In my last discussion with Nicholas Negroponte about the sub-hundred dollar laptop, I got the conversation off to an awkward start by asking a question about how the device would be used as “a teaching tool” in the classroom. Negroponte explained that this was exactly the wrong way to think about the device – the goal was to convince teachers it was little more than an electronic book and let the kids discover on their own what this remarkable little box could actually do.

And then he reminded me that Alan Kay was designing the UI for the machine. Which made his previous comments make a bit more sense to me.

I ended up sitting in on Kay’s talk at WSIS yesterday by accident. I was taking a break from my otherwise all-consuming task of annoying the Tunisian authorities and decided to catch my friend Andrew McLaughlin’s talk on a panel devoted to the Library at Alexandria. But Andrew had another speech scheduled at the same time, and when I finally finished handing out boxes of filtering circumvention software, Kay was speaking, talking about his work in computers in education and the software of the $100 laptop.

Kay began by explaining that most people aren’t using computers to do the most important things they’re able to do, by which I think he means that we’re not using computers to explore, experiment and discover. Mentioning that he, Nicholas and others working on the hundred-dollar laptop were getting older, he suggested that he was getting sick of computer “vendors who don’t realize there are children in the world.

Outlining the challenges behind the one laptop per child project, Kay characterized the challenges from easy to hard: hardware, software, user interface, content and mentoring. Making it clear that the computer would be based on free and open source software, Kay showed off the Squeak Smalltalk environment by interrupting his presentation to drawm, then animate a car.

For those who haven’t seen Squeak, it’s a great way to understand the sorts of environments Kay thinks are most conducive to learning the real power of computers. Think of a tool like Macromedia director, which lets you draw, animate and script… but for kids… and based around SmallTalk, a language so simple than many experienced programmers (like me) find it bafflingly counterintuitive and hard to use.

The car Kay designs in a few seconds drives in a circle by moving a few units forwards, turning an equal number of units – Kay explains that this is a lesson in differential geometry, one of several mathematical ways of describing a circle. He goes onto show a more complex example – two students who program a car to follow a colored path on a screen, using the principle of feedback (when the car sees the edge of the path, it correct and rights itself.)

Kay puts forth the interesting proposition that “our brains aren’t designed for thinking – they’re designed for survival” – for making quick decisions, which aren’t neccesarily the correct decisions. He sees this as a major barrier to doing science – it’s taken until fairly late in human history that we’re willing to challenge our own perceptions, and “received wisdom” and carry out our own experiments. He offers a critique of Wikipedia as a teaching tool – the article on gravity doesn’t teach you about gravity – it’s a set of assertions organized in a story, not designed to help you learn about gravity. (It seemed like an odd swipe to take at Wikipedia, given that Jimmy’s never billed it as a teaching tool, and given the extent to which Negroponte has indicated that Wikipedia will likely be core to what’s distributed with the machine.

Kay goes on to show a terrific way to use the Squeak environment to teach about gravity. Children (and a teacher, we presume) film a falling ball. By breaking up the frames of the video and aligning them aside one another, measuring the distance the ball falls in each interval and discovering the principle of constant acceleration.

He ends with his thought that the hardest aspect of the one laptop per child project was “getting mentors for children” – finding (and training?) people who can help children learn to experiment and create, helping the readers of this new kind of book read better.

I’ve heard Alan speak several times in the past couple of years, and have been on a panel or two with him in that interval – I found him at his most cryptic in this talk, perhaps because he had a short time to speak, perhaps because I was tired from agitating and troublemaking. While I came away with the clear sense that he’s planning a UI for the laptop based on some form of Squeak/Smalltalk environment, I had almost no sense for how teachers are going to learn to mentor using this device.

In my earlier talk with Negroponte about the device, he suggested that one way to teach educators to use the laptop in the classroom was to send Kay around the world to teach small groups of teachers, who could go on to teach their peers. After this talk, I’m not buying it. It’s clear that there are amazing ways to use a laptop on every desktop as a teaching tool, and that a teacher like Alan could find countless ways to use such a device. But I also got the sense that it’s a subtle art to teach in this way and that it’s going to be far from obvious for most teachers how to approach this new device as anything other than a book.

