I&D Blog

Stacy Perlman, a senior at Northeastern University, interviewed me a few weeks back for a piece on the use of Google Maps for human rights activism. The result, “Mapping Genocide: Google Earth and Darfur,” is a wonderful narrative piece of journalism, plotting the emergence of Crisis in Darfur through Ushahidi. Stacy captures the crucial crux of this issue:

 While there is no way to monitor how many people have been influenced by the map to join an advocacy group, lobby congress or donate money, a case study report on the project noted that “more than 100,000 have visited the “What Can I Do?” page on the museum’s site to find out how they can help.” The page provides a variety of ways to take a stand including contacting the media to tell them there is a lack of coverage on the issue and communicating with decision-makers such as the U.S. government and the United Nations about the need for humanitarian assistance.

While crediting the Crisis in Darfur Map as a great awareness tool, Joshua Goldstein, a graduate research assistant at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School noted that the obvious pushback to a project like this is that “at the end of the day you’re not saving lives.” Although awareness about Darfur is critical, Goldstein makes the point that awareness that leads to activism is even more crucial.

“Sometimes there is just nothing more you can do than report what you see.” This was Erik Hersman’s impetus behind creating a tool called Ushahidi, which allows people in Kenya to report acts of violence via mobile phones and theinternet, and have them appear automatically on an online map for others to see.

Ushahidi is a mashup, a blending of two Internet applications to relay information in a visually compelling way. Over the past few months, experimental mashups, particularly those centered on Google Maps, have emerged in an attempt gain a better understanding of humanitarian emergencies and democratic processes.

While Ushahidi is unique in allowing witnesses to report incidents of violence via mobile phone with picture or video, there are three other particularly interesting Africa-centric smashup experiments, each with a slightly different set of functions. This first is Darfur Museum Mapping Initiative|Crisis in Darfur, which is a collaboration of Google Earth and the U.S. Holocaust Museum. This platform allows the user to view professionally collected photos, video and written testimony from Darfur, as well as view images of destroyed villages and IDP camps.

Also, the Zimbabwe Civic Action Support Group recently developed the Mapping Electoral Conditions in Zimbabwe project, a map-based collection of reports of everything from voter fraud to looting to vote buying. Understanding that a crackdown from the authorities is more likely in Zimbabwe’s tightly regulated news space, this site is designed as a secondary news source, reporting only reports published by others. Finally, my friends and colleagues at Northwestern University’s Center for Global Engagement launched Assetmap.org/Uganda, which is an effort to map “ongoing community-led philanthropic partnerships in northern Uganda.”

There seems to two be two particularly compelling reasons that mashups are effective. First, reporting an act of violence or voter fraud is an act of participation in a chaotic environment. It’s a way to be a witness, and urge the world to do the same. Daudi of MentalAcrobatics writes:
“We as Kenyans are guilty of having short-term memories. Yesterday’s villains are today’s heroes. We sweep bad news and difficult decision under the carpet; we do not confront the issues in our society and get shocked when the country erupts as it did two months ago.”

Secondly, an interactive map is a remarkably effective way to tell a story. Tragic violence in Kenya’s Rift Valley or Sudan’s Darfur calls for empathy and action, but it is difficult to feel a connection with a place you can’t imagine. C.J Menard’s famous map of Napoleon’s march to Moscow is often hailed as the best statistical graphic ever made, because it powerfully represents the decimation of 470,000 troops in the frigid Russian winter of 1812. Mashups like Ushahidi and This is Zimbabwe do not claim to be statistically complete representations, but like Menard’s drawing they aim to pull the reader into a visually acute experience.

Tools like Ushahidi are created in order to compellingly present crimes that should not be allowed to face impunity. The obvious criticism, perhaps most acutely felt by those who make these tools, is that they do not actually do anything to help prevent crimes or save lives.

However, many are working to change this. Patrick Meier, a PhD candidate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a Doctoral Research Fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Institute (HHI) is attempting to apply the lessons of digital activism to humanitarian early warning systems. Meier is developing a tool called the Humanitarian Sensor Web, which allows community leaders and service providers like the World Food Program to coordinate their efforts in emergency humanitarian situations. Further, the Sensor Web aims to serve as a source of collective intelligence, with a map-based database of places and events, which will help those who are responding to current crisis or planning for future security or humanitarian relief.

