On the night of October 27th, a group of activists - Free Culture @ NYU - took to the mean streets of New York City to protest the presence of DRM (digital rights management) technology on CDs sold by Sony BMG or EMI. According to the protest website:

We also met plenty of consumers who were shocked, dismayed, and saddened by the news that the CDs that they had just bought probably won’t work on their computer or iPod. We even gave some help to people who complained about CDs not working on their computers. We also got into Virgin and deposited some flyers around the store. It was a great event, everyone had a great time despite getting a bit cold at the end.

The protest was covered by Slyck.com, p2pnet.net and other anti-DRM weblogs. Cory Doctorow, of BoingBoing, pointed that blog’s readers to the photoset of protest photos on Flickr. As of 12:18 EST on October 31, 2005, FLickr tells me the photoset has been 2802 times. (That number will likely rise as West Coast BoingBoingers wake up and check their RSS feeds.)

The photo set inspired me to think about the recent history of political protest in the United States: civil rights in the 1950s, feminism in the 1960s, protests to end the Vietnam War in the 1970s, to end apartheid in the 1980s, the Million Man March in the 1990s, the great anti-DRM marches of the new millenium. As I thought about the dozens of causes more likely to inspire me to march than digital rights management, Darfur leapt to the front of my list. And that led me, through Sokari Ekine’s Black Looks blog, to this photo series on Flickr.

On September 29th, hundreds of Sudanese refugees began protesting outside UNHCR offices in Cairo, Egypt. The refugees, who had fled violence in Darfur, were given “blanket temporary refugee” status, which means they’re ineligible to be resettled to a third country - they receive little humanitarian assistance and are deeply concerned about being forcibly returned to Darfur. Damanga.org outlines some of the demands of the refugees, who remained camped outside the UNHCR offices for more than three weeks:

1) We refuse to return voluntarily to Darfur because of the lack of security that the region is still experiencing.

2) We also refuse to resettle permanently in Egypt because cooperation between the governments of Egypt and Sudan has made our lives here difficult.

3) We refuse the random, unjustified arrest of Sudanese refugees in Egypt, many of whom are detained without charges filed or access to legal protection.

Pambazuka News reports that the protest now involves 1,200 refugees. One refugee told the Pambazuka reporter, ““We will wait here, we will die here. We have no other place to go.”

The Flickr photo series, linked to by Pambazuka and Black Looks, features seventeen photos of the protest camp, the list of demands, and the banners held up to protest the murder of Sudanese refugees in Egypt.

As of 12:43 on October 31, 2005, the Flickr photo set had been viewed 81 times.

As tempting as it is to make fun of NYU students for fighting for their “right” to purchase DRM-free music, I’m glad that they’re protesting something, even if the wrong they’ve chosen to right comes in at #23,273 on my personal “things worth fighting for” list. It’s the amplification effect that bothers me more. Why is one photo set featured on BoingBoing and the other isn’t?

Some possible answers:

- The folks at BoingBoing probably don’t know anything about the Cairo protests. I try to follow this issue, but I didn’t know about this protest until catching Sokari’s bookmark. While there are a lot of BoingBoing readers in the East Village of NYC, there are fewer in Cairo, and they may not yet have brought the issue to their attention.

- BoingBoing author Cory Doctorow is deeply committed to the issue of free culture, follows the movement closely and reports on this issue on his group blog, much the same way I write about African politics here. It’s his perogative to follow the issues he’s passionate about. And BoingBoing does some humanitarian coverage, providing excellent information on the Southeast Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters.

- BoingBoing readers may well be more concerned with DRM than with refugee issues in Northern Africa. BoingBoing is a private business - it maintains a huge readership by covering topics of interest to its readers, and filtering out other topics. Perhaps BoingBoing is more useful to its audience by covering DRM protests and not human rights ones.

It’s this last point I’m most interested in. I’ve been writing for the past two years about “problems” with media attention - most notably, the problem that events involving Africa get a whole lot less attention than those involving Iraq, Israel, Europe and the US. Jay Rosen (shrewdly, helpfully, kindly) pointed out a hole in my argument when I visited with him several weeks back at a conference in Chicago. While I can document how little coverage Africa gets in relation to Iraq, I haven’t successfully made the argument for why Africa deserves more coverage.

Jay argues that media - whether cable channel, newspaper or blog - serve a polis. This means that they’re obligated to do more than creating compelling content and selling ads - they’re obligated to inform their readers about issues that help them make decisions as citizens. It makes sense that community newspapers cover local news more thoroughly than international news - their audience needs to be informed about local issues to vote in local elections, protest local injustices and mobilize to right local wrongs.

I can complain that papers like the New York Times don’t cover Africa enough, but I have to make the argument that the issues in Africa are germane to the readership of the Times. It’s possible to make the same argument that the readers of BoingBoing are more concerned, and more likely to act, on issues surrounding DRM than they are about Sudanese refugees: more BoingBoing readers have iPods than have people they care about in refugee camps. In this sense, BoingBoing and the Times may well be serving their readers better than I would if I controlled their editorial agenda.

