The Global Voices meeting was an amazing success – it’s hard to explain just how cool it was to meet blogging pioneers from all around the world. I’m exhausted and a little overwhelmed by all the work we have to do, but I’m very happy, very gratified and incredibly grateful. Thanks to everyone who helped make it happen.

Jim Moore has an interesting commentary on the post I made a couple of days back about Ghana’s election. (Jon Lebowsky has picked up the conversation and is continuing it on WorldChanging.)I pointed to a piece on GhanaWeb about the multiple ways technology is being used to monitor Ghanaian elections, quickly report results from far-flung constituencies and generally produce an election that is free, fair and transparent. (So transparent, in fact, that I’ve been having a great deal of fun watching the election results come in district by district.

Jim points out that Ghana is so highly connected that it’s quite hard for anyone to aspire to throw the elections (Rawlings’s unsupported complaints of Nigerian interference aside). Unhappy incidents like the shooting near the Burkina Faso border are widely reported and discussed, incidents of intimidation or vote fraud were reported into radio stations, and results and polling data were closely scrutinized. The result? An election that’s being widely celebrated as free, fair and exemplary.

Jim wants to know whether we can take some of the lessons from Ghana’s election and apply them to the current situation in western Sudan. He points to Tom Barnett’s key observation, “disconnection equals danger”, and points out that Sudan’s disconnection from global communication networks is allowing a genocide to take place.

Unfortunately, it’s a long road from Sudan to Ghana. The reason these systems work in Ghana is that government, for the most part, works. When a cellphone user calls a radio station to report intimidation at a polling place, there’s reason to believe the police will come by and stop the intimidation. That’s not a reasonable assumption in Sudan, where the government is likely responsible for said intimidation.

The need in Sudan is to increase connectivity with the outside world so that other governments of the world can respond to the atrocities taking place in Sudan. While there’s a temptation to get very high tech, my suspicion is that less is more… getting basic voice connectivity into camps across the Sudan/Chad border could go a long way towards letting people in the camps communicate the actual situation unfolding there.

My suggestion: take a lesson from the situation at the Rwanda/Democratic Republic of Congo border, where MTN builds cellphone towers that serve Congolese users, although they’re not licensed to operate in DRC. There’s widespread smuggling of handsets and smartcards from Rwanda to DRC – it’s quite possible that the Sudan/Chad border is similarly porous. Companies like MTN or Spacefon have a lot of experience linking GSM to VSAT and providing voice services in extremely isolated locations. It would be interesting to see a) whether the government of Chad would allow this to happen and b) whether the community concerned with Sudan could raise the money to make this happen.

Bonus link: BBC/JoyFM’s Kweky Sakyi-Addo is maintaining a terrific online diary of his experiences covering the Ghana elections. He’s a natural weblogger, and I’ve got high hopes his journal will continue.

My global wanderings have now taken me quite close to home – I’m in Cambridge late this week for Berkman’s Internet and Society conference, Votes, Bits and Bytes. Rebecca Mackinnon and I are leading a Saturday session of the conference, Global Voices, a discussion of “bridge blogs” from around the world, and we’ve both been involved with hijacking the program of the conference, ensuring that the discussion is broader than yet another Dean campaign postmortem.

When Rebecca and I started talking about who we’d like to get included in the conference program, Hossein Derakhshan – better known as Hoder – topped both of our lists. Hoder was Iran’s first prominent blogger, and did an enormous amount of work to make the Internet accessible to Persian-language bloggers. I’ve had a great time hanging out with him for the past two days, wandering around Cambridge and talking about blogs, the universe and everything. In the process, I was lucky enough to get a preview of the talk he delivered today. Here’s a quick outline of that talk:

There’s about 70 million people in Iran, and 70% of Iranians are under 30 years old. There are roughtly 5-7 million internet users in Iran, and, amazingly, about 70 – 75,000 active iranian weblogs, most of them in Persian. The Internet in Iran is the most trusted medium for journalism, more trusted than satellite broadcasts, either from the middle east or from the United States. (There are a couple of Persian-language satellite channels broadcast from Los Angeles.)

Unlike in the US, where the Internet came online a good five years before blog-like interactivity, the Internet was introduced in Iran with blogs… and this may mean the Internet gets used very differently in Iran. As in the US, it took a while for the Internet to move beyond entertainment to politics – many of the Iranian blogs are basically entertainment, but politics are starting to become more important.

Here are three possible metaphors to think about the role of weblogs in Iran: weblogs can be windows, bridges and cafes.

Using a window, you can see inside Iran, and Iranians can see outside of Iran. You can see changes in social expression and individual morality. You can discover that individual Iranians are far more tolerant, open minded, and cool than people might think they are.

