David Weinberger has an intriguing post up today about the “Fallacy of Examples“. He’s reacting to a column from Nick Kristof in the New York Times titled “The Luckiest Girl“, which recounts the story of Beatrice Biira, a young woman from Uganda whose improbable journey through Connecticut College began with the donation of a goat to her family through Heifer International.

David finds the story moving - how could you not! - but points out that Biira’s amazing journey is hardly a typical outcome of livestock donation programs. Indeed, the reason Kristof is telling it is that it’s so remarkable. And that may be something of a problem:

I’ve noticed in business writing in particular the frequency of what we can call the Fallacy of Examples (a type of Fallacy of Hasty Generalization). You read some story about a successful CEO as if we should learn from his (yes, usually it’s a him) example. But we are struck by examples frequently because they’re exceptional. As exceptions, examples are the last thing you want to learn from.

Not always, though. Sometimes examples are typical. That’s different. The trick is determining which are which.

The problem of deciding whether an example is typical or exceptional struck me as resonant with Clay Shirky’s new (brilliant, must-read, go buy it now) book Here Comes Everybody. Throughout the book, Clay points out that online communities tend to experience a power-law (Pareto) distribution of participation. If you attempt to generalize about the group as a whole from the most prolific participants, you’re going to misunderstand what’s going on.

This is a predictable misunderstanding - we appear to have a tendency to assume that people we encounter are distributed on a bell curve. Fly into Amsterdam and you’ll notice that there are a lot of tall people around. Spend a day or two and you’ll likely conclude that Dutch people are tall, significantly taller than Americans. This turns out to be true - Dutch people are now roughly two inches taller than their American counterparts, likely due to a better diet and excellent state-subsidized healthcare - your extrapolation from a few data points is a pretty accurate one.

Try a different experiment - watch some American TV and try to extrapolate the bell curve of body type in the US. You’re going to get it wrong, and you’re going to feel fat, no matter how skinny you happen to be. People on American television aren’t a bell curve distribution in term of weight - they’re way, way out on an extreme. Media critics suggest that the relentless repetition of images of underweight actresses has a negative impact on young women, leading them to aspire to extreme body types.

Here’s the thing - it’s lots easier to write about extreme examples rather than median ones. (It’s probably easier to watch extremely thin people on TV than ones of median weight as well.) Stories of prolific wikipedians, alpha bloggers or brilliant flickr photographers are more interesting than stories about someone who set up a LiveJournal, posted five times then gave up… which is lots more typical. And Biira’s story is far more compelling than the story of a girl whose family got a goat, and is slightly better fed than the median Ugandan, but who didn’t get to go to school. This, unfortunately, is probably closer to the median effect of livestock donation - not a bad thing, by any means, but not wholly transformative.

The answer to the Fallacy of Examples is not to stop giving examples. Human beings need stories to be interested in issues - that appears to be how we’re wired to take in information. Joi Ito, writing about the recent Global Voices summit, talks about how personal stories can help solve “the caring problem”, making international incidents relavent to audiences who might not care about this news otherwise. Kristof needs to tell us about Biira to get us interested in livestock donation - we’re not going to pay attention without a human story to hold onto.

(Indeed, some critics point out that livestock donation is a form of storytelling as well. Your $120 isn’t buying a goat - it’s a way of getting you to donate to an agricultural charity which will use your money to provision livestock, but also to pay staff salaries, fundraising expenses, etc. The story of giving a goat to a poor family convinces you to give, and perhaps to give more than you otherwise would.)

The solution may be to try to contextualize the story - is the example given an ordinary or an extraordinary one? Kristof signals this with his title, making it clear that Biira is an extraordinary case. But the story would probably be a fairer one with a more representative, median example, offered as a contrast. If you buy a goat for a Ugandan child, you’re probably not going to send a young woman to college… but you just might. It’s hard for me to blame Kristof for telling this amazing story, but it makes me wonder how many unconcious and inaccurate generalizations I’m making every day, looking at extremes and unconciously assuming they’re medians.