My problem with this argument is this: in an increasingly globalized world, the distant gets more local everyday. The rise of militant Islam in Central Asia was pretty distant to most Americans until September 11th, when it suddenly became profoundly local. Failed or failing states in Africa might remain very distant to Americans… or they might not, if Somalilia or Côte d’Ivoire emerge as global arms bazarrs in the absence of a functioning state. Pollution in China seems pretty distant until it starts affecting air quality in LA, at which point it’s very local.

Is localism, both of journalism and of dissent, a luxury we can’t afford in a global age? Is it okay for us to know about the arguments against DRM, but not about the arguments against refugee repatriation?

In other words, is it fair for me to make fun of the guy holding the green sign for fighting the RIAA rather than fighting for people who really need someone to march in the streets of New York on their behalf?

“What do you do for fun around here?”

That’s the question new hires to Tripod, the web company I helped found in Williamstown, MA, used to ask when they moved to our 8,000 person college town to join in the madness of the first wave of the web economy. The first person to ask the question of me was Margaret Gould-Stewart, a graphic designer who’d moved north from New York City.
At the time, I was sitting on the floor of my office with three other Williamstown geeks, reveling in the takeout Chinese food we’d just had delivered - DELIVERED! - from the nearby metropolis of North Adams, MA. The idea that a restaurant, other than a pizza parlor, would deliver was so radical that the answer to Margaret’s question was obvious: “We order takeout Chinese and sit around an eat it.” (She was unimpressed.)

I now live two towns south of Williamstown in an even smaller town. No takeout Chinese here. So the answers to the “What do you do for fun?” question have gotten a bit more rural in recent years.

This year, the answer to the question appears to be: “pickle vegetables”. I spent Saturday morning picking two and a half gallons of brussel sprouts so we could fill 12 pint jars with sprouts, hot peppers, garlic and pickling brine. (You say you don’t like brussel sprouts? You’ve never had pickled brussel sprouts… Or maybe you’ve never had my pickled brussel sprouts.) As we boiled, sealed and cooled the jars, Rachel and I realized that we had nowhere to put them. We put the year’s canning output on the dining room table, looking for space in the pantry to store the bounty… and finally ended up comandeering a TV table as an extra shelf for the new dozen jars…

As I looked at the 60+ jars we’d filled, I had one thought: “I should really buy stock in the company that makes canning jars.” So I visited the Ball Company website. No information on canning to be found - their “packaging” section features metal beverage and food containers as well as plastic containers… but nothing on canning jars.

It seems that Ball is a little embarrased by their canning heritage. On a page titled: There’s no such thing as bad publicity, is there, a Ball PR flack complains that reporters continue to be amused by the fact that a company that makes canning jars also makes aerospace equipment: “The company that makes those old canning jars also does other stuff.”

But hey, Ball - I don’t buy very many aerospace parts. Nor do I buy much industrial can stock. I realize that investors are probably more interested in aerospace than home canning… but there are net-connected rural Americans out there who’d love to see that you’re not embarrased by your home canning heritage.

(Kerr Group, the other major producer of canning jars, is just as bad - you can find information on tamper-resistant closures, but not on Kerr’s jar lids.)

I’m guessing, in the American culture of victimization that allows conservative republicans to claim that they’re being persecuted, despite controlling all branches of government, the failure of canning product manufacturers to acknowledge their role in food preservation makes me a persecuted minority.

Who’ll join me in starting a movement to demand that Bell and Kerr recognize that real Americans preserve food? That our great nation is based on guns, guts, and home-canned vegetables? Rise up, America! Demand your right to make pickles without persecution!

Say it loud: “I home-can, and I’m proud!”

Update: my neighbor (and member at the same farm where I pick my brussel sprouts), Doug Hacker, has shown his commitment to the movement, producing this handy graphic for fellow Picklers to add to their websites. Soon we will bring the anti-canning forces to their knees!

I Home Can

As President Laurent Gbagbo heads towards the end of his five year term, it’s possible that violence may flare in Côte d’Ivoire, which has been functionally divided since a flawed election in 2002. Presidential polls have been postponed, and Gbagbo - at the urging of the UN and the AU - is likely to retain control after his term ends Sunday. This is unlikely to go over well with the opposition, who will likely consider his rule illegitimate after October 30th.

Jonathan at Head Heeb is doing a typically excellent job of covering the situation in Côte d’Ivoire. Recent posts have included a link to a very spooky story by Canadian journalist Carol Off, who interviews Charles Blé Goudé, the founder of the Young Patriots, a violent ultra-nationalist youth gang who’ve helped President Laurent Gbagbo retain power in Côte d’Ivoire… and finds herself being recruited to do PR for the group. Given that Goudé is prone to speaking approvingly about Hitler and supports a vision of “iviorité” that denies citizenship to citizens of the north of the country based on their belief in Islam, Off observes, “An army of spin doctors could not save Charles Blé Goudé from himself. But I tell him I will think about his offer.”

In a post today, Jonathan advances the possibility of a two state solution to the ongoing conflict. Perhaps, as in Somalia/Somaliland/Puntland, it’s simply not reasonable to expect the two sides to rejoin any time soon.

Like many enclaves engaged in long-term conflicts, northern Cote d’Ivoire has effectively become an unrecognized state. However, unlike relatively successful entities such as Somaliland or Turkish Cyprus, the rebel-held territory has never developed the social infrastructure to support its de facto status. Northern Cote d’Ivoire is a state without a name and without an effective government, and has keenly felt the absence of economic and administrative institutions.

