Jerry Michalski (geek watcher, former Release 1.0 editor, conversational hacker) is giving a really interesting talk about deviant thinkers – outsiders. He gives us a rogue’s gallery of intellectual heretics, from seemingly unrelated fields and documents their individual heresies:

Psychotherapist Alice Miller: Abuse is epidemic and people don’t believe survivors.

Dogme 95 diector Lars Von Trier: Artifice diminishes movies.

Founder of the Quakers, George Fox: We don’t need intermediation in our relationship with God.

Richard Stallman: We should be able to share software.

Jerry sees a common thread through these outsiders – they’re all pointing to an implicit societal message: “We Don’t Trust You”. We don’t trust you to self-educate, to design, to enjoy authentic art, to minister to one another, to create collective goods or to know things you can’t measure.

Jerry’s interested in what happens when we start from a position of trust – when you believe that you’re dealing with “users”, not “consumers”, when you trust openness to be a competitive advantage, not a threat. Jerry believes that open content, tools and processes aren’t just good business practice, but have other critical values, releasing human energy.

I think Jerry’s insight is a useful one, and I’m interested to see what happens when he’s got some more time to use this notion of deep trust as a way to analyze software and economies… though I don’t quite understand what Jerry means by unlocking human energy…

A question I offered: if these thinkers are united by a belief that we had to trust others, why were they so dogmatic in their methods? Jerry’s got an excellent start of an answer – it’s not healthy – psychologically or otherwise – to be a leader. While the insight about trust is primary, other problems with being a leader make it hard for that leader to trust followers.

Very interested to see where Jerry goes with these ideas.

Mart Laar‘s a funny guy. He introduces Estonia to us as “one of the countries where Santa Claus lives”, and gives the nation’s history by listing, in rapid order, the nations that have invaded and conquered Estonia: “Germans, Swedes, Poles, Swedes again, Russians, Swedes, Germans, then Russians for a long time.”

He walks us through Estonia’s guerilla resistance to Soviet dominance with passion and humor (which only seems right, when you realize that he was a history teacher before becoming Prime Minister), up to nonviolent resistance against the Soviets with a human chain across the Baltics, as people held hands and demanded freedom for the Baltics.

Estonia gained independence… and immediately inherited the wind. In 1992 – when Laar first took office – there was 1000% inflation, and a 30% annual fall in employment… unsurprising because 92% of Estonia’s economy had been based on trade with Russia.

As he tells the story, Laar had no idea what he was doing, economically – “I was a blank paper” – and was therefore open to trying techniques that just shouldn’t work. So he picked up conservative economist Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose” and followed the advice in the book. This meant a focus on monetary reforms (eliminating the black market), opening markets (he eliminated all trade barriers) and flat taxes.

Whether or not Friedman’s prescription would work for every nation, it seemed to work very well for Estonia. The nation is growing at 6-7% a year, and 40% of the nation’s exports are high tech (including fun technology like Skype and Kazaa.) The Heritage Foundation lists the country as one of the most economically “free”, and it’s sometimes referred to as “the jewel of the Baltics”. Internet adoption is a very impressive 70%, and Laar shows us evidence of 100% paper-free eGovernment.

He gives a compelling talk. It’s a wonderful reminder that the distinctions of left and right we make in US politics don’t always translate across international borders. I tend to think of political revolutionaries as coming from the left. But here’s a revolutionary with Ronald Reagan (who he acknowledges was crazy, but admired nevertheless) and Milton Friedman as patron saints. It’s a good challenge for folks like me who tend to assume that the progressives are the folks on the right track…

Ingo Gunther is speaking as part of the “panel” I’m on at PUSH 2005 (it’s unclear whether the three of us will actually speak to one another, as we’re all running long…). He opens with some interesting statements about “the two big modernisms”: capitalism and communism, and his sense that “supercapitalism” has actually delivered quite a bit, as far as reducing poverty. His sense is that the more the future delivers, the less it’s embraced.

