I love airline route maps. I’ve fallen asleep staring at the tangle of possible journeys so often that I sometimes confuse the capilaries I see with my eyes closed with the red paths of Northwest flights hubbed out of Detroit and Minneapolis. I love the questions the maps raise: why is there a direct flight on Air Canada from Halifax to Fort McMurray in Northern Alberta? (Lots of Nova workers in the oil sands, I suspect, but I never would have asked the question without the map.) Why is Chengdu such an important Chinese air hub? Why does MIAT (Mongolia’s airline, affectionately known as “maybe I’ll arrive tomorrow” by regular customers) fly to Berlin, and no other western European cities? Does a direct Air Madagascar flight to Milan imply a strong Italian-Malagasy connection, or was Malpensa just one of the few airports where they could buy a landing slot?

These maps are deceptive in a way. They let you know what’s possible, but not what actually happens. The Northwest map will show you flights from Detroit to both Albany and Bozeman. While it’s good to know that it’s possible to get between those cities by flying Northwest, it doesn’t tell you how easy or difficult it might be to make that trip, how often those flights run, or how many people choose to make that trip. That’s okay - the job of maps is to tell a traveler where she can go, not where other travelers choose to go. But trying to extrapolate too much from a map of infrastructure may be a mistake - is the Ulaanbataar/Berlin link the sign of close governmental and trade ties between Mongolia and Berlin? Or an accident of history, airport capacity or other factors?

This lovely video gives a different picture from the route maps. It’s a simulation of global air traffic from the fine folks at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences. The map uses data from Flightstats.com, and overlays their position on a Miller cylindrical projection. Compared to some of the other flight data porn the folks at ZHAW have churned out - like their amazing Radar mashup of flights over Zurich, using live transponder data from aircraft - this was a pretty simple hack.

I’ve watched the video half a dozen times today, getting different insights each time. Popular routes become apparent - the arc of travel from the Northeastern US to London, Paris and Amsterdam runs west to east as night falls, and reverses as morning breaks. The popularity of that ocean crossing vastly outpaces traffic across the Pacific, connecting Tokyo, Manila and Beijing to Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. There’s more traffic from Brazil to western Europe than I would have guessed, and virtually no traffic across the southern Atlantic or Pacific. Domestic traffic in the US, India and China, and intra-EU travel is vastly more common than trans-oceanic travel. As the US is covered with yellow dots representing airplanes, international travel looks like a rounding error in comparison to domestic flights.

It’s not a map you’d want to use in planning your vacation, perhaps, but it would be a useful one to turn to if you were tracking the spread of an epidemic, for instance. If you’re studying SARS, it’s useful to know that you can, theoretically, get from Guangdong to Johannesburg - it’s lots more useful to know that most of those travellers are heading to Hong Kong, Toronto and New York City.

It’s a map of flow, not of infrastructure. It reveals infrastructure - the location of airports, the preferred air routes followed - because they appear as bright spots, places where lots of flow originates. A map of infrastructure - a map of potentials - shows every airport as co-equal; a map of flow shows you which airports are heavily used, which are pivotal nodes in a network. If you’re an executive at a fast food company, an infrastructure map of highways is moderately helpful - it’s obviously wise to place your stores in places where drivers could theoretically reach them, rather than in the middle of a desert. (No one told Pacific Bell this, obviously, before they erected the legendary Mojave Phone Booth.) But a map of flow is what you really need, showing where drivers are likely to go, and where they’re likely to come purchase your grease-laden wares.

It’s hard to map flow. Infrastructure tends to stay put. But people, cars, and shipping containers move all the time. To build accurate maps, you can’t simply plot the location of an airport once - you’ve got to map each plane that flies during some period of time. Things that don’t stay put aren’t always happy about being mapped. In simplest terms, maps of flow are a form of surveillance. Mapping your personal “flow” - in the way that the BBC is tracking a shipping container around the world - would likely be a gross violation of your privacy, as it would probably reveal more about you than you’re strictly comfortable sharing.

My friends Sandy Pentland and Nathan Eagle have been experimenting with something Pentland is calling “reality mining“, using surveillance of individuals via their mobile phones to extrapolate information about social networks, individual health and events in the news. Eagle tells me that the system was so effective, it could determine which of the anonymous participants were dating, and was able to correlate behavior to events like the Red Sox World Series victory, during which cellphone users clustered in bars and crossed the river to celebrate near Fenway. Unsurprisingly, a lot of sponsors are interested in this research, including mobile phone companies and advertisers - it’s not unrealistic to believe that mobile phone companies might, at some point, offer you free basic phone service in exchange for your behavioral data (collected by tracking your phone) and the opportunity to target ads to you based on your location. (See Blyk, a free mobile phone service in the UK, targetted to young people and ad sponsored…)

The maps Pentland and others are making tend to make us the most nervous when we place ourselves in them as individuals. We wonder what a map of our actions will tell others. We’re generally more comfortable with them in aggregate. Leaving the Berkman Center, I look at Google Maps to see whether the traffic heading west on Route 2 or I-90 is lighter. This is a useful thing and I’m very glad that someone is monitoring road conditions and letting me make intelligent decisions about which way to drive. On some level, I realize that my beat-up black truck is part of the overall picture represented as a green, yellow or red line. But that map generally doesn’t make me uneasy in the way that a map that allowed you to click on it and see “1999 Toyota Tacoma, 27 mph, heading west on Massachusetts Ave, MA license plate 345 GDF”. The former reads to me as mapping of flow, the latter as surveillance, but it’s not entirely clear to me where the line should be drawn between the two ideas.

The map above is called “In Transit” and is part of the Cabspotting program run by the Exploratorium, using data from Yellow Cab and visualisations by the folks at Stamen Design. All yellow cabs in San Francisco are equipped with GPS and report their location to dispatchers, automatically, once a minute - they’re being surveilled so that dispatchers can respond to requests for cabs or deploy cabs to another part of town. In this visualization, those minute-by-minute accretion of data points are blurred into lines, showing the paths that cabs take. And these paths can reveal some interesting things about how people flow through the city of San Francisco.

Those who know San Francisco will immediately pick out the major highways - 101, 280 and 80 - and the paths across the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate. It’s not hard to intuit where downtown is, to get a sense for the comparative popularity of various routes in and out of the city. The blank spots, on the other hand, are a little confusing. The area near #5 on the map is the Presidio, a former military base that’s now a park… which helps explain why there’s not much cab traffic through it. The areas just south of #4 and #7 aren’t parks - they’re Potrero Hill and Dogpatch, neighborhoods that are better known for industry and low-income housing than for tourist attractions or dot.com startups. To their southeast is a large blank patch on the map: Bayview and Hunter’s Point, a predominantly African-American neighborhood that surrounds a former naval shipyard. In other words, some areas are blank because there’s no good way to drive a taxi there. In other cases, they’re the neighborhoods where few people call for a taxi… or where the taxi drivers aren’t willing to go. The street map helps you figure out how to get from 3rd Street and Evans Avenue to Union Square, while the flow map makes it clear that you probably shouldn’t count on hailing a taxi to make the trip.

Maps of infrastructure visualize what it’s possible for people to do. Maps of flow show what they actually do. The two may diverge sharply.

A few years ago, if you wanted to send an email to a friend across the street in Accra, there’s a good chance the message would travel through the US or the UK on the way. Ghana had several competing internet service providers, and each provider bought internet connectivity from a different vendor. The vendors’ networks connected, just not in Ghana. So sending email across town meant sending a message on one ISP, to the US, transferring over to the other ISP, and back to Ghana, a journey that involved two satellite hops to cross the Atlantic. This is called “trombone routing”, and it’s generally something to be avoided.

If you mapped the network traffic of Ghanaian internet users - the flow - it sure looked like they were sending a lot of bits to and from the US. This might have been a result of trombone routing of emails between Ghanaians. Or it might have been because many websites are hosted in the US, and Ghanaian users wanted to read cnn.com, espn.com, etc. Knowing which it was mattered - if lots of traffic was local, it would make sense to construct an Internet Exchange Point (IXP), a crossing point for local ISPs to exchange traffic. If it was mostly requests to US webservers, the IXP wouldn’t save much money and probably shouldn’t be built. An infrastructure map would be no help - almost all traffic needed to go through the US, even if the intent was to communicate locally. To build a map of flow, Ghanaian ISPs would need to monitor their traffic, distinguish between domestic and foreign requests, share this information with fellow ISPs and make a decision regarding the utility of an IXP.

Ghanaian ISPs made the decision to build the Ghana Internet Exchange not based on understanding their own flow, but by looking at the behavior of other African exchange points. When ISPs in Johannesburg started exchanging traffic directly, they discovered that roughly 50% of their traffic was local to South Africa. The administrators who set up an exchange point in Nairobi saw roughly 25-30% local traffic. The disparity? There’s a lot more web servers hosted in South Africa than in Kenya, and hence more local traffic. To make the decision to build an IXP on a rational basis, you need to know not just the flow of internet traffic, but the flow the traffic would take if it were routed via an IXP. You need to know not just what users are doing, but what their intention is. This is a tough enough mapping challenge that you end up guessing, not analyzing.

