I was pleased to see this story about death tolls in the Democratic Republic of Congo on the first page of Reddit this morning. The story is, more or less, a press release from the International Rescue Committee, one of the best organizations doing work on forgotten conflicts and refugee issues. The most recent survey sees a death rate in DRC that’s 60% higher than in similarly impoverished sub-Saharan African countries, suggesting 45,000 “excess” deaths per month - deaths that can be statisically correlated to ongoing violence in DRC and the shattered infrastructure destroyed in ongoing conflict. The study suggests that there have been 5.4 million excess deaths in DRC since 1998, the start of the second Congo war.

IRC has been commissioning these surveys for quite some time. I looked back at an essay I wrote, explaining my interest in the topic of media attention, in August 2003 - the centerpiece of that essay was a 2003 study from IRC that reported 3.3 million excess deaths in DRC, making it the deadliest conflict since World War II. A 2006 study put the death toll at 3.8 million. This recent study suggests that elections - which were tainted by violence, but were miraculously carried out successfully - haven’t been able to substantively improve living conditions for people in DRC, which continues to be plagued by violence from Congolese and Rwandan rebels.

“antichrist”, who posted the story to Reddit, notes, “45,000 die in Congo every MONTH and nobody cares”. Sure seems that way from global media coverage. I wrote a piece about 18 months ago titled, “Is Israel a problem for the Democratic Republic of Congo?“, which suggested that overfocus on the Middle East by mainstream media detracts from coverage of violence, refugee issues and death in central Africa. Part of this disparity can be explained by US interests in the Middle East. Part may be explained by racism and systematic disinterest in Africa. And much may be explained by laziness - every international reporter knows the basics of the story of the Intifada, while most need hours of research to identify the basic groups who continue the conflict in eastern DRC. Much as it would be satisfying to write my rant on this topic again, I wrote it 18 months ago… and five years ago… and I suspect I’ll be writing it five years from now as well.

I’ll be interested to see if anyone pulls on a particular thread of the IRC report. The method used to calculate these death figures is an estimation method widely used in epidemiological studies, but which has generated a great deal of controversy when applied to the conflict in Iraq. Dr. Les Roberts was one of the authors of the first DRC death estimation study - he’s quoted in the AP story on the report - and he’s a figure who’s become quite controversial for his study in the Lancet of excess deaths after the US invasion of Iraq. Debunking the Roberts study has become a near full-time focus of some critics on the right, who’ve pointed to the political leanings of the authors as well as methodological questions for reasons to disbelieve the survey.

The Congo surveys use much the same methodology that the Iraq studies use - establish a baseline mortality rate (in Iraq, determine household death rate before the US invasion; in Congo, look at mortality rates in similarly underdeveloped nations); randomly select households and conduct interviews to determine mortality rates; compare baseline rates with the rates established via survey. But I haven’t seen any systematic attempts to debunk the Congo statistics, despite their possible vulnerability to the same methodological critiques as the Iraq studies. (I’d love to read any critiques of the DRC studies, if you know of any - please post links in the comments, or send them to me directly - ethan at ethanzuckerman dot com.)

That makes sense as well - the Iraq study was a chilling reminder of the cost of the Bush administration’s disastrous invasion of Iraq, and its release was calculated to influence the 2004 election. Those who believed that the Iraq invasion would have long-term positive effects had a compelling reason to challenge Robert’s et al’s estimates. The ongoing disaster in the DRC doesn’t even register as a foreign policy issue within the US, and therefore there are no knives drawn from the left or the right around the question of whether 3, 4 or 5 million have died in the past decade. 10 million could have died and there’s not a chance it would compel the Bush Administration to make a substantial commitment to support the DRC government or the UN mission in eastern DRC. No possible policy change means nothing to fight over, at least in the US-centered blogosphere and punditsphere.

If there’s any good news in the recent study - and believe me, I’m stretching trying to find any - it’s that death rates appear to have been decreasing in the easternmost parts of DRC. These are the areas where MONUC, the UN mission in DRC, has been on the ground attempting to maintain a buffer group between armed groups. MONUC has not been above reproach - there have been horrific stories of abuse of the local population by some peacekeepers, and the UN’s attempts to control behavior of peacekeepers have not been entirely successful. But the fact that the recent study hasn’t found death tolls even higher is due to the contributions of tens of thousands of troops, exclusively from low and medium development nations, to maintaining the peace in one of the world’s ugliest and most difficult conflicts.

Fernando Rodrigues is one of Brazil’s leading journalists, and an innovator in the field of unlocking public information. He writes for Folha de São Paulo, the largest paper in the country, and is currently serving as a Nieman fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

Rodrigues offers some context on Brazil and internet usage in the country, reminding us that the nation is one of the world’s largest democracies, with 186 million citizens, 42.6 of whom are connected to the Internet. Brazilians represent 46.3% of all South American Internet users. The nation is aggresively embracing the use of digital technology in politics - voting in Brazil is 100% electronic, with no paper balloting, and the government is ranked 13th internationally on an e-government survey from Brown University.

