This year’s Global Voices meeting was a three-day event for many of us. We’d decided it made sense to break the main meeting into two days: one open to the press and the local community and the other a closed discussion just for members of the community. This was a response to one of the trickiest aspects of the London meeting last year – while we had terrific debates about what Global Voices should be, with a lot of voices critical of the ways we currently operate, we didn’t have enough time to talk about how we do what we’ve chosen to do more effectively. The last day of our conference this year was a great chance to have some of the nitty-gritty discussions that just don’t come up when you’re debating whether or not blogging really is an important activity in the developing world, or arguing whether GV should be more or less like Indymedia.

(Quinn Norton from Wired News was with us for the public day of the conference, and also spent a lot of time one on one with people in our community – she’s got an excellent article today talking about some of the highs and the lows of the meeting.)

Once you’re bringing together bloggers from around the world (at painful expense, I might add…), it’s worth having as many meetings as you can possibly stand. This helps explain one of the coolest aspects of this year’s conference, the first meeting of the Hibiscus Project.

Hibiscus is a project designed to create dialog about the relationship between China and Africa, specifically encouraging conversations between bloggers in both regions. It’s the brainchild of Akwe Amosu, a brilliant and passionate Afrophile who’s had distinguished careers as a journalist, development professional and advocate. While she currently works for Open Society Institute as a lobbyist on African issues, Hibiscus is a project she’s carrying out independently. Because we’re lucky enough to have Akwe as one of the advisors to Global Voices, she was good enough to hold her first meeting in Delhi “Day Zero” of our conference – this meant that a large number of our community members were able to be part of the discussions as well.

(Akwe took care to explain that this meeting was opportunistic – it took advantage of the fact that a large number of bloggers were already in New Delhi. Many of the bloggers she hopes to have around the table to discuss Hibiscus weren’t able to be there, either due to scheduling or funding reasons – she made it very clear that there will be a Hibiscus launch meeting at some point soon with a wider list of attendees and many more people represented around the table.)

Anyone who follows the African blogosphere knows that China’s expanding interest in the continent has been one of the main stories of the past year. Akwe points out that the recent Africa Summit in Beijing attracted more African leaders than most African Union meetings do. China has made it extremely clear that they consider aid and investment in Africa a top national priority. Akwe explains that Africa and China are having a major impact on each other, but that the relationship is assymetric. She suggests that this assymetry may not persist – colonialism taught us that these relationships have a tendency to reverse themselves over time.

The goal of Hibiscus is to start a dialog over these issues between Chinese and African bloggers, helping each side understand the other’s perspectives, concerns and hopes. The goal is to take advantage of the fact that people are already writing about these issues, and to use the fast, iterative nature of the blogosphere to hold these conversations, instead of publishing yet another magazine or journal.

As bloggers around the table begin answering the question, “What do people in your community think about the other community?” the complexities of this relationship become very clear. Some of the African perspectives are ones readers of this blog will be familiar with:

- China’s interest in Africa means that there’s another player on the continent – this may give African leaders leverage over existing players like the World Bank, the IFC, the EU and the US.

- A colonialist past – especially skepticism about France’s involvement with the continent – leads to a great deal of caution about the impact of China in Africa. Ndesanjo points out that African bloggers appear to be converging on a language to describe the situation: the “second scramble” for Africa, with implications of a recolonization taking place.

- Daudi Were points out that his fellow Kenyans have learned to be suspicious of their leaders – he wonders what Kenya has been giving up in exchange for the economic concessions coming from China.

- Africans are conscious of the assymetry – Daudi points out that while Kenyans can now see English-language CCTV – which many welcome as an alternative to CNN – an application by a Kenyan radio station to broadcast in China was summarily rejected.

When the Chinese bloggers talk, the perspectives are less familiar to me.

- Oiwan Lam notes that Africa gets used for ideological purposes in the Chinese media. On nationalistic shows like “The Rise of a Great Nation”, viewers are told that supporting poor, victimized Africa is part of China’s responsibility as a world power.

- Jacky Peng sees a huge demand for information about everyday life in Africa for an unexpected reason: the Chinese government is encouraging people to take jobs in Africa and individuals who consider these jobs want to know what they’re getting into. Forums are filled with questions like “How much can I earn in Africa?” and “What’s it really like to live there?”

