Recent technology “camps” – Transparency Camp, Government 2.0 Camp – sparked discussion about whether there should be a crisis response camp. Crisis Camp was born in May, 2009 with a two-day event in Washington DC which brought together a variety of civic hackers who wanted to share knowledge around crisis technology and response. The World Bank took notice and ended up hosting the Ignite sessions associated with the camp, giving developers a chance to put ideas for crisis response in front of people who often end up providing funds to rebuild after crises.

The World Bank wasn’t the only large group interested in working with crisis hackers. Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft came together to found the Random Hacks of Kindness event, designed to let programmers “hack for humanity” in marathon sessions around the world.

While these events preceded the earthquake earlier this year in Haiti, that crisis was the seminal event in increasing interest in participating in technology for crisis relief efforts. A crisis camp to respond to the Haitian earthquake involved 400 participants in five cities and pioneered 13 projects. Over time, the crisis camp model spread to Argentina, Chile and New Zealand, with developers focused on building tools for use in Haiti, Chile and Pakistan. Blanchard explained that the events provided space for people who “didn’t want to contribute money – they wanted to do something.”

The camps had some tangible outcomes:
- I’m Okay, a simple application that allows people to easily tell friends and family that they’re okay, in an emergency situation, was developed at Random Hacks of Kindness
- Tradui, an English/Kreyol dictionary for the Android was developed during the Crisis camps
- Crisis camps also developed a better routing protocol to enable point to point wireless between camps in Haiti, writing new drivers in 48 hours that were optimized for the long ping times associated with using WiFi over multi-kilometer distances

Perhaps the most impressive collaboration to come from the Crisis Camps was work on OpenStreetMap for Port au Prince. Using satellite imagery released by the UN, a team created a highly detailed map, leveraging the work of non-programmers to trace roads on the satellite images and diasporans to identify and name landmarks and streets. As the map improved in quality, the volunteers were eventually able to offer routing information for relief trucks, based on road damage that was visible on the satellite imagery. A convoy would request a route for a 4-ton water truck, and volunteers would use their bird’s eye view of the situation – from half a continent away – to suggest the safest route. Ultimately, the government of Haiti requested access to the information, and Crisis Camps provided not only the data, but training in using it.

The conversation turned to the challenges Crisis Camps have faced in making their model work:
- About 1/3rd of the participants are programmers. The others range from the “internet savvy” to those with complementary skill.
- Problems and requirements are often poorly defined
- It’s challenging to match volunteers to projects
- There’s a shortage of sustainable project management and leadership
- Projects often suffer from undocumented requirements and code, few updates on project status.
- Little work focuses on usability, privacy and security.
- Code licensing often isn’t carefully considered, and issues can arise about reusability of code on a licensing basis.
- Projects can be disconnected from what’s needed on the ground
- Disconnection happens in part because relief organizations don’t know what they want and need and are too busy to work with an untested, unproven community
- Volunteer fatigue – the surge of interest after a disaster tends to dissipate within four weeks
- There’s a lack of metrics and performance standards to evaluate project success.

The goal is to move from a Bar Camp/Hackathon model to a model that’s able to build sustainable projects. This means bringing project management into the mix, and asking hard questions like, “Does this project have a customer? Is it filling a well-defined need?” It also means building trust with crisis response organizations and groups like the World Bank and FEMA, who can help bring volunteer technology groups and crisis response groups together.

Crisis Commons see themselves as mediating between three groups: crisis response organizations like the Red Cross; volunteer technology organizations like OpenStreetMap; and private sector companies willing to donate resources. Each group has a set of challenges they face in engaging with these sorts of projects.

Crisis response organizations have a difficult time incorporating informal, ad-hoc citizen organizations into their emergency response plans. There’s a notion in the crisis response space of “operating rogue” if you’re not formally affiliated with an established relief organization… which further marginalizes volunteer tech communities. Many CROs have little tech understanding, which means they aren’t able to make informed decisions about collaboration with technical volunteers. In a very real way, crises are economic opportunities for relief organizations – that reality doesn’t breed resource sharing, which in turn, gets in the way of sharing best practices and lessons learned.

Volunteer tech communities frequently don’t understand the processes used by CROs, and frequently fail to understand that there’s often a good reason for those processes. While VTCs provide tremendous surge capacity that could help CROs, if there’s no good way for CROs to use this surge capacity, it’s a waste of effort on all sides. At the same time, tech communities inevitably suffer from the “CNN effect” – when crises are out of sight, they’re out of mind, and participation slumps. This is particularly challenging for managing long-term projects… and tech communities have massive project management and resource needs. Finally, successful VTCs can find themselves in a situation where they have a conflict of interest – they’re seeking paid work from relief organizations and may choose to cooperate only with those who can support them in the long term.

Private sector partners are usually participating in these projects led by their business development or corporate social responsibility divisions… while cooperation with the other entities often requires technical staff. Response organizations are often the clients of private sector players – the Red Cross is a major customer for information systems – which can create financial conflicts of interest. And working with large technology companies often raises intellectual property challenges, especially around joint development of software.

Meeting with a subset of crisis response organizations, Crisis Commons understands that there’s a need for long term relationships between tech volunteers and relief organizations, tapping the innovation power of these charitably minded geeks. But this requires relief organizations to know what solutions are already out there and what are reasonable requests to make of volunteers. And volunteer organizations need to understand the processes CROs have and how to work within them.

