Category: ICT

Ken Banks and ICT4D.

Ken Banks has a lot of, let’s say, chutzpah. This morning I spent a solid 45 minutes being introduced to his world of ICT4D. Find the interview on Project Diaspora.

On a personal note, here’s my favorite passage (mostly because it illustrates the power that I – and many others – believe technology has):

Does empowerment play a key role in FrontLine SMS?

The logo of FrontLine SMS is those arms stretched up in the air. So, we have decided that empowerment is a key message. I think that [empowerment] is a word that is overused a lot in this space, there’s a lot of different ways of defining empowerment. I think for me the purest form is that you give people the tools that they need to do their job better and then you let them decide whether or not they want it. Then you provide the tool and you don’t try to be controlling in any way. You say, ‘Hey, if you want to use it, the software is free, we’ll support you for free, we’ll connect you with other users, we’ll do all we can. But, at the end of the day, it’s your project and you do it your way.’ And if it works, please tell us.

new words.

Language preservation online:

Other languages are moving online as a way to ensure their survival in a digital age. The 27,000+ articles in the Lëtzebuergesch wikipedia don’t reflect the size of the language (spoken by roughly 390,000 people in Luxembourg) but the passion of that community to ensure the language exists in the 21st century. While Jay Walker may predict the rise of English as the globe’s second language, I’m predicting that the internet will make it easier to document, share and keep alive the world’s linguistic diversity. (They’re not incompatible ideas, BTW, though I still think Jay’s overstating the trend.)

Less to do with language preservation, but in Southern Uganda, more and more of the agriculture forums are being published in Lugandan. This allows a growing number of people to participate, since English literacy is limited.

in news survival.

Taking “specialization” to a new extreme:

It’s nice to be listened to. I guess. Maybe. Though I now find myself wondering whether I wouldn’t be better off shutting up.

I saw the first reports of Michael Jackson’s death on Twitter around 6pm. I ran a little script I threw together some weeks ago called “twitcent” to see just how many tweets would share the news. Twitcent takes advantage of the fact that Twitter gives a unique, sequential ID to each tweet to estimate the intensity of posting around certain terms. It retrieves a page of 100 search results for a particular search term – say “Michael Jackson” – and looks at the ID numbers of the first and last tweets listed. Take the difference of those numbers, and you get how many tweets were posted between search result #1 and #100. Divide, and you’ve got a percentage of tweets on the system in a discrete, small interval mentioning the term.

Is it accurate? I dunno. If my assumptions are right, it should be – if Twitter’s not always numbering sequentially, or if some large percent of tweets on the system are unsearchable, less so. Anyway, I ran several search terms through the engine and saw something I’d never seen before – search terms registering in double digit percentages, and the term “Michael Jackson” appearing in 13 – 20% of the tweets.

So I tweeted the following: “My twitter search script sees roughly 15% of all posts on Twitter mentioning Michael Jackson. Never saw Iran or swine flu reach over 5%” And then I went to make dinner.

When I got back online this evening, the tweet had been quoted in Wired News, the New York Times Bits blog, Washington Post’s mocoNews, and in the San Jose Mercury News.

Oh, wherever went that old-school journalism (actually, it never really did exist, did it?) where thorough research, lots of conflicting opinions, and delicious words are the main course? Must remember to stick to the more flexible art of magazine writing. Er, when I get there.

potentials.

Look, if you’re not yet convinced, the White House is “tweeting in Farsi.”

On a less related note, I keep thinking to my earlier brief on donor fatigue, media fatigue, political fatigue etc. What type of psychological (scientific!) studies exist on how long the human brain pays attention to a particular issue? How often do people commit themselves to a 10-year development battle?

in canada’s web.

Could “O Canada!” finally be getting somewhere?:

reader writes, “Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore gave a speech this week that appears to suggest a surprising shift in Canadian policy on copyright. Moore talked about the great opportunities presented by the Internet and how many older politicians don’t understand these opportunities.”

For context, this is the same government that recently tried to ram through a super-restrictive version of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, refusing to meet with Canadian artists, filmmakers, academics, librarians or user-rights groups. As Michael Geist says, “Last year’s experience with Bill C-61 left thousands of Canadians deeply disappointed with government on copyright policy. Yesterday’s remarks signal an important shift with both Clement and Moore clearly committed to more open consultation and to the development of a balanced copyright bill that better reflects the real-world realities of new technologies, innovation, new creators, and the reasonable expectations of Canadian consumers.”

