In the dark days immediately after leaving Geekcorps, I remember telling my wife that there are only three things that can happen when you found a company:
- it fails, and you walk away.
- it succeeds, and you stay there forever.
- it succeeds, you move on and the folks who take over run it differently than you would.

At the time, I was too angry to realize an implication of that third possibility: the people who take over your business might run it better than you ever could.

That’s what’s happened with Global Voices. Rebecca and I were watching from the sidelines at the fourth day of our annual summit in Budapest, a closed meeting for our community to plan its future direction. As David, Solana and Georgia engineered an amazingly smooth, fun and participatory meeting, Rebecca turned to me and said, “Wow, they’re good at this.” “Much, much better than we are,” I replied.

Georgia Popplewell, Ivan Sigal - both photographed at the Budapest summit by Joi Ito.

The best concievable thing that can happen to you as an entrepreneur - social or otherwise - is to start something that other, smarter people want to work on. I knew we were on the right track with Global Voices when Georgia Popplewell, an utterly remarkable broadcaster, journalist, photographer and blogger, agreed to sign on as our managing director, taking on the absurdly complex task of coordinating the daily efforts of a hundred-plus volunteers and employees from around the world.

I got another vote of confidence when Ivan Sigal agreed to become our new Executive Director, starting in mid-August. Ivan is a long-time pro in the field of media development, working with Internews for the past decade on projects throughout Asia and the Americas. He’s an extremely talented photographer, an up-and-coming blogger, and a very cool guy. Which is a good thing, as he and I are going to be working very closely together, as the responsibilities associated with Executive Director are largely the ones I’m currently covering - raising money, planning strategy, making partnerships. Oh, and did I mention raising money? That’s a big one.

I’m not going very far away - I’m chairing the board of Stichting Global Voices, the legal entity in the Netherlands that manages GV projects. But it feels really, really good to know that we’ve built something that people want to be apart of and that smarter people are now steering the ship.

Obviously, not everyone felt that way, and when Metallica sued Napster in 2000, I was one of the 317,377 users banned from the system. I was also one of the 316,784 (that’s an estimate) users to run de-ban, rebuilding my registry so I could rejoin the network.

I didn’t stay long after the ban. Napster shut down shortly after, and the services that stepped in to replace it were, from the perspective of a music fan, not very good. I rekindled my love affair with independent record stores, bought a lot of used CDs and vinyl, and have generally missed the whole move to BitTorrent and peer to peer filesharing. Chalk one up for the RIAA, I suppose, but with the instant gratification of downloadable, legal music from iTunes and Amazon, I just haven’t been that tempted.

Up until about a week ago. Two things happened to lead me back to the dark side. One is that I was introduced to Dr. Johan Pouwelse, a fascinating guy who’s doing research on the power and potential of peer to peer networks. He’s in the odd position of having extensive funding from the European Union to build extremely powerful peer to peer systems, and he’s (understandably) interested in finding non-infringing uses for peer to peer technology. Pouwelse wondered what I thought about P2P as a method for distributing activist video - I though it was a cool idea, but probably premature, as centralized systems like WITNESS’s Video Hub, as well as more conventional solutions like YouTube, are working reasonably well for video authors. The main problems with activist video aren’t around content blocking but around the difficulty of authoring compelling media and in discovering this media - P2P doesn’t directly help with either problem.

In the course of talking with Pouwelse, I decided to try out his software, Tribler, which combines a peer to peer client, video playback software and some interesting ideas on search. What’s most interesting about the software is the idea that users can use bandwidth as currency, allowing the system to better address the free rider problem and reward users to sharing as well as downloading.

Purely for research purposes :-) I decided to try Pouwelse’s software… which meant finding something I was interested in to search for. Since we’re in the midst of the fourth sumo tournament of the year, the Nagoya Basho, I started looking for match footage. Bingo. Some kind souls have been recording and digitizing NHK’s English-language broadcast of the tourament, and posting it, day by day, in gigabyte-sized files on torrent servers.

