Jane Perrone spent the full day with us at the Global Voices summit, representing The Guardian. Her article on the conference is spot on (as is her accompanying blog post) and begins with a lead that’s going to be one of my favorites of all time:

The Global Voices conference called to mind a United Nations of blogging: there was a Cambodian sitting next to an Iranian sitting next to an Indian sitting next to a Kenyan sitting next to Richard Dreyfuss.

The article goes on to explain what the Oscar-winning actor was doing, listening attentively from the back of the room and chatting, one on one, with different global bloggers. (Dreyfuss actually attended all three days of the Berkman conference – I got a good chance to talk with him about his current interests, which include intercultural dialogue and diversity and neutrality issues in journalism. Very much hoping to hear his reactions to the conference – perhaps he’ll start a blog and let us know what he thought.)

Jane was one of several “influencers” to mention her openness to hearing story ideas and suggestions from the Global Voices crew. Another was Robert Scoble, who joined us for a good chunk of the afternoon. He offered an excellent one-liner – “I wish blogger prominence were measured by the number of people you link to, not the number of people who link to you” – as well as an invitation to our international bloggers to pitch stories to him via email for his amplification to the blogosphere. He also good naturedly handled some criticism about Microsoft’s opposition to free software, and its policies associated with MSN Spaces, commandeering a back room at Reuters for a meeting with a prominent Chinese human rights advocate to talk about MSN Spaces.

Scoble also has a post about one of my favorite features of Reuters HQ – truly enormous video screens that broadcast video, headlines, images and views from around the world. He had the chance to talk with Matt Hassock, Reuters’ technical operations manager (and Global Voices lifesaver – Matt spent his Saturday stage managing the entire Global Voices conference, solving one technical problem after another), who told him the screens cost a million dollars each, and use RSS to bring in information from regional servers around the world and display them to Reuters workers and guests.

Upstairs, in the Reuters Newsroom

(Matt is such a phenomenally nice guy that after spending a full Saturday making our conference possible, he took me aside after the conference to give me a personal tour of the Reuters newsroom – a vast room filled with 250 workstations, each featuring a pair of computer screens, a pair of video screens and a truly terrifying telephone. Each workstation is the domain of a Reuters editor who writes the stories that end up in the world’s newspapers. Matt tells me that he spent the whole day at our meeting in part because he’s fascinated by the contrast in working methods between our hyper-mobile bloggers and the Reuters news room…)

Lucy Hooberman, who works on R&D for the BBC, was inspired by the Global Voices conference to do a bit more marketing for her pledge on Pledgebank to mentor people in the developing world on their use of new media tools. Given how much of this mentoring I find myself doing on the average day, this is an easy pledge for me to sign on to. The full text of the pledge follows below – with my name, the pledge now has 141 of the 250 names it needs…

“I will mentor a minimum of two people in the developing world in the area of my skills base and expertise (media, communications, broadcasting , democratic media building, participatory media, community video). I will do this for free for a minimum of six months (in my free time). The mentoring will be in person or via email/skype and the mentoring connections will be established by a website and database that I am willing to take responsibility for creating but only if 250 other people will mentor a minimum of two people in their skills.”

There’s a healthy crop of photos of the conference posted on Flickr, under the gv2005 and globalvoices tags. Links to some of my favorites:

• Ory schools us on the secrets of the Kenyan blogopshere.
• Bun ThaRum joins us from Cambodia -it’s his first trip outside of Southeast Asia.
• Brendan interviews Neha.
• Jeff Ooi rocks the mic.

As for the reactions from our bloggers… give everyone a day or two to get home and catch up on email (me included) before we start seeing the really interesting posts about issues raised and projects started.

Thanks to everyone who made the conference happen and to everyone who’s expanding the impact by writing and talking about it.

