My friend Onnik Krikorian has become a Facebook evangelist. Onnik, a Brit of Armenian descent, living in Armenia, is the Global Voices editor for the Caucuses, which means he’s responsible for rounding up blogs from Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan as well as parts of Turkey and Russia. This task is seriously complicated by the long-term tensions in the region. Armenia and Azerbaijan are partisans in a “frozen” conflict – the Nagorno-Karabakh war, which lasted from 1988 – 1994, and remains largely unresolved.

It’s taken Onnik years to build up relationships with bloggers in Azerbaijan, relationships he needs to accurately cover the region. Azeri bloggers are often suspicious of his motives for connecting and wonder whether he’ll cover their thinking and writing fairly. But Onnik tells me that Facebook has emerged as a key space where Azeri and Armenians can interact. “There are no neutral spaces in the real world where we can get to know each other. Facebook provides that space online, and it’s allowing friendships to form that probably couldn’t happen in the physical world.” (Onnik documents some of the conversations taking place between Azeri and Armenian bloggers in a recent post on Global Voices.)

Graph from the front page of peace.facebook.com

Onnik was talking about his love of Facebook at an event hosted by the US Institute for Peace, where I and colleagues at George Washington University and Columbia were presenting research we’d carried out on the use of social media in conflict situations. Onnik’s hopes for Facebook as a platform for peace were echoed by Adam Conner of Facebook, who showed the company’s new site, Peace on Facebook. The site documents friendships formed between people usually separated by geography, religion or politics. Some of the statistics seem clearly like good news – 29,651 friendships between Indians and Pakistanis per day. Others are rather dispiriting – 974 Muslim/Jewish connections in the past 24 hours.

I’m a data junkie, and there’s little more frustrating to me than an incomplete data set. Basically, by showing us a very small portion of the nation to nation social graph, Facebook is hinting that the whole graph is available: not just how many friendships Indian Facebook users form with Pakistani users, but how many they form with Americans, Canadians, Chinese, other Indians, etc. Obviously, this is info I’m interested in – I’ve been building a critique that argues that usage of social networking tools to build connections between people in the same country vastly outpaces use of these tools to cross national, cultural and religious borders.

Without the whole data set, it’s hard to know whether these numbers are encouraging or not. Are 29,651 Indian/Pakistani connections a lot? Or very few, in proportion to how many connections Indians and Pakistanis make on Facebook in total? In other words, we’ve got the numerator, but not the denominator – if we had a picture of how many connections Indians and Pakistanis make per day, we might have a better sense for whether this is an encouraging or discouraging number.

I made a first pass at this question this morning, using data I was able to obtain online. Facebook tells us that the average user has 130 friends – a number that might be out of date, as the same statistics page lists “over 400 million users”, not the half billion currently being celebrated in the media. (Ideally, we’d like to know how many new friends are added per day so we can compare apples to apples, but you got to war with the data you have…)

We also need a sense for how many Facebook users there are per country. Here, we turn to Nick Burcher who publishes tables of Facebook users per country on a regular basis. Nick tells readers that the data is from Facebook, and the Guardian appears to trust his accounts enough to feature those stats on their technology blog. They are, alas, incomplete – Burcher published stats for the 30 countries with the largest number of Facebook users, and revealed a few more countries in the comments thread on the post.

Because we don’t have data for Pakistan, we can’t answer the India/Pakistan question. But we can offer some analysis for Israel/Palestine and Greece/Turkey.

Facebook for Peace tells us that there are 15,747 connections between Israelis and Palestinians for the past 24 hours. The term “connection” is not clearly defined on the site – it’s not clear whether a reciprocated friendship is 1 connection or 2 – because I’m going to count the number of Israeli friends and Palestinian friends, it makes sense to count a reciprocal friendship as two connections. (If Facebook is counting differently than I am, my numbers are going to be half what they should be.)

3,006,460 Israelis are Facebook users… a pretty remarkable number, as it represents 39.92% of the total population of the nation and roughly 57% of the country’s 5.3 million internet users. There are very few Palestinian internet users – 84,240, or 2.24% of the population… This mostly reflects how few Palestinians are online, as Facebook is used by 21% of Palestine’s 400,000 internet users.

At 3,090,700 Palestinian and Israeli Facebook users, we should see almost 402 million friendships involving an Israeli or a Palestinian. If we extrapolate from 15,747 friendships a day to 5.7 million a year, we’re looking at Israeli/Palestinian friendships representing 1.43% of friendships in the Israeli/Palestinian space… with all sorts of caveats. (The biggest is that the use of a year-long interval to calculate total friendships is totally arbitrary and probably not supportable. If you’ve got better data or a suggestion for a better estimation method, please don’t hesitate to speak up.)

We get very different results from looking at Greece and Turkey. 2,838,700 Greeks are Facebook members (25.11% of the national population), while 22,552,540 Turks (31.08% of the population) are. That’s roughly 3.3 billion friendships projected, and our year-long approximation finds us just over 4 million Greek/Turkish connections. That suggests that only 0.12% of friendships in the pool are Turkish/Greek friendships.

What explains the disparity between these numbers? While there’s certainly a long history of tension between Greece and Turkey, the last major military confrontation between the nations ended in 1922. Israel and Palestine, on the other hand, are involved with an active conflict and Israel’s recent incursion into Gaza ended a few months ago. What gives?

It’s possible that the numerous efforts designed to build friendship between Israeli and Palestinian youth are having an impact, much as Onnik’s work in Armenia and Azerbaijan is showing positive results. But there’s another possibility – 20% of the Israeli population are Arab citizen of Israel, and the majority of this set is of Palestinian origin. It’s certainly possible that the high percentage of Israeli/Palestinian friendship includes a large set of friendships between people of Palestinian origin in Israel and Palestinians… indeed, given the difficulty for both populations in meeting in physical space, we’d expect to see increased use of the internet as a meeting space to compensate for the difficulties of meeting in the physical world. This could be a factor in explaining India/Pakistan friendships as well, as well as Albanian/Serbian friendships, as the emergence of new nations through partition and conflict left groups united by cultures, separated by borders.