There’s this guy, Matt Harding. He describes himself as “a 31-year-old deadbeat from Connecticut who used to think that all he ever wanted to do in life was make and play videogames.” After Matt got sick of his job making videogames in Brisbane, Australia, he started an extended global walkabout. And as he travelled the world, he danced - badly - and had friends record him performing the same dance in front of some of the great sites of the world.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Matt is something of an internet celebrity - his videos have been watched millions of times, and the most recent one (above) is pretty damned charming. I watched it about half a dozen times yesterday, realizing that I liked it so much because the goofy smile on his face in the scenes where dozens of people rush on screen to dance with him is the best approximation of the way I felt at the recent Global Voices Summit. Trust me - there’s very little in life that feels better than talking, singing, dancing and drinking with people from around the world who are working with you on the same project, sharing many of the same values, goals and perspectives - dancing like an idiot on the streets of Lisbon or Sana’a is a pretty good approximation.

(I will also admit that I got a little choked up by Matt’s decision to edit, back to back, a clip of him dancing with a wild group of friends in Tel Aviv followed by a clip of him dancing in the streets of East Jerusalem in the West Bank with a small group of children. Rachel is in West Jerusalem right now, and was planning on travelling to the West Bank tomorrow, for an encounter program intended to let rabbinic students stay with Palestinian families to better understand the complexities of modern Israel and the personal dynamics of the ongoing conflict. Unfortunately, yesterday’s bulldozer attack means the trip was called off, and she’s now looking for other ways to connect with the local Palestinian population.)

Since I’m obviously having some trouble returning to my ordinary work life after the Summit, I spent a bit more time today looking at Matt’s videos, digging into his earlier dance videos. As I started watching his original video, shot in 2005, I winced involuntarily as I realized that the soundtrack was Deep Forest’s “Sweet Lullaby”, a piece of music I have strong feelings about.

“Sweet Lullaby” is a song based around a vocal sample misrepresented as a Pygmy song from Central Africa. Actually, the sample is from a lullaby, “Rorogwela”, sung in the Solomon Islands. The song is sung by a woman named Afunakwa, who was recorded in 1970 by the legendary ethnomusicologist, Dr. Hugo Zemp. The story of Deep Forest’s unauthorized use of the sample, their miscrediting of the sample’s origins and Zemp’s understandable anger has been brilliantly documented by Professor Steven Feld in an article called “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music” in Public Culture. Suffice to say that the guys behind Deep Forest, who portray themselves as “sound reporters”, didn’t feel compelled to properly credit the person or culture the sample came from, or the ethnomusicologist who recorded it.

I used the story of Afunakwa as a way to discuss intellectual property in developing nations in a law class I co-taught, which I documented in a piece called “Tumeric, pygmies and privacy“, one of my favorite blogposts, though one that’s literally never gotten a blog comment or much reaction. (And the students, for the most part, seemed to think that my argument that developing nations might want to use copyright to protect indigenous knowledge was pretty contrary to everything they believed about free culture, remix and all that cool web2.0 stuff…)

So I was pretty blown away to discover a video on Matt’s page titled “Where the Hell is Afunakwa?” Matt evidently discovered the controversy over the song and went to the Solomon Islands - as he says in the opening of the video, “I figured it was time I learned what I can about the song and Afunakwa… and also see about paying back my debt.”

On the island of Malaita in the Solomon Islands, off the coast of Papua New Guinea, in the town of Auki, Matt met David Solo, a cousin of Afunakwa. Talking to David, he learns that Afunakwa has been dead for some years, and gets a partial translation of the lyrics of the song:

[Small brother or sister] keep quiet
I tell you, even though you cry, I try to stop you
Even though you cry, I still carry you

Solo and a friend agree that they’re not able to accurately translate, as the words used are no longer used by people of his generation - they offer to take him to meet with relatives of Afunakwa, older people who can offer a better translation. He wasn’t able to change his flight to have that meeting, but he has plans to visit Afunakwa’s family in Baegu village in a future trip.

I find it deeply moving that a man best known for his goofy dancing felt compelled to discover the real story behind Afunakwa, and I’m grateful for this next chapter in the story. If you’re a documentary filmmaker looking for a tale to tell, allow me to suggest flying Matt and Professor Feld off to the Solomons and tell a final chapter of this story.

By the way, Internet, have I told you lately how much I love you?

