My friend Persephone Miel came to the Berkman Center more than a year ago to take on a challenging question: What’s the future of journalism in a digital age? This is the sort of question research centers love to take on – thorny, complicated, and very important. With support from the MacArthur Foundation, Persephone and Berkman colleagues have held conferences and conversations, written papers and blogposts and ultimately released a comprehensive report from the Media Re:public project.

The video above gives a quick sense for the questions asked and (sometimes) answered in the report. The report is a set of linked documents, including an overview of Persephone’s research, papers by knowledgeable people in the field, and a set of case studies of experiments in integrating citizen media with professional journalism. My paper, “International News: Bringing about the Golden Age” wonders why the international connections possible in a digital age haven’t led to better, more compelling international news coverage. Dan Gillmor argues that new media demands a new form of literacy, for readers as well as for journalists. And Ernie Wilson raises the stakes of the debate, arguing that democracy is at risk if we don’t overcome some of the limitations and siloing we’re seeing in the early stages of new media. There’s lots of amazing stuff in the report for those interested in a skeptical, scholarly and ultimately optimistic view of news in a digital age – hope you’ll check it out.

On Monday, my laptop and I set up shop in my local university library so I could escape the world of digital content and get some writing done. The university in question has internet connectivity, of course, but I have no affiliation and, therefore, no access. In the heart of an institution dedicated to preserving and sharing knowledge, I managed to find a place where I could disconnect from incoming data long enough to get some writing done.

It didn’t work. It turns out I need Google to write these days. I wanted to reference a longshoremen’s strike in Long Beach, and couldn’t remember whether it took place in 2002 or 2005. A better man would have left a question mark in the text – I found myself using my phone to try to Google the answer, then broke down and went to visit the public internet terminals. Realizing how silly this was, I went back to the coffee shop where I usually write, logged on and went back to researching and writing. (And yes, I realize there are likely ways I could have solved this on paper. But I find I’m not consulting the Reader’s Guide to Periodicals nearly as often now that I can search newspaper websites. Are you?)

There’s a problem with this discovery. Much of the good stuff isn’t on the web yet. It’s still in the library. And those of us who’ve gotten out of the library habit are missing information we need. I got a rude awakening to this when I started writing about media attention. Unable to find anyone online writing about media attention, I assumed I was one of the first… missing critical work done by Johan Galtung in 1965, which would have been obvious searching the literature in the library.

Those of us who live and work in a digital world can’t wait for a day when an online search for information looks not only at data stored on millions of webservers, but in the millions of books in the Library of Congress. That vision motivates pioneers like Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, Michael Hart of Progject Gutenberg and Maura Marx of the Open Knowledge Commons.

Marx spoke at the Berkman Center earlier this week, introducing Open Knowledge Commons, a new project funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to help coordinate the myriad of projects working towards the goal of a universal digital library. Sloan’s motivation for funding this new organization has to do with fear of duplication of effort – they are supporting a wide range of efforts to digitize content, and realize that there’s a need for a central registry of content that’s been digitized. There’s also a great need to coordinate legal and advocacy efforts to make the larger vision of a global, multilingual open library possible.

Formerly with the Boston Public Library’s digitization project, Marx sees the project of a universal digital library as an extention of the work Josiah Quincy Jr. and others took up when they formed the American public library movement – the availability of knowledge that would be “free to all”. In a digital age, Marx argues that an open knowledge commons needs to be without enclosure, encompassing both all recorded media and the “cognitive processes applied to it” – the uses of that media – and maintained in the public sphere for the use and benefit of everyone. Her vision is broader than just having access to all texts digitally, but being able to do complex, cross-text work like named entity analysis and text extraction on a huge corpus.

Of course, it’s not as simple as putting all the world’s books in a pile and scanning them one at a time. There’s a great deal of complex legal uncertainty around what libraries can and cannot do with scanned books. Public libraries are possible – in intellectual property terms in the US – through the doctrine of “first sale”: if you’ve bought a book, you can lend it to others, if you’d like, rather than forcing them to buy their own copy. It’s not so clear how this applies in a digital age, and there are open questions about copyright, licensing and fair use in a digital age.

