Apologies for the silence, everyone. I’m on a self-imposed writer’s retreat, and while I’m writing a lot, it’s not currently showing up on this blog. I’m trying to spend all of August focused on my book in the hopes of getting close to a first draft by September. The reason for the deadline is a happy one: as many of you know, I accepted an offer from MIT to head up the Center for Civic Media and teach at MIT’s Media Lab. Once I start that new existence, I suspect I’ll have a tougher time finding uninterrupted days to write. So I’m not writing for the blog (yes, I realize I’ve been bad of late), but expect to be blogging lots of stuff from the Center starting in the fall. And if all goes well, I hope you’ll have something long, edited and published from me late next year. In the meantime, you’ll see some bookmarks continue to accumulate here, and I’m still posting a few things a day to Twitter. So, enjoy the silence, and see you in September.

So, I got a new job. A really cool new job.

As of September, I’ll be based at the MIT Media Lab as a principal research scientist and director of the Center for Civic Media. The Center is the next generation of the “Center for Future Civic Media” founded by Henry Jenkins, Mitch Resnick and Chris Csikszentmihályi in 2007, supported by the Knight Foundation, to explore the opportunities, challenges and questions that surround communities, news and information in a digital age. The Knight Foundation announced a renewal of their support for the Center today, and we’re relaunching as the Center for Civic Media this fall. The press release announcing these changes is here, and Harvard’s Nieman Lab has an interview with me discussing about the new position.

I’m very excited about this. I’ve had the chance to be a fellow at the Center twice now, once early in the lifespan of the project, and again over the past few months, and it’s been a great opportunity to get to know people doing some amazing work at the frontiers of digital media. The Center is housed between MIT’s Media Lab and the Comparative Media Studies department, which puts an interesting challenge in front of researchers: work both to create new tools and to develop the thinking and theory behind the civic media field. I’m particularly excited by the fact that MIT’s also hired my friend Sasha Costanza-Chock, who will be co-principal investigator (along with me and Mitch Resnick) – Sasha’s done amazing work both on the theory of civic media and on projects like VozMob, a platform that lets low-income and migrant workers in LA share their stories via mobile phones.

While I’m stepping down from some of my responsibilities at the Berkman Center, I’m going to continue to be on Berkman’s Fellows Advisory Board, the group that helps put together Berkman’s incredible fellows program. And my work with Hal Roberts and the Berkman team on Media Cloud will continue as a collaboration between Berkman and Center for Civic Media.

For me, the fun really starts in the fall – for the summer, I’m holed up in western Massachusetts, working on my book. Looking forward to seeing friends at the Civic Media conference this week, and many more once I’m at the Center in the fall. Many thanks to the folks at MIT and at Knight for making this possible.

I’m happy to announce that W. W. Norton & Company has agreed to publish my first book, Rewire: Rethinking Globalization in an Age of Connection. Should all go well, I hope to turn in the manuscript late this year for publication some time in 2012. I’m very grateful to my agent, David Miller of The Garamond Agency, for his hard work in helping me bring this book to the world. And I’m greatly looking forward to working with Brendan Curry at Norton.

My book asks whether the internet is leading towards more contact across boundaries of language, nation and culture and, if not, how we could rewire the tools we’ve built to increase international connection. The ideas will be familiar to many of the readers of this blog – the book is a chance to explore ideas like cultural bridging, pervasive translation, structured serendipity and xenophilia at length. For those who haven’t read posts where I’ve talked about those ideas, my TED talk is a good introduction to the ideas I’ll be exploring.

I have high hopes of writing less online and more offline, but won’t stop work on this blog. I would expect to be posting more bookmarks and short pieces and fewer essays, but you never know. And I’m posting extensively on my twitter feed, and will try to update folks on the book’s progress there and here.

My beloved wife, the Velveteen Rabbi, is now a real rabbi. She was ordained on Sunday by the Jewish Renewal movement, a group founded by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, who offered blessings at the ceremony. (He’s on the left in the photo below. Rachel is two to his right…)

I am absurdly proud of Rachel for the hard work she’s done and for achieving this incredible milestone. I’m also thrilled that she’s now a representative of this movement within Judaism. One of the traits the Renewal movement is best known for is its deep commitment to respect and dialog between faiths, especially Abrahamic faiths. Reb Zalman refers to this idea as “deep ecumenism”, a sense that some of the most important religious work people can do is in finding common ground between diverse religious traditions, and it’s the impulse that led him to complement his rabbinic identity with study in the Sufi Order of Hazrat Inayat Khan. For an entertaining and enlightening introduction to this idea, Rodger Kamenetz’s “The Jew In the Lotus“, which chronicles a journey Zalman and others took to Dharmsala at the invitation of the Dalai Lama to discuss the survival of Tibetan Buddhism in exile.