If international actors working to reintegrate the north and the south of the country focused on building infrastructure and making the north governable as a separate entity, it might be vastly preferable to having the north fail entirely. As we know, instability in West Africa has a terrible history of spreading - long-standing conflicts in Sierra Leone and Liberia have flooded the region with small arms, and young men who’ve never had a job other than “gun for hire”.

Human Rights Watch reports that Gbagbo is, in fact, hiring those young men, trying to beef up army forces in preparation for potential conflict. HRW interviewed a number of recent recruits, who report that Ivoirian army officers are recruiting former Liberian soldiers, including children, and paying them $400 to join the Iviorian armed forces. Unsurprisingly, Gbagbo denies that such recruitment is taking place.

The UN has warned that the troops currently keeping the two sides separated are short on resources. That resource shortage may prove deadly if widespread conflict - as is being anticipated - breaks out in a few days.

Despite living twenty minutes drive from Williams College, and my pattern of getting my coffee and mail in Williamstown, I rarely come to Williams to attend academic lectures. It’s just habit - Harvard is where I go for lectures, while Williamstown is where I have coffee. But brilliant people come through my alma mater all the time and I generally ignore them.

A good friend mentioned on his blog that George Lakoff was speaking at Williams and I managed to drag myself off my snow-covered mountaintop to hear hear the talk… I’ve read enough short pieces by Lakoff that I tend to assume that I know what he’s all about. But hearing 20 quick talks at Pop!Tech went a long way towards reminding me that there’s something useful about hearing someone summarize the core of their theory in half an hour, an hour or ninety minutes. And hey, the World Series ended in four games.

Lakoff spoke for almost two hours in a packed hall, taking ninety minutes to get through his argument before accepting questions from the assembled students and townspeople. The opening chunk of the talk was one that most progressives have heard ad infinitum over the past few years: in the early 1970s, conservatives created a powerful idea and message machine (inspired, Lakoff says, by a memo from Lewis Powell, who later became a Supreme Cort justice) designed to take control of universities, the media and political discourse as a whole for conservatives. Through the creation of business professorships and conservative institutes at universities, numerous well-funded thinktanks and speakers bureaus, which Lakoff asserts book 80% of the “talking heads” on television, conservatives managed to turn “liberal” into a dirty word.

Lakoff asserts that this process has been succesful not just because substantial sums - perhaps $400 million a year - have been spent on the process. After all, progressives have also spent money on thinktanks, talking heads and media presence. Lakoff believes that conservatives have mastered the art of “framing” ideas - using carefully crafted language to move debates from the world of rational argument, to the world of “common sense”. Lakoff gives the (now classic) example of a press release issued by Karen Hughes on the first day of the George W. Bush presidency, which introduced the term “tax relief”. The phrase, repeated relentlessly by the White House, implies a “conceptual frame”. For there to be relief, there has to be an affliction, an afflicted party and someone to relieve that affliction.

Lakoff believes that the repetition of framing terms causes physical changes in the brain of listeners, the literal rewiring of synapses. It’s not brainwashing, as it’s not done under duress: “It’s not illegal, just smart.” Frames, he argues, define common sense. Facts that don’t fit existing frames are ignored or explained away: “If the facts don’t fit the fram, the facts bounce off”. To illustrate this, he points to a study suggesting that 80% of Bush supporters believe that Saddam Hussein was involved with the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

As Lakoff began to draw a distinction between surface frames - careful wording around concepts - and “deep frames”, the talk moved beyond what I’d gotten from reviews of “Don’t Think of an Elephant” and other pop characterizations of his work. Lakoff talked about his literal incomprehension of Dan Quayle’s 1992 acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, and of the 1994 Contract with America. He understood the words and parsed the sentences, but says he literally couldn’t understand how the phrases fit together logically. What hold together promises to get rid of abortion, install the flat tax, make sure people can own guns, and stop environmental regulation?

To his credit, Lakoff then tried to figure out what held his (diametrically opposed) views together and discovered that he couldn’t construct a coherent category… which has a special irony, as Lakoff wrote the book - Women, Fire and Dangerous Things - often used to teach categorization to cognitive scientists and linguists.

Working on an insight from a student paper, Lakoff explored the idea that discourse about nations is usually framed in terms about families - we “send our sons and daughters to war”, we have “founding fathers”, whether in the US or “Mother Russia”. He started developing an argument that conservative thought is based on the “deep frame” of the “strict father” family, while progressive thought is based on the “nurturing parents” family.

Trying this argument out at a linguistics conference where two conservative Christian friends were participants, Lakoff got the surprising feedback: “Haven’t you read Dobson?” The Dobson in question is Dr. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, and an enormously popular author and columnist who writes on everything from politics to religion to childrearing. Reading Dobson’s child-rearing guide, “Dare to Discipline”, Lakoff felt like he discovered the essense of the conservative deep frame:

- It’s evil out there. Dad protects you from evil. Mom can’t. The world is competitive, and Dad’s role is to win those competitions and provide for the family.

- Kids are born bad - they don’t neccesarily do right and avoid wrong. They need to be disciplined by a strict father to do the right thing.

