (or at least consider it in what are widely thought to be corrupt tendering processes), to encourage use in schools, libraries, and businesses. What's slightly unusual, according to my companions this afternoon, is that there are still laws on the books in Ukraine, holdovers from the still-looming Soviet days, which render use and production of open source software illegal. Apparently, a software developer needs to be able to show that he has been paid for the production of software that he has developed, and a user needs to be able to display a license agreement from a vendor licensed by the state. This would mean that, technically speaking, downloading and installing Firefox or Open Office is a crime in Ukraine, and contributing to an international project would also be out of bounds. A note on accuracy: I've googled this up and down and can't come up with anything concrete because, I suspect, I don't read Ukrainian, but have been assured by numerous Ukrainian colleagues that this is indeed the case. UAFOSS dedicates a significant amount of effort to having this law changed, although the somewhat regular collapse of the Ukrainian government (and the fact that there has only been a caretaker government here since January) has slowed their lobbying efforts considerably.

So far as I can tell, this law is totally obscure and widely ignored. A Google search will turn up a lively open source community in Ukraine, and after narrating the above story today, the UAFOSS guys went on to talk about all the open source work they *are* doing in Kiev, including an exciting-sounding localization project that involves the Ukraine's national language office and an effort to set up a network of help-desk centers around the country. Still, I can certainly understand why UAFOSS are working to change the law. Unfortuantely, unenforced and outdated laws languishing on the books can come back to bite at a later date if they're not cleared off. Further, forcing a discussion on open source licensing could help to break open other discussions on intellectual property issues that still tie the hands of other industries in Ukraine.

Posted by Janet at 09:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

A few weeks ago, my friend Ethan Zuckerman wrote a post on the difficulties of running a Linux desktop. Even the relative success of Ubuntu, the popular version of the Debian distribution professionalized into consumer-grade ware by Mark Shuttleworth's company Canonical hasn't got me convinced that a Linux desktop is for everyone, and Ethan outlined why very effectively.

Today, I flew to Kiev, Ukraine with a colleague of mine who is an unusual breed: a relative non-techie who is also a Linux desktop user (Suse) and a Linux enthusiast/defender. At least until, perhaps, this morning at 7:30 a.m., when we sat down next to each other at the airport in Budapest and simultaneously flipped open our matching IBM Thinkpads. Mine started up, caught the Ferihegy airport free wireless (Pannon, if you're looking) and downloaded my last dregs of email; his did something that, to me, looked like those bad command line moments in hacker movies where the untutored audience is supposed to easily get it that Something Has Gone Wrong. So, my colleague was without his computer all day as we sat through three hours in Munich and two plane rides. After a consultation with the Linux guru back at our office, the problem was potentially isolated (a problem with the encryption container that holds all his data); as we're visiting our colleagues here in Kiev tomorrow morning, we'll set up my colleague's computer with a static IP address tomorrow morning and Linux Guru from our office will tunnel in from Budapest and try to sort out the problem.

To my way of thinking, this is an interesting illustration of when, for non-techies, running a Linux desktop can work, and when it may not work so well. My colleague may be able to solve his problem because he:
1. Has a dedicated Linux guru in our office
2. Has a mobile phone on which he can call said guru when he's out of the office
3. Has an office to go to in a foreign country where he can set up a particular help desk situation on the fly
4. Has been patient enough and dedicated enough to his Linux experiment not to toss his laptop out the window and restart with a Windows machine when things go wrong.

This situation led to a dinner discussion tonight with an open source savvy Ukranian colleague: when is it appropriate to encourage non-profit organizations to use Linux machines? From one perspective, open source seems like a logical solution to the tech woes of many low-resource organizations struggling to survive, sometimes in very hostile political environments: an open source desktop means you're not using pirated software that could potentially give the authorities an excuse to close you down; if you're Tajik or Georgian or another non-Microsoft language, it might mean that you can use software in your own language, instead of in English or Russian; if you have some command-line confidence, you may be able to customize it in ways that make the software more useful to you than a Windows desktop would be. However, given the type of situation outlined above, I think it's difficult to suggest that for an individual organization without an easily accessible Linux-friendly tech support person, open source desktops would be the right choice (although I do think anyone can use the open source triple play of Open Office, Firefox, and Thunderbird with little trouble, if they are launched in the right direction).

