RConversation

Global Voices, generative media structures.. and the end of nationalism?

Photo by Neha Viswanathan: A small subset of the Global Voices bloggers who met in Budapest.

(Apologies in advance for the length of this post. I've decided to subject my readers to this even-longer-than-usual "brain dump" because at least a few people out there are interested in some of the ideas related to global participatory media, and I'd like feed back on some of the outstanding questions faced by Global Voices.)

At the end of last week's Global Voices Summit, one of our Middle Eastern bloggers came up to me and said: "nationalism is dead for me now." He said that ten years ago he was a strong nationalist. Being a blogger and debating issues with other people online over the past few years has greatly weakened that feeling. Now after four days hanging out with bloggers from all over the world, nationalism makes no sense to him any more.

(For full accounts of the summit, see David Sasaki's excellent overview, Ethan Z's great series of posts,  our media digest, the summit blog, technorati, google blog search, Rezwan's excellent roundup of summit bloggers, etc.)

The blogger's rejection of nationalism (I'm not going to name him because he is sensitive about how he has been portrayed in the past), and the role GV seems to have played in his change of thinking, brings me to Joi Ito's post-summit blog post. Joi is now on the GV Board and has been involved since the very beginning - when it was just a meeting of bloggers. He writes:

Global Voices is a super-important part in fixing what I call the "caring problem". There is a systemic bias against reporting international news in most developed nations. When pressed, many editors will say that people just don't want to read articles about other parts of the world. This is because most people don't care. They don't care because they don't hear the voices or know people in other countries. I think that by providing voices to all over the world, we have the ability to connect people and get people to care more.

I also believe that voice is probably more important than votes or guns. I believe that combating extremism is most effectively done by winning the argument in public, not by censorship, elections or destruction. I believe that providing everyone with a voice to participate in the global dialog is key. The ability to communication and connect without permission or fear of retribution is a pillar of open society in the 21st Century. Global Voices is the best example of this that I know of.

Patrick Philippe Meier, a self-described GV "outsider" and doctoral research fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative had this conclusion:

...The Internet, and the information society, the global network of social nodes and connections, is becoming more complex. This complexity adds to diversity and balance. Most people, most of the time, in most places are nonviolent. Social extremes are by definition minorities. Global Voices are more informed and moderate. Giving a voice to these Global Voices online is likely to diminish the impact of extremists. How do we find these voices in the symphony of the superhighway? We need to make quanta of information more indexable and more searchable. Tag, tag, tag away. Only then will locality, diversity, opportunity be made more visible....

So how did we get to the point that people are saying such things about GV - things we never imagined when we started the project - and where might we go from here? As this article that I wrote jointly with Ethan Zuckerman back in 2006 tries to explain, GV arose as an attempt to address badly skewed global information flows in which the voices of people from North America and Western Europe are disproportionately amplified in the global media. But now here's the problem: the skewed flows aren't just happening on a global scale, there are imbalances within countries, regions, and communities. So the question is: what is the best way to achieve a global media environment where everybody has the ability to speak and be heard? And is there also a way for people to find authenticity, relevance, and quality amidst the cacophony of cat-blogging and hidden agendas?

By having a tiered system of expert blogger-editors and translators who curate what they find to be globally relevant and authentic from their regions, we've made a decent but imperfect stab at the second question, although I think we need to revisit our systems in the future and find ways to improve them, funds and people permitting. This year's discussions in Budapest focused largely on the first question: equity of "voice" within national borders as well as across borders.  At several points during both the public conference and the internal community meetings, people talked about the importance of amplifying minority, non-elite, disadvantaged and dissenting voices alongside "representative" or "typical" voices from various countries. Simultaneously, there's also the problem of "silent majorities" who tend to spend less time seeking media interviews, demonstrating in public, and doing things that headlines than people who tend to be on the more atypical extremes of any given country's political spectrum. These attention deficits lead not only to imbalance in media coverage, but also create social pressures that lead to self-censorship: people think, think "why should I stick my neck out and risk getting in trouble for an issue few people in my country really care about or agree with?"