I’m not much of a political blogger, unlike many of the folks at the Personal Democracy Forum conference. (Okay, that’s not true. I just write about African politics, not US issues, which puts me decidedly in the minority in this room.) So I wasn’t familiar with either Jane Hamsher, of Firedog Lake, a left-wing blog, or Patrick Ruffini, a Republican activist, organizer and blogger. They reminded me that I’m spending too much time at journalism conferences these days - it was a surprise for me to hear from speakers who are decidedly partisan, decidedly activist and doing work that’s decidedly journalistic.

Hamsher tells the story of breaking an interesting video - a very upset Clinton supporter, Harriet Christian, who was thrown out of the DNC rules committee meeting. She filmed a video of Christian yelling as she left the venue, and tells us that she rushed to get it online before the dozens of TV crews who’d shot the same footage. She was shocked that none of the networks aired their footage… until the video she shot received more than a million views on YouTube, and became a subject of political discussion.

She sees this as an example of liberal blogs ability to direct attention and potentially to shape the news agenda. She believes that liberal blogs were able to power Ned Lamont past Joe Lieberman in the democratic primary in Connecticut (though not actually into a senatorial seat.) This demonstrates that anti-war candidates can win elections. (Hmm. See previous parenthetical.)

Political blogs aren’t just reporting stories - they’re taking action. She shows a political ad that her blog produced with Ricki Lee Jones and the Squirrel Nut Zippers - titled “Had Enough” - which was offered to any candidate who wanted to run against a Republican. “It’s not just about community and commentary, it’s about coming together to effect a change.”

That change may be affected by money. And readers of liberal blogs have a lot of it. Hamsher reports that readers of liberal blogs are “white, male, old, affluent,” with the largest group between 40 and 60 years old. They’ve got an average income of between $100 and $150,000 a year. This helps candidates like Barack Obama, who are discovering that fundraisers may be obsolete - one good speech, documented on blogs and available online, may be the centerpiece of campaigns in the future.

Patrick Ruffini points out that Republican bloggers have largely focused on three issues: the war on terror, the governmental fiscal restraint, and support for conservative judges. Right-wing bloggers have shown their strengths at moments where they’re able to work on specific, concrete issues. He sites the example of the RedState blog as a group that came together to defeat Harriet Miers’s nomination to the Supreme Court. It’s not a minor victory for a community to get a president to pull away from a nomination, Ruffini argues.

The best organized campaign on the right in this election cycle, he argues, was Mike Huckabee’s campaign… and he cites Zephyr Teachout, no conservative sympathiser, as the person who gave birth to this observation. The Huckabee campaign allowed bloggers to add themselves to a blogroll, a group that included lots of “long tail” blogs from the evangelical and homeschooling communities.

For the right to really take advantage of these tools, they’ll need a common cause. He offers the idea of a wiki-based “Contract With America” - could we see another Newt Gingrich-type revolution coming from conservative activists getting together online and putting forward a new governing platform?

There aren’t a lot of questions from the audience at PDF so far, but the question immediately after these two speakers is a doozy. Former independent Presidential candidate Lenora Fulani - who reminds us that she was the first female and first black presidential candidate to make it onto the ballot in fifty states - wonders whether there’s any space opened by these new tools for politics in the US beyond the two established parties. (The answer she gets from the two speakers isn’t very satisfying - Ruffini points out that most “independent” voters voted for Reagan, and argues that most independents will vote for either the Republican or the Democrat this year.)

After a break, we’re back on stage with the left and the right. Chuck DeFeo of Townhall.com argues that we’re now seeing the “true democratization of the 4th estate.” Our new media makes it possible for anyone to communicate ideas in a many to many model. We’ve been waiting for the “1960 moment” - the moment at which television become the most important medium in US politics - to come to the Internet. But perhaps we’re waiting for the wrong thing.

The move to television has made politics less participatory. Voters become an audience to be talked at, not dialoged with. And we can trace a decline in political involvement, DeFeo argues, since we’ve seen that shift in media. As our media shifts towards many to many media, it’s fragmenting and getting more partisan. But DeFeo argues, “I would much prefer involved activism over apathy.”