My goal in this post isn’t to belittle the power of Facebook for providing a border-transcending space where friendships can be built – Onnik’s story makes it clear that Facebook is a real and powerful tool for good, at least in the Armenian/Azeri space. But I continue to think that we overestimate how many of our online contacts cross borders and underestimate how often these tools are used to reinforce local friendships. I’d invite friends at Facebook to correct my numbers or my math… and mention that we could do a much better job of answering these questions if Facebook would release a data set that shows us all the cross-national connections made on the service.

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Ross Perez has created some great interactive maps that visualize the adoption of Facebook around the world, using Burcher’s data – worth your time.

• Greg's Cable Map
  Excellent, fascinating undersea cable map with ability to report faults
  (tags: cable cables connectivity maps infrastructure internet)

I’ve just spent two weeks giving lectures and workshops in five cities and three countries. Some were ones I’d planned for months, like the TED talk. Others were more off the cuff. And then there was our workshop on ICT and the film industry in Lagos last week.

Promotional photo for Franco Sacchi’s film, This is Nollywood

In discussing this workshop with our Nigerian partner, we’d proposed a round-table conversation between three ICT and development scholars and a dozen participants from the Nigerian film industry. Our goal was to learn more about how Nollywood (and Kanowood – turns out that “Nollywood” has become a political term in Nigeria, more associated with the South than the North) works, what the challenges the industry faces are and think about how we as academic researchers could take on questions that might help the sector move forwards. Basically, it was intended to be the first step in a process that might later lead to giving some presentations about what we’d learned.

When we arrived in Lagos, the invite list for our event had expanded to 150 people… far too many for a round table… and my colleagues and I found ourselves preparing slide decks and speeches. Those speeches began with lines like, “Please be aware that we know almost nothing about the Nigerian film industry, but…” and tried to cover topics we do know something about: social media, internet infrastructure in west Africa, intellectual property law. And we had some added constraints – our video-rich slide decks crashed the machine that had been set up to run our presentations, and we ended up scrambling to move decks onto my Mac laptop and make it run from backstage, controlled by a wireless mouse that made my machine crash every few uses.

And yet, the event went surprisingly well. As we’d hoped, no one took our presentations especially seriously – instead, the audience heard them as provocation and wondered – forcefully – why we weren’t addressing the issues that the Nigerian film industry faces… which, according to the room of producers and directors we faced, largely are about getting paid.

Nigeria’s film industry is the third largest in the world in financial terms, with revenues in the neighborhood of $200-300m a year, and it’s likely that Nigeria produces as many films per year as Bollywood. Films are made quickly and inexpensively – the budget is usually under $100,000, sometimes under $10,000 and filming rarely takes more than a month. The vast majority of these films go straight to video. Indeed, there’s almost no other market for Nigerian films – cinema operators tell us that the production quality of films isn’t high enough to allow them to be shown in theatres. As much as 70% of Indian film revenue comes from screenings, as does a substantial, though much smaller portion for Hollywood. (This whole paragraph is cribbed entirely from Dayo Ogunyemi’s excellent slide deck on Nigerian Film Financing, prepared for a 2009 WIPO meeting.)

Given that over 90% of revenue comes from home video sales, piracy is a problem in the Nigerian space. The politics of this are complicated – some producers told us off the record that the same distributors they rely on to market and sell their licensed wares are involved with pirating other producer’s movies.

It quickly became clear that the politics I and my colleagues bring to the questions of intellectual property were pretty far from those of most of the producers in the room. The Berkman Center helped bring Creative Commons to life, and we’re as strongly associated with arguments against using technology to enforce copyright as any group I know of. And many of our new friends were looking for assurances that technology could make piracy disappear, by putting strong DRM measures on their product and thwarting large-scale piracy.

This fear of piracy recently extended to seeing the Internet as a space for piracy. Nollywood legend Tunde Kelani told us that he’s become used to seeing his films clipped into short segments and posted on YouTube. He and his lawyers send copyright complaints to YouTube, who quickly remove the segments. He tells us that he recently got an email from someone who’s been posting his films, which began, “You’ve got a lot of balls” to demand these files be taken down and proceeded to tell him that any of his films would be pirated as soon as it was released and put online.

(I asked a set of Ghanaian friends about online piracy and Ghallywood films – were they using BitTorrent to download films? They laughed at me – while the level of net connectivity in Ghana is generally higher than in Nigeria, the cost of downloading a video from BitTorrent, vastly exceeds what it would cost to walk onto the street and buy a film from a local vendor. To the extent that YouTube is a threat to Nigerian and Ghanaian film, it’s a threat to expatriate audiences, not domestic ones.)

So what do a bunch of IP radicals have to say to an audience like this one? All we were able to do was try to tell the future by talking about the past, and about what’s happening elsewhere.

India’s an interesting country to use as a comparison for Nigeria. The economics of Bollywood are very different, because there’s a well-established cinema culture and that’s where much of the revenue comes from. But Indian distributors do make money from home video sales, and my friend Sunil Abraham tells me they’ve done something fasciating – they’ve tried to make it impossible to pirate by keeping prices sufficiently low. At 50 rupees for an official video (a bit more than a dollar), it’s extremely hard for a pirate to make a profit… which allows the producers to do larger production runs and keep the price low. Matt Smythe, a grad student of Mike Best at Georgia Tech, gave a fascinating short presentation about video sharing in India via Bluetooth – it’s pretty common to be able to get Bollywood videos loaded onto your smartphone from a PC at a phone shop for a small fee. Smythe wondered whether this might not lead to a different revenue model in Nigeria – distributing videos through mobile phone companies, or through the numerous informal phone stores in the country.