Now, if you want some real leaders in internet (and ICTs) turn your eyes towards much more innovative and advanced Kenya. Poverty pushing the masses to skip a few basic “development” steps to much greater glory (though still patchy).

uganda twit.

Check out folks like @AnneMugisha on Twitter and you see the rising interest in using this application for the upcoming 2011 Ugandan elections. An election bound to be contentious.

tweets.

This is the key sentence:

That is, tweets by their nature seem trivial, with little that is original or menacing. Even Twitter accounts seen as promoting the protest movement in Iran are largely a series of links to photographs hosted on other sites or brief updates on strategy. Each update may not be important. Collectively, however, the tweets can create a personality or environment that reflects the emotions of the moment and helps drive opinion.

if the internet could.

And this is why my potential MA thesis could fail:

In an interview with The Guardian, Gordon Brown muses on why the internet means the end of genocide:

“The changes throughout the world, whether you talk about the environment, or the nature of jobs, are dramatic. For centuries, individuals have been learning how to live with their neighbours. Now, uniquely, we’re having to learn to live with people who we don’t know. People have now got the ability to speak to each other across continents, to join with communities that are based not on territory, but on networks; and you’ve got the possibility of people building alliances right across the world. That flow of information means that foreign policy can never be the same again. You cannot have Rwanda again because information would come out far more quickly and public opinion would grow to the point where action would need to be taken. Foreign policy can no longer be the province of just a few elites.“

It’s a nice thought, but as Darfur activists would point out we’re not short of information on what happened there and very little of the action which Brown talks about has taken place. [Let's leave aside for now the issue of whether it's a genocide or not]

Here’s the problem. There is no direct correlation between us knowing about a tragedy and us doing something about it. Make Poverty History was one of the most popular grassroots campaigns in Europe since the anti-apartheid movement, but that hasn’t stopped countries backsliding on their commitments. [Again, let's leave for another time the debate on whether the aid actually works]

Journalists often try to convince people to talk by telling them it will help their cause. If you talk to me about how your village was razed to the ground by the Janjiweed or the FDLR or the Ethiopian army then the world will know and someone will do something to stop it. I’ve never felt comfortable giving that line because it’s just not true.

Now, just to sound like a broken record, there’s still merit in people being able to participate in knowledge-creation (about themselves) and the organizational structure this encourages in civil society. While this is not what Save Darfur is up to, it does imply that the “democratization of the media” is now central to effective (if not efficient) human development.

the idea.

Continuing the Twitter debates, a little pragmatism from Andrew Sullivan’s readers:

Twitter is a method of communication, like the phone.  Clearly, people can relay inaccurate information over the phone.  But when you want to move information quickly, phones are invaluable.  Similarly, twitter is very useful for moving (small amounts of) information from one person to multiple people very, very quickly. Does that sound obvious?  It is.  And yet for some reason people keep talking about twitter as if it were some sort of alien technology that is hard to understand.

change.

Yes, social media brings social change:

The Internet and mobile phones have taken on a major role in Iranian politics over the last several months. As protests over the contested election results continue in Iran, the government has dramatically increased its control over digital technologies. Many important Web sites have been blocked over the past couple of days, including the Web sites of the opposition parties in Iran, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. While political organizers have learned to leverage the organizing power of Web 2.0 tools, government censors in Iran are quick to shut them down when they are most effective. None of this is surprising; it reflects similar events seen in many places around the world.

website that kills?

From the FP:

I almost missed this fascinating story in The Times (of London) on how Google Earth found itself in hot water in Japan by allowing (with some modfications) to map discrimation against the burakumin caste, which is one of the main social minority groups in the country. It’s not the first time that online maps have been used – and, most importantly, abused, as the Times story makes clear – to document the exact position of ethnic minorities in a city (see this excellent post from Paul Goble on how Russian nationalists have done the same thing in the Russian city of Volgograd).

However, the case of the burakumin is even more interesting, as it involves a controversial subject that is a few hundred years old and maps could provide enough information to identify those belonging to the caste and then discriminate against them (the fear of identification is great among the Burakins – many companies refuse to hire them and some even hire private detectives to run adequate background checks).

google flu trends.