He’s got an extraordinary set of images from globes he’s built, visualizing interesting different sorts of data. One has nations marked with life expectancies, another distorts Japan into a continent to show it’s economic impact. THere’s a beautiful map that shows one with only international waters, another that shows only manmade borders.

They’re gorgeous, and extremely powerful. Looking forward to looking through them at length online – there’s 300 of them, and they’re blowing my mind. The best so far – a map where some countries have been replaced by the names of international corporations that have the same economic strength. Mongolia becomes Revlon, Kazakstan becomes Viacom…

Iqbal Quadir, one of the founders of Grameen Phone – the remarkable Bengali phone company that puts cellphones into the hands of women entrepreneurs – is speaking at PUSH 2005. He starts by reminding us that Bangladesh was producing 1/3rd of all European textiles in 1757, and that Dhaka dictated terms of trade to Europeans. So what happened? It’s not just colonialism – Bangladesh has been free of colonialism for 60 years. Why is growth so elusive, for Bangladesh, and for the rest of developing nations?

Iqbal points to a “top-down approach” favored by the World Bank and others… and notes that it puts power into the hands of authority, not into the hands of people. The US didn’t develop this way – technoloogical empowerment from below led to success in developed nations. Technology can amplify voices, make it possible for individuals to have a voice that gets heard by central authorities.

As an example of top-down and bottom-up, Iqbal points towards the explosive growth of mobile phones, versus stagnation in landline growth in Africa. The fixed lines are an example of a top-down approach, the mobile lines of more agile, bottom up approaches.

Iqbal’s story behind Grameen Phone goes back in time, to the war between East and West Pakistan. (East Pakistan later became Bangladesh.) To avoid the conflict, Iqbal’s family moved away from the city, and Iqbal grew up in a very rural part of Bangladesh. He remembers wasting a day walking to a nearby village to try to buy medicine, and discovering the pharmacist was out. Thinking about computer networks twenty years later, he realized that “connectivity equals productivity”. ITU research supports this contention – in low GDP per capita countries, econmic impact of each phone line is quite high. It gets lower as GDP per capita increases.

Thinking about classical economics, Iqbal wonders how Bangladesh can follow Adam Smith’s maxim, “Specialization leads to productivity.” For people in an economy to specialize, they need to depend on one another – if I’m going to stop farming and become a basketweaver, I need to rely on someone who’s going to continue farming and growing my food. Dependability needs connectivity. So connectivity can lead to specialization and to productivity.

Why are rich economies spending more and more money on communications, given that the cost of phone lines has gone down? We’re communicating more.

In Bangladesh, 1993, there were only 2 phones per 1000 people, and virtually none in rural areas. There was a $500 connection fee, and a 5-10 year waiting period. Most phones were analog, and many didn’t work. How much brainpower was being wasted by virtue of wasting productivity because of an absence of connectivity?

Iqbal found himself challenging some myths about economic development and the poor. Can shared costs overcome the problems of low individual buying power? Can the value of purchasing a productivity tool make it possible for people to “overinvest” in communication technologies, because these technologies can increase income?

What’s the real problem with digital divides in Bangladesh? The lack of other infrastructures. There are no credit checks, rpads for repairmen, banks to collect bills, schools for the children of workers. Grameen Bank looked like a solution to a lot of these infrastructural problems. Would it make sense to put GSM towers within Grameen offices?

Grameen had 1138 branches in Bangladesh, 2.3 million borrowers, 94% female, with $33 million lent per month. The core model – a woman borrows money from the bank, buys a cow, sells the milk and repays the loan. So why can’t a cellphone be a cow?