Following DeFeo is Ariana Huffington, who’s legendarily shed her conservative past to become a leading liberal activist, and publisher of the Huffington Post. She’s very good at one-liners… and very, very angry with traditional media. “Old media has given up the pursuit of truth for a type of fake neutrality.” She points to media debates over climate change, where Al Gore faces off against Senator James Inhofe, a notorious climate change skeptic. (You’ll note that his Senate homepage currently features an oil derrick…) These two sides, she argues, don’t have equal news value:
“The earth is not flat. Evolution is a fact - sorry Mike Huckabee - there is no other side to this issue. The war in Iraq is an unqualified disaster - I am convinced there is no other side to this issue.”

What Huffington Post seeks to provide is “transparency, accountability, and community.” The reporters for the site are not unbiased, but they make it clear where their biases lie, rather than pretending they don’t exist. She points to Lou Dobbs as an embarrasing example of someone who pretends to be a journalist, pointing to his remarks linking a (ficticious) rise in leprosy cases to illegal immigrants. She feels that the media needs to pick these stories apart over sustained periods of time. “We need the obsessive compulsive disorder of the new media instead of the attention deficit disorder of the old media.”

Her fiercest words are reserved for Bob Woodward, who she dismisses as “the dumb blonde of journalism, awed by access to power.” Picking apart his career - from bringing down a president to uncritical accounts of the Bush administration - she closes with the admonition, “We cannot sell independence for access.”

While I admire and respect the passion and energy of this set of speakers, they leave me a little worried about my colleages who work on the future of journalism. Friends like Dan Gillmor are passionate about ensuring that new media holds on to what’s best about older journalistic media. But an increasing amount of journalistic media is coming from very partisan sources. Should we expect that readers are aware that media has changed and that we should expect every voice to have strong, visible bias? Or does this point to a need to re-learn how to read both online and offline media to understand that we’ve got far more activist media and far less that’s striving for - real or fake - neutrality?

If innovations in the citizen media community are shaping the political process, it’s worth looking closely at the structures and architecture of that new space. Two speakers at PDF specialize in visualizing and analyzing mass sets of data. Anthony Hamelle of linkfluence builds very pretty maps of the blogosphere, much like the famous Glance and Adamic visualisation, or my colleague John Kelly’s work on Iranian blogs.

The graphs are influence graphs, showing who links to one another within “like-minded” communities. The idea here is to look at linking between political blogs in only a political context, discarding other links that are outside of context. The result is a tight, pretty map that shows a decided red/blue (conservative/liberal) split in the US political blogosphere, plus a small set of common sources used by both sides. The graph is remarkably easy to explore, allowing users to mouse over it and see the media sources referenced.

A new tool (perhaps not yet available online?) tracks the emergence of terms and subjects over time, allowing for trend analysis - Hamelle shows the rise of “FISA” as a key term in discussions last week.

Matthew Hurst, who runs the Data Mining blog and is a researcher with Microsoft Live Labs is the king of these sorts of visualizations. He offers thoughts on a very broad topic - “What can you do with all the social media data - if you’re collecting information from Twitter, Usenet and blogs, simultaneously?”

Hurst points out that, with a bit of creativity, one can extract a great deal of data from blogs. You can often figure out the geographic location and the gender of the poster, and you can nearly always retrieve the complete (public) posting history of the author. One tool Hurst has been developing shows posts, in realtime, on a map of the US, giving a sense for how ideas emerge and move across the physical world.

An early Hurst visualization of the English-language blogosphere. The top cluster is technology blogs, and the two bright dots are BoingBoing and Engadget. The lower, larger cluster is the interconnected US political blogosphere.

Hurst graphs virtual communities as well. One gorgeous visualization, not shown here, clusters blogs based on their location on servers. Livejournal blogs tend to cluster closely together, while Blogspot blogs are evenly spread throughout the linksphere.

What can you do with these sorts of tools and the ability to look at citizen media in realtime? Well, you can watch ideas emerge, based on tools that track words. Matt offers a graph of bloggers talking about Obama versus those talking about Clinton - the lines crossed in February, allowing him to predict Obama’s rise several weeks before it became a dominant narrative in mainstream media. What’s rising now? Conversations about oil appear to be dominating all political discussions.

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.

Can you name the director of your local public radio station?

This isn’t one of those tests where you’re supposed to feel guilty if you can’t name your congressperson. I asked this question at a meeting of US media professionals and only one person in a room of twenty could come up with a name.