Blogs can build bridges: bridges between genders, ages, and social class. Women in iran can talk about how they see the world and have these conversations, anonymously, with men. Parents and children can talk about shared and different values. Blogs build bridges between voters and politicians, like Iran’s former vice President Mohammed Ali Abtahi, who blogs in English, Persian and Arabic.

Blogs even build bridges to the hardline religious people – hizbola-izi – individuals who are deeply religious and politically radical. They’ve got blogs, too, and we can use them to see what’s really going on in their minds.

Blogs can be cafes – they create a social space for discussion that doesn’t exist any other way. In Iran, there’s no newspaper or TV channel that’s not controlled by the government. There’s a red-line you can’t cross: talking about Iran’s relationship with the US, or Iran’s relationship with Israel. Because of this red line, Iran isn’t engaged in a discourse about the nuclear program. Blogs are the only place where this discussion can take place.

Blogs have replaced “taxi talks” – in Tehran, five or six people packed into a shared cab, and political debate always takes place in cabs. (Incidently, the US elections were a hot topic in cabs. Turns oiut that the Iranian government was so against Bush that many Iranians were for him…)

The upcoming presidential election in March is likely to see effects of the Internet, and weblogs, in this upcoming election. Hardline conservatives are so angry and frustrated that they can’t control the Internet that they’re sponsoring a huge crackdown on political websites. These days, most political sites are filtered, and readers need to use proxies.

There’s a conspiracy theory in Iran that all these websites – the “spider’s web”, a Koranic reference – is a CIA plot to undermine the regime. And the crackdown on blogs has already put dozens of people in prison.

If Ayatollah Khamenei was a blog reader, you’d see very different decisions being made. Like Bush, he’s unconnected from reality, insulated by advisors, and rarely needs to encounter real Iranians… which he’d be forced to encounter if he read weblogs.

During the question session, Jeff Jarvis – who is passionate about the role of the Internet in increasing freedom in the Middle East – asked Hoder “What do Iranians need? What can those of us in the US do to help?”

Hoder’s response: Blogger is a great tool, but because it hasn’t been localized, it’s hard to encourage people to use it. There are local services in Persian, but because their servers are in Iran, they can’t operate freely. What countries like Iran really need is free, localized blogging services that don’t get shut down by oppressive regimes. (Unsurprisingly, that will be one of the main topics of conversation at Global Voices tomorrow…)

dotFAF reminds us that Ghana’s presidential and parliamentary elections begin today:

There’s one country America wont be invading anytime soon. We dont have any oil. We love abusing freedoms (of speech and of the media). And we absolutely like voting. Go Ghana!!

Ghanians are voting today, and by god i’ve never seen such fanaticm since… well since people queued up to buy copies of Halo 2.

While there’s been some talk in the Ghanaian press about a need to avoid ethnic incitement leading up to the election, a general expectation seems to be that the vote will be free, fair and non-violent… and, as a result, there’s been very little international press attention.

One reason to believe the election will be free and fair? The active use of technology to monitor the elections. Kwami Ahiabenu has an excellent article on GhanaWeb about the use of cellphones and live radio to monitor polling sites and report results, about CD-ROM based voter registers, and results processing software to help search for fraud. Very, very cool.

As I travelled in Egypt and Jordan last week, I asked most of the people I met with whether they were getting interested in weblogging. The general answer I got – “We’ve heard about it, but there aren’t a lot of people doing it here.”

That may be true, in absolute terms, but there are some fascinating voices already making themselves heard in the Middle Eastern blogosphere. EGLUG’s Alaa just pointed me to the Egyptian Blog Ring, which links to 30 Egyptian blogs, most of them in English. The ring is hosted by Mindbleed, who also is a member of BlogAfrica, as is the wonderfully named One Pissed Arab. Amina Khairy of Al-Hayat has urged me to read the very popular Big Pharaoh, (also a ring member) who seems to average 30+ comments on each excellent post.

Head Heeb points to JordanPlanet, a great aggregation of fourteen Jordanian blogs. The very cool Jordanian blogger Natasha Twal points to another regional aggregator, Bahrain Blogs. And Roba, author of AndFarAway, points to AraBlog, a “reblogger” site that aggregates posts from around the region and the world.

All this said, I retract some of my earlier complaint that it’s hard for an American to get a sense for the conversations taking place in the Arab world. Turns out I just wasn’t listening in the right places.

I just posted an article on WorldChanging about Ammannet, an amazing radio journalism organization run by a Palestinian media activist, Daoud Kuttab, who is working on half a dozen key media projects designed to transform the Middle East. The Ammannet project should be of real interest to folks working on podcasting – they’re generating an amazing amount of online digital audio, in English and Arabic, and just need to add RSS to the mix to turn into one of the world’s largest podcasters…

Please check it out.