There was a great deal of skepticism about the idea, so Iqbal moved home and started a company. He eventually convinced Telenor – the Norwegian national telephone company – to help fund the project and provide technical expertise. With Grameen’s distribution and Telenor’s technology, the business has grown radically, and now covers the majority of the nation – it’s by far the largest company in Bangladesh. By 2004, 95,000 women are selling access to phones that they own in 50,000 villages. And Grameen Phone provides $200 million a year to the government in taxes. Net income in 2004 was $125 million. And each phone owner is making about $700 a year, which is an excellent income in Bangladesh.

Iqbal’s lessons:

Well, I’m here at PUSH 2005, and it’s off to a weird start. Intentionally, self-consciously weird. Cecily Sommers, the conference organizer, has appeared on stage with angel wings and a halo made from newspaper. She’s following our artistic entertainment, which is a tap dance and percussion troupe called Ten Foot Five. Her introduction to the two days of talks is punctuated/interupted/critiqued by an unintroduced man in black, who tells stories about the Egyptian guy who’s translating the Persian blog he wants to read. A little contrived, but certainly attention getting…

It’s interesting to get a sense for how my work might fit into this conference. The theme is “The Geography of Change”, which makes me feel pretty good about my presentation, which is typically map-filled. I’m now a bit less worried about being weird, and more worried about being predictable. Should be interesting…

The man in black has just eaten something that he claims is part of Albert Einstein’s brain. But hey, weird is good. And if the opening ceremony – which ended in a cocktail party featuring a fashion show – is any indication, it’s certainly going to be very, very interesting for the next 48 hours.

If you’re reading this blog and you’re at PUSH, a) please find me and say “hi”; b) let’s hang out in channel #push-the-future on freenode.irc.net…

Alaa Abd El Fateh is an Egyptian blogger, open source advocate and democracy activist. Along with his wife, Manal, he maintains “Manal and Alaa’s Bit Bucket”, a site hosts their blogs and the blogs of several Egyptian free speech and pro-democracy organizations. They also maintain an Egyptian blog aggregator.

Alaa has been active in the Kifaya movement – an alliance of student, human rights and other groups – which is demanding democracy in Egypt, but protesting against recent moves by Hosni Mubarak for multiparty elections, on the grounds that the elections won’t be sufficiently open to opposition candidates. (The word “kifaya” means “enough” in Arabic.) On May 25th, the day of a referendum on constitutional changes, members of the Kifaya movement staged a demostration in Cairo. They were attacked and beaten by Mubarak supporters. Several female journalists and activists reported being groped, or having clothing torn off by Mubarak loyalists and security forces.

Alaa, Manal and Alaa’s mother, Dr. Laila Soueif, were part of the Kifaya demonstration on May 25th, and were attacked by pro-government forces. Alaa talks about his experiences at the hands of the protesters, about the history of Kifaya, the relationship between Kifaya and other opposition groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, and about prospects for democracy in Egypt. We also talk a bit about human rights blogging in Egypt and the importance of online media, like the radio station from opposition political group El Ghad.

It’s a long interview – about 45 minutes – but really worth hearing. If I get a chance this weekend, I’ll try to post a digested version for those short on time. But it’s really worth a full listen (mp3, 45 minutes, 21MB)

Some links Alaa and I mention in the interview:

never forget – a collection of links and accounts of the May 25th protest violence and the “Black Wednesday” movement.

Misr Digital Online Newspaper

El Ghad online radio feed. (Has been down a great deal due to heavy demand.

Egyptian Blog Ring

Image: Lighting candles at a vigil in Cairo, June 8th, to remember the violence that occurred two weeks earlier on May 25th. From Manal at manalaa.net.

A few weeks back, the elections in Ethiopia looked like a great victory for supporters of increased openness and democratization. Reporting on the apparent increase of the opposition from 12 seats to 174 in the 547-seat parliament, Abraham McLaughlin wrote in the Christian Science Monitor:

The campaign included surprising signs of openness: massive opposition rallies being allowed in the capital; coverage of the opposition in government-controlled media; and, for the first time ever, more than 300 international observers being invited in to watch the vote.