As a result, most of the projects working on a digital library are starting with content that’s out of copyright. Project Gutenberg began keying in public domain books in 1970s, avoiding licensing issues by focusing on texts where copyright has expired. The Million Books Project, started early this decade, has used OCR to create a collection of books focused on agriculture, scanning both public domain works and asking permission to scan copyrighted works. The Internet Archive, Marx tells us, was very active in this project, helping invent the high-speed scanning systems used by most libraries today, including the Northeast Regional Scanning Center, funded by 20 libraries in the Boston area. These libraries have scanned half a million books in the past three years, focusing on the Biodiversity Heritage Library project.

The landscape around library digitzation shifted in 2004 when Google announced partnerships with major university libraries to scan a huge set of texts and make them accessible via Google Book Search. Google has the resources to scan a huge number of books, and its ambitions in the field make a wide range of people in the book world nervous. Publishers and some copyright-holders worry that Google Book Search could become a Napster for books, allowing users to download copyrighted material without paying – the American Association of Publishers and the Author’s Guild sued Google in 2005 for “massive copyright infringement”. Many of the other library digitization projects aren’t real happy about Google’s plans either. Google isn’t handing the output from its scans to other digitization projects – it’s making them available through their search service. And because Google is scanning so much content and making much of it available at no cost, it is likely undercutting other projects to digitize texts and make them available in a free, open way. They also worry that Google may not be fighting hard enough for concepts enshrined in US copyright law, like fair use.

Marx is critical of the recent settlement between Google and the publisher and author groups. The 300-page settlement (Google’s summary of it here, EFF’s reader’s guide to the settlement here) allows Google to offer “previews” of works that are in copyright, but out of print, and give access to the full text for a fee. This involves creation of a licensing body that will provide this subscription access, and a book rights registry which should make it easier for authors to register “orphan works” and get paid for their work. Google has already scanned 7 million books and seems likely to scan many more now that a solution is in sight.

But there are real problems with this settlement, Marx tells us. Libraries get limited access to this subscription content – a single terminal with access per library. While Google has rights to the entire corpus to run analyses and experiments, other researchers can gain access only through two research centers. These centers must evaluate research before it takes place, and Google and the publisher and authors groups can block said research. Furthermore, the research can’t be used for commercial purposes without Google’s permission. Finally, there are concerns about privacy – will Google be as committed to the privacy of readers as libraries are?

In other words, Marx and the Open Knowledge Commons group would like a solution that’s a good bit more open. And they’re worried that a pretty good, but closed solution, will remove incentives to build a high quality open solution. Just because Google has the power to achieve a settlement with Google doesn’t mean that other digitization projects will be offered the same terms.

In contrast to this unsatisfying outcome, she points to a recent argument over the use of catalog records in the WorldCat format. OCLC, a non-profit library organization, attempted to force users of its catalog record system to add a field to their records, a license assigning the data to OCLC and demanding it not be used in competing systems. The library community reacted strongly to the policy, and OCLC retreated, recommending but not obligating the record field.

Marx hopes that OKC will be able to monitor and weigh in on battles like these, but will also push the envelope for open content. She argues that open access can increase sales, and wants to see ways for libraries to make affordable printed copies of texts accessible. This requires working with publishers and authors, as well as fighting copyright battles in the courts. She also believes it would benefit from a massive public works project – a giant effort to create a public good of open licensed, freely available digitized books, funded by governments as well as foundations. Having this data available openly would allow experimentation with annotation, as with Library of Congress’s Commons experiment on Flickr, asking Flickr users to help tag and categorize images from the LOC.

