This week featured ferocious clashes in Mogadishu between Somalia’s fledgling federal government and Al Shabab, an Islamist militia with ties to Al Qaeda. Al Shabab has declared a “massive, final” war on the fragile government and struck Tuesday with a deadly suicide bombing on a Mogadishu hotel used by the government to house ministers. Xan Rice, writing in the Guardian, reports that security experts expect more attacks during Ramadan, possibly coinciding with important dates on the religious calendar.

The attacks help underscore two uncomfortable truths about the situation in Somalia. One is that the Somali government is incapable of protecting itself and would fall, perhaps within hours, without support from 6,000 AU troops. Despite massive support from governments around the world, including the US, the Transitional Federal Government is so disorganized that it’s often unable to pay its troops. As a result, they are often defecting to Al Shabab, for economic reasons, not ideological ones. The second is that Al Shabab scares the crap out of nearby east African countries, especially Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda.

Uganda has a right to be scared. Last month, a set of coordinated bombings in Kampala killed more than 70 people who’d assembled to watch the final match of the World Cup. Al Shabab has claimed credit for the attacks, which it says were intended to punish Uganda for supplying troops to the AU force. The militia has also threatened Burundi, which supplies troops to the AU mission, and carries out occasional raids into bordering Kenya. Their real animus is reserved for Ethiopia, which occupied Somalia – with US support – from 2006-2009. (The countries have been in conflict on and off since 1948… and depending on who you ask, back to the 16th century.)

Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia are all important US allies, and it’s likely that there’s increasing pressure on the Obama administration to “do something” about Somalia. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni – in an NPR op-ed - makes clear what he’d like the US to do in Somalia: support more peacekeeping troops, and give the Somali government more money. While that sounds rational on the surface, it might not be a very good idea. Understanding why requires looking at the history of Al Shabab and the US’s tragic role in helping bring a violent and extreme movement to prominence.

The one period of peace Mogadishu has enjoyed since Barre’s ouster in 1991 was a six month period in late 2006 where the comparatively moderate Union of Islamic Courts controlled Somalia. Markets, stores, the Mogadishu airport and port reopened and many civilian and business leaders cheered the new stability.

This period of relative calm ended when Ethiopia invaded Somalia in December 2006 to re-install the government the UIC had chased out a few months before. Ethiopia had good strategic reasons for moving against the UIC. Ethiopia saw the UIC as an ally of Eritrea, with whom it has a stalled border conflict and long rivalry. And Somalia, under Barre, invaded the majority Islamic/majority Somali Ogaden region of Ethiopia in 1977. (BBC’s timeline of events in Somalia may be useful.) Ethiopia continues to fight rebels in the Ogaden, some of whom seek a “Greater Somalia” that encompasses western Ethiopia and Somalia. So the notion of an Islamic Union with popular support, which might seek a Greater Somalia strategy was understandably intolerable.

The US didn’t much care for the UIC either. The Bush Administration state department believed that some of the UIC warlords had provided support for Al Qaeda… a claim UIC leaders denied. And, as Nir Rosen observes in this excellent TIME op-ed, some in the state department found UIC’s explicit Islamist alignment intolerable. So the US supported the Ethiopian invasion with intelligence, military advisors and, incredibly, turned a blind eye to a North Korean arms shipment that allowed Ethiopia to repair its tanks. The Ethiopian army rapidly chased the UIC out of Mogadishu, reinstalled the federal government (TFG = “transitional federal government”) and, left in 2009 to be replaced by AU forces.

What Ethiopia and the US didn’t anticipate (though they should have) was that the occupation of Somalia radicalized the population and led to the rise of Al Shabab, a group that’s proven to be much more extreme than the UIC. Al Shabab now controls most of southern Somalia and all but a few blocks of Mogadishu, where the nominal government of Somalia is protected from ouster by 6,000 AU troops. Those troops, in turn, are increasingly resented by Somali civilians, as their shells kill civilians in trying to strike Al Shabab forces.