Needless to say, all of the tools discussed in this article are in their nascent (in web terms ‘beta’) stage, but they are evidence of an exciting new set of tools that can provide a variety of important functions, from demonstrating the need for a humanitarian intervention to actually implementing one.

cross-posted to In An African Minute. 

Following the examples of Burma and Colombia, digital activists in Egypt organized an online campaign using facebook, blogs, yahoo groups and SMS to organize strikes in Egypt on April 6 to protest the government’s economic policies and to demand political reform.

Users have created an official facebook group whose membership reached over 66,800 on the day of the planned strikes and protests.

The activists have also created a special blog (in Arabic) and posted updates from around the country throughout the day with reports and photos about the strike and demonstrations, as well as arrests made by the Egyptian police and security forces. The activists have also created another facebook group where they published information about how many people participated, where and when.

The protests and strikes on April 6 were limited in some places such as the state-owned textile factory, where police stopped workers from organizing and protesting, but a group of them broke away and managed to start a protest, despite some of them being dispersed by police with batons.

AFP reported that traffic around the country was unusually light for a Sunday, the first business day in Egypt, and that some classes at the American University in Cairo were canceled, while attendance was generally low at schools and universities.

The creator of the Facebook’s April 6 group was arrested by the Egyptian police on Sunday, but cyber-dissidents decided to undertake additional anti-government activities on May 4, the same day Egyptian President Mubarak turns 80.

As fresh clashes broke out the next day, a governor of a northern Egyptian province announced a commercially-financed project to distribute free bread to poverty stricken families “in a gesture reflecting worries by authorities over further unrest.”

While Internet users managed to use several technology tools available to them to campaign and publicize their efforts, the government has used various suppression measures in response. For example, the Ministry of Interior on Saturday threatened “immediate and firm measures against any attempt to demonstrate, disrupt road traffic or the running of public establishments and against all attempts to incite such acts.” Also, more than 200 people, including bloggers and politicians, were arrested.

The digital activists’ arguably limited success in organizing massive strikes and protests can be attributed to the power of state’s suppression and intimidation, rather than the ineffectiveness of the online tools. After all, the activists managed to not just mobilize individuals and groups, but also to make the state take their tools seriously.

In last week’s WaPo, Anne Applebaum writes about mobile phones in political organizing in East Asia. “That covert cellphones have become the most important means of transmitting news from certain parts of East Asia is no accident. Llasa, Rangoon, Xinjiang and North Korea are all places dominated, directly or indirectly, by the same media-shy, publicity-sensitive Chinese regime.”

She is almost certainly wrong that there is something specific to China-dominated regions that make them more amenable to using mobile phones for activism. Anyone who follows this space can immediately think of a handful of anecdotes from Eastern Europe or East Africa where mobiles have played much the same role. But is these any evidence that certain types of regimes make certain digital activist tools more useful? While there may be different kinds of government surveillance or various levels of internet penetration in different regimes, I think the fundamentals of digital activism are the same. What MIT Computer Science professor Steve Mann calls ‘sousveillence‘, using mobile technology to keep governments accountable, is useful regardless of location.

Cross-posted to In An African Minute. 

Although Facebook is probably known more as a threat to productivity stateside, Sacred Facts’s post surveying its censorship in a number of Middle Eastern countries hints that social networking sites may pose a unique and potent threat of democratization to repressive regimes. And given the presence of similar censorship extending to other social networks, it seems at least that the authorities of the censoring nations seem to agree.

Of course a number of the decisions to censor social networks, as well as to censor Web 2.0 technology more broadly, have been justified solely by the desire to keep out sexually explicit content. But that explanation, perhaps partially true in some instances, does not provide a complete account across the spectrum of censoring states, some of which have been open about targeting political speech. Nor does “protecting social norms” seem to be a default explanation for users targeted by this censorship.

When Syria recently decided to block access to Facebook without official explanation, reactions to the decision were varied.

Women’s rights advocate Dania al-Sharif suggested to Reuters, “Facebook helped further civil society in Syria and form civic groups outside government control. This is why it has been banned.”

In the same article, Ammar al-Qurabi, head of the National Association for Human Rights, suggested that the target was political content published by Syrians. Additionally, according to Reuters, he said “We have asked officials and they said Facebook could become a conduit for Israeli penetration of our youth, but the real reason for blocking the forum because it provides for criticism of the authorities.”

And at the Jerusalem Post, Calev Ben David suggests that Facebook was targeting because users “were able to communicate with the outside world free of their state’s pervasive censorship.”