The hope for Crisis Commons is to become an “independent, nonpartisan honest broker” that can “bridge the ecosystem and matrix the resources.” This means “translating requirements of the CRO to the crisis crowd, helping the public understand CRO requirements,” and the reasons behind them. This could lead towards being able to set up a service like “Crisis Turk”, which could allow internet savvy non-programmers to engage in data entry tasks during a crisis.

In the long term, Crisis Commons might emerge as an international forum for standards development and data sharing around crises. Building capacity that could be active between crises, not just during them, they could direct research projects on lessons learned from prior disaster relief, could build a data library and begin preparing operations centers and emergency response teams for future crises. Some scenarios could involve managing physical spaces to encourage cooperation within and between volunteer tech teams and providing support for future innovation through a technology incubation program.

Starting from the shared premise the Crisis Commons founders presented us with – “Anyone can help in a crisis” – the discussion at Berkman focused on the structure Crisis Commons might take. The goal behind a “commons” structure is to be able to be an independent and trusted actor in the long term, to be able to be objective source of tech requirements, and to be able to bring non-market solutions to the table. But the founders realize that this is an inherently competitive space, and that volunteer organizations might find themselves in conflict with professional software developers in providing support to relief organizations, or with relief organizations if volunteer organizations began providing direct support.

It’s also possible that another player in the space could compete with Crisis Commons in this matchmaking role. Red Cross could develop an in-house technology team focused on collaborating with technology volunteers. Google could use the power of their tech resources to provide services directly to relief organizations. A partnership like Random Hacks of Kindness could emerge as the powerful leader in the space. Other volunteer technology organizations – Crisis Mappers, Strong Angel – might see themselves providing this bridging function. FEMA could start a private-public partnership under the NET Guard program. What’s the sweet spot for Crisis Commons?

One of our participants suggested that Crisis Commons could be valuable as a developer of standards, working to train the broader community about the importance of standards, and on the challenge of defining problems where solutions would benefit a broad community.

Another participant, who’d been involved with several Crisis Camp events worried that “the apps, while neat, never really made it into the field,” suggesting that the problems raised are real, not theoretical. It’s genuinely very difficult for tech volunteers to know what problems to work on… and hard for relief organizations under tremendous pressure to learn how to use these new tools.

This, I pointed out, is the problem that could prove most challenging for Crisis Commons in the long term. When crises arise, people want to help… but it’s critical that their help actually be… helpful. Clay Shirky told the story of his student, Jorge Just, who’s worked closely with UNICEF to develop RapidFTR, a family tracking and reunification tool. It’s been a long, engaged process with enormous amounts of time needed for the parties to understand each other’s needs and working methods… and it’s easy to understand why it might be difficult to convince volunteers to participate to this depth in a project.

I offered an observation from my time working on Geekcorps – I meet a lot of geeks who are convinced that the tech they’re most interested in – XML microformats, mesh wireless, cryptographic voting protocols – are precisely what the world needs to solve some pressing crisis. Occasionally, they’re right. Often, they’re more attached to their tech of choice than to addressing the crisis in question.

As such, the toughest job is defining problems and matching geeks to problems. At Geekcorps, it often took six months to design a volunteer assignment, and a talented tech person needed to meet several times with a tech firm to understand needs, brainstorm projects and create a scope of work, so we could recruit the right volunteer. While that model was expensive – and ultimately, made Geekcorps unsustainable – I think aspects of it could help Crisis Commons find a place in the world.

I ended up suggesting that Crisis Commons act as:
- a consultant to relief organizations, helping them define their technical needs, understand what was already available commercially and non-commercially and to frame needs to volunteer communities who could assist them
- a matchmaking service that connected volunteer orgs to short term and long term tech needs, preferably ones that had been clearly defined through a collaborative process
- a repository for best practices, collective knowledge about what works in this collaboration.

Unclear that this is the right solution for Crisis Commons or the road they’ll follow, but I came away with a strong sense that they are wrestling with the right questions in figuring out how to be most effective in this space. Very much looking forward to discovering what they come up with.

I’m not very active in local politics. I follow international news more closely than the news of my hometown. In my defense, Western Massachusetts is a pretty sleepy place in political terms – this part of the state is so blue that the Democratic primaries tend to be the only elections that matter, and often major offices go uncontested at that level.

But one local issue has caught my eye… quite literally so. I live in a mountainous area, where some of the major employers are ski areas. One – Jiminy Peak – had the clever idea that their windswept mountaintop would be an excellent place to site a wind turbine. They used state grant money to research the feasibility of their site, then spent $4 million of their resort revenues to install a 1.5MW turbine. It provides a substantial portion of their energy needs and has helped the resort position itself as a green company.

Turbine atop Jiminy Peak

The turbine has become a local point of pride. So I was thrilled when one of the companies involved with installing Jiminy’s turbine started building 10 1.5MW turbines about a mile from my house. These turbines were sited atop another ski hill, this time Brodie Mountain, a ski resort that was mothballed in 1999, sold to Jiminy Peak and later sold to a real estate develolper. The developer, Silverleaf Resorts, began a legal campaign to shut down the wind farm that had been approved by local zoning and permitting boards, and which had already installed four turbines. They found a technicality and got an injunction that has held up construction for the past year.

I wrote a letter to my state representative, state senator and to my US congressman complaining about the injunction and the stalling of the project. I figured that, at worst, it would be a voice in favor of the windmills, helping counterbalance the sometimes shrill voices that are trying to stop wind development in the county. I also figured it would be an interesting test of the responsiveness of local government – would I get any response from my local politicians? Would they send form letters or have something insightful to share?