The distinction between maps of infrastructure and maps of flow matters to me because I think it can help explain certain misconceptions and misunderstandings about our connected world. My contention - with very little to support it, frankly - is that we tend to assume more connections than actually exist. We see a map of infrastructure that shows it’s possible to fly from Antananarivo to Albania and assume, on an unconcious level, that the connection is routine, frequent, common. We look at maps of the internet - a near-worldwide tangle of undersea cables - and assume that data flows everywhere, connecting every one of us.

A map of flow would help us understand a more complicated reality. You can fly from Antananarivo to Albania, but you might be the only person this year to make the trip. Traffic flows between Ghana and the US via the Internet. We can see a cable - SAT-3 - that connects West Africa to the global internet through Europe and India. A map of flow could tell us whether that connection is symmetric, whether Americans are looking for information from Ghanaweb as often as Ghanaians are looking at ESPN or CNN. If we could see flow, we might detect the dark spots, the places reached by infrastructure but disconnected - through language, economics, or force of habit - from global flows.

Erik Hersman and I look a bit alike. We’re both beefy, balding white dudes who spend a lot of our time thinking and talking about Africa. We hang out at many of the same development and technology conferences. He’s someone I always enjoy reading, and someone I’m proud to call a friend. A post from Erik a few weeks back on his (brilliant, must-read) blog, White African, got me thinking a bit about what we have in common and what’s different about our backgrounds, and our roles in the tech and development community. (This isn’t entirely a surprise, as the post involved Erik weighing in on a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot this fall and trying to figure out, and reacting to one of my posts on the topic.)

Erik’s parents were bible translators, and he was raised in Kenya and Sudan, studying at Rift Valley Academy in Kijabe, Kenya before spending his adulthood in the US. He lives in Orlando, Florida with his wife and a passel of children, though he spends an enormous amount of time focused on sub-Saharan Africa, managing the AfriGadget blog and helping lead the team behind Ushahidi (both of which should be familiar to readers of this blog, and are worth visiting, if you’re not.) In a sense, he’s suspended somewhere between central Florida and east Africa, one foot in either world.

Erik in Southern Sudan, 1978

In the language of sociologist Dr. Ruth Hill Useem, Erik is a third culture kid. He was raised both in the culture of his parents, and in the cultures of the people he grew up with. Useem argues that kids raised in this way end up developing a third culture by combining elements of their “birth” culture and the local culture they encounter. Useem argues that children who go through this process - the kids of military personnel, missionaries, diplomats and corporate executives - often have more in common with each other than with other kids from their birth culture. More recent research on third culture kids suggests that TCKs, as adults, are often well-adapted to live and thrive in a globalized world. They’re often multilingual as well as multicultural, are generally extremely good at living and working with people from different backgrounds. As a downside, some TCKs report feeling like they’re not really at home anywhere, either in their birth culture, culture they were raised in or any new culture.

Erik’s not just a TCK, he’s also a bridge figure. By “bridge figure”, I mean someone who acts as an interpreter between cultures, introducing people who look at the world in one way to another way of looking at the world. The term has a murky genesis - Xiao Qiang and I started using the term to describe the work bloggers were doing translating and contextualizing ideas from one culture into another. Shortly after, Hossein Derakshan gave a memorable talk at the Berkman Center, explaining that blogs in Iran act as windows, bridges and cafés. I’ve been using the term “bridgeblogger” ever since to refer to people who are building connections between people from different cultures via their online work, and “bridge figures” to people engaged in the larger process of building understanding between cultures.

To understand what’s going on in another part of the world often requires a guide. The best guides have a deep understanding both of the culture you’re encountering and the culture you’re rooted in. Erik is able to do things most Americans aren’t able to do. He can wander around Gikomba, Nairobi and talk to local metalworkers in Swahili, and find out about the process of turning the drive shaft of a Land Rover into a cold chisel… because he’s a Kenyan. And he can tell the story in a way that’s interesting to an audience of American geeks.. because he’s an American geek. Lots of people have one of these skillsets - bridge figures are lucky enough to have both. Third culture kids are well-positioned to act as bridges because they’ve got strong roots in two or more cultures, but it doesn’t guarantee that all will take on the task of bridging.

Bridge figures have lived substantial parts of their life in at least two cultures. Sometimes this is a function of physical relocation - an African student who pursues higher education in Europe, an American Peace Corps volunteer who settles into life in Niger semi-permanently. It can also be a function of the job you do - a professional tour guide who spends her days leading travelers through Dogon country may end up knowing more about the peculiarities of American and Australian culture than a Malian who lives in New York City but interacts primarily with fellow immigrants.

Merely being bicultural isn’t sufficient to qualify you as a bridge figure. Motivation matters as well. Bridge figures often care passionately about one of the cultures they inhabit and want to celebrate it to as wide an audience as possible. One of the profound surprises for me in working on Global Voices has been discovering that many of our community members aren’t motivated by a sense of post-nationalist globalism, but by a form of nationalism. Many of our volunteers live in the US or Europe but come from developing nations, and their work on Global Voices is motivated, at least in part, by explaining their home cultures to the people they’re now living and working with. Erik’s work on AfriGadget is motivated, in part, by a strong desire to explain to Americans the creativity and innovation that characterize African approaches to technology. Equally, his work on projects like Ushahidi bring some of the best thinking around technology in developed nations to bear on African problems.

Not everyone wants to build bridges between the cultures they’ve encountered. Immigrants - and especially the children of immigrants - often reject their birth culture and embrace the culture they’ve emigrated to in a way that makes then poorly positioned to act as cultural bridges. Others reject the culture they’ve moved to, staying rooted in their birth culture and consciously remaining outside the culture they’re living within. In Mohsin Hamid’s brilliant novel “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”, the protagonist and narrator, a Pakistani Muslim working in the New York financial sector, rejects his role as a “janissary” for American capitalism and becomes a leader of fundamentalist students in his native country. We expect the narrator to act as a bridge, explaining his home country to a Western reader - when he fails to act as a bridge and turns on his audience, it’s a deeply surprising narrative moment.

My personal path towards engagement with Africa is a different one than Erik’s. I grew up in suburban Westchester County, New York, not in southern Sudan. Neither of my parents were missionaries or even world travelers, and I didn’t meet any Africans until high school, when a shy Cameroonian girl joined our class and threw the grading curve in French classes entirely out of whack. (Who knew Africans spoke French?) I didn’t become interested in African culture in a sustained way until I started studying African music in college, a decision that had more to do with the influence of a brilliant teacher initially than my interest in the field. The fact that my time in Ghana in 1993-4 was a positive one owes a great deal to the intervention of dear friends who helped bridge cultural divides for me.

Me in Ghana, 1993.

I am not a bridge figure. Fond as I am of sub-Saharan Africa in general and Ghana in particular, I lack the nuanced cultural and linguistic understanding to explain contemporary African news, politics and life to fellow Americans except as an informed outsider. On the other hand, I’m more or less obsessed with African politics and development, and spend a great deal of time and energy trying to learn more and to share what I learn with others. My initial fascination with Ghana has turned into a more general fascination with people and places I know little about. Somewhere in the process of discovering Accra, I became a xenophile.

Ghanaian-American philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah is leading a drive to revive the term “cosmopolitan” as a way of describing people positioned to thrive in a globally interconnected world. He traces the concept back to he Cynics, who saw themselves not just as loyal to their individual polis, but citizens of the wider cosmos, and offers a path forward for the identity. Cosmopolitans, to Appiah, are those who take seriously the notion of obligations to those who are not our own kin, and take an interest in the beliefs and practices those others, striving to understand, if not accept or adopt, other ways of being.

In “Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers“, Appiah uses his own experience as the child of a Ghanaian mother and an English mother, educated both in Ghana and the UK, living in the US, to explain the complexities of cultural encounter and identity in a connected world. But using Appiah as our model cosmopolitan risks making the definition too narrow. I’d characterize Appiah as a classic bridge figure, raised with feet in two cultures, and a career that’s focused on connecting Ghanaian and European approaches to philosophy. But his definition of cosmopolitanism leaves space for xenophiles as well, individuals who commit to an open, curious, receptive approach to the world, actively seeking to understand the complexity and diversity of the world we’re living in.

Bridge figures build bridges between cultures, and xenophiles walk across them. When Mahmood Al-Youssif, Ahmed Al-Omran or Amira Al Hussaini write online in English to explain life on the Arabian peninsula, they’re not writing for local audiences - they’d write in Arabic if they were. They’re inviting people who don’t know about or don’t understand the region to learn more, and those who know a bit about the region to stay connected and in touch. Bridging is a frustrating process when no one crosses the bridge - it’s far easier to talk to people who already speak your language and understand your culture. Blogs die without readers; bridgeblogs die without xenophile readers.

It’s been a challenge for me to define xenophiles as a category without falling victim to definitions that are trivial or superficial. It’s easy to dismiss the idea by suggesting that everyone who eats sushi and listens to world music is - or considers herself to be - a xenophile. Too loose a definition and “xenophile” ends up sounding like a synonym for “liberal”, “multicultural or even “politically correct”, which isn’t what I’m intending.

