The people of Zimbabwe have been waiting patiently - perhaps too patiently - to hear the outcome of elections that are now almost three weeks old. Since yesterday, they’ve been waiting to see what happens to the cargo of the An Yue Jiang.

According to the Times of London, the ship left China in late March, at roughly the time of the March 29th election. (This is London reports that the arms deal was finalized on April 1st, three days after the elections, late enough for the ZANU-PF government to know they were facing a lost or closely contested election.)

The ship carries mining cargo for Botswana, and a 77 tons of small arms destined for Zimbabwe - AK-47 rounds, rocket propelled grenades, mortar shells. There is understandable fear that this materiel could be transferred from the Zimbabwe government to pro-government militias, or simply used against by the military in attacks on citizens who demand that MDC presidential candidate Morgan Tsvangarai be allowed to take power. As “Hope” writing on “This is Zimbabwe” puts it, “We call them guns; Mugabe calls them ‘campaign materials’”.

South African President Thabo Mbeki faced international pressure to block the shipment - he and his staff argued that this was a legitimate transaction between governments, and pointed out that Zimbabwe doesn’t currently face an arms embargo. Fortunately, many South Africans disagreed with that position.

The South African Transport and Allied Workers Union, an organization that represents 300,000 South African workers, refused to unload the ship, citing concerns about arming a government that does not appear to be respecting election results. (It was briefly reported that a state-owned company, Armscor, might be asked to unload the ship over the objections of SATAWU.) And Anglican bishop Rubin Phillips, backed up by the South African Litigation Center, petitioned the Durban High Court to block the shipment. The court ordered that the ship could be offloaded, but that the cargo could not be transmitted across the South Africa/Zimbabwe border. Reuters reports that the ship has subsequently left Durban, evidently without offloading the arms.

So what now? Now we watch other Southern African ports to see whether the ship will be allowed to dock and offload elsewhere. Keep a close eye on Beira, a port city in Mozambique that’s an easy drive to Harare. It will be interesting to see whether civil society in Mozambique is capable of mobilizing as effectively as South African organizations did. Don’t bet on it.

Heh. Or maybe they’re in more of a hurry. According to a NYTimes story, “the last radio transmission the authorities heard from the ship was this: ‘Next port, Maputo,’ referring to the capital of Mozambique.” Interesting. The main roads from Maputo to Zimbabwe pass through South Africa. I still think Beira is a better bet, as it’s a straight shot from Mozambique to Zimbabwe.

Driving home last night from Boston, I caught a piece on NPR about the problem of distressed properties in the wake of the slump in the US housing market and the sub-prime mortgage crisis. As homeowners discover they can’t pay their mortgages, banks forclose on the properties, and they sit abandoned. Often they become targets for looters, who break in and steal copper plumbing, for vagrants who live in them, or for arsonists. Even if they simply decay, they lower property values for other homeowners in the neighborhood.

Some people are proposing radical solutions to the problem. Barbara Reed is the mother of a firefighter who was crippled while fighting an arson fire in a Buffalo, New York abandoned building. She’s tried to launch a movement called “Take Down a House” (pronounced “Ta-dah!”), which believes that the way forward for that struggling city is to remove abandoned houses and shrink the residential housing stock. Unfortunately, she’s discovering that house removal can cost tens of thousands of dollars, especially if the home contains asbestos - it may cost too much money to shrink Buffalo to the size it really needs to be.

There are abandoned and distressed properties on the web as well. If you’ve ever put up a wiki and failed to garden it, you know what I’m talking about. I used to have a small wiki on this domain that Rachel and I used for grocery lists. (Yes, I realize very little is geekier, but it’s really cool to have your partner create a grocery list on a wiki while you go to the store and access it on your phone.) We forgot about it until a speaker’s agency, looking for my bio, came across it and let me know that it had become a link farm for porn. I thanked the woman who let me know and mentioned that it was supposed to be a shopping list - she pointed out that my wife and I appeared to be shopping for some racy things indeed.