My spiritual roots are in the Episcopal church, specifically in a high school chapel whose doors are inscribed with the instruction: “Believers, say a prayer. Nonbelievers, be respectful.” It’s both an easy and challenging injunction, and I’m honored to be married to a religious leader who takes the challenges of finding common ground between people of all faiths – and none at all – seriously and leads with her actions as well as her words.

I suspect that Rachel will offer reflections on ordination on her blog once she’s back from the ALEPH conference in Colorado and has some time to digest – in the meantime, I’m simply too proud of her and too happy to wait for her to blog about it first. (And yes, despite the ordination, she’s keeping “Velveteen Rabbi” as pretty much the best blog title ever…) If the ordination wasn’t enough to celebrate, she’s released a new collection of poetry this week, titled 70 Faces, a lyrical reflection on a year’s cycle of Torah readings. (You can get it at Amazon…) Congratulations to Rachel, to her co-ordinands, and to anyone who follows their heart and their faith in the service of justice and cooperation.

Apologies for radio silence on this blog, friends. April is apparently the month that I’ve returned to public circulation. During those months I was at home taking care of wife and baby, I evidently said “yes” a few too many times, and have set myself up for a month with a dozen talks, lectures or presentations at panels. As a result, I feel like I’ve been writing a ton – and I have – it just hasn’t appeared on this blog, just on the slide decks I’ve been presenting.

Last night was one of the most challenging and rewarding events thus far. My friend Chris Csikzentmiháyli of MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media invited me to moderate a panel discussion on “civic media in difficult places”. When I signed on, I hadn’t realized that the event was wholly virtual – the folks I was talking with were all appearing via skype, which turned the event into something analagous to a live radio show. I had good fun playing Chris Lydon, and the event worked both because MIT did an astounding job of making the tech almost seamless and because I had an amazing array of guests: Cameran Ashraf of AccessNow, Mehdi Yahyanejad of Balatarin, Georgia Popplewell of Global Voices, Huma Yusuf of Dawn.com, Ruthie Ackerman of Ceasefire Liberia, Brenda Burrell and Bev Clark of Kubatana, and Lova Rakotomalala of Foko Club. Thanks to everyone who particpated and came… and please feel free to enjoy the podcast, if you’re curious what folks from Iran to Zimbabwe have to say about the future of civic media.

My next gig also involves civic media and human rights activists… but the details are a little different. Hal Roberts and I are speaking at the George W. Bush Institute at Southern Methodist University in Dallas as part of a day-long event on “cyber-dissidents”. Our job, as I see it, is to make sure that everyone there is realistic about what can and can’t be done with circumvention technologies, and to ensure that a vision for internet freedom is broader than supporting dissidents in countries the US government identifies as restrictive of speech. Hal’s going to pull apart the tech behind internet circumvention and I’ll be offering the ideas I fleshed out in my “Beyond Circumvention” and “Protect, then Project” posts. It should be an interesting event – I’ll be liveblogging, so I will do my best to give readers a window on what transpires there.

In Texas, I’m also going to be speaking at International Symposium on Online Journalism and a forum on Texas Financial Transparency. Both are at UT Austin, one of my favorite places in the state – looking forward to spending time with old friends there. After that, a workshop on Internet Security and Internet Freedom at the Center for IT Policy at Princeton.

The icing on the cake – ROFLCon. Do I understand ROFLCon? Nope. Am I giving the opening keynote? Yep. Along with danah boyd. Do we know what we’re going to say or do? Not a clue. Suspect it will be a blast, however.

Looking forward to returing you to your regularly scheduled blogging sometime in the next few weeks.

We turned off the snowmobile tracks half a mile back, as they bent to the west and GPS pointed north to our destination. The trackless snow is knee-deep and I’m sweating as we push forward, one heavy footstep after another. 250 feet from destination. We scramble up a ridge, heading towards an outcropping of rocks beside a small stand of pine. 74 feet north by northeast. As we approach the largest of the rocks, the GPS reads “Arriving at destination”. One step ahead of me, Kris kneels down and extracts a box from a cavity behind the boulder. A nine-inch square tupperware container, it’s spray-painted grey and otherwise unmarked. Steam is rising from my gloved hands as I pry the lid off. As I open the cache, the contents of the box glow in the winter sunshine: a logbook, a laminated card and seven rubber duckies.