Charlie Nesson pulled me aside during the break between the third and fourth sessions of the Global Voices conference yesterday and asked me if I was having a good time. I told him, “I will retroactively have a great time. Which is to say, I’m so busy and crazy right now, I can’t really tell if it’s going well, but I bet I’ll be thrilled tomorrow.”

It’s tomorrow, and I’m thrilled.

It all started to make sense to me last night. Dan Gillmor and I sat in the lobby of the Paddington Hilton and sipped our drinks as a cavalcade of Global Voices folks came in from the London night. After introducing Dan to the dozenth amazing blogger to pass by our table, Dan turned to me and said, “Do you have any idea how lucky you are to get to work with all these people?”

I do. What I’m now able to realize, with a few hour’s distance from yesterday’s Global Voices summit: Over the past year, Rebecca and I have had the chance to meet – virtually and in person – an amazing array of brilliant bloggers from all over the world. I tend to forget that most people aren’t aware of the diversity, strength and brilliance of this group. This, I think, includes most of our bloggers, who had the powerful experience of discovering they’re part of something much bigger than they’d previously imagined.

It took a few months to figure out what Global Voices was going to be after our first meeting a year ago today. I think it’s going to be a few months more before we know what emerges from this year’s meeting. But for me personally, the experience of nursing a beer and saying hello dozens of my amazing friends, one after the other, is something I won’t forget any time soon.

There’s almost ninety of us in a beautful room at Reuters Headquarters in Canary Wharf, London. But in typical Global Voices fashion, there’s a virtual footprint to the gathering as well. The conference is being audiocast – you can tune in at here or here. There’s an IRC transcript of the conference, being broadcast by SJ Klein on the #gvtrans channel on freenode.irc.net, as well as a backchannel conversation in #globalvoices. Angelo Embuldeniya is taking logs from those IRC sessions, writing them into blogposts, adding photos posted from people in the room and creating a live blog of our conference, despite the fact that he’s in Bahrain…

For a visual sense of what’s going on, please check out the GlobalVoices tag on Flickr – there’s lots and lots of photos from the gathering.

It’s interesting – much of the goal of the conference for me was just getting everyone together in this room. I think there’s so much to be said for getting people who work virtually to see each other face to face. But now we’re getting into the substance of the conference – talking about how bloggers in our communities can best work with mainstream journalism in our current session. I’m realizing that I may be following a great deal of the conversation via the transcript and blog after the fact because there’s so much to think about, logistically, while the conference is going on…

Tags:gv2005

Lisa Goldman, Sokari Ekine, Haitham Sabbah and I headed across town yesterday to the legendary Bush House to appear on Have Your Say, a new radio show that our friend Kevin Anderson is helping put together. Have Your Say is an “interactive radio show” – one of the producers said, “Don’t ask us what that means, because we don’t know.”

What it seems to mean is that it’s an hour-long radio show that tries to integrate input from phonecalls, skype, instant messages, emails, discussion group posts and, I suspect, via mental telepathy. Alongside host Steve Richards is Rabiya Parekh, who sits beside him in the studio, managing messages coming in from emails and SMSs and reading them on the air.

Our gang with Steve and Rabiya

While Steve tried very hard to integrate the four of us into the flow of the show, the content made things a bit challenging for us. The show began with a focus on the bombings earlier in the day in Bangladesh, moved on to a debate about whether or not California inmate Stanley “Tookie” Williams should be executed, and ended with a debate on the superiority of the World Cup or the Olympics as the world’s dominant sporting event.

This led to odd questions like Lisa trying to offer the Israeli perspective on Tookie Williams and the Crips (“there isn’t one”) or us trying to channel our respective regions’ opinions about football versus the olympics (football in every case). But we all got to speak a bit about blogging in our regions and the goals of Global Voices. I’m hoping the crew at Have Your Say will think of Global Voices as a way to find participants for these shows in the future.

