Another day, another book chapter. No, not the book I’m hoping to write over the next n months - a book on citizen media in crisis situations being put together by a pair of academics in Britain. Given that some of the folks mentioned in this piece periodically read this blog, and that lots of readers are interested in how citizen media might be used in crisis situations, I thought I’d post a draft here in the hopes that y’all might have additions, subtractions, corrections and thoughts. Please feel free to use the comment thread to offer any thoughts you might have. Apologies in advance if I don’t respond to all comments promptly - I’m about to stop pretending to be an academic and pretend to run a global citizen media organization through its “annual” meeting.

Citizen Media and the 2007 Kenyan Election Crisis
Ethan Zuckerman, Harvard University
Draft - 6/20/2008

The crisis surrounding the disputed 2007 presidential elections in Kenya served as a stark reminder of how fragile young democracies can be. It also put into sharp focus the power new media technologies give citizens of developing nations to report news and organize responses to crisis situations. A number of Kenyans demonstrated how technically sophisticated and globally connected their country is at precisely the moment when their leaders demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice the nation’s reputation for stability in exchange for continued governing power.

While Kenyan citizen journalists and community organizers have a great deal to be proud of in their response to an electoral crisis and the concomitant ethnic violence, information technology was also used both by the government and civilians to amplify tensions and coordinate violent attacks. The technologies used by citizen reporters and community organizers were the same ones used by forces in the government who sought to rig the election, and agitators who attempted to expand ethnic violence. One lesson from the use of information technology in the Kenyan crisis is that the technology itself is neutral. It can be used powerfully to give citizens a voice in crisis situations, or used to aggravate those same crises.

A Brief History of the 2007 Elections

Mwai Kibaki became the third president of Kenya in 2002 after winning a landslide election against Daniel arap Moi, who was widely accused of corruption. Kibaki promised to address problems of government corruption and experiences some early victories, leading the IMF to resume lending. The resignation and flight of John Githongo, anti-corruption advisor, in early 2005 was a major blow, and suggested that corruption problems might be endemic to the Kibaki government.

Kibaki, who had promised a new constitution when elected, put a draft constitution up for vote in November 21, 2005. The constitution consolidated presidential power, making it easier for the President to fire uncooperative ministers. Raila Odinga led the opposition to the referendum, choosing an orange as his campaign’s symbol, opposed to the banana chosen by Kibaki. The defeat of the referendum was viewed as a major embarrasment for Kibaki as well as a precursor to a challenge by Odinga in the next presidential elections.

On December 27, 2007 presidential and parliamentary election pitted President Mwai Kibaki and his Party of National Unity (PNU) against Raila Odinga and the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM). Odinga led in polls before the election. Early results showed substantial losses in parliament for the PNU, and suggested that Odinga led Kibaki - at the same time, delays in announcing election results raised concerns about possible election rigging.

Three days after the elections, the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) declared Kibaki the winner of a closely contested election, with a margin of 230,000 votes. Kibaki was quickly sworn in as President as members of the ECK held a press conference to express concerns about voting irregularities. Riots erupted in the Kibera neighborhood of Nairobi, an opposition stronghold. The new government banned live television coverage of the protests and deploying troops to keep the peace and block demonstrations. Odinga attempted to hold an alterate inauguration on December 31st, but the event was banned and Uhuru Park, where it was to be held, was sealed off by riot police.

The situation took a brutal turn on January 1st when more than 100 ethnic Kikuyu (the tribe Kibaki belongs to) were burned to death by a gang of Kalenjin, Luhya and Luo men (tribes associated with Odinga) in a church outside Eldoret, in the Rift Valley. Over the next weeks, as African and international leaders flew into the country to mediate, clashes between ODM and PNU supporters, and between Kikuyu and minority ethnic groups were responsible for more than a thousand and at up to 600,000 internally displaced persons.

In early February, as party leaders began negotiations in earnest, violence slowed, possibly reflecting the political nature of the clashes, or perhaps as a result of the separation brought about by internal migration of threatened ethnic groups. On February 28th, a power-sharing agreement mediated by Kofi Annan was signed by Odinga and Kibaki, establishing a new position of Prime Minister, to be held by Odinga. Lengthy negotiations led to agreements on composition of a new cabinet, creating seats for 40 ministers, an unprecedented and expensive number.

Digital Media in Kenya

Understanding the role of citizen media in the elections crisis requires a brief history of Kenyan digital media as well. With an estimated 3 million internet users, Kenya has one of the highest levels of internet penetration in sub-Saharan Africa, at 7.9%. (Of major sub-Saharan African countries - i.e., discounting those with populations under a million - only Zimbabwe and South Africa have higher net penetration.)

More than 12 million Kenyans - roughly 30% of the population - have mobile phones, as compared to a continent-wide penetration of 20%. Kenyan companies have been early adopters of mobile money transfer systems like M-PESA and complex SMS-based systems like Kazi560 which matches jobseekers and employers via their phones.

Against this backdrop, it makes sense that Kenyans would emerge as early adopters in citizen media. Prominent Kenyan blogs, including Daudi Were’s “Mental Acrobatics” have been online since early 2003. Starting in 2004, Kenya Unlimited has aggregated posts from individual blogs on a central site and provided a “webring”, a navigation mechanism that links related weblogs together. In 2006, a nationwide blogging contest - the Kenya Blog Awards or “Kaybees” - helped bring together individual Kenyan bloggers into a community. Afrigator, an African blog aggregator based in South Africa, cites two Kenyan blogs in its list of top twenty blogs, giving the country the second best representation on that list (after South Africa, which dominates.)

Kenyan bloggers have an influence beyond their online readership. They’ve emerged as source for ideas and stories for mainstream papers. Indeed, this influence has included cases where newspapers have taken stories, word for word, from blogs and have been forced to apologize for their plagarism. (See my paper, Meet the Bridgebloggers, for more on this story). Kenyan bloggers have not been shy about using their online platforms to agitate for political change. Ory Okolloh, author of the popular Kenyan Pundit weblog, launched Mzalendo in early 2006 , a site designed to provide increased transparency and insight into the Kenyan Parliament.

Blogging the 2007 Elections

Several Kenyan bloggers took pains to document the 2007 election, but there’s little indication from their posts that any anticipated the unusual events that would follow the election. In the midst of a thorough post describing his voting experience, and the precautions taken by the ECK to prevent election fraud, Daudi Were observed:

“One thing I noticed was that no one was wearing any political party merchandise and the conversations in the queue were distinctly non political. Rather than being divided, by queuing together to exercise our civic duty and responsibility we were bound together in a sort of patriotic camaraderie. We all felt it was worthwhile to take part in the vote and that ultimately was what mattered.”

