Engadget was good enough to feature the Geekcorps Mali Wifi-via-water-bottle antenna designed by Ian Howard and crew… but they didn’t credit Ian or Geekcorps. As Ian points out in a comment on the piece, the Geekcorps crew is now developing antennas as inexpensive as $2 per install. And they’re reaching out to the web as a whole for help on other challenging problems, like how to heat-sink a Pentium 4 in a country where the air is filled with fine Saharan dust and daytime temperatures can exceed 55C. (That’s 130F for you Americans in the crowd…)

The Mali program - which is designed to help provide wireless Internet access to community radio stations - was the last project I had a hand in designing for Geekcorps. It’s working amazingly well, bringing broadband to a number of radio stations, and helping others start digitally engineering and editing their broadcasts.

Of the efforts taking place under the Geekcorps brand name, Geekcorps Mali is the one closest to my original vision for Geekcorps and the one I’m proudest of. I’m ludicriously grateful to Ian for the hard work he’s done in Mali, and in keeping the Geekcorps vision alive.

Thanks to Ndesanjo Macha’s Digital Africa for pointing me to the Engadget story.

Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah is a Ghanaian engineer working for Lotus at their facility in Cambridge, MA. His blog, Koranteng’s Toli, currently features one of the best essays I’ve ever read on cultural sensitivity and software localization. (Koranteng’s blog is so much fun because he’s a consistently strong commenter both on tech and African issues - his account of Ghanaian president Kufour’s second inauguration - through a filter of absurdist playwright Ionesco - is a great introduction to his Africa reporting.)

As a software designer, Koranteng understands how hard it is to get the details of localization right - full support for different character sets and text that reads right to left instead of left to right. But he’s also interested in the cultural details of software design, which can be so subtle that you’re unlikely to detect them unless you’re directly effected by them:

The first thing I very quickly noticed: somehow all the photos that I uploaded to Yahoo Photos turned out darker than on Flickr (the services both resize uploaded photos). The photo-resizing algorithm used by Yahoo Photos was giving worse results. This was noticeable to me because a large number of photos featured darker-skinned people such as myself. The originals were fine and where there were lighter skin tones everything looked good, but with darker skintones, the resized photos were not so good.

Koranteng found similar problems with Flickr’s flash plug-in and slideshow feature, as well as with Adobe Photoshops “Quick Fix” and “Auto Correct” options:

the Quick Fix or Auto Correct options in Photoshop seemed tailored for lighter skintones so I was constantly having to do manual tweaking of my photos. Now this is not a big deal for a few photos and indeed it’s fun to fiddle with photos but after a couple of hundred images, it gets tiresome. I found mysef longing for “smarter” recognition by the software or for at least, a nice ‘dark skin’ option that I could set in a preferences dialog.

He points out that this is hardly a new problem - all technology needs to be able to adapt to the people who are using it. And technologies are more likely to succeed if they can be easily adapted to local needs.

…photographers in Africa over the past 150 years have had to deal with brighter sunshine, higher contrast as well as darker skintones when processing their photos as photography has gone through its various evolutions and has now moved into the digital realm. The people who install photo laboratory hardware in Ghana where I come from, always have to recalibrate their equipment to deal with the kind of skin tones that are present in the local market. The factory defaults simply won’t do. I’ve had better results developing film in Ghana than in the US because I often forget to tell the labs here that they should “watch for skintones”

(I can vouch for this - I look so pale in all the photos I’ve had developed in Ghana that I could pass for the undead. Or a goth who got really, really lost.)

It’s a must-read piece for anyone who develops technology for use in other countries and cultures.

To: my four readers

From: your grateful correspondent

Re: new blog

Yes, after 18 months - that’s 11 years, in blog years - “…My Heart’s in Accra” will be moving from the cozy confines of Harvard’s servers out into the wide world. The new blog is a global affair (would you expect any less from me?) - it’s hosted by Rimu Hosting, an absurdly competent group of Kiwi geeks who run data centers in NYC and Austin, Texas. As a result, I no longer really know where my blog is, so I’m simply calling the new one “…My Heart’s in Accra”.

The new blog - not really all that different from the old blog - will be living at http://blog.ethanzuckerman.com. I’m planning on cross-posting to the Harvard site and the new site for the next few weeks, and then I’ll put redirect links on this site which push folks over to the new blog. In the near future, I’m hoping all four of you can visit the new site and help me test it - do comments work, for instance? Does the stylesheet break in your browser? I’d love to work all this out before forcing people over to the new site. Also, feel free to beat the rush and move your aggregator over to the new site feed, now available in RSS 2.0 and Atom.

