Rebecca asked me to cover the Global Voices daily blog roundup yesterday. It was a good chance to discover just how powerful the Global Voices aggregator has gotten… and how much work it is to sort a coherent post out of the hundreds of voices we’re trying to pay attention to.

Our tools, at this point, are pretty primitive. We’re soliciting suggestions for new feeds to watch via the Media Wiki-based Bridge Blog Index, and tracking the feeds via Bloglines. (I managed to crash Firefox on my Mac several dozen times before realizing that I simply can’t load all the posts from the 439 feeds we’re currently trying to track – Firefox grabs multiple megs of memory for each Flickr picture involved, then slows to a crawl… So now I view the site country by country, region by region.)

Brief geeky digression. Non-geeks may skip the next two paragraphs, if you wish.

At some point this summer, I’d like to glue together a good, server-based aggregator (so that other folks can see our feeds) with a del.icio.us – like ability to tag and categorize feeds and the wiki-like ability of multiple users to suggest feeds for inclusion in the catalog. I’ve talked briefly with some wikifolks about an API for mediawiki… though increasingly I’m thinking I could get the functionality just from del.icio.us and a server-side aggregator.

I’m likely to try this based around the del.irio.us codebase, trying to get it integrated with an aggregator, either by writing that functionality or duct-taping it to an existing web-based aggregator. I’m looking at rnews and feed on feeds – anyone have experience with either, or suggestions for something else I should be looking at? (I’m more comfortable with Perl/PHP/Python than Java, so Java suggestions aren’t that helpful to me. And yes, I’ve thought about integrating with a client-side aggregator and rejected it for the simple reason that this tool needs to be used simultaneously by people on five different continents.)

In the process of surfing these global feeds, I’m finding that there are few corners of the globe where there isn’t at least one blogger. I’m surprised – and delighted – to find Avaiki blogging from the Cook Islands, a group of 15 islands in the South Pacific which is self-governing “in free association” with New Zealand. (In other words, Cook Islanders handle internal affairs, while New Zealand is responsible for external affairs, in consultation with the Islands goverment.) And Yvette Lopez, living and working in Somaliland, is helping me learn about this country emerging from the chaos of Somalia…

And while we initially had a tough time finding people reporting the events first-hand in Andijan, a number of Peace Corps volunteers are blogging regularly from Uzbekistan, providing key information on the situation. (Dee Warren of Noughsaid has just been ordered to leave her village in the Fergana Valley.) And Lyndon at Scraps of Moscow has been doing an incredible job of translating every single snippet he can find about Andijan in the Russian-language blogosphere.

Following links to the blog is also turning up amazing blogs to watch, like Blog Nnegh, a blog apparently in Tamazeight, a Berber language.

All these blogs make me want to get on a plane and meet more bloggers out there. All of which makes me sad that I’ve had to cancel my trip to South Africa later this month. I’d planned to speak at Commons-Sense, a conference associated with the launch of Creative Commons South Africa, but some personal issues have meant that I need to spend a bit more time at home, and I couldn’t make the travel work out for a shorter trip. I’ll be sorry to miss all the friends who are attending the conference and all the South Africa bloggers I’d hoped to meet, but hope we can do some blogger dinners when I’m in town in September.

Okay, off to Amman now…

I’m reassured that Dina finds India paradoxical as well – I worried that I was the only one. Travelling from Bangalore to Bombay, Rajastan and New Delhi earlier this year, I described India to friends as having the highest standard deviation of anywhere I’d ever been. That is to say, I’ve been to places much poorer than villages I saw in India, but I’ve never seen poverty in such proximity to widespread wealth.

Dina’s recent blogpost provides a great photographic example of this disparity. A cultural anthropologist based in Bombay, Dina often is asked by companies to study how products are used in different Indian environments. Blogging from a recent trip to a village in Utter Pradesh, Dina notes that the village has no electricity, no working phone lines, and six cellphones. She, on the other hand, is able to post her digital photos from her laptop via a CDMA phone:

And here I am sitting in this taxi with a laptop and my Reliance CDMA connection, being able to beam these images to the world in real time through my blog. India is a strange paradox!

(The photo is from Jaisalmer, in western Rajastan, February 10, 2005.)

Boing Boing featured a recent call for assistance from the current administration of Geekcorps. Evidently a couple of volunteers for posts in Ghana were forced to pull out and the current team is anxious to fill these positions. (As I’ve mentioned before, I no longer am connected to Geekcorps or IESC in any way. I heard about the volunteer shortage when I started receiving comments and questions about the Boing Boing post…)

One aspect of Wayan Vota’s quote in the Boing Boing post caught my eye: “We provide international airfare, expatriate housing, and a nice per diem, with the beauty of Accra, Ghana as an added bonus.”