I sent the letter a little more than a week ago, and was surprised – stunned, shocked and thrilled – to get a phonecall Monday morning from Ben Downing, my state senator. He apologized for not responding to my note immediately – he wanted to wait for the outcome of a meeting so he could give me the good news that the project was likely to go forward in the next few weeks. He filled me in on several details I hadn’t known about the project and the legal battles surrounding it, and basically – without being pretentious about it – made it clear that he knew vastly more about local renewable energy projects than I ever will. I came away with the strong sense that I was represented by someone who had deep insight into local issues, was happy to hear from me, wanted me to understand local issues fully, and was going to be advocating for a point of view close to my own.

It obviously helped that I’d picked an issue that’s close to Senator Downing’s interests – who knows whether I would have gotten a similar response to a question about property taxes or the quality of local roads. But I pretty damned impressed, and it got me thinking about the political and media climate in the US today.

It’s not news that there’s a populist upsurge in American politics, based on widespread dissatisfaction with various institutions of government. Only 16% of Americans recently polled by Rasmussen think Congress is doing a good job… and that number is higher than it was a few months ago. And only 12% of polled voters believe their representatives are interested in helping constituents more than they are interested in advancing their own careers. This seems like it should spark a wave of anti-incumbency – as some are predicting, watching the rise of Tea Party-backed candidates in Republican primaries.

But the oldest truism in American politics is that people hate Congress but love their Congressperson. Since 1964, the lowest re-election rate for incumbents in the House of Representatives has been 85%, and lately has been approaching 95%. Incumbents have the advantage of name recognition, of being able to promise pork-barrel projects to voters, and the profound advantage in fundraising that comes from being in office with a near guarantee of election. If you were a company or indivdual hoping to influence a legislator, betting on the incumbent is a safe bet… which helps fund the incumbent, making incumbency a safer bet.

I wonder if there’s a different theory that might explain this disjunction: media attention is proportional to government dysfunction. I live very close to two other states – Vermont and New York. I know far more about New York state politics than I do about politics in my home state. In part, that’s because the most powerful of the local NPR stations is based in Albany, the state capital of New York. But it’s also because New York State politics is such a dysfunctional mess that it’s endlessly fun to report on. (Don’t believe me? Listen to the first story of this episode of This American Life and thank your lucky stars that your legislature isn’t this broken.) I probably know more about the budget crisis affecting California than I do about my own state’s budget… which is proving difficult to balance, but doesn’t face the sort of massive crisis California does.

I hear a lot about the most dysfunctional members of Congress – the crooked and the crazy – and little about those who are serving constituents and getting legislation passed. It makes sense – the senator with the wide stance is lots better copy than the senator with a nuanced stance on a complex political issue.

With many small newspapers in dire financial straits, cutting back local political reporting, national media becomes inceasingly influential and important. My local government officials are extremely unlikely to receive national attention unless they do something criminal or crazy. And if I’m not hearing about the positive work they’re doing in local media, it’s likely that my impression of politicians, as a class, is that they’re criminal, crazy and the source, not the solution, to societal problems.

So let me propose an experiment. Pick an issue you’re passionate about, preferably a local issue. Write a (paper) letter to local elected officials… the more local, the better. Blog, tweet, Facebook or otherwise talk about the response you get or don’t get. I’m curious whether the surprisingly positive experience I recently had is the lucky convergence of a responsive public servant and an interesting issue, or a hint that our governments might not be as dysfunctional as we tend to hear.

Two updates/postscripts to this post:

- My timing was either terrific or dreadful – my letter reached my representatives a few days before a new agreement that appears to let the wind project go forward. The Berkshire Eagle story on the “pact” to allow the wind project to proceed is here. While my advocacy had absolutely nothing to do with it, it’s great to see the project go forward.

- I got a call from Representative Denis Guyer two days ago, wanting to talk about the project. We spoke this evening (September 3rd). Guyer isn’t the wind fan that Downing is and made the case to me that wind farms are “no different” from large gas, coal or oil projects, “except that they might be cleaner”. He was critical of how Berkshire Wind had handled themselves in the Brodie Mountain case, but told me that he agreed that an 80% complete project was embarrassing and frustrating. And he pointed me to a recent oped in the local paper and on his blog arguing against a statewide bill designed to make approval of wind projects easier for developers.

As with my experience with Senator Downing, I was impressed that he’d taken the time to call me and felt like he had a good sense of the local issues, even if we disagreed on aspects of the situation. In some ways, this made his willingness to call me even more impressive than Senator Downing’s call, as he knew I was on his side and likely to agree with what he had to say.

So… two for three in terms of constituent service so far. And I’m willing to give Congressman Olver a break, as this is really a local, not a national issue. As I said above, I’m impressed with the knowledge, dedication and communication of my local officials. Your mileage may vary, but I hope your experience isn’t too dissimilar from mine.

The attacks help underscore two uncomfortable truths about the situation in Somalia. One is that the Somali government is incapable of protecting itself and would fall, perhaps within hours, without support from 6,000 AU troops. Despite massive support from governments around the world, including the US, the Transitional Federal Government is so disorganized that it’s often unable to pay its troops. As a result, they are often defecting to Al Shabab, for economic reasons, not ideological ones. The second is that Al Shabab scares the crap out of nearby east African countries, especially Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda.

