Disclosure
My disclosure statement, modelled on David Weinberger’s comprehensive disclosure page on his blog.
No one pays me to say - or not say - certain things on my blog, in print, or in radio, TV or newspaper interviews. That said, I accept the idea that one’s professional affiliations and business relationships may influence one’s judgement and therefore I offer the following information about my affiliations so you can better make up your mind whether I’m being fair in my opinions and representations.
I’m employed by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School as a research fellow. My agreement with the Center is that my research focuses primarily on the Global Voices project. At present, I’m not otherwise compensated for my work on Global Voices.
My other major source of income comes from investing money I made from the sale of Tripod.com in 1998. I stopped buying individual stocks around the same time I started blogging - my holdings are in large, managed funds, which would make it difficult for me to shill for a particular stock even if I were inclined to do so.
I also make a modest amount of money from consulting, public speaking and writing articles.
I chair the board of directors for Worldchanging, the nonprofit entity that produces worldchanging.com. I’m not compensated for that work.
I sit on a funding board for the Information Program of the Open Society Institute, a multi-national foundation funded by George Soros. I’m (modestly) compensated for the time I spend on OSI issues and for my travel for OSI. Through OSI, I work with - and inevitably end up advising - nonprofit technology projects throughout the world.
I serve on the advisory boards for several ventures, for and not-for profit. These include the US and Africa advisory boards for FON, a wireless technology company, which has provided a small number of stock options in the company. I also am an advisor to GlobalGiving.com, to KadmusArts.com, neither of which I hold any stock in. I also advise, in less formal arrangements, a large number of other projects around the world.
I am a registered Democrat in the state of Massachusetts, though I tend to break with the party on some economic issues, especially those surrounding free trade. While opinionated about African politics, I have no particular party affiliations.
When I’m writing about issues where I have a distinct financial interest, I will do my level best to disclose my fiscal involvement in the situation. If you feel I haven’t done so clearly enough, or have other issues with this disclosure policy, please let me know.
February 8th, 2006 at 7:24 pm
[...] David’s concern is a valid one - if it’s not clear whether someone’s supporting something out of enthusiasm or out of fiscal interest, blogs become a much less useful - and more fraught - medium of discussion. With that in mind, I’ve added a formal disclosure policy to my blog - it’s accessible from each page of the blog as well. (I modeled my policy on the exemplary policy David Weinberger has had on his site for the past 18 months.) If there’s insufficient information in there, let me know and we can talk about whether I’m willing to add the information you’re interested in. There are limits to what I can disclose, in some cases - I’m under confidentiality agreements regarding some of my work - but I’ll work to disclose potential conflicts of interest as well as I can. I want to mention, though, that I’ve disclosed my relationship with FON in my prior two posts on the topic. [...]
March 6th, 2006 at 1:44 pm
[...] The last paragraph of the otherwise paranoid story is good news, I think, for FON, the for-profit wireless company I help advise. (Please see my disclosures page for full information on my relationship with FON.) The Brodeurs, who were inadvertently sharing their Wifi connection in Los Angeles, pissed off some of their neighbors, who offered to pay for continued access to the network. That’s precisely what FON lets you do - open your access point to a limited number of users for a fee, letting them pay to help subsidize your connection. Does the fact that the Brodeurs decided not to do this imply that we’ve got a broken business model? Or that it’s an idea that’s been waiting for someone to make the technology dead simple so that people can share their connections with fewer security worries and a way to make some money in the process? [...]
March 7th, 2006 at 8:47 pm
[...] Alexander Kazulin, a leader of the opposition to Belarus’s strongman Aleksander Lukashenka, was recently arrested and beaten when he attempted to register to attend a meeting of delegates with the president. He’s been charged with “malicious hooliganism” for allegedly defacing a portrait of Lukashenka while in detention. “Malicious Hooliganism” is evidently a big deal in Belarus - it carries a possible jail sentence of six years. Reporters Sans Frontieres reports that at least nine journalists were beaten while covering Kazulin’s arrest. [...]