This idea didn’t go over especially well – one member of our audience intervened to tell us that Indians were better educated and more literate than Nigerians and could handle such complicated technology as Bluetooth, while they couldn’t. I happen to keep a copy of the UN’s Human Development Report on my laptop and was able to check – actually, Nigeria’s literacy level is higher than India’s… I found myself wondering whether this objection was a version of the “it can’t work here” argument that plagues international development, or whether there’s a confidence problem Nigeria faces when looking at other models in developing nations either close or far away – examples from Ghana and Kenya were met with similar skepticism that these ideas could work in Nigeria’s “unique” environment.

But there was near universal agreement that Nigerian cinema was looking at a transition not dissimilar to the one the US music industry faced with the rise of technologies like Napster. We made the case that the record industry wasted a decade by sitting on their hands, suing companies like Napster out of existence rather than developing alternative models. Now, we’re starting to see models – iTunes, streaming audio, consumer-choice pricing – that seem to be working in some markets for music.

One aspect of alternative music models that might make sense for Nigerian film is an appearance model. In Lebanon, pop stars routinely make most of their money through performing at weddings, a lucrative gig that can yield as much as $40,000 for a top performer. With alternative revenue models like this, piracy starts being seen as advertising, not as an obstacle. It’s harder to perform live as a cast of actors… but there’s a culture of “appearance fees” in Nigeria where famous people, including film stars, demand significant sums to appear in person at events like weddings and political rallies. It’s not hard to imagine films starting to make money off premieres, where Nigeria’s (substantial, wealthy) elite pay large sums to watch the film in a grand launch and mingle with the stars.

Like many of the models we discussed, this requires the quality of Nigerian cinema to improve. I watched a few films during this trip and have watched dozens of others previously (my street vendors assure me that every film I’ve bought for 200 naira is genuine, licensed and top quality… :-) and have gotten used to bad lighting and terrible sound. It’s too much work to record audio separately from video performances and sync them later, so nothing is close mic’d… and when Nigerian actors begin to argue (as is mandatory in all Nollywood films) the sound clips. If quality improved, perhaps cinemas would start showing the films, and TV companies would buy and broadcast more.

(Or maybe not. One producer told me that television stations don’t pay producers for content – instead, a producer buys air time from a station and is on the hook for selling ad time to support the film.)

Quality, in turn, requires better financing. Most Nigerian films are financed by family and friends. While this can work for films up to $100,000, it’s very hard to raise the multi-million dollar sums that might be necessary to produce a Nollywood film that gains international attention and audience. Banks are reluctant to lend even to established producers, for fear that the books aren’t transparent… or perhaps this is simply a reflection that it’s hard to get risk capital anywhere in West Africa at present. A representative from the World Bank tells us that the Bank is putting $30 million into the “cultural space” in Nigeria. This includes a $5 million fund to take equity stakes in producing films, making investments of up to $200,000 into films.

Exciting as this idea was, there seemed to be more enthusiasm for two ideas that came up at the discussion. One involved partnering with the mobile phone networks, which are rapidly dominating the Nigerian ISP space, and selling films to handset users via the 3g networks that have come online in the country. While mobile money transfer hasn’t hit Nigeria yet, it has come online in Ghana and seems to be just a matter of time before we see it in Nigeria – once people get used to paying for services with phones, it becomes a reasonable assumption that they might pay for appropriately priced content.

The second idea that attracted widespread enthusiasm was the establishment of a film studio in Lagos that rented equipment and provided space for production. I mentioned this to friends who pointed out that a large studio had been built and never used in Cross Rivers State – I don’t know that story, but I got the strong sense that at least some of the producers in Lagos would be willing to try to patronize a studio they’d been involved with helping to design and build.

As with most discussions, the good stuff came up when I and my colleagues shut up and listened. Zik Zulu Okafor led a fascinating panel of stars, directors, producers and lawyers, who went a long way towards educating us towards what has worked and what hasn’t thus far. I came away with a strong sense for the understandable pride Nigerian filmmakers have for the industry they’ve built. Producer Ralph Nwadike told us a wonderful story about traveling to South Africa in 2000 to give a pitch for his film. The filmmakers who preceded him all asked for two to five million US dollars – Nwadike’s films were being made for less than $10,000 each. When he finally got up to pitch, he chose the highest pricetag he could imagine himself saying with a straight face – a million US dollars. None of the South Africans had a sense for how inexpensively made these films were – they simply knew they were watched and loved across the continent.

There’s one unambiguous blessing to the digitization of Nigerian cinema, Tunde Kelani tells us – at least we’ll have a record. The history of Nigerian film in an analog era has disappeared as those videocassettes wore out.

There are no easy solutions to the future of Nigerian cinema and no guarantees that new ideas – building cinema houses, selling extremely cheap copies, distributing via mobile phone networks or bluetooth – will move the industry forwards. But as Kelani concluded his remarks: “Either you make films or you make excuses – Nollywood decided to make films.”

The past two days, I’ve been participating in the first day of a two-day event on information technology and government transparency in Nigeria. It’s a conversation that’s both timely, and also a bit late – decisions recently made in Nigeria mean that the upcoming presidential election will take place in January 2011. My colleages at the Berkman Center are working with colleagues at Georgia Tech, election monitoring organization NDI, Nigerian IT training academy Digital Bridges Institute and sponsors from the MacArthur Foundation have organized two days of events – the first day is a large public session hosted at the Yar’Adua Center (not named after the late president, but his uncle) in Abuja, where we’re hosting a set of panels for an audience of about 300. Tomorrow, we’ve got scheduled a day-long “unconference”, hoping to build alliances and tools that will help make the 2011 elections more free, fair and transparent.