The increased openness demonstrated by Zenawi’s government (he’s been in power since 1991, winning three elections widely percieved as being rigged) doesn’t neccesarily mean this election process is going to be a peaceful one. Students began rioting in the “Mexico” section of Addis Ababa on Tuesday, and taxi and bus drivers began a general strike on Wednesday. The government has responded by opening fire on demonstrators, killing at least 22.

Andrew Heavens, a freelance journalist based in Addis, has been in the heart of the situation, taking photographs for Reuters. His blog, Meskel Square, is currently filled with harrowing stories and images:

At one point a young man burst out of the morgue roaring with grief. He kept charging on the surrounding doctors, clenching his fists, desperate to find someone to take his grief out on. Seconds later he ran out of the room in tears.

Just for the record, I saw 11 bodies at the Black Lion and Zawditu hospitals, all with gun shot wounds, some to the head. As you know the official count at the moment is 22.

They all seemed to me to be in their twenties or at most their early thirties. Most of the protesters I saw earlier yesterday were much younger – see this picture of stone-throwing youths. The real worry is that this unrest will spread from the students to “street people” across the city, turning the protests into widespread unrest.

Andrew is posting his photos on Flickr. They include pictures of students protesting in the streets, youths armed with stones, and far too many photos of the wounded and dead.

The Ethiopian blogosphere is buzzing with speculation about whether Ethiopia is heading towards a Ukraine-style revolution. Opposition bloggers are especially vocal. Ethiopundit has a long post speculating that the election was stolen and arguing that the concession that the opposition had won seats in Addis was a smokescreen to disguise overall election fraud. Dagmawi favors statistical analysis, including speculation that record turnout favored the ruling party and indicates fraud.

Ethiopian Review believes that (opposition party) CUD spokesman Ato Lidetu Ayalew is being held without food and water by the government and asks people to contact the ICRC to ask for help seeking his release.

The Ethopian government appears to be cracking down on the independent press, revoking press permits for Deutchse Welle and Voice of America. Heavens is asking commenters on his blog to keep “comments moderate”, surely aware that his presence in Addis could also be threatened.

The Global Voices aggregator is following half a dozen Ethiopian blogs and may be useful to anyone interested in following developments as they happen.

Photo by Andrew Heavens

I feel compelled to link to an article that’s getting lots of play in the African blogosphere this week. I found it through Ory, who found it through Timbaland. It’s an essay by Lara Pawson, a reporter for BBC’s Africa Service which shows American and European aid workers in Africa at their worst, conducting a photographic scavenger hunt, which requires them to photograph stereotypical – and sometimes humiliating – African scenes.

Making the whole story even more disturbing is Pawson’s report that partipants in the hunt paid passerbys to stage shots of drinking a beer on the street, urinating in public or carrying loads on their heads, sparking spontaneous battles over who would get paid as a photographer’s model. Pawson uses this tale to open a wide-ranging critique of arrogant expatriates and the whole system of international aid (all the while patting herself on the back for being less racist and elitist than the anonymous people she’s talking about.)

I’m not going to defend the actions of the dumbasses she writes about, and I’m certainly not going to claim that aid to Africa works well or at all… but I think it’s worth noting that Pawson is basing her indictment of African aid based on pictures of aid and aid workers at their worst.

A more nuanced examination of aid in Africa might allow that there are ranges of behavior for both aid organizations and individual actors working on aid projects in Africa. Towards one end of the axis that represents bilateral and multilateral aid is “tied aid”, where the money given to a nation goes back to the donor nation in terms of goods and services. While the US is well known for giving tied aid (and Pawson notes in a footnote that the Italians tie aid more heavily than the Americans), the Japanese are best known in the development community for giving large sums of money for road construction and then awarding the construction contracts to Japanese contractors. The downside of heavily tied aid – a project gets completed, but very few locals are employed in construction, and there’s a good chance that the construction can’t be maintained by local talent. The upside – a road gets built.