Xenophilia is about connecting with people, not with cultural artifacts or other things. Liking Japanese food or Senegalese hiphop doesn’t make you a xenophile - xenophilia is about making connections across language and cultural barriers motivated by your interest in making better sushi or translating Daara J lyrics. Xenophilia is broader than the love for a specific culture or an aspect of that culture - it’s a broader fascination with the complexity and diversity of the world. Xenophilia changes your behavior, especially your behavior in seeking for information, leading you to pay attention not just to the parts of the world that have caught your attention, but to others that you know little about.

While it’s easy to define xenophilia in a way that trivializes it, there’s also a danger of making a definition too onerous. My suspicion is that many xenophiles have lived in or close to another culture long enough to lose the certainty that their home culture is the “right way” to think about the world. (My time in Ghana gradually eroded my certainty that people in other nations secretly wanted to be Americans, or that the American approach to social organization, especially to the role of the extended family, was the right way to do things. This was a deeply uncomfortable and unsettling process.) But I don’t want to limit the definition of xenophilia to those of us lucky enough to have the chance to live and work outside our native cultures.

Most of us can’t aspire to be bridge figures - we’re simply not rooted in multiple cultures. But we can aspire to be xenophiles. It’s my argument that we need to. The world we live in is so complicated and interconnected that many problems, both big and small, require openness, understanding and the ability to communicate with people from different cultures. Imagine trying to solve climate change without talking with Indian and Chinese citizens… or living a full life in an urban neighborhood without connecting with your neighbors who speak different languages.

My work the past decade has focused on cultivating xenophiles. Ultimately, Geekcorps was more successful in building a group of knowledgeable, dedicated and committed geeks who care about the developing world than it was in training geeks in developing nations. Global Voices is a space filled with bridge figures, desperate to reach xenophiles through whatever media we can access. Geekcorps taught me that it isn’t hard to build xenophiles if you can afford to buy a lot of airplane tickets - working in another country is a surefire way to ensure you’re going to need to learn to communicate with people from another culture, and is likely to produce the change in perspective that leads to xenophilia. Global Voices is (in part) an experiment to see whether xenophilia can be cultivated without plane tickets, offering the chance to connect with people in other parts of the world through their stories, videos and pictures.

The Internet Age should be a golden age for bridge figures and for xenophiles. The same tools that make it possible for me to obsess over sumo or argue about the Ghanaian elections from Pittsfield, MA allow Erik to tour you through Nairobi without you leaving your house. A major challenge is that these tools enable all sorts of other behaviors, including the ability to cocoon ourselves in information that’s unthreatening and unsurprising. The challenge bridge figures face is in finding people willing to listen; the challenge for the xenophile is locating and listening to these different voices without being overwhelmed by the roar of the internet.

I’ve been in Dubai for the past three days at a World Economic Forum event. WEF is starting a new project called “Global Agenda Councils”, and they’ve invited people to participate in conversations on 68 topics, ranging from the very broad (”Faith”), the very scary (”Pandemics”) and the very prosaic (”The Future of Mining and Metals”.)

(Why 68? According to one account, they wanted 70, to riff on the lucky number seven, but two didn’t come together.)

I suspect that gatherings like this one represent the ultimate nightmare for the world’s conspiracy theorists - seven hundred wealthy, powerful, privileged, important and self-important people gathering in an opulent setting to debate the world’s problems. And more than one person pointed out that there’s something of an irony in asking the sorts of folks here at WEF to address the outcome of the global fiscal crisis - aren’t these the folks who caused it?

To disappoint all the folks who imagine a secret world government emerging from these meetings… don’t count on it. The phrase, “the world’s largest brainstorming session” has been thrown around for the past couple of days, and that may or may not be true, but the emphasis has been on brainstorming and talking. Lots of talking. Three days of talking.

This was a very useful thing within our group. While the folks confronting “the future of the internet” agreed that we’re not facing a crisis, as many of the other groups are, we did agree that there’s two sets of issues worth considering in explaining the state of the current internet: stresses, and fractures. Stresses are widespread strains to the system - a huge increase in traffic due to filesharing and online video, the continuing copyright wars, the professionalization of cybercrime, the increasing effectiveness of DDOS attacks.

Fractures are slightly more subtle. They’re issues that if left unchecked might cause the single, unified internet we know and love to split into multiple internets. These include incompatibilities between the mobile and wired web, the immobility of content trapped in the “walled gardens” of companies like Facebook which make it challenging to migrate content, as well as more social issues, like the fragmentation of public space online (the possibility of echo chambers ala Cass Sunstein) and the danger of fragmentation by language, culture and local laws, my current obsession.

The structure of the event demanded that we offer policy recommendations to ensure a healthy future of the internet. This is easy to do, but hard to do in a way that breaks new ground. We spent a difficult and frustrating day simultaneously trying to draft a short set of recommendations and brainstorming on ways that the internet could be a useful tool for the other 67 councils, most of which are working on issues more pressing and challenging than ensuring a vital, creative and generative internet. The brainstorm yielded what I think is a pretty interesting frame, the idea of the internet as a tool for social homeostasis.

Homeostasis is the set of processes that organisms use to regulate their internal environments. If a mammal gets hot, homeostasis systems cause the animal to sweat or pant, trying to cool it off. They work based on feedback mechanisms, constantly monitoring environments and changing behavior based on this feedback. It’s been observed that an emerging “internet of things” will allow for refined environmental monitoring, both locally and globally. On a personal basis, you could have much better control of your personal energy use if you could get a display of every appliance turned on in your house and its energy usage; similarly, we’d likely have a better understanding of temperature fluctuations if we could embed billions of temperature and atmospheric sensors into infrastructure around the globe.

This idea of using the internet as a backbone for feedback mechanisms may have utility beyond the realm of environmental problems. Image a schoolsystem with pervasive internet connections and a mechanism for collecting and listening to feedback from students, teachers, administrators and parents. An enlightened school system might be able to make better decisions and change decisionmaking mechanisms through incorporating opinions from all levels. As Jeff Jarvis pointed out, it’s as likely that networked publics will build their own feedback mechanisms and find their own ways to institute change, either cooperating with existing powers or challenging thems.

For the internet to act as a medium for homeostasis mechanisms, it needs to be free, open, uncensored, accessible, multilingual and all other sorts of good things. It also might mean that it makes sense to advocate for universal connectivity in the context of advocating for other problems, believing that systems that aggregate information bottom up and communicate it vertically and laterally could lead towards better problem-solving on large societal issues. A few of my colleagues and I are trying to group-write a short essay on this topic, which I hope to share on this blog later this week.

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One of the reasons I was excited to come to the Global Agenda Councils meeting was the chance to visit Dubai. I hadn’t visited previously, and I’ve a wide range of opinions about the city. We got a truly unusual picture of the city, one that gave me a bit of cultural whiplash on Sunday.

The geeks and the sheik. Photo by David Sifry.

After the main conference ended, our group stuck around to meet Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, prime minister of the UAE and ruler of Dubai. The sheik had requested our presence for a fifteen-minute audience to brief him on our deliberations. This turned out to be long enough for each member of our party to make a single statement about what we thought might be important about the internet’s future.

I had been thinking about internet censorship that day since encountering a brief story in the Gulf Times about a set of photos of the Obama family watching election results. The story referenced a Flickr URL, and when I tried to load the page, I got the UAE blockpage, alerting me that “the site falls under the Prohibited Content Categories of the UAE’s Internet Access Management Policy.” In UAE’s defense, they’re transparent about filtering the internet and allow people to request sites be reviewed and unblocked. However, my colleagues at the Open Net Initiative have researched UAE’s filtering closely and argue that it’s inconsistent and strays beyond censoring “un-islamic” topics to blocking political speech. I used my 90 seconds to introduce the idea that the internet is a method for social feedback and that it can’t work in this fashion unless the internet is open, pervasive and uncensored. I have no idea whether the sheik and his advisors realized this was a reference to UAE’s filtering policies - my colleagues did, and I felt better than I would have had I let the opportunity pass.

With no international incidents other than David Sifry beginning his remarks, “Your excellency, Hi!” which reduced several of our team members to laughter, much of our merry band headed downtown to explore the older side of Dubai. We’d spent three days in the Jumeirah Beach hotel and associated properties, which are very beautiful, hospitable and comfortable and feel very much like the newer hotels in Las Vegas. They’re an imagined version of Arabia, very comfortable but entirely divorced from history, and it’s very hard to feel like you’re actually visiting a real place. Walking alongside the creek in old Dubai, I felt myself relax a bit.

Walking around the souks, it’s easier to understand how Dubai came to be - a trade city allowing for interaction between Indian, Persian and Arabian culture. It’s amazingly multiethnic and cosmopolitan in the old town - I had fun trying to identify national origin by face and dress. Walking with Bruce Schneier, he observed, “It’s like one country laid on top of another.” Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, maybe? Or Las Vegas redone by Walt Disney overlaid on the universal souk. I managed to talk our group into dining downtown at one of the outlets of the Evergreen Restaurant, a chain of vegetarian Indian restaurants pitched at the folks who work in Dubai, not at wealthy travellers. We ordered an embarrasing amount of food for six people, all of which was richly spiced, vegetarian and filling - dinner for six cost under $25.