The joy in a smooth functioning democratic process extended through the 28th, as it became clear that the elections had ousted a large number of incumbents. Ory Okolloh noted:

“Folks this is a historic election by Kenyan standards, regional standards and international standards - I don’t think there is a precedent for the number of incumbents that are going down despite having massive resources behind them and attempts to bribe voters. And I challenge you to find an election in the Western world in recent times where people have come out with such determination, conviction, and a strong sense of civic duty . I’m very very proud of Kenyan voters and you all should be no matter who you are supporting.”

The tone - and focus - of coverage changed sharply on December 30th, as it became clear that the disputed election would be declared in Kibaki’s favor. The ban on live media reports particularly incensed Okolloh, who had been monitoring TV, radio, the internet, SMS and local gossip to produce several election updates per day. When the live coverage ban was announced, she declared:

“All live broadcasts have been suspended by the government. The order was released as ODM was addressing their press conference. This is now officially a police state. So we have no idea what ODM is saying, and what the security situation is around the country. ”

In the wake of a ban on live media, some Kenyan bloggers responded by redoubling their efforts as citizen reporters. Reeling from the violence in her native Eldoret, Juliana Rotich began posting brief bulletins on
refugee movements, fuel shortages, road and airport closures. Some were posted via SMS using Twitter to disseminate messages to a wider audience; others featured photos and were uploaded to Flickr using a GPRS modem. Daudi Were took to the streets on January 3rd, following ODM activists as they attempted to march to Uhuru Park to attend a banned rally. His photos document the empty streets of the usually-bustling capital and the tense standoffs between activists and security forces, and provided insights on the confrontation hard to find in international media covering the confrontations.

As it became clear that Kenya would be in crisis for more than a few days, bloggers began to search for ways to share their workload. Okolloh, who resides in Johannesburg, returned home on January 3rd, after a difficult debate over whether she should stay to document the crisis or prioritize the safety of her young child. Three days after arriving in South Africa, she added a new feature to her blog: “diary entries” written by guest bloggers and submitted to her via email. In the month the diary was active, it featured 26 posts from a variety of Kenyans, including regular bloggers who sought an opportunity to reach a larger audience and from people who had not previously published online. The tone was sharply different from Okolloh’s opinionated, but news-focused, reports - the diaries were personal reflections on the crisis, providing context for readers interested in how the crisis was affecting individual Kenyans.

In her first post on returning to Johannesburg, Okolloh proposed another form of distributed reporting, a Google Maps mashup that showed incidents of violence reported throughout Kenya:

“Google Earth supposedly shows in great detail where the damage is being done on the ground. It occurs to me that it will be useful to keep a record of this, if one is thinking long-term. For the reconciliation process to occur at the local level the truth of what happened will first have to come out. Guys looking to do something - any techies out there willing to do a mashup of where the violence and destruction is occurring using Google Maps?”

The reaction to this idea, one of nine points in a long roundup, helps demonstrate Okolloh’s influence and reach in the blogger community. (Technorati lists Kenyan Pundit as the #15,282nd most popular blog in its index, a very high rank for an Africa-focused blog. At the peak of its popularity during the crisis, 0.004% of all blog posts on the internet linked to Kenyan Pundit, a level comparable to regular linking to Global Voices Online, one of the 200 most popular blogs in the world. Within three days of her January 3rd blog post, a prototype version of the system she proposed had been built. By January 9th, it was live at Ushahidi.com. (The term
Ushahidi means “witness” in Swahili.) A day later, a partnership with Kenyan mobile phone operators allowed Kenyans to post reports using an SMS shortcode.

The authors of the Ushahidi system were, without exception, people deeply involved in Kenya’s citizen media community. David Kobia, the lead author of the system, administers Mashada.com, the leading bulletin board site for Kenyans and the Kenyan diaspora. The chief architect of the system was Erik Hershman, author of the Afrigadget and White African blogs. Bloggers Daudi Were and Juliana Rotich built partnerships with NGOs in Kenya to promote the service and generate reports from outside the web community. Hershman reports that 75% of Kenyan blogs linked to Ushahidi by January 10th, helping launch the site to local and global audiences.

Ushahidi is best understood as a form of collaborative citizen journalism. Individuals submit reports of violent incidents - as well as of peacemaking efforts - via a web form or SMS message, including details of the incident, its geographic location and supporting information, including photos or video. Ushahidi’s administrators attempt to verify reports, cross-checking against mainstream and citizen media reports, resolve multiple reports into a single record and make the reports visible on an interactive map. The result is a powerful visualization of the complexities of violence and peacemaking in post-conflict Kenya.

The Ushahidi project is now focused on creating a sustainable, open-source platform to allow citizen crisis reporting anywhere in the world. The platform was adopted in late May 2008 by United for Africa, a South African project that documents xenophobic violence. On May 28th, Ushahidi won the NetSquared N2Y3 mashup challenge, a prominent software competition which awarded the project a $25,000 first prize.

Who’s the Audience for Crisis Media?

Since Ushahidi is built by SMS and web submissions, but chiefly visible via the web, it’s worth asking whether the main audience for the site is inside or outside the country. This question is complicated by the fact that the possible audience for these projects inclues Kenyans living domestically and Kenyans in the diaspora as well as non-Kenyans. Kenya’s diaspora is a powerful political and economic force - some estimates put remittances from the diaspora at more than $1 billion US per year, more than 2% of GDP. Diaspora Kenyans have held political debates in Washington DC and stay deeply involved with national politics through groups like the Kenyan Community Abroad.

Some of the most innovative efforts in response to the Kenyan crisis were aimed, wholly or in part, in motivating the Kenyan diaspora to support reconstruction efforts. Mama Mikes, an online business that accepts payments via the web and delivers goods to addresses within Kenya (a system some have termed “alternative remittance”). During the crisis, they began offering diaspora Kenyans the opportunity to give online, purchasing relief materials which the company staff delivered to displaced persons camps in the Rift Valley. Mama Mikes documented the materials purchased on their staff blog, thanking donors by name and documenting their trip to the camps. To encourage donations and support, either through Mama Mikes or directly to the Red Cross, Juliana Rotich began photographing conditions in displaced persons camps and food distribution efforts One effect of this coverage was to add transparency to the relief efforts and reassure donors in the diaspora that goods were reaching people in need.

It’s difficult to determine the extent to which citizen media efforts affected news coverage and perceptions of Kenya outside the diaspora population. (It is beyond the scope of this essay, but a future research project might consider the extent to which Kenyan citizen journalists were cited in the mainstream press in the weeks the crisis was most intense.) But it is apparent that many Kenyans were concerned with the international perception of their country in the wake of the crisis.