It wasn’t even a question. I’m hooked. I’ve been sucking down the files during the workday and spending my evenings watching bouts on the laptop. I picked the right tournament to re-enter the world of filesharing. Asashoryu, the brilliant and controversial Yokozuna, dropped out of the tournament today after a poor call cost him a second loss early in the tournament. Kotooshu, the impressive Bulgarian Ozeki who won the previous tournament, picked up two losses early, but is still very much in the hunt, two wins behind Yokozuna Hakuho, who remains undefeated. And my very favorite, Sekiwake Ama, a scrappy, tiny (by sumo standards) Mongolian technician, started 5-0, before blowing the sixth match to his archnemesis Kotoshogiku. Can’t you feel the excitement?

My main man, Ama, sporting the Nike logo on his kesho-mawashi. Didn’t know Nike was making sumo gear these days.

There’s a few ways to watch sumo from the US, though none of them appear to be sanctioned by NHK, which broadcasts the matches in Japan. The excellent Chiri mo tsumoreba blog features good commentary (neither as comprehensive or as snarky as at Sumotalk) as well as links to match highlights posted on YouTube. Some are commented in English, others in Japanese. While useful, they’re tough if you don’t speak Japanese, as you’ve got to listen very closely for who’s fighting - in watching a full tournament, you can rely on the match card, which I usually find at Goo Sumo. With a match card and a bit torrent client, you can enjoy the entire foot-stamping, salt-throwing, big-men-staring ceremony of the event. Google “torrent nagoya day x” where “x” is the appropriate day of the tournament, and you’ll find a torrent link in no time.

Here’s the thing - I’d vastly prefer to pay for this content. Not out of any sort of sense of legality - for purely practical reasons. NHK has threatened, in the past, to stop broadcasting with English-language commentary. This commentary’s pretty essential for non-Japanese speaking fans. This sport is fast, complicated and extremely subtle, something that benefits greatly from a knowledgeable commentator. If paying NHK for a download - on iTunes, for instance - means they’ll keep producing English commentary, I’ll do my part.

I buy Chris Anderson’s argument in The Long Tail that the Internet makes saleable content that has small audiences. What surprises me is how few media producers seem to understand this argument. NHK will sell you the right to broadcast the bashos, but doesn’t seem interested in taking money from individual consumers, even though they offer premium satellite packages for Japanese speakers living outside the nation.

Here’s the thing, NHK - if there’s a sufficient audience for your content, it’s going to end up on peer to peer networks. Why not give those of us who’d pay for it the chance to do so?

As a bonus, watch Ama beat up Ozeki Chiyotaikai in this video from day 5 from the tournament, created the old fashioned way - with a video camera focused on the television. Can you say “analog hole“, boys and girls? I knew you could.

Added bonus: an Ars Technica piece on Dr. Pouwelse’s research.

What about scientists?

That’s the research interest of my colleague Melanie Dulong de Rosnay. She’s using her time as a Berkman fellow to study alternative copyright systems and their usage and relavence within academic and library communities. Yesterday, Melanie presented research on the licensing of scientific databases and the obstacles such licensing presents to collaboration between scientists around the world.

Under US law, pretty much anything you write down is copyrighted. Scrawl an original note on a napkin and it’s protected until 70 years after your death. Facts, however, are another matter - they can’t be copyrighted. So while trivial but creative scribblings are copyrighted, unless you choose to release them into the public domain, the information painstakingly discovered about the human genome - DNA sequences, for instance - aren’t. But the containers they’re stored in - the databases they’re held in - can be copyrighted.

If I sound confused about this stuff, that’s because I am. And so were the folks at Science Commons, the project that spun off from Creative Commons to focus on open publishing of scientific information. For a couple of years, they offered a wonderfully complex FAQ on applying Creative Commons licenses to databases - the first question read “Can a Creative Commons license be applied to a database?” After a six paragraph answer to that question, the third question read, “So, a Creative Commons license can be applied to a database?”