At the same time, Internet penetration in Brazil is quite low by the standards of developed nations, with 22.4% of the population connected. And while Brazil has full democracy and a free and vibrant media, it has no freedom of information law, which is critically important for journalists trying to investigate government stories. And while Brazil’s egovernment initiatives are being recognized internationally, Rodrigues raises a distinction between quantity and quality of e-government efforts.

Rodrigues was the founder of a critically important project in the world of Brazilian transparency - Politicos do Brasil. The site lists information on 25,000 political candidates in Brazil who’ve registered since 2000. This information includes critical financial data. Brazilian politicians are required to submit a statement of “patrimony”, their personal assets, which are a matter of public record, but are very difficult for citizens to obtain. Those records have been digitized, or hand entered, and are now accessible for all the users of the site. During the 2006 elections, the site registered 1 million visits in a single day.

The site was funded by Rodrigues’s paper, Folha de São Paulo, which saw it as a powerful tool for computer assisted reporting. While it’s been a resource for the paper, it’s been at least as powerful for competing newspapers, especially for small regional newspapers. Folha focuses primarily on national stories, but a regional paper might focus on the finances of a local politician.

This led to a story, for instance, in O Globo about the former governor of Mranhão state, in the northeast of the country, who reported personal assets of about $250,000, but purchased a penthouse for $1.5 million dollars. Investigation of his finances led to his jailing on charges of tax evasion. Across Brazil, the assets of politicians have increased 41.8% over the course of a four-year election cycle, which vastly outpaces the 3-4% rate of annual inflation in Brazil… which suggests that either that Brazilian politicians are amazingly astute investors, or that there’s continuing political corruption in Brazil.

The success of this project is a strong argument for laws that increase governmental transparency in Brazil. According to Rodrigues, the Brazilian constitution mandates a right of access to information, but there’s no law that mandates this access. He’s now working with the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalists, an organization inspired in part by the US organization Investigative Reporters and Editors, to build a movement towards a freedom of information law in Brazil. ABRAJI is now one of the leading partners in a coalition of 18 organizations supporting this law, along with 15 congressmen from different parties.

The above map, from Privacy International, shows countries that have FOIA laws (in green), pending legislation (in light green) and movements towards FOIA laws (in yellow). It’s worth noting that many developing nations don’t yet have a movement towards FOIA acts - it’s very difficult for journalists to break certain stories on their governments without the legal ability to obtain key documents through legal channels. Before you can build online transparency systems, you’ve got to have ways of obtaining key pieces of information from your government.

In questions after his talk, Persephone Miel pointed out that the Politicos do Brazil project put online 25,000 CPF numbers, the Brazilian equivalent of social security numbers. Miel wondered whether there were privacy concerns from releasing this much personal information online. Rodrigues explained that he’d put a formal question to the Brazilian supreme court asking whether a newspaper or web site could do this. The response: politicians, as public figures, should expect that newspapers and websites could release public information on their fiscal status, including CPF numbers. Not only does the Politicos site make the CPF numbers, they include a tutorial which helps citizens look up a politician’s tax returns based on their CPF number.

I asked two questions - who are these resources for? Are sites like this primarily for journalists and civil society organizations, or for citizens at large? Rodrigues explained that the site gets heavily used by citizens immediately before elections, but generally is a resource for journalists. However, he believes that government information is nearly always demanded by journalists first, then by civil society and the general public after FOIA laws become well established.

My second question asked whether these transparency efforts had helped reduce corruption in Brazil. I mentioned that Transparency International, which publishes an annual index of “perception of corruption” that ranks Brazil as corrupt as China and India. Rodrigues is highly critical of TI’s methodology, suggesting that the reporting of corruption in Brazil both helps make the country less corrupt, but may increase the perception of corruption in Brazil in the short term. He’s a supporter of Global integrity, a new project designed to measure corruption and government effectiveness through the synthesis of over a hundred factors. The hope is that the results are more objective than TI’s thoroughly subjective index. “Our reporting might give the impression that every politician in Brazil is a thief. Actually, the standards for Brazilian politicians are as good as many other countries, but we’re transparent about our corruption, which might be dragging down our international perceptions.”

Like many of you, I’ve been following the events in Kenya closely the past three weeks. One way to measure the continuing protest and unrest is to follow the story through Ushahidi, a citizen media site put together by friends of mine to allow Kenyans to post news about post-election unrest and violence. Each incident is added to a map, giving a visualization of the ways in which reactions to a rigged election have spread across the nation.

Most of the news on the Ushahidi blog is extremely sad. Some reports feature stories that are getting play in international media, like the shooting of youth by government soliders in Kisumu - video of the incident made its way onto Kenyan television and has been widely circulated on the internet. Many of the incidents documented on Ushahidi point to violence from state actors against protesters, something that’s become depressingly common as Kibaki’s government continues to maintain a “no tolerance” policy against protests, including peaceful protest.

But Ushahidi is also documenting stories that don’t get as much coverage internationally, or even within Kenya. A recent report on “Mama Peter” in Eldoret focuses on one aspect of the unrest - property crimes. An entrepreneur who’d invested in a hair salon and a training school for hair dressers found herself fleeing violence in Eldoret and the destruction of her stores. These reports aren’t as dramatic or brutal as video of soldiers shooting unarmed men, but they add to the complexity and sadness of the current situation in much of Kenya.