I’m a huge admirer of these projects, but I worry that they are – for completely understandable, wise and legally logical reasons – scanning the wrong stuff. In approaching the elephant in the room – America’s broken copyright laws – innovators have worked on two sides of the problem, avoiding the massive middle. Projects like Creative Commons urge creators to release content under less restrictive licenses, allowing reuse and remix. This is starting to have a modest effect on new content. It’s certainly possible to build a good powerpoint presentation using only CC-licensed images on your slides; it can be a bit trickier to find enough CC-licensed music to keep your mp3 player full. The digitization projects work on the other side of the spectrum, focusing on content old enough to have returned to the public domain. The new frontier is orphaned works, books governed by copyright, but where the copyright holder isn’t findable.

It’s exciting to be able to freely download Treasure Island, or remix a Jonathan Coulton song without violating laws. But much of the content we want and need isn’t going to be available anytime soon, via legal means. It is, however, available via illegal means, and the discussion at Berkman revealed how many of us have resorted to pirate media to access books we’ve wanted to read. (I’ll own up. I’ve been known to download the PDF versions of Harry Potter books so I can read them on my laptop while I travel. But I’m a good boy and buy them – in hardcover – when I get home.)

My concern is that if projects like OKC are seen as focusing exclusively on collections of texts primarily interesting to historians, the larger vision of a universal digital library gets positioned as a fight for academics, not a mainstream concern. I hope OKC will consider taking on larger fights as well, perhaps attempting to win access to put texts online by asserting fair use, or testing whether the first sale doctrine can apply to digital, not just analog media. If not, I worry we’re going to end up with two parallel systems – a carefully worked out, legal system for texts 99% of people aren’t looking for, and well-developed black markets for texts people are looking for.

It’s a story too strange to be true: a wealthy Bangladeshi film-maker is building a life-sized replica of the Taj Mahal near Dhaka so that Bangladeshis can see the famous building without making the expensive trip to India. At least, that’s what AFP is reporting:

He hired specialist architects, sending them to India to measure the dimensions of the real Taj Mahal, and brought six Indian technicians to his building site across the border… Moni imported marble and granite from Italy, diamonds from Belgium and used 160 kilogrammes (353 pounds) of bronze for the dome.

As reports have come in about the “$58 million structure”, there’s been speculation on a diplomatic “fracas” between India and Bangladesh and questions about whether a building can be copyrighted.

It would be nice if someone actually went and visited the building site.

Several Bangladeshi bloggers did just that this past weekend. They reported paying unusually high fees for motorized rickshaws to the site, and an admission charge that was high by local standards. The building itself was underwhelming:

Local tiles on a plain and simple brick structure… even the tiling work is that of an amateur… the structure is still incomplete. Even if after all this they want to put Italian marble where will they put it? All the visitors were upset and were feeling cheated. …After 10minutes we realised that there was nothing to see inside. We left. On the way back we spoke to other visitors and there was only one word going around — “what a scam!”
From Bibortonbadi, translated by Aparna Ray for Global Voices

Bloggers noted that the filmmaker in question is notorious for making cheap Bollywood knockoffs, and consider this the architectural equivalent of such chicanery. The fact that the newspaper story ran during Eid has increased the traffic, as families decided to take Eid trips to visit the “attraction”.

Video from the underwhelming replica.

Bloggers are particularly incensed at local media’s role in the scam. Bibortonbadi called one local paper to complain and was told that the paper had simply published an AFP story without any verification:

I was surprised to note that the leading dailies of the country did not do any verification before writing about these false claims such as 400crores BD Taka (58mn USD), 172 diamonds, Italian marble etc. Is 400crores a child’s play? When someone claimed to have spent that kind of money, did they (the MSM) not find the time to verify these tall claims before publishing them as is? At best they would have had to travel for about 1.5hours to do this verification. Is there such dearth of news in this country (that there is no need to verify – anything will do) or can money power get anything published these days? At best only 3/4 crores were spent.

It’s pretty common for professional journalists to complain about poor factchecking in blogs, and the possibility that bloggers will hype stories that professional journalists would have quickly and easily debunked. Here’s a classic counter-example: an international press agency hyped a story which helped rip off Bangladeshis, who used blogs to debunk the story. Here’s hoping the international outlets hyping the story will pick up on the corrections as quickly as they seized on the story.