The approach Science Commons is taking now is a different one - they’re now recommending use of a protocol that specifies how data can be made Open Access - the FAQ on that protocol explains that the complexities of asking scientists to release their data under Creative Commons licenses was so severe that Science Commons has ended up advocating for data to be released public domain, under the auspices of their protocol, instead.

This question of complexity is what Melanie’s research has focused on. She looked at the terms of use for roughly 200 databases neccesary for work in the life sciences. Evaluating the terms on all those databases, she discovered that only 7 met her stringent definitions of Open Access to data - these databases could be accessed without registration; they could be downloaded for local use; they could be incorporated into other works; they had clear, understandable terms of use. This last factor proved to be the most challenging. She spent hours reading these terms with other experts in the field and discovered that, a great deal of time, the experts disagreed on what was permitted under a specific agreement.

THe reason this is important, Melanie explains, is that scientific research proceeds more quickly when researchers can share resources. But with databases encumbered by different, confusing legal protections, it can become a legal nightmare for researchers to do complex work building new tools that combine information from two databases in a novel way, for instance. And databases that are protected by access restrictions can be out of reach to scientists in developing nations who might not have the financial or technical resources to access them.

I was particularly intrigued by a comment from John Wilbanks, who runs the Science Commons project. He points out that a project like the database work Science Commons and Melanie are undertaking is basically one that seeks to make a cultural change, encouraging scientists to share data while retaining citation credit. In some scientific communities - particle physics, for instance - this is standard practice. In others - microbiology - it’s quite uncommon. Wilbanks suggests that this has something to do with the economics of the fields. There are only a few supercolliders, and physicists have to share them, while there are lots of bacteria out there.

I’m glad that researchers like Melanie are digging into these issues. I have a great deal of respect for anyone willing to take on the task of understanding these labyrinthine, illogical and extremely important systems… and a great deal of gratitude that I don’t do research in these areas myself… :-)

Moldova doesn’t come out as a promising tourist destination in Hawks’s account, but he’s clearly grateful for the enthusiasm and good humor of the people he encounters along the way. The nations fares less well in Eric Weiner’s excellent “The Geography of Bliss“, a book in which Weiner travels the world visiting nations that show unusual levels of happiness or unhappiness. Moldova is one of the latter, and Weiner isn’t really able to find many people happy about living in Moldova… though many observe that the vegetables are very fresh.

Weiner offers a possible explanation - Moldova is caught between two cultures, Romanian and Russian, and doesn’t have a clear sense of national identity. Whether or not this theory is accurate, it’s certainly true that there’s a deep split in Moldova between Russian-speakers in the eastern Transnistria region, many of whom would like to see the region split and join with Ukraine or become an independent republic, and the rest of the nation, which is culturally closer to Romania.

My picture of Transnistria is a dark one, based solely on Hawks’s experiences there - which center on a scary experience with local tycoon who owns a football team and who ends up briefly kidnapping him. Transnistria frequently appears in reports about arms trade from former Soviet republics, with accusations that former Russian weaponry is exported via Odessa in the Ukraine. Between Hawks’s narrative and news stories about “frozen conflicts” in the former Soviet Union, I have a mental image of Transnistria as a dark, spooky place filled with vampire-infested castles and public markets where rocket-propelled grenades are lined up next to the vegetables… which, of course, are very fresh.

Which is why it’s always nice to chalenge imagined places with images from the real ones. Lyndon Allin has a set of translations on Global Voices from a Transnistrian Live Journal community, where Russian-speakers are talking about government propoganda, misallocation of health resources, and funny stories about uncooperative bus drivers. Basically, the same discussions that take place in any politically active blogosphere are taking place in Tiraspol.