What we concluded over a meal of Ukranian pickled vegetables, kvas, and stuffed cabbage was the utility of institutional structure in a Linux desktop deployment: universities, libraries, schools, and government offices all have the advantage of structure, usually some tech support, and better yet (at least in educational environments) a set of users who may also willingly become the techies needed to solve others problems. This is the kind of situation where I think it makes a lot of sense to deploy Linux desktops, and indeed, from Shuttleworth's TuxLabs to SchoolNet Namibia to the Deerleap Project in Georgia to the Armenian national library's experiments with open source, that model has started to bear real fruit; it's also started to acclimate real users to a new system without the same level of risk that they'll be alienated through frustration or poor support.

Update: we couldn't get a static IP address in our Kiev office, so Colleague is out of luck until we get back to Budapest on Friday.

Posted by Janet at 09:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Burma's State Peace and Development Council is at it again. Mizzima, an online publication covering all things Burma, reported two days ago that users inside Burma are reporting blocked access to Google search and gmail. For those who follow the Burmese government's desire to control their citizens' information access, this is perhaps no surprise: the Open Net Initiative last year released a report on internet filtering in Burma that noted a significant filtering rate of sites hosting information on government opposition group, Burmese information, and email service providers. (Concerned for the nation's morality, the SPDC also blocks porn and gambling sites.) Also blocked were specific searches for filtering workarounds, like the one ONI tested on Google for "SMTP+POP3+tunnel".

Burma, of course, is not alone in filtering the internet (although the presence of a single state-run internet service provide makes it spectacularly easy, as well as filtering systems like those provided by Fortinet that the ONI reports the Burmese government started using last year.) China is regularly in the news as the Great Firewall cuts further and further into the online freedoms of Chinese internet users. Equally distrubing is the realization by smaller countries that what works for the giants could also work for them: Ethan Zuckerman recently wrote about Ethiopia's apparent blocking of a mainstream blogging service, and the subsequent yawning non-coverage in mainstream media over this watershed event. The problem, as he points out, is that it's really difficult to verify exactly what's going on in a repressive country, exactly what's being blocked, etc. Ethan gives a good description of the work ONI is doing, including the painstaking detail that needs to go into it in order to be accepted. Particularly when you have a few state-owned ISPs serving a country, blocking and unblocking sites is really quite easy; what you end up with a population that isn't going to trust gmail, yahoo, or hotmail as a reliable service. What this means is that they will tend to use local (reliable) email services, which are more easily monitored by the state.

Documenting internet filtering in repressive countries is crucial. Equally crucial is proactively educating these populations, particularly people involved in civil society who desparately need to get information in and out of repressive countries, on how internet filtering works, the risks they take in information gathering and distribution over the internet, and what simple tools and techniques are available to them to circumvent censorship. That's not a small order: most activists are passionate about their issues, not about technology. Many serious activists aren't part of the international NGO jet set: they don't speak English, and they need to receive training, tools, and handbooks in their own languages. Finally, the great majority of people who live in Burma, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, China, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and so on can't travel outside their countries to learn these things, and trainings within are clearly dangerous for all involved. How to deal with all these issues is an ongoing puzzle, although quite a few smart people have started thinking about innovative ways to address these situations. Secure NGO in a Box, which I've written about here before, is one of those efforts to put localized information and tools into the hands of those who need it. Still missing is the training piece that needs to go hand-in-hand with the set of tools (although the Secure Box team has done a good job of writing a manual for beginners that is intended to be used alone), as well as an answer to the reaction time issue. In the game of cat and mouse that repressive governments play with internet filtering, civil society is so far always in the position of playing catch-up.