He also points out that the official information available on Africa is extremely uncritical – there’s certainly very little discussion of corruption in Africa in government-sanctioned news sources.

- Portnoy Zheng points out that the view is very different from Taiwan than from mainland China – Taiwanese are most concerned about the few African nations that continue to recognize Taiwan, and are worried that China’s new initiatives will pull more nations onto the “other side”.

- Jen Bréa, who was in Beijing for the summit, saw the posters as symbolic of how little information most Chinese had about Africa, and indeed, about other parts of the world like Latin America. She was shocked at the extent to which the images the Summit chose to feature were wild animals and “scantily dressed natives”, not the images of contemporary, modern Africa.

Rebecca MacKinnon jumped in to mention “the elephant in the room” – Chinese racism towards Africans. She reminds everyone of riots that took place in Nanjing in the 1980s when Chinese students dated African men. She argues that Chinese tend to regard all foreigners as alien and Africans as more so. This sparked some spirited responses around the table – Blaise pointed out that Beninoise had extensive impressions of the Chinese from their communist past, and that many of these impressions were unflattering: “Don’t those guys eat dogs?” Alice Backer argued that the issue on the table was xenophobia, not race, urging people not to automatically adopt the language and terminology we use in the US to talk about racial issues.

As the dialog opened, people got increasingly comfortable with the idea that there’s both a knowledge and perception gap between the African and Chinese blogging communities, interesting solutions were put on the table. Several suggestions focused on creating some sort of shared site, translating posts and comments so that people could participate in the dialog regardless of language – the translation model put forth by the Interlocals project was the one discussed most extensively, allowing anyone to translate any piece into any language. (Accuracy and bias is an obvious problem with this model…) Building these dialogs isn’t as easy as just translating, though – Jacky pointed out that Chinese bloggers are often reluctant to get into political discussion and that conversations about daily life might be more likely to get widespread Chinese participation.

It’s unsurprising that, at a face to face gathering, strong arguments were made for projects that brought African and Chinese bloggers together – Ndesanjo broke the ice by declaring, “I want to get to China!” Is the natural tendency of bloggers to want to talk with one another sufficient to get bloggers in China to open their homes to African bloggers, or vice versa? Would these journals from the road be useful as complements to the larger economic and political discussions already taking place, at least in the African blogosphere?

My guess is that Hibiscus won’t have a clear mandate or path forwards until there have been more meetings like this one. But I came away with a sense that there’s a fascinating constellation of issues here, and a real passion between people to have these conversations, one to one and many to many.

Imnakoya was at the gathering and has an excellent summary post of discussions. He’s asking everyone to use the Technorati tag “Hibiscus Project” when discussing this topic.

The situation in Somalia is, as it always is, extremely confusing. Headlines yesterday alternated between reports of fierce battles and reports that both sides were returning to the negotiating table.

An excellent interview with Ken Menkhaus in Foreign Policy helps explain this pattern:

Neither the Ethiopians nor the Islamists has the ability to deliver a knockout punch. The only way this armed conflict will be short is if each side is trying to send a signal to the other. In other words, they bloody each other’s noses, then step back and assess the very high risks to both sides, and someone steps in to mediate.

He goes on to explain that this situation favors the UIC – because they control so much of the country, they win in a stalemate:

Some people argue that the prospects of a negotiated settlement are nil, that the Courts have nothing to gain. They are already in a position of tremendous power within Somalia. They are the strongest military and political force by a long margin.

This, in turn, means that Ethiopia may be caught in a long quagmire, making them more vulnerable to pressure from Eritrea on their northern border.

It’s difficult to get news from Somalia right now – it continues to be a dangerous place for non-Somali journalists, and it’s very hard to get a “man on the street” impression of the situation in Baidoa or the surrounding area. I’d had my fingers crossed for Andrew Heavens, who pulled out of the Global Voices meeting to try and travel to the Ethiopia/Somalia border region – his most recent blog post suggests that he had to abort the trip. Mike Pflanz from the Telegraph is writing from the other side of the border – he’s travelling with MSF and offering a diary from the road – at present, he doesn’t seem to be anywhere near the fighting, but he’s giving some interesting impressions of the comparative normalcy of southern Somalia under the UIC.