If failing to maintain a wiki is like leaving an abandoned building unlocked and unguarded, there are less dramatic ways to abandon a web property. Run a blog on a platform like MT or Wordpress and let it go dormant, and you more or less guarantee that your property will be invaded - searching for holes in these platforms and using those holes to install linkfarms has become extremely common. The blog may look unharmed by the outside, but there may be vagrant pharma spammers residing somewhere within. As with architecture, there’s a tough balancing act - should you keep the structure alive for historical reasons or tear it down for the community good? I tore down FreeHaoWu.com not too long ago, because it became clear I couldn’t maintain it and it was becoming a spam magnet.

BlogAfrica.com has never quite become a distressed property, but I’ve felt like a slumlord the past few months - yes, it’s got occupants, but the plumbing is backed up and the hallway lights don’t work. The site is running on an old, buggy version of Reblog, and my attempts to upgrade to a new version weren’t successful. A persistent PHP bug meant that all posts were dated January 1, 1970, a true epoch fail. (S’okay if you didn’t get that joke. It probably means you have a life away from the computer screen.) For the last several months, when people have registered blogs with the service, I’ve begged them to register with Afrigator.com, a much better maintained, full-featured blog aggregator.

Fortunately, someone’s taken the property off my hands - the good folks at AllAfrica.com. AllAfrica was the original host for the aggregator - Kwin Kramer and I came up with the idea for BlogAfrica in 2003, and he hosted the first incarnation of the site on AllAfrica, back before there were many open source blog aggregators (or many African blogs.) When he moved from AllAfrica to other technical projects, I moved BlogAfrica over to my own servers, with substantial help from Boris Anthony, thinking that we might merge it with Global Voices. Over time, it’s become clear that the value of Global Voices is our editorial effort, not our reach as an aggregator, and the projects have remained unmerged.

So now AllAfrica is planning to revive the site, upgrading the technology and, I hope, helping integrate African blogs with their brilliant news content. The site will likely be dark for a couple of days during the transition, but I predict it will be back better and stronger than ever before. And it’s less likely that someone will break in and steal the copper plumbing.

I had a post queued up forthe start of 2008. I’d planned to begin the year on an enthusiastic, positive note, suggesting that this might be the year where Africa began to catch up to the rest of the world in terms of telecommunications and where African creativity and entrepreneurialism began to be noticed on a global stage. Central to my argument was the rise of the Kenyan stock exchange, the emergence of international calibre business process outsourcing centers in Kenya, and the completion of deals to create two or three high-speed internet cables that connect Kenya to the global internet.

That post will be on hold for a little while. Or as my friend at Bankelele puts it, “Up till December 2007, the focus of Kenya was investing towards Vision 2030 - now we may have to find a new target to aim for – a Vision 2009, which is to perhaps to get the economy back to where it was in 2007.” Right now, it’s unclear who will be running Kenya in 2008, whether he will have the possibility of passing a budget, and how many people will be killed before the faceoff between Odinga and Kibaki is resolved.

I wasn’t watching the Kenyan elections closely. I took off the end of the year, as I do every year, and was spending time at my house with friends, when my mobile started going off. I got a small flood of text messages from Afrophiles around the world, most of which included the phrase, “This is heartbreaking.”

That’s the right word. Kenya’s a country so stable that the EU had considered not sending observers to monitor these elections, arguing that the chances of irregularities were low and that resources for African election monitoring were scarce. Yes, we’re all used to irregularities in Kenyan politics… but there are creative government-monitoring efforts, a vibrant blogosphere, and an occasionally excellent (and occasionally very disappointing) free press, which all make outright theft of an election less likely than in most African states.

Yet that’s what appears to have happened. The Economist pulls no punches:

The decision to return Kenya’s 76-year-old incumbent president, Mwai Kibaki, to office was not made by the Kenyan people but by a small group of hardline leaders from Mr Kibaki’s Kikuyu tribe. They made up their minds before the result was announced, perhaps even before the opposition candidate, Raila Odinga, had opened up a lead in early returns from the December 27th election. It was a civil coup.