The case against doubling down on peacekeeping and supporting the TFG, as Museveni suggests, starts with the observation that there’s no peace to keep in Somalia, an argument Jeffrey Gettleman makes in the NYTimes. Peacekeeping has never had meaningful dividends in Somalia, and outside occupation seems to be a powerful catalyst for the creation of new military forces. The federal government is a bad joke, not only ineffectual but fraught with internal divisions that are likely to break it apart if it ever achieved any power. If the government were ever to be able to operate beyond a AU-maintained perimeter, it would face a reconstruction challenge much worse than the situation faced in Afghanistan.

Counterintuitively, the best thing the US might do to prevent Somalia from becoming an operating base for Al Qaeda is to disengage, limit involvement to targeted strikes on international terrorist leaders and to providing humanitarian aid. That’s the case governance expert Bronwyn Bruton makes in this interview with the Council on Foreign Relations. She notes that a divided, clan-ruled Somalia was an environment Al Qaeda previously found impossible to operate in – the level of inhospitality of the clan system appeared to “inoculate” Somalia from foreign engagement. She suggests that allowing the TFG to fall and Al Shabab to rise will lead towards Al Shabab fracturing as a coalition, and eventually a return to clan politics and conflict, which is ultimately the only stable basis for a future functional Somali state.

Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi makes a similar case in an article in the American Thinker titled “What To Do About Somalia“. He urges a containment strategy – ensure that Al Shabab doesn’t act outside of Somalia, and cut off external supports. He also suggests the US and the international community recognize Somaliland, the comparatively stable north of the country, as an independent nation, creating another potential ally in stabilizing southern Somalia.

(Side note – while looking for Al-Tamimi’s article, I searched for “what to do about Somalia”. Google returned a wonderful result from Trip Advisor, titled “Things to Do in Mogadishu“. I love that Trip Advisor wants to find me a cheap flight to Mogadishu and to help me find a cheap Somali passport.)

What I find most interesting about Bruton’s arguments is her argument that the US is incorrectly framing the situation in Somalia as a conflict between religious ideologies. She argues that the TFG and Al Shabab are both ad-hoc, opportunistic groups looking for power, not advocating for a particular religious ideology. Because TFG is seeking funding from western governments, it argues that it’s a bulwark against terrorism. Al Shabab looks for support from Al Qaeda in the hopes of support from extremists in the Middle East. But the ideology is secondary to the search for power. (Some groups in Somalia have expressed concerns that the TFG includes a large number of Wahabbists, which seems incompatible with a pro-US orientation… and supports Bruton’s case that ideology is trumped by opportunity.)

If we take the conflict in Somalia out of the “extremist Islam versus the world” frame that the US often falls into, Bruton argues, we might be able to see that increased outside intervention will likely worsen the conflict. Perhaps then would make the decision to disengage. This doesn’t mean ignoring Somalia – it means watching borders closely, and being willing to strike against foreign fighters should they take shelter under Al Shabab. But it means giving up a failed strategy of nation building on the cheap and by proxy.

It’s a tough time in terms of US politics to make this case. The US’s ongoing costly and bloody involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq sends a daily message to the American people that the Muslim world is a dangerous place. That sense is being exploited for political gain by the far right in the US, who see islamophobia as winning political strategy, as seen in the absurd debate about the Park51 Center in New York City. President Obama has been admirably clear about his willingness to build bridges with the Muslim world and in supporting Park51 in the current controversy. President Bush was also admirably clear about rejecting a “clash of civilizations” frame in his public statements, but it’s less clear that his state and defense departments rejected this frame.

Nir Rosen is right – the US helped bring Al Shabab to power by backing an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia. What President Museveni is saying isn’t as extreme as the rhetoric Meles Zenawi used prior to the Ethiopian invasion, but the course of action he urges may lead to a similarly undesirable outcome. Or, to quote noted Somali analyst Admiral Ackbar, “It’s a trap.” Let’s hope President Obama is wise enough to avoid it.

