Another day, another book chapter. No, not the book I’m hoping to write over the next n months – a book on citizen media in crisis situations being put together by a pair of academics in Britain. Given that some of the folks mentioned in this piece periodically read this blog, and that lots of readers are interested in how citizen media might be used in crisis situations, I thought I’d post a draft here in the hopes that y’all might have additions, subtractions, corrections and thoughts. Please feel free to use the comment thread to offer any thoughts you might have. Apologies in advance if I don’t respond to all comments promptly – I’m about to stop pretending to be an academic and pretend to run a global citizen media organization through its “annual” meeting.

Citizen Media and the 2007 Kenyan Election Crisis
Ethan Zuckerman, Harvard University
Draft – 6/20/2008

The crisis surrounding the disputed 2007 presidential elections in Kenya served as a stark reminder of how fragile young democracies can be. It also put into sharp focus the power new media technologies give citizens of developing nations to report news and organize responses to crisis situations. A number of Kenyans demonstrated how technically sophisticated and globally connected their country is at precisely the moment when their leaders demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice the nation’s reputation for stability in exchange for continued governing power.

While Kenyan citizen journalists and community organizers have a great deal to be proud of in their response to an electoral crisis and the concomitant ethnic violence, information technology was also used both by the government and civilians to amplify tensions and coordinate violent attacks. The technologies used by citizen reporters and community organizers were the same ones used by forces in the government who sought to rig the election, and agitators who attempted to expand ethnic violence. One lesson from the use of information technology in the Kenyan crisis is that the technology itself is neutral. It can be used powerfully to give citizens a voice in crisis situations, or used to aggravate those same crises.

A Brief History of the 2007 Elections

Mwai Kibaki became the third president of Kenya in 2002 after winning a landslide election against Daniel arap Moi, who was widely accused of corruption. Kibaki promised to address problems of government corruption and experiences some early victories, leading the IMF to resume lending. The resignation and flight of John Githongo, anti-corruption advisor, in early 2005 was a major blow, and suggested that corruption problems might be endemic to the Kibaki government.

Kibaki, who had promised a new constitution when elected, put a draft constitution up for vote in November 21, 2005. The constitution consolidated presidential power, making it easier for the President to fire uncooperative ministers. Raila Odinga led the opposition to the referendum, choosing an orange as his campaign’s symbol, opposed to the banana chosen by Kibaki. The defeat of the referendum was viewed as a major embarrasment for Kibaki as well as a precursor to a challenge by Odinga in the next presidential elections.

On December 27, 2007 presidential and parliamentary election pitted President Mwai Kibaki and his Party of National Unity (PNU) against Raila Odinga and the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM). Odinga led in polls before the election. Early results showed substantial losses in parliament for the PNU, and suggested that Odinga led Kibaki – at the same time, delays in announcing election results raised concerns about possible election rigging.

Three days after the elections, the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) declared Kibaki the winner of a closely contested election, with a margin of 230,000 votes. Kibaki was quickly sworn in as President as members of the ECK held a press conference to express concerns about voting irregularities. Riots erupted in the Kibera neighborhood of Nairobi, an opposition stronghold. The new government banned live television coverage of the protests and deploying troops to keep the peace and block demonstrations. Odinga attempted to hold an alterate inauguration on December 31st, but the event was banned and Uhuru Park, where it was to be held, was sealed off by riot police.

The situation took a brutal turn on January 1st when more than 100 ethnic Kikuyu (the tribe Kibaki belongs to) were burned to death by a gang of Kalenjin, Luhya and Luo men (tribes associated with Odinga) in a church outside Eldoret, in the Rift Valley. Over the next weeks, as African and international leaders flew into the country to mediate, clashes between ODM and PNU supporters, and between Kikuyu and minority ethnic groups were responsible for more than a thousand and at up to 600,000 internally displaced persons.

In early February, as party leaders began negotiations in earnest, violence slowed, possibly reflecting the political nature of the clashes, or perhaps as a result of the separation brought about by internal migration of threatened ethnic groups. On February 28th, a power-sharing agreement mediated by Kofi Annan was signed by Odinga and Kibaki, establishing a new position of Prime Minister, to be held by Odinga. Lengthy negotiations led to agreements on composition of a new cabinet, creating seats for 40 ministers, an unprecedented and expensive number.

Digital Media in Kenya

Understanding the role of citizen media in the elections crisis requires a brief history of Kenyan digital media as well. With an estimated 3 million internet users, Kenya has one of the highest levels of internet penetration in sub-Saharan Africa, at 7.9%. (Of major sub-Saharan African countries – i.e., discounting those with populations under a million – only Zimbabwe and South Africa have higher net penetration.)

More than 12 million Kenyans – roughly 30% of the population – have mobile phones, as compared to a continent-wide penetration of 20%. Kenyan companies have been early adopters of mobile money transfer systems like M-PESA and complex SMS-based systems like Kazi560 which matches jobseekers and employers via their phones.

Against this backdrop, it makes sense that Kenyans would emerge as early adopters in citizen media. Prominent Kenyan blogs, including Daudi Were’s “Mental Acrobatics” have been online since early 2003. Starting in 2004, Kenya Unlimited has aggregated posts from individual blogs on a central site and provided a “webring”, a navigation mechanism that links related weblogs together. In 2006, a nationwide blogging contest – the Kenya Blog Awards or “Kaybees” – helped bring together individual Kenyan bloggers into a community. Afrigator, an African blog aggregator based in South Africa, cites two Kenyan blogs in its list of top twenty blogs, giving the country the second best representation on that list (after South Africa, which dominates.)

Kenyan bloggers have an influence beyond their online readership. They’ve emerged as source for ideas and stories for mainstream papers. Indeed, this influence has included cases where newspapers have taken stories, word for word, from blogs and have been forced to apologize for their plagarism. (See my paper, Meet the Bridgebloggers, for more on this story). Kenyan bloggers have not been shy about using their online platforms to agitate for political change. Ory Okolloh, author of the popular Kenyan Pundit weblog, launched Mzalendo in early 2006 , a site designed to provide increased transparency and insight into the Kenyan Parliament.

