I’m here in Amman after one of the longer trips of my life - Cape Town to London to Amman. It really seemed like a good idea when I planned the trip, but seemed less wise at 2am, as I arrived in the city. Eight hours after clearing customs, I’m on stage, talking about Open Content, wondering whether I’m actually speaking English or whatever odd language my mind speaks in the dark hours of the night. (The slides are here, though they may not make much sense without the talk to accompany them.) I thought it went fairly well - I get the sense that, while open source is beginning to be a popular topic here, very few folks are aware of how much work is taking place on projects like Wikipedia, and people seemed quite excited to see some of these possibilities.

A number of the attendees here, like blogger Ahmad Humeid, have been disappointed that turnout has been relatively small. While that’s certainly true in comparison to the enormous conference Int@j helped organize two years ago, I’m really pleased to see seventy people in Amman interested enough in Open Source to spend two days listening to international and local experts on the subject. When I was talking to IT professionals in Jordan two years ago, almost everyone was working solely on Microsoft architectures - now it seems that the smartest young Jordanian developers are working on open platforms.

I’m hugely looking forward to tomorrow’s blogger gathering in Amman. We’re meeting at Wild Jordan in Jabal Amman at 7pm - if you’re interested in attending, please let Isam Bayazidi - ibayazidi AT gmail DOT com - know. Fantastic folks like Isam, Ahmad and Mohammed Sameer will be there, and we you will be, too. (And yes, we’ll post pictures, here and on Global Voices…)

Apologies for sparse blogging - there have been a number of factors that have kept me largely offline. I haven’t had connectivity at the hotel we’re staying at in Cape Town, and while I’d had high hopes of making it out to a cybercafe today, my travelling companion and I both got a nasty case of food poisoning last night and have spent today, for the most part, asleep in bed.

Today’s events aside, it’s been an excellent trip for meeting new folks. Tony Carr and Stephen Marquadt at the University of Cape Town’s Center for Educational Technology were good enough to host me for a small, informal bloggers dinner Thursday night. The only actual bloggers there were me and Tanzanian blogger Obe Indya Nkye, a PhD candidate in economics at UCT, who blogs in Kiswahili. It turns out that Indya and I have a friend in common - Ndesanjo Macha - who helped convince Indya the value of blogging about complex economic development issues in language average Tanzanian readers could understand. He’s now planning on starting to blog in English as well, which should be very much worth reading.

Tony and Stephen invited me to give a talk at the Center for Educational Technology, speaking on the subject of community blogging both from the perspective of Global Voices-style bridge blogging and from the perspective of academic class as community. Good turnout, great questions from the crowd and I’m really enjoying showing off the pretty new Global Voices site.

The main focus of my trip here is to visit with interesting IT projects for Open Society Institute. Some are projects we’ve already funded - some are prominent players or innovators in the local IT scene. I had the great pleasure of meeting part of the team behind Highway Africa on Thursday morning - an amazing conference for African journalists, Highway Africa is starting to look at ways to take blogs seriously as a tool for journalists, and the folks working on the project tell me that several of their journalists are now blogging. I also got to meet with one of the guys behind the Shuttleworth Foundation’s TuxLabs project, an effort to build thin-client Linux based computer labs in schools around the country, and to visit with some of the folks at CSIR, South Africa’s leading technical thinktank. A number of CSIR teams are working on projects I’m enthusiastic about, most notably OpenTelephone, an effort to create an easy-to-use graphical interface to creating interactive voice systems. More about all these folks - and functioning links! - when I’m back in the land of broadband. (Which might be the Cape Town airport, Heathrow Airport, or Amman…)

Blogger dinner tomorrow night (Thursday July 21st) in Cape Town - 7pm at Yindees. If you’d like to join us, please email me at ethanz AT gmail.com. We’re still planning the Amman bloggers gathering for the evening of July 28th, at Wild Jordan. Again, please let me know if you’re planning on being there.