Ushahidi is tracking hopeful stories as well. A category of incidents on the site is “Peace Efforts”, community-based projects that are attempting to bring Kenyans together while other factors tear them apart. A report on a meeting of senior doctors in Nairobi begins:

A group of senior doctors concerned about the escalating insecurity met to think through the issues of the day and in particular to consider their possible role in the mediation process.
Their starting point is the fact that they as doctors are able to work across tribal lines while their patients in particular the politicians seem to be unable to do so.

My hope is that we’ll see more doves on the Ushahidi maps in the future, and fewer fires. And since the opposition is now shifting tactics towards a boycott, perhaps maps need to start being market with dollar signs?

In the long run, I suspect tools like Ushahidi - which now accepts reports via SMS - will be useful for everyone working in citizen media when events grip a nation or a region. I also suspect that the tool is important for Recovery 2.0 efforts, where having visualizations of people in trouble is a first step in deciding where and how to deploy aid. It’s too early to be looking for silver linings in a situation that’s still rapidly evolving, but I suspect the reaction of the Kenyan tech and blogger community will be one of the long-term positives of this situation.

I’m not the only one looking for silver linings. Daudi Were identifies the civility that’s prevailed in Parliament - despite ferocious political conflict - as a source of pride. At the very least, there were “no unseeingly scenes of honourable members doing what some call pulling a South Korea.” Amidst a wealth of bad economic news, Bankelele finds some hope in the fact that some insurers are covering damage from riots, despite the fact that policies don’t cover these damages.

If you’d like to be part of a hopeful story in Kenya, take advantage of the system that the folks at Mama Mike’s have set up to process donations to the Red Cross. $25 sends the following items to a Red Cross/Red Crescent center in affected areas: “5litres of cooking oil,sanitary products,2kg of unga,2kg rice and a pair of shoes.” Juliana is documenting the work that the Red Cross is doing assisting displaced people and has photos of a relief center set up in Jamhuri Park, near Nairobi. She urges readers to give: “This week we would like to appeal to all bloggers, friends of bloggers, wannabe bloggers, diaspora kenyans, Tedsters, treehuggers, geeks, nerds, boingboingers, worldchangers…you get the idea, to give what they can using Mamamikes’ donation page. ”

That page is right here, and I’m happy to report it’s very easy to use. So use it.

The last time I wrote about happiness, I found myself swamped with emails requesting my data set and asking questions about methodologies for measuring happiness. Readers, it seems, are pretty interested in happiness. And editors certainly are - Businessweek just produced a story and photoset of the dozen happiest nations, according to British researcher Adrian White.

People love to think, talk and argue about happiness. I have a hard time counting the number of times I’ve been approached at development conferences by someone who wants to tell me the story of Bhutan’s decision to focus on Gross National Happiness, not Gross National Product. Or the times I’ve been forwarded an article asserting that Nigeria tops a world happiness survey. We’ve all been happy and unhappy, and we’ve all got opinions - well- or ill-informed - on what makes people happy, which means we’ve all got something to say on the topic.

I was interested in correlating happiness to health, and threw some simple statistical techniques at a data set I’d found online. In a development that made me, well, pretty unhappy, I discovered that the data I was using - also Adrian White’s Global Projection of Subjective Well-Being - was apparently “borrowed” from the New Economics Foundation’s “Happy Planet Index”. That data, in turn, is apparently extrapolated from Dr. Ruut Veenhoven’s World Database of Happiness, which is a concordance of happiness research from around the world. The database includes results from 95 countries, many of which have been surveyed several times over the course of decades, asking people a fixed series of questions about their subjective satisfaction with their own lives.

Veenhoven’s database is the starting point fror Eric Weiner’s excellent “The Geography of Bliss“, a witty, funny and insightful book, which follows the wanderings of a self-described “grump” through his travel to happy and unhappy nations.

A foreign correspondent for NPR, Weiner sees a lot of nations at their worst. And he claims not to be a happy man, an addict of self-help books designed to help him enjoy his life more. Explicit in his journey is the question, “If I lived here, would I be happy?” There are some interesting geographic patterns to happiness. Impoverished and wartorn nations are generally not happy places. Scandinavian and Alpine nations are, for the most part. You might conclude that cold, rich nations are the places to be if you’d like to be happy.

But making generalizations in this field is difficult.
Many of the former Soviet states are cold, and most rank very low in happiness. Money’s not guaranteed to help either. There’s an “East-Asian Happiness Gap“, where wealth East Asian nations are a lot less happy than you’d expect given their wealth. (Possible explanations for the gap include, “environmental disruption, excessive competitiveness, repressive education, excessive conformity, negative attitudes towards enjoyment, and the emphasis on outward appearance.” Sounds like a drag.)