Posted by Janet at 08:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (102)

Onfocus has a post on how to secure Google Calendar (and Gmail) automatically. You can do this by hand each time you go to the sites by entering an "s" after the http (i.e., https:), but by installing the user script Onfocus suggests in Mozilla Firefox, you can ensure that your connection is secure each time you visit the sites. Hooray.

Note, though, that this doesn't mean that your calendar and email data is secure from Google: goodness, no. They can peak at it whenever they like. What it does mean is that the man in the middle (between your computer and Google's servers) doesn't have access to your data. While in the West this may not be such a big deal (or it may, regrettably), these kinds of simple-to-install automatic services are increasingly useful for users in countries where surveillance is more likely to be the norm. For those looking for quick-and-dirty information security (imperfect but better than nothing), this is a good thing to keep on tap.

Posted by Janet at 01:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Irrawaddy, a print and online magazine covering all things Burma, ran a great article earlier this week on the American Association for the Advancement of Science's project on Human Rights and Geospatial Information. The article cited the work the AAAS team has undertaken to document the destruction of villages in Zimbabwe. Click on the thumbail image at right to see the images, taken three years apart. This is evidence that is stark, and very difficult to argue with: in the first shot, a village is clearly visible and in the second, only foliage remains in what is clearly the same location. Where did the village, and the people who live there, go? Amnesty International answers this in last week's press release :

Amnesty International today released the first-ever satellite images of the wholesale destruction of a large community in Zimbabwe -- providing the clearest possible evidence to date of the devastating impact of the Zimbabwean government's policy of house demolitions.

"These satellite images are irrefutable evidence -- if further evidence is even needed -- that the Zimbabwean government has obliterated entire communities -- completely erased them from the map, as if they never existed," said Kolawole Olaniyan, Director of Amnesty International's Africa programme.

The organization commissioned the satellite images to demonstrate the complete destruction of Porta Farm -- a large, informal settlement that was established 16 years ago and had schools, a children's centre and a mosque. The organization also released graphic video footage showing the forced evictions taking place prior to the demolitions.

Irrawaddy's interest in the Zimbabwe story is close to home: the AAAS team is looking to using satellite technology and geospatial information to shed light on village destruction in Burma's Karen State, according to the Irrawady article. The technology could potentially also be used to look for secret prisons in Burma, or document the illegal destruction of hardwood forests allowed by the Burmese military junta. The geospatial team at AAAS is also looking at Sudan as a possible case study.

For organizations that work to shed light on human rights abuses in places where observers can rarely go, this type of documentation is priceless -- not only because it documents what the outside world cannot see, but because the documentation is visual, and can be used to create a compelling and graphic story.

That said, satellite imagery can be thwarted. Clouds, it turns out, are the enemy of satellite imagery, and so monitoring time-sensitive events can easily be scuppered by cloud cover. The creation of satellite imagery is of course not constant, so capturing a specific, single event may also be difficult, particularly when factoring in weather and nighttime. The AAAS' website on this project has a good set of resources to learn more about the use of geospatial information in the human rights context, including satellite and data resources and organizations that work with GIS.

Posted by Janet at 08:26 PM | Permalink

Professor Ron Deibert, director of The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, alerted me a few weeks ago to a brief and helpful resource now on their website: an FAQ on Psiphon, the tool for circumventing internet censorship that Citizen Lab is developing. Psiphon works a bit differently than other circumvention tools now available, relying on social networks, or, as the developers at Citizen Lab call them, "networks of trust":

Who will use Psiphon?

Psiphon operates through networks of trust. There are Psiphon providers, who install and run the server in an uncensored country and Psiphon users who login and access the server from a country that censors the Internet.

How does Psiphon work?

Psiphon acts as a "web proxy" for authenticated users, retrieving requested web pages and displaying them in a user's browser. Psiphon uses a secure, encrypted connection to receive web requests from the Psiphon user to the Psiphon provider who then transports the results back to the Psiphon user. There is no connection between the Psiphon user and the requested website, as Psiphon transparently proxies the request through the Psiphon provider's computer allowing the Psiphon user to browse blocked websites seamlessly.