Despite that mention of tribal affiliation in the opening graph, the Economist avoids the “reminiscent of the Rwandan genocide” theme that’s rearing its head in CNN, the Guardian and other northern media outlets. Christian Science Monitor, to their credit, is already debunking that storyline, offering a piece by Scott Baidauff titled “Ethnic Violence: Why Kenya is Not Another Rwanda“.

It may be a cause for optimism that the northern media is worried about missing another case of ethnic cleansing - as it did for the whole Rwandan genocide, the first years of the Darfur genocide, and continues to do with ethnic violence in the DRC - but it’s also deeply frustrating to Kenyans who want a more complicated story told to the world about these elections and the tensions it has exposed. Bankelele has an inspiring post about people who are maintaining the peace, which reads in part:

The answer is citizens themselves.
Every day this week, I have heard & seen touching stories like these;
- Neighbors talking to one another about maintaining their many years of peace
- Neighbors setting up watch out groups and liaising with the local police
- Neighbors taking in and sheltering friends, relative and strangers
- Police officers talking down residents this morning who had hoped to march to Uhuru Park.
- Local leaders and MP’s talking to their constituents – preaching non violence.
- Neighbors standing together and ignoring the sparks from outsiders

Al Jazeera’s coverage has been excellent, focusing on the government crackdown on peaceful protest, as well as on violence between civilians. Their excellent correspondent Mohammed Adow has been on the ground, shooting footage of Uhuru Park and the clashes between protesters and riot police:

But the best source for news, moment to moment, has been from bloggers, who continued to report on the elections and their aftermath during a media blackout. My friend Juliana Rotich - Global Voices’s environment editor - is in Eldoret, where rioters burned a church sheltering people who’d sought sanctuary from violence, killing dozens of them. She’s providing terse dispatches from the town, reporting on traffic at the airport, the closure of local businesses, the death of a local hero, an Olympic athlete, in political violence.

Juliana, like my other friends in Kenya, are reporting using GPRS service from Safaricom and other mobile operators as connectivity has been sporadic. With that in mind, it’s pretty amazing the sort of work Daudi Were is doing on Mental Acrobatics. Daudi followed supporters of the Orange Democratic Movement to Uhuru Park in Nairobi to a planned protest, and documented the confrontation between the General Service Unit (an elite group of paramilitary police) and political demonstrators. He’s got photos journalists would kill for, including shots that are disturbing to anyone who knows Nairobi well - streets that should be packed with the daily streetlife of the capital which are silent and shuttered today.

Downtown Nairobi, January 3rd, 2008. Photo by Daudi Were.

It takes guts to go out into the streets and get into the face of paramilitary police. It also takes guts to take care of your family and walk away from a situation. Ory Okolloh has been providing moment to moment dispatches on her blog, Kenyan Pundit. Yesterday, she decided to leave Nairobi for Johannesburg, where she currently lives, a decision that clearly was extremely difficult for her to make. She’s got a very young daughter, and as much as her passion for Kenya was keeping her in Nairobi, she made the right call to go back to South Africa.

It’s people like Ory, Daudi and Juliana - and the hundreds of other bloggers out there covering the situation - who give me every confidence that Kenya will continue to rise, and that the future of this beautiful nation is a bright one. But this is a dark moment, and my heart goes out to everyone who loves Kenya and wants to see it peaceful, prosperous, democratic and free.

Global Voices is rounding up blogs from the Kenyan blogosphere. Ndesanjo Macha has already posted two comprehensive roundups, and we’ll likely have a special coverage page up in the next day or so, focused on blogs covering the events in Kenya.

A funny truth: the more interaction we have virtually, the more important it becomes to see people face to face.

While Global Voices is a completely virtual organization, with no offices, no headquarters, no location other than that of our members, we spend a lot of time trying to see each other face to face. Georgia Popplewell and Amira Al-Hussaini are at the BlogHer conference this week, and many of the rest of us are jealous, both because it should be a great conference and because we’re missing a chance to see our friends.

When you interact with someone online, it can smoothe your offline interactions. You’ve got a common context, something to talk about. You know things about each other that could takes weeks or years to come up in ordinary conversation.