Blogging the 2007 Elections

Several Kenyan bloggers took pains to document the 2007 election, but there’s little indication from their posts that any anticipated the unusual events that would follow the election. In the midst of a thorough post describing his voting experience, and the precautions taken by the ECK to prevent election fraud, Daudi Were observed:

“One thing I noticed was that no one was wearing any political party merchandise and the conversations in the queue were distinctly non political. Rather than being divided, by queuing together to exercise our civic duty and responsibility we were bound together in a sort of patriotic camaraderie. We all felt it was worthwhile to take part in the vote and that ultimately was what mattered.”

The joy in a smooth functioning democratic process extended through the 28th, as it became clear that the elections had ousted a large number of incumbents. Ory Okolloh noted:

“Folks this is a historic election by Kenyan standards, regional standards and international standards – I don’t think there is a precedent for the number of incumbents that are going down despite having massive resources behind them and attempts to bribe voters. And I challenge you to find an election in the Western world in recent times where people have come out with such determination, conviction, and a strong sense of civic duty . I’m very very proud of Kenyan voters and you all should be no matter who you are supporting.”

The tone – and focus – of coverage changed sharply on December 30th, as it became clear that the disputed election would be declared in Kibaki’s favor. The ban on live media reports particularly incensed Okolloh, who had been monitoring TV, radio, the internet, SMS and local gossip to produce several election updates per day. When the live coverage ban was announced, she declared:

“All live broadcasts have been suspended by the government. The order was released as ODM was addressing their press conference. This is now officially a police state. So we have no idea what ODM is saying, and what the security situation is around the country. ”

In the wake of a ban on live media, some Kenyan bloggers responded by redoubling their efforts as citizen reporters. Reeling from the violence in her native Eldoret, Juliana Rotich began posting brief bulletins on
refugee movements, fuel shortages, road and airport closures. Some were posted via SMS using Twitter to disseminate messages to a wider audience; others featured photos and were uploaded to Flickr using a GPRS modem. Daudi Were took to the streets on January 3rd, following ODM activists as they attempted to march to Uhuru Park to attend a banned rally. His photos document the empty streets of the usually-bustling capital and the tense standoffs between activists and security forces, and provided insights on the confrontation hard to find in international media covering the confrontations.

As it became clear that Kenya would be in crisis for more than a few days, bloggers began to search for ways to share their workload. Okolloh, who resides in Johannesburg, returned home on January 3rd, after a difficult debate over whether she should stay to document the crisis or prioritize the safety of her young child. Three days after arriving in South Africa, she added a new feature to her blog: “diary entries” written by guest bloggers and submitted to her via email. In the month the diary was active, it featured 26 posts from a variety of Kenyans, including regular bloggers who sought an opportunity to reach a larger audience and from people who had not previously published online. The tone was sharply different from Okolloh’s opinionated, but news-focused, reports – the diaries were personal reflections on the crisis, providing context for readers interested in how the crisis was affecting individual Kenyans.

In her first post on returning to Johannesburg, Okolloh proposed another form of distributed reporting, a Google Maps mashup that showed incidents of violence reported throughout Kenya:

“Google Earth supposedly shows in great detail where the damage is being done on the ground. It occurs to me that it will be useful to keep a record of this, if one is thinking long-term. For the reconciliation process to occur at the local level the truth of what happened will first have to come out. Guys looking to do something – any techies out there willing to do a mashup of where the violence and destruction is occurring using Google Maps?”

The reaction to this idea, one of nine points in a long roundup, helps demonstrate Okolloh’s influence and reach in the blogger community. (Technorati lists Kenyan Pundit as the #15,282nd most popular blog in its index, a very high rank for an Africa-focused blog. At the peak of its popularity during the crisis, 0.004% of all blog posts on the internet linked to Kenyan Pundit, a level comparable to regular linking to Global Voices Online, one of the 200 most popular blogs in the world. Within three days of her January 3rd blog post, a prototype version of the system she proposed had been built. By January 9th, it was live at Ushahidi.com. (The term
Ushahidi means “witness” in Swahili.) A day later, a partnership with Kenyan mobile phone operators allowed Kenyans to post reports using an SMS shortcode.

The authors of the Ushahidi system were, without exception, people deeply involved in Kenya’s citizen media community. David Kobia, the lead author of the system, administers Mashada.com, the leading bulletin board site for Kenyans and the Kenyan diaspora. The chief architect of the system was Erik Hershman, author of the Afrigadget and White African blogs. Bloggers Daudi Were and Juliana Rotich built partnerships with NGOs in Kenya to promote the service and generate reports from outside the web community. Hershman reports that 75% of Kenyan blogs linked to Ushahidi by January 10th, helping launch the site to local and global audiences.

Ushahidi is best understood as a form of collaborative citizen journalism. Individuals submit reports of violent incidents – as well as of peacemaking efforts – via a web form or SMS message, including details of the incident, its geographic location and supporting information, including photos or video. Ushahidi’s administrators attempt to verify reports, cross-checking against mainstream and citizen media reports, resolve multiple reports into a single record and make the reports visible on an interactive map. The result is a powerful visualization of the complexities of violence and peacemaking in post-conflict Kenya.

The Ushahidi project is now focused on creating a sustainable, open-source platform to allow citizen crisis reporting anywhere in the world. The platform was adopted in late May 2008 by United for Africa, a South African project that documents xenophobic violence. On May 28th, Ushahidi won the NetSquared N2Y3 mashup challenge, a prominent software competition which awarded the project a $25,000 first prize.

Who’s the Audience for Crisis Media?

Since Ushahidi is built by SMS and web submissions, but chiefly visible via the web, it’s worth asking whether the main audience for the site is inside or outside the country. This question is complicated by the fact that the possible audience for these projects inclues Kenyans living domestically and Kenyans in the diaspora as well as non-Kenyans. Kenya’s diaspora is a powerful political and economic force – some estimates put remittances from the diaspora at more than $1 billion US per year, more than 2% of GDP. Diaspora Kenyans have held political debates in Washington DC and stay deeply involved with national politics through groups like the Kenyan Community Abroad.