Part of the excitement about the event for me is that it’s been a chance to meet some Nigerian superheroes who’ve come to be part of the event. I was able to invite Dele Olojede – founder of Timbuktu Media, the publisher of the 234Next news service – to join us. He had to back out of the panel I’m moderating, but he and I were able to sit down and talk about his innovative new project, which aims to use news delivered on paper, online and via mobile phone to challenge existing power structures in Nigeria. Meeting folks like Dele, as well as young innovators like Gbenga Sesan (behind the Light Up Nigeria and Enough is Enough campaigns) makes trips like this worthwhile.

Our little gathering has managed to attract some big names, including Donald Duke, former two-term governor of Cross Rivers State (who, everyone in the room assumes, is now a candidate for president.) Duke speaks briefly to the audience and notes that Nigeria is looking abroad, and especially to Ghana, to see how elections can run smoothly. (We crypto-Ghanaians in the crowd appreciated the shoutout.) While it would be great to learn from Ghana, “Nigeria is unique. We could learn how to do it elsewhere, but there’s a gene in us that means we…” He stops and makes a vague, uncertain hand gesture that sends the crowd into laughter. “I can’t find a word for it, I need to use my hands. And I hope we can use technology to undo some of this.”

As large conferences often are, our presentation are a mix of formal thanks to the various powerful people in the room, short idea pieces from the presenters, and strong provocations from the audience. Rather than trying to get full summaries, I’ll try to pull out the tidbits that stuck with me.

Ian Schuler of NDI, our cosponsor for the event, suggests that one of the most powerful uses for ICT in elections are for forensic analyses – registration analysis (elimination of duplicate voters), quick counts, and parallel tabulations. He also offers a shoutout to Ghana, where these techniques were used to great effect. These, he tells us, are examples of ways we can let the problems lead, rather than the technology – this interventions don’t require much tech, usually little more than a mobile phone and a system of reporting codes, but can be powerful because they’re so tightly matched to the problems we face.

Kwami Ahiabenu of PenPlusBytes, a Ghanaian nonprofit that’s focused on making journalists more technically skilled and competent, has been leading vote reporting (as distinguished from vote reporting) projects throughout the continent – Malawi, Botswana, Guinea, Ghana and other countries as well. In Guinea – which Ahiabenu notes is lucky to have a military leader who’s committed to stepping down – his team was able to obtain a shortcode – 8008 – which allowed anyone to report problems at particular polling places. Rather than dismissing the power of new technological platforms for political engagement, he asks “Why do all these old men have Facebook accounts?” Here he’s referring to the new trend of African leaders build their Facebook presence. “It’s the only way to reach out to the youth population.”

Emma Ezeazu of the Alliance for Credible Elections gains applause from the room with quips like, “the government has become criminalized”, and that “government has become an albatross in this country – a mental block to change.” He suggests we assess technologies for transparency seriously because it’s a mistake to outsource this process to professional election workers: “We have be turned into watchers of election workers.” Asked later about the possibility for technology for monitoring polling places, Ezeazu tells us that the thugs who intimidate and break up elections “are very cowardly people – when they see everyone has a mobile phone, they back off.” In other words, the ability to report on people being denied the ability to exercise their franchise can be enough to scare the thugs off… sometimes.

A tough question for the panelists from a woman from River State: Who do you report to if you lose your franchise? If you report to the electoral commission, are there actual consequences of reporting? It’s one thing to urge people to participate, but if that articipation doesn’t lead to change. Why urge people to participate?

Professor Jibrin Ibrahim offered one of the four co-keynotes of the day, which started with the brilliant line: “We’ve organized very good elections, we’ve organized very bad elections. We are especially skilled in organizing very bad elections.” Looking for the common thread between the good elections, Ibrahim suggests that the good elections are ones where the incumbent was not a player… and the bad ones tend to be ones incumbents have planned.

Ibrahim tells us that Nigerians have needed to coin a new term to explain how elections are stolen: digital rigging. He points to an election in Ondo in 1983 where the results reported had literally nothing to do with the election at all. In more recent times, ICT has acted as a ruse, showing that preparations were excellent, but hiding the reality of a stolen election. Sometimes we can see a stolen election coming because the promises are so absurd. For the 2007 election, the elections authority proposed a system that involved ana electronic voter register, biomechanical cards, and voting machines that transmitted results to the elections comission headquarters. While the officials promised the most technically sophisticated election in the world, what resulted was wholesale theft of votes.

Carlo Binda of NDI tries to disabuse us of the notion that elections monitors just care about elections – “elections are not an event, they’re a process”. He points out that Yemen recently held an election that went off without a hitch… but “that’s not where the shenanigans took place”, and the election led to no change at all. He reminds us that the Obama campaign did something very basic – simple, straightforward organizing – more than they did deployment of new ICT technologies. “ICT alone is not the silver bullet.”

While I didn’t get to grill him on my panel, Dele Olojele of 234NEXT gave a short keynote to talk about his new model, which began as a Twitter feed, then became a website, and only later became a printed newspaper. While this model of disseminating news – fast, online, investigative – is having success in breaking stories, it hasn’t caused the change Olojele hoped for: “A funny thing happened on the way to the revolution. Sometimes providing information is not enough.” He tells us about breaking a story that conclusively demonstrated graft by the oil minister. “The story sank like a stone – no resignation, no reprimand.” Olojele tells us he’s still trying to crack the code, because the goal is “setting free 150 million people.” Here ICT is not a magical bullet, but “when you are fifty years old, I am no longer looking for magical bullets” – instead ICT is provides a new space wehre there is hope that things can change.

Asma’u Joda from the Center for Women and Adolescent Empowerment reminds us that women are the majority of voters, and often don’t know why they vote. “Usually, we vote because our men tell us, or because someone promises something we can feed our families. And if we don’t know why we’re voting, we make the worst choices.” She wonders whether ICT is the most appropriate tool for the women she works with – they can’t afford phones, credits and when they can, half the time, the network doesn’t work. More important may be leaders like a nationally respected Imam, who could ensure women the vote by making a public statement okaying their participation in elections. And in her community, where one family’s children are everyone’s children, it’s possible that wired, connected children may alter the opinions of their parents and other parents in the community.