A group called Concerned Kenyan Writers, led by celebrated Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina, sought to organize Kenyans to write op-eds in international newspapers with intent “to present a human face to the Kenyan post-election crisis; to counter the static images and impressions of escalating violence and anarchy in the foreign press and to document this turning point in our nation’s history for posterity.” In editorials like Wainaina’s “No Country For Old Hatreds” in the New York Times, authors challenged portrayals of the crisis as an eruption of ethnic hatred, suggesting instead that the events reflected systematic manipulation of ethnic stereotypes by political parties seeking political gains. Bankelele, a popular blog focused on banking and investment in Kenya, challenged the narrative that Kenya would become another Rwanda with sober, thoughtful analyses of the implications of the crisis for Kenyan economics.

It’s also clear that many Kenyan were interested in raising their voices, either through projects like Ushahidi, Concerned Kenyan Writers, Kenyan Pundit’s diaries, or via their own blogs. On December 30, 2007 - early in the crisis - Daudi Were posted instructions on starting your own blog in response to the avalanche of comments he’d received on his own posts. Many of these comments criticized existing bloggers, or demanded that certain posts or comments be removed from the Kenya Unlimited blog aggregator. Daudi responded, “If someone writes something you disagree with by all means let your voice be heard as you present your counter view, and the best place to do this is on your own blog.” This raises another open research question: did the Kenyan elections crisis cause more Kenyans to start blogging? Will they continue beyond the crisis? Should efforts to introduce citizen media to new populations focus on crisis response efforts?

A Darker Side to Citizen Media

It’s an oversimplification to view online reactions to the Kenyan crisis purely as a proud moment for citizen media. One of the most dramatic lessons of the crisis is that technologies useful for reporting and peacemaking are also useful for rumormongering and incitement to violence.

As the Kenyan crisis unfolded, many cellphone owners received SMS messages that urged them to drive neighbors from their houses: “If your neighbor is a Kikuyu, just kick him or her out of that house. No one is going to ask you anything.” Messages included expressions of ethnic hatred, warnings that one ethnic group would attack another, and rumors that implicated Kenyan companies and institutions in promoting violence. The Nation Media Group, a major Kenyan media company, was forced to issue a press release specifically to counter rumors that its vehicles were being used to transport arms throughout the country to increase violence.

Kenyan mobile phone operators cooperated with the Kibaki government to send messages to subscribers, urging them not to send or forward inflamatory messages. Juliana Rotich reported receiving the following message on her mobile phone in Eldoret: “The ministry if Internal security urges you to please desist from sending or forwarding any SMS that may cause public unrest. This may lead to your prosecution”. On January 1, 2008 Ory Okolloh reported “Bulk sms has been blocked by the government to prevent guys from sending inciteful messages.”

Firoze Manji, a Kenyan human rights activist and editor of Pambazuka News, pointed out that these messages from the government had the effect of challenging legitimate political organizing via mobile phone. Blocking bulk SMS may have been intended to stop spreading ethnic hatred, but it also created obstacles for the ODM as they attempted to organize rallies and protests. Manji was particularly offended by a message from Kibaki shortly after he was inaugurated, urging all Kenyans to remain calm: “How did Kibaki get my phone number? This is a major breach of privacy.”

The ministry of information may have been premature in threatening prosecution for forwarding messages that incited violence. The Nation reported on March 1, 2008 that the government had compiled a list of 1700 people who had forwarded messages that incited ethnic violence. However, “there is no law governing hate speech over mobile phones, radio and television.” Groups like the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights have been pushing such a law, unsuccessfully. It’s possible that concerns about the role of SMS in the crisis situation may reopen debate on electronic hate speech.

Ethnic incitement wasn’t limited to SMS messages. Bloggers discovered that their comment threads were becoming increasingly hostile and featured many hateful sentiments, sometimes expressed in tribal languages so as to be understandable only to members of that group. Daudi Were’s post on January 4th, 2008, outlining the guidelines to comment on his site left little doubt about the content he was being forced to moderate:

“I am not here to spoon feed you or even debate with you what does or does not make valid commentary. My younger cousins who are just out of their teens and about to join high school know the difference between intellectual and valid commentary and hate speech. So do you. I will not enter into a lengthy debate on whether your comment, that we should “finish” this or that tribe is valid because of some socio-economic-political-historical injustice you quote. For crying out loud our country is burning. You fuel the flames here and I will burn your comment, i.e. I will delete it.”

Moderation problems became so intense on Mashada, Kenya’s leading bulletin board site, that David Kobia had to take extraordinary steps. He shut down the site for a cooling-off period, and briefly explored paying moderators to continue their work, as they were quickly resigning after trying to cope with floods of hateful messages. On January 29th, he shut the forum down entirely, noting “Facilitating civil discussions and debates has become virtually impossible.”

A few days later, Kobia launched a new site, I Have No Tribe. Like Ushahidi, it was centered on a Google Maps mashup. However, this mashup showed posts from Kenyans around the country and around the world wrestling with the statement, “I have no tribe… I am Kenyan.” Kobia redirected the Mashada site to the new site, and it rapidly filled with comments - combative as well as supportive, as well poems and prayers. Kobia reopened the forums on February 14th, having elegantly demonstrated that one possible response to destructive speech online is to encourage constructive speech.

Hundreds of Pakistani lawyers are protesting Pervez Musharraf’s attacks on the judiciary - and the failure of Pakistan’s new government to overturn Musharraf’s actions - with a series of marches from Karachi to Islamabad, referred to as “the long march“.

There’s no shortage of media attention on the protest, including an excellent series of short interviews conducted by the BBC. But it’s reasonable to assume that media outlets won’t be able to watch every encounter between protesters and security authorities.

That’s why noted Pakistani blogger and media activist, Dr. Awab Alvi, is organizing citizen media coverage of the Long March. Bloggers can contribute photos and videos to the blog by sending email to LM@help.pk. Awab is hoping that many protesters will take advantage of Pakistan’s GPRS network to upload photos, video and text reports, allowing near real-time coverage.

The blog currently features a combination of brief bulletins and a mix of citizen and mainstream press photos. Unfortunately, Awab appears to be posting photos to Facebook in a way that makes them very hard to share here, but there are a number of striking images already uploaded.

And, of course, there’s a Twitter feed. Twitter: don’t start a revolution without it!

Law professors Cass Sunstein and Eugene Volokh brightened my drive to Harvard last week with a dialog about “the architecture of serendipity”. Sunstein is well-known for his concerns about echo chambers and “media cocoons” that allow citizens to insulate themselves, hearing only the opinions and perspectives of people who agree with them. (He develops this idea at length in Republic.com, later Republic.com 2.0, and to a lesser degree in his excellent Infotopia. My review of Infotopia, if you’re interested.) He’s concerned that the customizability and choice offered in digital media can make it easier for citizens to insulate themselves from the sorts of differing views they need to make informed decisions as citizens.