Clearly, they don’t live in Western Massachusetts or the Albany, New York area. (And I beg pardon in advance from my international readers - this is a post focused on public radio in the US, and specifically in my corner of it, and may be opaque to folks who live in countries with different models for public broadcasting.)

The director of my local public radio station, WAMC, is Dr. Alan Chartock, and like satirist Bill Shein, I can hear Alan Chartock’s voice in my sleep.

I hear his voice when I wake up as well. That’s because Chartock is also the “political observer” on WAMC, and his commentary on the day’s news events is featured in every morning’s newscast. The morning magazine show from 9am to noon features a segment called “The Congressional Corner”, where Chartock interviews local politicians. The afternoon call-in show, Vox Pop, features Chartock as a host at least once a week. He also hosts weekly shows, “The Media Project” and “The Capitol Connection”, as well as commenting on another weekly show, “The Legislative Gazette”.

It often seems like WAMC is pioneering a new radio format: Chartock Radio.

There’s a reason most people can’t name the administrators of their local public radio stations. Those folks tend to stay behind the scenes, allowing the celebrity hosts of nationally syndicated shows, and occasionally local reporters, to occupy the spotlight and build loyalty to the station. With the exception of Tory Malatia, humorously name-checked at the end of every episode of This American Life, most station managers aren’t known outside the community of public radio insiders.

Chartock has chosen a very different model for his administration of WAMC. As the Albany Business Review sympathetically observes, he’s the public face of the radio station, a constant presence in the life of station listeners. Not only do I know Chartock’s name, I know his wife’s name, his former faculty position at SUNY Albany, and what town he lives in. If I weren’t trying so hard to avoid listening to him, you’d think I were stalking the man.

I also know a great deal about Chartock’s political opinions. Chartock’s politics are pretty close to my own - unabashadly liberal, and strongly pro free-speech. It’s not that I disagree with the majority of his public political statements - it’s just that I don’t especially want to listen to them. I agree with much of what Keith Olbermann says, but I don’t generally tune into him, because I’m more interested in news coverage that aspires towards neutrality, rather than in the opinions of angry white men, on the right or the left. (I’m angry, white and opinionated enough on my own, thanks very much.)

When I wake up to National Public Radio, I’m looking for wide-ranging reporting and analysis with a minimum of overt opinion. I’m not naive enough to believe that this, or any other news, is “objective”, and I’m willing to do the work to search for a variety of opinions and perspectives on stories I’m following. But Chartock keeps putting his chocolate into my peanut butter, making me feel like I’ve stopped listening to NPR and tuned into Air America. Or, as one NPR producer thought, to Pacifica network, an explicitly left-wing syndicated radio network:

“I was driving through upstate New York and listening to the local public radio station, and there was this guy on the air ranting,” says one Washington-based NPR news producer, who didn’t want to be identified. “He was talking about the war in Iraq and how wrong it was and how we’re being held hostage as a country by this right-wing administration.”

The NPR producer assumed he had tuned into a Pacifica radio station, one of a small network of community stations that broadcast left-of-center advocacy-journalism programs. “It was actually sort of entertaining,” the producer recalls. “But then I nearly couldn’t believe it when this guy said, ‘In just a few moments we’ll be returning to NPR’s All Things Considered.’”

What that producer heard was Chartock during a fund drive when he’s at his most histrionic, taking to the airwaves for hours at a time to urge supporters to support the station. (Shein’s excellent parody portrays Chartock during a fund drive for precisely this reason.) Even Chartock has to know he sounds absurd at these times, punishing listeners who don’t give quickly enough with accordion renditions of “Lady of Spain” or by singing off-key. (Actually, he’s stopped playing “Lady of Spain”. I’d like to claim credit for this one. After one particularly egregious fund drive - and yes, I gave - I used Napster to download a dozen renditions of Lady of Spain and burn him a CD so he could torment listeners with a bit more variety. To the best of my knowledge, he hasn’t used this particular tactic since.)

The unnamed producer is quoted in a story in Baltimore’s City Paper about public radio and bias. NPR has been fighting accusations that it has a systematic liberal bias. While they’ve invested substantially in trainings and policies designed to combat bias, each affiliated station makes its own policy decisions. Vermont Public Radio, according to the article, restricts talk show hosts from expressing their opinions on air. WAMC, on the other hand, has a decided perspective on issues, especially when Chartock is on the air.