The founder of the Enough is Enough Coalition, Chude Jideonwo, tells us a funny story – he came up behind one of the young Nigerians tweeting at this gathering and said in a scolding tone, “Young man, you should be paying attention.” His friend jumped and immediately put down his Blackberry, embarrased to be called out. Chude tells us that the guy in question has thousands of Twitter followers and is reaching a much wider audience that we are, speaking in this hall. Yes, it’s possible to exaggerate the influence of our tools – he mentions he has no good answer to the question, “How are you going to upload the picture when the area boy is holding a gun to your head?” ICT is simply another tool. But we’ve seen evidence that it can mobilize people who often aren’t politically active, bringing a large group of youth to rally both in Abuja and Lagos, brough to the streets via digital media. “We tend to think if you go onto Facebook, you’re going to meet a young person in Europe. That’s not usually the case – you are going to meet the youth of Abuja.

Bolaji Aluko of Howard University gives an excellent analogy, talking about the infrastructures that made the World Cup possible – the early stages, the referees, the rules, the fouls and the penalty kicks. While there were problems – a number of terrible calls, an unpredictable ball, no goal line review – most everyone agrees that Spain won and deserves to be “president of football” for the next four years. The problem with elections in Nigeria, Aluko tells us, is not that Nigerians are poor losers – it’s that the rules don’t work. We don’t have real separation between the legislature, executive and judiciary, and corruption in one wing infect and reinforce the other. The press becomes a target of indimidation and influence. When this fails, we see military coups. Glad one of those didn’t break out against FIFA.

The event we’re helping organize here is two days – the first is the public discussion, the second, a daylong unconference and brainstorm for people interested in building tools and organizations to make the 2011 elections more transparent and fair. In that spirit, we saw a series of short “spotlight sessions”, focusing on technology projects already underway which might assist in better 2011 elections.

Thomas Smyth, a PhD student under Mike Best at Georgia Tech, shows off Yarn for Yarn, an electronic platform for citizen dialog. The platform tries to recognize that “the internet isn’t quite what we want it to be in Nigeria” and uses SMS and battery powered kiosks to participate in an online, question-driven discussion. If you’re in Nigeria, you can participate by choosing a six-letter username and sending a text that says “register (that username)” to 0816 746 4700. When you get a confirmation code, send “join #enigeria” to the same number to subscribe to a moderated discussion coming out of our conference today.

The founder of Transform Naija (whose name I missed, unfortunately) tells us that, about a year ago, he knew basically nothing about ICT. He came to an event we held in Abuja last year, and he’s now spearheading an initiative focused on mobilizing citizens. He tells us, “if I can do this, everyone can.” His project adds a layer to citizen election monitoring, using the Ushahidi mapping platform, but adds a key component – allowing participation via voice telephony. For now, it supports five platforms – the three “regular suspects” (Hausa, Ibo, Yoruba) plus English and Pidgin. The goal is to collect reports on free and fair elections, corruption and human rights abuses and to see whether authorities respond correctly to these reports. He closes by telling us that he wants to see transparent elections taking place starting at the student elections level. We need people to get used to the idea that elected officials – student or otherwise – are accountable and work through fair elections.

Gideon Tetteh of CDD Ghana tells us of the experiences he had conducting a parallel vote tally during Ghana’s recent presidential elections. As most readers of this blog should know, the vote was extremely close, and the elections commission ended up consulting with the parallel tabulation to ensure their results were correct. (There’s skepticism that a model that worked in Ghana will work in Nigeria.) Tetteh wonders whether we can start using mobile phones to hold politicans accountable for their promises between election cycles. When we transfer money using mobile phones (a common practice in Ghana now using MTN’s mobile money), we call the recipient to confirm she received the funds. Why don’t we call our relatives in the villages to see whether the promises politicians made them during election cycles get carried out?

Fasoro Oladipo (@dfasoro) of the nigeriaelections.org portal shows us a funny webpage – it’s the electoral comission’s information page on the late president Yar’Adua. It has his name, a broken image an no other information, not even his gender. He asks “What did you know about the 2007 elections? How did you know it?” and tells us that he’s building a system to combine what the electoral commission (INEC) knows, what CSOs and NGOs know, and what you know, because “not knowing leads to not acting.”

Our surprise guest on our final day is Julian Assange, founder and editor in chief of Wikileaks. (Okay, not a surprise to me – I had an enjoyable argument with him about singularity theory last night.) Chris Anderson, TED’s founder, interviews him onstage and talks through Wikileak’s mission, structure and history. Julian is in fine form, and when Chris begins by asking if it’s fair to say that Wikileaks has released more secret documents that the collective enterprise of journalism, Julian allows that it’s an embarrassment for journalists to have such a comparison made.

Chris walks through some of Wikileaks’s most notable stories, beginning with the Project KTM report, a corruption report that contained information damaging to the Moi administration in Kenya. The report, viewed as a holy grail for understanding corruption in Kenya, was released by Wikileaks shortly before parliamentary elections and, Julian tells us, shifted the vote 10% according to intelligence reports.

Wikileaks is now best know for the release of the “collateral murder” video that depicts the killing of two journalists and multiple civilians by an Apache gunship in Iraq. Asked by Chris what was important about releasing the video, Julian tells us that it was important for understanding the “gross disparity in force” between potential insurgents with small arms and a helicopter gunship and for the impression that American forces were “looking for excuses to kill, targeting people rescuing the wounded.”