Volokh, one of the smartest bloggers out there, believes that Sunstein overestimates the diversity of old media, suggesting that most newspapers have such a strong center-left bias that they serve as an ideological cocoon, and suggests that blogs invite people to break free of ideological bias, by linking to pieces they critique. So far, so good - this is a well-trodden path, on both sides of the argument.

It gets more interesting, in my opinion, when Sunstein starts defending old media, invoking “the architecture of serendipity”. (Here’s a clip on the NYTimes website, an excerpt from the longer dialog on Bloggingheads.tv, which includes this argument.) He argues that, the “daily newspaper, when it’s working well, builds in the architecture of serendipity.” It’s designed to draw the idea to a headline or story that you might not otherwise encounter, hoping to capture your focus and draw you into a story you didn’t know you were interested in, but which gives you information that changes your worldview.

My regular readers know that I’m interested in serendipity as one of the tools that can help combat homophily, the tendency of birds of a feather to flock together, and to share their preferred sources of information, often at the expense of other voices and sources of information. But it’s difficult just to identify good examples of serendipity, and much harder to figure out how to engineer it. It’s worth looking closely at newspapers as tools that try to generate serendipity, and to ask questions about whether we’re losing this function in a move from paper-based to digital media.

Today’s New York Times has six major stories and seven minor stories on the front page. The major stories, which include headlines, large blocks of text and, in two cases, photos or graphics. Those stories include substantial hooks to interest a reader - 200-400 words of text, plus images, designed to convince a reader to a) buy the newspaper and b) read the body of the story. The seven stories at the bottom of the page include 17-48 words of text as hook, and three include pictures. Count every mention of a page inside the edition you could turn to - the paper equivalent of a hyperlink - and there are 23 links a reader can follow from the front page.

The contrast to the online edition of the Times is pretty stark. Just counting possible links (using a search for anchor tags in the source HTML), there are 423 other webpages linked from the front page. A more careful count, ignoring ads, links to RSS feeds and links to account tools for online readers, gives 315 content links, possible stories or sections a reader could explore from the front page. While there are almost 14 times as many pages for a reader to explore, they’ve got much less information on what links to follow: while twelve stories have text hooks, the wordcount ranges between 10 and 26 words. While there’s a good chance one of those stories might convince you to click on it, you won’t start reading it on the front page, the way you might with the 200-400 word stories in the paper edition. (There are lots more images to choose from - 15, one of which is a video - in contrast to the seven images on the paper front page.)

Okay, so the paper gives 7% as many options to the reader that the online edition does, though provides up to 20 times as much text to get a reader invested in a story. So what? And isn’t this just a function of what medium is good at? If the paper edition of the New York Times could support hyperlinks, wouldn’t there be 300 on the front page? (And if computer monitors were as eye-friendly as printed paper, wouldn’t the Times website feature lots more text?)

Newspapers have at least three public-interest functions. They report news, they offer a space for public debate, and they prioritize news for readers. There are powerful online alternatives for those first two functions. I’m starting to get concerned that there’s not much good thinking about that third critical function.

As Sunstein points out in his conversation with Volokh, there’s a much wider range of information available online than there was in the days where old media was the only media. Not only do we have an explosion of citizen media, we’ve now got the opportunity to read
newspapers from around the world (including an amazing African collection via AllAfrica.com) and access a much larger wealth of newswire stories than would be available in any newspaper. We haven’t achieved perfect equity in this field - people in wealthy nations have far greater opportunity to read and write online than people in developing nations, and there are a whole lot more small-town American and European newspapers online than websites for African and Indian papers - but it’s hard to make an argument that we live in anything other than a more info-rich and info-diverse environment.

(There is, on the other hand, a good argument to be made that certain types of media, especially investigative journalism and international journalism written by foreign correspondents, are in real danger. You might be interested in a previous post on business models for “difficult journalism“. My sense is that there’s less and less support for difficult journalism, especially at papers like those in the Tribune network, which are facing strong management pressure to decrease the amount of news they report, ensuring parity with advertising.)

It’s also pretty clear that we’re not hurting for spaces in which citizens can express opinions. It’s not easy to get a letter to the editor published in the New York Times, but it’s pretty trivial these days to publish a blog. (See, again, my caveat that this is a whole lot easier to do in Canada than in Cambodia.) And there are new types of news outlets that specialize in amplifying personal opinion, like the Huffington Post, which are able to put some opinions in front of very large readerbases.

With such an embarrasment of riches, you might expect unprecedented diversity from online news sites. You’d be disappointed. Major news aggregation sites like Yahoo News and Google News offer tens of thousands of stories… but there’s a huge amount of overlap and clustering. The Project on Excellence in Journalism, as part of their 2006 State of the News Media, offers “A Day in the Life of the News“, an attempt to look at the entirity of the day’s news in the United States. They report, “The level of repetition in the 24-hour news cycle is one of the most striking features one finds in examining a day of news. Google News, for instance, offers consumers access to some 14,000 stories from its front page, yet on this day they were actually accounts of the same 24 news events.” It’s not that there aren’t more stories available on Google News - there’s tons of deep coverage accessible to anyone willing to search - but that you may be disappointed if you’re relying on Google News to put a story on the front page that you didn’t expect to be interested in but find compelling or useful (my operating definition of serendipity).

You may be disappointed for a different reason from news voting sites like Digg and Reddit. These sites rely on their users to suggest stories, and to vote on which ones should lead the coverage. As a result, these sites provide a lot of stories that may be interesting, if you share the interests (and perhaps the demographics and psychographics) of the reader/editors. But they’re pretty unlikely to surprise you with serendipity - because readers have so much in common (see Whois reddit?, in which community respondents self-report that the site’s users are 92% male, 70% employed in the IT industry or as students, and 70% from the US), they often use the same sources to find stories, and are likely to vote up stories that emphasize certain technical and political viewpoints. (See my post on “Homophily, serendipity and xenophilia” for lots more on this idea.)

And here’s where the 19th century technology of the daily newspaper proves itself to be a very powerful “persuasive technology“. When an editor assigns front-page real estate to a story, she’s telling the reader that these are the stories that demand the most attention and persuading you to read them… or at least read them long enough to decide whether or not they trigger your serendipity switch. Many newspapers have a convention of putting the biggest stories of the day “above the fold” and saving the bottom of the front page for important local stories and for “the serendipity box”, a place on the page for a story that might escape your attention if the editor didn’t feature it.

The Times, to their credit, sometimes treats half the front page as an opportunity to drive readers to stories they probably don’t know they’re interested in. Today’s largest story, in terms of page real estate, is “Inside Gate, India’s Good Life; Outside, the Servant’s Slums”, a story about class divides in modern, urban India. It’s certainly not breaking news, and it doesn’t have much to connect it to the day’s news agenda. But it’s a lovely piece of storytelling - the key factor David Weinberger identifies in getting people to pay attention to developing world news. Being on the front page works - the India story is the #3 story emailed from the NYTimes site today, suggesting that a large number of people found it compelling enough to pass it on. (Story #8 is a front page story from yesterday on South Korean mothers moving their children to Australia or New Zealand for better educational opportunities, another classic serendipity box story.)