African bloggers, brought together by aggregators like Afrigator, BlogAfrica and the beautifully redesigned Kenya Unlimited, have been looking for events that bring them together face to face. The first iteration of the Digital Citizen Indaba in Grahamstown, South Africa received some criticism that the gathering didn’t represent the diversity of the African blogosphere and was heavy on South African bloggers, non-African bloggers and, to be frank, white dudes. The DCI is happening again this year and bloggers are invited to apply for scholarships - I hope that many African bloggers will. TED Global in Arusha helped demonstrate how valuable it can be for African and Afrophile bloggers to spend time face to face - DCI is another opportunity for bloggers to get together on someone else’s dime.

The Cambodian bloggers - or “Cloggers”, as they’re evidently known - are getting into the game and planning the first Cambodian Blogging Summit in late August in Phnom Penh. The conference is the outgrowth of a series of 14 workshops taught by Cambodian bloggers which have introduced 1700 students to blogging. The summit it a chance for Cambodian bloggers to work together, and to meet other bloggers in the region face to face, sharing insights, strategies and starting projects. Beth Kanter, who works closely with the Cambodian blogosphere, will be attending and offering some trainings at the summit. She’s trying to raise $4,000 to bring three “videoblogging kits” to the summit, which could be given to up and coming videobloggers at the event. If you’re inclined to support this worthy cause - either fiscally, or by offering her advice, training materials, sources of cheap video equipment - please check out her wiki space on the project.

It’s hard to know what to expect when you get an interview request from Pitchfork Media. After all, the Pitchfork folks are the cooler-than-thou indie music geeks who are embarrased for you that you don’t know your Boards of Canada from your Fountains of Wayne. I mostly listen to old vinyl records of electric kora music… what could I possibly say to these folks?

Turns out Chris Dahlen writes a regular column - “Get That Out of Your Mouth” - for Pitchfork which, based on past issues, seems to focus on pop culture and the political. Turns out it’s pretty good, which wasn’t much of a surprise for me, as my conversation with him a week or so ago was one of the best chats I’ve had with a journalist in the past year. That conversation makes up much of issue #32 of his column.

Chris asked an interesting question, the sort of thing I’m psyched to research when I’m not neck-deep in fundraising and legal structure questions for Global Voices: is there more information availble in the sexy, Web 2.0 corners of the web about virtual worlds than there is about corners of the real world? Specifically, he looks at the information he’s able to find on YouTube, blogs and wikipedia about Star Wars, versus the information he’s able to find about Africa.

I got myself in trouble with my Wikipedian friends when I asked this precise question a couple of years back. And this time around, I was careful to let Chris make the Tatooine/Tunisia comparisons. (SJ has pointed out that doing straight wordcounts on articles is a tricky business, as good Wikipedia articles have often been subdivided into sections… which raises the question of when we’ll see a page on the political economy of Tatooine…)

The conversation turned into a discussion about the importance and challenge of bridgeblogging, a subject I’m always happy to talk about. It touched on some of the main points I’m trying to make about bridgeblogging these days - that more mature blogospheres seem to bridge less than small ones, the difficulties of getting people to care about people they don’t have personal connections to.

The most interesting aspect of the discussion to me was the idea that Chris brought to the table - that we might pay more attention to imagined worlds than to the real one. First, this helped me understand precisely why I find the Second Life hype so disconcerting - I find it deeply odd that journalism is expanding into these illusory spaces while it’s shrinking in the real world. I think the answer may be that these new spaces - whether SecondLife, World of Warcraft, the culture of fanfiction or machinima - are far more coverable than many events in the real world. Chris uses an example I offered about the difficulty of finding out what’s what in Somalia - there are literally hundreds of situations in the globe where, despite political importance and the impact on human beings, we’ve got very little idea what’s actually going on. By contrast, virtual and pop-culture worlds are knowable in a deep, comprehensive, net-friendly and encyclopedic manner. That, plus fewer vaccinations, could make anyone want to be a virtual worlds correspondent rather than a real-world journalist.