And then to experience true cultural whiplash, we took Afghan-driven gypsy cabs back to our luxurious hotel, cleaned ourselves up as best as we could, and talked our way into the Burj al Arab hotel. Advertised as a “seven star” hotel, the Burj isn’t the sort of place you simply visit and stroll around in - fellow travelers told us that we needed to make a reservation and leave a cash deposit just to tour the lobby. We managed to talk our way into the bar that’s cantilevered high above the ocean, one of the more opulent and absurd spaces I’ve ever entered. And yes, the drink I ordered cost more than the dinner we’d purchased for six.

I came out of the evening feeling a little dizzy, and not just from the gin. Many development economists suggest that a society with a high level of economic inequality is inherently unstable, and it’s pretty clear that the difference between the world of the Burj al Arab and the Evergreen is pretty vast. Then again, the folks who do most of the physical and service work in Dubai are guest workers here on work visas, making it highly unlikely that there’s going to be an effective rebellion of the underclass.

I had a moment of reassurance in a very strange way as I drove home today, not about economic inequality in the UAE, but about Schneier’s observation about places laid atop one another. I was hungry as I drove home from Kennedy and knew from experience that there are few places to stop on the Hutchinson Parkway. So I turned off at the exit for City Island and had breakfast in a truly unique corner of New York that looks more like a coastal town in Maine than like any part of the Bronx I’d ever seen. I was baffled by the fact that I’ve driven past the turnoff to this neighborhood dozens of times and never realized that there was a treelined parkway leading two miles to a rustic beach town, which is part of the city of New York. It’s not the difference between the downtown and the beach hotel in Dubai, but it’s a reminder that places are laid atop one another all the time, not just in the strange, beautiful and unsettling country that is the UAE.

I gave a talk a few weeks ago in Barcelona that was pretty well-received and widely blogged. Specifically, several bloggers have picked up and amplified the seven key points I offered in the talk - a list of principles that I believe characterize much of the best innovation coming out of Africa. I was deeply flattered that the blogger behind Design in Africa put these principles into dialog with advice offered by a couple of my heroes: Paul Polak and Amy Smith. And given the interest in the ideas expressed in those points, I thought I’d take the time (a flight from Dubai to JFK…) to offer a more thorough picture of the talk.

(This is probably a mistake. My guess is that the reason the seven points post has been widely circulated is that it was only a couple of hundred words, as opposed to the proxility I generally offer in this space. Turning something pithy and digestible into a Russian novel is probably not the best way to increase the currency of my ideas, but hey, evidently that’s how I roll.)

My friends in Barcelona asked me to address the question of innovation. How should social change organizations innovate? I realized that I didn’t have a lot of great examples of innovation initiated by social change organizations… but I had lots of great stories about ambitious and smart Africans innovating. This train of thought led me to think about approaches to innovation and, more or less directly, to how I failed out of graduate school.

I didn’t fail out, per se. I dropped out. But I dropped out because it was very clear that the graduate school I was in - the Integrated Electronic Arts program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Insitute - wasn’t a very healthy place for me to be. For one thing, the school was housed in the sub-basement of a communications building. There wasn’t any natural light in any of the spaces, and it had become something of a tradition for students to design “virtual windows”, usually computer monitors showing live or recorded footage of an outdoor scene designed to make the underground space less imprisoning and oppressive. (iEAR is no longer in a sub-basement and I understand it’s a much better program now, so please don’t read my failure to thrive as a comment on the current program.)

My real problem with iEAR was the problem of the blank canvas. I made some cool art as an undergraduate by playing with garbage. I somehow persuaded the environmental studies department at Williams College to give me a grant to spend the summer of 1992 wandering the garbage dumps, scrapyards and railroad tracks of northwestern Massachusetts and turning the junk I found into musical instruments. Then I’d pull out a four-track recorder and make strange, clanking music with said instruments and try to persuade my friends who were studying modern dance to build dances and perform on stage with me. It worked surprisingly well, well enough to get me an audition tape that first got me a scholarship to study in Ghana and later a scholarship to graduate school. Don’t knock junk art until you try it.

The great thing about making art out of junk is that it tells you what it wants to be. The decorative metal collar from under the glass bulb on a lightpost? Well, it’s too heavy and irregular to ring when you hit it, so it’s not a bell. But it’s shaped a bit like a dumbek and has a nice resonant cavity. Obviously, it’s a drum. All it needs is a skin made from the plastic top of a coffee can and some kite string to tension the membrane.

The tools we used at iEAR didn’t tell me what to do. Instead, they told me that I could do anything. You can put anything you want in that blank Photoshop window, limited only by your ability to draw, photograph or render it. Some of my colleagues thrived in this environment - my dear friend Daniel Beck used these tools to enhance the beautiful work he was already doing, making dark and beautiful films with a balky movie camera and a rusted tripod. Most of us didn’t fare so well, making art that was either absurdly overambitious or merely self-indulgent. I hated the stuff I was making… which rapidly turned into hating myself… which made me uniquely vulnerable to taking the first job offer that would get me out of the damned sub-basement.

(The job turned out to be to help co-found Tripod.com, which turned out to be a good thing indeed.)

Here’s what I learned by failing out of art school: constraints are good. They force you to be creative. If you’ve got a vast supply of precious hardwoods and carefully crafted musical hardware, you’ll probably spend a year failing to build a beautiful mandolin. (Trust me, I’ve done that, too.) But given some rusty wire, a couple of sheets of plywood and some thin sheets of plastic, you can make a jammin’ junk balalaika over the course of a long weekend. It won’t be pretty, it won’t look or work 1exactly the way you want it to… but the fact that you’re working within sharp constraints will force you into some creative solutions. (2″ PVC sawed lengthwise as a neck? Yep, that’ll work.)

It turns out that great artists choose to constrain themselves all the time. Some of Picasso’s most moving works were made in his blue period, when he constrained himself - consciously or otherwise - to a limited, stark color palette. While I love buildings where Antonin Gaudi used a bricolege of colored tile, his most moving building, Sagrada Familia, shows the architect constrained to simple, smooth white shapes. And it wasn’t until I bothered reading up on Joan Miro that I realized that he was a phenomenally technical painter before he decided to constrain himself to expressive, colorful, childlike compositions that look, at first glance, like doodles. (Three artists with a Barcelona connection. That’s what we public speakers do - pander to the crowd.)

Innovation comes from constraint. And most of us aren’t smart enough to know what to do with a blank canvas.

This helps explain why there’s so much gorgeous African innovation for friends like Erik Hersman and Juliana Rotich to feature on Afrigadget. The soccer ball, pictured above, summarizes this neatly for me. If you’re a soccer-mad kid in Kibera, Narobi, you may not have a ball to play with. But there are lots of plastic bags littered around the neighborhood. Gather a few of them, tie them together with a scrap piece of rope and you’ve got a very cool soccer ball. Leave a tail on the rope and you can train yourself to be a better ball-handler, hacking the ball on your foot while keeping hold of the string, and tucking the string in to play on the field. Your product, in some ways, is even better than the one you’d buy if you had enough money to buy a soccer ball. And if you lose it or it gets stolen, you can build another one with a modest investment of time and resources.

You’ve heard the expression “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. It’s a compact way of making the point that you should use the right tool for a job, that you should make sure that you’re considering a question in the proper light before offering an answer. It’s a good expression.

But what about situations where you really only have a hammer. Does that mean you should ignore all opportunities that would call for pliers, or a philips screwdriver? Should you constrain yourself to living in the world of nails?

Not actually an African hammer. It’s a metaphor, people. Run with it.

The African hacker’s approach to this is to find a friendly blacksmith and hack your hammer. A little welding and you can put a prybar on there, maybe a compact axe. File down one of those prybar flanges and it’ll make a nice screwdriver as well. You’ve still got a hammer, but it’s a multifunctional hammer, an innovative hammer.

This, by the way, is how lots of innovation occurs in the real world. Eric Von Hippel at MIT’s Sloan School has written extensively about user-driven innovation. “Lead users” push the limits of what tools can do, and adapt them to solve the problems they’re facing. Companies that learn from these lead users can change their research and development cycle, building products that solve the problems their users actually face. Anyone who is interested in lead user theory could learn a lot from hanging out with African hackers.

So let’s try a challenge based on innovating from constraint. Let’s design a cooling system for market sellers to use to keep their vegetables cold. This is an important task if you’re a small-scale farmer in a hot country - as soon as you pick your crops, they start wilting and become less valuable by the minute. If you can keep your tomatoes, cabbages and carrots cold, you’ll sell more for more money, and you’ve got a better chance of feeding your kids and sending them to school.

Lots of people try to solve this problem by looking at inexpensive electric refrigerators. After all, dorm-sized refrigerators are already pretty cheap - maybe we could scale one down, remove some parts and make an “appropriate technology” developing world version… coincidentally opening up a whole new market for Maytag or Haier.