Chris asks why Wikileaks encourages the leaking of secret information. Julian gives the most clear response I’ve heard him offer to this oft-asked question. “There’s lots of information in the world that can achieve reform. Information that organizations spend effort to conceal is a signal that it’s information that could do good.” He acknowledges that not all secrets are fair game, allowing that people’s personal medical records should be allowed to be secret.

There’s not much disagreement in the crowd when Chris Anderson, exploring the tensions between secrecy, journalism and power, asks whether they see Assange as “a people’s hero” or a dangerous provocateur – the vote is overwhelmingly for the former and Assange seems slightly disappointed.

We look at a recently released document concerning an oil leak in Albania, which
new leak – oil leak in Albania which appears the obvious product of corporate negligence. When Wikileaks released the document, they were approached by the company to ask the document be removed. His team engaged with the corporation, asking for confirmation that it was their document, specifics on what the document was about… all of which helped serve as provenance for the document. Julian described this as one of his favorite ways of identifying and verifying materials.

Asked if Wikileaks has documents about BP, he allows that it does, but hasn’t released them. He explains that their “publication rate is minimized by a reengineering and fundraising effort” that’s been ongoing for some months now. The reengineering is to help the site cope with the high loads it faces due to widespread attention. Julian notes that it’s been difficult to grow the organization for fear that expanding too quickly will compromise security.

Chris makes reference to one the details of Julian’s childhood reported in a recent New Yorker profile – that Julian attended 37 different schools growing up. Julian confirms that his childhood was spent with parents who worked in the film industry, and later running from a cult. Chris asks if this is a recipe to create paranoia, leading Julian to quip, “The movie industry?”

Asked further about his background and motivations, Julian offers the thought that “capable generous men don’t create victims; they nurture them.” One way to help victims is to “police perpetrators.”

The interview closes with questions about Wikileaks’s recent work in Iceland. A leaked report on the banking industry and the financial collapse – which had devastating implications for Iceland – was due to be the subject of a television broadcast, but a court injunction moments before the story went to air prevented the release of information. Wikileaks posted the text of the report and Icelandic readers discovered it through the site. The incident led to a sense that Iceland shouldn’t suffer from these restrictions on journalistic freedom in the future. And so Wikileaks has cooperated with Icelandic parliamentarians to pass legislation that helps the country act as a data haven.

I was packing to go after Professor Wolff’s lecture and folding my tent when I got distracted by William Perrin‘s talk and ended up staying later than I’d planned. Perrin is a community activist who has focused on his neighborhood of King’s Cross for the past eight years. He introduces us to some of the neighborhood’s challenges – a rash of cars burned by hooligans for fun, widespread public drug sale and use, a large population of drug-addicted prostitutes, a group of drunken young teens who would steal and race motorscooters during Arsenal football games. All, he tells us, within 400 meters of one of London’s major railway stations.

(This is, amusingly enough, the neighborhood I’m enroute to as I write this, as it’s where the Guardian newspaper’s offices are.)

Perrin reacted by becoming a member of every community organization he could, and found himself flooded with information, both online and off. He began summarizing and sharing his summaries online as a way of coping with the mass of data and discovered that collating this data was a hugely helpful community function. He points to a collection of other community information blogs at Openly Local.

The technology isn’t the most important story in thinking about technology and social change, Perrin tells us. He’s had the most success with extremely simple technology. A short video of the noise from gravel, poured into a metal box, at the cement plant down the road from his flat was enough – plus lots of email – to persuade the CEO of Cemex to change local procedures so the company would be a better and less noisy neighbor. Perrin is openly critical of pundits who posit the utility of new, complex technologies to enable social change – he takes a swipe directly at Clay Shirky and his enthusiasm for platforms that might enable community drafting of legislation. And he tells the TED community that they are general at the bow wave of technological change, while the people living in communities are usually deep in the wake.

So he suggests a possible pledge for young, net-savvy leaders, like Obama and the new UK administration, which he calls the TED Global Internet Pledge:

“For my government, the internet is now the primary means of communications with the public for policy formation and service delivery. We shall extend basic training and support to people who cannot use the internet, enabling them to do so. Our public institutions must change themselves to make this happen within existing budgets, within 12 months.”

The commitment to using simple online tools and to ensuring they are widely available will do more to support revitalized civic life, he proposes, than a wealth of innovation in new tools for civic engagement.

And that’s all, for me at least. The conference had a couple more speakers and punting on the Thames, but I’m off to London, Abuja, Lagos and Accra. While this wasn’t my first time speaking at TED, it was the first time I gave a long talk, and was certainly the most attention I’ve ever gotten at a TED event. I’m very grateful for TED for showcasing my recent work, but I have to say, microfame is a real distraction from the blogging. Sorry that I wasn’t up to my usual levels of prolixity for this event. As always, thanks to the organizers, everyone who spoke and everyone who listened. And back to your regularly scheduled, significantly sparser blogging starting now.

Dimitar Sasselov uses a recent event in history – the reburial of Copernicus with honors in his native Poland – as a way of discussing a major discovery in his own work. Like most of his contemporaries, Copernicus had been buried in a communal grave. Scientists found hairs in a book which they knew to be in his library and attempted to match them to remains in the crypt where he was buried. By comparing DNA, they were able to make a confident match and exhume his remains, reburying them with the recognition deserving of the man who changed our understanding of the solar system to a heliocentric one.

Despite advances in DNA sequencing and other technologies, Sasselov tells us that it often seems like we’re not making much progress in answering the essential questions of life. What is life? What is the origin of life? Is there life on other planets or are we alone?

With the launch of a new telescope, the Kepler telescope, there’s a new way to look for earth-like planets in orbit around other stars. The telescope uses the transit method – it looks for the mini eclipse that occurs when a planet passes in front of a star. By detecting the dimming of the light, the users of the telescope are able to extrapolate the size and period of orbit of the planets blocking the light.