It’s interesting for me to think about how a radio show adapts to take advantage of the Internet. I’ve worked a bit with the team behind Chris Lydon’s Open Source radio show, and it’s a fascinating contrast to this show. Have Your Say is devoid of opinion from the hosts – it’s designed to be a space without agenda or bias. Open Source is strongly opinionated and agenda’d, has a strong dose of Chris’s personality, and focuses on a single issue for an hour, which makes it a bit easier to engage than when the issue changes every ten minutes. I think I prefer the long-form model Chris uses, but I’m cognisant of the fact that Have Your Say is very new – about five weeks old – and I’m very excited to see where it goes as it grows up. Thanks, Kevin, Steve, Rabiya, for having us on your show.

Tags: gv2005

A recent radio program on “This American Life” inspired me to write a rant to the show’s producer, Ira Glass, complaining that the show reinforced a greant number of stereotypes about Northern charity towards Africa and African dependency on Northern aid.

Ira has not gotten back to me – nor have any staff from “This American Life” – but Chris Tenove, the subject of the story, had the good grace to write in response to my rant. He offers some facts in his defense, and the more general point that his story was designed to illustrate his naiveté. I still don’t think the story did its job, but I’m very grateful for Chris’s response, and I include it in full, below. And, at some point when I’m not sleep deprived and about to help run the Global Voices annual meeting, I’ll take him up on his offer for story ideas in Tanzania and Uganda. If you’ve got some ideas, please post them in the comments section.

Hi Ethan. I read your “rant” about my program on This American Life, and I have decided to take you to court for defamation.
Ha! Actually, I really appreciated it. This was the kind of discussion I was hoping that the program would provoke. I would love it if more people decided to dissect my motives, critique my strategy, and propose better solutions.
There are a few quick comments I would like to make, in my defense:

* The village or the local health officials would not have paid for operations for these people. Sierra Leone’s health care system is basically non-existent. The village was hoping to raise money but, as I said in the program, they thought it would take at least a year.
* The 2nd charity donation was to a Sierra Leonean run organization.
* Most of Sierra Leone is rural, war-torn, and poor, so that’s what I described. However, like you, I would love that there be more programs on Africa so that other aspects of the continent would make it into the public imagination of North America.
* I did check in with recipients of my aid a few months after my visits, and all was well. Also, a part of the interview which was not broadcast was me saying: my biggest worry is that the charity might do harm, so I tried to make sure it would not cause conflict in the community, etc.
* I didn’t put in the names of the people I gave money to because I did not want to publicly reveal their health problems or the fact that they were the recipients of aid. That decision should be up to them.

The whole program was supposed to be: “here’s a naif in Africa, here’s what he tries to do, what can we learn from his successes and mistakes.”
I hope they run your rant, or at least part of it.
And, by the way, I hope to be spending a few months in Uganda, Tanzania, and possibly Malawi early next year. If you want to suggest story ideas – and I am very interested in local success stories and interesting use/development of new technology – then fire your suggestions my way!

Nart Villeneuve and Michelle Levesque are starting our afternoon in London with a detailed overview of techniques to detect and circumvent internet censorship. It’s a hugely useful talk – I’m enjoying learning some of the tricks Nart and Michelle use to figure out what’s being filtered.

Lots of what these guys learn about what’s going on with filtering techniques is through the block pages employed by ISPs that censor their users’ access to the web. A blockpage will sometimes tell what software is being used to block the internet, and (occasionally) why a page is being blocked. (Nart’s got a great gallery of these block pages, from nations, businesses and universities. Burma is my favorite.

Another critical tool for figuring out blocking technologies is to track the headers a web browser is receiving from a webserver. Nart and Michelle use LiveHTTPHeaders, a plugin for Mozilla that allows you to see the HTTP headers as a page downloads. Sometimes a block page (the sneaky ones) will give you a 404 error – page not found – suggesting that a page has been deleted or moved. Watching the headers, you can see that the page served is actually a 401 – forbidden. In other cases, providers redirect some sites to other pages – this will show a 301 or 302 redirect in the headers.