Which has me thinking about the power of stories. On the one hand, the fact that I opened a link in today’s Global Voices Digest had everything to do with the previous stories I’d read about Moldova. I don’t pay attention to every story on Global Voices - who could? - and I tend to click on stories that appeal (as, I suspect, everyone does.) This usually means African and middle East stories, and stories I feel some sort of interest in. And Hawks and Weiner have brought me to the point where I’m sufficiently interested in Moldova to click. But they may also have given me a picture that’s so impossibly dark and depressing that a sunny picture of a cinema in Tiraspol is interesting to me simply because it’s vastly more… normal… than my mental picture of that breakaway republic. The storytellers have gotten me to pay attention, but they’ve also given me a frame for the stories that may be so inaccurate that I pay attention in the wrong ways. (See previous discussion on David Weinberger’s “Ninja Gap” here, here and here for lots more thoughts on storytelling, framing and media interest in developing nations.)

Doing a bit of reading on Lyndon Allin, the translator who wrote the Global Voices story, I discovered that he’s an ideal guide for me in getting to understand Moldova. Many of the bridgebloggers who get involved with Global Voices are people who want their countries and cultures to be better understood by the wider world. Some are people from the US or Western Europe who’ve fallen in love with little-known parts of the world and want to bridge the gaps between their experiences and their world at home. That’s been my story since heading to Ghana as a 20-year old grad student. And it sounds like Lyndon had a transformational summer in Chisinau almost a decade ago that has him committed to explaining Moldova to the wider world. Sorry we didn’t get to talk more at the GV summit, Lyndon, and thanks for helping bridge the gap between the Moldova I’ve read about and the one actually lodged between Romania and Ukraine.

My colleague Shenja van der Graaf studies the culture of game modding, the practice of customizing a game to make it more enjoyable, to make a political or artistic point, or to create an entirely new game. Game modding is usually associated with first-person shooter games, beginning with games like Doom and Quake. Shenja studies some of these games, and has done extensive research on Valve, the company that produces games like Half-Life and Counterstrike. (Counterstrike originated as a mod of Half-Life, and Valve is a company that embraces modding as a key tool in improving and developing games.) She’s also looking closely at systems like Second Life, designed explicitly to make it possible for users to create games and new behaviors.

Some of the conceptual frame for Shenja’s work comes from Eric Von Hippel (another Berkman fellow), whose theories about open innovation focus on how some users of products invent new tools or new uses, extending the functionality of those products. Modding, like other forms of user innovation, offers ways for companies to learn from what users actually do with their products.

In particular, Shenja is interested in “user-particiation on firm-hosted platforms”. This is a more conceptually complicated space than open source software development. Someone building a mod isn’t creating intellectual property they can reuse without impediment, in the same way that a developer working on a project like Apache or Firefox does. Instead, users are putting a great deal of work into modifying a closed-source product, the property of a specific firm. Shenja wants to know why people do this.

Most mods are pretty trivial - they simply change the appearance of characters or of the environment of a game. Shenja shows us a first-person shooter where the enemies are converted into Homer Simpson, who keeps saying, “I am Evil Homer”. Others are significantly more involved. Portal, a new game released by Valve, radically changes the rules of first person shooters. Instead of killing enemies, the goal in Portal is to solve a series of puzzles by projecting “portals” on different parts of the game environment - the two halves of a portal connect to one another, and players solve problems by moving themselves or objects through the portals.

Portal began as a mod to Half-Life, taking advantage of the fact that Valve offers an SDK (software development kit) which allows users to build full games using the core game engine from Half-Life. Students at DigiPen Institute of Technology developed, as a student project, a game called Narbacular Drop, which introduced the portal mechanic. Valve hired all the students who worked on the game and invited them to build Portal. Shenja tells us that the reason Valve didn’t release Narbacular Drop was because of an intellectual property conflict - DigiPen retained IP rights to the game and their resistance to letting that IP be used meant that Valve couldn’t by the game.

Shenja has done extensive studies of the message boards used by modders and suggests that there is a “U-shaped participation curve” in the community. There are lots of people who make farily easy, trivial mods, and a small group of people who get deeply involved with building mods. The folks who get deeply involved often end up building software development teams at least as sophisticated as the teams who build the original games. Gene Koo, another of our fellows, tells us about a mod he worked on for Civilization 4, another platform extremely open to modding. “Basically, I stopped because I would have had to quit my job if I kept managing the mod.” The project ended up involving graphics and animation specialists, designers and writers, and required as much project coordination and management as a major software project.