March 15th, 2006 at 1:16 pm
[...] But Snyder’s solution of weighing blogger behavior against journalistic codes of conduct seems like a mistake. It’s not reasonable to ask that academics who blog turn down travel spnsorship, as it’s pretty hard for us to attend conferences. It may be reasonable that we disclose when we’re attending a conference and our travel expenses have been paid - I have a disclosure policy on my blog which makes this general point, but perhaps I need to be more specific event by event. (And perhaps you guys will let me know what you think I should be saying regarding expenses when I attend events like the Al Jazeera forum.) But I think Snyder’s “ethical dilemma” around my attendance at the Forum is less a dilemma and more an objection to the organization who hosted the forum. Perhaps Snyder has some biases or agendas behind his essay that he should be disclosing? [...]
February 15th, 2007 at 3:34 pm
[...] The network ID on my laptop quite often reads “Free Wifi” or “Open Wifi”. That’s because I frequently go to conferences where wifi is expensive, or nonexistent, and I connect my Mac to ethernet and use it as an open wifi node. This is pretty common practice, as are communitarian open wireless networks like CuWin and commercial semi-open wireless networks like Fon (a company I’m on the advisory board of.) In other words, there’s a lot of open wireless networks out there run by folks who are neither unscrupulous or pranksters. [...]
July 6th, 2007 at 7:14 pm
Hey Ethan, I just wanted to say hello, and tell you that what you’re writing about is really vital. I am a filmmaker from Portland, Oregon, and am working on a documentary right now about Africa, and all of the stereotypes/misconceptions that go along with it.
I especially love your phrase “Africa is a continent, not a crisis”, and I reference it often when talking about my film. Do you mind me using this phrase on our film website? I would be happy to link to your blog. My filming team and I really want to start a global conversation about Africa, and I thank you for taking the initiative in such a great way.
-Ben VanderVeen
August 16th, 2007 at 4:05 am
[...] of the Kenyan parliament. This project grabbed attention around the Internet, from the BBC to Ethan Zuckerman’s widely read blog. In fact Mzalendo received enough media attention both in Kenya and around the [...]
September 10th, 2007 at 11:08 am
Hey Ethan,
Thought you might want to know- we have a fantastic first year student from Accra- I talked to him about your Ghana stuff. Here is Kwame’s contact info :
Kwame.A.Poku@williams.edu
Cheers,
RG
October 31st, 2007 at 9:46 am
Hey Ethan
Inspired by your blog and writings by other experts and academics (and my own experience living in Tanzania), I am writing a paper about the transformational impact of mobile phones in Africa. While the impact is great, I do not see it as a silver bullet for African economies given their other governance, infrastructure, etc problems. I have also read that there is an “interoperability” problem in some countries where, it is said that “…In most
sub-Saharan countries, rival telecom companies do not allow customers to place calls to competitors’
networks, with the result that many people find it necessary to carry multiple phones on separate networks…” While I realize in many parts of the world there are restrictions on using other network to “roam” not being able to place a call to someone who uses another operator is a serious impediment to communication. Do you know if this regulation still applies in many African countries? I have searched, and researched, and searched again, but only came up with one claim about this restriction.
Thank you in advance. I love your blog…read it every day. It’s my little trip back to happier times when I was doing more doing than thinking. Hopefully one day I will get back there.
Thanks
kjm
July 30th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
Ethan, please excuse my placing this here, I don’t see another way to contact you.
I read and carefully followed your excellent step-by-step suggestions at V
http://advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org/projects/guide/
Between that and this
http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/internet/page6042.cfm
you answered just about every question and concern I had.
I thank you most sincerely.
My problem is that after carefully downloading and restarting I cqnnot find any Tor buttons, Privoxy or Vidalia icons, nuttin. And the torcheck shows that Tor is not active.
I know you’re busy and I’ll try to be understanding if you don’t reply, but my gadfly activities have already caused me much grief and I’d sure like to prevenr further hassles.
Firefox 3.01, Mac OSX 10.4.11, MacBook 2.1, Intel Core 2 Dou
Thanks for listening
Shas