In their new book, Access Denied, the Principal Investigators of the Internet and Democracy project (as well as the Open Net Initiative) Jonathan Zittrain and John G. Palfrey propose a number of possible goals for Internet censorship including,

o To create barriers to information for its own citizenry;

o To create barriers to communication between citizens within the regime;

o To create barriers to communication between its citizens and the outside world, perhaps to prevent negative information about the regime to spread;

o To send a message that surveillance is occurring;

o To maintain a monopoly of control on “cultural goods”;

o To maintain a monopoly of control over the development of civic society;

Admittedly the prospect that state censors will provide transparent accounts of their conduct or motivation is whimsical. Their goals may span that entire spectrum or may track more closely with a subset of them, and there is minimal incentive to be open. Highlighting acts and possible motivations of censorship help highlight possible paths to support democratization.

On February 7th and 8th, the Berkman Center hosted a three day conference entitled “Digitally-Empowered Activists: Getting the Tools to the People Who Need Them” in Istanbul, Turkey. The presentations highlighted efforts by people to use tools, such as video, SMS, and blogging, and focused on ways of communicating these methodologies to activists who can benefit from them.

Video Mashups and Activism

The first speaker was Sami ben Gharbia, a veteran activist in Tunisia and leader of Global Voices Advocacy. Gharbia showed several examples of video mashups he and others have created to comment on Tunisian issues: some of the videos he showed regarded internet censorship (a play on the “404,” a Peugeot motor car and a video decrying the use of SmartFilter); one showed a comment on the the 2005 World Summit on Internet and Society and the democratic gap; and another pointed to presidential spending excesses (use of the presidential plane, and a tour of the presidential palaces). Other videos pointed to specific criticisms of Tunisian President Ben Ali, such as his military background and the extent of his time in power.

Aside from video mashup, Gharbia has also created a Tunisian Prison Map, depicting the locations of prisons using Google Earth and including popup widowns for each prison showing video from an interview with a current prisoner, Human Rights Watch, or Medecins Sans Frontiers, or similar commentary.

Social Mobile: FrontlineSMS

The second speaker was Ken Banks, creator of FrontlineSMS, a tool geared toward nonprofit groups seeking SMS communication. It was designed to reintegrate a group of South Africans, displaced to make way for Kruger National Park, into the dialog about conservancy. The tool is useful because other media are often unable to reach the populations targeted, and the creation of a portable messaging hub to send and receive messages to mobile phones makes it difficult for the service to be blocked by governments. The service has been used for elections monitoring in Nigeria and the Philippines among others, communication between the media and rural areas in Zimbabwe, circumventing the state of emergency in Pakistan late last year, communicating coffee prices to farmers as part of the post-tsunami rebuilding effort in Aceh, and others.

Facebook as a Tool for Activists?

Imran Jamal then spoke as a representative of the Burma Global Action Network and its use of Facebook as a tool for advocacy. The Facebook Group “Support the Monks’ Protest in Burma” is one of the largest groups with 403,393 members as of February 12, 2008. It was started by Jamal and others to document information about the Saffron Revolution and coordinate various global events. Jamal noted that Facebook was good at reaching lots of users and serving to align and inform the various advocacy groups, but he notes that the Facebook format is not customizable by the groups themselves and does not naturally lend itself to advocacy. For example, comments are difficult to search and retrieve information from, and it is difficult to grow and maintain an activist base, particularly since Facebook groups larger than 10,000 are not permitted to send messages to all their members.

The Role of Blogs in the Kenyan Elections

The next presentation highlighted the role of blogs and twitter in last December’s Kenyan presidential elections, especially with respect to monitoring the violence and strife in the aftermath. Several blogs, such as KenyanPundit.com and Ushahidi.com, are nearly exclusively covering the elections protests. Many of the blogging sites are organized into the Kenyan blog webring kenyaunlimited.com. One blog site, Mashada.com, became ethnically divisive enough to be unmoderatable and the forums were closed. In its place, the organizers set up ihavenotribe.com, where Kenyans and others are successfully submitting their thoughts.

Another site that was discussed was MamaMikes.com, which allows people to log on and deposit money to have it delivered to people in Kenya in the form of various different commodities, such as gasoline, beer, mobile phone credit (note that through the m-pesa system money can be transferred from one mobile phone to another).