• allAfrica.com: TED2006
  Good preview of TED Africa by Tami Hultman of AllAfrica
  (tags: africa TED)
• Access Blogspot Banned / Blocked Blogs from Pakistan, India, Iran and China at pkblogs.com
  A proxy designed specifically to allow people in countries that block access to Blogger.com to read your blog
  (tags: ethiopia china pakistan freespeech blogs)
• YouTube – ethan zuckerman history of the internet
  My “History of Internet Communities in Five Minutes” bit at the “Beyond Broadcast” conference, remixed and posted by Charlie Nesson on YouTube
  (tags: video berkman mine internet history)
• MediaBerkman ? Blog Archive ? How Open Will Harvard Be to Internet and Society?
  Podcast of Charles Nesson’s talk at Berkman about what it means to be an “open” university. The talk ends with an (ahem) spirited exchange between Charlie and me on Second Life, the possibility of an open metaverse and why I’m troubled that Charlie’s embr
  (tags: secondlife croquet berkman nesson system:badutf8)
• Wired News: Pluggd: A Google for Podcasts
  Interesting audio search technology for letting folks find the interesting bits of podcasts. If it works as well as it demos, it could be a key tech in allowing people to produce useful podcast search engines… which would make podcasting a more powerful
  (tags: podcasting search geek)
• Global Voices Online ? Blog Archive ? Delhi Summit Reflections: We ARE the People of the Year.
  Excellent reflection from Rebecca on the GV summit, Time’s decision to name “You” as person of the year, and the challenges ahead for GVO and citizen media as a whole
  (tags: citizenmedia globalvoices rmack system:badutf8)
• Telegraph | News | Mike Pflanz: Diary from Somalia
  Mike Pflanz is in Somalia at a fascinating time, roaming around with MSF as the standoff between the UIC and the Ethiopia-backed “national government” turns into active warfare. Good stuff so far.
  (tags: somalia blogs media ethiopia)
• Google library: Open culture? – CNN.com
  Alfred P. Sloan Foundation gives the Open Content Alliance $1m to start digitizing key texts, in part to ensure an open alternative for the Google books project.
  (tags: freeculture openaccess google opencontent)
• Cybermohalla
  A Delhi-based project which gives citizens of slum communities the tools they need to author and distribute digital media, for self-expression and activism
  (tags: india technology citizenmedia)

My cousin, Adam Zuckerman, was recently nominated for a remarkable honor – BeliefNet’s most inspiring person of 2006. The nomination recognizes the work he’s done in his hometown of Portland, ME, to call attention to the ongoing violence in Darfur. Adam ended up organizing a passover seder with a Darfur-focused haggadah which brought together local activists and refugees in the Portland community. He’s lobbied the Maine legislature and helped get the state government to divest from Sudan. The New York Times has featured his work, and Beliefnet calls him “one of the most outspoken advocates of the Darfuri cause in the U.S.”

Did I mention that he’s 18? And that he selected George Washington University in DC for his undergrad education because it puts him in Washington, DC, so he can lobby Congress without taking an 11-hour bus ride?

Yep. That’s pretty inspiring. Congrats, Adam, on all the work you’ve done and on the recognition you very much deserve.

On July 23, 2006, two Lebanese Red Cross ambulances were attacked by Israeli forces, causing injury to the ambulance crews and the patients aboard – one of the patients, Ahmad Fawaz lost his leg in the attack. The incident generated a fierce burst of media attention because the attack on a marked Red Cross vehicle was a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions.

This media attention generated a wave of citizen media “debunking” of the incident, making an argument that the attack on the ambulances had been staged by Hezbollah sympathizers to frame Israel for war crimes. The debunking was led by the author behind Zombietime, whose analysis was picked up by prominent right-wing blog, Powerline, and later by conservative commentator Oliver North. This claim was later repeated by Australia’s foreign minister Alexander Downer, who stated “it is beyond all serious dispute that this episode has all the makings of a hoax.”