Some of the most innovative efforts in response to the Kenyan crisis were aimed, wholly or in part, in motivating the Kenyan diaspora to support reconstruction efforts. Mama Mikes, an online business that accepts payments via the web and delivers goods to addresses within Kenya (a system some have termed “alternative remittance”). During the crisis, they began offering diaspora Kenyans the opportunity to give online, purchasing relief materials which the company staff delivered to displaced persons camps in the Rift Valley. Mama Mikes documented the materials purchased on their staff blog, thanking donors by name and documenting their trip to the camps. To encourage donations and support, either through Mama Mikes or directly to the Red Cross, Juliana Rotich began photographing conditions in displaced persons camps and food distribution efforts One effect of this coverage was to add transparency to the relief efforts and reassure donors in the diaspora that goods were reaching people in need.

It’s difficult to determine the extent to which citizen media efforts affected news coverage and perceptions of Kenya outside the diaspora population. (It is beyond the scope of this essay, but a future research project might consider the extent to which Kenyan citizen journalists were cited in the mainstream press in the weeks the crisis was most intense.) But it is apparent that many Kenyans were concerned with the international perception of their country in the wake of the crisis.

A group called Concerned Kenyan Writers, led by celebrated Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina, sought to organize Kenyans to write op-eds in international newspapers with intent “to present a human face to the Kenyan post-election crisis; to counter the static images and impressions of escalating violence and anarchy in the foreign press and to document this turning point in our nation’s history for posterity.” In editorials like Wainaina’s “No Country For Old Hatreds” in the New York Times, authors challenged portrayals of the crisis as an eruption of ethnic hatred, suggesting instead that the events reflected systematic manipulation of ethnic stereotypes by political parties seeking political gains. Bankelele, a popular blog focused on banking and investment in Kenya, challenged the narrative that Kenya would become another Rwanda with sober, thoughtful analyses of the implications of the crisis for Kenyan economics.

It’s also clear that many Kenyan were interested in raising their voices, either through projects like Ushahidi, Concerned Kenyan Writers, Kenyan Pundit’s diaries, or via their own blogs. On December 30, 2007 – early in the crisis – Daudi Were posted instructions on starting your own blog in response to the avalanche of comments he’d received on his own posts. Many of these comments criticized existing bloggers, or demanded that certain posts or comments be removed from the Kenya Unlimited blog aggregator. Daudi responded, “If someone writes something you disagree with by all means let your voice be heard as you present your counter view, and the best place to do this is on your own blog.” This raises another open research question: did the Kenyan elections crisis cause more Kenyans to start blogging? Will they continue beyond the crisis? Should efforts to introduce citizen media to new populations focus on crisis response efforts?

A Darker Side to Citizen Media

It’s an oversimplification to view online reactions to the Kenyan crisis purely as a proud moment for citizen media. One of the most dramatic lessons of the crisis is that technologies useful for reporting and peacemaking are also useful for rumormongering and incitement to violence.

As the Kenyan crisis unfolded, many cellphone owners received SMS messages that urged them to drive neighbors from their houses: “If your neighbor is a Kikuyu, just kick him or her out of that house. No one is going to ask you anything.” Messages included expressions of ethnic hatred, warnings that one ethnic group would attack another, and rumors that implicated Kenyan companies and institutions in promoting violence. The Nation Media Group, a major Kenyan media company, was forced to issue a press release specifically to counter rumors that its vehicles were being used to transport arms throughout the country to increase violence.

Kenyan mobile phone operators cooperated with the Kibaki government to send messages to subscribers, urging them not to send or forward inflamatory messages. Juliana Rotich reported receiving the following message on her mobile phone in Eldoret: “The ministry if Internal security urges you to please desist from sending or forwarding any SMS that may cause public unrest. This may lead to your prosecution”. On January 1, 2008 Ory Okolloh reported “Bulk sms has been blocked by the government to prevent guys from sending inciteful messages.”

Firoze Manji, a Kenyan human rights activist and editor of Pambazuka News, pointed out that these messages from the government had the effect of challenging legitimate political organizing via mobile phone. Blocking bulk SMS may have been intended to stop spreading ethnic hatred, but it also created obstacles for the ODM as they attempted to organize rallies and protests. Manji was particularly offended by a message from Kibaki shortly after he was inaugurated, urging all Kenyans to remain calm: “How did Kibaki get my phone number? This is a major breach of privacy.”

The ministry of information may have been premature in threatening prosecution for forwarding messages that incited violence. The Nation reported on March 1, 2008 that the government had compiled a list of 1700 people who had forwarded messages that incited ethnic violence. However, “there is no law governing hate speech over mobile phones, radio and television.” Groups like the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights have been pushing such a law, unsuccessfully. It’s possible that concerns about the role of SMS in the crisis situation may reopen debate on electronic hate speech.

Ethnic incitement wasn’t limited to SMS messages. Bloggers discovered that their comment threads were becoming increasingly hostile and featured many hateful sentiments, sometimes expressed in tribal languages so as to be understandable only to members of that group. Daudi Were’s post on January 4th, 2008, outlining the guidelines to comment on his site left little doubt about the content he was being forced to moderate:

“I am not here to spoon feed you or even debate with you what does or does not make valid commentary. My younger cousins who are just out of their teens and about to join high school know the difference between intellectual and valid commentary and hate speech. So do you. I will not enter into a lengthy debate on whether your comment, that we should “finish” this or that tribe is valid because of some socio-economic-political-historical injustice you quote. For crying out loud our country is burning. You fuel the flames here and I will burn your comment, i.e. I will delete it.”

Moderation problems became so intense on Mashada, Kenya’s leading bulletin board site, that David Kobia had to take extraordinary steps. He shut down the site for a cooling-off period, and briefly explored paying moderators to continue their work, as they were quickly resigning after trying to cope with floods of hateful messages. On January 29th, he shut the forum down entirely, noting “Facilitating civil discussions and debates has become virtually impossible.”

A few days later, Kobia launched a new site, I Have No Tribe. Like Ushahidi, it was centered on a Google Maps mashup. However, this mashup showed posts from Kenyans around the country and around the world wrestling with the statement, “I have no tribe… I am Kenyan.” Kobia redirected the Mashada site to the new site, and it rapidly filled with comments – combative as well as supportive, as well poems and prayers. Kobia reopened the forums on February 14th, having elegantly demonstrated that one possible response to destructive speech online is to encourage constructive speech.

Can you name the director of your local public radio station?