A big thank you to Dave Winer, Jesse Ross, Hal Roberts, Wendy Koslow and John Palfrey for providing the space and support to get me blogging. I’m moving on not out of any problems with the Harvard blog server but because I find I’m teaching folks around the world how to blog using WordPress hosted on Blogsome, and I need to be using WordPress so I know what I’m talking about.

Thanks for reading, and look forward to seeing you on the new server.

Roy Bennet was born in Zimbabwe when it was known as Southern Rhodesia. His family had lived in Rhodesia for decades, and Roy continued the family tradition, working a 7,000 acre coffee farm and raising 900 head of cattle.

In 2000, everything changed for Roy and his wife Heather. Their farm was seized by Mugabe’s forces, who slaughtered their cattle, destroyed their house and displaced 800 people living on his farm. Heather, who was pregnant at the time of the attack, was abused and miscarried.

Roy Bennet didn’t respond by leaving Zimbabwe, as many white farmers did when Mugabe forcibly “redistributed” their land. Instead, he ran for parliament. And won. The predominantly black voters of Chimanimani voted for Bennett, the candidate of the opposition MDC party, 11,410 to 8,072. This election was widely considered rigged in favor of Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party - Bennett’s actual popularity in Chimanimani may be significantly stronger.

Roy made a terrible mistake last fall, and shoved Zimbabwean Minister of Justice Patrick Chinamasa after Chinamasa called Bennett’s late father and grandfather “thieves and murderers” during a parliamentary debate. Rather than try Bennett in the Zimbabwean courts - which would likely have given Bennett a fine or a warning - the Zanu-PF dominated parliament appointed an investigative committee which sentenced Bennett to a year’s hard labor.

When Bennett announced his intentions to defend his parliamentary seat from prison, he was initially denied the right to run, under the grounds that he was “a criminal”. A few weeks before the election, a Zimbabwean judge ruled that Roy could run, and delayed the election until April 30th.

Concerned that the month-long delay would allow Zanu-PF to concentrate forces in Chimanimani, possibly intimidating or harming MDC supporters, Bennett worked out an agreement with the government-appointed electoral commission that allowed Heather Bennett to run for the seat. Heather Bennett began addressing rallies throughout the area, speaking in Shona, and was widely seen as the favorite in the race.

But, in an election widely viewed as fraudulent, Mugabe and Zanu-PF have won a majority, and look close to winning a 2/3rds majority, which will allow them to change the constitution. And Heather Bennett was defeated by the Zanu-PF candidate.

Heather has expressed “shock” over election results and points to irregularities in vote counts in a statement on her website. The Sokwanele blog reports that this shock is widespread, pointing to silence in rural areas, as voters wait to hear the results of votes in rural areas:

“There is substantial evidence of rigging in the rural constituencies and the people of Zimbabwe are now in a state of disbelief and shock. The evidence is damning and all await a statement from the president, Morgan Tsvangirai. Most people are glued to their radios and televisions and the streets in the cities and rural villages are quiet. The delay in announcing the rural figures has left Zimbabweans without access to external communications confused, for the initial figures for urban areas indicated an MDC victory.”

God help the people of Zimbabwe.

419 spam of the day:

FROM:PETER THEMBA MOYO

OR (moyo_2004@hotmail.com)

My response:

from: 419@blogafrica.com

Ethan Zuckerman

I’ll let y’all know if I hear anything.

C’mon, 419 scammers - let’s get our details right. Remember, it’s the little things that count. If you’re Jonathan Moyo’s son, remember to spell Dad’s name right. Oh, and check to see if he’s dead before sending this mail.

A thought: does it actually matter - to the effectiveness of this as a 419 mail - if Moyo is or isn’t dead? My guess is that effective 419 scams rely on three things:

A name for the deceased that shows up in Google.

Google “Jonathan Moyo” and you get 32,100 results - the first page is all newspaper headlines. If I didn’t follow Zimbabwean politics and didn’t already know Moyo’s name, I’d certainly be able to conclude that Moyo was a real person, important in Zimbawean politics. Perhaps all that matters when you’re trying to reach an audience dumb enough to bite on a 419…

My comparative silence on “…my Heart’s in Accra” has been counterbalanced by a couple of long posts on the Global Voices website. Rebecca and I presented our current thinking about GV to our Berkman colleages and friends on Tuesday, and we wanted a couple of great stories to show off as we “soft-launched” the project. In the past couple of days, I’ve posted an online conversation with Sokari Ekine, the creator of the fantastic Black Looks blog, an essay by Elina Karakulova on her reactions to the “revolution” in Kyrgyzstan, and a quick look at the weblog put together by rights organization Sokwanele in Zimbabwe. I’ll throw something up later today talking about what we accomplished in Tuesday’s brainstorm…

A bit of followup here, talking a bit more about aspects of the Kyrgyz and Zimbabwe stories.