Zombietime’s argument centered on published media photos of the damaged ambulances – commentators concluded that the vehicles had suffered minor damage, while a missle strike would have destroyed them, and that rust around the missle entry hole proved that the hole had existed well before the alleged attack.

Human Rights Watch has just issued a 25-page refutation of this analysis, based on visits to Lebanon, interviews with all three ambulance patients and four of the six ambulance crew. (The Zombietime analysis was based on analysis of the photographs – the debunker did not travel to Lebanon or interview eyewitnesses.) They conclude that the ambulances were both struck by missles, one of which removed Fawaz’s leg, but that the missles were likely Dense Inert Metal Explosives fired from an Israeli drone. Other attacks from Israeli drones caused substantial damage within vehicles without destroying them entirely – larger missles, fired from Israeli helicopters and airplanes tend to obliterate vehicles entirely, leaving large craters.

Human Rights Watch had a definite interest in clearing up uncertainty about the events of July 23. The illegal attack on the ambulances was one of the violations of international conventions that Human Rights Watch reported in their first report on the Lebanon/Israel war – once the attack had been characterized as a “hoax”, some commentators used this characterization to call into question HRW’s other accusations about Israeli conduct during the war. And HRW’s report does include a major correction – they no longer characterize the attack as coming from a manned Israeli aircraft, but now believe the attacks came from a remote-controlled drone.

I’m fascinated by the incident, the “debunking” and HRW’s response refutation of the debunking (a “rebunking”?) because it raises interesting questions about what citizen media can and can’t do. I’ll happily acknowledge that the debunking of the Bush National Guard memo was a high point for the idea of bloggers as fact checkers of the media, even though the incident was seen as a victory for right-wing bloggers. (I’d prefer to see it as a victory for the idea of blogs as an oversight mechanism for the media.) I think it’s very important that photographs which were digitally retouched to enhance smoke, making the destruction in Lebanon look more apocalyptic were debunked, and I note this even though the incident was very embarrasing to Reuters, which is a substantial sponsor of the main project I work on these days.

But this is a case where the armchair pundits apparently got it very, very wrong… and may not have gotten it wrong in especially good faith. The bombing of marked Red Cross vehicles is very damaging to the narrative embraced by the American right that the Israelis are standing up to “global terror” with the sort of care and restraint one would hope for from a democratic state. (Then again, as an American, I haven’t gotten a lot of care and restraint from my democratic government lately.) There’s a strong motivation for pundits supportive of Israel to analyze the photos closely and offer an explanation that absolves Israel of a major breach of the Geneva convention.

What’s disturbing to me about the situation is the timeframe. Zombietime and affiliated rightwing commentators got their story out very quickly, offering their analysis within days of the incident. HRW’s response is coming almost half a year later. This makes sense – HRW actually went to Lebanon and interviewed people who saw the incident, while Zombietime looked at press photos and offered theories. While HRW’s analysis is critical in determining what really happened on July 23rd and demanding accountability from the Israeli government, this report is hardly likely to call as much attention to the incident as it recieved when it was initially reported. Zombietime et. al. already accomplished their rhetorical goals – they gave an explanation that let some readers dismiss the reporting of the incident and cast doubt into the mind of other readers. It’s unlikely that many of those people will wrestle with the issues again as a result of HRW’s report, as much as I’d hope otherwise.

This raises an interesting question about the future of factual disputes in the age of citizen media: should we expect partisan refutation of all inconvenient facts? If this is the case, is it a victory for dispersed global fact-checking, or for rhetoric? Pro-Israel organizations like Honest Reporting are closely monitoring media for stories they consider critical. If they subject these stories to careful, factual analysis and reveal sloppy reporting, like that conducted by Dan Rather on the Bush memos, this is a good thing. But if they do their own sloppy reporting and the assertions they offer can’t be challenged until six months after the fact, we’re in for a very ugly chapter in the history of news media.

Organizations like HRW are going to have to get better at responding to situations like this one in a way that’s both fast and careful. HRW can’t respond as quickly as a blogger because they’ve got a long track record of offering careful research and analysis before publishing reports. But maybe they need to consider mobilizing their own affiliated bloggers – I am proud to be one – much earlier in the process, not just when they’ve finished their analysis.