A possible (counterintuitive) conclusion is that more choice might mean less serendipity. It’s probably possible for you to read the six major stories on the New York Times homepage, and might be possible for you to read the 13 the editor chose to feature today. I don’t care who you are, but you’re not going to read the 315 stories linked to from the Times’s online page. Navigating that page requires a great deal of personal choice - you surf through a pick the topics that are of interest to you… which may mean you filter out topics you don’t know you’re interested in, or topics you’re actively disinterested in, which might capture your attention in a moment of serendipity.

In the paper edition, you’re trading choice for trust. It’s harder to find precisely the stories you know you want, but you’ve got the opportunity to let the editor surprise you. It isn’t always the case, but the most surprising story I encounter in a given day is often something put forward by the “Old Gray Lady“.

If it’s possible to engineer serendipity with ninteenth century technology, it’s certainly possible with the resources we have today. But it’s not easy. Most recommendation technologies - the algorithms Amazon or NetFlix use to suggest what movies you might watch next - are a form of collaborative filtering. These systems take information about your preferences (either the movies you tell it are your favorites, or the ones you’ve expressed interest in by purchasing) and use this information to find other users who’ve expressed the same preferences. Then they recommend items that other user has liked that you haven’t expressed a preference about.

My friend Nathan Kurz, who’s turned his substantial brainpower to this topic more than once, argues that these systems aren’t about recommendation, but about prediction. The sorts of systems Netflix is seeking via its Netflix Prize do a good job of making consistent, safe recommendations of stuff you’re predisposed to like, penalizing systems that take a risk to try and recommend stuff you’d never heard of and are going to love. Quoting Nate:

Predict how well the user will like each of the items in the dataset, and recommend the items with the highest predicted values. And since Root Mean Square Error is easy to measure (and hence easy to write papers about) this is what many algorithms try to optimize.

The problem with this is that it tends to produce the safe recommendations in the user’s comfort zone, rather than the risky recommendations that might expand their horizons. But the solution to this is not to use this same prediction system and randomize the results, but to design a system based around recommendations rather than around predictions. Instead of predicting what is most likely to be liked, give the recommendations most likely to be loved.

Nate’s got some good theories about how to build systems that engineer serendipity, but they largely boil down to matching people to people. Expand that set of people you’re taking recommendations from to include people who share some interests, but live in a different information universe, and you’re likely to diversify your recommendations. Find someone who shares your interest in early 1980s techno music, but lives in Lagos, and you’re likely to find some serendipitious recommendations.

Sunstein’s proposed solutions for architecting serendipity are also pretty human-focused. He recommends that bloggers make a conscious effort to link (civilly and politely) across ideological lines and that both bloggers and blog readers should monitor their media consumption to ensure they’re diversifying their inputs. In other words, the move into digital media may put the responsibility for finding serendipity from editors to readers. It’s hard to know whether this will happen - as Volokh observes, “to the extent that this is a problem, it’s a problem that’s a result of basic human failings, and that freedom and extra choice will reinforce those failings…”

Like most basic human failings, you’ve got to accept that something’s a problem before you can address it. There’s been a lot of celebration and self-congratulation about the diversity of voices that we’re able to hear in this new medium. (I’m guilty as charged on those scores.) It’s worth thinking about whether we’re doing as good a job of discovering new voices as we are at raising our own voices.

Bonus links:

- Professor Sunstein offers the idea that a university can serve as a source of serendipity, putting people in touch with people they’d otherwise not have the chance to interact with.

- On the subject of people you’re probably not interacting with, David Sasaki, managing editor of Global Voices’s Rising Voices initiative, goes into a maximum security prison in Kingston to visit his grantees, a group of Jamaicans learning to blog in prison.

- Sometimes it’s the pictures, not the words, that catch our eye. Jen Brea interviews blogger Cedric Kalonji about his astounding photoblog which documents daily life in Kinshasa.

One of the themes I was struck by at the Berkman at Ten conference was the idea that the net is now mature enough that we should be studying what’s actually happening, not just what we think should happen. While that doesn’t sound like that much of a breakthrough, it’s useful to me, at least, in thinking about how the center takes on projects and research topics. A good bit of the early work at the Center - especially our work on ICANN - was far more prescriptive than descriptive. A project like the Open Net Initiative, on the other hand, is careful to focus on documenting what’s happening around the Internet, leaving change of those realities to related projects like Psiphon and Global Voices Advocacy.

The focus on journalism at the Berkman Center over the past couple of years has been a focus on what’s really happening, not on what we thought might happen. I suspect that had you asked Professors Zittrain, Nesson and Lessig in 1998 whether the survival of high-quality journalism in a digital age was part of the Center’s mission, your question would have been met with a curious look. Now you’re likely to get a curious look because it’s so apparent that the question is central to our research.

I’ve spent a lot of time with Berkman colleagues - and colleagues throughout the Boston/Cambridge community, including friends at the Business School, the Nieman Center and local newspapers - talking about business models for journalism in a digital age. A conversation we had on Wednesday makes me wonder whether there’s an opportunity here to move from the prescriptive to the descriptive. In other words, while I’ve spent a lot of time lately agonizing about how Global Voices might find a revenue model to sustain our work, the answer may be to look closely at revenue models people are already using to support substantive journalism in the era of blogs, Craigslist and media consolidation.

One of the groundrules for these conversations has been a focus on journalism that’s difficult to finance: investigative journalism and international journalism. This isn’t meant to imply that other types of journalistic writing - political opinion or entertainment journalism, for instance - are somehow inferior… just easier to finance. Investigative and international journalism is expensive, requiring travel, research and time. Many of the stories that result are “long-tail” stories - they’re not going to be interesting to the entire news audience as, for instance, Iraq war stories were in 2003. The people who’ve been participating in these conversations believe firmly that there’s a public interest in reporting these stories, and that this work is essential for partipatory societies even if it’s not easily supported by pure for-profit models.

A conversation about supporting this sort of journalism tends to start with a good deal of despair about the state of American newspapers and the dismal future young journalists face. Newspaper layoffs are so common that graphic designer Erica Smith is maintaining an interactive layoffs map, called “Paper Cuts“. Jill Carroll, in a paper for Harvard Shorenstein Center, documents a 30% reduction in the number of foreign correspondents employed by US newspapers. Media critic David Shaw bemoaned a shrinking “newshole” for international news, reduced 70-80% between the mid-1980 and 2001.

If we’re interested not in preserving newspapers, or the ability to make a living as a professional journalist, it’s possible that the picture changes somewhat. Accepting Dan Gillmor’s observation that people will “commit acts of journalism” - and observing that some people appear to commit these acts serially - it’s possible that there are a number of business models that might support “difficult” journalism on an ongoing basis.