The ducks have been hand-painted, dressing them in different outfits – policeman, solider, college graduate. The laminated card doesn’t help explain their presence here. But it does explain the box we’ve found: “Congratulations! Intentionally or not, you’ve found a Geocache!” In cheerful, reassuring tones, the note explains to the uninitiated – “muggles”, as they’re known in caching circles – that the box is part of a global game, offers an invitation to participate and politely requests that the cache remain unmoved and unmolested if you choose not to play. We sign and date the logbook with our caching handles and, regretting that we haven’t brought a duck-themed gift to trade, seal the container and carefully stash it in its hiding place.

We’re 300 yards away, slogging through the deep snow towards the next cache before I get the joke. On geocaching.com, where we’ve found the coordinates that started our hunt, this cache is titled “An Odd Cache“. The title of a cache is often a clue to its location – here, it elucidates the payload: a set of odd ducks.

You may wonder what sort of odd duck chooses to hide children’s toys in a remote state forest in western Massachusetts. (Or spends their free time searching for them.) I wonder, too. Geocaching can be both a solitary and social sport. At home, logging the finds we’ve made, I look at the profiles of the folks who’ve recently searched for the caches we found. A family with two small children. A diesel mechanic. A windshield installer. And always “Rocking the Goat”, a retired couple who’ve logged 11,500 finds in the past five years, including 120 in an apparently epic day. I’ve yet to meet any of these people in person, but I’m starting to understand bits of their personalities from their cache descriptions, the clues they offer, the design of their hides.

I don’t know what drove “Kathy & Gary” to haul a box of rubber ducks up a mountainside. The other caches hidden nearby – by the same cacher – are well-made and thoughtfully placed in beautiful locations, but none hint at the whimsy of this hide. I look for something clever to say as I sign the log online, but can’t come up with something pithy to summarize my sense of satisfaction, surprise and wonder. So I write what everyone writes – “TFTC” – thanks for the cache.

One of the most inspiring and infuriating conferences I’ve attended in the past few years was the Metaverse Roadmap Summit, held in Silicon Valley in May 2006. Most of the participants were devotees of virtual worlds, online spaces where what’s possible is governed by not by the laws of physics but by the restrictions of the software. The ability to build interactive spaces without constraints seems to bring out the utopian in many thinkers. Much of the conversation focused on aspirations for technologies that seemed divorced not just from their current state of development but from the wildest hopes of their developers. I was – and remain – unconvinced that (even very technically sophisticated) virtual worlds will automagically encourage intercultural dialog and collaboration or increase empathy. (No need to repeat my rantings here.)

I was more impressed with the thinkers at Metaverse Roadmap who were exploring augmented reality, ways of overlaying layers of information over the real world. Rather than starting with a blank canvas as the virtual worlds folks did, the augmented reality crowd started with satellite photos or camera views of the physical world. It was much easier to judge the success or failure of their work – did layering information on the physical world enable interesting new behaviors? Reveal hidden truths? Or did it obscure what was already visible?

Most augmented reality demos I’ve seen since focus on adding information to physical reality to improve decisionmaking. Patti Maes demonstrated Sixth Sense at TED last year, which involved complex hand gestures that manipulated a “data layer” projected on the world via data goggles. She showed one of her students using the system to enhance his experience of a bookstore by pulling up reviews and ratings for the books on the shelves (and, not coincidently, their prices if delivered via Amazon.com). While this particular application didn’t grab my imagination (why not just shop online?), it wasn’t hard to imagine appealing scenarios. My dream: facial recognition goggles that give me a dossier of information about people I’ve already met, so I never have to struggle to remember someone’s name, job or company again.

Whether we’re using technology fresh out of MIT’s Media Lab or the increasingly ubiquitous smartphone, this form of augmented reality is becoming commonplace. Walking down Ninth Avenue in New York, I can query any number of websites and discover that this sushi bar isn’t as highly rated as the one three block south. Dopplr will tell me which restaurants my well-travelled friends prefer; Foursquare can tell me which coffee shop the wired hipsters are jostling to be mayor of. It’s not hard to imagine an augmented 9th Avenue, with Zagat ratings, Board of Health Warnings and Chowhound tips hovering above each eatery, reducing my risk of ever eating a bad meal.