These guys also use a very nice kit of traceroute tools to see how IP blocking works. This includes not only conventional (ICMP) traceroute, but TCP traceroute, layer 4 traceroute and packet sniffers like Ethereal.

Nart and Michelle also add some useful suggestions that I’m planning on using in long-promised update to the anonymous blogging guide. They suggest that bloggers who know their sites are going to be blocked plan ahead, getting accounts with multiple ISPs and registering multiple domain names. They recommend switching domain names and IP addresses periodically to avoid blocking by government censors, and setting up a technical mirroring solution, so that when one domain is closed down, you can quickly move to another one. They also suggest licensing your content under creative commons, so people feel free to mirror it and to make sure third-party aggregators, like Bloglines, know about your site so they cache copies via RSS.

Finally, Nart shows off the new software Citizen’s Lab is developing (with a grant from my team at OSI) – Psiphon. Psiphon is a filtering circumvention tool that relies on you having a trusted contact in a nation where the net is not filtered. The trusted contact runs an easy install program and ends up with a window that looks much like an instant messaging program. Psiphon uses instant messaging protocols to tell friends in other nations what URL to access to use the proxy server you’ve just brought up, allowing them to surf the web through your connection. Very cool – can’t wait for a release of the software.

Just back from the opening event of the Global Voices conference – an informal dinner at a Lebanese restaurant near Marble Arch. (Thanks, Neha, for setting things up for us.) Amazing to be at a table with 40 bloggers from around the world, with conversations about the similarities between Malay, Chinese and Indonesian languages, the different forms of Islam in southeast Asia and the Middle East, what Jordanians think of Hungarians, wind power in China and Mongolian sumo. Can’t wait to see what the real meeting tomorrow brings.

I’m in London today, at a Berkman/Open Net Initiative meeting on Human Rights, Filtering and Blogging. It’s a complex meeting to blog about, since some of the content is very much off the record, as we’re talking about issues that are very sensitive and have the real possibility to get people into trouble.

That said, SJ Klein is doing his usual terrific job of simulcasting the conference via IRC. If you’re interested in what’s going on, point your IRC client to irc.freenode.net and log onto the #is2k5 channel to get a transcript. SJ will be transcribing for the Global Voices meeting tomorrow as well – check out the Global Voices conference page for more information.

My colleagues at the Berkman Center are generally a pretty optimistic bunch. For the most part, we tend to believe the Internet is a very, very good thing, that it’s generally making the world a better place and that we should fight tooth and nail to protect it.

Our colleagues at the Oxford Internet Institute may well believe all this, but they’re also hard-nosed academics who damned well want proof that the Internet is changing things before they’ll say so. It’s useful to hang out with them because they do an excellent job of challenging things we often take for granted.

Our second “case study” for the day did a nice job of giving both the cyberoptimists and cyberskeptics something to cheer about. Silver Meikar is a technology entrepreneur, a blogger and a former member of the Estonian parliament. He’s an expert of the phenomenon of “E-stonia”, the emergence of this formerly Soviet Baltic state as a technology powerhouse, producing both Skype and Kazaa.

He’s a skeptic, too, with numbers to back up his questions about whether Estonia’s really ready for e-government.

Net penetration in Estonia is amazingly high. 52% of the population reports using the Internet regularly. 35% have computers at home, and every government bureacrat, no matter their rank, has a computer on their desk and an email address. Silver believes this is a result of a strong educational system, lots of influence from Germany, Finland and Sweden, and a commitment to overhaul the state bureacracy after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In some senses, Estonians are huge users of online services. Over 50% bank online. And with an online tax system that lets people pay an annual bill online in seconds (it has your salary, your investment income, etc. prefilled for you, online…), the vast majority of Estonians file their taxes online.