I got a great question via email from a reader a couple of days ago, asking what books I’d recommend for a Christmas break reading list for someone wanting to educate him or herself on Africa. I ended up suggesting a couple of my personal faves, as well as one book currently on my “to read” pile, George Ayittey’s Africa Unchained.

The others I suggested as great first reads:
- Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”
- Adam Hochschild’s “King Leopold’s Ghost”
- Any number of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s books, including The Shadow of the Sun and The Soccer War.

It occurred to me, after sending off this brief list, that I’d be much better off with a list suggested by my readers. So, if you’ve got a moment, think about what three books you’d recommend to someone who doesn’t know very much about African culture, politics or history… and share that advice on the comments. If we get some good feedback, I’ll post a compiled list of suggestions… and it may help shape my holiday giftgiving as well. (And yes, I’m still shopping. A trip that extends until December 20 will do that to a guy…)

Thanks for the idea, Kevin – point me to your blog, will you?

It’s easy to forget where you are when you travel as much as I do. The hotels, the conference centers, the airports can all blur together. And at an event like the Global Voices Summit where you’re more interested in the people who’ve come together than the setting you’re all in, you can forget for a few moments that you’re in India.

During a coffee break at the meeting yesterday, I walked out into courtyard of the India Habitat Center and followed the sound of pipes to a huge group of snake charmers, performing in one of the courtyards. The performance wasn’t just a cultural display – it was a protest, of sorts. Since India outlawed keeping wild animals in captivity, it’s been increasingly difficult for snake charmers to make a living. These performers, from the Jogi Nath community in Rajastan, are trying to call attention to the knowledge and expertise of snake charmers, which are associated with many people’s image of India even though it hasn’t been legal to keep and charm snakes for many years.

Snakes aside, the sound of a hundred charmers on pipes and drums is a pretty amazing thing – I was happy to get a quick bit of video. And I was very happy to have the reminder that, yes, I really was in India…

gvdelhi2006

David Sasaki has put together a remarkable session on translation at the Global Voices conference. It begins with a conversation led by John “Feng 37″ Kennedy in Chinese between the half dozen Chinese speakers in the room, then a five-person conversation in Swahili, led by Ndesanjo Macha, then a lively conversation in Hindi involving about a quarter of the room. David observes that, during each conversation, he saw about half a dozen people smiling, engaged in the conversation, and everyone else ignoring the larger conversation. This is obviously a useful metaphor for some of the challenges we’re seeing at Global Voices – how do we amplify, contextualize and translate conversations from all the languages represented online?

Portnoy Zheng leads a project to translate articles from Global Voices into Chinese. His reason for launching the project was a sense that it was very hard to get relavent international news in the Taiwanese mainstream media. He began translating with a story from Indonesia on Global Voices, talking about a plane crash caused by overloading a plane with durian which killed a number of Indonesian politicians (Durian is an inherently funny fruit, which may explain why Portnoy felt compelled to provide a pan-Asian translation.) After translating about 100 posts, he met Rebecca in Taiwan and decided to formalize the project. There’s now a site – maintained by about 10 translators – which translates a subset of Global Voices articles. There’s no clear guidelines to which ones are included – usually posts that talk about China or north Asia, and often articles about controversy in the Middle East, which Portnoy feels don’t get covered closely enough in Chinese media.

David points out that Global Voices currently translates only a small subset of the languages of the blogosphere – we translate content from Spanish, Portuguese, Swahili, French, Arabic, Persian, Mandarin, Russian and occasionally Serbian and Ukranian. In other countries, we neccesarily misrepresent the local conversation, showing off only a few people in the country who happen to be bilingual. He points us to a recent blog post titled “Africa, Global Voices y el anglocentrismo cool”, which argues that if you don’t speak English, you don’t show up on global voices. David’s looking for ways to turn critique like this into involvement – what would be involved with getting the author of this post to help translate GV into Spanish and translate Spanish posts on GV?