The article quotes Stephen Yasko, an NPR station manager in Towson, MD as supporting the independence of NPR member stations on the subject of bias: “So if Alan Chartock is what Albany and upstate New York created and what works for them, that’s a beautiful thing, no matter what some outsiders might say.”

That, indeed, may be what works for WAMC’s listeners. The station is an amazing success story in many ways, and that success has been led by Chartock, who was part of a team who raised money to buy the station out of bankruptcy in 1981. Since then the station has expanded both by acquiring other stations in the region and by producing large amounts of original content. It’s become a fundraising juggernaut, raising over $2 million a year in three fundraisers from listeners (as part of a near $7 million annual budget.) Clearly something is working for many of WAMC’s listeners and supporters.

But there’s a downside to these expansions. WAMC is produced in Albany, NY and broadcasts from atop Mt Greylock in western Massachusetts (about five miles from my house.) But stations in the WAMC system of transmitters and repeaters are located as far away as Plattsburg, NY (140 miles north of Albany), Utica (90 miles west) and Milford, PA (120 miles south). As one would hope a public radio station would, WAMC tries very hard to provide local news. But this means that local coverage includes breaking news in Plattsburg, a mere three hours drive from my house, and only five hours away from those poor listeners in eastern Pennsylvania. News from Boston, which houses the government I pay taxes to, would likely be more helpful, but doesn’t fit within the station’s footprint.

So why don’t I listen to another station? There aren’t any. WAMC is my only option for public radio via FM. I’m just outside the listening areas for WFCR, an excellent public radio station based in Amherst, MA, and just south of the listening area for Vermont Public Radio. (I can now listen to programming during daylight hours from WNNZ, a new day-only 50,000 watt station affiliate of WFCR.) I don’t know the history well enough to know whether there have been credible challenges to WAMC in the Western MA/eastern NY area. All I know is that my situation with public radio feels a lot like the nightmare of media consolidation Chartock often talks about: when I turn on the radio, all I hear is the same voice, because a single entity has purchased all the stations, filling them with the same political viewpoints.

But hey, it’s an NPR station, right? So most of the programming is just syndicated NPR/PRI/APM programming, right? Well, that’s the other rub. WAMC produces ten shows - three featuring Chartock - and distributes them via National Productions, its own syndicator. Some are quite good. Others are pretty terrible, especially when you compare them to nationally syndicated offerings from the major NPR networks. The particular thorn in my side is “The Media Project”, a half-hour discussion of press issues hosted by Chartock that’s so bad that promos for the show routinely include panelists admitting that the 30 second plug is likely better than the show as a whole. If WAMC were not producing and syndicating The Media Project (which they proudly remind us each week is listened to in Nacogdoches, TX), they might be willing to carry WNYC’s brilliant On The Media, an hour-long program that’s consistently one of the best things on the radio.

I only know about On The Media because I can listen to it via the web. Podcasts - including OTM, PRI’s The World, Tavis Smiley, Sound Opinions and Democracy Now! - let me listen to excellent programming that isn’t available on my local broadcast station. And discovering just how consistently good these shows are makes me wonder why they aren’t broadcast by WAMC and why WAMC continues producing some of its weaker shows.

As much as I’d like to blame Chartock for this situation, I think what’s going on points more to the difficulties public radio in the US faces in the digital age. Savvy listeners can choose audio content at no cost from providers - professional and otherwise - around the world. They understandably would like their stations to carry this content, as it’s lots easier to listen to an FM radio in many circumstances than to a laptop or an iPhone. (I do a lot of radio listening as I repair my roof, for instance, where I’d really much prefer to accidently drop a $5 transistor radio than an iPod.)

Stations have to pay for this content, though, which requires raising money from their local communities. The better a job they do attracting listeners, the more they pay. It makes sense that WAMC would try to make money by producing content locally and trying to syndicate it themselves, making money instead of paying it. Unfortunately, in an internet age, when your listeners can compare your mediocre product to the best content available, they’re likely to demand your station switch to airing the good stuff. When your station doesn’t, they’ll support those programs directly if given the opportunity.