It's not just mainstream media that presents a skewed and un-representative picture to the world; it turns out that blogospheres, at least as they have naturally evolved so far, are amplifiers for the voices and views of educated, wired elites. As David Sasaki, who runs Rising Voices, Global Voices' outreach arm, writes: "As incredibly diverse as the global blogosphere is, the 'blogger demographic' tends to [be] very homogenous. From Tanzania to Tasmania, most bloggers live in the wealthy neighborhoods of urban centers, most are well educated, and most belong to the majority groups of their countries."

Whose voice - and whose life - gets to represent a particular nationality, ethnic group, or community, is a problem that both Ethan Z, who co-founded GV with me, and web philosopher David Weinberger have been writing about over the past few days. Media reporting about any given issue tends to rely on a few colorful examples, chosen for their interestingness, the willingness of the subjects to talk to the media, and their ability to speak articulately Weinberger points out that extrapolating reality from a few examples  results in what he calls "The Fallacy of Examples."

As Ethan points out, "it’s lots easier to write about extreme examples rather than median ones." He cites Clay Shirky's excellent new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations - which I happened to read on the plane en route to Budapest. Shirky analyzes the way in which online communities tend to follow a "power law." Ethan describes the phenomenon: "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."

There are many factors contributing to who gets to the top of the power curve, starting with who even tries to speak, who succeeds in speaking, and who is silenced.  The digital divide - access to affordable internet and mobile communications - is only one small part of it. Many people are so accustomed to being ignored, it doesn't occur to them that creating their own media would produce any useful result. They worry about bringing trouble on their families by calling socially unacceptable attention to themselves. In Budapest, we agreed that Global Voices has an important role to play - and some believe a responsibility -  in supporting people who have stories to tell but who are isolated for various reasons. When local authority figures (or their parents and spouses) discourage them from speaking, they can be encouraged by the fact that people around the world are indeed linking to them - and that if something happens to them, questions will be asked.

Censorship and threat of imprisonment also skew the conversation: if certain kinds of views are silenced - or driven to quiet largely-unnoticed pockets of their online communities - then it becomes hard to tell whether the loudest and most predominant voices really represent the majority view of a particular community if the censorship and threat of retribution had not been imposed on its people. There was some discussion in Budapest about to what extent our regional editors and bloggers who represent certain countries have an obligation to amplify "representative" or "mainstream" views and to what extent they should be amplifying minority and "dissident" voices. It's a tough balancing act, and no matter what you do, you get criticized by people who think you're misrepresenting their country or community.

Perhaps the biggest unresolved problem on Global Voices is how to be truly fair to everybody - to minorities as well as majorities, while not appearing to take sides in various people's independence struggles. Now here's the background: Our editorial structure is based Wikipedia's list of countries - a list maintained by a very active community who fight fiercely about any addition or subtraction. It generally serves us well - or better than any of the alternatives seemed likely to do - but it's impossible to please everybody, and there are people who regularly trash GV for this choice. Our ideal goal (far from being realized) is to have a contributor from all of those countries except North America and Western Europe. This stems from a decision at the beginning that if we started out including those two regions, GV could get dominated by those bloggers who have other global platforms anyway. Our priority was to create a platform for people who have a harder time getting their voices heard. At any rate, the countries that we do cover are then divided up into regions, each managed by a "regional editor". We also have a number of language editors who post summaries and excerpts of translated content from non-English blogs into English on the main site. What languages we translate onto the main site is primarily a function of funding and volunteer interest. (Meanwhile, as Ethan described in this post, a family of websites have sprung up on which volunteers translate GV's English content into various languages.)