I found myself wonder (aloud, as I often do at Berkman events) whether building game mods has become a type of auditioning for jobs as a game developer. There are lots of people who want to make computer games, and modding well is one possible path to those jobs. Another attendee of Shenja’s talk observed that modders are a bit like scriptwriters, writing on spec. “The brutal economics of game making and filmmaking demands that lots of people do creative work for free.” The good mods rise to the top, the good films get produced, and thousands don’t.

Two experiences later in the day convinced me that this idea is basically right. A young friend of mine attended the talk, and later that day asked me for some advice on applying to college. He’s looking for an open source project to work on, and wanted advice on where he could contribute both to make useful software and to do something visible enough that it might help with college applications. (I suggested plugins for either Wordpress or Drupal.) In other words, he’s looking for a good place to audition.

I had dinner with another friend, who recently had an extremely successful audition. He’s a talented musician and composer, as well as a videogame addict. Lately, he’s played hundreds of hours of Rock Band, the fascinating new game from Harmonix. A few weeks ago, he was offered an interview at Harmonix, which involved a test - arranging a pop song so it can be played on the five colored keys of the Rock Band guitars and drums. It turned out that his hundreds of hours were time well spent - he’s starting a new job at Harmonix in a few weeks. In other words, don’t let anyone tell you that it’s a waste of time to play video games.

Because you may or may not be an Africa-based journalist, let me unpack the question for a moment. There are a number of international conflicts that have claimed more lives and displaced more people than the conflict in Darfur. The Second Congo War and its ongoing aftermath is believed to have killed more than 5.4 million people, mostly due to “excess mortality” connected to disease and starvation. Other conflicts compare to Darfur in terms of brutality and displacement, but have received far less attention. War between Ugandan forces and the Lord’s Resistance Army in Northern Uganda has displaced more than a million people from their homes, and one in three boys in the region have been abducted, for periods of time or permanently, by LRA forces. The war between Ethiopia and Islamist forces in Somalia - supported by the US military - has created 1 million internally displaced persons and 450,000 international refugees.

It’s admirable that activists have been able to draw so much attention to Darfur. I’m interested in the phenomenon not to criticize focus on Darfur over other conflicts, but because I’d like to help people working on other conflicts gather attention and resources. I see Darfur as a rare example of an international crisis that’s gotten huge attention in the US despite the fact that most Americans have no direct, personal connection to the region. (I’m not the only one trying to do this - John Prendergrast, who’s focused on Darfur for the International Crisis Group, is one of several Africanists who’s started a new organization, Enough, designed to harness some of the attention around Darfur and call attention to situations in DRC, Uganda, Somalia and elsewhere.)

Agreeing with the analysis that attention paid to Darfur is unprecedented, my friend offers a two-part analysis, which I’ve modified to a three part analysis:

- The time was right. Guilt over the failure to intervene in Rwanda, especially on the part of North American and European nations, offered an opportunity to demand intervention in another African conflict.

- In the US, there was already close attention paid to Sudan by human rights and by evangelical Christian communities, based on a perception of the Sudanese civil war as a religious conflict between the Muslim north and Christian (and animist) south. (My contribution to the analysis, based on my experience talking to evangelical friends about their anti-Khartoum activism as early as 2000.)

- The conflict in Darfur has been reducible to a fairly simple media narrative, with good guys and bad guys… even thought this narrative doesn’t accurately reflect the reality on the ground.

It’s this last point my friend and I focused most of our discussion on. The process of covering the conflict in Darfur has convinced my friend that a narrative centered on a merciless proxy army raping, chasing and killing innovent civilians in an attempt to ethnically cleanse a region isn’t wholly accurate. “This isn’t good guys versus bad guys. This is bad guys versus bad guys.”