In our solar system, we have five small, earth-like planets and a smaller set (four) of differently sized gaseous planets. Copernicus believed that there was a harmony in the relationship of planet size, a distribution with more small planets like ours, and fewer large ones.

For years, it looked like Copernicus had gotten it wrong – it seemed like large, gaseous planets were more common. But this is likely just because we can only see the big ones. With Kepler now in use, this pattern is inverting – a set of 1160 observations shows far more small, earth-like planets in orbits around varying stars, and a smaller set of large gas giants – basically, a Pareto distribution with respect to planetary size.

Sasselov extrapolates from this data to suggest that there are a large number of earth-sized planets out there. Size matters, because life as we know it is more likely to occur on small planets, capable of supporting an atmosphere or liquid water. He suggests there are 100 million potentially habitable planets and that the next research project is to start studying them, trying to understand their chemical composition and, therefore, the possibility they support certain types of life.

If these experiments to enumerate planets are one form of exploring the possibility of non-terrestrial life, another major approach – which he explains as two sides of a bridge being built to join over a river – is lab experimentation. Recent experiments show that agitation of chemicals in liquid water can lead to the formation of bubble membranes that resemble cell membranes. This offers the intriguing suggestion that cell structures could be universal.

It’s easy to see ourselves as insignificantly small in the scale of the universe. Sasselov takes off his tie, asks us to imagine its length as that of the universe. Our planet is the size of an atom in this scale. But in time scales, the fraction of time our planet has been in existence is a large portion of his tie – a handful or so. Perhaps this helps us see our place in the world is not insignificant.

Stefan Wolff is a scholar of ethnic conflicts and civil war. He tells us that, while there’s seldom good news when we talk about these topics, there are reasons for hope. Specifically, he’s hopeful about three factors: leadership, diplomacy and institutional design.

There are certainly reasons to worry about ongoing civil war. Wolff reminds us of recent civil conflicts in Georgia, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Israel and Palestine, Darfur and Iraq. But there’s good news as well. In the long term, there’s an overall decline in the number of civil wars, and we’re seeing roughly half as many as there were in the 1990s, with fifty civil wars. Death rates are lower from combat casualties, though the trend is less unambiguous. And there’s a decrease of 2/3rds in civilian casualties, which is great, but those statistics don’t consider the tragically common other effects of conflict on civilians – torture, rape and maiming.

So why is the situation getting better? Sometimes there’s a military victory, like with the victory of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. But these rarely show up as resounding successes. Wolff tells us an African colleague once told him, “The ceasefire on Tuesday night was reached just in time for the genocide to start on Wednesday morning.”

Looking at success stories might help us. The Northern Ireland peace process mediated by Senator Mitchell was a resounding success and has led to lasting peace in Northern Ireland. There were very clear conditions for participation in negotiation – a firm commitment to exclusively peaceful means. Agreements were innovative and let all parties see their core concerns addressed. People built cross-border institutions that link Belfast and Dublin and acknowledge Irish dimension of the conflict. There was an acknowledgement of rights of individuals and groups, and local leaders rose to the challenge of compromise.

This isn’t the only success – stopping the civil war in Liberia, preventing civil war in Macedonia, and ending the conflict in Aceh – in each case, institutions have stood up to the promise of making peace instead of sustaining conflict.

Why didn’t Oslo work as a process for peace in Israel and Palestine? The process didn’t include enough of the issues – instead, it left them to local leaders, who soon disengaged, became distracted. The Southern Sudan peace process wasn’t comprehensive enough, and may lead to resumption of conflict.

In Kosovo, failure of a negotiated solution led to de facto partition. Here we should probably blame the intransigence of local leaders, and the failure to settle for less than full demands. Western support for Kosovar independents probably didn’t help either, and the failure to build institutions to address concerns of Serbs and Albanians alike contributed.

Even when situations less than optimal, Wolff tells us, leaders have a choice and can make a difference for the better. A cold peace is better than a hot war for everyone involved. But these sorts of solutions don’t happen automatically. Leadership has to be capable, determined, visionary. Leaders need to connect to each other and to followers, so they can bring them along on a long and arduous journey.

Diplomacy must be well resourced, sustained, and a use a mix of pressures. It needs to push for equitable compromise, and involve a broad coalition of local, regional and international supporters.

Institutional design should focus on issues, innovative thinking, and be supported by well-funded implementation.

Parties involved need to move away from maximum demands, towards compromise. And we all need to invest in developing leaders who have the skills, vision, determination to make peace so that “the child soldiers of today can become the children of tomorrow.”

Ze Frank is a very funny man. He’s also an extremely sweet and caring guy. And while his talk at TED features some of his classic collaborative web performances – the Earth sandwich, YoungMeNowMe – most of the talk is about recent projects that focus on our need to feel and to be felt.

The star of the show is Ray, whose song, written to help his daughter cope with the stresses and pressures of her job, begins, “I’m about to whip somebody’s ass.” Ze’s fans began to remix the song, which he compiled into an album and promised to deliver it to Ray… if his fans could fin him. They did, two weeks later, and Ze flew to St. Louis to meet Ray, who turns out to be a preacher, and who was amused that his gesture for his daughter had gone viral.

Ze tells us that there’s a real challenge with technology that’s supposed to connect us – lots of people who build this technology are not good at connecting with people. He’s hoping to do better.

One project – A Childhood Walk – asks you to remember a walk you took as a child over and over again, take the walk again in Google street view and post a photo and the memory associated with it.

Another – from 52 to 48 with love – urged polite messages of reconcilliation between the left and right in the US in the wake of the 2008 elections. Right wing blogs concluded that this was condescending and Ze received reams of hate mail. He built a collage of some of the angriest bits, printed it on paper and asked people to fold them into “angrigami“, creating something beautiful out of this strong emotion.