Thorough coverage of the fake Taj scam on Global Voices.

Understanding Somalia always requires some triangulation. Recent events are more than a little baffling, at least at first glance. At second glance, they make a bit more sense, but seem to indicate even more miserable times again for the people in the south of that unhappy country.

To review:

- Somalia hasn’t had a central government since 1991. The northern part of the country has declared independence as Somaliland; the central and southern sections have been wracked by violence, much of it between clans.
- The country is “run” by a transitional government led by Abullahi Yusuf Ahmed, which has UN backing, but almost no power on the ground. Until very recently, the vast majority of “government” members lived and worked in Kenya
- In 2006, Somalia looked to be heading in a more peaceful direction, under the leadership of a group called The Union of Islamic Courts (UIC). Markets reopened, violence slowed, and a semblance of normalcy returned. But Ethiopia, the US and others worried that the UIC were harboring Al Qaeda, anti-Ethiopian forces, or both.
- With US intelligence backing, Ethiopia invaded Somalia in late 2006, installing and supporting the transitional federal government (TFG).
- UIC forces quickly melted away. But more extreme groups from within the UIC emerged and began battling the TFG. One of the most extreme – al Shabab (“the youth”) – now controls large parts of the country and is engaged in daily attacks with the TFG and Ethiopian forces.

The central irony of the story thus far is that, near as most outside observers can tell, the UIC weren’t bad guys for the most part. While the Ethiopians and Americans were able to chase them out – at least temporarily – what’s now emerged is an Islamist movement that’s more serious, more extreme, more likely to be aligned with Al Qaeda. If we accept the idea that Somalia was the US’s third front in the “war on terror”, it’s been the least succesful of the fronts, achieving even less than efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So here’s the latest confusing and contradictory news:

The Ethiopians are leaving. On the one hand, that’s not a bad thing – they never should have been there in the first place. Somalia and Ethiopia have fought two wars, prior to this one – Christian Ethiopian troops were never going to be seen in Mogadishu as anything but occupiers. Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia’s dicatorial prime minister, gave his version of a “mission accomplished” speech, but at least acknowledged that “it has been impossible to crush the Islamist extremist al-Shabab forces and establish a stable government in the two years since he dispatched troops to neighboring Somalia. But he said that was not Ethiopia’s objective.”

What was the objective? “to defuse the plan orchestrated by Eritrea, accompanied by al-Shabab, and anti-peace elements in Ethiopia… We have defused it in a way that it cannot come again. That is, if we feel there are signs it is coming back again, we can take action.”

Let’s translate from Zenawi into English for those who aren’t fluent. Ethiopia’s primary military concern is Eritrea, with which its fought a bloody and pointless border war after Eritrea declared independence. Zenawi was worried that Eritrea would back the UIC – which was sweeping across the country in 2006 – in seeking a “greater Somalia“, including majority-Somali areas of Ethiopia like the Ogaden. (Eritrea’s interests – if those were in fact Eritrea’s interests – would have more to do with tweaking Ethiopia than in seeking greater Somalia.) The UIC is no longer in power, and perhaps Zenawi believes that al Shabab’s ambitions don’t extend beyond Somalia’s current borders. Or perhaps Ethiopia’s military is badly stretched and the forces deployed in Ethiopia are needed to maintain order domestically – the New York Times reported a year ago that teachers and civil servants were being forced onto the front lines in the Ogaden to fight rebels there.

As for the clause about taking action: Despite the fact that Ethiopian troops are slated to pull out of Somalia, right now they appear to be pouring in. The TFG claims that the troops are “helping the Somali people and they will get rid of al-Shabab.” That seems unlikely, since TFG controls almost no territory at this point – perhaps this is a last stand, an attempt to keep al-Shabab away from the Ethiopian border? Or a shift in policy, recognizing that leaving al-Shabab unchecked will mean needing to defend the border sooner rather than later? Or a reaction to the fact that TFG forces are deserting at an unprecedented rate, some taking their weapons and joining militias?