Many of the ways we talk about augmenting reality focus on reducing risk. By adding information to the bookstore, we reduce the risk that we buy a boring title and overpay for it. Augment the grocery store and we reduce the risk that we buy endangered, unsustainable fish or toxic glass cleaner manufactured by a gay-unfriendly conglomerate. Surrounding ourselves with information online – from authorities, friends, from the crowd – we make decisions in the physical world with increasing assurance that we’re getting the best deal, value or quality.

I worry about a world with less risk. With four stars shining over this trendy sushi bar, will I miss the unrated Uzbek teahouse down the street? Or the admittedly crappy dive bar that becomes a sentimental favorite? In a world rich with information, will I still stumble and explore? I don’t want to go back to a world where I can’t pull up record reviews on Allmusic.com… but I fell in love with music buying $2 cutout LPs in the back room of my local record store, stumbling through a forest of forgettable music to my own passions and tastes.

Geocaching augments reality in a different way. It adds a layer of the magical to the mundane.

There are at least 100 caches hidden within ten miles of my house. I’ve found fewer than 30 of them. Driving to the post office or the grocery store, I pass by them and smile at the secret knowledge I have that my neighbors lack – the specific stone that needs to be moved to reveal the hiding place. How many other stones have secrets hiding under them? What other games are played throughout the world, with secrets hiding in plain sight, invisible to us because we don’t know to look?

If the hides I’ve found make me smile, the ones I’ve searched for and fail to find have a more profound hold on me. There’s a cache hidden on or near the guardrail of a stretch of highway I drive almost every day. I’ve spent two hours, split between half a dozen sessions, looking for the mystery of this cache – the bolt I need to turn, the panel I have to slide, the rock to lift to unpack the mystery. When I drive by this guardrail, it glows pink, just like the trigger points for missions in Grand Theft Auto. I can park the truck, step into the neon glow and start an adventure, or I can drive past and go on with my life.

Enhancing the Berkshires this way invites me to exit my well-trodden paths and explore places I’ve systematically ignored for the past twenty years. I tend to think of my hometown – population 2990 – as a small place. It is, if I describe the locations I visit regularly – a cafe, a bar, a gas station, a sandwich shop. But when you’re looking for a small box hidden in ten square miles of deep woods, the real size of the world is made manifest. It’s small because I drive the same two roads over and over, and too seldom stop to turn over the rocks and look behind the guardrails.

Augmented 9th Avenue promises a world with no unwanted adventures. Geocaching the Berkshires promises an adventure any time I’m willing to bushwhack through the brambles, looking for secrets.

The coordinates point to a junction near the center of my tiny hometown, but the cache description makes clear that there’s a puzzle to solve before I can start hunting. I decipher a pair of messages, each encrypted with a different Caesar cipher and discover the true coordinates – a hillside a mile from town. I park my truck, follow the GPS into the woods and almost immediately discover a rusting 1940s Studebaker pickup, its roof partially caved in, but otherwise remarkably well preserved.

The cache I’m searching for is a “micro”, a size too small to contain little more than a paper log. Micros are often magnetic “hide a key” containers. As I kneel in the snow, poking at the back bumper of the wreck, I realize there are a lot of places to hide a key on the frame of a truck. Hands cold, knees wet, I thought back to the cache description, looking for a clue. The cache’s title implies that the truck is for sale, so I begin to act like a prospective buyer, kicking at the nonexistent tires, climbing in the cab to check the comfort of the rusted spring seat. I lift the hood and poke at the near-pristine engine. The dipstick is still in place and as I pull it from the engine block to check the oil, I find the log in a greasy plastic bag. It’s beautiful.

I live in one of the loveliest parts of the US, replete with rolling mountains, fast-flowing streams, colorful forest and rocky cliffs. To my shame, I too rarely take myself out for hikes, wandering through the woods with no destination in particular. Years ago, I concluded that I was simply lazier than my friends, or less in tune with the ineffable rhythms of nature. Now I think I’m just more teleological.

Invite me for a hike up Greylock, the state’s highest peak – which happens to be in my backyard – and I’ll find an excuse not to go. Tell me that someone’s hidden something halfway up the mountain, in a location that’s probably hard to get to and give me no encouragement other than a set of GPS coordinates and I’m off, dragging as many unwitting friends as I’m able to ensnare along the way. I’m embarrassed that it takes something as silly and arbitrary as signing my name to a log to get me to lace up my boots, but there it is. I need destinations, goals, and it turns out that they’ll shape my behavior even if they’re extremely silly.

The reason to go caching isn’t the rubber ducks or the opportunity to sign a log. It’s the non-zero possibility that something strange, wonderful and serendipitous will happen enroute. Some of us are inclined to wander without a goal in mind – others need goals that encourage us to wander somewhere we wouldn’t normally stray.