The news stories go by - the London bombings, the G-8/Live8 focus on Africa, the six month anniversary of the Boxing Day tsunami - and Darfur remains. As it’s become abundantly clear that the US won’t have major involvement with the Darfur situation, it’s less commmon to see news stories on Western Sudan in the mainstream press. After all, “Millions of Darfurians still living in camps, still dying slowly” doesn’t make for much of a headline.

For folks interested in what’s going on in the IDP (internally displaced persons) camps in Darfur, the blog “Sleepless in Sudan” has become required reading. We know that “Sleepless” is an “Aid worker, female, 31, extremely single,” living and working in Darfurian IDP camps. We also know she’s got a sharp eye, a still-functioning sense of outrage, and a gift for making real the horrible conditions hundreds of thousands of Darfurians are living under.

Sleepless’s recent posts have been about the Kalma camp, which houses about 150,000 IDPs. The Sudanese government is interested in breaking up the camp, either for the legitimate reason that it’s in danger of flooding (a recent post describes Khartoum as a “veritable African Venice”, with cabs and tuk-tuks stuck in an underwater traffic jam) or out of fear that rebels are training and regrouping within the camps.

The effort to migrate Kalma residents to a new, smaller camp at Al Salam has involved cutting off “black market” food - i.e., anything to supplement the basic foods the aid agencies are handing out and threatening to bulldoze the camp. According to Sleepless, a grand total of one person has relocated to Al Salam so far.

The reason is simple - concerns for security. Despite the fact that shootings occur every day in the camp and nearby towns, they’re considered vastly safer than the villages the IDPs have fled, which are held by the Janjawid who initially chased the villagers out. This leads to situations like the one describeda sad meditation on mangos, posted about a week ago:

“Well, we always used to plant mangoes,” I’m told by one of the locals (who has himself been displaced by the fighting and lives with his family in one of the camps). “This season, I even took the risk of walking back to my field from the camp just to plant. But in the past few weeks it’s been too dangerous to go outside of the camp with all these shooting and attacks against people like us. So I can’t go and harvest anything, and now the new people from other tribes who’ve moved into my village and taken over my fields are selling me my own mangoes in the market.”

We all have to laugh - there is no other way to deal with the absurdity of the situation, even though I’m sure that’s the last thing my colleague feels like doing when he is actually paying the man who hands him his mangoes in the market.

He just shakes his head. Then he laughs again. “You know, it is even worse for my cousin. He bought some mangoes from the people who are now farming his fields, and then as he was walking home along the outskirts of the camp, some bandits started pushing and harassing him. They took his money, and the mangoes too. So he has planted them once, paid for them once, and still he has no mangoes.”

We can’t help but laugh again, but sadly, I have to admit that today’s sweet mangoes leave me with a more bitter aftertaste than usual.

Alas, Sleepless’s stories are often ones you can’t laugh about. She’s hearing reports of women being beaten and raped as they leave the camps to collect firewood. She raises the horrific possibility that these attacks are being perpetrated by the anti-Janjawid, anti-Khartoum rebels, in part to help keep aid dollars flowing to the area:

he discussion goes back and forth, but finally I establish that a lot of the men feel that the rebels are intentionally letting a small number of militias stay in the area to make sure the security incidents don’t go away COMPLETELY.

“If there are no deaths, no rape, nothing, then you khawajas [foreigners] will not come here, they are saying. It’s just a tactic that the rebels are using.”

Sleepless in Sudan is by no means an easy or comfortable read. But the author is taking a great deal of personal risk to tell us these stories and is clearly hoping that someone is listening.

(For more background on the situation in Darfur, you may want to read the New Republic’s blog this week, which is featuring pieces by Professor Eric Reeves from Smith College, who is following the situation in Darfur very closely and has an excellent explanation of how the situation came about.)

I mentioned a few weeks back that I was planning on hosting blogger dinners in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Amman later this month. Unfortunately, my time in Jo’burg is quite brief, as I’ve had to arrive a few days late so I can be home for a memorial service for Dick Sabot this Sunday. So I need to call off the Jo’burg dinner - I’m sorry to miss the Jo’burg bloggers who’ve already gotten back to me, and I hope to see you the next time I’m in town.

