Digital Green Ribbon Campaign for Darfur, Sudan: the projection of
witness and collaboration into areas of conflict and repression.
It looks like we may be able to launch the “Digital Green Ribbon Campaign for Darfur, Sudan” this week at the Harvard Internet and Society Conference.
Update:
The military has long talked of the “projection of power” into
particular regions. The Digital Green Ribbon Campaign is about
learning to project the power of witness and the power of
communications-enabled social organization into situations of conflict
and repression.
This is an opportunity for civil society to learn to use the
techniques of modern communications to develop rapid response
communications systems that can penetrate national borders, can evade
censors, and that can help people connect with each other to liberate
themselves.
This is “Radio Free Europe” for the 21st century. As Nicco said of
the situation in Ghana, whatever the intentions of the government of
Ghana, Ghana is so much “on the grid” that repression can scarcely
happen. Sudan and Darfur, by contrast, are off the communications grid..
Thomas Barnett speaks eloquently of the “gap states” that are off the grid of global society.
The projection of digital access into such states could be a very
low-cost, fast-response way to start to connect the citizens of these
areas into the most interesting people across the rest of the world.
By the way, what is the status of WorldSpace radio? Barnett in his blog speaks of it here.
Could WorldSpace help in Sudan? Perhaps by providing updates and
logistics of use to the citizen resistance to the government? Not
sure. WorldSpace is cool, but one-way.
Update:
I just spoke with Nicco, formerly Webmaster of the Dean campaign
who now works on a variety of web-based initiatives.
In regard to the Digital Green Ribbon Campaign, Nicco called our
attention to the use of ham radio to carry email in Haiti, as well as
the use of motorcycle-based email pickup and delivery services in
Nigeria–both could be implemented in Darfur and other parts of Sudan.
The ham radio idea is particularly powerful, it seems to me. As Nicco
said, “Ham radio folks were the first bloggers.”
I wonder if anyone out
there knows folks in the ham radio scene the might have relationships
in Sudan, or could work with us to develop them? The content of ham
radio communications could be immeiately blogged, and might develop
into “ham moblogging” and “ham podcasting.” By the way, for the middle
east and Africa we might want to rename “ham” to “lamb.”
Nicco was recently in Italy and was invited by a
friend to tour the World Food Program situation room –which Nicco
describes as “very intense.” The bottom line is that people are
starving in Sudan, and the UN Food Program is crippled by lack of
security. The tragedy is tracked day-by-day in the WFP situation room
in Rome. Nicco is going to write up his impressions,
and we will post them here.
December 07, 2004 | Permalink
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