This isn’t one of those tests where you’re supposed to feel guilty if you can’t name your congressperson. I asked this question at a meeting of US media professionals and only one person in a room of twenty could come up with a name.

Clearly, they don’t live in Western Massachusetts or the Albany, New York area. (And I beg pardon in advance from my international readers – this is a post focused on public radio in the US, and specifically in my corner of it, and may be opaque to folks who live in countries with different models for public broadcasting.)

The director of my local public radio station, WAMC, is Dr. Alan Chartock, and like satirist Bill Shein, I can hear Alan Chartock’s voice in my sleep.

I hear his voice when I wake up as well. That’s because Chartock is also the “political observer” on WAMC, and his commentary on the day’s news events is featured in every morning’s newscast. The morning magazine show from 9am to noon features a segment called “The Congressional Corner”, where Chartock interviews local politicians. The afternoon call-in show, Vox Pop, features Chartock as a host at least once a week. He also hosts weekly shows, “The Media Project” and “The Capitol Connection”, as well as commenting on another weekly show, “The Legislative Gazette”.

It often seems like WAMC is pioneering a new radio format: Chartock Radio.

There’s a reason most people can’t name the administrators of their local public radio stations. Those folks tend to stay behind the scenes, allowing the celebrity hosts of nationally syndicated shows, and occasionally local reporters, to occupy the spotlight and build loyalty to the station. With the exception of Tory Malatia, humorously name-checked at the end of every episode of This American Life, most station managers aren’t known outside the community of public radio insiders.

Chartock has chosen a very different model for his administration of WAMC. As the Albany Business Review sympathetically observes, he’s the public face of the radio station, a constant presence in the life of station listeners. Not only do I know Chartock’s name, I know his wife’s name, his former faculty position at SUNY Albany, and what town he lives in. If I weren’t trying so hard to avoid listening to him, you’d think I were stalking the man.

I also know a great deal about Chartock’s political opinions. Chartock’s politics are pretty close to my own – unabashadly liberal, and strongly pro free-speech. It’s not that I disagree with the majority of his public political statements – it’s just that I don’t especially want to listen to them. I agree with much of what Keith Olbermann says, but I don’t generally tune into him, because I’m more interested in news coverage that aspires towards neutrality, rather than in the opinions of angry white men, on the right or the left. (I’m angry, white and opinionated enough on my own, thanks very much.)

When I wake up to National Public Radio, I’m looking for wide-ranging reporting and analysis with a minimum of overt opinion. I’m not naive enough to believe that this, or any other news, is “objective”, and I’m willing to do the work to search for a variety of opinions and perspectives on stories I’m following. But Chartock keeps putting his chocolate into my peanut butter, making me feel like I’ve stopped listening to NPR and tuned into Air America. Or, as one NPR producer thought, to Pacifica network, an explicitly left-wing syndicated radio network:

“I was driving through upstate New York and listening to the local public radio station, and there was this guy on the air ranting,” says one Washington-based NPR news producer, who didn’t want to be identified. “He was talking about the war in Iraq and how wrong it was and how we’re being held hostage as a country by this right-wing administration.”

The NPR producer assumed he had tuned into a Pacifica radio station, one of a small network of community stations that broadcast left-of-center advocacy-journalism programs. “It was actually sort of entertaining,” the producer recalls. “But then I nearly couldn’t believe it when this guy said, ‘In just a few moments we’ll be returning to NPR’s All Things Considered.’”

What that producer heard was Chartock during a fund drive when he’s at his most histrionic, taking to the airwaves for hours at a time to urge supporters to support the station. (Shein’s excellent parody portrays Chartock during a fund drive for precisely this reason.) Even Chartock has to know he sounds absurd at these times, punishing listeners who don’t give quickly enough with accordion renditions of “Lady of Spain” or by singing off-key. (Actually, he’s stopped playing “Lady of Spain”. I’d like to claim credit for this one. After one particularly egregious fund drive – and yes, I gave – I used Napster to download a dozen renditions of Lady of Spain and burn him a CD so he could torment listeners with a bit more variety. To the best of my knowledge, he hasn’t used this particular tactic since.)

The unnamed producer is quoted in a story in Baltimore’s City Paper about public radio and bias. NPR has been fighting accusations that it has a systematic liberal bias. While they’ve invested substantially in trainings and policies designed to combat bias, each affiliated station makes its own policy decisions. Vermont Public Radio, according to the article, restricts talk show hosts from expressing their opinions on air. WAMC, on the other hand, has a decided perspective on issues, especially when Chartock is on the air.

The article quotes Stephen Yasko, an NPR station manager in Towson, MD as supporting the independence of NPR member stations on the subject of bias: “So if Alan Chartock is what Albany and upstate New York created and what works for them, that’s a beautiful thing, no matter what some outsiders might say.”

That, indeed, may be what works for WAMC’s listeners. The station is an amazing success story in many ways, and that success has been led by Chartock, who was part of a team who raised money to buy the station out of bankruptcy in 1981. Since then the station has expanded both by acquiring other stations in the region and by producing large amounts of original content. It’s become a fundraising juggernaut, raising over $2 million a year in three fundraisers from listeners (as part of a near $7 million annual budget.) Clearly something is working for many of WAMC’s listeners and supporters.

But there’s a downside to these expansions. WAMC is produced in Albany, NY and broadcasts from atop Mt Greylock in western Massachusetts (about five miles from my house.) But stations in the WAMC system of transmitters and repeaters are located as far away as Plattsburg, NY (140 miles north of Albany), Utica (90 miles west) and Milford, PA (120 miles south). As one would hope a public radio station would, WAMC tries very hard to provide local news. But this means that local coverage includes breaking news in Plattsburg, a mere three hours drive from my house, and only five hours away from those poor listeners in eastern Pennsylvania. News from Boston, which houses the government I pay taxes to, would likely be more helpful, but doesn’t fit within the station’s footprint.

So why don’t I listen to another station? There aren’t any. WAMC is my only option for public radio via FM. I’m just outside the listening areas for WFCR, an excellent public radio station based in Amherst, MA, and just south of the listening area for Vermont Public Radio. (I can now listen to programming during daylight hours from WNNZ, a new day-only 50,000 watt station affiliate of WFCR.) I don’t know the history well enough to know whether there have been credible challenges to WAMC in the Western MA/eastern NY area. All I know is that my situation with public radio feels a lot like the nightmare of media consolidation Chartock often talks about: when I turn on the radio, all I hear is the same voice, because a single entity has purchased all the stations, filling them with the same political viewpoints.