But that’s a poor solution to the problem. Even if you can reduce the cost from $100 to $30, it’s still way to expensive for the market you’re trying to serve. Plus, your market sellers don’t have electricity either at home or at work, so you need a generator - expensive - and diesel - expensive. And even if you can line up the generator, the diesel, the fridge, none of these things are made locally. If they break, you’re shipping in parts from overseas and asking local mechanics to repair technology they’ve not often worked with.

Our constraints: no electricity, local materials, built and maintained locally, with a price point under $5.

Here’s how you do it. (Here’s how you do it if you’re an extremely creative and innovative Nigerian engineer.) Make two clay pots, one smaller than the other so it can fit inside it and leave a gap. Fill the gap between the pots with sand. Thoroughly wet the sand. Cover the top of your apparatus with a wet cloth. A couple of times a day, wet the sand and the cloth.

It won’t turn the mountains on your can of Coors Light blue, but it will keep your vegetables below 20C even if it’s 45C outside. In fact, the zeer pot works better the hotter and drier the day is. It uses the principle of evaporative cooling. As the water evaporates, the more energized, fast-moving molecules evaporate first, leaving the cooler, less-energetic ones behind. Your molecules left behind are less energetic on average, which is to say, cooler… and the vegetables inside that inner pot will stay cooler too.

(Before you try this at home, remember that this works in places that are hot and dry. If you’ve got 80% humidity, there’s going to be lots less evaporation than in a town in the Sahara, and this isn’t going to work nearly as well. Also, don’t try it with glazed pots - it works lots better if the clay jars are porous.)

The principles of evaporative cooling are well understood in the developing world, but Nigerian engineer Mohammed Bah Abba did a wonderful job of turning a physical phenomenon into a product that local artisans could build and local merchants would use. The pots are in wide use in northern Nigeria and also in southern Sudan. They cost roughly $2 for a set, and the market women who use them report that they make 25-30% more money from selling their vegetables.

The takeaway from the zeer pot story is the same as from the soccer ball - what you’ve got is more important than what you lack. If the problem of cooling vegetables turns into the absence of electricity to power your refrigerator, you’re going to solve the problem badly. But if youve got sun, sand, clay and some creativity, you might have a brilliant solution.

If we can use the sun to cool things down, surely we can use it to heat things up, yes? There’s an amazing wealth of designs for solar ovens available on the web. You can find plans for ones that look like umbrellas, ones that are unassuming glass-topped, foil lined boxes, ones made with tin cans as cooking chambers. Given the level of innovation and creativity surrounding these ovens - and the power of the sun in Africa - you’d assume that everyone would have adopted solar cooking.

Nope. Actually, solar ovens are a tough sell, even in places where firewood is extremely scarce. In refugee camps in Darfur, firewood is literally a matter of life and death. Men who go off to seek firewood risk being killed by fighters from other of other factions. Women risk getting raped. So families send young girls off, hoping they’ll be too young to be raped, or young boys, hoping they’re too young to be kidnapped and recruited as soliders.

Surely these folks would like a solar oven, yes? That’s the logic behind several projects designed to put solar ovens in refugee camps. But friends of mine who work in those camps aren’t especially enthusiastic about their prospects for success. You see, culture matters.

The woman cooking in the picture above is my friend Rose. She cooked for the geeks who lived in Geekhalla, the office and house we maintained as Geekcorps Ghana HQ. It was a really nice house, with electric power and a fully-equipped kitchen with a four-burner gas stove. So why’s Rose cooking over charcoal? Well, that’s how you make banku. It requires a particular kind of low, slow cooking with a great deal of stirring to get the consistency right, and Rose found that she could only make the banku she liked to eat and serve by cooking over charcoal in the backyard.

Stirring is the one thing you can’t do in a solar oven - as soon as you open the container where the food is cooking, you lose a great deal of heat. And stirring radically changes how your food cooks. I discovered this when a friend gave Rachel and me a crockpot. We eat a lot of stews in the winter, meat and potato creations that we cook on the stove on a lazy Sunday and eat for the following week. Our friend thought we’d enjoy a crockpot - we could put the ingredients in early on a workday, leave it alone all day and enjoy a stew in the evening. We tried it once and got a stew… that wasn’t stew. Everything was cooked through, but the starch from the potatoes hadn’t thickened the broth - basically, we got hot broth with cooked meat and vegetables in it. We hadn’t stirred, and it made all the difference. (We salvaged the stew by cooking it on the stove for about an hour, stirring vigorously… :-)

If people cook by stirring their food, they’re going to be highly resistant to cooking in a solar oven - the food won’t look or taste right. You’d think this would be the least of the concerns of people living in a refugee camp and risking rape to gather firewood. And you’d be wrong. My friends who’ve been working the Darfur camps report much more success showing people how to build more efficient three-stone fires, using three pieces of wood, and pushing them slowly into the fire, burning only the ends of the sticks. People are also having more success designing fuel efficient jikos, metal stoves usually made from scrap metal. A project at UC Berkeley has created a jiko that’s three times as efficient as a three-stick fire, but at $30 per stove, it’s still too expensive.

Don’t fight culture. Or, if you do, be cognizant of the fact you are, and that you may well lose.

The fine folks at Wildlife Direct, one the projects that focuses on bettering life for people and wildlife in Virunga National Park in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, turned their efforts to the problem of charcoal. This is one of the most pressing problems facing the developing world. Charcoal is an environmental nightmare. You get it by cutting down living trees, digging pits and partially burning them. Then you take the resulting coal and put it into sacks and sell it to women, who bring it home to cook with. They often cook inside, creating fumes and smoke that damages their children’s health.

Basically, the only good thing you can say about charcoal is that it’s cheap and people like to use it. Except that it’s not cheap anymore. As the authorities in the DRC try to prevent destruction of gorilla habitat, they’re protecting the forests from logging. This means lots less wood to turn into charcoal, which means rising prices.

The folks at Wildlife Direct tried to do the right thing. They knew that plant oils - extracted from local crops like palm nuts - could be used as cooking fuel. So they worked with a pair of German manufacturers to design a very beautiful stove, optimized for plant oils. It didn’t work. It’s not clear why - the web account of the project shows a great deal of enthusiasm for the stove… then moves on to another technology in a couple more weeks, not mentioning the pretty German stoves. My guess is that a) they didn’t work, b) they worked, but they broke and were hard to fix or c) they worked, but it was hard to get a supply of plant oil. One way or another, they violate the principle of locally made, local materials, local repairs.

The technology the Wildlife Direct folks moved onto is biomass charcoal. Dr. Amy Smith helped convince me a few years back that biomass charcoal is pretty much the coolest new technology being pioneered in the developing world. To make biomass charcoal, you take agricultural waste (the stalks from maize plants for instance), squeeze the water out of it and form the resulting bits into briquettes. You dry them out, and burn them as you’d burn charcoal. It takes serious experimentation to get it right, but the results are pretty amazing.

You end up with “charcoal” that’s produced as a fast-renewing resource, that repurposes agricultural waste and that, remarkably, burns cleaner than traditional charcoal.

There’s another great thing about biomass charcoal - it creates jobs. It takes a lot of people to work the press to produce this stuff, to prepare the “mix” for pressing, to dry the finished briquettes. But you can work within existing market mechanisms - people who make their living selling charcoal can make their living selling biomass charcoal, and people who made their living illegally logging and creating charcoal can create biomass charcoal. And the wooden presses can be made and repaired locally.

Two more lessons here. First, embrace market mechanisms. If people are making money making charcoal, they’re going to be deeply unhappy if you put them out of work… possibly unhappy enough to point an AK-47 at you, as happened when Virunga rangers tried to put charcoal dealers out of work. It’s much better to figure out how to leverage the mechanisms that already exist and put them to work to achieve your goals.

Similarly, there’s a lot to be said for learning how to innovate on existing platforms. People are already familiar with charcoal. They’ve got stoves that burn it, and they know how to cook with it. It’s lots easier to give them better charcoal than to convince them to cook differently. Charcoal is a very promising platform because it’s well understood and widespread - if you can make better charcoal, you’ve got a good chance of making a major, widespread change.

The platform that’s seen perhaps the most innovation in Africa is the bicycle. With a little bit of hacking, you can turn a bicycle into a cargo vehicle, loading it down with frightening quantities of bananas. Add a wheeled cart behind and a bicycle is an ambulance. Add a tiny one-stroke engine and it’s a motorbike, capable of propelling the rider over long distances… and she can start pedaling when she runs out of gas. In Uganda, bicycles become phone booths, with wireless phones attached to metal boxes mounted on the handlebars.

Because bikes are so common in Africa, they’re very well understood. Because they’re well understood, they’re hackable. A technology that’s precious, strange and scarce won’t get hacked - everyone will be afraid of breaking it. Tech that’s common, repairable and replaceable will.

Bikes get really interesting when you let them change function. In my single favorite video on Afrigadget, Peter Kahugu shows off his knife-sharpening bicycle in Nairobi. I love the video because I owned the same damned bicycle when I lived in Ghana in 1993. It’s a heavy, Indian-made beast, but it’s indestructable, and has some cool features. One useful feature is a huge kickstand that surrounds the back wheel. This lets you park the bike with the rear wheel off the ground… which allows you to ride the bike and spin the rear wheel without the bike going anywhere.