The Cape Town dinner is scheduled for 7pm on the 21st, at Yindees, a Thai restaurant. If you’re interested in coming, please drop me an email at ethanz AT gmail.com. And the Amman dinner is on at Wild Jordan in Jabal Amman on July 28th - probably 7:30, but I’ll announce a final time.

If you’re able to join us for either dinner, please let me know at ethanz AT gmail DOT com - look forward to seeing you there.

I’m back from Miami and the TTI/Vanguard conference, where I gave an updated version of my standard stump speech, which starts with Fiji water and ends with Global Voices. (I talked a bit about the version of the talk I gave at Push the Future about a month ago in a post called “The Trouble With ‘Globophilia’”. This version of the talk didn’t talk about globophiles (either the pro-globalists or the lovers of balloons), but did talk about “the next billion”. Slides are here, if you’re interested. PDF, 9.2MB)

Vanguard is an intimidating and fun format for a conference. Speakers have a 45 minute time slot, but everyone in the audience has a microphone, and after a ten minute “head start”, they’re welcome to tap in. The first time I spoke for this crowd, I was completely flustered by the fact that my first two questions were from John Perry Barlow and Alan Kay. (Five years later, I’m grateful when the questions come from Barlow because I know he’s a die-hard globophile, whether or not he’d like the term…) And preparing a talk is always a great way to figure out what I think nowadays. I have high hopes of turning the last two versions of the talk into a long paper, which I’ll undoubtably be trying out on all of you here…

So now I’m spending the next few days at home getting ready for an upcoming trip to South Africa, London and Jordan. (My trip to South Africa has been somewhat complicated by funeral arrangements for Dick - we’re doing a memorial at his farm this Sunday, so I’ve cut short the Johannesburg part of the trip. No blogger dinner in Jo’burg, I’m afraid, but we’re still planning dinner for the 21st in Cape Town and the 28th in Amman.) I find that the stupid details of life - paying bills, getting reimbursed for expenses, solving dumb tech problems - never seem to get done when I’m at home for long periods of time, but in the 72 hours before I get on an airplane.

With that in mind, I spent a chunk of today trying to get my phone - a Nokia 6820 - to recover from AT&T Wireless’s merger with Cingular. Ever since the two companies became one, anything more complicated than a simple call on the phone has gotten increasingly different to accomplish. But with about an hour on Cingular’s site - and an additional hour on a couple of blogs, and I’ve got SMS, MMS, WAP and IMAP working again.

Given that on my last three trips to Jordan, my phone has failed to roam, I spent $1.99 and about three minutes at Uniquephones and unlocked the handset. (Yes, I’m aware there are free ways to do this. But most involve downloading an .exe to a PC, which isn’t an easy thing for me to do. $1.99 via PayPal was lots simpler for me.) I was surprised by how easy the process was. Unlocking a phone involves hashing the phone’s unique ID - the IMEI - and the operator code, and coming up with a 15 digit password (plus checksum) that tells the phone to become operator independent. Uniquephone finds the operator code via a series of pulldown menus, hashes the keys and spits out a set of codes likely to unlock your phone. Surprisingly slick and easy, compared to hanging out on #IRC and looking for phone haX0rs to help you out…

(Before anyone gives me a hard time for hurting poor Cingular, let me point out that I’ve paid back the $200 they subsidized my phone purchase 6 times over already, and that I’ll be using their network except in countries where they don’t have roaming agreements…)

In the process of learning more about this phone, I discovered two cool applications I had no idea it could run - j2me versions of ssh and irc. More than once, I’ve dreamed of accessing my servers via my phone - the MobileSSH client built by Idorokko works as well as I could imagine a shell working on the postage-stamp sized screen of my phone. I’m going to need to reorganize some files and write some new aliases to make it really useful, but I’m thrilled to have it. And the open-source jmIrc client works far better than I would have imagined. I’m very much looking forward to hanging out in the #globalvoices channel during my next airport day…