There’s an upside to this, of course - produce excellent programming and you’ll get donations from far outside your geographic area. I now support WNYC specifically to support On the Media and Chicago Public Radio in gratitude for Sound Opinions and This American Life. (And I give to WFCR to support shows like Morning Edition, even though I can’t actually hear it here except via AM.) But in a world where listeners can choose from any content, your content needs to be excellent, or you need to stop producing it.

This is the same quandry smaller newspapers find themselves facing. Realizing that subscribers are turning to the New York Times online if they care about international issues, they’re cutting international and national bureaus and focusing on local news. Some do so successfully, while others are being forced to cut that coverage as well as revenue models change and classified advertising is no longer a reliable revenue source.

WAMC, I fear, is too big to do a good job with local coverage and too small to produce world-class syndicated programming. It’s too big for my hundred dollar donations to have any significant influence over content and too small to merit the scrutiny of a project like Colorado MediaMatters. Evidently WAMC is good enough that no one has organized a campaign to demand that WAMC take more neutral stances on personal opinion on-air or to attempt to build a rival station with a different on-air philosophy.

I’d love to hear about ideas for changing WAMC from anyone interested in the topic. Is the philosophy to try to convince Chartock to change? To build a rival station and try to draw listeners and sponsors to that station instead? Is there a winnable compromise, perhaps pushing WAMC management to use one of their new HD channels to run a more “traditional” NPR station, with more syndicated content and less Chartock? Am I the only one who’s reached this point of frustration with Chartock radio?

Part of the fun of having an academic life based in Cambridge, MA, is that you’ve gotten to see a great deal of the most exciting research taking place in this insanely academic city. The last session of the MIT conference features some the superstars of the MIT Media Lab world, researchers whose work has been featured around the world as well as on the banks of the Charles. But it’s less interesting to hear Deb Roy talk about his amazing project surveilling his son’s language development for five minutes than for the two hours we hosted him for at the Berkman Center.

That said, it’s often useful to see these quick talks because they give you the single, paradigmatic example of a tool that helps you introduce it to someone else. Fernanda Viegas’s talk about ManyEyes, an incredibly powerful platform for creating data visualizations, can be summarized pretty well by a single visualization - a word tree visualization of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s senate testimony, centered on the phrase “I don’t”:

Mako Hill’s presentation of Selectricity, a fascinating tool for online voting, gave an elegant single demonstration as well. Mako invited the crowd to vote on a location for dinner after the conference, choosing between several type of cuisine. Instead of having a single choice, voters listed their preferences in order - “Indian, Mexican, Chinese, Italian, Burgers”. While Mexican food had the largest number of first-place votes, Chinese food won as the most widely acceptable preference.

Selectricity allows communities to create online voting system using a wide range of voting methods through an incredibly simple tool. Mako’s a voting nerd, and believes that there’s a huge number of voting methods that might be greatly superior to voting methods commonly used in the US. Voting activists usually focus on trying to get governmental elections to use these new methods… and Mako points out that governments are the hardest things to change. By making online polling using different methods extremely easy to do, Mako is giving a wide range of groups the opportunity to experiment with different voting methods.

One group that’s used Selectricity is Students for Free Culture, who modified their election bylaws to allow for preferential voting. With 13 candidates and 16 voters for the board of the organization, traditional voting methods would have failed badly for the organization’s needs - preferential voting through Selectricity found an organization leader who was the top choice on only two ballots, but was ranked 3rd or 4th on most ballots, and was therefore an excellent compromise choice for the organization.

It’s the third day of MIT’s Future of Civic Media Conference, and I’m still finding that I can’t get the phrase “civic media” to come out of my mouth. Must be all those years of trying to sell the “citizen media” meme. Fortunately, despite the fact that we’ve all seen several dozen demo talks at this point, there are still truly fascinating ideas and technologies coming across the stage at the (bizarre, oddly mis-shapen, maze-like) Stata Center.