On the other side of this axis is “direct aid” – aid given directly to a government, not to a subcontractor which might have a relationship with the donor nation. It seems obvious, on the surface, that direct aid is “better” or “fairer” than tied aid. Before jumping to this conclusion, it’s worth asking the question – where does that money go? In transparent, democratic countries with low corruption – Botswana, or possibly Ghana – there’s a decent chance that money given to the government benefits the people. In the more kleptocratic nations – Equatorial Guinea or Chad, for instance – it’s less clear that this money is going to benefit anyone other than big men in the government who may well pocket these funds.

If you want to benefit the people of Zimbabwe, but don’t want to give money to Mugabe, what do you do? Either you give money to local NGOs, or to outside contractors, most likely contractors based in your own country. If there are few NGOs in the country, or if they’re small and ineffectual, you’ll do “NGO strengthening” projects… which probably involve bringing in expats to work with the local organization. In other words, if you’re going to provide aid responsibly, you’re probably going to strike a balance somewhere between tied and direct aid.

There’s an axis for behavior as an expatriate living in Africa as well. It’s sometimes possible to construct an existence that lets you see Africa through the windows of 4x4s, from an air-conditioned walled compound, or from poolside at the various “clubs” that serve as social centres for expats from one national origin or another. (It’s usually only possible to construct this lifestyle if you’re directly employed by a national government, or work for a large multinational or extremely well funded NGO.)

On the other side of the axis, it’s possible to live without air conditioning, running water or electricity, making efforts to break down cultural barriers by learning local languages and customs, wearing locally-made clothing, etc. Again, it seems obvious that this is the way we’d “want” expats to behave in Africa. But there’s a term for going far in this direction – “going native” – and reasons why it’s frowned on by some international development folks.

As an American or European, you’re not African, despite how well you speak a local language or know your way around. Your value to whoever is paying for you to live in Africa is that you’re a bridge figure between local culture and your home culture – turn your back too thoroughly on your home culture and you lose that ability to bridge. (USAID – and many other goverment departments – rotate employees from overseas postings every few years and mandate a few years at home between tours to ensure that people representing America are still culturally American…)

Second – and more practically – most Europeans are physically ill-adapted to “going native” – there’s a decent chance that waterborne illnesses or malaria which are serious for your African friends are deadly for you as an expat. When I work in Africa these days, I stay in air-conditioned hotels, drink bottled water and eat carefully. It’s not that I can’t live in rougher accomodations – my apartment when I lived in Ghana in 1993-4 didn’t having running water or air conditioning – it’s that I’m a lot more likely to be effective during the few days I’m in country if I’m not fighting off amoebic dysentery or dog tired from trying to sleep in a hundred degree room.

Most expatriates in Africa tend to be powerfully aware of these axes. In the same way that suburban American conversations can involve shuffling of the social order based on the quality of lawn care, much of the social ordering in expat culture has to do with how “expat” or “local” you’re personally living your life:

“Wow, Jane’s really settling in well – she’s learning how to speak Ewe and taking drumming lessons.”

“Yeah, but her husband is spending all his time at the swimming pool at the American Club…”

When you bring employees or volunteers to work in Africa, one of the big challenges is helping them find their place on the expat/local axis. One of the ways we tried to help Geekcorps volunteers in Ghana acclimate was, ironically enough, a scavenger hunt. Invented by our first Ghana country director, Stophe Landis, the hunt asked incoming geeks – who’d been in Accra for about 48 hours – to take themselves out for lunch at one or more of Accra’s excellent restaurants and come back with evidence – a photograph or another souveneir – that they’d reached the destination.