- Discipline needs to be painful enough to make children want to avoid punishment and discipline themselves. Morality is the disciplined obedience to the strict father.

- Prosperity and morality are linked. If you’re not prosperous, you’re insufficiently discipled, not moral enough to follow the rules. You deserve your poverty.

- If a child is well disciplined, the father will not have to interfere as an adult. And if the child is undiscipled, the father should turn the child out at 18, letting him sink or swim.

(A reminder - I’m doing my best to summarize Lakoff’s talk, not neccesarily endorsing this characterization of Dobson’s work. And I’m certainly not endorsing Dobson’s work either. My opinions on all of this comes at the end of the blog post…)

Examining the social and political implications of this frame, Lakoff concludes that in this worldview, social programs are evil because they create dependency, and eliminate discipline. As a result, they should be eliminated. Furthermore, the correlation between morality and power points to a reinforcement of traditional hierarchies - parent above children, Western above non-Western countries, straight above gay, christian above non-christian, white above non-white. Lakoff advises us that he develops this analysis at some length in his recent book, “Moral Politics”.

In contrast to the strict father model, Lakoff believes that progressives have their own model based on the idea of two equally reponsible, nurturing parents. In this model, the focus is on caring for the child, being responsible for her welfare, and responsible for yourself so you can continue to caretake and nurture. This set of ideas - care for others, be responsible for yourself, be responsible for others - is the heart of the progressive frame.

The implications of this frame: Nurturing parents want to protect their children against crime, drugs, dangerous chemicals, smoking, car crashes, etc. - protection of the environment, of laborers, of consumers is a major progressive theme. Parents want their children to be treated fairly, which leads to a focus on the progressive themes of fairness and equality. Nurturing parents want their children to be fulfilled, which means progressives need to focus on opportunity and general prosperity.

Unfortunately, Lakoff argues, most progressives can’t tell you there core values. Instead, progressives attempt to argue with facts, which Lakoff believes is a losing strategy. Lakoff unpacks arguments from conservatives and progressives about reforming social security. The conservative arguments, he says, have no facts attached to them - they’re a list of values and principles: Individual initiative made the country great. Free market capitalism is the engine of prosperity. Pull yourself up by bootstraps. Government is the problem. You can spend your money better than the government can.

Progressives respond with a complex, nuanced argument about a $1.5 trillion dollar trust fund which fully funds social security until 2042 or maybe 2052 then funds it at 80% but would fund it fully with 3% economic growth or a lower cap on benefits and…

His point? The progressives may be right, but they don’t win any arguments, as facts bounce off of frames when they don’t fit. To win these arguments, progressives need to get better at appealing to voters in terms of trust, authenticity, and values. Progressives need to let go of the rationalist fantasy that people make decisions based on rational thought and analysis of facts.

Instead of working in terms of frames, Democrats are working from polls - they poll to discover the most important issues, then craft rational policy responses to those issues. But since the issues have been framed by conservatives, the policies proposed move inexorably rightwards… and since the deep frame has been defined by the conservatives, progressives are always going to appear weaker on the deep values than the conservatives are.

So what should progressives do? Lakoff closes by talking first about Katrina, which he sees as a missed opportunity for Democrats and by the Terry Schiavo case, which he sees as a Republican misstep. He argues that Democrats had a perfect opportunity to demonstrate that the conservative “sink or swim” mentality towards the environment, public infrastructure, job creation and disaster relief, led to a situation where many people were left on their rooftops, wonderinf if they would literally sink or swim. And he argues that the conservatives violated their own playbook on the Schiavo case, making voters deeply uncomfortable with the idea that the government might intervene in intensely personal family health matters.

Lakoff’s next steps in all of this - start a thinktank, the Rockridge Institute, which will work on creating an alternative messaging system (which sounds very much like MeetUp.org) and a progressive playbook, which articulates a “consistent, positive vision of what it means to be progressive.” In this respect, he seems to be consciously echoing the playbook conservative organizer Frank Luntz has been arming his foot soldiers with.

Moving from reportage to my reaction:

Lakoff’s an impressive speaker. It’s extremely difficult to give a compelling speech for 90 minutes - trust me on this one. And it’s extremely difficult to do it without visual aids or, apparently, without notes. At the end of the two hour event, I found myself with pages and pages of notes (the long summary above doesn’t cover half a dozen things Lakoff detailed in the talk) and the general sense that what Lakoff said made a great deal of sense.

It wasn’t until I started driving home that I started realizing parts of the argument I was uncomfortable with and questions I wanted to ask Lakoff, or someone who’s read him more closely than I have.

Is the metaphor of nation as family an inescapable, essential one, or is it just the one that’s dominated our discourse for the last few decades (or, perhaps, centuries?) It makes me uncomfortable that the two models he outlines would map so neatly to the two parties that dominate American politics. If the family metaphor, and the two perspectives on family he articulates are somehow essential, does it neccesarily imply oppositional, two party politics? Is politics neccesarily binary? (Lakoff stated that 35-40% of Americans are progressives, 35-40% are conservatives, and the remaining 20-30% are some of each - sounds pretty binary to me.)