But hey, it’s an NPR station, right? So most of the programming is just syndicated NPR/PRI/APM programming, right? Well, that’s the other rub. WAMC produces ten shows – three featuring Chartock – and distributes them via National Productions, its own syndicator. Some are quite good. Others are pretty terrible, especially when you compare them to nationally syndicated offerings from the major NPR networks. The particular thorn in my side is “The Media Project”, a half-hour discussion of press issues hosted by Chartock that’s so bad that promos for the show routinely include panelists admitting that the 30 second plug is likely better than the show as a whole. If WAMC were not producing and syndicating The Media Project (which they proudly remind us each week is listened to in Nacogdoches, TX), they might be willing to carry WNYC’s brilliant On The Media, an hour-long program that’s consistently one of the best things on the radio.

I only know about On The Media because I can listen to it via the web. Podcasts – including OTM, PRI’s The World, Tavis Smiley, Sound Opinions and Democracy Now! – let me listen to excellent programming that isn’t available on my local broadcast station. And discovering just how consistently good these shows are makes me wonder why they aren’t broadcast by WAMC and why WAMC continues producing some of its weaker shows.

As much as I’d like to blame Chartock for this situation, I think what’s going on points more to the difficulties public radio in the US faces in the digital age. Savvy listeners can choose audio content at no cost from providers – professional and otherwise – around the world. They understandably would like their stations to carry this content, as it’s lots easier to listen to an FM radio in many circumstances than to a laptop or an iPhone. (I do a lot of radio listening as I repair my roof, for instance, where I’d really much prefer to accidently drop a $5 transistor radio than an iPod.)

Stations have to pay for this content, though, which requires raising money from their local communities. The better a job they do attracting listeners, the more they pay. It makes sense that WAMC would try to make money by producing content locally and trying to syndicate it themselves, making money instead of paying it. Unfortunately, in an internet age, when your listeners can compare your mediocre product to the best content available, they’re likely to demand your station switch to airing the good stuff. When your station doesn’t, they’ll support those programs directly if given the opportunity.

There’s an upside to this, of course – produce excellent programming and you’ll get donations from far outside your geographic area. I now support WNYC specifically to support On the Media and Chicago Public Radio in gratitude for Sound Opinions and This American Life. (And I give to WFCR to support shows like Morning Edition, even though I can’t actually hear it here except via AM.) But in a world where listeners can choose from any content, your content needs to be excellent, or you need to stop producing it.

This is the same quandry smaller newspapers find themselves facing. Realizing that subscribers are turning to the New York Times online if they care about international issues, they’re cutting international and national bureaus and focusing on local news. Some do so successfully, while others are being forced to cut that coverage as well as revenue models change and classified advertising is no longer a reliable revenue source.

WAMC, I fear, is too big to do a good job with local coverage and too small to produce world-class syndicated programming. It’s too big for my hundred dollar donations to have any significant influence over content and too small to merit the scrutiny of a project like Colorado MediaMatters. Evidently WAMC is good enough that no one has organized a campaign to demand that WAMC take more neutral stances on personal opinion on-air or to attempt to build a rival station with a different on-air philosophy.

I’d love to hear about ideas for changing WAMC from anyone interested in the topic. Is the philosophy to try to convince Chartock to change? To build a rival station and try to draw listeners and sponsors to that station instead? Is there a winnable compromise, perhaps pushing WAMC management to use one of their new HD channels to run a more “traditional” NPR station, with more syndicated content and less Chartock? Am I the only one who’s reached this point of frustration with Chartock radio?

If you’ve been following recent news out of Zimbabwe, you know that the leadup to the June 27th run-off election has featured shockingly violent intimidation, flagrant disregard for international election laws and norms, and provocations of the international community. Add that to the underlying misery in Zimbabwe, where the government no longer publishes the inflation rate and outside estimates put it at over 1 million percent, and you’d expect the upcoming elections to be irretrivably rigged in favor of the ruling party.

Political humor from our friends at Kubatana

Which, I suspect, is the case. But here’s two small, strong reasons for hope.

As my friend Tawanda Mutasah has observed, Mugabe’s legitimacy has historically depended on the argument that he was fighting neo-colonialists who wanted to reconquer Africa, and that his actions were supported by other African leaders. Tawanda took hope from the refusal of neighboring countries to allow a Chinese ship filled with weapons to dock and unload. It was a clear message that African governments didn’t unconditionally support Mugabe, and that they would press back against blatant attempts to overthrow an election through violence.

I’m taking hope today from a letter, signed by a number of prominent African leaders, demanding that Zimbabwe allow election observers and address reports of voter intimidation. The signatories include former UN secretaries Kofi Annan and Boutros Boutros-Ghali, several former presidents, as well as international luminaries like Mo Ibrahim, Angelique Kidjo, Youssou N’Dour, Wangari Maathai and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Unfortunately, the list doesn’t include any current African heads of state. And I was surprised to discover Nelson Mandela’s name absent from the list.

You probably can’t convince Thabo Mbeki to sign. But you can add your name... and, especially for my African readers, I would urge you to do so.

A second, small note of hope comes from a BBC interview with opposition party members who’ve been forced to flee their homes to escape political violence in Zimbabwe. The reporter was threatened by notorious war veteran Joseph Chinotimba before reaching a camp where hundreds of people had been forced to flee for “voting wrongly”. S/he reports:

I have spoken to people with deep gouged wounds in their buttocks and their feet, broken limbs, burnt down homes, even the bereaved.

Almost all are scared but they are also defiant.

Robert Mugabe’s thugs may well have over-stepped the mark and actually stiffened people’s resolve.

One woman who had lost everything was emphatic.

She told me that her beating had made her stronger. “It is my certificate,” she said, like some perverse badge of distinction.

Now she would go and use it to vote again for change.