I’m suspicious of folks on both the left and the right who are talking up the Kyrgyz “revolution” as part of the spread of democracy through the world. One of the reasons I think Karakulova’s piece is so important is her observation that the events that just transpired were not a revolution, but a rebellion:

“I personally do not think that Kyrgyzstan witnessed a revolution, but a rebellion with change of political elites. Revolution implies ideological change. I do not see any ideological difference between the current interim government and the former one.”

The Akaev government was so rotten with corruption that no one was willing to stand in the way of the protesters when they seized the “White House”. But it’s a mistake to conclude that this shows support for a revolutionary “movement”, rather than just massive dissatisfaction with the status quo. (Indeed, Kurmanbek Bakiyev has said little that sounds like a recipe for a new direction for the Kyrgyz government.)

It would also be a mistake to assume that the Kyrgyz “revolution” will create some sort of domino-effect in the former Soviet republics. A rally of 1,000 people last week against Lukashenko was quickly dispersed, with the ringleaders being thrown into prison. As Fred Weir observes in the Christian Science Monitor:

the post-Soviet countries that have so far been rocked by revolution have been among the most liberal and relatively democratic in an admittedly tough region. “Akayev, to his credit, allowed a fairly permissive environment for NGO’s to work,” says Stuart Kahn, Kyrgyzstan project director for Freedom House, which is partly financed by the US government. The danger, he says, is that other Central Asian leaders may see Akayev’s concessions to democracy as the Achilles’ heel of his regime. “The lesson they may draw is that the permissive, or semi-repressive environment Akayev created is antithetical to maintaining the status quo.”

In other words, one very real possible outcome of the Kyrgyz revolution is an increasing crackdown on the limited freedoms still available in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Belarus.

On the Zimbabwe side of things, I wanted to look more closely at an article by my main man, Abraham McLaughlin. McLaughlin observes that China is a major player in the Zimbabwean election, an observation consonant with the trend that China is becoming a huge, if not dominant, political force on the continent. It’s widely understood that China’s efforts to prevent UN sanctions against Sudan have had less to do with solidary between oppresive nations, and more to do with ensuring access to a regular oil supply.

McLaughlin reports that the Chinese governments, or Chinese companies, have provided pro-Zanu-PF t-shirts and radio jamming devices to the ruling party, helped build Mugabe’s presidential palace, and sold the government jet fighters and trucks in violation of a Western arms embargo. It’s hard to know whether this is “just business” for the Chinese government, or whether they actively support Mugabe’s repressive regime. But, one way or another, it helps relieve pressure on dictatorial rulers by enabling them to point to the support they see in the east even as they lose support in the west.

Eric Osiakwan visited the Berkman Center yesterday from Ghana, by way of Stanford University. He’s an old friend from the Ghana ISP scene, one of the founders of GISPA (the Ghana ISP association) and currently is acting as executive secretary of AFRISPA (the African ISP Owners Association), the leading trade group for ISPs on the African continent.

Eric is a Reuters Digital Vision fellow and is focusing on questions of fiber and wireless internet and telecommunications access in Africa. Learning from the successes and failures of internet and telecom projects in Africa over the past decade, Eric is advocating for a model of infrastructure development in Africa that favors small business ISPs and NSPs over formerly state-owned telecom incumbents.

Some of Eric’s key points:

Eric’s a big supporter of Internet exchange points, both nationally and regionally, and points to an IDRC-sonsored study, prepared by Russell Southwood, which suggests possible voice and data savings of $400m a year across Africa if IXPs were properly implemented.

Based on lessons learned, Eric’s recommendation is for a “horizontal layering of communications infrastructure”, which allows SMEs to compete with larger providers on the network. Basically, he’s supportive of a network that’s technology neutral, transparent, interconnected and allows small players to rent infrastructure from larger players to offer services. This said, Eric feels like Africa needs fiber - lots more fiber - to satisfy the demands of consumers at a high quality level. He’s interested in a number of regional and cross-continental cables interconnecting the SAT-3 and EASSy cables which link Africa to the outside world.

Here, I think Eric’s being a bit conservative. One of the great successes of African telecom has been the growth of wireless services, both for voice and data. We spend some time talking about interesting technologies for running data over 50km via terrestrial wireless and about new low-cost phone technologies like CorDect and CDMA 450. That said, Eric also points out that fiber has gotten much cheaper, and that there are a number of situations, like the Volta River Authority situation in Ghana where fiber exists and is unused.