Some models that have come up in conversation:

The 5% Model - One of the problems American newspapers suffer from is the difficulty of delivering a 20% return on investment year to year to investors, a level of return that’s evidently demanded by financial markets. Perhaps traditional newspaper models are sustainable if the goal was to return a much more modest - say 5% - return on capital investment.

Cross Subsidy - Related to the 5% model is the idea that newspapers support “difficult” journalism with more lucrative content - entertainment, sports and local news. If other parts of a newsgathering operation are sufficiently profitable, it’s possible to finance in-depth reporting.

The Membership Model - Newspapers outsourced much of their reporting to the Associated Press, using a shared news bureau to provide a breadth of coverage difficult for any one paper to provide. While AP is now large, powerful, and sometimes critiqued by newspapers for high fees, there’s still room for membership-based bureaus. Eight Ohio newspapers are sharing resources on state-wide political coverage in a new collaboration called OHNO, an interesting swipe at AP.

Ad Supported - The default internet business model - supporting coverage through a combination of banner and keyword ads - may be able to support “difficult” journalism, either through cross-subsidy or just attracting sufficient attention to key stories. The concern on the model is that there’s a constant temptation to fish for attention-grabbing stories. This can be a benefit in a cross-subsidy model, but it might be dangerous for a tightly subject-focused news outlet.

Niche Content - High-quality niche content can survive on subscription models. One example offered in our discussions is statehouse newsletters. Local newspapers find it expensive to provide deep statehouse coverage - subscribing to specialist newsletters may well be cheaper. And lobbyists find the content to be mission-critical and are willing to pay a premium for the information.

Foundations Pay - A great deal of high quality journalism is already foundation funded - listen to the credits at the end of an NPR show for a sense for some of the major players in the field. ProPublica, with backing from the Sandler Foundation, is promising a newsroom of 26 journalists, “all of them dedicated to investigative reporting on stories with significant potential for major impact”. This is, for better or worse, the model that Global Voices is currently using to find support.

One Rich Guy - A variant on the foundation model - which comes complete with program officers, oversight boards and all sorts of checks and balances - the one rich guy model has been responsible for some excellent journalism in the case of Al Jazeera. It’s known to be a weak model for investigative stories about the rich guy in question.

Public Funding - The BBC’s funding comes from television license fees, a form of public funding for public interest reporting. That said, it’s hard to imagine a future in which public broadcast funding is massively increased in the US - and even harder to imagine a future where independent reporters and bloggers could successfully compete for that funding. We raise this model so we can talk longingly about working as journalists in Europe.

Advocacy Journalism - Highly partisan political organizations have turned out some excellent investigative journalism - see the Polk Award Talking Points Memo won for coverage of the US Attorney’s controversy. A major concern is that while advocacy journalism on different sides of a political issue may serve to provide balance and fact-checking, it’s not hard to imagine situations in which a key issue might only be investigated by highly partisan journalists on a single side of an issue.

Sponsor a Beat - In one of our conversations, someone mentioned blogs raising money for reporters to cover specific stories. David Axe of War is Boring uses this model - I’d love other examples of international and investigative journalism sponsored this way.

Indirect Revenue - This is the model I end up advising most new bloggers to take: don’t expect your blog to make money directly, but look for the indirect ways it benefits your work. Blogs lead to freelance work, to books, to speaking invitations - it’s possible that serious journalism in whatever medium may have indirect benefits to the author that outweight direct benefits.

Our conversations have included some theoretical models as well. If you’ve got examples of people trying these models, I’d love your links.

Multimedia production - A small team might produce the same story in different media - text, video, audio - and sell to various news outlets. The ability to sell stories across platforms might make a model more fiscally sustainable. (Circle of Blue, a non-profit effort focused on covering the world’s water crisis, is pursuing this sort of model)

Translation as cross-subsidy - This is a model that’s come up a few times in talking about sustainability and Global Voices. We translate lots and lots of content to produce our site, and our translators are phenomenally talented. A service like Global Voices could serve as a showcase and legitimator for translators, a front-end to a web-based human translation marketplace, and profits from that marketplace might cross-subsidize our translated coverage. (I’m firmly convinced that someone will build a strong, multi-lingual, reputation-based online translation marketplace in the next couple of years. A major regret in life is that I don’t have the time to do it right now.)

TookTheBuyout.com - More a joke than an actual model - a site designed to give all the talented journalists who’ve taken buyouts from mainstream newspapers a place to publish independent investigative reporting. Given the name recognition of some of the people who’ve stepped down from papers recently, this might well be ad supportable.

I’d love your input on other models that people are pursuing or thinking about. This isn’t a theoretical issue for me - over the next few years, Global Voices needs to pursue one or more models to support our work, even if that model involves continuing to persuade foundations that our work is important and worth supporting. Examples focused on investigative and international journalism are the ones that are most helpful; models that are in use and supporting high-quality journalism are the most interesting ones. Please share what you know and help me get beyond a short dozen of models here.

I’d hoped that spending three weeks offline would be a great time for ideas to ferment, much as they do when I’m on vacation. Turns out that this healing thing is harder work than I’d anticipated. Rather than a wealth of insights to write about, I’ve mostly got a backlog of unanswered research questions that I wish I’d been able to research. That, and a new addiction to episodic dramas produced by HBO.

One of the questions I’ve wanted an answer to for some time is how the community focused on Darfur has managed to attract so much attention to their cause. While the situation in Darfur is dramatic and dire, there are a number of other situations on the African continent that demand attention and, generally, receive a small fraction of the attention paid to Darfur. Medicines Sans Frontieres publishes an annual list of stories they feel are underreported, including situations in Somalia, eastern DRC and the Central African Republic. (I wrote at some length on the topic of “underreporting” and these top-ten lists some months earlier.)

My interest in this question about Darfur isn’t because I want to wag a finger at the Darfur movement, but because I hope other movements can learn from it. There aren’t a ton of examples of situations where a large number of Americans have become passionately interested in political and security situations in developing nations without a strong indicator that the US might become militarily involved in those countries. (In other words, Iraq doesn’t count.) Tibet and Darfur are the main ones that come to mind. And while Tibet has been a celebrity cause du jour for years now (and benefits from the substantial charisma and media savvy of the Dalai Lama), interest in Darfur has developed quite rapidly and may have preceded mainstream media coverage of the issue.