Both the FAQ -- which makes a complicated idea very accessible to the non-technical end-user -- and the nearness of Psiphon's release are very good news for the growing number of countries where online censorship is not just a threat, but a reality.

The bad news is that censorship circumvention remains a game of cat and mouse, a point highlighted today in a press release from Reporters Without Borders. The report they issued focused on the increased control and filtering internet users are experiencing in China, particularly in terms of access to Google; for China internet watchers, this isn't entirely unexpected. Particularly alarming, though, were the final three paragraphs of the release:

At the same time, the authorities have largely managed to neutralise software designed to sidestep censorship since 24 May. Such software as Dynapass, Ultrasurf, Freegate and Garden Networks is normally used by about 100,000 people in China to gain access to news and information that is blocked by the firewall isolating China from the rest of the worldwide web.

Bill Xia, the US-based exile who created Dynapass, said the jamming of these programmes had reached an unprecedented level and he was convinced the authorities were deploying considerable hardware and software resources to achieve it.

Software engineers based abroad have been trying to update these programmes on the basis of information they have received from Internet users inside China. A new version of Dynapass was released a few days ago, but its effectiveness is still extremely limited.

This is bad news, although a tool like Psiphon may be able to step effectively into the breech, at least for a period of time.

Posted by Janet at 10:58 PM | Permalink

I'm very late to the discussion on Ethan Zuckerman's blog about the efficacy/validity of Second Life's Camp Darfur. Many excellent points on all sides have been made in the comments, and so I'll keep this brief. Basically, I'm with Ethan on this one, but for slightly different reasons than he's articulated. It's not just Camp Darfur that I find a bit off-putting; it's most "renactments" of tragic circumstances in the name of education or awareness-raising. The problem I have with them comes down to control. One of the most prevailing aspects of life in the United States nowadays is control over your environment: you can visit the supermarket, pick up your dry cleaning, watch a video, read the New York Times, or talk to your friends at nearly any time of day or night. Your choices are, in essence, overwhelming. Games like Second Life are even more about choice than real life; the whole point is that you choose your personality, profession, tools, finances, indeed, your very state of being.

My experience in refugee camps and with refugees has been limited, but probably more direct than that of many Americans. I volunteered at a refugee camp on the Hungarian/Romanian border for a while, visiting to play games with rooms full of the children of eastern Europeans, Africans, Asians who had been picked up trying to enter the European Union. I've visited with Palestinians in Jordan who grew up in refugee camps and whose families still live in them. Some of my closer friends have worked for years with refugees from the various countries that make up former Yugoslavia. None of this makes me an expert by any means, and yet it seems clear to me that the main characteristic of a refugee existance, and the main source on ongoing, constant anxiety, is the lack of control. In a camp, an individual can make few decisions for self or family. Life is about boredom, listlessness, lost opportunity, and fear of a totally unknown future. To be sure. the camps in Sudan have the additional horror of unexpected physical attack, which presumably drives anxiety through the roof when combined with the crushing nothingness of everyday life. I believe that it is human nature to try and better one's situation (and indeed, games like Second Life exist largely to meet this desire). In a refugee camp, that tendency is thwarted at nearly every turn. Most refugees can simply do nothing but wait, passively, for someone else, be it a international agency, their own government, or a man with a weapon, to make the decision that will change their lives. Or, like the Palestinian refugees still in Jordan, they simply wait, and wait.

This is why I find the idea of any kind of reenactment of these spaces so frustrating; it's a false emotional situation. As people who are choosing to visit a virtual world, we have all the control; we can come to Camp Darfur, look around, and then leave. Then we can come back. Maybe there will be someone interesting there, or something interesting happening. Then we might stay, and explore. Or leave again. Or sit and think. It's our choice. And because that choice always exists for us, but rarely or never for the refugees whose experience we seek to understand, I think Camp Darfur and other projects like it miss the crucial element that they wish to convey.