I’m dumb about the Middle East.

Despite the ludicrious overfocus of the American media on Israel/Palestine and Iraq, it’s pretty easy as an American to be dumb about the Arab world.

(The perpetually insightful Rebecca Mackinnon brings this up as a critique of my work on media attention, which suggests that media underfocus on certain regions is a major problem. She points out that North Korea, one of her pet topics, is not so much undercovered as poorly covered. More stories on a subject doesn’t mean better coverage, unless that coverage is more substantial, nuanced and multifaceted, which American coverage of North Korea – or the Middle East – rarely is.)

A major reason for my personal stupidity is the fact that I can’t read Arabic. There’s a major, and well-known, translation gap between Arabic and european languages. The 2002 Arab Human Development report points out that five times as many English language books are translated into Greek (spoken by less than 15 million people) every year than into Arabic (spoken by 225 million people.) And I’ve yet to find a free online tool that lets me translate Arabic stories on Al-Hayat, or other independent Arabic newspapers. (Al-Hayat is good enough to provide some of their stories in translation.) This means that it’s hard for me – and for all English-speakers – to get a sense for what the “Arab street” is talking about.

Because I can’t understand what’s going on in Arabic-language sources, I’d guessed that a vast regional dialogue was taking place that North Americans and Europeans were excluded from. I’d assumed that the nations of the Middle East and North Africa were tightly linked by heritage, religion and language into a single cultural block. As I met with activists and intellectuals in Egypt and Jordan this past week, most did their best to disabuse me of that notion… none more so than the Open Source Software developers.

Something I hadn’t understood about Arabic – while written Arabic is a lingua franca (for the obvious reason that the Holy Quran is written in Arabic and is unchanged from the Prophet’s authorship), spoken Arabic varies somewhat from country to country. Egyptians have a hard time understanding Jordanians, who in turn, have a hard time understanding Syrians, and so on.

The matter gets even more complicated once you consider the challenges of creating technical terminology in the context of a classical language. Classical Arabic doesn’t include a term for “hard drive”, for instance – how does the language adapt to allow conversation on these technical topics? (A side note: Icelanders take pride in the fact that their language has evolved so little in the last thousand years that schoolchildren can read millenium-old sagas with little difficulty, as the vocabulary is familiar – consider how unfamiliar Chaucher’s language in the Canterbury Tales looks in comparison. The downside? An apocryphal story suggests that the word for Microsoft’s operating system, and for sub-screens on a computer monitor in Icelandic is the word for an inflated sheep’s bladder, used in ancient Icelandic turf houses as windows.)

Alaa Abd El Fatah, a brilliant geek and a member of EGLUG, the Cairo-based Egyptian Linux Users’ Group, told me about a series of introductions to open source software being developed by EGLUG partners in the colloquial arabic spoken in Egypt, rather than the classical arabic understood throughout the region. It’s more readable and accessible to the Egyptians he’s trying to convert to the Open Source cause, but it’s hard for people outside the region to understand. A human rights activist in Jordan mentioned that the training materials she imported from Morocco led to laughter at the silliness of the word choice, not serious debate on women’s rights. And Raed Neshiewat, a software developer in Amman, mentioned reading an article in a computing journal from Syria and finding it very confusing:

“They were using a term to mean “the case of the computer”. The term probably translates into English as “chassis”. But in Jordan, we use that term to mean, “the body of the car”. So I was trying to figure out why this guy was trying to put a hard drive in the body of his car.”

It gets more complicated. For ideological reasons, Libya and Syria have been resistant to any loan words from English, French or any other European language for any sort of scientific discourse. So they’ve created their own Arabic-derived terminologies for chemistry, physics and computer science…

One approach to solving the language problem is to agree on a common source of terms – Raed suggests that PC World, published in Dubai, is becoming the “stylebook” for Arabic technical discussions. Alaa, an open source geek, is more interested in a grassroots approach – he’s a participant in a project called Arab Eyes, which is trying to Arabize large sets of open source programs, and is maintaining a wiki glossary of arabic computing terms, trying to get the F/OSS communities throughout the region to converge on a single set of technical terms.

The process of Arabizing technical terms happens very quickly. Amina Khairy, who just wrote an article on Egypt’s emerging blogging scene, tells me that there’s already a verb in Egyptian arabic that means “to blog” – “bal’waga”. But most of Egypt’s bloggers are writing in English, perhaps because many of them are expats living in Cairo, but also possibly because they’re looking to reach a global audience. (She mentions that a number of Ethiopian immigrants, working as nannies for wealthy families, are also blogging, in a combination of Arabic another language, probably Amharic.)