• Trapped in the Anglosphere, we've lost sight of next door | Martin Kettle | Comment is free | The Guardian
  Powerful essay on "the anglosphere" and the ways in which the English language is limiting the political interests of UK citizens
  (tags: culture europe politics web language cosmopolitanism xenophilia disconnect)

• YProductions
  Interesting mapping essay, with a good example on constrained urban environments by Chombart de Lauwe, who tracked the movements of a student in 19th century Paris
  (tags: cartography design mapping research paris qs)
• Articles / Personal Informatics Lab
  Bibliography of scholarly papers on Quantified Self
  (tags: data tracking qs informatics quantified reading)
• The Data-Driven Life – NYTimes.com
  Gary Wolf's summary of the state of experimentation around the Quantified Self in NYTimes magazine
  (tags: analytics culture data datamining health information psychology sociology lifestreaming productivity tracking qs quantified)
• International broadcasters: Waves in the web | The Economist
  Overseas news services like Voice of America and BBC World Service are less effective in the face of competition from new networks – some local, some rising powers like China's media arm or Al Jazeera.
  (tags: global media news radio bbc aljazeera)

Earlier this week, I met with Evan Paul, a smart urban planner just out of a master’s program at MIT. He’s working with colleagues on a new idea – “Global Planning Partners”, a nonprofit intended to help urban planners in the North work with planners in developing world megacities. And while I love and respect projects like Dx1W that point to the challenges of asking students in the developed world to “solve” developing world problems, I think projects that connect professionals in the developed and developing world to encourage cooperation and skill transfer are significantly more likely to lead to good outcomes.

(I had a chance to talk with Martin Williams, a young economist who’s spending two years in Ghana, in Accra a couple of weeks back. He’s serving as staff economist within the Ghana Ministry of Trade and Industry… where he tells me he’s the only guy who’s building economic models to understand trade policy. He’s there due to the grace of the Overseas Development Institute, a UK thinktank that provides economics support to developing economies. No doubt that Martin will be able to have a great impact while in Ghana, but it’s a little crazy that this is a function being provided by a recent Masters graduate in the country for two years. The reason isn’t that there aren’t trained economists in Ghana – there are, but the Ministry pays so poorly that they’re working elsewhere. Makes me wonder whether there’s more of a shortage of urban planners in countries like Ghana, or whether the economic incentives drive trained planners to work outside the country…)

So Paul and I were talking about the successes and failures of Geekcorps, the NGO I helped found in 1999 and walked away from in 2004. I tried to explain why Geekcorps had become so expensive and so hard to sustain – that putting people on airplanes, whether it’s to dig a well or advise a government, is incredibly expensive. Coming out of the Geekcorps experience, where raising money to support our volunteers led me to a partnership with USAID which ultimately ended up crushing the project, I found myself urging Paul to consider a problem that I’ve yet to adequately solve: how do you build relationships, share ideas and transfer skills without getting on airplanes?

Needless to say, I’m not the only person who’s tried to solve this problem. The UN’s volunteering program, UNV, has been working for years to establish a virtual volunteering arm that lets individuals take on tasks like research, translation, or graphic design to help development organizations around the world. Nabuur, an online volunteering community, tries to ground these sorts of virtual experiences in learning about the villages where these opportunities are based, and building connections between individual users of the system.

But much as reading lecture notes via MIT Open Courseware isn’t the same thing as dragging yourself across the MIT campus on a wet, grey February morning for a 6.042 lecture, assisting a Ghanaian primary school to write an application for grant funding isn’t the same thing as drinking palm wine with village elders. Not only does virtual volunteering provide a different set of rewards than participating in person, it means that it’s much harder for you to understand local needs and constraints, and easier to make bad design assumptions.

It’s possible to understand Global Voices as a “post-airplane” project, but that’s a misreading of how the network actually came about. After a few months of working on the project, Rebecca and I took advantage of a Berkman conference to bring dozens of international bloggers together at Harvard to build the relationships that led to forming Global Voices as a functional online community. We’ve spent absurd sums every two years to bring our community together in India, Hungary, Chile because we believe – correctly or otherwise – that face to face interaction is part of the magic that allows this project to run primarily on love, not on money. And the accumulated goodwill that comes from getting lost together in Zakir Nagar lasts between these biennial meetings and gives us a basis for collaboration in the interim.