An illustration of this argument was the May 10, 2008 attack by the Darfur-based Justice and Equality Movement on Omdurman, one of the cities that make up Khartoum. While the target was a military headquarters, roughly 30 civilians were killed in the clashes. My friend, who reported from the scene, reports that JEM was using mortars to attack goverment positions, well aware that those positions were surrounded by residential areas and would necessarily involve civilian casualties.

What frustrated my friend more was the response from Darfur activist groups to the JEM attack. It wouldn’t have been hard to condemn the violence and mourn the death of civilians before pointing to the larger context for the violence. That’s not what Save Darfur, the US non-profit coordinating “180 faith-based, advocacy and humanitarian organizations”, did. Their May 12th press release focused almost solely on the danger of retaliation against Darfuri communities in Khartoum and elsewhere:

Reacting to rebel attacks in and around Khartoum over the weekend and the Sudanese government’s heavy-handed response, Save Darfur Coalition president Jerry Fowler today released the following statement.

“The rebel attacks have endangered the lives of civilians in Khartoum and in Darfur and have raised fears of widespread retaliatory atrocities. The Sudanese government has often responded to rebel violence with brutal attacks against civilians. That these latest attacks took place inside the Sudanese capital enhances these fears. All parties must understand that there can be no violent solution to this conflict.

“Darfuris in Khartoum report that the Sudanese government is already conducting arbitrary detentions, torture and killings in and around Khartoum. Reports from Darfur indicate that the janjaweed militias are mobilizing and have begun to attack the town of Tawila in North Darfur.

“The Security Council and the entire international community must demand the protection of civilians in Darfur, Khartoum, and Chad. Individual governments – including the United States, United Kingdom, and China – must make clear that there will be significant consequences for any attacks on civilians, including U.N. Security Council sanctions upon individuals responsible for those attacks.

“Ending the violence requires the full deployment of the UNAMID, EUFOR and MINURCAT civilian protection forces and the initiation of a robust peace process with a clear end state for Sudan. The international community should therefore hold a special donors conference to announce the commitment of all necessary resources and equipment for UNAMID, and should renew diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict in Darfur and craft a peace for all Sudan.”

It seems odd to argue that there can be no violent solution to the conflict without condemning an attack by JEM, as the UN, EU and US did. Groups like Save Darfur run the risk of being viewed as propogandists for a violent group if they don’t find ways to condemn violence as well as urging peace.

My friend’s concern isn’t that Save Darfur is serving - knowingly or unknowingly - as a PR arm for JEM. It’s a concern that groups advocating on behalf of Darfur aren’t dealing with the real Darfur so much as a simulated Darfur, “Second Life Darfur”, as my friend put it, referencing a rant I posted two years ago about a simulated refugee camp built in Second Life designed to call attention to the conflict in Darfur. The situation in Darfur is incredibly complex, with several Darfuri groups with different aims and tactics, and complicated relationships between the Janjawid militias and the Sudanese Army.

My friend points to conflict over estimates of death in Darfur as an example of both how hard it is to report news from Sudan and how easy it is to slip into simulated realities. There’s no good consensus over how many people have been killed in violence in Darfur. Sam Dealy, writing in the New York Times, points to a study, viewed with high confidence by many researchers, by the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters which projected 131,000 excess deaths between September 2003 and June 2005, with a likely sharp drop in mortality after June 2005 because many Darfuris are now in refugee camps. Respected Sudan researcher Alex De Waal offers a “best guess” of 200,000 dead, including 50,000 from direct violent conflict, the rest dying from disease or malnutrition connected to forced removal from their land.

The uncertainty over figures hasn’t stopped Save Darfur from using a specific, very high number. Ads in the UK included the claim, “After three years, 400,000 innocent men, women and children have been killed.” Not only is that figure much higher than most estimates, it’s clearly incorrect that everyone killed is “innocent” - all estimates include combatants, and it’s hard to call guys who invaded a base of AU peacekeepers, killing ten, “innocent”. The European Sudanese Public Affairs Council, an explicitly pro-Khartoum group, complained about the ad to the British Advertising Standards Authority, which ruled in their favor, telling Save Darfur that the 400,000 figure was a disputed opinion, not a fact.