Recent projects include a pair of songs, a beautiful “scared mantra” for a child who has trouble sleeping, and a “chillout song” for a woman named Laura going through a hard time. The song ended up involving the participation of hundreds of singers, who joined in telling her, “Hey, you’re okay, you’ll be fine, just breathe.” It’s a good message for all of us.

Rachel Sussman is photographing organisms that are more than 2000 years old. The project was inspired by Jamon Sugi, a two thousand year old Japanese Cedar at a remote island called Yaku Shima. The project is a combination of philosophy, photography and history, starting at year zero and working backwards.

The project features wonderful species like La Llareta – a three thousand year old shrub that looks like a strange pile of moss. She visited Greenland and photographed a map lichen, which grows a centimeter every 100 years. She tells us that visiting Greenland was more live traveling in time than in space, going to a place where you can grab foot-long trout with your hands from a running, glacial stream.

The trout aren’t very old – indeed, there are no animals in the set, as the oldest animal alive – a tortoise – is only 175 years old. A coral isn’t a very speedy animal, but there is one that’s 2000 years old off the shores of Tobago – it’s beautiful, nibbled by parrot fish and there’s an open question of whether it will be damaged by the Gulf oil spill.

But generally we’re looking at plants and fungi. Really big fungi.

The Armilaria Death Rings are caused by a predatory fungus, sometimes called honey mushroom or “the humungous fungus”. It’s best seen from aerial photography in rings of trees killed by the fungus.

Circles of plants appear in her work. A clonal colony of quaking Aspen is a single tree, with a single genome, but looks like a forest. It’s 80,000 years old, lives in Fish Lake, Utah, happens to be male, and in theory, is immortal.

The Sagole Baobab in Limpopo Province, South Africa, is two thousand years old. As they age, baobobs hollow out, because they become pulpy. She tells us about trees that have been used as a bar, a prison, a toilet.

Welwirschia, a primitive conifer, a shrublike desert tree, lives in Namib desert, where it features the longest leaves in the plant kingdom. To its south, in the bush veldt of South Africa, trees grow almost entirely underground with just leaves poking above the surface. This protects them from fires that sweep through the area. They, too, are astoundingly old. So are some creosote bushes in the US – 12,000 years old – which are slow spreading circles, in danger on their Bureau of Land Management land, which is open for ATV traffic.

In more serious threat are Siberian Actinobacteria. They’re 400-600,000 years old and we know they’re alive because we can document them doing DNA repair at temperatures below freezing. In her upcoming travel, she’ll go to Antarctica to photograph 5000 year old moss.

Why do this? The oldest living things are a record of the past, call to action, and a barometer of the future.

(Clay’s talk is similar to the one he gave at the Aspen Institute last year, though that talk was more than an hour long and, obviously, was able to cover more territory than an 18 minute TED talk. Here are my notes on that longer talk, which Clay was kind enough to vet and correct…)

WWF’s Jason Clay starts his tale of doing more with less with a story about his own childhood, growing up very poor on a farm in Missouri. When a scholarship allowed him to get out and go to school, he studied agriculture and anthropology. This eventually led him to working in a refugee camp in Sudan – “If you get a PhD and decide not to teach, you don’t necessarily end up in a refugee camp – you could always drive a taxi in New York.”

Using the techniques he’d learned as an anthropologist, he conducted interviews on how many people were raped, how many were arrested and tells us he was able to calculate with unfortunate accuracy how many body bags they’d need.

This wasn’t his path, he tells us. And so he found himself at a Grateful Dead show, talking to Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry’s, who asked him, “What can I do to save the rainforest?” The answer Clay offered: “Use nuts from the rainforest to prove the forest is worth more as forest than as pasture.” The product, Rainforest Crunch, was an enormous success – $100 million in sales – but he tells us it failed. “Why? The people who were gathering Brazil nuts weren’t people cutting the forest. We needed to be working on beef, timber and soy.”

Returning to Sudan, Clay tells us he wondered why didn’t people realize famine was caused by politics, not weather. An Oromo friend answered his question: “You can’t wake a person who’s pretending to sleep.”

Human beings are currently using 1.3 planets worth of resources for consumption. Yes, population growth is important, but so is the size of ecological footprint. The average American consumes 43 times the average African. When we’ve reached a planet of 9 billion people, all of whom are likely to consume twice as many resources, we’re at a load much, much higher than what we can sustain globally. Yes, we need to bring up efficiency and productivity, but we need to bring consumption down.

Clay asks if consumers should have a choice about sustainable products… or should we mandate that all our products are sustainable? It takes 1.8 seconds for the average American to make an average consumer choice. That’s not long enough for a consumer to figure out whether frozen lamb from New Zealand is better for the environment than fresh from the UK, or even if organic potatoes have fewer toxic chemicals than conventional. (The answer to both those choices is non-trivial – and in both cases is, “it depends”.)

So sustainability has to be a pre-competitive issue. And, Clay tells us, we need collusion to address it. He and WWF have identified 30 key parts of the world where we need to protect biodiversity, and 15 major commodities that threaten biodiversity. Do we address this by changing the behavior of 6.9 billion consumers? It’s way too hard. 300-500 companies control 70% of these key commodities. And 100 companies control 25% of all this trade. And Clay argues that, if we chance their behavior, we can change 40-50% of production.

Now there are agreements with 40 of these companies, and negotiations underway with another 40. The plan is to use those 80 to twist arms of the remaining 20. One of the involved companies is Cargill, which not has plans to double palm oil production by planting only on degraded land. Mars has made a commitment to buy only sustainable seafood for its pet food. And they’re sequencing the cocoa genome and releasing it into the public domain so people can come up with better ways to grow the product sustainably, so Mars can always make chocolates.

The price of food as a share of household income keeps going down. But in part this is because consumers aren’t paying the true cost of food. If we bring in the externalities – particularly water – we’d see a massive shift in costs.

Clay closes by telling us, “Whatever was sustainable in a planet of six billion will not be in a planet of nine.”