Favorite Digital Activism Tools

The group also discussed their favorite digital activism tools, such as gmail and other google apps, audio (especially for rural communities), collaborative tools such as wikis and google docs, photoblogging, digg and other story dissemination sites. Other concerns raised were security and anonymity measures, tools for fundraising, tools for translation, and attention paid to low bandwidth web use.

Getting KnowHow Into the Field

Stephanie Hankey, a co-founder of the Tactical Technology Collective, explained the tools her organization has created in order to disseminate knowledge about digital advocacy to groups who need it. She described several software packages for download and on CD for distribution that give people toolkits to set up the technical aspects of an NGO, and she mentioned two forthcoing toolkits for citizen journalism and mobile advocacy.

Ethan Zuckerman also blogged about mashups, SMS, and the Facebook presentations at the event.

Crossposted on Victoria Stodden.

One of the most promising realms of Internet & Democracy is transparency and accountability. This Tuesday, we welcomed Fernando Rodrigues, an innovative leader in this field, to talk about his work on exposing corruption in Brasil. Fernando says:

“The Politicos do Brasil is a website, the project started in 2000. We have more than 25,000 politicians listed on the site, covering the three national general elections - 1998, 2002, and 2006. Everyone who ran for office in those elections are listed (most of them). It’s a free search website. Anyone can search, look for information about any politician. And just to give you a flavor of what this is all about, in 2006, when we last updated it, it had an audience of more than 1 million unique visitors on the first day.”

See the Berkman Events blog for a complete transcript of the talk and Ethan Zuckerman for liveblogging and commentary.

 Two weeks ago, Kenya was a haven of democracy and prosperity in Africa, with a competitive national election process and an attractive annual economic growth rate of 6-7%. Last week, a presidential election pitted incumbent president and Kikuyu tribesman Mwai Kabaki against leading opponent and Luo tribesman Raila Odinga. After what was initially described as a very close vote, Kabaki swiftly announced himself the winner and swore himself in for another term.

This week, the election results are being described domestically and internationally as fraudulent, and violence has erupted between rioting mobs and police in Nairobi, and between ethnic groups throughout the country. Mobs in the town of Eldoret burned at least two dozen inside of a church (see Red Cross helicopter video of Rift Valley humanitarian situation on You Tube) and dozens more have died in the streets of Nairobi’s Kibera slum. The port of Mombasa has ground to a halt, already causing petrol shortages as far is Kampala, Uganda. Today, despite cancellation of a major anti-government rally, protesters turned to the streets and were met by police using tear gas and water cannons.

Blogs and mobile phones have played critical roles since violence erupted.

Blogs
Besides South Africa, Kenya has long had the most vibrant blogging community in sub-saharan Africa. Since Sunday, when the government instituted a media blackout, blogs have become critical to spreading the latest news. On Tuesday, the blackout was lifted, but in this rapidly changing situation, bloggers have been far swifter and more detailed in their reporting about the latest clashes. Berkman and Harvard Law School alumni Ory Okollo (Kenyan Pundit), as well as Berkman friend Juliana Rotich (Afromusing ) have been critical in relaying information from the volatile Eldoret/Burnt Forest. Also, Nick Wadhams has presciently put the current violence in perspective of previous Kenyan elections.

Ndesanjo Macha has been posting excellent Kenya updates on Global Voices and White African has a list of bloggers covering the conflict.

SMS
While only about 3.2% Kenyans have Internet access, mobile phones are far more ubiquitous. The African digerati in Kenya are leaders in experimenting with how to use mobile phones for sharing information. White African recognizes that “the problem with mobile phones is that they’re so dispersed - there’s no central core for users to all tune in to. Of course, that’s the strength in mobiles too. The trick is to leverage the strength without destroying the medium.”

Soon after violence erupted, Mashada, a prominent online forum launched an SMS hotline to help share information. Further, several prominent Kenyan blogs are accepting comments via SMS. Perhaps most prominently, BBC Africa’s Have Your Say received over 3800 and published over 1300 comments after requesting updates from Kenyans. Readers can vote up messages they deem most relevant. While these innovative SMS tools are allowing more people to contribute opinions and information, none of them can directly reach the majority of Kenyans, who need Internet access to see the posted messages. While Twitter is perhaps the most promising tool in this regard because of its ability to delivery messages to mobile phones, there are no reports of it being used widely this week in Kenya.