It’s possible to read Save Darfur’s exaggerations cynically, as Brendan O’Neill does in a fierce piece for his online journal, spiked. We should expect the campaign for Darfur to play fast and loose with the facts, “since ‘Save Darfur’ activism – from Hollywood celebs calling for Western military action to the growth of campaigning commentary on the conflict – has not really been about Darfur. Rather, it has been about creating a new moralistic and simplistic generational mission for campaigners and journalists in America and Europe.”

O’Neill references a challenging and compelling piece by Professor Mahmood Mamdani in the London Review of Books. Mamdani wonders why the same western campaigners anxious to get the US out of Iraq - a complex conflict involving national armies and paramilitaries - is so anxious to push military intervention in Darfur, which has similar dynamics. The reason he offers is that “There is nothing messy about Darfur [in the minds of American activists]. It is a place without history and without politics; simply a site where perpetrators clearly identifiable as ‘Arabs’ confront victims clearly identifiable as ‘Africans’.” This radical oversimplification of the conflict is something he puts squarely on the shoulders of activists, focusing in particular on Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times:

The journalist in the US most closely identified with consciousness-raising on Darfur is the New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof, often identified as a lone crusader on the issue. To peruse Kristof’s Darfur columns over the past three years is to see the reduction of a complex political context to a morality tale unfolding in a world populated by villains and victims who never trade places and so can always and easily be told apart. It is a world where atrocities mount geometrically, the perpetrators so evil and the victims so helpless that the only possibility of relief is a rescue mission from the outside, preferably in the form of a military intervention.

His critique of Kristof expands to an indictment of journalism as a whole: “Journalism gives us a simple moral world, where a group of perpetrators face a group of victims, but where neither history nor motivation is thinkable because both are outside history and context.” Obviously, not all journalism reduces situations to good versus evil, ignoring history, context and nuance… and it’s probably too much to suggest that all Kristof’s work has ignored context and nuance, though he’s clearly taken the stance of an advocate, rather than a journalist on this issue.

My question is this:

If Darfur is one of the best examples of people in the developed world paying attention to events in a developing nation, and if drawing attention to Darfur has involved an oversimplification of the conflict which may be damaging and misleading, should be be looking at the Darfur movement as an exemplar for how to draw attention to developing world issues, or should we be avoiding it like the plague?

In other words, is it possible to get people interested in African stories without oversimplifying them? Is it possible to solve “the caring problem” too well, convincing people to care too much and in the wrong directions? For those of us trying to get more attention to the rest of the world, how do we strike this balance between too much and too little?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evgeny is deeply concerned with the question of serendipity and on the phenomenon of media cocooning, the tendency of people to surround themselves with media that echoes topics, interests and political points of view that we share. More to the point, as a Belarussian fascinated both international politics, he’s frustrated that popular blog aggregators rarely track news from around the world, or news on subjects other than technology. From an email he sent to friends this morning:

Over the years of following the English-language blogosphere, I have become increasingly frustrated with the absence of news aggregators that could help me stay on top of important developments in non-tech areas. Fields like economics, design, law, environment, or literature didn’t seem to have their own Digg, Techmeme or Technorati; thus, navigating through the growing non-tech blogospheres has become very difficult. As the amount of information on the Web has kept growing rapidly, it has proved quite challenging to remain a true polymath, i.e. remain continuously well-informed about a multitude of fields, not just one.

Fighting fire with fire, Evgeny’s released a new aggregator, Polymeme. Using software he and a team of developers have put together, the system tracks 20 collections of blogs, each tightly focused on a specific topic, like Economics or Evolution. The software reads the RSS feeds of the blogs and discovers what news stories, blogposts or other media that community is pointing to and discussing. The system offers stories and blogposts clustered around the topics, which are paired with (creative-commons licensed, discovered on Flickr) photos and organized on a frontpage and subject pages. Other tools allow you to find popular memes, phrases and topics that have been identified across communities.