I agree with Kay that the easiest challenges of the laptop are the hardware ones – indeed, I think these are the challenges Nicholas and team have done the best job of figuring out. I suspect the software – a version of Redhat Linux optimized for a diskless environment – is also well thought out. But the questions of UI, content and mentoring – as well as the challenges of distributing, servicing and financing these machines – strike me as tough challenges where there’s lots of work still to be done.

It’s 6pm on the final day of WSIS and I’m in the Tunis airport nursing a beer and waiting to start the long trip home. It’s been an exhausting three days, though rewarding, and I feel pretty good about the small way in which we were able to influence the character of the discussions at WSIS.

Rebecca, my partner in crime, took over the task of blogging today and has two posts on events, one on the workshop I ran this morning with a “dream team” of anticensorship and secure computing geeks – Dmitri Vitaliev, Wojtek Bogusz and Nart Villeneuve, another summarizing the events and mood of yesterday’s controversial session.

In her post, Rebecca makes a point of praising our Dutch sponsors and their actions to ensure we were able to hold our seminars as planned. I can only echo her sentiments and offer my grateful thanks. Both Hivos and the government of the Netherlands put themselves on the line to ensure that our guests were able to speak about freedom of expression around the world and learn tools and techniques to combat net censorship. An activist NGO like ours couldn’t hope for better friends. We very much hope to work with Hivos again in the future and are grateful for the chance they gave us to put together these sessions of WSIS – thanks, guys.

It’s too early for me to offer any wisdom about whether the summit accomplished any of its goals. I’m skeptical that three days of meetings and networking brought rural Africa any closer to full inclusion in the information society. While I had a lot of fun seeing old friends and meeting international bloggers – and Huawei and ZTE probably sold a lot of censorship-enabled routers – I’m still skeptical that WSIS was anything more than a vast trade show.

But I’m deeply pleased that WSIS forced the Tunisian authorities to loosen some of their restrictions on freedom of speech, if only for a few days. I’m encouraged that the press conference opening the Citizens’ Summit was able to proceed. And, thugs aside, I’m pleased we were able to carry out our sessions.

The question for me now – will there be a backlash on speech in Tunis after the summit? Will the brave folks who spoke out at the citizens’ summit or attended our sessions see repercussions from their actions over the next weeks?

And most importantly, will the rest of us keep a careful eye on Tunis, for the next two weeks… and the next few years?

Update: speaking of bullshit in Tunis, it’s worth reading this press release, regarding the refusal of Tunisia to admit the director of Reporters Without Borders, who was accredited to attend the summit, but wasn’t allowed to leave the airp[lane he arrived on. And a BBC story on this, and related matters…

Global Voices is in a tight battle for the award for the best English Language blog in the Best of the Blogs Awards. If you’re so inclined, drop by and cast a vote for us! Or for any of the other excellent blogs nominated there…

Hossein “Hoder” Derakshan tells us that a clear indicator of the power of blogs in Iran is the fact that a 73-year old Ayatollah in Qom is now discovering that he needs to change his domain name periodically to avoid domestic filtering by Iranian censors.

Hossein tells us that, while 10% of Iranians as a whole have net access, huge numbers access the Internet from public sites, which means that some sites have up to 500,000 visitors a day. 70% of Iranians are under 30 years of age, and these are the main audience for blogs.

The government views blogs as potentially threatening to their regime, not because of their work in disseminating information – satellite television stations in the US and Europe beam a great deal of information into Iran. But the Internet is unique because it allows people to connect to one another and to organize.

Hossein explains some of his motivations for blogging, saying that he’s “as anti-Bush as I am anti-Khamenei”. He makes it clear that he’s not pro-US, not being funded from the US and pro-reform. This was a useful bit of context, as Hossein spent much of his time talking about the recent elections in Iran, which he considers rigged and illegitimate.