Ethiopia has stated a hope that the UN will take over from Ethiopia to keep TFG in power. That’s not going to happen. The UN’s totally overstretched in the region with major peacekeeping efforts in eastern DRC and in Darfur. Indeed, the Ugandans – who’ve been tripping over themselves to be as pro-US as the Ethiopians – are pulling out as well. The Burundians won’t be far behind, whatever the AU says. If the Ethiopians continue their pullout – and who knows if the influx of troops is temporary or long term – TFG will lose all control within weeks and the southern part of the country will be under al-Shabab control.

In other words, two years after ousting a moderate Muslim (admittedly unelected) government that had made great strides in achieving security, we’ve now guaranteed control of Somalia by an extreme, intolerant, Al-Qaeda aligned group that’s responsible for stoning rape victims to death. Oh, and half a million civilians have been forced to flee Mogadishu, leading to a major humanitarian crisis. And piracy has grown so brazen in Puntland that even newspaper readers who don’t dig for African news have heard about it.

I offer this as context for a story on Wired today about the possibility of a “US land invasion” in Somalia to prevent piracy. That strikes me as extremely unlikely. Could US special forces land in Eyl, blow up some speedboats and damage pirate assets. Sure. Will it do anything in the long term? No. Another coastal town will end up as the center of piracy. It’s too profitable, there are too many weapons in the region and too little else for pirates to do, in absence of other economic opportunities. And the US has no interest in invading and controlling Somalia ala Iraq or Afghanistan… and there’s no indication that a concerted effort to control Somalia would be any more successful in the long run than attempting to hold Afghanistan.

So what’s going to happen? My money’s on al-Shabab controlling Mogadishu within weeks, and moving to stabilize the country under Sharia law. This is likely to be less pleasant than the control the UIC imposed, but will likely have the effect of reducing piracy and, perhaps, allowing commerce to resume. In the medium term, it’s likely to threaten Ethiopia and perhaps Kenya in a serious way, and to provide safe haven for Islamic extremists. And in the long term, it’s likely to become a major security issue for the Obama administration, possibly rising to the level where it’s discussed by folks other than Africa policy wonks.

A wild card in all this? Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, the chairman of the Alliance for the Re-liberating of Somalia, one of the more moderate leaders of the UIC, has returned to the country from Djbouti. Sheik Sharif is returning at the invitation of the TFG. This sounds like a somewhat desperate attempt by TFG to find some allies against al-Shabab. I don’t know the situation on the ground well enough to know whether Sheik Sharif is likely to be able to muster forces to support the TFG.

In the meantime, nearly everyone watching the situation can agree on one thing: for the vast majority of people in Somalia, it’s just going to keep getting worse.

Background on the situation in Somalia from previous of my blogposts.

Vijaysree Venkatraman of the Christian Science Monitor has a very generous article about my recent thinking on the challenges of finding sufficiently challenging information online, and how media organizations can architect serendipity in a digital age. I come off somewhat more zen-like than I suspect I am in real life, but perhaps that’s not a bad thing.

I’ve been (very slowly) putting together a book proposal about serendipity, homophily, xenophilia and cultural bridging, and so the ideas in the CSM article will look pretty familiar to my regular readers. For anyone else who’s stumbling onto this line of thought for the first time, let me recommend:

– A talk I gave at MIT Museum’s Soapbox Series, which includes excellent questions and brainstorming from the audience

– A conversation Global Voices editor Solana Larsen and I had with master interviewer Chris Lydon for Radio Open Source

– Blog posts from April, June, September and December of this year on this set of topics. (See? Told you I was writing slowly.)

Okay, that’s roughly as much self-promotion as I can handle this week. Thanks to Vijee for her interest in the story and for CSM for helping to share these ideas with a wider audience.