Anthropologist Christopher Kelty is visiting Harvard from Rice, discussing his book “Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software” at the Berkman Center today. The book is an ethnography and “analytic history” of free softare, focusing on the cultural importance of the free software movement. He’s interested, in particular, in the ways that free software has “modulated” and informed other sectors, like citizen journalism.

Framing the talk, he asks, “Why do geeks look alike?” We do, as it turns out – he offers two photos, of geek legends Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, who could have used each other’s driver’s licenses. He offers this as a special case of the idea that geeks seem to be able to find each other across national, language and cultural barriers. And he observes that a fascination with free software seems to link together geeks of all cultures.

His ethnographic study of geeks begins in Boston with MedCommons, a company that focuses on medical information using open source tools and models, and moved on to a hacker group in Berlin, a hyper-networked tech innovator in Bangalore and finally the Connexions open education project at Rice. This final study is especially interesting, as it demonstrates how the logic of open software “modulates” and influences another field – educational materials.

Kelty offers five key components of the free software world:
- Fomenting a movement (evangelizing for free models)
- Sharing source code
- Defining an open infrastructure
- Writing copyleft licenses
- Co-ordinating collaboration

Discussing these components, Kelty explores some critical moments in the history of free software. He suggests that the fact that Unix was neither an academic or commercial project means that it was very difficult to decide how the code should be owned. Once the Lions’ commentary on the UNIX 6th edition – basically a literary criticism of source code of the operating system – began circulating in the computer science community, it was essentially impossible for AT&T to restrict the circulation of the code. Sharing that code, and the resistance to restriction helped create the culture of the code. Unfortunately, it also made it possible for Unix to fracture and create so many incompatibilities that, in turn, it set the stage for Microsoft to introduce Windows NT, pledging to end the confusion of the Unix market.

The book looks at the standards battle between the OSI Reference model and TCP/IP. While OSI managed to get acceptance as an international standard (which is a very, very hard thing to accomplish), TCP/IP outcompeted it in the marketplace, largely because it was central to Unix, freely available and, eventually, installed with every modern machine, whether the user knew it or not. In the end, this created an open infrastructure that allowed a wide range of new applications to take place.

A discussion of copyleft licenses focuses on the early history of the GPL, which Kelty identifies as an Ur-license that nearly every other free software license is descended from. He outlines the battle Richard Stallman fought over the future of Emacs, which included the strange case of Stallman being accused of violating the copyright on something he invented.

For examples of coordinated collaboration, Kelty points to the debate between organizational models for Apache and Linux. Linux has, historically, functioned as a benevolent dictatorship with Linus Torvalds coordinating contributions to the kernel. Apache has worked more as a meritocracy, with an oligarchy admitting people to a core team on the basis of contributions. He points out that these communities are anything but self-organizing – if anything, they’re organized around code management systems which create a technical structure for contributions and releases of a free software project.

The same basic principles that have given such vitality to the open source movement are being adopted and experimented with in other fields. Kelty points out that there’s now an attempt to build open source biological systems, through projects like BiOS and the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. The source code in biology are the publications and ideas of the field. The open infrastructure is the lab protocols that allow experiments to be replicated. Coordinating collaboration happens through tools like the Public Library of Science. Kelty observes that free collaboration in these systems is more common outside of academe than within, which seems counterintuitive, until one considers the incredible importance of taking credit within the academic world as a way to promote your career.

One of the more interesting ideas I gleaned from Kelty’s talk was the phrase “recursive publics“. The concept is a response to Habermasian visions of the public sphere – a space that’s voluntary, rational, independent of power, and forces accountability. (It won’t surprise you that many academics argue that these spaces no longer exist, and may never have existed.) Technology is important in the creation of these spaces, at least in the modern age, and Kelty suggests that part of what’s interesting about free software is the way that it’s sought to make free each aspect of its existence. Once you free the code, it raises the importance of freeing the language… then freeing the operating system and the protocol designs. Follow this logic to its end and you understand why free software folks are advocating for net neutrality or trying to build open, alternative networks via mesh. The goal, ultimately, is to create a public space that enables the existence of free software… built via the principles and code of open software.

The lengths that some guys will go to so they have something to blog about! You thought it was bad when I had retinal surgery just so I could post pictures of the inside of my eye? Well, look at this Doc Searls character, live-blogging from the hospital with pancreatitis. Outrageous!

Seriously. Doc, who is one of the sweetest, warmest, funniest, smartest men I’ve had the pleasure to work with is having one hell of a year. Since moving to Boston, he’s had a couple of very serious medical situations and has been sharing his experience with amazing openness and humor. Please check in on him virtually and show him some love.

Part of the fun of having an academic life based in Cambridge, MA, is that you’ve gotten to see a great deal of the most exciting research taking place in this insanely academic city. The last session of the MIT conference features some the superstars of the MIT Media Lab world, researchers whose work has been featured around the world as well as on the banks of the Charles. But it’s less interesting to hear Deb Roy talk about his amazing project surveilling his son’s language development for five minutes than for the two hours we hosted him for at the Berkman Center.

That said, it’s often useful to see these quick talks because they give you the single, paradigmatic example of a tool that helps you introduce it to someone else. Fernanda Viegas‘s talk about ManyEyes, an incredibly powerful platform for creating data visualizations, can be summarized pretty well by a single visualization – a word tree visualization of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s senate testimony, centered on the phrase “I don’t”:

Mako Hill’s presentation of Selectricity, a fascinating tool for online voting, gave an elegant single demonstration as well. Mako invited the crowd to vote on a location for dinner after the conference, choosing between several type of cuisine. Instead of having a single choice, voters listed their preferences in order – “Indian, Mexican, Chinese, Italian, Burgers”. While Mexican food had the largest number of first-place votes, Chinese food won as the most widely acceptable preference.

Selectricity allows communities to create online voting system using a wide range of voting methods through an incredibly simple tool. Mako’s a voting nerd, and believes that there’s a huge number of voting methods that might be greatly superior to voting methods commonly used in the US. Voting activists usually focus on trying to get governmental elections to use these new methods… and Mako points out that governments are the hardest things to change. By making online polling using different methods extremely easy to do, Mako is giving a wide range of groups the opportunity to experiment with different voting methods.