This concerns me because the family metaphor does a lousy job of addressing some of the issues I’m most passionate about - international development, fair trade, responsible globalization, preservation and melding of global culture. Family metaphors are essentially local, about the nurting or disciplining of those closest to you - my contention is that global challenges today require profound empathy and concern for people far away from you physically, and that in our globally interconnected world, everything’s more local than we think. My focus on these issues tends to put me in opposition to my fellow progressives on certain types of issues (trade, especially) and led me at some point to declare myself a “pro-globalization progressive”. Is it possible to advocate for those core values of global citizenship and cultural exchange from the perspective of a nurturing family?

My second set of concerns has to do with my contention that Lakoff’s focus is more tactical than substantial. He was very careful to state that people were misinterpreting him when they asked for slogans to sell existing policies - his point is that we need to communicate our deep frame, our progressive values, rather than just selling policies. But while I’m much more comfortable with the progressive value frame over the conservative value frame, I’m not convinced that either camp has the right answers to complex questions like the ones raised in my previous post (How do we help Africa simultaneously develop economically while maintaining a functioning health system, and address the issue of a nursing and doctor shortage in rural America?)

Some of my more political progressive friends are convinced that the key is to win back one or more branches of government so that we can advance ideas that are bound to work better than what currently passes for political thinking in America - we could push for energy independence, universal healthcare, improvements in public education. While I certainly can’t argue with that, there are other problems where I’m not convinced the progressives are all right and the conservatives are all wrong, and I’d greatly prefer a world in which both sides of the ideological aisle are working together on some of these issues.

I’ve been frustrated the extent to which progressives seem to be apeing conservative strategies to try to win back power. I think Lakoff’s core idea - that we need to articulate a progressive valueset - is a worthwhile one. But I worry that it’s easy to focus on building competitive institutions - thinktanks, a political playbook, a network for disseminating messages - and not actually take on the challenge of solving some of the problems we don’t have easy answers for.

One of the perpetual debates in the African blogosphere is the significance of the “brain drain”. Well-educated Africans are often able to emigrate to North America or Europe, where their skills are in demand. On the one hand, this emigration takes some of the best and brightest out of local economies. On the other hand, these emigrés often send substantial sums of money home - in many countries, remittances often are one of the major contributors to a national economy.

Whether you believe that the economic contributions of the diaspora outweigh the costs of losing great minds from the continent, it’s hard to ignore the disastrous effects on Africa’s national health systems the loss of trained doctors to jobs in the North is having. Sokari Ekine has written extensively on the topic; David Gyewu spoke about the problem at Pop!Tech this past weekend.

With a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine and an accompanying article in the New York Times, the issue is now getting some attention outside the African/Afrophile community. Dr. Fitzhugh Mullan’s research shows some stunning numbers. Looking at national databases of physicians in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, he discovers that 23 to 28% of new physicians studied medicine outside the country where they are practicing. Of those emigré physicians, 40-75% are from lower income countries. This means that many nations are exporting a large portion of their trained physicians - of the 20 countries who export the highest number of physicians proportional to the number trained, 9 are in the Carribean or Sub-Saharan Africa.

The consequences for African and Carribean hospitals are dramatic. The New York Times interviewed Dr. Agyeman Akosa, director general of Ghana’s health service, who said, “I have at least nine hospitals that have no doctor at all, and 20 hospitals with only one doctor looking after a whole district of 80,000 to 120,000 people.” According to Dr. Mullan’s study, Ghana loses 3 of every 10 doctors trained to the US, UK, Canada or Australia. Ghana has roughly 6 doctors for every 100,000 people - the four wealthy nations in the study all have at least 220 doctors for 100,000 people. It’s even worse in Jamaica, where 41 of 100 doctors leave the country, or Haiti, where 35 of 100 leave.

Why does this happen? Two major factors contribute - African and Carribean nations can’t pay their doctors attractive salaries, so they’re encouraged to leave for more lucrative salaries in the North. And the North needs doctors because nations like the US don’t train enough medical school graduates. There are 22,000 spaces for first-year residents in American hospitals, and only 17,000 US medical school graduates to fill the spaces.

Which leaves me wondering - what do all those fresh-faced Harvard students I see every Tuesday go on to do with their lives? There’s a reported shortage in Computer Science students in the US, and so many international graduate students in the hard sciences - in part because there are so few US-born graduate students - that many schools are offering ESL (English as a second language) classes for teaching assistants. Please tell me that not all these smart young people are becoming lawyers, consultants and bankers.

Some African nations are demonstrating that they can bring back business talent by creating environments for entrepreneurship - many of the Ghanaian entrepreneurs I know lived and worked in the US or the UK, developed robust business skills and some capital, and came home to start businesses when the environment looked sufficiently promising. Is it fair to expect African nations to spend sufficient money on their national health services that they can attract doctors to stay home? Or do the US and other nations need to take some responsibility for ensuring they don’t leave poor nations devoid of trained medical professionals?

If the latter, don’t hold your breath for the US to change immigration policy, as my friend David Gyewu suggests, to allow high-skill personnel in for only five years as a time. A few years back, a college friend was chief of staff for a prominent conservative US Senator. I visited him at the Senator’s office and joked that, if only we had a single issue in common, I could lobby him. He pointed out that we probably had more agreement on immigration than I thought, as the Senator was working hard to make it easier for immigrants to come to the US. The reason? The Senator’s mostly rural state had a large number of hospitals without medical staff - the only way to staff those hospitals with doctors and nurses, he felt, was to welcome medical professionals from the developing world.