Yesterday afternoon, I sat in on a discussion at a Berkman Center conference about the role of YouTube in electoral politics. It was never explicitly stated, but the assumption (of course) is that we were discussing US politics. Was YouTube a new platform for disseminating online video? Did videos posted online matter, or was it the amplification effect provided by traditional media that made some videos relevant? Should YouTube be thought of as a medium for political discourse, or as a holding tank for media, which can be called on by bloggers and other online writers to illustrate points of view? Does online video help voters get beyond the sound-bite driven news media? (Evidence in favor of this perspective is the huge number of people who watched Obama’s speech on racism in its 37-minute entirety, or the voters who watched the entirety of Reverend Wright’s speeches and came away with a very different opinion than those who saw soundbites on news networks.)

As we argued about video and political discourse in the US, I was downloading video focused on the election that’s still happening, the Ghanaian election. There’s a remarkable amount of election-focused video available, more than I would have imagined.

This well-made video, narrated by Joseph Appiah-Dolphyne of Africanews.com, offers a view of campaign posters, rallies and street scenes in Accra, as well as interviews with several voters about their preferences and reasons for supporting candidates. (It’s also got a great shot of NDC’s posters advertising the “connection” between Obama and Atta Mills.) These vox pop interviews are quite popular – I’m very fond of this interview with a Twi-speaking NPP supporter. I can’t understand the vast majority of her reasons for supporting Nana Addo – I’m mostly just marvelling at her ability to carry on a political discussion while balancing a 20-liter bucket of water on her head. Much as random American voters move into political pundit mode when people put a camera in their faces, nearly everyone is willing to offer commentary on the prospects for the candidates in the runoff – this video from africatalks offers the analysis of Edem, who’s positioned by the interviewer as “Ghana’s Joe the Plumber“. I’m not sure I buy that – Edem speaks more clearly and coherently than Joe, and he hasn’t announced either a book deal or a country music recording career yet.

Some of my favorite videos are part of efforts to ensure that the voting process is fair and transparent. The video above shows public vote counting in Odododiodio (say THAT five times fast!) with uniformed election workers tallying the total number of ballots. While there are videos that document all aspects of the process, from registration through the actual voting, it’s also clear that the presence of a camera can be a threat to some. Some of the people waiting to register to vote in this video are arguing with police, accusing them of intimidating voters – the police, in turn, are upset that they’re being filmed. As video becomes a more common tool of election monitoring in Ghana, it will be interesting to see whether people grow more or less resistant to being filmed while voting or overseeing voting.

Of course, not all election-related videos are quite so civic-minded. There’s a good dose of slander available as well, including a wonderfully mean video that accuses current president Kufuor of being a puppet of the Bush administration by showing photos of him with the US President over a song by Fela. Not the most persuasive argument, but these musical commentaries are more about image than argument. Reggae artist Sheriff Ghale appears ready to dismiss all politicians who want his vote. “I never trust no politrician.” Guess that’s not much of an endorsement for anyone.

Watching these videos, I have two reactions. One is nostalgia – watching these videos is like getting a chance to wander around Accra, something I miss doing. The second is a much stronger sense for how the election season is actually taking place. I’m following election news quite closely, but actually seeing polling places, election monitors and posters has made the poll much more real to me.

Here’s my question – do videos like this have the same effect for people who don’t know Ghana well? I’ve been watching a lot of the videos we feature on Global Voices, trying to get a sense for when citizen video works well. We’ve got a story today about a Finnish expatriate who lives in Thailand, who joined the People’s Alliance for Democracy in occupying Suvarnabhum Airport near Bangkok. He shot several interesting videos, which I’ve watched a few times. They help give me a sense for what the protests looked like from the inside, but the videos of confrontation between PAD and police are just… confusing. I can’t really tell what’s going on and I wish there were more context on his website.

One of the biggest discoveries we’ve made at Global Voices is the importance of context in helping people understand citizen media. Ask anyone who works on the editorial side of the project and they’ll generally tell you we do three things: filter through large sets of online content and select the stuff likely to be interesting to a broad audience; translate from other languages into English; provide sufficient context to a piece of blogpost, photo or video so that it makes sense to an audience not familiar with local events or culture.