That’s the key to Peter’s business, as he uses the power of that back wheel to turn a belt which turns a grindstone mounted on the handlebar… which lets Peter sharpen knives and scissors, a trade that pays him a solid wage, roughly $10 a day. His business is entirely portable, which lets him bring his services to his clients. And he can take his tools home at the end of the day. The bicycle is still a transport tool, but it’s also a power generation tool.

William Kamkwamba has never met Peter Kahugu, but they’re spiritual kin. William got interested in electrical power living in a Malawian village that’s disconnected from the electric grid. One of the few ways to generate power is to use a bicycle dynamo, a simple tool that captures the motion of a spinning bicycle tire and uses it to rotate a coil of wire within a magnet. The current that results can be used to power a light for the bicycle… or, really, anything else, if you can just figure out how to keep pedaling the bike.

So William attached windmill blades to the sprocket of a bicycle and put the assembly on top of a tower made of wood. The wind turns the sprocket, the chain turns the rear wheel, which turns the dynamo, which produces sufficient power to light his parents’ house with Christmas lights and power two radios.

(That William did all this with a grade school education is part of the story. Or that he had to manufacture all the switches and acoutrements himself, usually by heating and shaping PVC pipe. Or that his windmill got written up in the Malawi Times… which got him written up in some Malawian blogs… which got him into Afrigadget… which helped get him to the TED Africa conference… which got him written up in the Wall Street Journal… all of which means that well-wishers around the world have helped raise enough money to send William to the best highschool in South Africa and, in the long run, to a top engineering university. But that’s another story.)

The mobile phone is the new bicycle. They’re amazingly pervasive in sub-Saharan Africa - there’s at least 100 million handsets in the region, and people in very rural areas are often able to access phones, even if they’re borrowing them from friends or renting time on them from a local entrepreneur. Because they’re pervasive and well understood, they’re hackable. And they’re changing function. So while there are lots of cool stories about peole using phones to get better prices for their fish or to share information on market prices for maize, the stuff that flips my wig is when people use phones to replace cash.

Until you’ve lived in an all-cash society, you have no idea what a problem cash is. The guy in the photo above is Stophe Landis, who was our program director for Geekcorps in Ghana. This is not the photo of a drug deal going down - Stophe was simply trying to give each of our volunteers a weekly stipend of about $50. At that point, the largest bill available in Ghana was worth a bit less than a dollar. So paying the stipends involved handling large bricks of cash.

Imagine buying a car in this kind of cash society. I don’t have to - I acted as “bagman” for a friend years ago, carrying two huge shopping bags of bills so she could pay $3500 for a used Corolla. When you don’t have checks or credit cards, you pay cash for everything. And when inflation devalues currency quickly, you carry huge stacks of bills.

The phone’s changing all this. To send money from the city to a family member in the village - say to Auntie Grace in Dzolo-Gbogame - you traditionally took a stack of bills, handed them to a taxi driver who was travelling to the region and said, “Hey, give these to my auntie, will you?” It worked better than you’d think… but not all that well. It’s much safer to travel with the cash… but that gets pretty time consuming if you’re travelling home every time you’re trying to send money to your family.

It’s easier today. You buy a couple of phonecards. You call the woman in Dzolo-Gbogame who owns a phone. She rents the phone to other villagers, collecting fees in cash and using it to pay for mobile phone minutes - it’s a good living. You tell her, “I’ve got fifty dollars in mobile phone credit here. I’m going to read the numbers off to you so you can top off your phone. Once you verify that the numbers are real, go give $48 to Auntie Grace and tell her to call me to tell me she got the money.”

That’s the system called “sente” in Uganda, and known by different names in different corners of the continent. It relies on the fact that prepaid mobile phone cards have the remarkable property of turning money into information - your $50 turns into a series of numbers, which can be turned into $50 worth of value at a later point. Information is lots easier to move than money, so you can get money to Auntie Grace without getting into a cab or trusting the cab driver. (You do have to trust the phone lady, but the fact that Auntie Grace can confirm the transfer goes a long way to making that a more secure transaction.) The system works so well that creative phone companies are formalizing the system - M-PESA, the celebrated e-cash system that’s become so popular in Kenya is really just a formalized form of sente.

If this seems like a surprising use for mobile phones, it is. But it makes intuitive sense to people who’ve lived and worked in the developing world. Serious problems, like the difficulty of living in a cash only society, aren’t always obvious from afar.

Another function change phones are taking on is becoming location-sensitive tools. In the same way that my phone talks to GSM towers to give me a rough idea of where I am, allowing me to navigate darkest Queens via my iPhone, Kenyan hackers are figuring out how to turn GSM phones into elephant tracking systems. It’s a good idea to know whether elephants are enroute to your farm as one elephant can eat a year’s crops in a single evening. If you know that elephants are on the way, you can stand in your fields with torches and chase the animals off.

What you need is for the elephants to let you know that they’re coming. SMS works well for this. Elephants are fitted with GSM-powered collars. These collars are aware of “virtual fences” - when the animal crosses into areas where it’s likely to encounter humans, the collar sends a message to a SMS gateway, which forwards a warning to villages who have mobile phones. Because villagers can effectively defend their crops, they’re less likely to attack and kill the elephants.

SMS is an effective tool for monitoring all sorts of large, dangerous mammals. You can make the argument that Morgan Tsvanagarai was able to challenge the first round of Zimbabwe’s presidential elections in no small part due to SMS. A change in polling law meant that every local polling station in Zimbabwe was required to post local voting results publicly. Zimbabwe’s opposition party, MDC, organized an effort to collect these results via SMS. As a result, the MDC knew, within a few hours after the close of polls, that they’d received more votes than ZANU-PF.

When private companies invested in building mobile phone towers, it’s unlikely that they were thinking about eliminating voter fraud, tracking elephants or even moving sums of money around. But infrastructure begets infrastructure. Once you’ve got an infrastructure that lets lots of people communicate, they’ll find ways to make it work as a currency system, for instance - they’ll build new infrastructures on top of it. (Think about how aspects of American car culture - drive in movies, diners, strip malls, big-box stores, just-in time inventory - have been built on top of the internet highway system.)

Here are the seven principles of innovation from constraint that I shared with my audience in Barcelona:

- innovation often comes from constraint
- don’t fight culture
- embrace market mechanisms
- innovate on existing platforms
- realize that problems aren’t obvious from afar
- understand that what you have is more important than what you lack
- build infrastructure on infrastructure

I’d add two other observations that I’ve realized in giving this talk more recently:

- objects need to become familiar and pervasive, then they become hackable
- the really amazing innovation happens when objects change function

I closed the Barcelona talk looking at how these principles were followed or ignored on three international development ICT projects: One Laptop Per Child, Kiva.org and Global Voices, a project I’ve helped lead. I’m not confident that I got those evaluations right. I suggested that OLPC was suspect because it definitively ignores market mechanisms and largely fails to build on what’s already present. You can argue that it innovates on existing platforms, using open source software, or argue that it designs its own hardware and operating environment. But questions like whether the project ignores or embraces culture get very difficult to evaluate, leaving me wondering if this is really an effective method of testing the success or failure of projects, or whether it’s more useful as a way for innovators to think about their work as they’re executing projects.

I suspect that the seven or nine “laws” I’ve offered here are likely augmented by dozens of other useful observations from far more experienced students of developing world innovation like Dr. Smith and Paul Polak. I’m not sure that introducing another seven or nine “laws” is useful, except inasumuch as it lets us draw some generalizations about innovation from constraint.

Making these generalizations forces us to understand that astounding stories like William Kamkwamba’s windmill aren’t isolated cases. They’re everyday miracles, the routine creativity that allows people with limited resources to live, thrive and survive in difficult environments. This sort of innovation is hard for people in developed nations to understand intuitively precisely because we’re free of the constraints that characterize life in the developing world.

Innovators who want to help people in the developing world need to find ways to understand constraint and the creativity that can come from constraints. This is why Dr. Smith asks her students to spend a week living on $2 a day in Cambridge, MA to understand what a serious constraint income is. It’s why I focused on bringing geeks to Africa to live for months at a time, hoping that proximity to these constraints would help them help counterparts working within constraints. It’s why anyone who wants to write software to help poor people needs to step away from the blank screen and into the world of constraint before writing a line of code. Your constraints are your best friend as an innovator, your best chance of creating something with lasting utility.

Yesterday was election day here in the US, and was interesting to see how much like a holiday my colleagues (and I) are treating it. Roughly one third of my colleagues wore Obama shirts - there’s a surprising absence of McCain/Palin gear.

We celebrated our non-holiday (because, oddly enough, election day isn’t a day off for most people, even if polling places are experiencing multiple-hour waits) with a lunch talk by Professor Sunshine Hillygus, political science professor at Harvard and author of “The Persuadable Voter“. Her talk, “Divisive Technology: The Impact of Information Technology on Presidential Campaigning”, focused on the ways in which politicians are using technology to “microtarget” voters and deliver specific messages to specific voters… and what this might mean for (American, mostly) democracy. A timely subject, to say the least.