At the time, I was encouraged to discover that a politician I’d always dismissed as a neanderthal had at least one issue where he’d seen the light. And now I wonder whether this wasn’t yet another issue where I should disagree with the man.

This blogging thing might actually be for real.

Important people are starting to blog. Big people.

Really, really big people.

Komusubi Futenho’s got a blog. It’s in Japanese, which I don’t read, but Jeshii has offered some translations. The post he translates seems to deal primarily with athelete’s foot.

Futeno’s not my favorite rikishi - he’s a bit old school for my tastes, as compared to the tiny Mongolians I’m a fan of. But if Futeno’s blogging, it can only be a matter of time before Yokozuna Asashoryu has a blog. For that, I’d learn how to read Mongolian.

Sumo’s very big in the US right now. A recent demonstration event at Madison Square Garden wasn’t exactly authentic… but sounds like it was enjoyed by at least some of the audience. The New York Sun titled their article “Tired of Fixed Fights? Try a Different Kind of Wrestling.” Guess they haven’t read Steven Levitt’s brilliant paper on corruption in sumo wrestling…

One small observation - we’ll know sumo has actually been taken seriously in the US when someone can write a story about the sport that doesn’t focus on the mass of the competitors. Asashoryu (current champion of Japanese sumo, 68th Yokozuna, astoundingly successful wrestler, winning 86% of matches as Yokozuna) - 319 pounds. Orlando Pace - Pro Bowl offensive lineman, Saint Louis Rams - 325 pounds.

C’mon, guys. Real men wear diapers.

(Previous post on those amazing Mongolian rikishi…)

Winter in the Berkshires can quite easily stretch from October through May. We’ve had snow at our house as late as June 1st - I have photos somewhere of snow coating our tulips. And we often get dustings of snow in early October. But it’s rare that we get out and out snowstorms before November.

But hey, when the remnants of Hurricane Wilma get together with tropical storm Alpha and a routine cold front, fun things can happen. The photo above is what my driveway looked like this morning. The trees caught more wet snow than usual since most still have (yellow) leaves on them. Most are merely bent down over the driveway - some have come uprooted from the waterlogged soil and I’ll need to chop them into firewood later today.

Rachel was understandably daunted by the trees in the driveway and cancelled her morning meeting - I went down with a bowsaw to clear a path and realized that the branches blocking the path were actually pretty light. I drove through them, which knocked some snow off, lightening them up further, and felt a bit like going through a natural car wash. Here’s hoping they return to their usual positions as the temperature rises to a balmy 5C…

Driving home last night from Berkman, the announcer on WBUR, the Boston NPR station I listen to, kept reporting that the storm would cause rain and high winds, as well as some snow “well West of Boston”. Guess we’re well west of Boston.

When you hold a conference on changing the world for the better in rural Camden, Maine, it’s a challenge to ensure that your audience is a diverse one. The price tag of a conference like Pop!Tech keeps some people away, while Camden’s relative inaccessibility is a barrier to others. And, as anyone who organizes a conference these days has discovered, it’s increasingly difficult to get international attendees to a conference in the US, as visas are hard to get and some folks are unwilling to jump through immigration hoops to come stateside.

With this in mind, I’m truly impressed by Andrew Zolli was able to accomplish at this year’s Pop!Tech, with help from the Sun Microsystems and Dr. Djibril Diallo from the UN Office of Sport for Development and Peace. Sun made it possible for ten young African innovators to attend the conference, and Andrew reconfigured the schedule, so that Sunday morning featured reactions to the conference by the African attendees.

The Sunday session was moderated by Fortune Magazine’s David Kirkpatrick, a well-respected technology journalist who has some personal experience with Africa, spending part of his childhood in Nigeria. He had the unenviable task of giving time to ten speakers and a handful of invited guests (myself included), who’d been seated in the front row to engage in dialogue with the Fellows… all in the course of a two hour session.

Kirkpatrick asked the attendees to reflect on what talks had been most useful to them in thinking through problems in their home countries. As one might expect, Negroponte’s proposal for a $100 laptop received a number of mentions, as did Bunker Roy’s work on the Barefoot College.

But other answers surprised me. Ory Okolloh saw value in the Ansari XPrize as a technique for getting people interested in tackling large challenges, even as she had a hard time seeing how space exploration was relevant for Africans. My friend David Gyewu (my former boss, as well - he was deputy minister of Communications in Ghana when I was doing a good deal of work there on telecommunications policy) found some hope in Dr. Kuiken’s work on bionic limbs: even if it’s going to be a long time before Ghanaians can afford computerized limbs, perhaps manual versions of these limbs can help the thousands of Africans injured by disease and by land mines. Lydia Muchodo - a peace campaigner in Uganga - took a very different message from Rebecca MacKinnon’s China talk than I did - where I saw a government repressing dissident voices, she saw a government working to create access and jobs in rural areas.

