I’m in Berlin, speaking at Wizards of OS tomorrow, and hanging out with some of my Open Society Institute friends. So far, the conference is a little ideological for my tastes, unreformed capitalist that I am, but the company is pretty good.

I had the great pleasure of having dinner last night with Joris Komen of SchoolNet Namibia, one of my favorite projects on the African continent. Joris and crew have been bringing low-cost harware, Unix software and training into schools throughout Namibia – at present, they’ve worked with close to 250 schools throughout the country.

The major achievement of SchoolNet, from my perspective, is the substantial concessions they’ve gotten from the Namibian government. They’ve gotten the state telco to provision service to schools at extremely low cost, which allows them – with some grant funding – to give funding to schools at no cost. And they’ve gotten access to the 2.6Ghz frequency, which they’re using to provide wireless access to rural schools across the nation, a crucial strategy in a nation as huge and sparsely populated as Namibia.

Joris observed that educational uses are a great lever for telecommunications reform in African countries. Most arguments about telco reform in Africa end up in battles between incumbent telco providers trying to protect a near-monopoly on service versus new players who attack that monopoly with new tech. Joris suggests changing the debate, by forcing dominant telcos either to prove that they can provide universal service to schools… or get out of the way and allow new technologies and new companies to do it. A very cool strategy, and a good proof of concept in the successes SchoolNet have achieved so far.

Since comments on this blog aren’t syndicated, I wanted to post an excellent comment just posted by Jeff Sharlet of The Revealer, a terrific weblog on religion and the press. Jeff responds to my recent post on the undercovered stories the UN wants to see more coverage on – he adds his list of religion stories he’d like to see better covered:

1. The looming possibility of a fundamentalist takeover of the Methodist church, one of the largest in the U.S.

5. Jewish messianism. No, not Jews for Jesus — Chabad, and its influence on non-Orthodox Jews.

I’d love to see experts in other fields pick up this meme and offer their five most important undercovered stories – please feel to chime in on the comments or on your own blog if this idea interests you.

The UN’s Department of Public Information is publishing a fascinating list, titled Ten Stories the World Should Hear More About. The site listing these stories notes “The stories are not ones that have never been reported, but are often second-rung issues that need more thorough, balanced and regular attention.”

My observation is that the stories seem to range from stories that are reasonably well known – AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa – to those that even news junkies might have missed – chronic instability and insecurity in the Central Afrian Republic. The list seems to have a bias towards sharing good news as well as bad, calling attention to the progress Tajikistan is making post civil war and to the peaceful resolution to conflicts between Nigeria and Cameroon over the Bakassi Peninsula. (There’s more than a little UN boosterism going on here, as these two conflicts were examples of the UN’s success in global mediation.)

Media geek that I am, I find myself thinking about the criteria of newsworthiness Johan Galtung and Mari Holcombe Ruge set forth in their brilliant 1965 paper, “The Structure of Foreign News”. (Alas, the preceding link is to JSTOR – unless you are on a university campus in the US or UK, it probably won’t work for you…) Galtung and Ruge would predict that most of the stories the UN is trying to call attention to are unlikely ever to be covered. Almost all violate the “frequency” criteria that Galtung and Ruge believe is critically important – events are news when they happen suddenly, and fast enough to be reported in a daily newspaper. Earthquakes, bombings, floods – by the end of the day, you’ve got a death toll. Long-scale crises like overfishing are hard to report on, as they unfold over years and decades.

Even those stories that fit within the newswindow on the basis of timeliness have other strikes against them. All the UN stories involve people from non-elite nations, and few involve elite people, two criteria that lead to coverage. Many fail to be “unexpected”, a major Galtung and Ruge criterion; those that are unexpected, tend to be positive, a strike against them in terms of making news. I’d be pleased to discover that the UN’s urging leads to more and better stories on these issues (and, indeed, I’ll likely set up some scripts to check coverage over the next couple of months!) but I’m not optimistic.

It leaves me thinking – what are the ten stories I’d like to see media attention focused on? Off the top of my head:

- US relationships with countries like Uzbekistan and Pakistan, whose human rights regimes leave much to be desired, but who support the US military’s work in Afghanistan.

- Global interest – especially US and Chinese – in African oil and the economic and political posturing taking place to get access to it.

- The slow-motion disaster in Darfur, Sudan

- The long-term prospects for survival of Democratic Republic of Congo as a single nation and the implications for instability at the heart of Africa.

- The explosive growth of cellphone usage in Africa and Asia, and the implication that they are owned and used by an emerging middle class.

Do you have five others to offer, dear readers? What are the undercovered stories you’d like to see mainstream journalists pay attention to in the near future?