Professor Hillygus argues that the new information environment - a world of 24 hour news cycles, electronic communication and database marketing - has changed who politicians talk to and what they’re willing to say. The change isn’t just about style - it’s also about substance. These changes go beyond what we’ve expected to see with the rise of blogs - an increased engagement in political debate for those who are already interested and widening gaps in political knowledge for those who aren’t.

Hillygus argues that the ability to microtarget voters, selecting small subsets from databases via questions asked in polling and by cross-checking lists against databases of magazine subscriptions, changes political speech. Candidates are willing and able to take many more stances on issues than they’d take in broadcast media like television. Her research saw major-party presidential candidates in 2004 taking positions on 75 discrete issues in direct mail and email, vastly more issues than either addressed in television ads, speeches or interviews.

The goal of microtargetting, she argues, is not reaching undecided voters. Those guys are unpredictable and unlikely to vote anyway. The goal is to reach persuadable voters. These are voters who may not be aligned with your party, but may align with your candidate on a key issue: a persuadable partisan. This might be a Republican who’s pro-choice. If you can convince that person that an election is about abortion, s/he might be willing to cross party lines and support your candidate. “The goal is to build a coalition between the base and persuadable voters.”

You’re looking “to create cleavages in the opposition”. This can be done by narrowcasting messages to individual voters on issues you think will cause them to break away from their party, which they usually align with based on economic issues. You’re looking for a wedge issue, like gay marriage or abortion. Of the candidate-paid direct mail Hillygus analyzed, 30% focused on wedge issues, and 9% on “moral wedge issues”, as compared to 0% in
television ads.

This targeted campaigning is so effective because it allows the candidate to speak to an audience in terms they’ll understand, but which might not play well on a broader stag. “It’s dog-whsitle politics - you’re sending messages to those you intend without letting anyone else know.” These messages are heavily targeted to active voters in competitive states - this reflects the need to intelligently allocate resources, to people likely to vote and likely to have their vote matter.

She sees this trend as being potentially very damaging to our political life. People may be being “peeled away” based on trivial issues, like which candidate is more pro-snowmobile. (Oddly, this was pretty easy to figure out in the 2008 election.) It’s being used because it works - people are more likely to disagree on social issues than economic ones, she argues. But it’s not clear whether this pattern will hold as clearly in the 2008 elections, in part because Obama is taking a very different approach, targetting people who don’t have a high history of voting participation and attempting to create new voters, instead of persuading existing ones.

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I found myself trying to digest Hillygus’s talk in the wake of Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort. I finished reading the book a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been carrying it around with me, trying to figure out whether to review it or not. There’s much in the book to like - a smart, insightful analysis of American political and social history and a provocative thesis. And there’s much not to like - a thesis that’s supported more via anecdote and history than data, and which ultimately paints an extremely stark picture of American political life.

Bishop argues that Americans are creating ideologically homogenous communities by physically relocating, sorting ourselves into churches and neighborhoods that minimize our contact with the “other” and maximize interaction with those we’ve got ideological and demographic common ground with. He offers a statistical argument based on the rise of “landslide counties”, counties where a presidential candidate wins by more than 20% - he sees a sharp rise in the number of these counties between 1976 and now, and argues that the distribution can’t be explained by gerrymandering.

He offers an explanation of our polarization based on a split of the church into a more liberal branch focused on social issues and a more conservative branch focused on personal salvation. And he traces the rise of megachurches and their use of recruitment techniques which sort new converts into small groups where they interact with people who are very close in age and background. This comfort of the group, writ large, is what we’re looking for when we move… and as Americans are very, very mobile, we’re rapidly sorting ourselves into a red and blue nation.

Okay, so some of this rings true. I’m doing a lot of reading on homophily, and there’s certainly strong evidence that humans will sort themselves into homogenous groups around the smallest differences. It makes sense that we’d gravitate towards people “like” us. And I remember, four years ago, bemoaning the fact that I literally didn’t know anyone who was planning on voting for Bush, and therefore was blindsided by election results. I certainly live in an area that’s politically segregated.

But the red/blue dichotomy proposed by Bishop seems a little too simple to me. Are union steelworkers in Pittsburgh - reliably democratic - the same group as my college professor and dairy farmer neighbors (also both reliably democratic, though probably a mistake to put them in the same category, either)? Professor James Gimpel’s patchwork nation theory seems a lot more nuanced and closer to the reality I’ve observed on the ground.

The patchwork nation - the idea that the US is more complex than red and blue, and likely is better explained by roughly a dozen more complex demographic categories - leaves a bit more room for Hillygus’s theories as well. If we’ve sorted ourselves into red and blue, and we’re looking to our neighbors for cues as how to vote, how persuadable are we really? On the other hand, if we’re living in an “immigration nation” community, it’s possible that we might be pushed to the right with a strong wedge appeal on abortion, or to the left with a strong appeal for immigration reform.

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I’d been hoping that Obama would win so decisively that I could simply dismiss Bishop with evidence that there’s democratic support virtually everywhere. But, of course, a “landslide” in American politics means getting 53% of the vote, not 60% or greater. And there’s no doubt that there are communities where people voted very heavily for one candidate or another.

Map by Mark Newman, licensed under creative commons. I.e., spread it around…

But there’s a lot of purple on this map as well. Perhaps this is because we’re not as well sorted as we will be in a few more years, when we simply can’t speak to each other at all. Or maybe we’re more persuadable and less fixed than Bishop thinks we are.

I’d like to think this last conclusion is the case. Like many Democrats, I’ve taken heart at the stories I’ve heard of long-time Republicans crossing party lines to vote for Obama, either from a desire to be “on the right side of history”, to punish Bush, or for fear that the McCain of 2008 wasn’t the principled maverick of the McCain of 2000. But reality forces me to admit that Obama’s victory has more to do with the turnout of Latino and Black voters, and of some new, younger voters, not hundreds of thousands of voters crossing party lines.

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Is Bishop right? I hope not. He’s got very little hope for a post-partisan nation. And the most exciting thing about the Obama victory for me was the fact that he ran a 50-state campaign and shows a genuine commitment to try to lead the whole country, not just the blue states.

Is Hillygus right? It’s hard for me to say, at least in the 2008 election. Ultimately, wedge issues may have mattered less than the simple economic truths that faced Americans after eight years of unsuccessful policies. The passage of Proposition 8 - illegalizing gay marriage in deeply Democratic California - is a reminder that economic and social policy don’t always go hand in hand.

What I do know is that I’m deeply proud that Americans - white and black, red and blue - managed to elect someone who has a vision of America that’s less about subdivision and microtargetting and more about common ground. Yep, I’m realistic - I understand that “Barack Obama does not fart cinnamon-scented rainbows. He is not trailed by angels and unicorns.” I expect to be disappointed more than once, and to disagree with Obama’s compromises in more than a few cases. But I’m thrilled, not just that we’ve demonstrated that a nation stained by the history slavery can elect a man of color to the highest office in the land… but that he’s committed to a style of government that tries to represent all of us, not just those of us who moved to blue neighborhoods to support him.

I’ve been invited to participate in the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the future of the internet. This is a group of extremely smart folks who’ll be meeting both in the real world (in Dubai late next week) and online to share ideas and strategize about ways to keep the net open, robust, innovative and generative. I’m honored to be part of this group… and I’m trying to figure out how I can push my fellow council members onto some less familiar ground. I worry that there’s likely to be a great deal of agreement in the room on the basic ideas of network neutrality, collective governance and resistance to censorship and control. And since I generally agree with those ideas, I wanted to be provocative in another direction.

We’ve all been asked to write brief essays about the future of the internet. My friend Jeff Jarvis shares some thoughts on his essay, on the idea of the internet as a right. My essay is on the importance of translation in the age of the polyglot internet, and it follows below, with substantial help from my friends involved with Lingua, Global Voices’ amazing translation project.

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The first wave of the Internet revolution changed expectations about the availability of information. Information that was stored in libraries, locked in government vaults or available only to subscribers was suddenly accessible to anyone with an internet connection. A second wave has changed expectations about who creates information online. Tens of millions of people are contributing content to the modern Internet, publishing photos, videos and blogposts to a global audience.

La globalización de internet ha traido la conectividad a 1′3 billones de personas. El internet que proviene de la globalización y de la autoría de los usuarios es profundamente políglota. La Wikipiedia está ahora disponible en más de 210 lenguas, lo que implica que hay comunidades capaces de crear contenido en esas lenguas. El buscador de blogs Technorati observa al menos tantos posts en japonés que en inglés, y algunos expertos especulan que probablemente hay una cantidad parecida de contenido en chino, creado en
sitios como Sina y QQ, que en todos los blogs en inglés juntos.