Weiner travels to nine nations in writing the book, some unusually happy (Switzerland, Bhutan, Iceland), some surprisingly unhappy (Qatar, Moldova). He’s better at writing about the unhappy ones than the happy, which may reveal a fundamental truth of travel writing - it’s just not much fun to read about someone having a great time. (One of my favorite travel writers is Redmond O’Hanlon, whose jungle journeys generally sound like misery, interspersed with danger, failure and sheer terror, gently seasoned with British wit. My guess is that he wouldn’t be nearly as good at writing about beach vacations in the Bahamas.)

It’s hard to draw firm conclusions from Weiner’s travel about what makes some nations happy and others miserable. Weiner gives us intriguing hints at the state of the art of happiness research, writing at some length about “the hedonic treadmill“, a concept coined by Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell, who were studying the happiness of lottery winners and accident victims. Unsurprisingly, the lottery winners were quite happy, and the paralyzed accident victims unhappy. But over time, both returned to levels quite close to their happiness before these surprising developments.

Most people believe that acquiring a bit more money would make them happy; they tend to find that acquiring wealth is a trap, as they always want a bit more (hence, the treadmill.) There’s an exception - people who are truly impoverished will see their happiness increase with increased income. But this effect maxes out at a surprisingly low level, around $15,000 in annual income. In a rich country, there are only a few things likely to have an unambigious effect on your happiness over a long period of time, Weiner tells us: “Noise and big breasts. Studies have found that we really never get used to loud noises, despite prolonged exposure. Another study found that women who get breast implants never tire of the enjoyment it brings them, and presumably their companions as well.” And now you know.

Weiner adds his own layer of theory to his travels, introducing a couple of useful concepts to people interested in happiness. He discovers that throughout his travels, he meets people who are much happier in the places they’ve migrated to than in the lands of their birth. “They are hedonic refugees, moving to a new land, a new culture, because they are happier there. Usually, hedonic refugees have an epiphany, a moment of great clarity when they realize, beyond a doubt, they were born in the wrong country.” My guess is that a lot of people born in Burkina Faso, for instance, have this moment of clarity but aren’t able to relocate to Denmark - this is, perhaps, a more useful concept for explaining the migratory patterns of the rich and privleged than the world as a whole. But it’s an intriguing clue about “cultural fit”, the idea that someone who doesn’t fit well with the dominant culture of a place may be unhappy even if most of her fellow citizens are blissful.

Weiner also suggests that culture goes a long way towards explaining unhappiness in Moldova, the unhappiest nation he visits. Moldova is legendary in the happiness studies community, a nation that ranks extremely low in happiness despite beating out many nations in terms of life expectancy and wealth. Weiner believes this is because Moldova is:

…a fabricated nation. It doesn’t exist. Oh yes, you can go there, as I did, and walk its streets, eat its mamaliga, drink its bad wine, talk to its miserable people. Later, safely home, you can flip open your passport and admine, if that’s the word, the stamp that says “The Republic of Moldova”. None of this matters. Moldova does not exist, and existence is, in my book, a prerequisite for happiness. We need a solid identity - ethnic, national, linguistic, culinary, whatever - in order to feel good about ourselves.

This theory helps explain Weiner’s reaction to Qatar, which he finds surprisingly unhappy. His visit to Qatar’s historical museum, an unairconditioned concrete bunker in a nation where summer temperatures routinely break 50C, convinces him that Qataris have outsourced their history and heritage, not just all menial - and much technical - labor. Unless it’s the claustrophobia that comes from a society bound by tribal rules, but freed of the constraints of traditional financial rules by incredible wealth through national resources. Turns out it’s almost as difficult to pin down the causes of unhappiness as it is to explain happiness.

“The Geography of Bliss” makes a lousy self-help book - it won’t help you relocate to your happy spot on the earth, if such a thing exists. But it’s a really fun way to get a handle on what we do and don’t know about happiness, and you’ll likely be (marginally, slightly, temporarily) happier if you read it.

I had dinner with my parents, my sister and her wife Friday night. The topic of conversation, as I suspect it was around many family dinner tables, was the Iowa caucuses, the first step in the almost interminable process of selecting US presidential candidates.

I was thrilled that Obama was able to beat out presumtive front-runner Hillary Clinton and wondered aloud whether the victory of an African-American candidate in lily-white Iowa meant that the US had made major progress against pervasive racism. (I’m far from the only one to ask this question.)

My sister-in-law wasn’t buying it. An African-American woman in a same-sex marriage, she encounters lots more prejudice and racism in daily life than I do. (Yes, even in liberal, gay-friendly Massachusetts, where we all live.) As she talked about her sense that Obama can’t win primaries in the South, I found myself thinking of a blogpost I’d read earlier that day.

Lower Manhattanite, writing on the Group News Blog, offered his visceral reaction to Obama’s victory in Iowa - the profound fear that the Senator would be struck down by an assassin’s bullet.

Mom was all of 21 when Malcolm was killed uptown. She and my dad knew him well. This was resonating deeply in her, and I could hear the upset in her voice. We lived around the corner on 115th Street from the Mosque they fire-bombed in “retaliation” the next day. Ascendant Black men at rostrums was going to hit my mom funny no matter what. And she was not wrong for the trepidation she felt.

“Are any Black people watching this tonight just enjoying the history of all this? Or are they all as nervous as we are?”, I asked her.