The critical unanswered question in Eric’s proposal is “who’s going to pay for this?” While laying fiber is much cheaper than it used to be, the costs are still substantial and it’s unlikely that most African SMEs will be able to raise capital to lay fiber. Eric suggests a possible model in which the World Bank lends money to SMEs to purchase fiber, requiring companies to take their companies public and repay the loans in shares, which then return to a funding pool. It’s an interesting proposal, but one fraught with possible complications - does SBC or France Telecom get to lean on the World Bank for this sort of financing? Who determines how much money is neccesary to lay cable, and how big the loans should be? I’m looking forward to hearing Eric’s answers to these questions as he develops the idea further.

A week back, at the Madrid Democracy summit, I had a dinner conversation with friends that centered on the complications of professional journalists maintaining blogs. (The conversation began with a discussion of the Boston Globe’s censure of Hiawatha Bray for political comments he made on his blog.) I argued that I wished that more journalists blogged, so I could triangulate between their “official” stories and their personal observations.

A friend participating in the conversation - who has forgotten more about journalism than I will ever know - argued that, while I was welcome to engage in such triangulation, it was unwise for me to wish it onto readers as a whole. He pointed out - correctly - that I’m a media junkie and argued that most readers aren’t willing to triangulate between a journalist’s personal statements and her reporting. Furthermore, he argued, if a journalist is behaving professionally, there’s no need to know her biases because the reader should have no reason to question whether the reporter’s perspective is coloring the story. Rather than push for more disclosure by journalists and more triangulation by “active readers”, why not just push for more responsible journalism?

I don’t really disagree with my friend’s arguments - it’s just that I’m greedy. I want professional, unbiased reporting and I want to know as much about the reporter as he or she is willing to share. I don’t want to triangulate all the time, and I’m most pleased when my triangulation reveals that a story is told fairly and well. But I really want to be able to check.

In our dinner conversation, one issue that came up was media consolidation - when every major city had multiple newspapers, most of them with a definable political bias, it was fairly easy to triangulate between various biased stories and get to a version of underlying events. To a certain extent, judicious use of Google News allows one to accomplish something similar - I found myself reading Google News closely yesterday, to see who was surprised or worried by the prospect of Wolfowitz becoming the head of the World Bank and who was not.

Unfortunately, most of the stories I’m interested in are reported by a single news source - usually the BBC, IRIN, AFP or the Christian Science Monitor. Triangulating between news sources is often hard to accomplish. Which makes me increasingly grateful for reporters who are blogging as well as reporting. In our dinner conversation, I pointed to Abraham McLaughlin of the Christian Science Monitor, who oftens blogs and reports the same trips he takes in Africa.

McLaughlin’s story and post earlier this week give a good picture of what I hope for out of the synergy of blogging and journalism. Yesterday, McLaughlin posted a story about a candidate for the Zimbabwean parliament and his struggles to campaign in such a repressive nation. The story is surprisingly hopeful - the candidate, a white farmer displaced from his land - was able to hold a rally without being arrested or having his supporters threatened. (While this hardly seems like a great victory, you’ve got to cheer any movements towards openness in Zimbabwe.)

Lest one think that McLaughlin fully buys the statement by a ZANU-PF (ruling party) member that “This election will be freer and fairer than almost any in Zimbabwe’s history - and many in Africa and the world,” McLaughlin’s blog provides a different perspective. Written a day earlier, he gives a “Harper’s Index” of the misery Zimbabweans are facing and the challenges a reporter faces reporting in the country:

2: The number of people during my four-day trip who asked me to help them get out of the country.

I’m not sure that it’s “professional” for McLaughlin to tell me about his rental car bill, or that people have asked him for help getting out of Zimbabwe. But I’m glad he did.

And suddenly, the world looks a few shades darker.

The World Bank is an easy target for activist critiques, but the Bank under Wolfensohn has made real progress is moving away from “supersized” projects that put nations deep in debt and towards funding projects that have good inputs from beneficiaries and grassroots. Wolfensohn has evidently communicated his desire to continue serving, but doesn’t have support from the White House.

Given the strong influence Wolfowitz had over American foreign policy under Bush’s first term, it’s hard to believe that this doesn’t reflect a major Bush administration effort to change the role and structure of the Bank.

Bloggers around the world, especially in the Middle East, are mourning the death of Zouhair Yahyaoui, a Tunisian journalist and founder of Tunezine, an activist, alternative magazine.

Zouhair was imprisoned for 18 months, starting in 2002, for “spreading false news”, because he posted opposition materials on his site. In 2003, he won Reporters Sans Frontiers cyber-freedom prize for his work. During his imprisonment, he went on several hunger strikes and may have been tortured. He died of a heart attack on Monday, at age 36.

I found Mohamed’s post from Cairo very moving, reminding us, “People really die for this.” ordoesitexplode.com has an excellent overview of Zouhair’s life and work, as does Hou-Hou blog, in French.

The irony of holding the second WSIS meeting in Tunis grows everyday.