Hossein’s blogging began in 2001 when began blogging in Persian. His blog became popular quickly, and found himself needing to write a guide for bloggers to answer all the questions he was receiving. Using his guide, about 3,000 blogs were started in Persian. Then a number of companies started Persian language blog services. Now there are more than 700,000 blogs in Persian, written by bloggers inside and outside Iran.

Blogs in Iran can be concieved of as windows, bridges and cafés. They let people see what can going on in other people’s lives. They can build bridges that connect genders, people inside and outside the country, and bring politicians and their supporters together. A blog from an Iranian reforist candidate received up to 1000 comments on some of his posts, showing a clear dialog between politicians and candidates. And blogs as cafés allow discussions – on topics like nuclear enegry – which can’t take place in any other media.

Blogs have gotten some Iranians into trouble. Mojtaba – whose blog wasn’t very popular, with less than 50 readers – landed him in prison because he “insulted” the supreme leader of Iran. Hossein tells us that he was held and interrogated the last time he was in Iran and informed that he wouldn’t be allowed to easily come back to Iran while he was writing online about such sensitive topics.

The first two questions from the audience came from Tunisians to Hossein, who asked him very pointed, and largely off topic questions about his views on Iranian politics. The first question basically accused Hossein of being a western plant, based on his excellent spoken English. We’d been warned by the leaders of other sessions that contingents of Tunisian government supporters were attending sessions and asking off-topic questions that were designed to express support for the Tunisian government. Hossein handled the questions well, making it clear that he was born and raised in Teheran, wasn’t representing either the US or Iran, but his own opinions.

The room got very tense during Hossein’s talk – I found out after the fact that a number of people, who we believe to be Tunisian security forces, were trying to push their way into the (already very crowded) room as he spoke. Hossein handled the situation well – he was his usual unflappable self – confident, opinionated and eminently his own man, whether denouncing the recent elections or making it very clear that he’s a proud Iranian.

Nart Villeneuve, director of technical research for Citizen Lab in Toronto, took the stage during a tense moment in the Expression Under Repression discussions. Rebecca announced that we’d be cancelling the planned break in the middle of our session – after the fact, I learned that our colleagues at Hivos were concerned that, if we paused the session, we wouldn’t be able to begin again as Tunisian plainclothed security forces had been threatening to shut the session down. We were also told that no one could hand out any papers, cards or other information during the session – again, trying to keep from provoking the Tunisian authorities. With extra time for questions, a Tunisian guest – from the Association of Tunisian Mothers – stood and read a long, prepared statement in French. Elijah Zarwan of Human Rights Watch offered a translation of her key point – that Tunisia’s decision to filter the internet had to do with matters of national security.

We’d expected Nart’s talk to be the most provocative, but we hadn’t counted on the context in which he’d need to deliver it. But Nart presented an overview of internet filtering with calm professionalism, referencing the recent ONI study on filtering in Tunisia, but being sure to focus equally on filtering regimes around the world.

Nart’s focus is on technical means of internet control, leaving aside non-technical means, like legislation. Specifically, he’s focused on content filtering, rather than service filtering (blocking things like Voice over IP telephony.) Content filtering takes place for reasons of cultural preservation – preventing a culture from the influence of pornography or gambling – or for political reasons – silencing dissidents or independent media.

Filtering occurs at different levels within the Internet – at the level of a personal machine, an ISP, or near a national gateway. Generally, sites are filtered using the DNS system, blocking IP addresses or URLs. DNS filtering, Nart points out, is fairly ineffective – if you tell a national DNS server not to resolve the name ethanzuckerman.com, the IP address – 66.199.228.29 – will still get you to my site. So most nations who filter the internet block specific server IPs, or specific URLs.

ONI tests what filtering is taking place by obtaining connections from various ISPs within a country and seeing what URLs are blocked – the results can tell them what technique, and sometimes what software, is being used to do the blocks. Generally speaking, nations that are just now connecting to the Internet frequently optimize their networks for URL-based filtering, which is more fine-grained and accurate, but costly in terms of computer processing power. Countries already widely net connected tend to use IP filtering instead, which is easier to implement on a widespread basis. The software used, most often, is imported from the US – SmartFilter, WebSense and Cisco are all widely used by governments to filter net sites.