Chris used a quote from Rebecca MacKinnon that’s stuck with me since she wrote it a few weeks back: “My last three years living back in the U.S. really brought home to me just how unreal the rest of the world seems to most Americans.” If there’s a single topic I’m most interested in, it’s trying to figure out how to break down that sense of unreality.

Deutsche Welle has released their Best of the Blog awards for 2006 - it’s a great selection again, a combination of blogs that are well-known and some that are lesser-known and great finds by the judges. Sokari Ekine’s Black Looks takes the User prize - the one voted by the general public - for Best English Language blog. It’s a great decision - Sokari’s work is continually challenging and very frequently brilliant. I’m thrilled she’s getting the recognition she deserves. Congratulations, Sokari.

Congrats also to my friends at the Sunlight Foundation for the jury award for Best Weblog. The Sunlight project is an amazing effort, and they’re pioneering new ground in “crowdsourcing” citizen media, using groups of people to report stories no single person could report.

Once again, Best of the Blogs is doing great work calling attention to blogs I’ve missed as well as blogs I read regularly. Congrats to everyone who won…

Ory Okolloh gave a remarkable speech a month ago at the Digital Citizen Indaba at Grahamstown, South Africa, explaining the reasons she and a collaborator formed Mzalendo, a website dedicated to encouraging transparency of the Kenyan Parliament.

I’d assumed that the project was an attempt to give Kenya a service like They Work for You in the UK, a project which tracks debates and votes in the Houses of Commons and Lords. What I hadn’t realized was the extent to which the Kenyan parliament is opaque to citizens. Ory offers some lovely examples of how hard it is to find out who your parliamentarians are and what they’re doing:

- When the Kenyan Parliament put up a website, it included biographical information on MPs. This led constituents to find out that MPs often didn’t have the educational background they’d campaigned on, leading to embarrasing questions: “Mr. MP, how are you qualified to represent me if you didn’t complete secondary school?” The Parliament responded by taking down the site and replacing it with a message that’s been up for months, claiming the site is being updated. (Andy Carvin’s got a great story on the incident.)

- The hansard - the verbatim report from parliamentary debates - is extremely difficult to obtain. To get it as a private citizen, you need to find the government printing office, pay a large sum, and wait for the office to work through their backlog of requests - the current wait is three years.

- Private citizens can attend parliamentary debates, but they can’t make recordings or take paper notes. Journalists are allowed to take notes on debates, but quite often, they don’t cover the parliament as closely as some Kenyan citizens would like.

So Ory and her partner set up Mzalendo, hoping that by collecting the information they were able to about parliamentarians and their debates and votes, they’d be able to encourage citizens to keep a closer eye on their MPs, and encourage MPs to start volunteering information about their work.

Ory’s now reporting their first victory - a small step, but an exciting one nonetheless - Kenyan MP Ukur Yattani has started answering constituent questions on his MP page on the site. His first post corrected information about his educational qualifications, but subsequent exchanges have gotten into substantive questions about gunfire between Ethiopian “bandits” and Kenyan police in Forole.

The honorable MP has been rewarded for his online candor with positive comments from Kenyans at home and in the diaspora - let’s hope this is enough to keep him writing online, and encourage other MPs to join him. And big congratulations are due to Ory and Mzalendo for creating a space to make these sorts of exchanges possible. Let’s hope this project grows and is echoed in countries across the continent soon.

The end of the Indaba is a set of workshops. I offered a hastily put together workshop on activism online - about half on useful tools for information for activists (aggregators, stored news searches, del.icio.us) and half on online anonymity. I had the pleasure of having Alaa in my session, which meant that my talk about paranoia and hiding your identity was countered by his excellent reminders to try to keep as much of your activism open and in the public eye as possible. (Kifaya evidently has most of its policy and planning debates on a public website, prefering to keep these discussions as transparent as possible.)