A great example of this is on the Afrigadget blog, where Erik Hersman turns a brief video of a craftsman making paraffin lamps out of used tomato tins into an extended look at the informal recycling industry in Nairobi. The video gives you a sense for the noise, and almost, the closeness and heat, of a metalworking workshop in Gikomba; the rest of the post explains how recycling workers collect scrap, sort out the most valuable pieces and sell cans to metalworkers, so they can build low-cost lamps.

In the same way that blogs exploded, putting the words of tens of millions of people on the web, forcing groups like Global Voices to learn how to curate, video is now growing in the developing world. Who’s curating video well? Who should we emulate and learn from in building collections of videos that help us visit different parts of the world?

Our conversation this morning at the Berkman conference on Internet and Politics has ticked off my colleagues Yochai Benkler and Eszter Hargittai. Eszter reminds us that it’s a mistake to talk about internet users as a single group. There’s a broad range of skill levels and ability to participate online, even in the subset of Americans who’ve got broadband access. There’s a tendency to oversimplify the discussion and assume that everyone in the grassroots can participate in online discussions – building online platforms for particiation may lead to a situation where only a subset of voices are represented.

Yochai’s pushback is more direct – he’s worried that discussions on the internet and politics are simply discussions on the internet and campaigning. He’s interested in the network public sphere – the conversations taking place in political blogospheres, on the left and the right, where participants collectively work to set the agenda. Politics is more than mobilizing people for the next battle – it’s about creating a space to debate the agenda. Joseph Nye summarizes Yochai’s points by asking how we involve participation while transitioning from salesmanship to governing.

While the academics argue the point on stage, the Obama transition team has introduced one of the more interesting tools I’ve seen to enable participation in the governing process. The website has a new feature – Open For Questions – which invites people to suggest questions the Obama transition team should answer. Users vote on these questions, deciding whether they’re worth asking the team or not. (You’ve got a third option to skip the questions, which the system charmingly responds to by registering your “Meh” vote.)

The system runs on Google’s Moderator platform, a very clever tool that allows a group of people to offer suggestions and prioritze them as a group. The platform apparently launched a couple of hours ago, and already 811 people have posted 471 questions and cast over 24,000 votes. The questions are pretty smart thus far, and I’ve been surprised at people’s willingness to vote on hard, geeky questions. (I posted a question on agricultural subsidies and was amazed to see it get a couple dozen votes within a few minutes.)

There are lots of challenges to building a tool like this well. Popular questions will tend to cascade, and since there’s no disincentive to vote for questions, the result is likely to be an impossibly huge set of questions for the transition team. But it’s very cool to see the transition team moving quickly to offer people a way to raise their voices and ask some questions. Does this suggest we might see President Obama try something like a Prime Minister’s Questions period?

“Would Obama be the President without the Internet? Yes, he would.”

That’s Peter Daou, internet strategist for Hillary Clinton. His perspective is more or less the mainstream opinion at a conference held by the Berkman Center in Cambridge today. For me, as someone who doesn’t study US politics nearly as closely as I follow African politics, this is a bit of a surprising opinion. After all, four years ago, a similar conference at Berkman was a celebration of the power of the Internet in political campaigns.

Obama’s campaign in 2008 was different. Micah Sifry of Personal Democracy Forum, sitting next to me, noted, “This was the best top-down campaign of the 21st century.” Marshall Ganz, a political scientist at the Kennedy School who’s written at length about succesful labor organizing, offers a useful distinction: carpenters and tools. Previous discussions about political organizing in a digital age have obsessed over tools – this conversation is strongly focused on carpenters.

Jeremy Bird of Obama for America focuses his discussions about technology as tools that allowed professional political organizers to be more powerful. There’s been little to no discussion of the idea that digital tools allow individuals to self-organize, or to allow the grassroots to feed information to professional organizers. If anything, the discussions have been a celebration of the power of traditional political organizing, and the small ways that email, Facebook, SMS messaging and online video give these organizers more tools to play with.