Uganda has a right to be scared. Last month, a set of coordinated bombings in Kampala killed more than 70 people who’d assembled to watch the final match of the World Cup. Al Shabab has claimed credit for the attacks, which it says were intended to punish Uganda for supplying troops to the AU force. The militia has also threatened Burundi, which supplies troops to the AU mission, and carries out occasional raids into bordering Kenya. Their real animus is reserved for Ethiopia, which occupied Somalia – with US support – from 2006-2009. (The countries have been in conflict on and off since 1948… and depending on who you ask, back to the 16th century.)

Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia are all important US allies, and it’s likely that there’s increasing pressure on the Obama administration to “do something” about Somalia. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni – in an NPR op-ed - makes clear what he’d like the US to do in Somalia: support more peacekeeping troops, and give the Somali government more money. While that sounds rational on the surface, it might not be a very good idea. Understanding why requires looking at the history of Al Shabab and the US’s tragic role in helping bring a violent and extreme movement to prominence.

The one period of peace Mogadishu has enjoyed since Barre’s ouster in 1991 was a six month period in late 2006 where the comparatively moderate Union of Islamic Courts controlled Somalia. Markets, stores, the Mogadishu airport and port reopened and many civilian and business leaders cheered the new stability.

This period of relative calm ended when Ethiopia invaded Somalia in December 2006 to re-install the government the UIC had chased out a few months before. Ethiopia had good strategic reasons for moving against the UIC. Ethiopia saw the UIC as an ally of Eritrea, with whom it has a stalled border conflict and long rivalry. And Somalia, under Barre, invaded the majority Islamic/majority Somali Ogaden region of Ethiopia in 1977. (BBC’s timeline of events in Somalia may be useful.) Ethiopia continues to fight rebels in the Ogaden, some of whom seek a “Greater Somalia” that encompasses western Ethiopia and Somalia. So the notion of an Islamic Union with popular support, which might seek a Greater Somalia strategy was understandably intolerable.

The US didn’t much care for the UIC either. The Bush Administration state department believed that some of the UIC warlords had provided support for Al Qaeda… a claim UIC leaders denied. And, as Nir Rosen observes in this excellent TIME op-ed, some in the state department found UIC’s explicit Islamist alignment intolerable. So the US supported the Ethiopian invasion with intelligence, military advisors and, incredibly, turned a blind eye to a North Korean arms shipment that allowed Ethiopia to repair its tanks. The Ethiopian army rapidly chased the UIC out of Mogadishu, reinstalled the federal government (TFG = “transitional federal government”) and, left in 2009 to be replaced by AU forces.

What Ethiopia and the US didn’t anticipate (though they should have) was that the occupation of Somalia radicalized the population and led to the rise of Al Shabab, a group that’s proven to be much more extreme than the UIC. Al Shabab now controls most of southern Somalia and all but a few blocks of Mogadishu, where the nominal government of Somalia is protected from ouster by 6,000 AU troops. Those troops, in turn, are increasingly resented by Somali civilians, as their shells kill civilians in trying to strike Al Shabab forces.

The case against doubling down on peacekeeping and supporting the TFG, as Museveni suggests, starts with the observation that there’s no peace to keep in Somalia, an argument Jeffrey Gettleman makes in the NYTimes. Peacekeeping has never had meaningful dividends in Somalia, and outside occupation seems to be a powerful catalyst for the creation of new military forces. The federal government is a bad joke, not only ineffectual but fraught with internal divisions that are likely to break it apart if it ever achieved any power. If the government were ever to be able to operate beyond a AU-maintained perimeter, it would face a reconstruction challenge much worse than the situation faced in Afghanistan.

Counterintuitively, the best thing the US might do to prevent Somalia from becoming an operating base for Al Qaeda is to disengage, limit involvement to targeted strikes on international terrorist leaders and to providing humanitarian aid. That’s the case governance expert Bronwyn Bruton makes in this interview with the Council on Foreign Relations. She notes that a divided, clan-ruled Somalia was an environment Al Qaeda previously found impossible to operate in – the level of inhospitality of the clan system appeared to “inoculate” Somalia from foreign engagement. She suggests that allowing the TFG to fall and Al Shabab to rise will lead towards Al Shabab fracturing as a coalition, and eventually a return to clan politics and conflict, which is ultimately the only stable basis for a future functional Somali state.

Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi makes a similar case in an article in the American Thinker titled “What To Do About Somalia“. He urges a containment strategy – ensure that Al Shabab doesn’t act outside of Somalia, and cut off external supports. He also suggests the US and the international community recognize Somaliland, the comparatively stable north of the country, as an independent nation, creating another potential ally in stabilizing southern Somalia.

(Side note – while looking for Al-Tamimi’s article, I searched for “what to do about Somalia”. Google returned a wonderful result from Trip Advisor, titled “Things to Do in Mogadishu“. I love that Trip Advisor wants to find me a cheap flight to Mogadishu and to help me find a cheap Somali passport.)

What I find most interesting about Bruton’s arguments is her argument that the US is incorrectly framing the situation in Somalia as a conflict between religious ideologies. She argues that the TFG and Al Shabab are both ad-hoc, opportunistic groups looking for power, not advocating for a particular religious ideology. Because TFG is seeking funding from western governments, it argues that it’s a bulwark against terrorism. Al Shabab looks for support from Al Qaeda in the hopes of support from extremists in the Middle East. But the ideology is secondary to the search for power. (Some groups in Somalia have expressed concerns that the TFG includes a large number of Wahabbists, which seems incompatible with a pro-US orientation… and supports Bruton’s case that ideology is trumped by opportunity.)