Nart mentions Saudi Arabia’s policy of blocking pages with an explicit message, making it clear that content is being blocked by a national firewall and offering users a chance to have the URL in question reviewed. Most countries – including Tunisia – don’t do this – they simply give you a generic error page. And most countries don’t have a set of consistent policies of what they block, or how they review blocked sites.

Generalizing from all the sites ONI has surveyed, the largest category of sites blocked are pornographic sites, followed by anonymizer sites, gambling, sex, alcohol and drug-related sites. In sheer numerical terms, political and religious sites don’t register as major categories. Censorship, Nart believes, usually begins with pornography, then moves to other topics as the temptation to block gets stronger. He gives the example of Thailand, where a panel of government and civil society organizations made the reasonable decision to block violent pornographic sites. Some months later, Thailand also started blocking sites critical of the king, or attempting to expose political corruption. Once the power exists, the tempation to block is very strong.

Nart’s greatest concern is overblocking. When countries block by IP, they block all the sites associated with that IP. Try to block a page on Blogger and you can inadvertently block all blogs. When trying to block 31 sites that contained North Korean propoganda, South Korea blocked over 3000 sites by accident. Nart is concerned that the lists used to block IPs and URLs aren’t published – in fact, they’re protected as trade secrets by the companies that compile them. And there’s no transparent review process to get sites taken off these lists.

I missed the end of Nart’s talk, dealing with some of the circumstances surrounding the Tunisian opposition to our discussions, so I’m very much looking forward to his workshop tomorrow on circumventing firewalls.

Isaac Mao rounded out the trio of citizen journalists speaking at the first panel of Expression Under Repression. One of the first Chinese bloggers online, Isaac spoke with a great deal more caution than Hoder or Taurai. He’s received warnings from people in China that his family might be in danger as a result of his decision to speak in public about the Internet in China. Isaac makes it clear that he takes these threats seriously and is choosing his words with caution.

Isaac was one of the major organizers of the recent Shanghai blogger’s conference. It’s difficult to hold meetings of over 200 people in China without attracting government permits. Isaac and friends managed to hold the conference by having it over a weekend in the hopes that the authorities wouldn’t notice.

Chinese media – and bloggers – tend to police themselves, Isaac tells us. He believes that “free thinking is more important than free speech right now”, that people in China need to learn how to think beyond the self-imposed constraints they’re bound by.

A BBC journalist interviewed Chinese bloggers at the Shanghai conference – none were willing to speak on camera. Isaac points to this as another example of self-censorship.

In the hopes of improving communication between the English and Chinese blogospheres, Isaac is urging his compatriots to start translating content from sites like Global Voices – to avoid a “one way world” in which all the content in China comes from Chinese media and where US media characterizes China, and Chinese people don’t speak back.

He also revealed that he’s planning on moving his blog, in the near future, to an overseas host. Isaacmao.com has been blocked for over three months in China – it forwards automatically to notisaacmao.com in the meantime.

A number of our Berkman colleagues attended the workshop Rebecca hosted and I helped organize at WSIS today. Reporting on events via their cellphones, they kept Amanda Michel at Berkman HQ up to date – her summary of their accounts is on the Berkman site.

The first panel session at Expression under Repression features three online journalists, Taurai Maduna from Kubatana.net in Zimbabwe, Isaac Mao of Blogbus.com in China, and Hossein Derakshan (hoder.com) from Iran.

Taurai is the information officer from Kubatana, an organization dedicated to publishing alternative viewpoints in Zimbabwe. The word “kubatana” means “unity” in Shona, and since 2001, the site has published information that can’t appear anywhere else in controlled Zimbabwean media spaces.

The main tool Kubatana uses are email campaigns, trying to mobilize Zimbabweans to question the government on simple, basic questions: in Harare, there’s no city water supply or garbage collection – so why are people being asked to pay for these services? They’re also screening videos, like “A Force More Powerful”, and a recent documentary about the destruction of “slum” housing by Mugabe. (The film was produced by a South African Organization, Solidarity Peace Trust.)