The second (and final) workshop I attended was Andrew Heavens’s workshop on photoblogging, which was brilliant on at least two levels. It was an excellent technical introduction to what’s involved with image blogging, talking about tools like fotolog, blipfoto and flickr. He plugs the brilliant Africanfuturist - who is on a one-person quest to quash African photographic cliches - and gives us wonderful lines like “Most blogs are about cats. And Brazillian teenage girls dominate the photo blogging world.” His rules for photoblogging are tremendously helpful:

Rule 1: The camera doesn’t matter.
Rule 2: Being there does matter.
Rule 3: Stop worrying and learn to love Creative Commons

The second part of his talk is a meditation on his work as a photojournalist in Ethiopia (”I can say without blushing that I’m one of the top four five photojournalists in Ethiopia. There are only four of us.”) and his interesting experiences with Creative Commons. Shooting professionally for Reuters and UNICEF, he sells a lot of his photos, but puts his extras up on Flickr under a Creative Commons non-commercial license. This means that many of his photos have been used for other purposes - Ethiopians in the diaspora used one of his photos to illustrate a story on New America Media, and other photos are being used on a set of greeting cards. As a professional photographer, Heavens found the situation disconcerting at first - “Wait, I usually get paid for this sort of thing” - but has grown to appreciate the reuse. The lifespan of most of Heavens’ photos on Reuters is a few days - they’re picked up by a newspaper or not - but the CC-licensed photos have a much longer lifespan and turn up in surprising places.

It wasn’t until Heavens covered the May 2005 elections that he understood just how far his photos might travel, and just how complicated the reuse relationships could get. Ethiopia’s elections were an impressive moment in history - the first democratic elections in thousands of years in the country. But they were widely viewed as being rigged in favor of the ruling party, and as results came in, opposition politicians took to Meskel Square to protest the results on June 2nd. University students protested as well, and those protests turned violent, with soldiers opening fire on the crowds with live ammunition.

Heavens took photos of the elections, the rallies, the violence and the hospitals and morgues. Some of the photos were purchased by Reuters and ran on their newswire - others ran on Andrew’s flickr feed. As Ethiopians around the world reacted with outrage to the violence, Andrew saw his photos appearing again and again - on a banner at a rally in Melbourne, in news photos of rallies around the world, on Ethiopian websites.

But the use of the images that really surprised him was in a viral video titled “Ethiopia’s June Massacre“. Five minutes long, the video shows a series of images interspersed with narrative text, over the haunting sound of a female Ethiopian singer. The narrative outlines the elections, the protests, the violence and makes strong - and perhaps unverifiable - claims, including that one of the people killed in the violence was a 14 year old child, killed while trying to flee. The video urges people to visit freeourleaders.org (down when I last checked it), a website which is strongly anti-government.

Roughly one third of the images used in the film are Heavens’ images, taken from his Flickr feed.

Heavens explains that his reaction to the film is complicated. On the one hand, it’s tremendously moving, and as someone who witnessed the events first-hand, Heavens says the film drew him back to the hope, fear and terror of those days in June. At the same time, it’s a very emotionally manipulative film, and Heavens says he’s uncomfortable seeing his images in the context of text that he may or may not support. (In person, as he is on his blog, Andrew is very careful not to express political opinions about the Zenawi government.)

There were practical concerns as well: “My kneejerk reaction was, ‘Will my freelance employers be upset that this film is using my images?’” Would the film affect his press accreditation, which the government needs to renew each year for him to effectively work in Ethiopia. Would it compromise his image of journalistic neutrality?

His ultimate conclusion: if those photos had just belonged to Reuters, “they would have made a few Britons seeing them over breakfast uneasy for a few hours.” Instead, they’ve got a life a year after they were taken, memories of critical moments in Ethiopian history long after that day has passed. He concludes, “If you love your photos, set them free.”

I’ve urged Andrew to write up his story, complete with photos, as an amazing and complex example of what Creative Commons can lead towards. The filmmakers who made the viral video probably cared less about the license of Heavens’s work (it’s unlikely the other photos in the film are CC, and the music almost certainly isn’t) than they did about the availability. But the use of photos in such a radically different, activistic content is both an example of what CC enables, and as why some folks might see CC as uncomfortable. I’d vastly prefer to see my friends at CC telling this story than fictional stories about Sowetan newspapers and expat South African musicians collaborating via CC - the truth is far more compelling than fiction.