If we take the conflict in Somalia out of the “extremist Islam versus the world” frame that the US often falls into, Bruton argues, we might be able to see that increased outside intervention will likely worsen the conflict. Perhaps then would make the decision to disengage. This doesn’t mean ignoring Somalia – it means watching borders closely, and being willing to strike against foreign fighters should they take shelter under Al Shabab. But it means giving up a failed strategy of nation building on the cheap and by proxy.

It’s a tough time in terms of US politics to make this case. The US’s ongoing costly and bloody involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq sends a daily message to the American people that the Muslim world is a dangerous place. That sense is being exploited for political gain by the far right in the US, who see islamophobia as winning political strategy, as seen in the absurd debate about the Park51 Center in New York City. President Obama has been admirably clear about his willingness to build bridges with the Muslim world and in supporting Park51 in the current controversy. President Bush was also admirably clear about rejecting a “clash of civilizations” frame in his public statements, but it’s less clear that his state and defense departments rejected this frame.

Nir Rosen is right – the US helped bring Al Shabab to power by backing an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia. What President Museveni is saying isn’t as extreme as the rhetoric Meles Zenawi used prior to the Ethiopian invasion, but the course of action he urges may lead to a similarly undesirable outcome. Or, to quote noted Somali analyst Admiral Ackbar, “It’s a trap.” Let’s hope President Obama is wise enough to avoid it.

(I had a chance to talk with Martin Williams, a young economist who’s spending two years in Ghana, in Accra a couple of weeks back. He’s serving as staff economist within the Ghana Ministry of Trade and Industry… where he tells me he’s the only guy who’s building economic models to understand trade policy. He’s there due to the grace of the Overseas Development Institute, a UK thinktank that provides economics support to developing economies. No doubt that Martin will be able to have a great impact while in Ghana, but it’s a little crazy that this is a function being provided by a recent Masters graduate in the country for two years. The reason isn’t that there aren’t trained economists in Ghana – there are, but the Ministry pays so poorly that they’re working elsewhere. Makes me wonder whether there’s more of a shortage of urban planners in countries like Ghana, or whether the economic incentives drive trained planners to work outside the country…)

So Paul and I were talking about the successes and failures of Geekcorps, the NGO I helped found in 1999 and walked away from in 2004. I tried to explain why Geekcorps had become so expensive and so hard to sustain – that putting people on airplanes, whether it’s to dig a well or advise a government, is incredibly expensive. Coming out of the Geekcorps experience, where raising money to support our volunteers led me to a partnership with USAID which ultimately ended up crushing the project, I found myself urging Paul to consider a problem that I’ve yet to adequately solve: how do you build relationships, share ideas and transfer skills without getting on airplanes?

Needless to say, I’m not the only person who’s tried to solve this problem. The UN’s volunteering program, UNV, has been working for years to establish a virtual volunteering arm that lets individuals take on tasks like research, translation, or graphic design to help development organizations around the world. Nabuur, an online volunteering community, tries to ground these sorts of virtual experiences in learning about the villages where these opportunities are based, and building connections between individual users of the system.

But much as reading lecture notes via MIT Open Courseware isn’t the same thing as dragging yourself across the MIT campus on a wet, grey February morning for a 6.042 lecture, assisting a Ghanaian primary school to write an application for grant funding isn’t the same thing as drinking palm wine with village elders. Not only does virtual volunteering provide a different set of rewards than participating in person, it means that it’s much harder for you to understand local needs and constraints, and easier to make bad design assumptions.

It’s possible to understand Global Voices as a “post-airplane” project, but that’s a misreading of how the network actually came about. After a few months of working on the project, Rebecca and I took advantage of a Berkman conference to bring dozens of international bloggers together at Harvard to build the relationships that led to forming Global Voices as a functional online community. We’ve spent absurd sums every two years to bring our community together in India, Hungary, Chile because we believe – correctly or otherwise – that face to face interaction is part of the magic that allows this project to run primarily on love, not on money. And the accumulated goodwill that comes from getting lost together in Zakir Nagar lasts between these biennial meetings and gives us a basis for collaboration in the interim.

I’ve started thinking of the GV model as “VPV” – virtual, person to person, then virtual again. People discover the community online, and connect based on their sense of shared identity and values with the people already participating. They come together, face to face, either at the biennial meetings we run or at the other people’s conferences (which we’re religious about invading and using to converge our network.) That, in turn, builds the trust and relationships we need to survive working together for the next months or years until we see each other face to face.

This form of social organization isn’t unique to the online age, of course – it’s the pattern scholarly communities have followed for years, with relationships developed through journals and individual communication, cemented by time visiting each others institutions and attending conferences. But the internet offers tools that can broaden and deepen these virtual ties. Reading a friend’s blog or following their twitter feed isn’t the same as beign able to see them each day, but it can be a more immersive experience than exchanging the occasional letter or article. I know far more about the daily habits of some of the GV colleagues than I do about friends I’ve known in person for twenty years.

I think part of the key to making a VPV community work is starting with a group that has a common identity, belief or practice. The common identity that links GV is a pretty loose one – we’re all bloggers (though participating in GV has the tendency to make one blog less, not more). That, and a mutual interest in making sure the online media world extends beyond North America and Europe, is evidently sufficient to create enough of a collective identity that many folks are able to participate within the project before they’ve met another GV person face to face. (I don’t know that anyone has yet met our beloved Veronika Khokhlova in person, despite leading our efforts in the former Soviet Union since early 2006.)