Randall Munroe’s webcomic xkcd has as a central theme the idea that we all need more adventures in our lives. It’s unsurprising then that he invented Geohashing, a strange variant of an already strange game, where a coordinate is generated algorithmically from known, changing values (the date and the previous day’s Dow Jones Industrial Average closing) to generate an arbitrary location within a few dozen miles. (Technically, it generates one per “graticule“, which is the cool kind of word you’ll get to use if you start geocaching.) You’re encouraged to visit the coordinates of the day, and especially encouraged to appear at the coordinates on Saturdays at 4pm local time, when there’s an increased (though still pretty low) chance that someone else will show up.

I love the idea of geohashing – the arbitrary nature of the algorithm has a purity to it that appeals to me. But I haven’t gone to find a hash yet. A cache implies that someone else thought a spot was worthy, in some way, to be encountered and appreciated – a hash has none of that baggage, for better or worse.

I’m interested in building structures that facilitate serendipity, because I worry that I, you and everyone else spends too much time walking familiar paths and too little time wandering in the wilderness. I worry about this in terms of news and information most often, wondering how we find ways to filter the rich information flows of the Internet without filtering out the unfamiliar and provocative. I’ve been making the case that we should stumble into unfamiliar territory because it’s good for us. But that’s about as effective as telling me that I should hike because I’m fat. Perhaps someone (me?) needs to start hiding caches of rubber ducks in strategic corners of the Internet.

I’m in New York City after speaking at a conference and grabbing a beer with Global Voices friends in a nearby bar. I should hurry to Grand Central and catch the next train home, but I’ve got my GPS with me and there’s a cache nearby. I’ve printed out the details and have a theory on the hide. I sheepishly admit to my friends that I’m not going to the subway station with them because I’m going to look for a hidden container somewhere on the mean streets of New York.

My friend Jer wants to come with, and so we follow the GPS across town, to the east. As we walk, I’m explaining my skepticism about urban caching to Jer. It’s hard to hide caches in major cities – unfamiliar boxes tend to freak out police, who might term them “infernal machines” and blow them up. So urban caches are often nanos, stuck to lampposts or the underside of benches. I’m a shy guy – the notion of searching on hands and knees for a tiny metal cylinder in public on city streets makes me nervous.

The cache title makes reference to “the M club” and we find ourselves outside a tony private club whose name starts with M. The clues suggest the cache might be hidden near something of interest to firefighters, and so we begin examining the standpipes set into the side of the building. I feel incredibly conspicuous and wait for the cops to arrive and haul us off for questioning. Finding nothing, we start walking to another corner of the building to check out more pipes. The doorman yells, “Broaden your mind, expand your search.”

Say what? He continues, “Why are you walking away? You’re so close! Persistence!” I ask him for a hint as it’s obvious that he knows what we’re doing and where the cache is. He walks us back to the standpipe we’d been examining. Jer begins unscrewing a cap, something he was reluctant to do while looking over his shoulder for cops. Our zen master doorman objects. “Do you really think they’d put something somewhere the firemen would find it?”

And then I see it – a stray wire hanging over the edge of the metal plate the standpipes are set into. Attached to it, a nano. The doorman congratulates us as I sign the log. Having shared an adventure and a surprise encounter with me, Jer gives me a hug and catches the 1 train. I head towards Grand Central, wondering what secrets, what hidden bits of magic surround me as I walk down 57th Street.

I’d been meaning to try geocaching for a few years now. My friend and colleague Eszter Hargittai convinced me to actually start caching, not by saying anything, but by being so clearly in love with the sport. Eszter is one of the most professional and responsible people I know, so watching her show up late for a Berkman meeting because she’d stopped to seek a cache on the way was the most ringing endorsement of a pastime I can think of.

Kristen Taylor, social media guru and foodblogger extraordinare, made the connection between caching and augmented reality for me. I was trying to convince her to augment her reality by looking for African restaurants in the Bronx and she got me thinking about data layers and structured serendipity instead. Googling for geocaching and augmented reality, I discovered that she wasn’t the first to make the connection – Dan Spira has an excellent blogpost on the topic, which makes the case that exploring the world with GPS doesn’t reduce uncertainty and wonder, but can increase it.