The “We Media” panel leads off the day - it’s introduced as the grumpy old white guys panel. (This is distinguished from the “enthusiastic young white guys” Web 2.0 panel yesteray, I suspect.) Leading off is Mathew Buckland, a blogger and publisher of the Mail and Guardian Online, which is the 4th biggest website in South Africa - this past year, it was profitable for the first time. The Mail and Guardian has brought politicians to blog during elections, has invited reporters to blog about the reporting of stories, and adds technorati links to each story to “encourage link love”.

Buckland notes that “when that wrinkled old prune Rupert Murdoch” believes a paradigm shift is taking place, you take notice. Murdoch believes the shift taking place with the rise of the Internet rivals that of the printing press which he believes destroyed aristocracy and tyranny. Buckland notes this may be overstated, and that the timing or the scale of this change may be disputed. But very few media companies believe that the online revolution is not real.

A more interesting tension, he says, is the tension between mainstream and citizen media. Bloggers have influence over their audience - they blog about their bad customer service experiences, and are empowered to punish those companies in the process. Blogs also empower their authors by paying them through Google Ads. The success of blogs is due to link culture, which is how the net is designed to work. The online publishers of mainstream media don’t have a clue about how this works. Bloggers are acting as watchdogs for mainstream media. But this isn’t a struggle to the death, just the rise of complementary media.

He ends with some questions and challenges for citizen media: Are we accepting this phenomenon with unbridled enthusasm? Citizen media has a weakness on standardized ethics and fair reporting. What are the consequences for getting the story wrong, on blogs or wikipedia? The mainstream media does get it wrong, but there are consequences. He closes by saying, “Self-regulation works only up to a point - it doesn’t work when you’ve got free riders, rebels, vandals and bad people. If anarchy doesn’t work in the world, why would it work in citizen media?”

(As you would predict, several questions - including mine - jumped on this last sentence.)

Peter Verweij focuses his talk on the question, “Are we all journalists now?” He starts by telling a story about walking along a canal with a student in Amsterdam on a winter’s night. In Amsterdam, most people keep their curtains open… but no one pauses to stare inside. Walking with his companion, she stops and stares, breaking a major societal taboo - the family inside doesn’t know what to do, so reacts in the only logical way - they wave.

His point is this - sometimes societal values demands we don’t look. Yes, the Theo Van Gogh murder, the asian Tsunami, the London Bombings were all reported by people with mobile phone cameras. But do we need to ask what happens when we run around and constantly take pictures. Are we all paparazzi now? Do we need rules and societal understanding about when we take photos?

Now we all have a printing press - anyone can publish to a global audience. But Verweij says, “you have to accept certain rules - you can’t say everything.” Blogs, he says, are highly subjective and highly opinionated. How do you check the assertions out? 99% of blogging is shouting at the television - roughly 1% is worth reading. (Verweij points to Howard Rheingold as someone he believes blogs well…)

He offers a definition of journalism, repeating it twice so we can get it right: “Journalism is truth-seeking storyteling, primarily serving citizens, without a legal foundation.” This means that you’re writing to serve citizens, and that you’re more likely to be writing about politics and economics than about art and poetry, and certainly not about your private interests. “Art and poetry have a certain function, but probably not part of public debate.”

This definition has a presupposition of truth, Verweij says. “You can say ‘there is no truth, there is no publicm but now you’ve moved into postmodernism”, which means you’re giving up journalism and civil society. Verweij says he doesn’t believe in the Nietzchean death of God - he believes in truth in journalism.

By this definition, only a small portion of bloggers do journalism, Verweij says. He argues for the “verdict of the New York Time”s: “Facts are sacred, comment is free”. “Otherwise, it’s art, it’s poetry, but it’s not journalism.”

Tom Jognson tells us he’s mad as hell and wants to know “how long are we going to take it?” Inspired by the lack of connectivity at the conference, he’s scrapped his existing talk and gives a talk on connectivity and control. He reminds us that those of us who remember the early internet remember travelling with a toolkit including alligator clips so we could clip our 1200 baud modems to phone lines. Bloggers need hardware, software, access, skills and readers to thrive - readers need many of the same things: hardware, software, skills and access.