…

I don’t know if you’ll ever really understand it and why it comes so quickly to the fore for Black folks. I guess, you need only to look at not distant, but recent American history and how deadly cruel it has been to Black people on the cusp of busting a door wide open. In my lifetime, Malcolm X was cut down. Medgar Evers was blown away. Martin Luther King’s flame was sniper’s bullet snuffed. Never mind all the back-room, black-bag shit the U.S. government ran on folks who stood tough locally like Chicago’s Fred Hampton and others.

We have developed an unfortunate Pavlovian response to the repeated sight of our best and brightest being blown away like so many dandelion bits in the wind.

And so we talked for a while about how much harder it is to be hopeful about racism in America when you’re not white. And my sister talked about the strength of Huckabee as a candidate and her fear that an evangelical candidate might be unstoppable in a national election.

And I realized that we were talking about tribalism.

My Kenyan friends, both home and abroad, have been highly critical of Northern media’s coverage of the political violence in Kenya. Friends are upset that the situation is immediately compared to the genocide in Rwanda. And they’re frustrated that coverage often falls into an African news trap - “Oh well, it’s all about ancient tribal hatred - nothing we can do about it.”

My friend Binyavanga Wainaina has an op-ed in Sunday’s New York Times, titled “No Country for Old Hatreds“, which does an excellent job of combatting that narrative. He points out that Kenya has a much more coherent national identity than many African nations, and that ethnic politics have lost out to pan-ethnic movements in the past. He notes, “Mr. Odinga and President Kibaki are not really ethnic leaders, but in the days since the disputed election they have stoked tribal paranoia and used it to cement electoral loyalty.”

In other words, the crisis in Kenya is not about Kikuyu versus Luo - thought some of the resulting violence may be. It’s about a leader who’s failed to implement the changes he’s promised and his desire to keep power, and the attempts of an opposition leader to build the narrative of a people’s revolution and gain international support. And both sides are taking advantage of one of the oldest possible narratives: tribe.

Tribe is a narrative that makes intuitive sense to people. Birds of a feather do flock together, in a phenomenon that social scientists call “homophily“. It makes sense that tribes tend to vote together as well. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Kenya is likely to survive this crisis, and it will survive for reasons that Bankelele suggested in a post a few days ago:

- Neighbors talking to one another about maintaining their many years of peace
- Neighbors setting up watch out groups and liaising with the local police
- Neighbors taking in and sheltering friends, relative and strangers
- Police officers talking down residents this morning who had hoped to march to Uhuru Park.
- Local leaders and MP’s talking to their constituents – preaching non violence.
- Neighbors standing together and ignoring the sparks from outsiders

It’s too easy to dismiss African political stories as the legacy of tribalism. Assuming that people will behave a certain way because of ancient hatreds, of in- and out-groups denies people political agency.

Kinda like my family and I were doing the other night as we talked about the Iowa caucuses.

Kenya can survive what it’s facing now by rejecting the simple narrative of tribe amd seizing the moment. Binyavanga argues, “The moment is now to make a solid thing called Kenya.” Maybe, just maybe, it’s possible for America to seize that moment, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As we near the shortest day of the year and the Christmas/New Year’s hibernation that spreads across much of the world, we’re entering list season. Newspapers, websites and other media release their top lists of best books, best films, best music, and I’m sure, duct tape, automotive lubricant and vegan bacon substitute. Time Magazine offers fifty top ten lists, including fashion must-haves and “t-shirt worthy slogans”.

I mention this not as a complaint - these lists are occasionally useful, and Global Voices authors are, in some cases, putting together lists of the best posts from their regions for 2007.

The lists I’ve been perusing today are the “underreported” lists - lists of stories that media critics or media outlets don’t feel were covered closely enough in 2007. Lots of organizations put them out. Project Censored’s leans to the left, while World Net Daily leans right. Medicine Sans Frontieres offers an extremely valuable list of “top ten most underreported humanitarian stories of 2007“, a list which includes conflicts in Somalia, DRC, Sri Lanka, Colombia and CAR, as well as drug resistant tuberculosis and nutrient-rich supplements to assist with child malnutrition.

It’s not too hard to understand why media critics - or groups like MSF, who rely on media coverage to help them raise funds - would publish lists of undercovered stories. But the term “undercovered” has an interesting implication bound up in it - the idea that there’s an optimal level of news coverage for each topic and that these topics aren’t getting their fair share. (I looked at this topic in some detail in 2003, building “models” for media attention that tried to predict how many stories a nation should feature in based on its population or its wealth. I received a lot of good critique, arguing that there’s no guarantee that just because two nations have the same population that they have the same amount of news - Nigeria may just be less interesting and less newsworthy than Japan.)

But it’s a little stranger to see a mainstream media outlet declare stories undercovered. When Time offers a list of the top 10 undercovered stories of 2007, should we read this as self criticism? Or as criticism of the broader media world? Or perhaps of the readership, for not expressing enough interest in stories the outlet was trying to tell and sell?