Virtual communities work well when there’s an assumption of good faith from other participants. Online communication is hard; we’ve got far less information about someone’s intention and emotion than we have in other forms of communication: no body language, no tone of voice. If we’re looking for evidence that the other participant is biased, inconsiderate, stupid, it’s often possible to find that evidence in the text he or she has posted. In real life, we tend to cut people slack and assume that a comment wasn’t made to offend. It’s harder to let things slide online – not only do we lack the non-verbal cues, but often it’s a mistake to assume good faith, to assume that your online conversant is interested in dialog rather than in a fight. (The comments on many newspaper websites can show you what conversation in absence of good faith looks like. Or you can just look at conversations within the US Congress at this point…)

If you can assume good faith long enough to establish real common ground with someone – preferably face to face – you can often weather the missteps that characterize these narrow channels of communication. Which isn’t to say that VPV communities always work out well – there are debates, like that over our Israel Flotilla coverage, that show that trust can be a scarce commodity even within a community of people who’ve had a lot of face to face interaction. I suggest that assumption of good faith as a precursor to building trust is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition to building lasting online relationships.

Which brings me back to this question of cross-cultural interaction without airplanes. If trust comes from assumption of good faith, and that assumption comes, in part, from a common practice or identity… maybe it’s time for activists to take a closer look at churches.

I spent Wednesday afternoon with Dylan Breuer, a theologian and lay leader in the Episcopal Church (the church that I’m a not-especially-active part of of.) She and I have been in touch over the years about political and social issues in East Africa, where she’s traveled extensively, working with local congregations. (Much of our conversation has had to do with what the Episcopal Church could do to support gay and lesbian rights in Uganda.)

While it’s an consequence of outdated, colonialist models of proselytizing that the Episcopal/Anglican church has presences in every corner of the globe, I’m wondering if it makes sense to think about church networks (in which I include mosques, synagogues, temples and any transnational religious institutions) as “latent networks” where the possibility of presumption of trust is higher because of a common identity and practice.

Which is to say, if we’re interested in building online relationships that cross borders of nation, language and religion, maybe the first step is to look closely at the networks that are already crossing these borders. And that an organization like the Episcopal church, which Sarah helpfully points out, does have (ritualized) weekly meetings to talk about social justice, might provide some of the infrastructure for online volunteering or other forms of VPV social change.

I realize that this is an open invitation for readers to respond with an emphatic “duh!” and perhaps the observation that American academics would benefit from spending more time in the religious institutions of their choice. Fair enough.

There’s a blind spot many development professionals have as well about faith based organizations. Eight years ago, I was in Dakar, Senegal with a colleague from USAID, working on a White House initiative. We’d had a very long week of meetings, and were chilling out on a Friday night before he returned to DC and me to Boston, eating at a beach restaurant. We were the only non-locals in the place, until a group of 40 Americans (the southern accents made it pretty obvious) walked in, led by a man whose deep tan and locally made shirt suggested that he wasn’t an interloper.

We held off our curiosity for about three minutes, then broke down and introduced ourselves. The group was a set of nurses organized by a Baptist church in South Carolina, and they’d been working in the south of the country, led by a missionary who’d been living in Senegal for a decade. Hearing that we were working with USAID, he explained the literacy program he and friends in his village had developed over the past years. It involved printing stories in French and Wolof on large sheets of paper, which were sold to market women to wrap loaves of bread. Kids were encouraged to collect the sheets, which could be redeemed, a hundred at a time, for small prizes. And a local radio broadcast led them through the stories – some of which, yes, were bible stories – teaching the children to read aloud. As we left the restaurant, my colleague observed that the literacy plan we’d heard about beat the crap out of most he’d been pitched at USAID, and wondered whether there was a way to match new USAID program officers with people with deep community knowledge… including missionaries who’d lived and worked in communities for years.

I don’t mean to trivialize the ways in which evangelism can be deeply disrespectful of local cultures. The people our friend in Senegal was preaching to were almost certainly Muslim, as most Senegalese are, and I’m uncomfortable with the fact that his literacy program is, on som level, designed to draw people from one faith to another. At the same time, I think it’s important to recognize that much of the contact between people from different nations comes through religious institutions. As someone who cares about building understand, relationships and communication between people, it seems like a blind spot – my blind spot – that I’m not paying much attention to these networks.

My impetus for this digital housecleaning? I’ve had a couple of kind mentions in the media recently, and thought it might be nice to people searching for me to find out what I’m doing lately… and not what I was doing in 2005. And just in case you missed it, here’s the shameless self-promotion:

CNN runs TED talks every Tuesday, and invites speakers to accompany their talks with an essay. I took the opportunity to write about Facebook’s 500 million member mark. This now means that my TED talk is circulating to another audience who are primed to believe that it’s about Facebook… though I don’t think I actually mention Facebook in the talk.

Before going to Oxford for TED, I dropped in on friends at the Guardian for their Activate Summit. Liz Ford offered an excellent overview of my talk there. I dropped by again on my way to Nigeria to do a brief interview about cyberutopianism, which follows below.