One of the questions debated most heatedly in Budapest (though politely and respectfully after several days of eating and drinking together and sharing hotel rooms) was this: Should GV include blogs from North America and Western Europe, especially those from minority communities whose voices are not well heard in their own national medias let alone the global media? Does it make sense to be covering Macedonia but not Greece? And the corollaries: Does our system of organizing the world - and thus people's identities - largely according to their U.N.-recognized nationality help or hinder the idea that people from anywhere on the planet should be able to have a voice and be heard? But if we don't organize ourselves according to the nation-state framework, and on top of that a regional hierarchy of editors, how do we organize our website without descending into chaos - or turning into a platform for the world's independence groups? On the other hand, there have been strong disagreements in the past year or so amongst contributors and editors over whether we should have separate categories and/or contributors for "Tibet" and "Chechnya" (to give just two examples of many others) - and if by failing to do so we are failing to adequately represent online voices from those places, and thus in effect discriminating against those minorities? It was fascinating to see who came down on what side of these questions - and it was not split along regional, ethnic, or socio-economic lines at all, people from all continents came down on both sides of these questions, to varying degrees. One observer of our community who I spoke to after the meeting suggested creating a "shadow" or "parallel" website in which we try organizing ourselves according to some other criteria than nation-state and see what happens. It's an interesting idea. I'd be interested in hearing more ideas and opinions from readers of GV as well as contributors and community members. Can GV come up with an innovative and equitable way to organize a global citizen media website without using the nation-state as its organizing principle?

...which brings me back to Shirky's book. Another point he makes which I agree with is that "communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring."  Activities like blogging, podcasting, and uploading videos to YouTube-like websites are no longer considered technically innovative by the Silicon Valley set. But these tools are only just starting to be used by indigenous Bolivians, barrio kids in Medelin, Colombia, young people in Madagascar, kids in Kolkata's red light district,  etc. Only after digital citizen media tools become commonplace in such communities will the most interesting social innovation really start to happen on a global scale. What excites me is that people who work on Global Voices are perhaps uniquely positioned to understand what's going on - as well as play a part in it. One thing that's clear from the GV experience so far is that people have multiple identities: many bloggers chafe at being pigeonholed in accordance with one accident of birth above all others. At the same time, others - especially bloggers from countries that gained independence in the past decade or so - are extremely proud of their national identity and proud to have the opportunity to promote that identity on a site like GV. Others come from minority groups seeking independence. How best to build a collaborative citizen media community among people who define their identities -  and identities of others - very differently? What - beyond an interesting website - might result from such an attempt? Is it possible to build a global citizen media community with a post-nationalist identity?

Shirky also talks about how systems of collaborative production - like Wikipedia, for example - are not organizationally flat. A very small percentage of Wikipedians do the bulk of the work. There are also community "enforcement" systems in place in order to prevent this open platform from being completely destroyed and overrun by a few ill-intentioned individuals. At the same time, these systems and structures - "rules" if you like - were not driven by a central management team in the way that the president and publisher of a news organization would decide (largely top-down, in my experience) and enforce (journalists' fear of being fired or laid off in the next round of cutbacks) how things should be run and what the editorial policies should be. If you ask Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales whether he had a plan for "solving" the many problems of vandalism and self-promotion Wikipedia faces, he says he didn't - the core community of Wikipedia's most passionate and active volunteers came up with solutions and developed the "management" and "enforcement" structures around them. Likewise, I'm quite positive that Ethan, myself, and GV's core management team are not going to come up with answers and solutions to the questions and problems I brought up in the previous paragraph. The solutions are going to have to be generated by the community, somehow, if enough of them even want to solve these problems or can achieve some sort of consensus. Who knows if that will ever be possible.

...which brings me to another book:  Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet, And How to Stop It. JZ (as he is known at the Berkman Center) is concerned about the Internet's potential loss of "generativity:" the ability of PC users at the edges of the Internet to innovate - develop software applications and all kinds of media platforms - without coordinating with some central authority, whether it be a computer or device manufacturer or whoever controls the Internet connections between devices. Increasingly, people are connecting to the Internet with what he calls "tethered devices" that are not generative: they don't allow the user to create new applications or media without working directly with the manufacturer, or at very least using the manufacturers designated and/or proprietary systems. A PC is generative while iPods, TiVo's, Wii's, etc., are not. There are some good reasons - security and user simplicity primarily - why these devices are tethered, not generative. But Zittrain warns that as the Internet becomes less and less generative, innovation and freedom of speech will suffer.