It took a while to get beyond the participants’ overall enthusiasm for Pop!Tech and into debates about the contents and structure of the conference. Clement Bwalya saw a missed oppportunity in the conference to talk about how the technologies discussed could affect people in Africa. (This was in part a structural difficulty - most speakers didn’t know about the Sun fellows program until very shortly before their talks, and very few were able to change their schedules to attend. But there’s an open question about to what extent Pop!Tech could change to have an African focus without alienating existing members of the community. On the other hand, asking speakers to try to make their remarks relavent to Africa would have forced discussion of some interesting issues.)

Ory had another suggestion - instead of making Pop!Tech more African, why not make an African Pop!Tech? Her idea: conference focused on innovators in Africa, organized by Africans, for Africans, held in Africa. The idea had lots of heads nodding, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Ory finds her phone ringing with any number of people who want to collaborate on this idea.

But the real debates had less to do with the conference and more to do with change in Africa. Several of the participants - especially Eric Osiakwan - were enthusiastic about the sub-$100 laptop, while others were tremendously skeptical. Neema Ngana noted that she’d taught four computer science courses at a university in Tanzania:

When I entered the computer labs, half of the time we didn’t have computers, so we used blackboards. In the medical center, 80% of the time, we didn’t have water. If the basic infrastructure for technology isn’t there, it’s pointless. While the $100 laptop could solve some aspects of the issue,what’s the value added within the school or other environment? If the child has a laptop, but his belly is empty or he’s worried about a parent dying of AIDS, the impact of the technology is radically lessened.

Lydia Muchodo wondered whether the money being spent on laptops would be better spent on community radio, a medium better suited to users who have a low degree of literacy than electronic textbooks or the web.

In a surprise to moderator Kirkpatrick, Ngana’s mention of AIDS in the quote above was the only time AIDS came up, unprompted, in the discussion. Ninety minutes into a dynamic discussion, Kirkpatrick decided to force the issue, noting, “I don’t think we can end this conversation without mentioning AIDS.”

Ory jumped in immediately, asking, “Why not?” She noted that everyone on the stage was profoundly aware of AIDS - she’s lost several family members to the disease and is raising an AIDS orphan - but that discussing the crisis didn’t seem central to a discussion of technology and its potential to change Africa. As the mood on the panel - and in the audience - got angrier, Emeka Okafor pointed out:

My problem with the question is that when mainstream media frames Africa, two or three topics come up again and again: AIDS, AIDS and AIDS. The relentless focus on AIDS plays into the framework of helplessness associated with the continent.

Okafor’s (brilliant) work on Timbuktu Chronicles focuses on scientific and economic innovation on the continent - he’s a firm believer that Africans can build brilliant, internationally succesful businesses and that weallth creation is a critical part of Africa’s economic development. It’s no surprise that he’s closely attuned to media portrayals of Africa as something other than the dynamic, creative place it is.

David Gyewu used the subject of AIDS to raise another issue - the role of the North in the southern “brain drain”:

When you strip away AIDS, life has to go on. How does government afford antiretrovirals? How do we innovate and create jobs so we can collect taxes and pay for the drugs we need?

Furthermore, where are our doctors and nurses? They’re all in Europe or the States - there are about a thousand doctors left in Ghana. You’ve got the technology to keep terrorists out - surely you can track doctors who come in then send them back. Let them stay for a while, then come back in five years to share their skills with their countrymen back in Africa.”

If the African panelists didn’t want to talk about AIDS, they did want to talk about corruption. Issues of transparency, good government and outright theft of tax dollars came up again and again. Okafor mentioned that “Africa needs its own Al Jazeera”, an independent journalist body to shake up existing institutions and expose corruption. He pointed to Elendu Reports, a new web site in Nigeria that’s exposing corruption by showing photos of mansions overseas owned by members of the Nigerian government.

While there’s frustration with corruption, there’s also extensive grassroots action to combat it. Ory mentioned that she’s working with other Kenyan bloggers on a site similar to Thomas.gov, showing the attendence and voting records of Kenyan parliamentarians. Ndesanjo Macha mentioned an effort in Tanzania to write a new constitution - one that recognizes the reality that Tanzania is now a multiparty state - on a wiki, to allow widespread participation in the process.

Eric Osiakwan captured the crowd’s attention with his passionate remarks about African leaders:

Africans need to fix Africa. We as Africans must take responsibility for where we are, and take responsibility for changing Africa. We have enough resources that we can develop africa. We have a big problem with leadership - if we have corrupt leaders, it means that we are corrupt. The African people are corrupt. Africans must be responsible for fixing corruption in Africa.

Fixing corruption is going to require some of the panelists to get involved with politics, former deputy minister Gyewu pointed out. He mentioned that his mother continues to ask him why he “threw away” a good job in Europe to get involved with Ghanaian politics:

“We can blame our leaders, but until people sitting here get in and do it themselves, nothing can change. If you want good politicians, you have to bite the bullet - get in there and do it yourselves. It’s hard to do politics without getting your hands dirty. But you can lead by example - if you can work in politics and remain free of corruption, you’re setting an example for the next generation of leaders.

It was an absolutely amazing morning. I think it was clear to everyone in the audience that the experiment had worked far better than anyone could have imagined - not only did the Sun Fellows find inspiration in Pop!Tech, Pop!Tech found inspiration in the Fellows.

I’m honored to have had a small role in helping the event come together, challenged and humbled by the wisdom expressed in the session, and hopeful that Pop!Tech, Sun and the UN will ensure that there’s an African contingent at Pop!Tech in the future.