Hi everyone. I’m going offline for about a month to recover from retinal surgery, which will take place tomorrow morning. I’ve had this surgery twice before – once in April 2008, and again in August 2009. This surgery is a repeat of August’s surgery, which was – unfortunately – not entirely successful, and I’ve continued to have vision problems with my left eye. There’s background on the procedure I’m having – vitrectomy – and the reasons I’m having the procedure in this blogpost here… and the success I had on the surgery on the right eye.

As with the past surgeries, there’s a long recovery period during which it’s painful and difficult for me to read. While I use assistive technologies and can be online a small amount each day, I usually don’t blog while recovering. (I’ve got a post or two queued up that might arrive after this one…) For anyone trying to reach me via email – please don’t expect a speedy response. Looking forward to seeing you when I’m back online in March.

My Global Voices colleagues have been taking time at the end this year to reflect on the past five years of our joint project. I’ve been rather busy with another joint project, my new son Drew, who is a month old today, and haven’t been particularly reflective. (Moments for reflection are generally spent asleep these days.)

Talking with an old friend today gave me the opportunity to step back and reflect a bit. My friend works for a foundation that supports social entrepreneurs and he’s interested in ways that the projects he’s supporting could work together. How could a set of cool, worthwhile organizations supported financially by the same funder somehow become a coherent movement, working together and learning from each other?

It took me a couple of moments to realize that my friend was turning to me for an answer to this question: how do you build a movement? (I’m sleep-deprived, remember?) He’s right – five years in, Global Voices isn’t just a website, a project, or a community. It’s a movement. Reading reflections from GV folks from around the world, it’s clear that Global Voices is a very different thing to different people – a window into other corners of the world, an alternative to despair, an antidote to stereotypes, a technologically-enhanced pilgrimage, a defender of language and culture, and of Article 19 rights, and an odd sort of family. The people who participate in Global Voices do very different things – mapping online censorship, translating texts, collecting links and offering original reporting – for very different reasons.

Believe it or not, this is by design. But it’s taken five years to get there.

Many nonprofit projects are the manifestation of the vision of one or more dedicated founders. That’s not the story behind Global Voices. Yes, Rebecca and I set the ball rolling five years ago with a meeting at Harvard. And we’ve both done what we can to move the work forward, Rebecca using her unparalleled journalistic skills, me leveraging my hard-earned talent for begging.

But the parts of Global Voices we’re proudest of are the results of other people’s passions and energies. Without Sami ben Gharbia, we’d be on the sidelines of the freedom of expression debate in cyberspace, rather than on the frontlines. Had Portnoy Zheng not started translating Global Voices into Chinese, we’d be a monolingual project, working to bring the world to an English-speaking audience, rather than the complex polyglotism we are today. Without Georgia Popplewell and Solana Larsen, we’d be writing just for blog readers, not reaching out to audiences through partnerships with newspapers, television and radio broadcasters. Had David Sasaki not challenged us to demonstrate that citizen media wasn’t just the province of the wealthy and well-connected, we’d not know about remarkable efforts in Colombia, Madagascar and Cote d’Ivoire and dozens of other parts of the world.

When Rebecca and I invited some dozen bloggers from around the world into a conference room at Harvard in late 2004, our goals were pretty simple – we wanted to see if there was common ground between people from different circumstances and cultures, united by a single, simple practice: writing about their thoughts and lives online. By the end of the day, I was so excited and energized that I wanted our group to produce a detailed plan for world domination, complete with marching orders. I was furious at my friends Jim Moore and Joi Ito, who moderated our closing session, because we came out of it not with a concrete plan, but with a general sense that we had some common values that we could build on.

They were right. I was wrong.

Global Voices – the people, the projects – hold together not through a grand, structured design, but because we share some very simple principles: people have a right to speak and an obligation to listen. (That’s my Twitter-sized summary of the Global Voices manifesto, itself a compact little document.) The people and projects who’ve chosen to flock under the GV banner tend to share a fondness for late-night parties in global cities, a strange sense of humor and a fondness for open source software… but the core values that allow us to work together are extremely simple. More complicated, more tactical and less vague and we’d find ourselves excluding some of the remarkable people and the creative ideas they’ve brought to the table. Had we a plan, an agenda, a schedule, we would have said no to ideas that have shaped us, making us what we are today.

Here’s the thing about a movement as inchoate as ours – there’s no way to know what’s coming next. That’s the challenge for Ivan Sigal – who ably took the reins from Rebecca and me eighteen months ago, and who’s kept our project thriving through the toughest of financial times. I don’t think a project like Global Voices can be steered. I think a leader needs to listen, to discover where the community is going and figure out how to smooth the path ahead. It’s the opposite of what a management textbook might tell you to do, a form of leading by following.