A common vocabulary is not the only linguistic problem Arab developers face while localizing software. Alaa points out that many of the current open source geeks are near-completely bilingual (as he is). They often write technical documents in a combination of Arabic and English. While many open source developers are smart enough to realize that Arabic is written right to left instead of left to right, very few are smart enough to smart bidirectional text – text fields that can be left to right or right to left, depending on what text is being entered.

But the real problem is search. Most content management systems that have been localized into Arabic have search functionality that is either deeply compromised or fails entirely. The reason is that Arabic has several diacritic marks that modify alphabetic characters. Each character plus diacritic is represented with a unique unicode character. But effective searches need to strip diacritics and search for any of the variants of a character, not the specific character/diacritic pair. MySQL and Postgres are smart enough to do this for European languages… but not for Arabic. So any CMS built on an open database tends to have no, or poor, search support.

The good news: people like Alaa are on the case, reporting bugs, patching software and trying to ensure that everyone in the Arabic speaking world will be able to use critical pieces of software. But a really comprehensive solution may require some serious investments, like an Arabization usability lab which lets developers figure out whether the software they’re producing makes as much sense in Yemen as it does in Mauritania.

I’m in Schipol Airport in Amsterdam, heading back from a week in the Middle East and to meeting in DC and Boston. I’m catching up on my blog reading and Jim Moore just posted something that makes me want to go down to the ticket counter and head to another nation for a couple of weeks…

The United Church of Christ (not my current denomination, but my mother and late grandmother’s denomination) has put together a beautiful 30 second spot about inclusiveness. The spot features parisioners being stopped at the entrance of a church by a pair of bouncers. A pair of men are turned away, as are a young man and woman of color – a white, heterosexual couple is admitted. The text reads, “Jesus didn’t turn people away. Neither do we.”

Evidently, broadcast television networks do turn people away. CBS/UPN and NBC have both rejected the spot as being “too controversial”. An excerpt of CBS’s refusal, reposted on the UCC website reads:

“Because this commercial touches on the exclusion of gay couples and other minority groups by other individuals and organizations,” reads an explanation from CBS, “and the fact the Executive Branch has recently proposed a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, this spot is unacceptable for broadcast on the [CBS and UPN] networks.”

Come again? We’ve just made it through the nastiest political campaign of my lifetime. The few bits of political advertising I didn’t manage to miss (by being in an utterly non-swing state) were mean, fearmongering and of questionable accuracy (both from the left and the right)… but evidently not controversial. A church decides that it wants to be inclusive and welcoming, and that’s controversial?

Evidently the “red line” the ad crossed for CBS and NBC involves the unholy combination of gay people and churches. Gays and lesbians are okay, as long as they’re funny urban figures in sitcoms. But when they want to go to church (a church that’s bending over backwards to welcome them) that’s a step too far. As Reverend Robert Chase, of UCC’s communication ministry points out:

We find it disturbing that the networks in question seem to have no problem exploiting gay persons through mindless comedies or titillating dramas, but when it comes to a church’s loving welcome of committed gay couples, that’s where they draw the line.

Fortunately, a number of broadcast and cable channels are airing the controversial ad, including the always edgy Hallmark channel. I guess their young, hip viewers are able to tolerate this uncomfortable “inclusiveness”, while CBS viewers recoil in fear.

Hey gang (by which I mean all four of my regular readers and anyone else who stumbles in…) I’m giving a talk early next week, and I need your help naming a concept. I’m talking about the spread of the Internet beyond the 800m people it currently connects, to “the next billion” and beyond.

I like the term “the next billion”, because it sounds so hopeful, like it’s right around the corner. Indeed, I would contend, it’s far closer that the 4.8 billion who still won’t be connected when we get the next billion people online.

It’s that group of people – the last 4.8 billion – that I’d like a catchy name for. I’d love to be able to talk about “the first billion”, “the next billion” and “whatever” and have a term that functioned as useful shorthand for the vast majority of the world’s population who aren’t on the electrical grid, will likely never have a land-based phoneline, generally live on less than $2 a day, are probably in rural areas, etc. Any thoughts?

(Suggestions like “the poor” are probably not helpful. I’d really like some sort of term or phrase that frames this in connectivity terms…)

Thanks in advance for any helpful suggestions.

ITConversations has put up the audio for my talk at Pop!Tech. They’ve also put online most of the other talks from Pop!Tech, as well as lots of other interesting talks, including a conversation Joi Ito and I had at O’Reilly’s Emerging Tech conference earlier in the year. If you appreciate what Doug Kaye is doing as much as I do, please visit his tip jar and show your support for IT Conversations.

More blogging on Egypt and Jordan coming soon… I need to make it through all the meetings so I can blog them for you!