I’ve started thinking of the GV model as “VPV” – virtual, person to person, then virtual again. People discover the community online, and connect based on their sense of shared identity and values with the people already participating. They come together, face to face, either at the biennial meetings we run or at the other people’s conferences (which we’re religious about invading and using to converge our network.) That, in turn, builds the trust and relationships we need to survive working together for the next months or years until we see each other face to face.

This form of social organization isn’t unique to the online age, of course – it’s the pattern scholarly communities have followed for years, with relationships developed through journals and individual communication, cemented by time visiting each others institutions and attending conferences. But the internet offers tools that can broaden and deepen these virtual ties. Reading a friend’s blog or following their twitter feed isn’t the same as beign able to see them each day, but it can be a more immersive experience than exchanging the occasional letter or article. I know far more about the daily habits of some of the GV colleagues than I do about friends I’ve known in person for twenty years.

I think part of the key to making a VPV community work is starting with a group that has a common identity, belief or practice. The common identity that links GV is a pretty loose one – we’re all bloggers (though participating in GV has the tendency to make one blog less, not more). That, and a mutual interest in making sure the online media world extends beyond North America and Europe, is evidently sufficient to create enough of a collective identity that many folks are able to participate within the project before they’ve met another GV person face to face. (I don’t know that anyone has yet met our beloved Veronika Khokhlova in person, despite leading our efforts in the former Soviet Union since early 2006.)

Virtual communities work well when there’s an assumption of good faith from other participants. Online communication is hard; we’ve got far less information about someone’s intention and emotion than we have in other forms of communication: no body language, no tone of voice. If we’re looking for evidence that the other participant is biased, inconsiderate, stupid, it’s often possible to find that evidence in the text he or she has posted. In real life, we tend to cut people slack and assume that a comment wasn’t made to offend. It’s harder to let things slide online – not only do we lack the non-verbal cues, but often it’s a mistake to assume good faith, to assume that your online conversant is interested in dialog rather than in a fight. (The comments on many newspaper websites can show you what conversation in absence of good faith looks like. Or you can just look at conversations within the US Congress at this point…)

If you can assume good faith long enough to establish real common ground with someone – preferably face to face – you can often weather the missteps that characterize these narrow channels of communication. Which isn’t to say that VPV communities always work out well – there are debates, like that over our Israel Flotilla coverage, that show that trust can be a scarce commodity even within a community of people who’ve had a lot of face to face interaction. I suggest that assumption of good faith as a precursor to building trust is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition to building lasting online relationships.

Which brings me back to this question of cross-cultural interaction without airplanes. If trust comes from assumption of good faith, and that assumption comes, in part, from a common practice or identity… maybe it’s time for activists to take a closer look at churches.

I spent Wednesday afternoon with Dylan Breuer, a theologian and lay leader in the Episcopal Church (the church that I’m a not-especially-active part of of.) She and I have been in touch over the years about political and social issues in East Africa, where she’s traveled extensively, working with local congregations. (Much of our conversation has had to do with what the Episcopal Church could do to support gay and lesbian rights in Uganda.)

While it’s an consequence of outdated, colonialist models of proselytizing that the Episcopal/Anglican church has presences in every corner of the globe, I’m wondering if it makes sense to think about church networks (in which I include mosques, synagogues, temples and any transnational religious institutions) as “latent networks” where the possibility of presumption of trust is higher because of a common identity and practice.

Which is to say, if we’re interested in building online relationships that cross borders of nation, language and religion, maybe the first step is to look closely at the networks that are already crossing these borders. And that an organization like the Episcopal church, which Sarah helpfully points out, does have (ritualized) weekly meetings to talk about social justice, might provide some of the infrastructure for online volunteering or other forms of VPV social change.

I realize that this is an open invitation for readers to respond with an emphatic “duh!” and perhaps the observation that American academics would benefit from spending more time in the religious institutions of their choice. Fair enough.