Probably the most enjoyable talk I’ve given lately wasn’t a lecture – it was a two-hour conversation with Ghanaian bloggers and tweeps set up by my friend Mac-Jordan. We were almost thwarted by technology – Google Calendar evidently decided to “help” by rescheduling our meeting at Smoothies Pub in Accra to eastern time, which meant that I showed up for the event at an hour when most Accrafolk are in church… and by the time everyone showed up, I’d given up and gone to find a bowl of omo tuo and groundnut soup. It all worked out, and I’m grateful to Mac-Jordan both for setting up the event and blogging about it. I clearly need to spend more time in Ghana – the local tech and literary scenes are both amazing.

Okay, enough about me – back to your regularly scheduled, sporadic posting.

She begins with a 1741 engraving by William Hogarth titled “The Enraged Musician“. A busy London street generates a welter of noise for the bewigged musician, who finds himself competing with village criers, a seller of songsheets, playing children and other distractions. The image isn’t just a narrative – it’s an example of anxieties about urban life and coming industrialization.

Crawford tells us that we’re now facing a new noise complaint complaints about the networked conversation. There’s a set of anxieties about network noise – “information overload” and “data smog” – starting to be discussed in the Australian context that Crawford is interested in unpacking.

In Australia, she tells us, there are now more mobile phones than human beings. She sees a metamorphosis underway, where the phone is moving from mobile communications to mobile media. Understanding this shift involves understanding how young adults are represented in the media, and what panics occur around youth and mobiles, and moving on to understanding the lived realities and the roles mobiles have in friendships.

By studying mobile use in four Australian states, looking at users in big cities and small towns, Crawford has concluded that mobiles are surprisingly emotion-rich items. She uses the term “emotional containers”, a device that serves as, in the words of one interview subject, “a network of all my friends in one.” As such, these devices are always on… but they’re not generally used for making phonecalls. In her study group – 18-30 year olds – voice calls are the least prefered mode of contact. Instead, young people use texts and social media, “light touch” contact through media like Facebook, which is “far and away the most popular space.”

Because light touch is so common and the device is always on, there’s an anxiety that comes from being separated from a phone. One subject tells her, “It’s under my pillow when I sleep.” She tells us about another interview subject who was trapped in an elevator for six hours. Her anxiety wasn’t about her personal safety – it was about being entirely off network.

This is likely a specifically urban anxiety – while users off network for a few minutes in cities complained, rural users were used to being off network, and got good at communicating in bursts when on network, and heading off network to escape.

The practices we use to manage constant connectivity are evolving, and they are negotiated between friends, families and colleagues. The workplace, in particular, is “a key space for this normative construction.”

Because we’re negotiating this in realtime, there are fears about “network noise” that seem to invoke a “myth of the fall”, positing a period when media didn’t impinge on our time. She cites Jaron Lanier as making this argument in “You Are Not a Gadget” and Giorgio Agamben, who made the case that the mobile phone as reshaping Italian gesture and speech, and homogenizing Italian society. But this isn’t a new problem – she notes that the philosopher Walter Benjamin was complaining about telephones as “uncanny and violent” in 1932.

The response to these concerns about information overload are well summed up by Clay Shirky’s pithy quote, “There is no such thing as information overload, only filter failure.” There’s a wave of “productivity porn” (using Merlin Mann’s term) like Lifehacker and Getting Things Done that promises to help readers focus. But total focus was never possible, nor desirable. Excesses of information is part of the human experience – no human could have read all the scrolls in Alexandria – and this tension between too much or too little information – between noise and silence – is an old one.

Crawford tells us about an organization founded in 1906 in New York City, “The Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise”. The society – which chose Mark Twain as honorary president – advocated for quiet zones around schools, hospitals, homes for the aged based on the belief that noise damages thinking. In contemporary thinking, she sees this idea echoed by cultural anthropologists Adam Greenfield, who talks about “zones of amnesty” and Genevieve Bell who speaks of “spaces of refusal”, places where we societally agree to disconnect and be silent. Greenfield is fond of positing a set of cafés called “Faraday’s”, where a Faraday cage prevents computers and phones from receiving a signal.

But there’s a creative role for noise as well. We see musicians start to embrace noise with the 1919 Antisymphony concert, rooted in the Dada movement, which leads to the rise of noise as a material for composition. Noise can be an intrusive element of randomness, but also a catalyst for creativity and new ideas.

People get enormous amounts of data by being always on and managing the flow of that data through their social connections. This is an evolutionary moment for us. We’re undergoing a social adaptation to high levels of information and a change of definitions about what constitutes attention, focus and productivity.

These aren’t technological changes so much as they are social changes inspired by technology. Crawford suggests that young people aren’t as tech savvy as we tend to think they are – most use only a few functions of their phones. They’re not especially invested in the technology but are using it as a means to an end: maintaining connections with their friends. As such, the problems that arise aren’t technical problems with technical solutions – “we’re going to negotiate this out through social means.”

It’s taken Onnik years to build up relationships with bloggers in Azerbaijan, relationships he needs to accurately cover the region. Azeri bloggers are often suspicious of his motives for connecting and wonder whether he’ll cover their thinking and writing fairly. But Onnik tells me that Facebook has emerged as a key space where Azeri and Armenians can interact. “There are no neutral spaces in the real world where we can get to know each other. Facebook provides that space online, and it’s allowing friendships to form that probably couldn’t happen in the physical world.” (Onnik documents some of the conversations taking place between Azeri and Armenian bloggers in a recent post on Global Voices.)