I’m reminded of an essay online organizer Zack Exley wrote about the Obama campaign. He identifies Obama’s success as a combination of bottom up and top down. Professional organizers work closely together using established political organizing techniques. They delegate some responsibilities – more than in previous campaigns – to local volunteers who design strategies to reach specific communities. The volunteers are enthusiastic and passionate because they’re empowered to do more than make phonecalls or knock on doors – they’re allowed to design strategy, at least on the local level. But the overall campaign was far from the sort of creative chaos of the Howard Dean campaign – it was a traditional, top-down political campaign that included messaging via every media channel and limited creative input from local organizers.

This afternoon, the conference will move from the political pros to the net enthusiast academics – it will be interesting to see whether there’s strong pushback on the limited ambitions associated with this model of online political organizing.

Other perspectives on the conference:
- From my colleagues at Berkman’s Internet and Democracy project
- From my Berkman colleague Gene Koo

I’m in Cambridge, MA today at a Berkman Center conference on Internet and Politics, an event that seems to roll around every four years as a review of how internet and community technologies were used in the US presidential campaign. I’ve come prepared to discuss the internet and politics with a copy of BBC’s Focus on Africa under my arm, a reminder that there are, in fact, other elections taking place this year, some of which are exciting and newsworthy as well.

With almost all votes counted, the election is apparently headed towards a run-off. The ruling NPP party candidate, Nana Akuffo Addo has received 49.13% of the vote, while NDC’s candidate, Professor John Atta Mills, which ruled the country from 1981 – 2000 received 47.92%. Since no candidate will receive a majority of votes, the election will head to a run-off on December 28th between the two leading candidates. While third-party candidates like Kwesi Nduom of the CPP haven’t attained a large share of votes, they may find themselves in a powerful political position, encouraging their supporters to vote for one of the candidates. (As the leader of a socialist-aligned party, we’d expect Nduom to side with the center-left NDC, but it’s hard to predict what he might do in this situation.)

Should Addo prevail in this next round, he’ll face an interesting challenge – a divided government. While NPP had firm control of the National Assembly for the past eight years, NDC made huge strides, winning at least 115 seats in the 230-seat legislative body. While competitive, free and fair democratic elections are unfortunately rare in sub-Saharan Africa, divided governments are exceedingly rare. It will be fascinating to watch if Addo has to compromise with his Assembly on ministerial appointments and annual budgets. (Okay, maybe you’re not fascinated, but I am.)

There’s lots to feel proud of in this election thus far. Former Botswanan president Ketumile Masir, monitoring the election with the Carter Center, noted, “Ghana is becoming a model of democracy in the region and abroad.”
Nana Oye Lithur, a Ghanaian gender activist, argues that a divided, “discering” electorate is the sign of something that’s especially powerful in Ghana, a free, diverse and energetic press. Everyone who cares about this country, and the continent as a whole, is holding their breath that the next round of the election is as free, fair, smooth and peaceful.

• Global Voices Online Egypt: Egyptian Dialect Wikipedia
  A group of Wikipedians has launched a wikipedia in Egyptian arabic, a split from the classical arabic edition that's been developed for some years on Wikipedia. Global Voices rounds up reactions. A few feel like it's easier to write in Egyptian arabic, while the majority seem to feel this is an anti-Islamist political statement, or simply a bad idea that will go nowhere.
  (tags: language translation arabic wikipedia blogs globalvoices)
• Link by Link – The Freedoms That Technologies Help Bring – NYTimes.com
  Apple is introducing the iPhone in Egypt with the Google Maps application crippled, at the request of the government which fears putting GPS capabilities in the hands of citizens. While some Egyptians are evading the restrictions by buying unlocked iphones over the web, it's an occasion for a meditation on whether technologies inherently help confront and change authoritarian regimes, or whether these regimes are more successful at adapting to and repressing speech via new technologies.
  (tags: censorship egypt freespeech gps iphone apple africa)