There’s a blind spot many development professionals have as well about faith based organizations. Eight years ago, I was in Dakar, Senegal with a colleague from USAID, working on a White House initiative. We’d had a very long week of meetings, and were chilling out on a Friday night before he returned to DC and me to Boston, eating at a beach restaurant. We were the only non-locals in the place, until a group of 40 Americans (the southern accents made it pretty obvious) walked in, led by a man whose deep tan and locally made shirt suggested that he wasn’t an interloper.

We held off our curiosity for about three minutes, then broke down and introduced ourselves. The group was a set of nurses organized by a Baptist church in South Carolina, and they’d been working in the south of the country, led by a missionary who’d been living in Senegal for a decade. Hearing that we were working with USAID, he explained the literacy program he and friends in his village had developed over the past years. It involved printing stories in French and Wolof on large sheets of paper, which were sold to market women to wrap loaves of bread. Kids were encouraged to collect the sheets, which could be redeemed, a hundred at a time, for small prizes. And a local radio broadcast led them through the stories – some of which, yes, were bible stories – teaching the children to read aloud. As we left the restaurant, my colleague observed that the literacy plan we’d heard about beat the crap out of most he’d been pitched at USAID, and wondered whether there was a way to match new USAID program officers with people with deep community knowledge… including missionaries who’d lived and worked in communities for years.

I don’t mean to trivialize the ways in which evangelism can be deeply disrespectful of local cultures. The people our friend in Senegal was preaching to were almost certainly Muslim, as most Senegalese are, and I’m uncomfortable with the fact that his literacy program is, on som level, designed to draw people from one faith to another. At the same time, I think it’s important to recognize that much of the contact between people from different nations comes through religious institutions. As someone who cares about building understand, relationships and communication between people, it seems like a blind spot – my blind spot – that I’m not paying much attention to these networks.

You may have noticed that I’ve done some housekeeping on the blog. It was about time – I can’t tell when I last updated my blogroll – best guess is sometime in 2006 – but my homepage was evidently last changed in late 2005. I’ll be adding more links to the blogroll in the next couple of weeks – please don’t be sad if you’re not yet included.

My impetus for this digital housecleaning? I’ve had a couple of kind mentions in the media recently, and thought it might be nice to people searching for me to find out what I’m doing lately… and not what I was doing in 2005. And just in case you missed it, here’s the shameless self-promotion:

CNN runs TED talks every Tuesday, and invites speakers to accompany their talks with an essay. I took the opportunity to write about Facebook’s 500 million member mark. This now means that my TED talk is circulating to another audience who are primed to believe that it’s about Facebook… though I don’t think I actually mention Facebook in the talk.

Before going to Oxford for TED, I dropped in on friends at the Guardian for their Activate Summit. Liz Ford offered an excellent overview of my talk there. I dropped by again on my way to Nigeria to do a brief interview about cyberutopianism, which follows below.

Probably the most enjoyable talk I’ve given lately wasn’t a lecture – it was a two-hour conversation with Ghanaian bloggers and tweeps set up by my friend Mac-Jordan. We were almost thwarted by technology – Google Calendar evidently decided to “help” by rescheduling our meeting at Smoothies Pub in Accra to eastern time, which meant that I showed up for the event at an hour when most Accrafolk are in church… and by the time everyone showed up, I’d given up and gone to find a bowl of omo tuo and groundnut soup. It all worked out, and I’m grateful to Mac-Jordan both for setting up the event and blogging about it. I clearly need to spend more time in Ghana – the local tech and literary scenes are both amazing.

Okay, enough about me – back to your regularly scheduled, sporadic posting.

Kate Crawford of the Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, is two years into conducting a massive study of mobile phone use amongst 18-30 year olds in Australia. The study, supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, continues through 2011, and is moving from a qualitative to a quantitative phase. Her presentation at the Berkman Center today, “Art of Noise: Mobile Social Media and Attention”, focuses on insights from the 339 interviews conducted so far.

She begins with a 1741 engraving by William Hogarth titled “The Enraged Musician“. A busy London street generates a welter of noise for the bewigged musician, who finds himself competing with village criers, a seller of songsheets, playing children and other distractions. The image isn’t just a narrative – it’s an example of anxieties about urban life and coming industrialization.