Taurai tells us that Kubatana operates openly, with the knowledge of the Zimbabwean government and has avoided harrasment, largely because the government doesn’t see the Internet as a way to reach the Zimbabwean mainstream, just the elites. Other groups are more threatening to Mugabe, like Zvakwana, a group that’s distributing a CD – “Rocking the Regime into Retirement” – which features banned songs, including “Change” by South African artist Hugh Masekela. In the song, Masakela sings, “What is it about a man that makes him want to stay in power forever?”, an obvious reference to Mugabe.

Other organizations are looking for alternative ways to protest. WOZA – Women of Zimbabwe Arise – are marching in streets, banging pots and pans and demanding “Why are these pots empty?” Zvakwana, who distribute the CD that features Masakela, is distributing condoms in wrappers that are marked “Get up, stand up… the Zimbabwean government accused the group of purchasing the condoms with US government funding, which the group denies.

Strategies to communicate in Zimbabwe via electronic means can be more difficult. Alternative radio stations like SWRadioAfrica.com have been jammed by the government in the period leading up to reading elections. People were recently arrested in an internet cafe for sending an email that criticized the government. And ISPs just refused to sign a document demanding that they release information on net users if the police demanded it.

While net filtering in Zimbabwe is pretty primitive, Rebecca pointed out that Zimbabwe has just taken a large shipment of Chinese computer equipment, which will likely help with filtering and censorship. Taurai thinks this is overkill, as most Zimbabweans are using the Internet primarily for email, not to read information or publish – Internet is such a luxury that it’s very hard for most people to do more than email their friends in the UK, not organize online.

Yesterday, we were warned that our session could be cancelled by the Tunisian authorities. We also discovered that the session wasn’t listed in the official program guide. Today, we came to the room where the session was to be held and there was a sign on the door stating that the workshop was cancelled. Friends who passed by the UNDP booth on the WSIS floor earlier today heard gossip that the security forces would appear at our session and anyone who attended would be arrested. And I got a few SMSs from people who’d asked about our session at the information booths and had been told there was no information on our session.

This low-grade harrasment did nothing to dampen our turnout for the session. The room is literally standing room only and people are listening in through the doorway. Unfortunately, about half an hour into the session, it became clear that some of the folks in the doorway were associated with Tunisian security forces. There was some shoving as some of these individuals struggled to get into the room, whcih was already filled with attendees.

Jaap Dijkstra made an allusion to these circumstances when he opened our “provacatively named session” with the observation that he was pleased that such a meeting as ours could take place at WSIS… just as he was pleased that Tunisian human rights activists could hold a press conference last night at the Tunisian Human Rights League. Dijkstra argued that human rights issues, especially the rights of freedom to speak, were central to the issues at WSIS, more than technological issues.

Rebecca MacKinnon is chairing the first panel and opens with an introduction to our blogger colleagues with a discussion of the importance of online freedom of expression. She explains her decision to leave mainstream media for new media, getting involved with tools and technologies that allow people’s voices to be heard directly, not through the filter of a foreign journalist. Our joint project, Global Voices, is all about finding ways to call attention to conversations taking place in Citizen’s media… and our first panel includes two GVO regulars, Isaac Mao and Hossein Derakshan, as well as Taurai Maduna, from Zimbabwe.

Before introducing our citizen journalists, Rebecca talks about one of the critical issues we’re focusing on for the next two days: Internet filters. She mentions the just-released Open Net Initiative report on Tunisia, demonstrating how a US firm – Secure Computing – helps the Tunisian government censor the internet. Rebecca shows us pages that are blocked by the Tunisian firewall, as well as net censorship in China (including a comparison of a Google search for Tianeman Square Massacres from within and outside China.)

Rebecca rejects as absurd the idea that expression under repression isn’t relevant to ICT and development, as had been suggested by Tunisian authorities in reacting to our panel. She points to the spread of SARS in China as an example of the ill consequences of blocking communications between citizens. The blocking of sites that report on anti-corruption efforts probably costs real money, as politicans continue putting money in their pockets at the expense of the wider populus. But she points out that filtering occurs in the United States as well, through things like filters in libraries that prevent teenagers from finding out about reproductive health.