The top story on Time’s list this year is about Somalia, and is titled, “The Other Darfur“, looking at the more than 1 million refugees who’ve left Mogadishu. Intriguingly enough, Somalia topped last year’s list with an article titled “Islamist Takeover in Somalia“. And the situation in Somalia is one that Time has covered admirably - thought I disagree with some of the characterizations in Alex Perry’s stories, I’m impressed that Time is giving him so much space and leeway to report from Somalia. (Perry likely had some influence in this year’s list, as story #10 is about Ethiopian/Eritrean tensions, a story closely tied to the Somalia story.)

Somalia is the #1 story on MSF’s list as well. In their announcement of the list, MSF observes that all ten stories they list received a total of 18 minutes coverage on the US’s three major television networks from January through November of 2007. (The lists have another overlap, with both Time and MSF listing drug-resistant TB as one of the top undercovered stories of the year.)

So what do these undercovered lists do? Does Newsweek read Time’s list and check to see if they’ve got the correct Somalia:Darfur ratio? Or the right Somalia:Britney ratio, for that matter? (Oddly enough, Newsweek’s search engine shows proportionately more stories on Somalia than Darfur - 180:124 - while Time shows 747:1248. But Newsweek’s got a way higher Britney:Somalia ratio - 257:180, versus 351:747… Just imagine the coverage we could get by sending Britney to Somalia.) Do they challenge readers to find stories that they might otherwise ignore?

At the very least, these stories offer some advice on what we might put in the serendipity box. If Somalia didn’t receive enough attention in 2007, perhaps the answer is to ensure that readers trip over it in 2008.

What worries me is that these lists, by neccessity, can’t feature the stories we know nothing about, only the ones we think aren’t getting enough attention. My GAP scripts suggest that Somalia is getting fairly good media attention by African standards, certainly far more attention than the Central African Republic, for instance. (Which is to say, less attention than comparably sized wealthy nations, but more attention than most poor nations.) How do we construct warning systems that tell us not just the stories we’ve missed, but whole parts of the world we might be missing? Underreported stories seem like an example of the demand problem - we know there are stories in these countries, but readers/advertisers/publishers aren’t asking for them, so we’re not telling them enough. Is there another set of stories where our constraint in supply - we simply don’t know the story to tell?

Special bonus - the Underreported weekly feature on the Leonard Lopate show on WNYC. Excellent 10-minute radio pieces on stories you likely would have missed otherwise. Great stuff!

My friend Evgeny Morozov’s bookmarks on del.icio.us are one of the places I look for inspiration when I’m feeling burned out on blogging, writing or thinking… which is more or less how I’m feeling near the tail end of a very long year. Evgeny linked to a story from Nat Torkington on O’Reilly Radar about the ways in which social software can reinforce homophily - the tendency of individuals to associate with people who are alike in age, gender, class, value terms - and how users or designers of tools might fight these effects.

Nat points out, “Designers first need to decide whether homophily is a a feature or a bug. Life is easy when you’re unchallenged: this is why people read the New York Times or watch Fox News…” This is, in essence, what Cass Sunstein worries about in Republic.com - in a world where one can choose media that matches one’s preconceptions and prejudices, what prevents us from choosing to live in an echo chamber of supportive voices?

There’s an odd paradox at work in the world of the pervasive web. On the one hand, it’s easier than ever before for an individual to share her ideas with the entire world. On the other hand, the mechanisms we use to discover ideas may make it harder for us to discover different ideas from different people. Assume that our social networks contain a lot of people who’ve got similar interests and backgrounds to our own, as homophily implies. There’s a good chance those folks are going to recommend similar stories for us to read. If our social networks become a major source of new ideas for us, there’s a real danger that homophily traps us in a conceptual echo chamber.

(At this point, if you’re like most readers, you’re ready to fight the premise of homophily with a list of all the people you spend time with/link to/have friended on Facebook, etc. who don’t share your nationality, language, socioeconomic status or race. That’s okay. danah’s here for you: “Sociological fact: most white people hang out with mostly other white people. Individually, everyone immediately screams not me! and starts listing off all of the people of color that they know. Individuals never want to see themselves as non-diverse, but the desire to be seen in a positive light does not make someone diverse.”

You may also be asking the “what’s so bad about homophily?” question. Here Sunstein can offer some help, suggesting that people who hear only similar voices end up polarized, less likely to compromise with people of different political viewpoints, less likely to find the sort of common ground and experience neccesary for a democratic society. I’d go further and argue that too much homophily can make you a) dumb and b) boring, ignorant of news and ideas that aren’t already interesting to people around you, and incapable of bringing ideas to your friends that they haven’t already heard.)

Examining ways around the homophily trap, Torkington looks closely as collaborative filtering, the technology that underlies most online recommendation systems. Rate a couple dozen movies, and the system looks for other users who liked the same movies you did (and, sometimes, disliked the same movies you did) and recommends to you the movies they like that you haven’t yet rated. That’s all well and good, but if you happen to like the same movies that other white computer geeks from rural America like, you’re very unlikely to be recommended a movie that’s the favorite of urban latino fashionistas.