So what’s next for Global Voices? I don’t think anyone can tell you. Not just because we can’t predict the Green revolution, the Fijian Coup or the Malagasy crisis. Not just because we don’t know what comes next after Facebook and Twitter. We can’t predict because a movement isn’t predictable – it’s the product of the passions and energies of the people who’ll stay with us, the new ones who’ll find us, and the continuing influence of those who choose to leave us. Global Voices has never stopped surprising me: what’s worked, what hasn’t, what we’ve done and left undone. Here’s hoping for an unpredictable, chaotic, participatory, passionate future built on the simple foundations of speaking and listening.

Many of my colleagues have featured a favorite recent GV post in their meditations. I wanted to do the same, but couldn’t fit the post I’d chosen into the thoughts above. So here it is as a bonus.

In early December of 2008, Mark Dummett of the BBC reported a wonderful “news of the weird” story from Dhaka, Bangladesh – a life-scale replica of the Taj Mahal, built at enormous expense. Global journalists sprang into action, documenting a diplomatic spat between Bangladesh and India over ownership of this cultural treasure, talking about the shocking idea of “pirating” another nation’s national symbols.

None of these intrepid reporters actually visited the Bengali Taj, though. Bloggers did, and they weren’t impressed. Aparna Ray translated their posts for Global Voices and explained that it was a poorly-made tourist trap clad in bathroom tiles, not the diamond-studded wonder those hardbitten AFP journalists credulously reported on.

A critical underreported story? An important victory for intercultural understanding? Nope. But as someone who spent far too much time the past five years answering journalistic questions about the credibility of bloggers, I can’t but help celebrating this inversion.

We’re nearing the end of our first week at home with a newborn, and he’s survived largely unscathed thus far. With a house full of extended family and nights spent sleeping in ninety minute intervals, it hasn’t exactly been the most restful or focused week in recent memory. Much as I’ve wanted to write a couple of long blog posts this week, the best I can do is offer a few links towards the pieces I’ve wanted to write about.

David Sasaki has an excellent post on MediaShift Idea Lab about the importance of mapping in marginalized communities. Referencing a number of projects designed to produce open source maps of favelas and slums, he quotes Mikel Maron, an evangelist of Open Street : “Without basic knowledge of the geography and resources of [a community] it is impossible to have an informed discussion on how to improve the lives of residents.”

Sasaki links to an excellent post from Mark Graham which raises another facet of geographic information – the amount of information available online about different communities and countries. Using geodata from Wikipedia, Graham makes a set of maps that display how many (English Wikipedia) articles about places are located in each of the world’s countries. Unsurprisingly, there’s much more content about North America and Western Europe than about sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia or Latin America. This isn’t a new issue – I wrote about attempts to address undercoverage in Wikipedia five years ago – but it’s extremely helpful to have Graham visualizing these disparities and challenging us to bridge some of these gaps. (Hanan Cohen was kind enough to point me towards Graham’s excellent post as well.)

I’ve been following proposed anti-gay legislation in Uganda, largely through Haute Haiku’s excellent reporting on Global Voices. It’s an absurdly ugly bill – not only does it criminalize homosexuality (which is the case in several sub-Saharan African nations), but it creates a crime of “aggravated homosexuality” that’s punishable by death and broad enough to include anyone who’s both gay and HIV+.

I hadn’t seen much coverage of the Ugandan legislation outside gay-oriented media and my faith community, which tends to follow gay issues very closely. So I was thrilled – and somewhat stunned – to hear a discussion of the Ugandan legislation on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air. Gross was interviewing Jeff Sharlet, author of a book about a fundamentalist political movement in the US congress called The Family. According to Sharlet, The Family practices a strange branch of Christianity which celebrates strong, charismatic leadership (including that of reprehensible dictators) and recruits adherents from the corridors of power.

In his interview with Gross, Sharlet reports that there’s a Ugandan branch of The Family and that they appear to be the core organizers of the anti-gay legislation. This isn’t quite as strange as it might sound – Uganda’s been a battlefield for American religious politics in the past. The ABC (“Abstain, Be Faithful or Use a Condom”) approach to AIDS prevention, heavily favored by US religious conservatives, was celebrated as reducing Uganda’s HIV prevalence rate. In truth, a number of different approaches were used in Uganda, and reductions in HIV prevalence may have been linked to a reduction in coffee exports, not to any particular practices. But Yoweri Museveni – the Ugandan leader, who the Family has embraced (according to Sharlet) – is a committed evangelical Christian and gave advocates of a faith-rooted approach to HIV reduction a leader to embrace and a laboratory to experiment in.