Most of the stories Polymeme finds, Evgeny tells me, are mainstream media stories… just ones that you’re not likely to find via Digg and Reddit - instead, they’re the stories getting discussed by economists, evolutionary biologists or other smart, subject-focused bloggers. It’s my experience that bloggers focused on a particular issue - Afrophilia, for instance - tend to flock to a set of articles that become important discussion points in that sphere, even if they’re invisible to the rest of the web as a whole. Polymeme gives you the chance to listen in on some of those conversations, even if you’re not an active blogger in that space.

Some things I think are great about the idea and the early incarnation of the system:

- Using bloggers as a set of experts to find relavent content is very, very smart, as that’s what bloggers are already do, and because human filtering systems are much more powerful than purely algorithmic ones.

- This is one of the first tools I’ve seen with an explicit promise to diversify voices on the web and break out of existing echo chambers. From a description on the site of the project: “Polymeme helps you discover intelligent content that lies beyond the usual echo chambers of tech news, celebrity gossip or American politics.”

- Because the collection of blogs the system uses is quite diverse, the sources cited tend to be significantly broader than those I see on other aggregators.

- The site is organized in terms of a central story, followed by stories and blogposts that comment on it, making it quite easy to find a path into a conversation on a breaking topic.

Spme open questions I’m curious to explore:

- Will the topics the system covers be as insular and echo-filled as the tech and US politics blogosphere? Is there a danger that Polymeme is just making more echo chambers?

- Is clustering stories enough, or will Polymeme need to do some storytelling to help encourage people to explore these new stories?

- Will the system work without the sorts of community voting functions that Digg and Reddit rely on? Are bloggers a better quality filter than a reader community?

I’m thrilled that Evgeny is trying a practical response to challenges about homophily and serendipity and fascinated to see where this will go. I hope you’ll give it a try.

Easy. They use an opinion spectrometer.

After a day-long brainstorming meeting about human rights issues online and a two-day conference, the Citizen Media Summitt, we’re now spending two more days discussing the future of our collective project. That means passionate, difficult conversations about big issues, like whether Global Voices editors and authors should be permitted to express strong personal opinions in their articles on the site.

The opinion spectrometer in use at the Global Voices 2008 Summit

We were introduced to the opinion spectrometer by Allen Gunn of Aspiration, though our deployment of the technique may be slightly different. If you’re interested in deploying the technology, we offer the technical description below:

With line segment AB, bisect the opinion plane equidistantly.

(Take a roll of toilet paper and unroll it down the center of the room.)

Designate A as representing the extreme of the opinion spectrum and B as te opposite extreme.

(People who really think GV should pay correspondents on one side of the room, while folks who favor volunteerism on the other side. More neutral positions in the middle of the room.)

Line C bisects segment AB perpendicularly, creating a two-dimensional plane. The C axis operates in terms of inverse absolute value, reflecting intensity of opinion.

(If you feel really strongly that GV should have a physical office, stand real close to the toilet paper. If you don’t care that much or could be swayed easily, stand towards the edge of the room.)

Interrogate points on the plane with regard to their two dimensional position. All other points are free to replot in response to interrogation. Iterate through a subset of the set of points.

(Pass around a microphone so people can explain their views. People will move around in response if their opinions are swayed.)

The resulting graph is a reflection of community opinion… which may reflect polarization, agreement or indifference.

It’s amazing how well this technique works. There’s a tendency in group discussions to attempt to come to a single conclusion. It’s actually way more helpful to know how strong feelings are about an issue, how polarizing that issue is, or whether an issue is truly unsettled for most speakers. It requires good moderation to make sure no one dominates the debate… but in a high-functioning community, people who find themselves at an extreme of the graph get visual feedback that they’re in a minority… and real-time feedback on whether an argument is persuasive.

A good method for running a meeting? The Global Voices folks are tightly clustered on the affirmative end of the toilet paper.