The “nice per diem” was one of the issues that finally caused me to leave Geekcorps and its parent company, the International Executive Service Corps, a little over a year ago. When we founded Geekcorps in late 1999, part of the thinking behind the organization was that we wanted to create an experience more like being a Peace Corps volunteer and less like a consultant. We knew we couldn’t pay actual Peace Corps wages to people living in Accra, but we tried to keep costs down, both for budgetary and conceptual reasons.

During the seven programs in Ghana Geekcorps ran while I was involved with the organization, we provided volunteer lodging in the same building that housed our offices – we paid $1800 a month for a walled compound that included six bedrooms, living space and three offices. Each volunteer received approximately $550 a month, $50 of which was earmarked to pay a housekeeper/cook who lived on the property. In other words, volunteers got about $100 a week, a lot of money in Ghanaian terms, but not enough to save, turn a profit or pay expenses at home. (This presented a real obstacle for some potential volunteers. It’s hard to spend three months working for $100 a week if you’ve still got car or mortgage payments at home…)

After Geekcorps merged with IESC in 2001, we received a great deal of pressure to pay our volunteers more – specifically, to pay USAID per diem. Set by the State Department, “per diem” is what all government employees receive when travelling, domestically or abroad, for each day on the road. It includes one fee for lodging and another for “meals and incidental expenses” – there’s invariably a five star hotel in any town the US government sends people that will provide a room at the “USAID rate” – i.e., one dollar under the lodging per diem.

The current per diem for Accra is $102 for lodging – which will get you a room at the Labadi Beach or La Palm hotel at a USAID rate – and $54 for meals and incidental expenses. That sum, which adds up to $378 a week, is a lot of money in Africa. It might be what a short-term business traveller spends, but it’s a lot more than a “volunteer” needs to live in Accra. The added money in the pocket makes it easier for a volunteer to to hang out at more expensive, expat-oriented establishments… and spend less time hanging out with Ghanaian co-workers, at neighborhood joints, etc.

So why was our parent company upset that we wanted to save some money? To understand, you need to understand the odd way USAID compensates its contractors. Every organization that does a meaningful amount of business with USAID has a NICRA – a negotiated indirect cost recovery agreement. This basically means that the organization has negotiated an overhead rate on the work they do for the USG. Whatever “direct costs” an organization experiences – plane tickets for volunteers, housing costs, field staff – are billed to USAID, along with an added percentage of those costs, which compensate the organization for administration, marketing and other “indirect” expenses. In other words, if we paid $2000 for a plane ticket to Ghana, we were allowed to bill the US government for the plane ticket and an additional $600 for our “overhead” in purchasing that ticket.

(IESC’s overhead rate was greater than 30% when I left the organization – it may well be lower now, as the rate is periodically renegotiated. Said negotiation usually involves telling USAID how much money you spent directly and indirectly in the previous year and calculating the percentage. If your NICRA rate increases, it may make it harder for you to win US government contracts, but you’ll still get paid for the work you’ve done. It’s very hard to lose money on a US government contract… which is why so many US goverment contractors move to doing business solely with the government.)

Why did my boss want us to pay volunteers more? Because the organization got paid more for spending more. And because paying Geekcorps volunteers less than other IESC volunteers raised questions: Were Geekcorps volunteers less valuable than other IESC volunteers? Or were they underpaid? Or were IESC volunteers overpaid? Better to be consistent and pay the Geekcorps volunteers at maximum per diem, even if field staff thought this was counter to the cultural goals of the program.

I’m still pissed off by this, a year after leaving the organization. As a taxpayer, I’m annoyed that US government contractors are incented to waste my money. As a supporter of international development, I’m angry that the modest amounts of money the US earmarks for international development get carved up by organizations skilled at playing the USAID game before reaching people in the field. But mostly I’m sad that the organization and model I helped build – which hoped to do international development a little bit differently – is now doing international development the same way all other USAID contractors are.

Does this mean you shouldn’t consider a Geekcorps assignment if you’re an experienced database programmer free from June through September? Not at all. But it might mean that you should think of it less as a volunteering tour and more as an overseas consulting gig. Geekcorps no longer maintains Geekhalla – our group house in Accra – and volunteers don’t appear to be recruited in “classes”, who travelled and trained together, as we did in Geekcorps’ early days. Worse? Not neccesarily, but definitely different.