Sharlet’s connection of The Family to the proposed Ugandan legislation raises the chances that we might see a coordinated push from activists in Uganda and the US against this ugly and discriminatory legislation – see change.org for some thoughts for what people in the US could do.

Christopher Dickey posted an interesting, though somewhat odd, story on Newsweek’s web site yesterday. Odd, because there’s nothing in the story that’s new since he began repsearching the story in late August. My guess is that the story hasn’t run until now because it’s a story that has no real facts. It’s about an absurd, Kafka-esque conspiracy… and I worry that Dickey’s article may not be entirely clear on how absurd the conspiratorial accusations are.

Hossein Derakhshan has been in custody in Iran for over a year – I’ve written about his detention on the blog several times. In August, in the wake of arrests after the Green Revolution, a series of show trials went on in Tehran, where an unnamed “spy” was said to have “confessed” to being involved with a vast, global conspiracy to overthrow the Iranian government. This conspiracy was widely reported in Persian-language media, and the details of the case made it clear to anyone who knew Hossein that he was the “spy” in question.

Friends who follow Persian media closely alerted me to the testimony because I, along with other individuals, were named in the show trial as Hossein’s collaborators. Investigating the story in August, Dickey contacted me to ask about my interpretation of events. I told him that the conspiracy was absurd, that Global Voices and I certainly knew and worked with Hossein, but that we were in no way involved with attempting to overthrow the Iranian government.

Because the story is completely false and because it makes accusations that are blatantly untrue, we decided not to cover the story on Global Voices and introduce the fabrications into the English-language media. Dickey made a different decision and reprints these imaginings – months after they appeared in Persian-language media, along with my denials that I or Global Voices are involved with anything more than promoting blogging around the globe, and then includes this paragraph:

“There are aspects of the testimony that align closely with reality.” Zuckerman continued. “Hossein participated in the first meeting of Global Voices in November 2004, hosted by the Berkman Center.” Just as the prosecutor said he did.

Let me be very clear about what I was saying in that comment. The aspects of the testimony that align with reality aren’t the ones about me – they’re details about Hossein’s travels and meetings. Yes, I’ve met with Hossein half a dozen times since 2004, when he first came to the Berkman Center’s inaugural Global Voices meeting. That’s not because I’m involved in plotting to overthrown the Iranian regime, but because I’m one of the founders of an international blogging network and Hossein’s a key figure in the Iranian blogosphere.

To understand what’s going on in this case, it’s worth listening to Omid Memarian’s recent story on This American Life. Omid was also a pioneering Iranian blogger, and he was detained in 2004. In his TAL story, Omid describes being forced to write his life story dozens of times, while interrogators attempted to fit details from his life into a paranoid narrative about a CIA plot to destabilize the country. Memarian’s description explains precisely how Hossein’s life story – an unusual and complicated one, to say the least – has been reframed into a spy novel-worthy fantasy. The initial Global Voices meeting at Harvard – memorable mostly because Hossein coined the term “bridgeblog” at the conference – turns from an academic conference into a fantasy vision of an initial planning phase for the green revolution.

Let me just be very clear, because Dickey’s story is not:

- Hossein Derakhshan isn’t an Israeli spy. He’s been unfairly detained for over a year and has likely been forced to issue a “confession” that includes real biographical details as well as fabrications.
- The other people and entities that feature in Derakhshan’s forced testimony – myself, the Berkman Center, Global Voices – have no involvement in Iranian political unrest beyond studying it and reporting on it.
- The Iranian government’s characterisation of my background and ties are as absurd and fabricated as any other aspect of this story.

Dickey gets it right in the last paragraph when he says, “Only a regime as introverted, unworldly, and uncertain as Ahmadinejad’s could believe in the conspiracy theory that’s been pumped up in the Iran show trials.” It’s rather unworldly to be somehow blamed (credited?) with masterminding a plot to overthrow the Iranian government. In reality, my involvement goes no further than sharing my concerns about an old friend who’s been unfairly detained by an unjust regime.

An earlier version of this blogpost suggested that Dickey had acted unethically in publishing our Facebook exchange. Dickey forwarded that exchange to me – which I had deleted – and pointed out that I had not explicitly asked him to keep the exchange confidential. While I still would have prefered that Dickey contacting me before quoting what I had perceived as a background exchange, I retract my earlier accusations and offer him my apology on those grounds.