(On the to do list is some searching through blog search engines, Lexis/Nexis and the NYTimes site to see when Nicholas Kristof picked up on the issue, in comparison to early blogs like Passion of the Present. A quick bit of research suggests that Kristof wrote his first major piece on Darfur in March 2004, titled “Ethnic Cleansing, Again“. Passion of the Present began publishing in March 2004 as well. I just glanced back at the personal blogs of Jim Moore (a former Berkman colleague) and Ingrid Jones, two bloggers who’ve been passionate and vocal on this issue since early 2004, and wasn’t able to find references before March 2004. Please send links if I’ve got this wrong - it would be very interesting to see a blog conversation about Darfur preceding Kristof’s article. (For what it’s worth, the earliest refernce I found on my own blog is February 4, 2004. And that post refers to BBC coverage, suggesting that it’s an instance of the blogger - me - following the mainstream media.))

One of the core arguments I’ve been making about media attention and the developing world is that it’s difficult to expect people in the developed world to choose to read about stories in the developing world unless someone makes the case that a particular story has relevance for that individual. It’s hard to discover these stories unless either someone in authority (a newspaper editor, a television anchor) leads you to the story, or unless your peer group leads you to it… in which case the homophily problem kicks in. Even if led to the story, it can be very difficult to connect with it - something Joi Ito has refered to as “the caring problem“. The Darfur story is an intriguing exception to these generalizations, and is worth studying as such.

Fortunately, that study is taking place. Charlie Beckett at the London School of Economics POLIS thinktank announced earlier this month that their center will study the emergence of the Darfur story in depth. He’s invited readers to offer their own theories - Rob Crilly, an excellent freelance journalist based in Nairobi, has weighed in with a compelling case:

The roots lie in the civil war of the south, when evangelical Christians from America found it easy to identify with a largely Christian population in the south pitted agains a Muslim, arab government in the north.

They carried their activity across to Darfur, bringing it the attention of many people who wouldn’t otherwise be aware of Sudan’s problems. But it has also attracted a bizarre mishmash of often conservative, religious groupings in an anti-Khartoum alliance.

Their black and white analysis has generally done more harm than good, and has sucked in people with a liberal viewpoint - including many of my esteemed colleagues in the press, who have a romantic notion that rebels are always the good guys.

I’ll be very interested to read the POLIS study and see whether they concur with Crilly’s analysis. I’ll also be interested to see whether there was activist media leading authors like Kristof to the story, or whether the movement picked up with mainstream media recognition and legitimation.

It’s been very gratifying to read comments and posts linking to my post last week on homophily, serendipity and xenophilia. I have high hopes of writing more on the topic, and am currently digging into “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks“, which danah boyd recommends as a thorough academic introduction to the subject. (That link will give you a summary of the paper, which is available in full text on JSTOR, a subscription-only journal archive. You may be able to get the full text of the paper if you access JSTOR from a university library… which is how I got a copy of it.)

So far, the research I’ve done has given me a sense for just how far back in time I need to go to understand scholarship on this issue… which appears to precede Aristotle, who writes about the phenomenon in Nichomachean Ethics, but who may be quoting Diogenes when he references “birds of a feather flock together”. Guess I picked a terrific time to take a month off from all reading…

One of the most exciting (for me, at least) conversations that’s come out of the post was one I had with Brooke Gladstone on Wednesday evening at WNYC’s studios in New York City. I was in NYC doing a bit of consulting for friends at Open Society Institute when I got a call from Jamie York, one of the producers of On The Media, my favorite public radio show. He’d shared my post with Brooke and they were kind enough to invite me into the studio to discuss the problems of homophily in digital media and possible solutions. You can listen to my segment on the audio player above, or on the page for our conversation. But I’d urge you to subscribe to the podcast - if you’re interested in smart, sharp, relavent critique of media around the world, this show is for you.

It was a great honor for me to be on the air with Brooke and I’m looking forward to thinking through these issues a bit more so I can speak more intelligently next time (and so I can be a bit less of a stuttering fanboy around one of my favorite public radio figures.)

As the post-election crisis lurches on in Zimbabwe, the question on everyone’s mind is “What next?” The ZANU-PF government briefly signalled an interest in a “transitional government of national unity” - headed by President Mugabe, of course, but involving opposition MDC politicians as well. The Herald - a state-owned newspaper which floated that idea of national unity - has changed course and now runs an editorial titled “Unity govt not feasible“. Deputy Information Minister Bright Matonga renounced the previous statements about unity and emphasized that ZANU-PF would challenge MDC in a run-off election.

Uncertainty over the future provides great fodder for discussion. At Harvard University in Cambridge MA this evening, a group of very smart Zimbabweans and Zimbabwe-watchers got together to discuss possible scenarios. Brian Chingono, a student at Harvard, offers a frame for the discussions which will be familiar to readers of this blog:
- It’s been almost a month, and no presidential election results have been released
- Robert Mugabe, in power for 28 years, has a history of political violence, dating back to violence against the Ndebele in the 1980s
- Thousands of Zimbabweans have been displaced by post-election violence
- Parlimentary results, which showed a victory for the opposition MDC, are now being “recounted”
- Chinese arms shipments to Zimbabwe raise fears that the denoument to the current situation may be a violent one.
He shows a video report from SkyNews - who have been doing excellent video journalism from within the country - showing violence against MDC supporters, and a system of reports on paper and by SMS that the MDC argues prove that they won the presidential election.

Chaz Maviyane-Davies, an award winning activist graphic designer, is a Zimbabwean exile. In the lead up to the 2002 Presidential election, he ran a series of striking ads, aimed at Zimbabwean voters. His aim, he tells us, was to “raise consciousness about the situation”. He spent 2-3 hours a day on the pieces and distributed them globally via email. While it might have been more effective to distribute the pieces on print, cost made it impossible for Maviyane-Davies - instead, he relied on sending them globally and hoping people would distribute, print and be moved by them. A later project, Portal of Truth, offered stark graphic commentary on the stolen 2002 Zimbabwe elections. His images are a tour of some of the darker moments in Zimbabwean political history, touching on the church’s unwillingness to enter into politics, Zimbabwe’s incursions into the Democratic Republic of Congo, the government’s willingness to print money to contest elections, voter intimidation by the military and efforts to prevent election observers from monitoring elections. Many feature Zimbabwean proverbs: “If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a small room with a mosquito.”

Maviyane-Davies didn’t create images for the 2005 or 2008 elections, but he’s been working on images in the last few weeks, including one for the poster that advertised today’s event, featured above.

My friend and colleage Tawanda Mutasah, the executive director of Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, is asked to address the thorny question, “How has Mugabe managed to stay in power?” He offers two answers - domestic repression, and a pretense of African legitimation. For decades, Mutasah tells us, Mugabe has terrorized voters throughout the country, with particularly severe cases in Midlands and the southwest of the country, to rig elections. While rigging efforts this decade have received more attention, it’s really a very old strategy.