Posted by Janet at 04:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The Kenyan Parliament is pretty non-transparent. It's dificult for even the dedicated to discover what the Parliament is working on, what bills are under discussion, and what the performances of individual MPs are. Two young Kenyans, Ory Okolloh of Kenyan Pundit and "M" of Thinker's Room, felt that a volunteer project that kept citizenry up-to-date on the activities of Kenyan parliament would be useful; even more useful was a forum that encouraged citizen participation, shifting the position of Kenyan voters from passive recipients of Parliamentary decree to active watchdogs of government activity. Ory and M have launched Mzalendo, site which will attempt to track Parliamentary happenings, bills, MPs, districts, and so forth. It will also provide a space for citizens to pose questions to the government, and will help to direct them to the correct MP.

One of the many things I love about this project is the technology -- Ory and M are using WordPress to run their site. WordPress is open source, easy-to-use blogging software. They've gotten someone to help them configure it, but for the most part, it's pretty straightfoward what they've done. I think it's fantastic that we've reached a point where technology is a very small hurdle to an individual citizen's effort to push transparency in government (or other areas). I'd be interested to hear more about the customizations they've done; it would be great if they wrote a bit more about that on the Mzalendo site or their own blogs so that others working on grass-roots anti-corruption projects might use it in their own efforts.

Posted by Janet at 03:47 AM | Permalink

The arrest and detention of Alaa Ahmed Seif al-Islam by Egyptian authorities following a peaceful protest in Cairo on Sunday is being well-covered in the blogosphere. Everyone from Instapundit to Elijah Zarwan is writing about it, and Global Voices Online is promoting a googlebomb campaign to direct "Egypt" google queries to freealaa.blogspot.com. Human Rights Watch has a press release out, and Alaa appears to be blogging (somehow) from his prison cell -- in English, he says, so his cellmates won't read over his shoulder.

Given the welcome flurry of angry attention directed at Egypt, I don't have much to add -- except to wish strength and peace to Alaa and Manal, and to the others in dentention and their families. I hope the Egyptian authorities come to their senses quickly and realize that jailing peaceful protesters for exercising the right to free expression (in this case, in support of judges persecuted for their anti-corruption stance, a huge issue in Egypt) is not, in the long run, a viable option.

Posted by Janet at 10:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (233)

I've written on this blog several times about how mapping and GIS technologies -- particularly those that are usable by non-experts -- can help to make a stronger case when advocating a cause. These tools have been used to great effect by the environmental movement, as well as by groups with interests as diverse as natural resource plundering iin the developing world and using chemical weapons against civilians. As tools like Google Maps put the possibility of mapping data into the hands of many, we're also seeing that collaborative projects can be undertaken with mapping as a focal point for tracking and clarifying information coming in from a range of sources. In other words, maps are being used to do, rather than simply to explain an end result.

Just recently, OSI's Information Program (where I work), released a set of case studies on this topic. Researched and written by Stephanie Lindenbuam, the set of documents includes a useful overview from the layman's perspective on what mapping means in an advocacy context. This is followed by a nine short papers (each 3-4 pages) that detail individual stories of how mapping is being used within an organization or campaign. The papers can be downloaded individually in pdf format. Take a look if this is something you're thinking about in your work.

Posted by Janet at 03:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I'm very happy to see the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Media and Democracy launch Congresspedia, the "citizen's encyclopedia on Congress that anyone can edit". The happy news is that Congresspedia is easy to use (based on the Wikipedia model), encourages citizen participation, and clearly isn't a joke. Anyone (US citizen or not) can go into any of the hundreds of pages already on Congresspedia and edit information about America's lawmakers...all 535 of them from the House and the Senate. The claim is that the site is non-partisan and encourages the beloved Wikipedian neutral point of view (or n-pov, for those in the know); most likely the major challenge will be whether they'll be able to maintain that. Given the squirmy battles in the regular Wikipedia over politicians' pages, one can't help but wonder.

But this raises a larger question about the offspring of Wikipedia; Congresspedia is essentially a sub-set of Wikipedia, hived off and put under its own name. But there's a bit of a problem of replication here. Richard Burr, the junior Republican senator from North Carolina, has a page on Wikipedia with