I tried to blog the recently past Pop!Tech conference in a bit more detail than I normally would, in part because David Weinberger decided to take this year off. I often rely on David’s near-transcript summaries of conferences I don’t attend and did my best to cover the three days I was actually at the conference to a standard near David’s. (And I still need to post Benkler’s talk from Friday and the Sunday events…) I wasn’t in the hall on Saturday, but am grateful that Buzz, Dina, Ory and other friends did a great job of covering the talks I missed.

I received lots of kind words about blogging the conference and more than a few questions about how I was able to get so many long posts up in a day. The truth is, what I was doing was simple compared to the tour-de-force Ndesanjo Macha pulled off during Pop!Tech. As the old line goes, “Fred Astaire was a great dancer, but Ginger Rogers did everything he did, only backwards and in high heels.” In other words, what she did was at least as impressive as what he pulled off…

Ndesanjo liveblogged the entire conference in Kiswahili. This means he wasn’t just notetaking and transcribing, as I was - he was translating hugely complicated technical terminology and concepts for his audience while writing in realtime. I could cheat and grab a whole paragraph from a speaker, writing it either with quotes around it or changing a word or two to make it a paraphrase. Ndesanjo had to figure out how to express a concept like “peer production” in Kiswahili while not losing the thread of Yochai Benkler’s argument. I noticed that, after a couple of sessions, Ndesanjo wasn’t even sitting in the main hall of the Opera House - he’d staked out a corner in front of a video monitor where he had access to an electric outlet, and he sat there for hours with his eyes locked on the speaker and his laptop. The rest of us are amateurs in comparison.

If you speak English and missed the conference, you can rely on the podcasts from ITConversations to fill your iPod and keep you busy for the next month’s worth of commutes to work - in this way, Pop!Tech is able to positively impact many more English speakers than the folks who filled the hall in Camden. But for the 50 million people who speak Kiswahili better than English, Ndesanjo’s work is the only way people will have a chance to participate in these conversations. His work explaining ideas like Bunker Roy’s Barefoot College and Nicholas Negroponte’s sub-$100 laptop ensure that these ideas will be discussed by people who can directly benefit from them, not just by the digital elite in the north. (And yes, I understand that many of Ndesanjo’s target audience don’t have regular internet access… but his dispatches often end up being picked up in Tanzanian newspapers and reaching a much larger audience as a result.)

What would it mean for Pop!Tech and other conferences to commit to including a set of brilliant multilingual bloggers in their conferences? What if we had Hausa, Arabic, French, Spanish and Chinese bloggers lined up, ensuring that the ideas expressed in these fora reached a truly global audience?

Congrats, Ndesanjo - I know your readers are very grateful for the work you put in the last few days. And for my non-Kiswahili readers, show the man some love on his English-language blog…

Bart Decrem, one of the folks behind the Get Firefox campaign, and a founder of digital divide organization Plugged In, is now working on a new project called Flock.

Flock is a new web browser. As he points out, a truly new web browser is a pretty radical concept - despite Firefox’s stability, it’s still got all the same buttons as the original Netscape browser. Flock is based on a new paragidm, Decrem tells us - rather than treating the web as a library, it treats it as if it’s a stream of events and a set of interactions between people.

We get a quick preview of the browser - it’s in alpha and available for download, though there are lots of caveats to expect that the browser won’t quite work yet. A couple of interesting bits:

- Bookmarking is a single click. You’re welcome to tag pages, ala del.icio.us… or you can just click a button and put them into a pile of bookmarked pages. Either way, bookmarks are stored on the web as well as locally. Like del.icio.us, bookmarks are social - everyone else can see what you’ve bookmarked and use that information to find new sites.

- There’s a search engine built into the browser. It can search on webpages you’ve viewed in the past - very cool for finding the fact you know you saw and didn’t make a note of.

- There’s an aggregator built into the bookmarking function - you can suck in RSS feeds, including flickr and del.icio.us tags and have them assembled in simple, cruft-free pages.

- In the spirit of the Berners-Lee read/write web, blogging is tightly integrated into the browser. It’s very easy to hilight a passage of a page, click a button and get a post fragment that’s formatted and properly cited. There’s a “shelf” tool, which seems to act like the old Macintosh “scrapbook”, capable of storing several cut and paste entries. And Flickr is very tightly integrated, making it easy to add photos to a post.

On the one hand, I’m looking forward to trying it once I’m on broadband sufficient to download the tool. On the other hand, so far it looks like a good merger of a browser and Net News Wire - cool, both not earth-shattering. Technologically speaking, I’m a pretty conservative blogger - I write using BBEdit (notepad on steroids, for you non-Mac folks) - I’m not convinced that Flock is sufficiently cool enough to move me away from my simple but effective blogging tools.

And I wonder whether forking Firefox is a great recipe for innovation, or a problem, taking momentum away from one of the most successful client-side open source projects yet. But hey, it’s in alpha - why worry about the implications before we figure out whether or not this is the next big thing or just a cool idea…?

I will end up blogging Yochai Benkler’s talk, but it’s going to take me a few more hours to process. Several people needed to be carried out of the hall after they collapsed from acute information overload when he finished - the man is so smart, there should be a warning label. Give me a few more hours to digest.