10年前にくらべて、今インターネットを使い始めるユーザーが、自分の言語のコンテンツを見つける確率は、はるかに高い。しかし、それぞれのインターネットユーザーが参加できる相互関係や会話の割合は、英語がネット上の主要言語であった1997年に、英語が理解できるインターネットユーザーが参加できた割合よりも低い。

আজকের ইন্টারনেট জগতে ভাষাতাত্বিক বিচ্ছিন্নতার ভয় রযে়ছে। পূর্বেকার
ইংরেজী ভাষার আধিপত্যের ইন্টারনেটে এর ব্যবহারকারীরা বাধ্য হতেন তাদের
ভাষাগত বাঁধা ডিঙ্গিযে় একটি একক ভাষায় তাদের চিন্তাধারা প্রকাশ বা বৃহৎ
পাঠকগোষ্ঠীর সাথে কথোপকথনে। কিন্তু আজকের ইন্টারনেটে পর্তুগীজ, চৈনিক, বা
আরবী ভাষাভাষীদের সুযোগ রযে়ছে তাদের নিজের ভাষায় নিজেদের সাথে যোগাযোগের
এবং হয়ত ভাষাগত বাঁধার জন্যে তারা কম আগ্রহী হবেন অন্য ভাষাভাষীদের সাথে
কথোপকথন চালাতে। এটি হয়ত সেইসব লোকদের ভবিষ্যৎবাণীকে সমর্থন করবে যারা
বলেন যে ইন্টারনেট শুধু সমমনাদের যোগাযোগ ও কথোপকথনের মাধ্যম হিসেবেই
উপযোগী। যা তুলে ধরবে না এই সত্যকে যে ইন্টারনেট একটি শক্তিশালী মাধ্যম
জাতিগত, ভাষাগত এবং সংস্কৃতির বাঁধা পেরিযে় অন্যান্য ভাষাভাষীদেরকে জানা
ও বোঝা এবং তাদের সাথে কথোপকথনের জন্যে।

حتى يكون باستطاعة الشبكة العنكبوتية تلبية طموحها الأكبر، علينا أن
نعترف بالترجمة كتحدي محوري لشبكة مفتوحة، مشتركة و محكومة بشكل جماعي.
الكثيرون منا يتشاركون رؤية عن الإنترنت كمكان حيث الأفكار الجيدة من أي
شخص في أي دولة تستطيع التأثير على الآراء و الأفكار حول العالم. هذه
الرؤية لن تتحقق إلا إذا قبلنا تحدي شبكة إنترنيت قادرة على التحدث
بلغات متعددة و بناء أدوات و أنظمة للوصل و الترجمة بين المئات من اللغات
الموجودة على الشبكة

Машинскиот превод нема да ги реши сите наши проблеми. Иако системите за машински превод постојано се подобруваат, тие сепак не го задоволуваат потребниот квалитет за да им овозможат на корисниците да учествуваат и коментираат во дебатите со говорници од други јазици. Најдобрите системи за машински превод сè уште имаат проблеми со секојдневниот и неформалниот јазик и даваат најдобри резултати во превод помеѓу романските јазици. Сонот за систем кој ќе овозможи превод кој е целосно автоматизиран и со добар квалитет помеѓу јазиците англиски/хинди сè уште изгледа недостижен.

در حالی که به شدت این نیاز وجود دارد که ترجمه اتوماتیک –ماشین های ترجمه- به
پیشرفت خود ادامه دهد ولی ما نیاز داریم تمرکز خود را صرف افراد مترجم کرده و
به آنها قدرت و توانایی بخشیم. مترجمان حرفه ای همچنان استاندارد طلایی برای ترجمه مدارک مهم به شمار می
روند. اما این روش ها برای کاربران اینترنت که می خواهند بفهمند دیگر کاربران در چین
یا کلمبیا در مورد چه بحث می کنند و در این بحث ها شرکت کنند ، بسیار گران است.

L’Internet polyglotte exige que nous explorions les potentialités et la puissance de la traduction humaine collaborative. Des centaines de millions d’internautes parlent plusieurs langues, un certain pourcentage de ces utilisateurs sont capables de traduire d’une langue à l’autre. Ces utilisateurs peuvent être l’épine dorsale d’un système puissant et collaboratif de production de contenus traduits et sont capables de prendre à bras le corps la tache audacieuse de traduire le Web.

我們此刻身處在網路內容翻譯新模式的起步階段，是種「同儕產製」的翻譯模式，班克勒（Yochai Benkler）提出這個詞語，以描述籌組合作式計畫時，不同於一般企業組成的新途徑。人們參與翻譯計畫動機各異:建立跨文化橋樑、獲取金錢報酬、個人榮耀等，同理可證，開放碼軟體亦源出於具熱情的程式設計師，在跨國企業支持下，我們需要「同儕產製」的翻譯模式，廣納更多人員與動機一同參與。

Para traduzir a internet, precisamos tanto de ferramentas quanto de comunidades. Programas de memória de tradução de código aberto permitirão que tradutores compartilhem o trabalho com colaboradores ao redor do mundo; mercados de tradução possibilitarão que tradutores e leitores se encontrem mutuamente por meio de sites parecidos com o Mechanical Turk da Amazon aprimorados com métricas de reputação; ferramentas de navegação permitirão que os leitores traduzam páginas continuamente em versões na maior qualidade possível e solicitarão futuras traduções feitas por humanos. Para tornar essas ferramentas úteis, é necessário formar grandes e apaixonadas comunidades, dedicadas a construir pontes em uma internet poliglota, a preservar as línguas menores e a elaborar ferramentas e conhecimento
acessíveis a um público global.

Raha toa ka tsy karohantsika ny olana momba ny internet sy ny fiteny maro dia mety hisy ny fizarazaran’ny internet. Misy fomba fijery mifaninana, ary tsy afaka mifandravona, momba ny fomba hitantanana ny internet. Raha mihena ny fanantoloan’ny internet sy ny internet zaraina, ary maka toerana kosa ny internet sinoa na arabo na anglisy, dia mihena ihany koa ny famporisihana antsika hiasa miaraka ka ho tonga amin’ny fomba fiasa afaka miravona sy mifandray. Tena misy ny mety hisian’ny internet maromaro, voazaran’ny fomba fiteny amin’ny voalohany, ary aty aoriana ho zarain’ny soa toavina mifandrirotra, fanaraham-penotra, ary aro fenotra samihafan’ ny tsirairay.

Mtandao wa intaneti ni chombo chenye nguvu kilichoundwa na wanaadamu ili kuwezesha maungano, ushirikiano na maelewano baina ya mataifa tofauti, rangi na tamaduni. Ili mtandao wa intaneti uweze kufikia uwezo wake wa kuunganisha au kusawazisha tofauti baina ya watu, inatupasa kuliweka kati tatizo hili la lugha na ufasiri katika mazungumzo yoyote yanayohusu mustakabali wa intaneti.

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Found that a little confusing? That was the point. Turns out that very few individuals speak Arabic, Persian, Bangla, Portuguese, and Malagasy… though all those languages are well represented on the Internet. Wonder what you’re missing? Me too. So I’ll link to an English version as well, in case you’re curious.

My hopes for bridging the gaps that challenge us in the age of the polyglot internet rest on human translators, like the amazing folks who produce editions of Global Voices in over twenty different languages. Just how effective is distributed human translation? Within two hours of asking friends for help, that document was translated into six languages. Had I asked at a better time - when our Asian friends were awake - the whole thing would have been done within that timeframe.

Let’s just hope my friends in Dubai find this amusing and take the time to read the English version. Or that one of my friends on the council has deep linguistic talents and can explain what I’m saying above to everyone. And thanks to Nathan Kurz for the idea of turning a document about the polyglot internet into a polyglot document.

I’ve had an artistic idea I’ve wanted to play with for some months now. It was inspired by a conversation with Dale Joachim, who uses cellphones to study owl populations. By calling forests during the night and broadcasting owl calls, he can listen through GSM-enabled microphones and hear responses.

This idea of listening into spaces has morphed into a much weirder idea, one that I’ll likely never get a chance to do… so I might as well share it with you.

There are lots of spaces around the world that map neatly to one another. A Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Canton, Ohio and another one in Canton, China, for instance. On the one hand, they’re the same spaces. On another hand, they’re profoundly different. (For one thing, the shop in Ohio probably doesn’t sell preserved egg porridge.)

KFC in Beijing, photographed by isriya.

I want to build windows between these spaces. We’d place videoconferencing systems unobtrusively in walls within these spaces - possibly something no more complicated than a flat-screen monitor and a webcam. They’d connect, at random, to one of these mapped spaces around the world, and for some period of time, you’d have a window from your restaurant in Ohio into China… and then a few minutes later, into Pakistan or Poland. You’d be able to hear the conversation in the other space, but it wouldn’t be any louder than the ambient noise in your location. If you chose to turn to the monitor and engage with someone on the other side, that would be up to you as well… which would be incredibly cool, but confusing, I suspect.

I’d like to build these windows in a variety of mappable spaces. Some would map very cleanly onto one another - one Starbucks to another, for instance. Others would be more conceptual - a public space in a shopping mall mapping to one in an outdoor market, like Makola in Accra, for instance. Or installing a monitor in place of the mirror above a sink in a public restroom, which maps to a monitor above another sink across the world.

Makola Market, Accra. Photo by Caroline Beaumont for Transaid.

I think we’d want to make all the video streams available online as well, both to show the diversity of locations and because it would create a great opportunity to monitor any possible interactions.

What would we do faced with these windows? Would we ignore them, the way we generally ignore other people in public spaces? Nod politely to f