Torkington suggests that social software should consider ways to make these serendipitious recommendations. It would be trivial, for instance, for Netflix to offer a feature titled “People different from you love these movies”. They’ve already calculated your nearest neighbor - in the process, they calculate your furthest neighbor. The question is whether these recommendations would be at all interesting to you - it’s not a recommendation of bad movies, or even movies that might be a bad fit for you, but movies that are loved by those different from you…

While Torkington takes a swing at the New York Times in framing homophily, newspapers like the Times have a terrific mechanism to encourage serendipity. In many major newspapers, the lower right-hand side of the front page is reserved for a story that readers would otherwise likely miss. (Friday’s paper is a good example. On a day where leading stories were about steroids in baseball, Al Qaeda and the US presidential race, the serendipity box featured a fascinating story about a Liberian mother in Staten Island sending her son back to Liberia rather than lose him to gang violence in the US.) These stories aren’t selected by algorithms - they’re chosen by editors who want to feature content in the paper that might otherwise be ignored, which frequently includes stories on topics other than Iraq, US elections or terror. Dan Gillmor describes this feature as “institutionalized serendipity“.

It’s less clear where the institutionalized serendipity lives on the New York Times’s website. The NYTimes homepage features several times as many stories on its webpage than on the front page of the paper edition, but it’s much less clear which ones you’re encouraged to read. There’s more choice and less guidance… which isn’t a bad description for the information universe opened by the Internet. And the guidance that’s offered may be a homophilic form of guidance - in the bottom right of the homepage is a box that offers a list of the ten most popular stories, as measured by email traffic, blog links and searches. In other words, these are the stories that fellow websurfers found most interesting, not the stories the editors felt you should read, even if you didn’t know you were interested in them.

The serendipity box in the paper New York Times is a form of persuasive technology - it convinces us to pay attention to information we’d otherwise ignore. As BJ Fogg notes on the homepage on Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab, the idea that technologies are persuading us, not just people’s arguments, can be an uncomfortable topic. But it’s also a very powerful tool.

By way of example: I visit the Googleplex in Mountain View a couple of times a year. Being a cheapskate, I usually try to arrange to be there for lunch to take advantage of Google’s amazing cafeterias. My favorite of the lunchrooms offers a huge salad bar, complete with chefs who dress your salad on your behalf. This is an odd phenomenon. At first glance, I assumed that this was Google’s way of saying, “We’re so wealthy and successful, we can afford to save our geeks the hassle of dressing their own salads.”

But that’s not the reason why. Dressing is where many of the calories in a salad come from, and most people over-dress their salads, turning a healthy meal into a more fattening one. Google’s salad chefs put a modest amount of dressing on your salad and toss it in steel bowls, so that your salad is thoroughly dressed, but not unheathily so. Look closer at the salad bar and it becomes clear that the entire experience is engineered to encourage you to assemble a healthy salad. Vegetables like peppers and carrots are closest to you; cheese and olives are as far away as possible, forcing you to make an uncomfortable reach to add that tasty fat to your innocent greens. The salad bar is a persuasive technology designed to change your eating habits.

I find this amusing, and vaguely sinister, but end up conceding that it’s probably a good thing, or would be if I ate at Google every day. In the same sense, I wish more websites would take institutionalized serendipity more seriously. Like green peppers, information you didn’t know you needed is good for you, and should be periodically put onto your plate, even if you didn’t request it.

Encountering new ideas isn’t a supply problem in today’s internet - it’s a demand problem. There’s a near infinity of people unlike you creating content and putting it online for you to encounter. But it’s entirely possible that you’ll never encounter it if you don’t actively look for it… or unless the systems you use to find ideas start forcing you outside your usual orbits into new territories. Don’t fear the serendipity.

The situation in Somalia is spiraling out of control, and, as always, it requires some serious digging to understand what’s actually going on. Sheikh Qasim Ibrahim Nur, the national security director of the Ethiopian- and US-backed Transitional Federal Government (TFG) noted that “About 80 per cent of Somalia is not safe and is not under control of the government.”

His statement was almost immediately undercut by the Ethiopian government, whose troops have made it possible for the TFG to have any presence in Mogadishu. Bereket Simon, an advisor to Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi, dismissed talk of the resurgence of the Union of Islamic Courts, saying, “The facts on the ground tell you that [the UIC] are in bad shape and having serious difficulties.”

Maybe Simon and Sheik Nur should get together and coordinate their stories, as the Sheik told reporters, “Foreign Islamist elements from Afghanistan, Chechnya and some Arab nations have arrived (in October and November). There are around 4,500 foreign terrorists in the country.” One would assume those alleged terrorists are supporting the Union of Islamic Courts, which briefly managed to achieve some peace and calm in Mogadishu, before the Ethiopian army (with US support) chased them underground. But perhaps they’re just in town on holiday, since the UIC is “having serious difficulties.”

Nur’s statement fits with the narrative that Ethiopia and TFG have been feeding their supporters - Somalia is a hotbed for international terror, and international intervention is neccesary to stabilize the region. Other of his statements seem custom-designed for the Bush administration: “We have evidence that a large amount of weapons were shipped to Somalia from Iran… These sophisticated weapons were intended to annihilate the Somali people.” Reuters noted that this statement “could not immediately be independently verified.” It certainly would be fascinating if it were true - Shia Iran supporting Sunni insurgents (and, allegedly, Sunni al-Qaeda) in a Sunni nation against Christian troops?