One group that’s used Selectricity is Students for Free Culture, who modified their election bylaws to allow for preferential voting. With 13 candidates and 16 voters for the board of the organization, traditional voting methods would have failed badly for the organization’s needs – preferential voting through Selectricity found an organization leader who was the top choice on only two ballots, but was ranked 3rd or 4th on most ballots, and was therefore an excellent compromise choice for the organization.

It’s the third day of MIT’s Future of Civic Media Conference, and I’m still finding that I can’t get the phrase “civic media” to come out of my mouth. Must be all those years of trying to sell the “citizen media” meme. Fortunately, despite the fact that we’ve all seen several dozen demo talks at this point, there are still truly fascinating ideas and technologies coming across the stage at the (bizarre, oddly mis-shapen, maze-like) Stata Center.

This morning’s session, led by the Media Lab’s Andy Lippman focuses on tools that are mobile, viral, and decentralized. The ones that caught my attention were:

– Nadav Aharony‘s work on peer to peer telephony, using a software platform called comm.unity. Aharony offers a demo running on Symbian mobile phones – he takes a photo and it quickly replicates itself to the comm.unity phones. That isn’t all that surprising – it’s basically a cool way of sending an MMS message to a group of phones… but the way it works is actually incredibly cool. Rather than sending a message to a cellphone tower, his phone finds nearby phones it is peered with, and sends the messages directly to the peers using WiFi.

Here’s why this is cool: While SMS is a very powerful tool for community organizing, repressive governments have gotten very good at disabling SMS around elections to help block protests (see Ethiopia for the paradigmatic example, as well as Cambodia.) Using a centralized technology for protest is often a poor decision. Peer to peer phone communication could allow for powerful activist uses for phones with little control by central authorities.

The killer application for this tech, of course, is the ability to make voice calls phone to phone, without paying the phone company. Unfortunately, there’s no incentive for hardware developers to fund this sort of research, as they’re currently locked in alliances with network operators, which might mean the tech languishes in obscurity.

I’m sitting next to David Reed during this talk – which is a little like sitting next to Einstein at a lecture on relativity – and he points out that the system works best now for asyncronous voice, not synchronous voice. It doesn’t actually use WiFi, but uses the radios, but addresses each phone via its MAC address rather than via IP addresses (eliminating the need for DHCP or a static IP), and uses a very simple listen, then send protocol. David, who is teaching at MIT, says that a number of MIT projects are developing the software, which currently runs on Linux/Symbian phones, but might be available on iPhones and other platforms soon.

- Dale Joachim’s provocative work on broadcasting to and from public spaces, via mobile phones. Joachim is an engineer who found himself fascinated with an unusual problem: how should researchers monitor spotted owl populations, as is mandated under state and federal laws? The preferred method is to visit a forest at night, play an owl call, and listen for responses. Dale wondered whether you could just call the owls via a cellphone… an idea that’s probably appealed to anyone who’s spent a cold night in the woods listening for owl calls.

The Owl Project at MIT is building systems that use celular and VOIP technologies, as well as systems of speakers and microphones, that allow remote monitoring of owl populations in forests. But the technology might be useful for any other application where it’s helpful to both broadcast and listen over long distances. In his talk, Dale suggests that we can think of his work listening to owls as a form of cross-species civic media. Invoking the Global Voices motto – “The world is talking – are you listening?” – he wonders whether technologies like his could help us encounter the voices, the audio environment, of places in other corners of the world, crossing barriers of culture and nationality.

Talking with Dale after his talk, I find myself wanting to borrow his technology to do a very strange art piece. I’d like to install the system in places that have similar functions, in very different parts of the world. What if the system ran in Makola Market in Accra and in a shopping mall in Springfield, MA? We’d hear the ambient noise of people shopping in a very different place and a very different way – how long would it take for people to realize what they were hearing, to try to use the technology to communicate?

There’s a lot of spontaneous, creative plotting taking place in the hallways at this conference. Some ideas that I’ve enjoyed thinking about, off the stage:

- Many, many projects that Knight funded in 2008 focus on either collecting information or transmitting information over mobile phones. This is great, as phones are an incredibly important technology for media in the developing world. But there’s no clear, single technical platform these applications can use. One of the hallway conversations has been about building content management systems that live on top of Linux-based PBX system, Asterisk. This might involve “marrying” Drupal and Asterisk, or building a rich middleware layer that would allow lots of CMS tools to access Asterisk, and place audio files into the database structures used by CMSs. There’s a faint hope that we can talk one of the MIT profs involved with the Center for Future Civic Media to teach a course on mobile phones and social activism which might focus on building out, documenting and supporting this platform.

- With programmable phone systems – interactive voice response systems – you can both collect and disseminate information in pretty creative ways. Geoff Dougherty of Chi-Town Daily News has developed a system that generates a random phone number within a Chicago exchange code, then uses Asterisk to dial it, allowing a volunteer to then read off a web-based script and collect information in a survey about police brutality. I wondered aloud whether a slightly more complicated program could do “robo-polling”, asking the basic questions and switching to a human surveyor if the questions reach sensitive materials, like reports of police brutality. (It was pointed out that a system like this would allow automated, low-cost “push polling”, delivered via VOIP – a nasty, mean political superweapon.)

Chris Csikszentmihalyi is an artist and provocateur as well as a programmer, inventor and professor. The projects he’s most excited about within MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media focus on the interface between political action, art, journalism and technology. He offers the observation that “all technology is politics”, and suggests that one of the best ways to do art, as in journalism, is to follow the money.

His framing talk invokes Manuel Castells, suggesting that people live within two spaces: the space of flows and the space of places. People think of themselves as living in places, but they’re affected by the flows of powerful forces. The architecture of flows, Chris suggests, can be visualized like a rhizome – a plant that shares a root structure, but where the visible manifestations pop up all over the place.

To illustrate his thinking about these ideas, he tells us about a Civic Media project called extrACT, which focuses on health issues surrounding extractive industries in the mountain West. Many homeowners are discovering serious health effects from living near refineries or gas wells – Chris describes the situation as “Love Canal thousands of times over”. extrACT is attempting to unite and mobilize people in these areas through sharing information and enabling collective action. One website, DrillWell, is a mashup of health complaints associated with energy extraction in the west, using data from the state of Colorado and overlaying it on Google Maps. Another site, called “The Landman Report Card” is an information sharing mechanism on “landmen”, people who buy the mineral rights of landowners and sell them to energy companies – some landmen have systematic ethical problems, and the site helps users share information on landmen with poor histories.