The goal is not the elimination of filtering entirely – we want filters to block things like viruses and spam. But we need the process of filtering to be far more transparent, and we need to hold responsible the companies like Cisco, Yahoo and Google that are cooperating with filtering efforts.

Local and international human rights groups upset about the decision to hold the World Summit in Tunis have been planning for months to organize a counter-summit, a “citizen’s summit” where issues like the Internet and human rights – which have been difficult to get onto the main WSIS agenda – can be discussed.

A meeting Monday to plan the summit was disrupted by Tunisian security forces, who prevented organizers from entering the Goethe Institute, where the meeting was being held. Since then, there have been reports that human rights activists have been beaten by government-based thugs after meeting with summit attendees, and a French journalist attacked by security forces. In other words, it hasn’t looked like a welcoming climate for a citizen’s summit.

So when a group of friends and I set off to the offices of the Tunisian Human Rights League, we dropped our laptops, bags and other encumbrances in our hotel rooms beforehand, wondering if we’d find ourselves running from Tunisian security when we went to attend the opening of the Citizen’s Summit.

We had a hard time finding the office, tucked on a residential street far from the Kasbah markets or the summit hotels. But when we arrived, around 5pm, there were already at least 200 people packed into the office’s ground floor conference room, a mix of locals and summit participants. As photographers leaned over one another and people (politely) shoved past one another to get a better look, a series of speakers from Tunisian human rights groups, European parliamentarians and others took the microphone to express their support for Tunisian citizen’s basic human rights, especially freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.

As we entered the compound, a team of t-shirt sellers urged five dinar shirts that read, in English, French and Arabic, “I am solidary with the Tunisian glorious movement of 18 October”. (I’ve yet to have anyone try to sell me a WSIS t-shirt.) The 18 October movement refers to a group of Tunisian human rights activists on a hunger strike to protest constraints on their rights in Tunis.

I kept waiting for a commotion in the back of the room that never came. In the immediate vicinity of the building, not so much as a police car was present. As the talks went on for over an hour, and speakers began handing microphones into the audience for comments and questions, people around me began marvelling at the fact that such a gathering could actually happen in Tunis, a nation notorious for cracking down on meetings that could be percieved as anti-government protests. Perhaps being in an international spotlight – as well as the spotlight of several TV cameras – was enough to put the Tunisian authorities on their best behavior.

But the barriers to free expression in Tunis became all too clear as we walked out of the compound to catch taxis for dinner. Walking down the narrow street that from the human rights center to the main road, we past a block lined with tough looking men in street clothes, some on motorcycles. There was no apparent reason for thirty men to be standing on this corner of the street – no cafe, no shops of any sort – and no indication that the group was moving at all. We walked past the group, turned, and took some pictures of the moon rising over their head.

(While this was satisfying, it was probably not the wisest thing to do, a friend of mine experienced in human rights work tells me. “it just provokes them.” But it was wonderful to hear Rebecca MacKinnon say. “There’s nothing that makes me happier than the sight of thugs running.”)

This immediately caused a commotion. One man shouted and suddenly all thirty men had scattered. We returned the way we came and found them a block to the left, looking similarly aimless and menacing, a few more meters away. We decided to return to the gathering and warn people that there was a potential confrontation down the road. But, as groups poured out of the packed office into the street, it became that this sort of intimidation is run of the mill for Tunisian activists – they’d been smart enough to call for taxis ahead of time – most of the folks walking past the thugs were foreigners. As my friend wise in the ways of human rights violations pointed out, “Nobody’s getting beaten up tonight. There are people from embassies and national delegations here. It’s just a reminder to everyone that they’re being watched, all the time.”

As one of the speakers pointed out, it’s our duty to be sure that we’re all watching Tunisia, not just during this summit, but afterwards. While some of the actions taken by Tunisian authorities during the summit are ludicrious, they’re likely to be just as outrageous after WSIS moves on and the world turns away. That’s what Ben Ali wants, and that’s what the brave activists who held tonight’s summit need to make sure doesn’t happen.