No, I do not think Google and public health policy go together:

Has Google been the only party to benefit from the swine flu debacle? A few weeks ago this would be a very unlikely conclusion to make: after all, Google Flu Trends, the company’s flagship flu predicting service based on the frequency of Google searchers for specific flu-related terms proved to be of very little use. By the time the Web-savvy Mexicans took to the Web to search for “tamiflu”, CNN et al were already on the case (not much surprise here: people who are in direct contact with pigs- i.e. farmers – are much less likely to be avid Google users and thus generate some unique insights into the nature of the epidemic).

But even despite these reservations, I do entertain the possibility that Google may have learnt about the increasing prospects of a swine flu epidemic much earlier than the rest of us did, in which case it was, umm, a bit irresponsible for them not to tell us immediately (for once, I would have been able to enjoy pork chops in Cairo where I am at the moment :-) .

So imagine my surprise when I found that Google has managed to turn tables on this debate and claim that one of the main reasons why they have been ineffective at predicting the outbreaks of epidemics like swine flu is the existence of the very tough European Data Retention Directive, which requires telecommunication companies to delete data in a period that can range from 6 to 24 months from the day of the recording.

Finish here.

One of my journalism professors kept telling me to not put so much faith in the internet. After all, the way it aggregates and understands data is not entirely predictable in the ever-changing world of humans and human nature.

And yes, I would rather keep my privacy then follow the illusion of saving the world through Google Flu Trends.

price of your future.

Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda is going through the same debacle as universities in Quebec, Canada. What is the price of education? What is the fine balance between high quality educational services and ensuring that students can fund their studies? In Quebec, the answer lies in allowing tuition rates to rise, but also in ensuring that the government matches these new costs with more opportunities for government funding, scholarships and student loans. In Uganda, well, it’s complicated. No student I know can draw on federal or provincial student loans to get through university. I haven’t a clue how a privately run university would ensure inclusion of talented young Ugandans when the banks and the government cannot offer the fundamental services to ensure everyone has an equal chance.

All about expanding internet access in Africa via soon-to-be installed new undersea internet cables. However, in all the optimism, doubts remain. Let’s hope governments can harness this revolution and start providing information and communication technology support to their populations. There is a good chance that this type of international connection will foster grassroots economic development.

Very few Kenyan households even have an internet connection and not many own a personal computer – indeed, there are just three million internet users in the whole country, out of a total population of close on 40 million.

The statistics for the rest of Africa tell a similar story – of the 945 million people living on the continent, just 54 million use the internet.

For all the talk of opening up access to broadband, this could end up being one big white elephant.

Continue reading →

in virtual art.

In terms of facilitating world-wide access to exclusive exhibitions, this is a fabulous idea. However, how will museums tackle declining ticket sales? Is this not a factor?

Let’s face it: while I love the experience of going into a museum, I would much rather not pay $15 to an exclusive exhibition and instead browse the goods online. However, I imagine that the benefits of this program far outweigh the costs:

For participating museums, it can be worthwile to go web 2.0, the organisers argue. They can reach new audiences, increase brand recognition and boost turnover. By now, eight museums in the Netherlands have joined. “We’re very happy with these entries, this is a good start. But we’re still looking for more museums that would like to participate”, an organisation spokesperson said.

in developing a virtual political voice.

An interesting analysis on the power of online activism. On top of the pessimistic approach to the role of Internet activism (well-founded, although I am generally more optimistic), Marc Lynch asks the West whether we are ready to both support and protect Internet political activists in authoritarian countries.

Much of my talk would be familiar to regular readers, and I don’t want to really repeat it here.  The very short version: politics come first, and that technology alone can have only a very limited impact in the face of authoritarian states.  Where internet activists have had a significant impact in Arab countries, it has usually been tied to distinct political opportunities – such as the Kwuaiti royal transition or elections — or else led by people who were activists first and used technology as a tool.  New media did help activists in Egypt, Bahrain and elsewhere to punch well above their weight for a while… but eventually the regimes caught up and the real balance of power showed.

I argued that the real impact of political blogging is still likely to lie in the longer term impact on the indivduals themselves, as they develop new political competencies and expectations and relationships.  The impact of the new media technologies will likely be best measured in terms of the emergence of such new kinds of citizens and networks over the next decades, not in terms of institutional political changes over months or years.  The rise of young Muslim Brotherhood bloggers through the ranks of the organization may well change that organization over the years.  Veterans of the Kefaya movement may over time figure out how to create lasting, popular political movements (with or without using new media).