David starts outlining some of the questions we’re facing in dealing with translation on GV:
- How do we encourage blogger translation? How do we get more people doing this?
- Do we need permission from bloggers before we start translating their work?
- Should we translate non-English comments into English to encourage conversation?
- Should we let people translate all our posts, using the Indymedia model which allows people to click a tab, choose a language and offer their own translation?

This last question raises the issue “Why isn’t everything put onto the site also put into MediaWiki, letting people translate on the fly?” The simple answer: maybe it should be – we’ve not spent enough time thinking through how to making the site translatable. One of our community editors points out that we have to make very careful decisions about what we translate – it’s an editorial choice as much as the stories we select for the site.

Two suggestions that got widespread applause and enthusiasm:
- finding a way to reward volunteer translators, perhaps with Amazon Rewards dollars or other currency
- making it possible for people to offer their reading of GV posts in translation from a link on the site.

It’s interesting to think about some of the assumptions Rebecca and I made about language when we started building GV two years ago. It was clear to us that we couldn’t build a site in more than one language, and that we weren’t well positioned to translate more than one or two languages. Also, we felt like we were featuring a very specific set of blogs – people who were choosing to write for a global audience, which often meant they were writing in English. But the blogosphere is a very different place two years later, and GVO has grown a great deal – trying to figure out how to accomodate and feature blogs from around the world is one of our major challenges going forwards.

gvdelhi2006

We’re about three hours into the first day of the GV Annual meeting here in Delhi – you can follow along in several different ways – the whole conference is being live blogged by Ange and SJ at the GV Delhi blog. There’s a live audio stream of the conference available, and there’s an active IRC channel going on as well at #globalvoices at irc.freenode.net. I suspect that if you searched for GV on flickr, you’d find a photostream as well. (Indeed, there is – Rebecca’s already got a slideshow up on Global Voices…)

Organizing a conference more or less guarantees that you don’t really get to participate in it. I’m sitting in the back of the room, trying to nurse our routers back to health. We’ve got a 512kbps leased line, which is allowing us to stream the conference, but a room full of laptop-wielding browsers is killing the two wireless access points we brought with us.

This, in some ways, is progress from yesterday, when I was killing the WAPs – we blew up a power supply last night as we tried out our wireless network. Boris and Jeremy, god bless them, went out to the market and bought a bunch of 220v power supplies which we thought might be capable of powering the WAPs. At dinner last night with Indian networking pioneer, Ashok Jhunjhunwalla, Boris and I borrowed an electric outlet in the middle of the restaurant and tried these new power supplies with one of our WAPs, and high-fived when it turned out to work.

The logistics behind this conference have been mind-bogglingly complex and, frankly, mind-bogglingly screwed up. We couldn’t book rooms at the same place we’re holding the conference, and because it’s the busiest season in Delhi, we ended up in a hotel about half an hour’s drive from the conference center. Which could have worked out well, if they’d actually given us the 35 rooms we booked – instead, they gave 15 away, and we ended up trying to position all our attendees in twenty rooms. So compared to that, a couple of exploding access points is hardly worth complaining about…

gvdelhi2006

It’s evidently my week for total media domination. Not only are my latkes experiencing international exposure through the Boston Globe, I’ve finally made it onto The Daily Show. At least that’s what I hear: connectivity’s a little spotty here in Delhi, so I’m relying on the flood of emails I’ve gotten, and a post on The Third Path which has a transcript of the bit I appear in.

The piece is an attempt by the ever-helpful Samatha Bee to give a makeover of Al-Jazeera International so that it’s more interesting to an American audience – she ends up suggesting they spend less time on news, and more time talking about kittens. There’s a quick clip of me talking about search engine censorship on the “Listening Post” show, a clip I recorded via webcam and sent in for a pilot of the show. It’s an illustration of AJI’s problem – that it’s content is so boring, Sam is forced to smoke a joint to make it more interesting. I’m glad that, of all the talking heads who’ve appeared on the new network, I’m the one the Daily Show feels best illustrates pomposity and boredom…

Just wait until tomorrow’s Global Voices meeting turns into a riot and you see my face all over the Indian media as I’m trampled to death by a horde of multinational bloggers…

Heh. It’s even better! My comment gets Samantha Bee to throw her joint away and leave in disgust! Thanks to Janet for the link…