Crawford tells us that we’re now facing a new noise complaint complaints about the networked conversation. There’s a set of anxieties about network noise – “information overload” and “data smog” – starting to be discussed in the Australian context that Crawford is interested in unpacking.

In Australia, she tells us, there are now more mobile phones than human beings. She sees a metamorphosis underway, where the phone is moving from mobile communications to mobile media. Understanding this shift involves understanding how young adults are represented in the media, and what panics occur around youth and mobiles, and moving on to understanding the lived realities and the roles mobiles have in friendships.

By studying mobile use in four Australian states, looking at users in big cities and small towns, Crawford has concluded that mobiles are surprisingly emotion-rich items. She uses the term “emotional containers”, a device that serves as, in the words of one interview subject, “a network of all my friends in one.” As such, these devices are always on… but they’re not generally used for making phonecalls. In her study group – 18-30 year olds – voice calls are the least prefered mode of contact. Instead, young people use texts and social media, “light touch” contact through media like Facebook, which is “far and away the most popular space.”

Because light touch is so common and the device is always on, there’s an anxiety that comes from being separated from a phone. One subject tells her, “It’s under my pillow when I sleep.” She tells us about another interview subject who was trapped in an elevator for six hours. Her anxiety wasn’t about her personal safety – it was about being entirely off network.

This is likely a specifically urban anxiety – while users off network for a few minutes in cities complained, rural users were used to being off network, and got good at communicating in bursts when on network, and heading off network to escape.

The practices we use to manage constant connectivity are evolving, and they are negotiated between friends, families and colleagues. The workplace, in particular, is “a key space for this normative construction.”

Because we’re negotiating this in realtime, there are fears about “network noise” that seem to invoke a “myth of the fall”, positing a period when media didn’t impinge on our time. She cites Jaron Lanier as making this argument in “You Are Not a Gadget” and Giorgio Agamben, who made the case that the mobile phone as reshaping Italian gesture and speech, and homogenizing Italian society. But this isn’t a new problem – she notes that the philosopher Walter Benjamin was complaining about telephones as “uncanny and violent” in 1932.

The response to these concerns about information overload are well summed up by Clay Shirky’s pithy quote, “There is no such thing as information overload, only filter failure.” There’s a wave of “productivity porn” (using Merlin Mann’s term) like Lifehacker and Getting Things Done that promises to help readers focus. But total focus was never possible, nor desirable. Excesses of information is part of the human experience – no human could have read all the scrolls in Alexandria – and this tension between too much or too little information – between noise and silence – is an old one.

Crawford tells us about an organization founded in 1906 in New York City, “The Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise”. The society – which chose Mark Twain as honorary president – advocated for quiet zones around schools, hospitals, homes for the aged based on the belief that noise damages thinking. In contemporary thinking, she sees this idea echoed by cultural anthropologists Adam Greenfield, who talks about “zones of amnesty” and Genevieve Bell who speaks of “spaces of refusal”, places where we societally agree to disconnect and be silent. Greenfield is fond of positing a set of cafés called “Faraday’s”, where a Faraday cage prevents computers and phones from receiving a signal.

But there’s a creative role for noise as well. We see musicians start to embrace noise with the 1919 Antisymphony concert, rooted in the Dada movement, which leads to the rise of noise as a material for composition. Noise can be an intrusive element of randomness, but also a catalyst for creativity and new ideas.

People get enormous amounts of data by being always on and managing the flow of that data through their social connections. This is an evolutionary moment for us. We’re undergoing a social adaptation to high levels of information and a change of definitions about what constitutes attention, focus and productivity.

These aren’t technological changes so much as they are social changes inspired by technology. Crawford suggests that young people aren’t as tech savvy as we tend to think they are – most use only a few functions of their phones. They’re not especially invested in the technology but are using it as a means to an end: maintaining connections with their friends. As such, the problems that arise aren’t technical problems with technical solutions – “we’re going to negotiate this out through social means.”