Graph from the front page of peace.facebook.com

Onnik was talking about his love of Facebook at an event hosted by the US Institute for Peace, where I and colleagues at George Washington University and Columbia were presenting research we’d carried out on the use of social media in conflict situations. Onnik’s hopes for Facebook as a platform for peace were echoed by Adam Conner of Facebook, who showed the company’s new site, Peace on Facebook. The site documents friendships formed between people usually separated by geography, religion or politics. Some of the statistics seem clearly like good news – 29,651 friendships between Indians and Pakistanis per day. Others are rather dispiriting – 974 Muslim/Jewish connections in the past 24 hours.

I’m a data junkie, and there’s little more frustrating to me than an incomplete data set. Basically, by showing us a very small portion of the nation to nation social graph, Facebook is hinting that the whole graph is available: not just how many friendships Indian Facebook users form with Pakistani users, but how many they form with Americans, Canadians, Chinese, other Indians, etc. Obviously, this is info I’m interested in – I’ve been building a critique that argues that usage of social networking tools to build connections between people in the same country vastly outpaces use of these tools to cross national, cultural and religious borders.

Without the whole data set, it’s hard to know whether these numbers are encouraging or not. Are 29,651 Indian/Pakistani connections a lot? Or very few, in proportion to how many connections Indians and Pakistanis make on Facebook in total? In other words, we’ve got the numerator, but not the denominator – if we had a picture of how many connections Indians and Pakistanis make per day, we might have a better sense for whether this is an encouraging or discouraging number.

I made a first pass at this question this morning, using data I was able to obtain online. Facebook tells us that the average user has 130 friends – a number that might be out of date, as the same statistics page lists “over 400 million users”, not the half billion currently being celebrated in the media. (Ideally, we’d like to know how many new friends are added per day so we can compare apples to apples, but you got to war with the data you have…)

We also need a sense for how many Facebook users there are per country. Here, we turn to Nick Burcher who publishes tables of Facebook users per country on a regular basis. Nick tells readers that the data is from Facebook, and the Guardian appears to trust his accounts enough to feature those stats on their technology blog. They are, alas, incomplete – Burcher published stats for the 30 countries with the largest number of Facebook users, and revealed a few more countries in the comments thread on the post.

Because we don’t have data for Pakistan, we can’t answer the India/Pakistan question. But we can offer some analysis for Israel/Palestine and Greece/Turkey.

Facebook for Peace tells us that there are 15,747 connections between Israelis and Palestinians for the past 24 hours. The term “connection” is not clearly defined on the site – it’s not clear whether a reciprocated friendship is 1 connection or 2 – because I’m going to count the number of Israeli friends and Palestinian friends, it makes sense to count a reciprocal friendship as two connections. (If Facebook is counting differently than I am, my numbers are going to be half what they should be.)

3,006,460 Israelis are Facebook users… a pretty remarkable number, as it represents 39.92% of the total population of the nation and roughly 57% of the country’s 5.3 million internet users. There are very few Palestinian internet users – 84,240, or 2.24% of the population… This mostly reflects how few Palestinians are online, as Facebook is used by 21% of Palestine’s 400,000 internet users.

At 3,090,700 Palestinian and Israeli Facebook users, we should see almost 402 million friendships involving an Israeli or a Palestinian. If we extrapolate from 15,747 friendships a day to 5.7 million a year, we’re looking at Israeli/Palestinian friendships representing 1.43% of friendships in the Israeli/Palestinian space… with all sorts of caveats. (The biggest is that the use of a year-long interval to calculate total friendships is totally arbitrary and probably not supportable. If you’ve got better data or a suggestion for a better estimation method, please don’t hesitate to speak up.)

We get very different results from looking at Greece and Turkey. 2,838,700 Greeks are Facebook members (25.11% of the national population), while 22,552,540 Turks (31.08% of the population) are. That’s roughly 3.3 billion friendships projected, and our year-long approximation finds us just over 4 million Greek/Turkish connections. That suggests that only 0.12% of friendships in the pool are Turkish/Greek friendships.

What explains the disparity between these numbers? While there’s certainly a long history of tension between Greece and Turkey, the last major military confrontation between the nations ended in 1922. Israel and Palestine, on the other hand, are involved with an active conflict and Israel’s recent incursion into Gaza ended a few months ago. What gives?

It’s possible that the numerous efforts designed to build friendship between Israeli and Palestinian youth are having an impact, much as Onnik’s work in Armenia and Azerbaijan is showing positive results. But there’s another possibility – 20% of the Israeli population are Arab citizen of Israel, and the majority of this set is of Palestinian origin. It’s certainly possible that the high percentage of Israeli/Palestinian friendship includes a large set of friendships between people of Palestinian origin in Israel and Palestinians… indeed, given the difficulty for both populations in meeting in physical space, we’d expect to see increased use of the internet as a meeting space to compensate for the difficulties of meeting in the physical world. This could be a factor in explaining India/Pakistan friendships as well, as well as Albanian/Serbian friendships, as the emergence of new nations through partition and conflict left groups united by cultures, separated by borders.

My goal in this post isn’t to belittle the power of Facebook for providing a border-transcending space where friendships can be built – Onnik’s story makes it clear that Facebook is a real and powerful tool for good, at least in the Armenian/Azeri space. But I continue to think that we overestimate how many of our online contacts cross borders and underestimate how often these tools are used to reinforce local friendships. I’d invite friends at Facebook to correct my numbers or my math… and mention that we could do a much better job of answering these questions if Facebook would release a data set that shows us all the cross-national connections made on the service.

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Ross Perez has created some great interactive maps that visualize the adoption of Facebook around the world, using Burcher’s data – worth your time.