You may have already noticed that we’ve relaunched Global Voices with a new design, put together by the wonderful Boris Anthony of HelpPush. The heavy lifting was done by Boris and Rebecca, but the actual move, yesterday, gave me fond memories of my sysadmin days. (But not as fond as the memories I’m getting from learning that I can search old Usenet archives, using Google Groups…)

Our bright, shiny new look hides some of the most heated comments threads we’ve ever seen on the site. Rebecca’s roundup of Muslim blogger reactions to the 7/7 bombings in London was linked by Instapundit. A number of his readers - many of whom seem convinced that Islam is an inherently violent religion - have had a hard time accepting condolences and condemnations of the bombings from Muslim bloggers.

Some of our Muslim contributors have been participating in the conversation, either on comments threads or with posts. Ahmed of Saudi Jeans reacted to an editorial by Tom Friedman in the New York Times (and a subsequent blogpost by Jeff Jarvis) by asking the question: “Is [terrorism] a Muslim problem so Muslims have to solve it themselves, or is it a global problem and the whole world is responsible to find the solution?”

Thinking about the conversations (and, occasionally, shouting matches) taking place on Global Voices over the past month, I’m realizing that we’re starting to see genuine cross-cultural dialog both through GV and in the blogosphere as a whole. The Live 8 debates and an earlier conversation about the importance of brain drain in Africa involved bloggers from both sides of the continent, as well as Afrophiles and people who knew very little about Africa, but thought Live 8 was an important effort.

Both the Live 8 and 7/7 conversations reveal something very interesting: People in the US and Europe are talking about what people think in Africa or the Middle East… and bloggers in those parts of the world are talking back. And, honestly, folks in the North aren’t always happy with what they hear.

They - we - better get used to it. As the next billion users come online, they’re not just sending email and reading webpages. They’re bloggers, authors, commenters, and you can expect to see lots more conflicts like the US/Brazil war in Orkut.

My dear friend and mentor Dick Sabot passed away (suddenly and unexpectedly) Wednesday night.

Dick was one of the founders of Tripod, and he gave me my first “real” job there… which may still be the best job I’ve ever had. He founded Geekcorps with me, generously supported our work and steered us through and beyond our merger with IESC… and the decision of all the founders to leave the organization. For the past ten years, he’s worked with me on every major project I’ve pursued, either as a partner, or as a supportive critic - for the last decade of adventures, he’s been journeying beside me, or the first person I looked forward to telling about the trip when I came back.

Dick wasn’t just my dear friend and mentor - he guided and advised hundreds of people as scholars, activists and entrepreneurs. Bo Peabody and I, talking immediately after his death, agreed that Dick given us more than many parents give their children… which is made all the more extraordinary by the fact that Dick gave his wife and four children even more.

I’ve been trying, and failing, to write a proper post in Dick’s memory and have realized that it’s going to take longer than a few days for me to process my thoughts and emotions. There’s a memorial service for him in Williamstown this coming Sunday - I’m looking forward to seeing some of the other people whose lives were touched by Dick, hearing their memories and thinking about his extraordinary life, in the hopes of properly remembering him in the future.

My wife, Rachel, has a beautiful remembrance of Dick on her blog. And the obituary in the Berkshire Eagle gives a sense for the richness of Dick’s life.

I’m having a hard time getting excited about the G-8 agreement on increased African aid.

I’m not alone. Oxfam doesn’t sound too happy. Nor does Dr Kumi Naidoo, chairman of the Global Call To Action Against Poverty, who said “The people have roared but the G8 has whispered.”

The $50 billion sum would impress me more if I believed the money in question would get dispersed. I got very excited about the Millenium Challenge Account - later the Millenium Challenge Corporation - first announced in early 2002, which promised $5 billion a year in aid to qualified developing nations. Three years later, the fund has dispersed a total of $400,000 and signed agreements with only 4 of the 16 countries eligible for aid. It’s unclear whether Congress will ever fund the MCC at the promised levels.