A key date for Zimbabwe was March 2001, when SADC (a regional trade body) agreed to a new set of norms and standards for elections. (Tawanda clarified by email today that the 2001 agreement was by the parliamentary forum of SADC. An agreement in August 2004 by SADC heads of state cemented these changes.) The fact that Zimbabwe signed on to these standards “makes it easier to say the elections have been stolen without people complaining about UK and US influence,” as these are African norms and standards, agreed to by Zim’s neighors.

The real problem, Mutasah explains, is the “joint operations command”, a group of six generals who are functionally in control of the government. “They’ve told Mugabe he can’t reliquish power” because they’re afraid of what will happen when they are no longer in power. They’re (understandably) afraid of being prosecuted for political murders and crimes against humanity.

Mugabe has been a master at leveraging his revolutionary credentials, but Mutasah tells us that “we’re seeing cracks in this pretense. The chink is now clear in Mugabe’s armor.” For years, he’s claimed that all of Africa supports him against the rest of the world and that he’s leading an African revolution. But now the president of Zambia has declared that any country in SADC which allows the Chinese arms shipment to be delivered will be violating SADC election codes. The president of Tanzania, who is currently heading the AU, has described the situation in Zimbabwe as “unacceptable”. President Mbeki of South Africa is looking increasingly isolated.

That said, Mutasah gives us a quick history lesson: in 1971, the Byrd Amendment overturned a ban on US trade with Rhodesia, allowing the US to import minerals despite Ian Smith’s deeply repressive regime. “Mugabe has been aware from long back that the politics of the international community has tended to be fickle, and I dare say, unprincipled.” The hope, today, is that the international community is changing and that it’s not monolithic. There needs to be a movement around global human rights solidarity that marginalizes Mugabe in terms of supporting the rights of poor people in Zimbabwe.

Andrew Meldrum, a journalist for The Guardian and The Economist who lived for years in post-independence Zimbabwe before being imprisoned and deported, sees cause for hope in the current situation. His proximate cause for hope is the international community’s refusal to allow an arms shipment from China to be delivered to Zimbabwe.

The message of this refusal, he tells us, is that Mugabe can’t win at the ballot box - he needs guns. And African leaders are starting to step up and pressure China (against a backdrop of China’s problems with Tibet and Darfur), which appears to have led to China backing down from delivering arms. In the past, Meldrum tells us he advised the US and British government not to condemn the Zimbabwean government because it ends up reinforcing Mugabe’s argument that he’s at war against colonial powers. “But at this point, things are so desperate, all possible criticism should go on.” He suggests that criticism should focus on democracy, the rule of law and human rights - “Who can be against those things?”

He notes that the government’s latest plan (which already appears to be taken off the table) for a national unity government isn’t realistic. “A government of national unity governed by Robert Mugabe is a contradiction in terms.” Mugabe doesn’t behave democratically within his own party. There’s no chance that the opposition - or the international community - will accept that solution.

Dambudzo Muzenda, a blogger and a student at the Kennedy School of Government, sees the recent election as proof positive that the national mood has turned against Mugabe. She believes that the election was “a personal vote against Mugabe and ZANU-PF, and that “people won’t accept a government with Mugabe at the top of the ticket.” Asked about the possibility of a truth and reconcilliation committee, she wonders whether this process will make it harder to oust hardliners, who will be afraid of facing persecution. “If that means trading immunity against justice… I would rather see Mugabe go scott free than see him stay in power and cause so much damage.”

Any conversation about the future of Zimbabwe has to face issues of land distribution. Meldrum unpacks the history of the 1980 Lancaster Agreement, in which the UK agreed to provide fiscal assistance to Zimbabwe to allow for land distribution. “Zimbabwe needed land reform before the seizures. And now it needs it again. No one has benefitted from these seizures.” He believes it will take 15 years, a process that might involve inviting experienced white farmers to bid on large farms and coach black farmers to the point where they’re able to productively take over these farms. Mutasah points out that the UK honored part of the Lancaster agreement, putting up £44m to compensate farmers. Unfortunately, this money rarely made it into farmer’s hands, and farms were given to cronies, not to people who could productively farm them. “Those guys in the upper echelons of the government - each of them owns at least five farms.”

Many of the questions focused on what diaspora Zimbabweans might do to effectively help change. Muzenda points out that roughly a quarter of the nation’s population lives in South Africa. They’re afraid to come out into the streets and protest, as many are in South Africa illegally. But South Africa could negotiate an agreement to allow disaporans to vote, either in an official or an unofficial way. And some activists are organizing protests, like attempts to jam phone lines at ZANU-PF headquarters and at certain ministries and embassies. In a later question, Muzenda is less hopeful, noting that protests within Zimbabwe will likely lead to declaration of martial law. She ends with the hope that Mugabe’s age may become a factor, or that a Jacob Zuma presidency of South Africa would be less forgiving and flexible with Mugabe. Mutasah wonders whether a public statement from Nelson Mandela would help further undercut Mugabe’s anti-colonialist cred and suggests people contact Mandela’s foundation.

An audience member wonders how Mugabe and ZANU-PF managed to allow election results to be published at polling places, which appears to be the key factor in preventing the election from being rigged. Mutasah quotes section and verse: “Section 64-1E is the key provision.” It was added to Zimbabwe election law under pressure from opposition parties. That pressure resulted from international condemnation of violence on March 11, 2007, where government forces broke up a peaceful prayer meeting. The outrage over that violence forced dialog between the government and opposition, and it allowed for a key change in election law.

I asked the panelists how they felt about the issue of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. Zimbabwe has an amazing history of forgiveness - Ian Smith, who led the apartheid government, was allowed to live out his days peacefully under the Mugabe government that fought for his ouster. How much forgiveness were panelists willing to offer in exchange for a change of government?

Chingono suggested that Zimbabweans were so desperate for basic human rights and food that they’d be willing to forgive many of the people involved with the government. Mutasah was far more cautious, warning of the dangers of “premature forgiveness”. “We are ready to go beyond the current impasse, but we see deep-seated anger,” connected to the massacre in Matabeleland, the 2000 killed between 2000 and 2002. The important lessons from the South Africa TRC, he tells us, is the importance of forcing people to confess their crimes in a serious, open, contrite way before being granted amnesty. He believes Zimbabwe will need a TRC, perhaps one in which lower-ranking functionaries are prosecuted while leaders are given amnesty, or perhaps vice versa. “In our experience with transitional justice, we’ve discovered that when anger is bottled up, it doesn’t always come up in a civilized way.” The challenge is not just to oust Mugabe - it’s to build a prosperous and stable country after the fact, which involves facing and moving through decades of frustration and anger.

Two bonus readings:

- An amazing post from an anonymous documentary filmmaker in Zimbabwe, unpacking the economics of Zimbabwe under hyperinflation and the people who are benefitting from it.

- Chinese resentment over the China/Zimbabwe arms deal and international press attention to China’s role in Zimbabwe, translated by John Kennedy for Global Voices.