This morning’s session, led by the Media Lab’s Andy Lippman focuses on tools that are mobile, viral, and decentralized. The ones that caught my attention were:

- Nadav Aharony’s work on peer to peer telephony, using a software platform called comm.unity. Aharony offers a demo running on Symbian mobile phones - he takes a photo and it quickly replicates itself to the comm.unity phones. That isn’t all that surprising - it’s basically a cool way of sending an MMS message to a group of phones… but the way it works is actually incredibly cool. Rather than sending a message to a cellphone tower, his phone finds nearby phones it is peered with, and sends the messages directly to the peers using WiFi.

Here’s why this is cool: While SMS is a very powerful tool for community organizing, repressive governments have gotten very good at disabling SMS around elections to help block protests (see Ethiopia for the paradigmatic example, as well as Cambodia.) Using a centralized technology for protest is often a poor decision. Peer to peer phone communication could allow for powerful activist uses for phones with little control by central authorities.

The killer application for this tech, of course, is the ability to make voice calls phone to phone, without paying the phone company. Unfortunately, there’s no incentive for hardware developers to fund this sort of research, as they’re currently locked in alliances with network operators, which might mean the tech languishes in obscurity.

I’m sitting next to David Reed during this talk - which is a little like sitting next to Einstein at a lecture on relativity - and he points out that the system works best now for asyncronous voice, not synchronous voice. It doesn’t actually use WiFi, but uses the radios, but addresses each phone via its MAC address rather than via IP addresses (eliminating the need for DHCP or a static IP), and uses a very simple listen, then send protocol. David, who is teaching at MIT, says that a number of MIT projects are developing the software, which currently runs on Linux/Symbian phones, but might be available on iPhones and other platforms soon.

- Dale Joachim’s provocative work on broadcasting to and from public spaces, via mobile phones. Joachim is an engineer who found himself fascinated with an unusual problem: how should researchers monitor spotted owl populations, as is mandated under state and federal laws? The preferred method is to visit a forest at night, play an owl call, and listen for responses. Dale wondered whether you could just call the owls via a cellphone… an idea that’s probably appealed to anyone who’s spent a cold night in the woods listening for owl calls.

The Owl Project at MIT is building systems that use celular and VOIP technologies, as well as systems of speakers and microphones, that allow remote monitoring of owl populations in forests. But the technology might be useful for any other application where it’s helpful to both broadcast and listen over long distances. In his talk, Dale suggests that we can think of his work listening to owls as a form of cross-species civic media. Invoking the Global Voices motto - “The world is talking - are you listening?” - he wonders whether technologies like his could help us encounter the voices, the audio environment, of places in other corners of the world, crossing barriers of culture and nationality.

Talking with Dale after his talk, I find myself wanting to borrow his technology to do a very strange art piece. I’d like to install the system in places that have similar functions, in very different parts of the world. What if the system ran in Makola Market in Accra and in a shopping mall in Springfield, MA? We’d hear the ambient noise of people shopping in a very different place and a very different way - how long would it take for people to realize what they were hearing, to try to use the technology to communicate?

There’s a lot of spontaneous, creative plotting taking place in the hallways at this conference. Some ideas that I’ve enjoyed thinking about, off the stage:

- Many, many projects that Knight funded in 2008 focus on either collecting information or transmitting information over mobile phones. This is great, as phones are an incredibly important technology for media in the developing world. But there’s no clear, single technical platform these applications can use. One of the hallway conversations has been about building content management systems that live on top of Linux-based PBX system, Asterisk. This might involve “marrying” Drupal and Asterisk, or building a rich middleware layer that would allow lots of CMS tools to access Asterisk, and place audio files into the database structures used by CMSs. There’s a faint hope that we can talk one of the MIT profs involved with the Center for Future Civic Media to teach a course on mobile phones and social activism which might focus on building out, documenting and supporting this platform.

- With programmable phone systems - interactive voice response systems - you can both collect and disseminate information in pretty creative ways. Geoff Dougherty of Chi-Town Daily News has developed a system that generates a random phone number within a Chicago exchange code, then uses Asterisk to dial it, allowing a volunteer to then read off a web-based script and collect information in a survey about police brutality. I wondered aloud whether a slightly more complicated program could do “robo-polling”, asking the basic questions and switching to a human surveyor if the questions reach sensitive materials, like reports of police brutality. (It was pointed out that a system like this would allow automated, low-cost “push polling”, delivered via VOIP - a nasty, mean political superweapon.)