President Bush has been quoted recently as claiming that the US had “tripled” US aid to Africa since 2000. Media Matters for America cites an analysis by former Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Susan Rice, which shows a much more modest increase - between 43 and 67% total between 2000 and now. Nancy Birdsall, the president of the Center for Global Development, analyzes Bush’s assertion of a tripling of aid from 2000 and a future doubling and concludes that most of those promises would be fulfilled by fulling funding the MCC and funding the President’s Emergency Plan for Aid Relief… in other words, this funding increase isn’t news, and won’t happen unless the Republican Congress that’s blocked full funding previously changes its mind.

More disappointing was the failure to set a phase-out date for the tarriffs and subsidies that make it so difficult for African nations to sell to the US and Europe. If Congress’s slowness to fund the MCC makes me skeptical, the lack of a date to phase out cotton and sugar subsidies makes it difficult for me to believe that major progress is going to be made on this front.

The focus on African development issues over the past few weeks have brought some really interesting voices to mainstream attention. Metafilter linked to a great interview in DER SPIEGEL with Kenyan economist James Shikwati. Titled “For God’s Sakes, Please Stop the Aid”, the interview gets off to a roaring start:

SPIEGEL: Mr. Shikwati, the G8 summit at Gleneagles is about to beef up the development aid for Africa…

Shikwati: … for God’s sake, please just stop.

SPIEGEL: Stop? The industrialized nations of the West want to eliminate hunger and poverty.

Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid.

Shikwati points to some of the difficult realities surrounding aid in Africa - for example, emergency food aid gets intercepted, gets sold on the black market and destroys local markets for homegrown grain. His radical prescription - refuse the aid, force nations to cooperate and trade regionally, so that Tanzanian and Kenyan corn could be sold to alleviate a Ugandan food shortage, for instance.

It may not surprise you that Shikwati is affiliated with the Libertarian organization the International Society of International Liberty, which is currently celebrating “The Year of Ayn Rand”. He’s also featured today by the free-trade Atlas Economic Research Foundation and is the founder of the Inter-Region Economic Network, described as” East Africa’s first free-market research and educational institute.”

While I find articles like Shikwati’s “The developing world needs trade, not aid, to help the poor” somewhat compelling, I worry he doesn’t have much of an answer to the question of “What happens to all the people currently depending on aid when it stops?” While it’s clear that trade barriers are making it much harder for African nations to compete in some sectors, lifting barriers alone doesn’t seem to solve the problem. Lesotho - briefly one of the great success stories of freer trade, exporting non-sweatshop jeans to the United States - is now getting clobbered by China now that the Multi Fiber Agreement (which constrained imports from China to the US) has been “phased” out.

The inimitable “M” of Thinker’s Room covers much of the same ground as Shikwati (hmm… they’re both Kenyan… and we’ve never seen them together in the same room… :-) in a follow-up to his widely cited and controversial post, Live Aid? Please!. The new post is a fable about the (all too real) imaginary state of Kundu which finds itself thoroughly screwed over by centuries of colonialism and decades of aid. It is, needless to say, provoking its own long and interesting comment thread.

I’m late in linking to this, but thought Stephanie Hanes’s post in the Christian Science Monitor Africa blog about her experiences attending the Johannesburg Live 8 concert was interesting - sounds like the vibe was a great deal more subdued than at the London and Philadelphia events.

It’s great to see the BBC pointing to African weblogs. But I gotta say, this roundup looks a little familiar to me.

Should I conclude that Alan Connor is a Global Voices fan? Or just that there’s an African A-list emerging… most of whom Global Voices links to on a regular basis? :-)

(I can’t possibly complain, since the last time the BBC mentioned me by name, they gave me a doctorate…)

Update: Alan Connor was good enough to write in and explain that his roundup was independent of the Global Voices roundup, though he’s now a GV fan. Glad my snarky comment helped alert Alan to our effort and apologies for implying that the BBC was using a GV resource without crediting us. Alan’s explanation - in the comments below - goes a long way towards making the case that, yes, there is an African A-List at this point…