Many of the projects featured in this session take an artistic approach to political issues:

- Heroreports is a project by Alyssa Wright designed to balance New York City’s “See Something, Say Something” program. So far, 1,944 New Yorkers have reported “suspicious activity” to the authorities – these reports have resulted disproportiately in the arrests of men of color, especially Muslim men, and have not led to thwarting any terrorist attacks. Her response is to encourage people to report everyday acts of heroism, helping balance a campaign that helps create a climate of fear with one that helps create a climate of hope.

- Leonardo Bonanni’s project, Sourcemap, began with an attempt to figure out “What’s in my laptop?” The project tries to make it easier for people to research the origins of industrial products, figuring out the likely sources of components and parts, and helping people understand the environmental impact of the products they use.

Projects from outside the Center for Future Civic Media also have an activist tone to them.

- Freedom Fone is a project from Kubatana, the amazing Zimbabwean civil society organization which has given voice to hundreds of people within the Zimbabwean NGO sector and population at large in online spaces. Using Tad Hirsch’s Dialup Radio software, Freedom Fone provides an alternative media space to the propoganda-filled newspapers and radio stations in Zimbabwe.

- Adrian Holovaty’s EveryBlock project is an outgrowth of the celebrated Chicago Crime map. Using both public records and user-generated content, each block of a city has its own webpage and RSS feed with hyperlocal media.

This morning’s session at the MIT conference on the Future of Civic Media focuses on new voices and new media. I’m giving the closing talk in the session, talking about the ten projects that currently comprise the Rising Voices effort of Global Voices. It’s a good fit, as our work on Rising Voices is precisely about figuring out ways that new media can allow new voices to reach a local and global audience.

Mitchel Resnick, one of the three founders of the Center for Future Civic Media, offers a frame for discussions by looking closely at the limits of teaching and journalistic models. Both disciplines can fall victim for a paradigm of “inform and instruct”, which can be confining. Resnick is interested in models that focus on discovery, and is known in the academic world for projects that help young people learn through discovery – notably the Scratch programming environment and the Computer Clubhouse project. Specifically, he’s interested in creating “opportunities for everyone to create, design, share.”

With the exception of Rising Voices, the projects showcased this morning are MIT projects, either coming out of the Media Lab or the Center for Media Studies. Some are well-known to people who follow the Media Lab closely:

- Computer Clubhouse, which now boasts 104 clubhouses in 21 countries, established over the past 15 years. The clubhouses act as community centers, allowing kids to explore computing in an afterschool environment, which help connect kids with elders and immigrant communities.

- Silver Stringers, led by former Boston Globe editor Jack Driscoll, allows senior citizens to create community newspapers online.

Others, I hadn’t seen before, including:

- What’s Up, a project by Leo Burd, which is an online and telephone-based community news system for kids. By dialing into a toll-free number, kids can obtain free voicemail accounts and start voice-based “mailing” lists, which transmit voicemail messages to groups. The system has been used in Lawrence, MA and helped youth throughout the community organize a meeting with the local mayor.

- Speakeasy, an amazing project started by MIT Media Lab researcher Tad Hirsch, now run by the Asian Community Development Corporation. The system uses mobile phones to allow immigrants with poor English skills to access volunteer translation services. Second-generation immigrants, the ACDC discovered, were interested in volunteering as translators, but didn’t want to come in from the suburbs to volunteer for half and hour. Now they help people navigate health appointments, student/teacher conferences and, increasingly, negotiations over forclosures.

I got the chance to present the ten projects David Sasaki and his team are funding and advising through Rising Voices. I offered a lightning fast overview of the projects, and told the story of how the HiperBarrio community on Colombia brought mainstream media attention and community action to help a local man, Suso, who had fallen into poverty from a family background of wealth and charity to the community. HiperBarrio has very quickly proven that it’s possible for citizen media efforts in marginalized communities to get ideas and stories into mainstream media. A theme for these projects – and perhaps for all the projects presented this morning – is that they’re not all going to succeed. To figure out how new media can enable new voices, we’re going to need to experiment widely with different technologies and put them in the hands of different groups. Sometimes this will work brilliantly, and sometimes we’re likely to have creative, informative failures.

I was lucky enough to catch Dr. Michael Eric Dyson speaking to the Commonwealth Club of California as I drove to Boston this morning. Dr. Dyson is a professor of sociology at Georgetown, a Baptist minister, and a fearsome cultural critic. His new book, April 4, 1968, focuses on the cultural significance of the death of Martin Luther King Jr.

Dyson’s talk complicates the picture of Dr. King, suggesting that the rhetoric of King’s later years was far closer to the angry language of Reverend Jeremiah Wright than the postracial, hopeful stance of Barack Obama. We can understand King, he argues, as articulating the hopeful vision of postracial America early in his career, but focused on the shortcomings of the American dream later in life.

King’s language, Dyson argues, differed greatly depending on whether he was addressing black or white audiences. While this makes sense and seems obvious, it’s a very different situation than today’s YouTube age, Dyson argues. Had white audiences listened to Dr. King’s speeches to his core, to his community, it’s possible that he would have been considered as radical as Reverend Wright is now portrayed. The media landscape Dr. King encountered made it far easier to speak differently to different audiences than is possible in American media today.

It crossed my mind, listening to this, that while Americans have gotten used to the notion that politicians have to speak to a global audience every time they get on stage, lest they call someone “macaca” or speak about “bitter” rural voters, we’re lots less used to the notion that the world is watching what our media says and does. Chinese anger over CNN’s coverage of Tibet and Jack Cafferty’s comments about “thugs and goons” should have been a wakeup call that news media isn’t just consumed by a local audience, but watched closely by people around the globe for perceptions, biases and language used.

There’s two sides to this new scrutiny. If we want to understand what people in other countries think and feel, we’ve got to watch their media and they’ve got to watch ours. The downside is that, as we start becoming aware of and speaking to the global audience, there’s a temptation to speak more carefully and less directly. It would be a shame if the process of paying attention to what people around the world say and think sanitizes media to the point where it’s impossible to discover people’s preconceptions through their local media.