Kenyan Pundit writes that the ability to send mass SMS has been disabled. Also, Afromusing received this text message while in Eldoret: “The Ministry of Internal Security urges you to please desist from sending or forwarding any SMS that may cause public unrest. This may lead to your prosecution.” This is a reminder of both the power and the danger of SMS, particularly in east Africa. In Uganda last year, a protest against developing Mabira Forest was organized via mass SMS in Kampala and quickly turned violent and resulted in at least one death.

Quentin Peel reminders us that “this is not a story of one tribe seeking revenge on another, as it was in the massacre of minority Tutsis by the majority Hutus in Rwanda. Kenya is a much more economically and ethnically complicated country.” Odinga’s cancellation of today’s major rally is an encouraging sign of level-headedness and concern for stemming the violence. As a beacon of stability since the 1960’s, its incredibly important for us to watch the humanitarian and political developments in Kenya over the next few days.

Cross posted to In An African Minute.

Our friends over at the Kennedy School have added grist to the ongoing debate over the impact of the Internet on democracy and democratic processes at a symposium and launch of an important new book, Information Technology and Governance: From Electronic Government to Information Government. Many contributors to the book along with editors Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and David Lazer participated in the day-long symposium on November 14th, 2007 at the Kennedy School of Government.

With regard to enhancing citizen participation and government accountability through the Internet, some of the most interesting issues discussed in the symposium for the Internet & Democracy Project and our research are in the following areas:

i) Internet-based participation of citizens in government policy-making;
ii) Accountability of government through citizen’s access to relevant information about the government;
iii) The relationship between political mobilization and the evolving flows of publicly relevant information among citizens.

On the first issue, Cary Coglianese stipulates that while “electronic rule-making” has broadened opportunities for citizen participation, it has not really ”revolutionized” participatory decision-making, as many “techno-optimists” (as he termed them) predicted. However, Coglianese does see the possibility of a new information class that does not necessarily require physical proximity to decision-makers to exert influence.

Regarding accountability of government through increased public information, Herbert Burkert warns against the conventional approach of electronic governance in limiting itself mostly to citizen services and thus undermining the importance of providing relevant information to citizens to contribute towards government accountability. He argues in favor of laws and regulations that will require governments to disclose this information. He also emphasizes the need for civil society to be vigilant and use this information to its advantage in order to hold governments more accountable.

On the issue of political mobilization and the flow of information among citizens, Matthew Hindman takes a cautious view by saying that the information flow among citizens has not necessarily broadened the scope for political participation and mobilization significantly. The information flow is still limited within a certain elite information class.

Our hats off to the editors of the book for investigating these important issues that we hope will spawn further research into this important area—it certainly has given us much to think about in our own research agenda.

Africa is often left out of the Internet and democracy discourse. I believe there are several reasons for this. First, some find it difficult to identify a robust civil society, where citizens challenge authorities on the basis of issues, not just power. Second, discussions on the African blogosphere are often more related (and rightly so) to using technology creatively to alleviate poverty instead of take part in the political process.

I believe that Kenya provides the best challenge to this stereotype. Long home to the most robust blogosphere in sub-Saharan Africa outside of South Africa, Kenya has utilized the Internet and mobile technology to keep their leaders accountable in creative ways. The most prominent project is mzalendo: Eye on Parliament, a volunteer effort created by young people who were ‘frustrated by the fact that it has been difficult to hold MP’s accountable for their performance largely because information about their work has been inaccessible.’ Further, Kenyan blogosphere meetups were the inspiration for similar efforts in Uganda and elsewhere.

Kenya will be a fascinating place to watch in the next few months as the nation prepares for late December elections. How will technology be mobilized for civic ends? One new initiative is called Voices of Africa (VOA), an effort by the Dutch-run Africa Interactive Media Foundation, which aims to bring powerful mobile technology to journalists. VOA’s pilot program is currently active in 4 African countries. Specifically in Kenya, journalists are receiving mobile phones with high-speed General Packet Radio System (GPRS) connections that allow them to upload large amounts of data, including video and audio. As Kenya VOA coordinator Evans Wafula says, “Technology has to be incorporated in journalism. The telephone is used to document, it’s a complete office. It takes human rights to the next level; perpetrators can be held accountable.”

In a nation where nearly half the population believes that election fraud regularly takes place, and where Daniel Arap Moi’s legacy of corruption still lingers, it will be fascinating to explore whether Internet and mobile phones can help keep leaders accountable.

Cross-posted at In An African Minute.