The lowest scoring restaurants were places within walking distance of our (walled, but non-airconditioned) compound, and obvious expat joints – the highest scoring ones were across town and difficult to find without asking directions from people in the neighborhood. The highest scoring – a Rastafarian vegetarian joint, Jah Rah – was on the fourth floor roof of a building in downtown Jamestown, accessible from a staircase at the back of a dimly lit alleyway. I’ve been there a dozen times and can only find it by taking a taxi to the general area and asking someone to lead me by the hand to it…

Some volunteers always go around the corner to the South African-run burger joint. Others pile into tro-tros, head downtown and find Jah Rah. Over time, everyone figures out how much of an expat or a local they want to be. If we did our jobs well, very few will end up at the extremes of the spectrum.

Just a last thought on Pawson’s article: very few people in the US and Europe get involved with international aid because they’re racist jerks. It’s a possible consequence of one style of expat living that people end up alienated from the people they’re trying to help. But there’s more than one way to live as an expat in Africa and more than one way to give bilateral aid.

Photo: “Luxury” accomodations at Geekhalla, Geekcorps’ group house in Accra.

Great tidbit on Registan, found through yesterday’s Global Voices roundup – the fines for viewing political sites in Uzbek internet cafes are twice as high as the fines for viewing porn. At 1100 som to the dollar, playboy.com will cost you almost $5, but viewing ferghana.ru will set you back almost $10. (Intentionally damaging a computer costs twice that – 20,000 som. No word on whether viewing political sites will damage your computer.)

Ferghana’s English language news service also points out that Karimov has now ordered cable stations throughout Uzbekistan to switch to broadcasting state propoganda or be shut down. Specifically, the stations are being told to broadcast a portfolio of programs from Uzbekiston Kabel Sistemalari, a company owned 80% by Karimov’s daughter. Who knows – perhaps she’s got some interesting candid shots of the dictator she’s like to get on the air.

The US government has, helpfully, issued a travel warning urging Americans not to visit our ally in the war on terror just now… Both the US and Israelis are removing some embassy staff from Uzbekistan, apparently in response to terror threats.

US troops, though, are still based in Uzbekistan and not likely to go anywhere soon, even though some right-wing Bush allies have become critical of our relationship with Karimov.

Special bonus story – BBC, also via Registan – Pro-government demonstration in Jizzakh features the banner: “Human rights activists are enemies of the motherland”. Something for us all to keep in mind as we blog human rights stories.

So I’m recording the second skypecast for Global Voices, talking with Sokari Ekine about the “war on terror” and the line goes dead. Skype makes a “click”, we’re cut off and I can’t redial. So I call her in Spain on my cellphone to apologize and finish our conversation, even though we’re no longer recording. We joke about the fact that the line goes dead just as soon as we start talking about terrorism – is the US government monitoring her phone? My skype account?

Jokes aside, I return to my computer with hundreds of scenarios for what might have gone wrong. I’ve had a bad week with this Mac – water crept into the display on Monday, and I had several dozen crashes when trying to set up my first Skypecast. But reading the server logs and doing a bit of diagnosis, it’s pretty clear what happened – I’m broke.

Unlike with Dina, I was calling Sokari via SkypeOut, which allows me to use Skype to call conventional telephones. And, since the call is still routed through Skype, I can record it. But while SkypeOut is cheap, it’s not free. I’d failed to check my account balance before initiating the call, and burned 9 euros of credit before – without any warning – Skype hung up on me.

If any Skype developers are reading this blog, a couple of thoughts: In the US, payphones (remember payphones?) used to warn you a few moments before cutting off your phonecall. A mechanized voice would cut in and urge you to deposit a quarter for the next three minutes. It certainly wouldn’t be hard to flash a warning that you’re almost out of credit and will be terminated shortly if you don’t transfer more money to Estonia. Or you could give us a little grace period. Those of us who have already sent in money and had our credit validated probably aren’t going to refuse to pay an additional euro to have our call continue uninterupted.

So that’s why the interview with Sokari ends so abruptly. I’m cheap. And Skype has some interface issues… :-)

Listen to our chat…