But while lots of other aspects of Estonian life have gone online, they’re rarely used. Over 900,000 of Estonia’s 1.4m people have a computer-linked ID card. This card, along with a unique password, serves as a legal signature, and can be used for secure Internet voting. Despite the number of cards issued, Silver tells us that only 16,000 have ever been used for any transactions. In a recent election, Silver says he voted from the train, using a card reader attached to his wifi-enabled laptop. But he was only one of 8,000 Estonians to vote this way.

Other e-government systems are amazingly sophisticated, though not always well used. XRoad is a system to allows government agencies to access information about you… but reveals what bureacrat accessed your information and why, allowing you to question why the government accessed certain records. It’s not clear whether anyone other than the hardcore privacy advocates use the service, but it’s interesting to know it exists. A system called TOM is widely celebrated in e-government circles – it allows citizens to offer suggestions directly to the government. But only 6,000 people have registered to use it and only 22 replies have been posted by government officials to the ideas posted.

Silver believes that Estonian will use online services, but only ones that are genuinely useful and helpful to them. Paying taxes online, in 40 seconds? Useful. Checking access to your personal data? Perhaps not so useful.

There’s also something generational going on here. Silver is a young guy – 27 years old. (He was elected to parliament when he was 25, making him Estonia’s youngest parliamentarian.) There’s reason to believe that the folks using their ID cards to cast an e-vote have some demographics in common. Silver tells us that the e-voters overwhelmingly voted against the mainstream Estonian Central Party. Is it possible that Estonian e-government will catch on as a new generation of “digital natives” become voters?

(They’re becoming pretty succesful dissidents. Search for the Estonian equivalent of the word “depressing” on Google and you’ll get a link to the Central Party site. Kinda like what happens when you search for “Arabian Gulf“. Estonian bloggers evidently decided it would be a useful protest against a party that Silver says “stopped learning at the fax machine”.)

Perhaps. But Silver makes it clear that it takes more than technology to get elected. He references a candidate for parliament who ran primarily on his blog and got a total of 9 votes. Three young men who produced their own TV ad only got 95. The lesson? Media – including new media – alone doesn’t work, even in E-stonian elections.

That said, it worked for Silver. A student activist and technology entrepreneur, a friend invited him to hear some young politicians speak at his university. Their speeches were so dull and vapid that Silver decided he needed to run himself. So he stayed up all night writing up a strategy and started running the next day. His campaign was organized primarily online, and he maintained detailed databases and mailing lists of people he’d contacted. He promised his constituents that he’d be accessible by email and phone and would directly convey their concerns to the parliament. He came in 11th in an election to select 10 representatives… but came into power when one of the representatives took a Ministry post. And he says that there are several laws on the Estonian books that came directly from constituent contact with him via email.

Will Estonia become E-Stonia? It probably has a lot to do with whether there’s just one Silver Meikar, or thousands waiting in the wings.

My friend Henrik Schneider gave a quick but excellent talk about the Hungarian blogopshere over lunch here at the first day of the Berkman Center’s moveable feast of an annual conference. (Oxford today, central London tomorrow, Canary Wharf on Saturday.)

His most striking slides featured a very strange and funny website – Sztripkviz – which recently came online in Hungary. The site asks questions about the Hungarian economy and rewards correct answers by removing clothing from an attractive model. Henrik points out that all the answers offered are the most positive possible regarding the Hungarian economy, suggesting that the site was put up by government supporters… or by the government itself.

(Henrik tells me that for the past two days, the site has been down, with a message saying that new questions are coming. He thinks this may be a polite way of taking the site down…)

Hungarian blogger Miles had an interesting response to the Sztripkviz, a site that echoes the design and the text of the pro-government site, but featuring the photo of a Hungarian homeless man and questions that feature some of the less hopeful statistics about the Hungarian economy. (Fortunately, the homeless guy doesn’t strip when you get the questions right.)

Henrik mentions that he’s not offended by the nudity of the site, but by the implication that Hungarian men won’t pay attention to economics unless a nude girl is involved…

He’s got an excellent blog post on the subject with links to some other commentary on the issue.