The occasion for this linguistic battle between allies was a mortar strike on Bakara Market, a busy center in Mogadishu. Ethiopia denies shelling the market, with Simon arguing that Ethiopian forces have the UIC under control, and therefore have no need to shell civilians. Indeed, Ethiopian Information Minister Berhan Hailu (safely in Addis Ababa) told reporters, “As far as we know, Mogadishu remained peaceful during the week.” He might want to pass that on to the 19 dead and 40 injured in the blasts. Somali analysts say that Ethopian forces are the only ones in the region with the capability to fire the sorts of shells that caused the carnage in the market. (Wanna bet that someone blames Iranian weaponry for this attack in the next couple of days?)

It’s hard to follow this story for a lot of reasons, not just because virtually every source is unreliable. Increasingly, it’s difficult for any reporters to operate in Mogadishu, or Somalia as a whole. According to David Axe, who wrote an excellent series of posts from Mogadishu, “Pretty much every one of Mogadishu’s roughly 100 independent media workers has been arrested for reporting on the fighting – some for days, some for weeks.” In a longer piece for the Columbia Journalism Review, he reports that the TFG is systematically harrassing journalists, attempting to quash any reports of fighting in the city or refugees fleeing.

In the process, they’ve created a much more repressive media environment than existed under the UIC, and have cut off essential information services. Think of the importance of a morning traffic report in a city where gunfire and extortive roadblocks are routine. Shabelle Radio provided one, with a dozen journalists contributing stories from around the city on the “Today in Mogadishu” program. The show has been off the air since the TFG shot up Shabelle’s offices at the end of Ramadan.

Axe’s reporting is extremely helpful for people trying to follow the Somalia story closely. He offers a useful history of Bakara Market, including the rise of a private militia to protect businesses and shoppers. That militia was chased out by the TFG earlier this year, and they turned over 1700 weapons to the TFG. (When TFG soliders get sick of not getting paid by their dysfunctional government, they sell their AK47s to local toughs, who use them to man barricades and rob passers-by of their mobile phones.) I’m slightly put off by Axe’s narrative of self-sacrifice and machismo - his first few entries focus on the dire warnings he ignored in going to Somalia, and his decision to quit his employ with McGraw Hill to make the trip - but I can’t argue with his bravery or with his reporting on the ground. (After all, Yahoo’s resident war correspondent, Kevin Sites hasn’t been there since a five-day trip in 2005, before the Ethiopian invasion…)

And I appreciate his efforts to clarify US involvement in the situation. He argues, “The United States is playing both sides, supporting the army inciting much of the fighting AND the army with the best chance of bringing peace.” That latter army is the fledgling AU force, which currently includes 1,800 Ugandan troops. Uganda and Ethiopia have been competing to be the US’s best friend in the Horn, and Axe notes that the Ugandan troops and trained and supported with US money and US-backed mercenaries, including DynCorp.

Axe only got a partial picture in his two weeks in Somalia, but it’s a vital and important one. Only a few media sources are shining a light on the situation in Somalia. The LA Times has an excellent article today about aid convoys shipping grain to the country with an escort from the French navy to protect ships from piracy - I would love to have the backstory on how Edmund Sanders got this story from Marka, 45 miles south of Somalia. Most media sources are relying just on wire stories… and those wire stories are getting harder to get as the TFG cracks down on all independent journalists, not just those reporting locally.

Closing his Somalia series, Axe notes, “…it’s about how the U.S. aims to fight wars in Africa — by proxy — and how these proxy wars might have the same result as our misguided invasion of Iraq. Instead of destroying Islamic extremists, pre-emptive wars often breed them.” He’s absolutely right. That’s the insanity of US and Ethiopian involvement in Somalia: we took a stabilizing security situation in Somalia and turned it into a humanitarian disaster. And we did it with almost no one in the US noticing.

Don’t say the Bush administration doesn’t learn from its mistakes - the government reaction to the quagmire in Iraq was to keep our next foray in the “war on terror” as quiet as possible, hoping no one would notice. For the most part, no one has.

Go to enough conferences and, if you’re lucky, eventually you’ll meet most of the people you’ve admired from afar. I’ve wanted to meet Mimi Ito for years - I’ve admired her research on mobile phone culture in Japan and have been keeping an eye on her research on youth culture, some of which intersects with fellow fellow danah boyd’s youth and tech work. Mimi and I were on a panel together at a meeting earlier this week - that event was, unfortunately, off-blog, but Mimi was good enough to let me post some notes about her talk and the conversation she and I had afterwards.

Mimi’s talk focused on the “Post-Pokémon” era of Japanese - and global - youth media. She identifies Pokémon as a media form that has defined the current framework, laying the groundwork for peer-to-peer communication and creation of media. While the current generation has outgrown Pokémon, the game franchise shaped how global youth think about culture and gaming. It linked analog and digital media, she proposes, by creating an electronic game that later manifested as a collectible card game, manga, anime, toys and other media. It put portability at the center of the media mix, and helped establish Japanese media content as a transnation