He argues that people in power - world leaders, system administrators - operate from a philosophy of insecurity and fear. President Bush, he believes, is afraid of the world because he travelled so little abroad. His impulse is to shut it out - a wall with Mexico. System administrators act the same way - “When in doubt, keep them out.” But networks grow weaker via exclusion, stronger via inclusion.

System administrators should be more like librarians, focusing on bringing in users, but protecting only the most sensitive data. He proposes a manifesto for the blogging communities: “the three 100s” - all people have access to all the data all the time.

Several questions challenged whether a) the internet has required regulation so far and b) who gets to tell us what blogs are authoritative or not. Andrew Heavens managed to ask the quesiton particularly sharply, asking Verweij for the list of 1% of blogs we should be permitted to read.

Mark Comerford, the moderator, closed by staying he was stunned that journalists are calling for more control over a new medium, given historical constraints on the press in Africa. He speculates that it’s “a cry for Rwanda not to happen again”, where the media is used to incite people to violence.

Conferences take debugging. The first time you throw a conference, you’ll find yourself facing problems you never imagined, problems you thought you anticipated and solved, problems you have no idea how to solve. The Indaba organizers thought they had arranged internet connectivity for all attendees - actually, they’d arranged it only for Rhodes staff members. Mark that one as anticipated, but unsolved and intractible. They ordered food for 120 for lunch. Unfortunately, they didn’t anticipate everyone else in their building showing up for lunch. About a third of the attendees (myself included) arrived five minutes after the food arrived and found themselves poking through the ransacked food trays looking for scraps of cheese. But one attendee went out and returned with a sack of hamburgers, the organizers bought a few sandwiches, and everyone got fed, loaves and fishes-style…

The debugging may be getting faster as well. After lunch, the Indaba tried “speed speaking” sessions, in which multiple speakers gave short talks to small audiences. The model proposed - the speakers would stand in the corners of a room, and a pack of listeners move from speaker to speaker. It took only a moment of debugging to realize that moving the speakers was much easier than moving entire audiences. Progress.

A couple of the talks are hard to summarize - one was a self-described rant which can be encapsulated into the talk’s opening statement: “Boy, Highway Africa Sucks Shite from a Big Pipe.” (The speaker evidently felt that the first three Highway Africas had been groups of people talking about issues that they were personally concerned with - journalist to journalist - but that this gathering focused more on PR people, spokespeople and shilling.)

Ian Gilfillan used his time to point to the existence of Wikipedia in languages other English, “potentially in every language spoken and written.” He’s active on the Afrikaans wikipedia, which has six thousand entries, but points out that other South African wikipedias have just gotten started, like the Xhosa, which has 20 articles.

He points out that different languages can have very different communities on Wikipedia. He characterized the culture of the English wikipedia as “quite American”, which he suggests means there’s a good deal of “cut and thrust”, delete wars and online arguments. The Japanese wikipedia, by contrast, tends to be more polite and careful, involving more discussion before changes are made.

Limo, the author of brilliant Kenyan banking blog, Bankelele, talks a bit about his work. He works in the Kenyan banking sector and uses his inside knowledge to help unpack financial information for Kenyans at home and abroad. Kenyans often wonder whether there are any jobs for them if they choose to come home - Limo posts a job every week that expatriate Kenyans can apply for via email. He spends much of his time focusing on stock issues and shares advice, attending general meetings of companies and offering his insights on what shares might be worth investing. It’s not a surprise that the blog is quite popular - about 800 visitors a day. It hasn’t been too easy to monetize it so far - Limo tells us he tried Google Ads and made $300, but was then removed from the program for alleged “click fraud” - now he’s looking for local sponsors, and using the blog to catapult him to financial writing assignments.

(We’re lucky to have so many smart Kenyans here. I also had the privlege of meeting Daudi Were, the mastermind of Kenya Unlimited. It’s really a privlege to meet some of these folks I’ve admired for so long…)