Andrij “Andy” Ihnatov is the president of Ukranian non-governmental organization Maidan International, a key player in the Ukranian Orange Revolution. Started in 2002, Maidan is one of two key political websites in Ukraine. And Andy tells us that the other key site – Ukrainska Pravda – was one of the proximate causes of the Orange Revolution.

As Andy puts it, “2002 is the year the Ukranian transition to democracy stalled”. The government became increasingly corrupt and less transparent. And media was increasingly either censored by the government or self-censored – “media was operating in a mode so as not to outrage the government”. With rare exceptions, there was very little investigative journalism, especially journalism willing to challenge the government.

One exception to this was Ukrainska Pravda, a group website led by independent journalist George Gongadze. Gongadze attracted the attention of Leonid Kuchma’s government by publishing a story about a referendum that was fraudulently amended, giving increased powers to a centralized government. As Andy puts it, “The website was only being read by a few thousand people in the country. Marginal. But it became a daily newspaper for President Kuchma.”

In September 2002, Gongadze disappeared and was later found dead, and beheaded. Evidence pointed to government involvement and the government found itself involved in “Kutchma-Gate” as the government was questioned regarding their role in the death of Gongadze.

As the scandal broke, Ukrainska Pravda found itself as the leading political site in the country, and the cybercafes were packed with people looking for alternative sources of information.

Maidan grew out of a movement – “Ukraine without Kuchma” – that was born, in part, in reaction to the killing of Gongadze. Maidan served as the information arm of the movement, maintaining a group weblog with 70 volunteer authors that helped spread information from different parts of the country and mobilize protests against the Kuchma government.

In a nod to Zephyr Teachout, who’s organized today’s meeting, Andy mentioned that the Ukranians were closely watching the Howard Dean campaign, MoveOn.org and other US attempts that were attempting to use the net to mobilize political dissent.

Kuchma’s government tried to respond to online activism, attempting to take over an online forum – “Talks” – by posting hundreds of irrelavent, off-topic messages. It worked, briefly, but the forum responded by starting to moderate those discussions.

While Internet penetration was low in the Ukraine during the Orange revolution – perhaps 3-4% – the users of the net were largely influencers – journalists, government employees, people who worked with international agencies. Stefan Iwaskewycz, a Ukranian American blogger spent time in a rural village in Ukraine during the Orange Revolution points out that the Internet connected to an existing information network. Small villages in the Ukraine have small newspapers that are often better trusted than national newspapers, which are sometimes seen as propoganda organs. If a single journalist associated with that local newspaper was able to get access to the Internet, that information could be disemminated to rural communities.

Maidan continues its work in Ukraine after the revolution and has been organizing online campaigns and protests about police corruption and about zoning. In both cases, Maidan is soliciting complaints online and using their visibility to force ministers to take them seriously – in the case of zoning services, a local governor has taken to responding to complaints on TV as well as online.

Jeremy Drucker from Transitions Online (a fantastic source of information about countries of the former Soviet Union), points out that Ukraine was not a totalitarian state, but one with political debate and dissention, even if there were strong restrictions on media. It might be unrealistic to expect the Internet to have as transformative effect on a fully closed state, like Belarus.

I find myself wondering if there’s an Internet and politics “sweet spot” – nations where there’s some openness and debate, but real constraints on what can and can’t be said, where the Internet is an especially effective disruptive tool for democracy. In mature democracies, we might not expect the Internet to be a profound force for change as there are so many other ways to disseminate fact and opinion. In nations where control over information is quite thorough, net usage is almost always heavily controlled, meaning it’s less likely to act as a transformative force. In nations that are somewhere between – in nations like Ukraine – access to information worldwide and the ability to amplify it may well be able to be a major force for social change.

A side note: Andy mentioned a site – 3dway.org – is one of the few sites effectively publishing indepedent information from Belarus. According to the Maidan site, some of the organizers of Third Way have been having major difficulties with the Belarussian KGB as a result of their site.