Reading the book on my way back from the GV summit I wondered:  if the Internet becomes less generative just as growing numbers of people in the developing world are connecting to it, what does that mean? Will indigenous people in Bolivia and teenagers in Malawi be deprived of the chance to shape the future of global communications to the same extent that college kids in California and Finland were able to do? If this is a real concern (which I think it is, the more I think about it), what do we do to make sure that generativity is preserved in the next generation of Internet-connected devices (largely mobile phones and set-top boxes, most likely)? At least for enough of those devices that people in the developing world will have the chance to innovate and shape communications technologies to their own community needs to the extent that Westerners have shaped technology to theirs?

Zittrain also talked a bit about generativity as an organizing principle, with Wikipedia once again as the prime example. This got me thinking about Global Voices and the extent to which GV is also a generative organization. Traditional news organizations are non-generative for the most part: changes in the way things are done generally are not due to initiative taken by reporters in far-flung bureaus: you can suggest changes but the policy decisions have to be made at the center then implemented downward - and substantial reforms happen very slowly, usually with great organizational resistance. GV is I think probably less generative than Wikipedia the way it's currently run, but still a lot more generative than a traditional news organization. Rising Voices, Global Voices Advocacy, and especially Lingua all arose from activities that bloggers in our networks saw the need for and were taking it upon themselves to do, long before GV created formal platforms for these activities. Since we are a largely volunteer-driven organization with only a couple full-time staffers, a couple dozen part-timers who are really working for love more than money and a couple hundred volunteers, we can't make any major policy decision about structure or funding without first gaining consensus from the community.  One might argue that this slows down executive decision-making, but on the other hand, if our community doesn't agree with a decision they'll stop contributing and GV will cease to exist anyway - like Wikipedia our volunteers are not tied to us by salary and employment contracts. But is GV generative enough? Are we enabling enough innovation at the edges and are we enabling new ideas that come from far-flung volunteers to get support and be implemented if the community agrees that they're worth implementing? I don't know the answer. I hope some of our editors and volunteers will let me know what they think.

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Footnote: To be clear, I take zero credit for the success of the Budapest summit, as I had very little to do with the planning other than a bit of fundraising and a bit of brainstorming early on. Most of the credit goes to Georgia Popplewell, Sami Ben Gharbia, Solana Larsen, and David Sasaki, not only for the awe-inspiring public program, and an advocacy workshop before the public summit, but also for two days of "internal" brainstorming meetings for people who contribute directly to the various GV projects. The meetings were so energetic that even cynics lost some of their cynicism. But the real magic came from all of our community members, just by being there and being themselves. It's not hard to have a great meeting when you bring together some of the most articulate people from around the planet who are generally not on the conference circuit, and thus have new things to say and brand new perspectives that you've never heard before!

Rising Voices: toward a more inclusive global conversation

(Photo courtesy Patrick Philippe Meier)

The public part of the Global Voices Summit is over, and the blog posts about it are piling up around the web. But the meeting continues for GV project participants, website contributors, editors, and others who are actively involved with our growing citizen media community. We're nearing Day 1 of two days of internal planning and brainstorming meetings in which we try to figure out where to take the project in the future. Ethan has a great post about the techniques David Sasaki, Georgia Popplewell and Solana Larsen have devised to unearth ideas and foster discussion amongst this multi-cultural, multi-lingual group.

I was almost brought to tears yesterday during the first panel, devoted to work by members of the Rising Voices project. Led by David Sasaki, Rising Voices is funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation. It gives micro-grants to promote blogging among groups of people who are - for various reasons, cultural, economic, linguistic, gender - not taking advantage of the opportunity to express themselves online. After Global Voices was created, there has always been concern by many people in our community that blogospheres in most countries are dominated by wired elites - and that unless we conduct more active outreach, Global Voices is really "Global Elite Voices."  Rising voices it our first stab at addressing that problem. Ethan writes that he is "blown away" by the work being done by Rising Voices grantees. Click here for summaries of all the projects and here to watch videos of all the projects. Also see the RV Introduction to Global Citizen Media. But before you click on any of those links, watch this video:

 

Global Voices Summit Slideshow

This slideshow is automatically generated from a feed of photos uploaded to Flickr from the Global Voices Summit in Budapest. If you're not in the room, see the webcast, liveblog, and twitter stream. You can also join the conversation on the #globalvoices IRC channel at freenode.net. (Go to Mibbit.com if you're not familiar with IRC clients.)

Tibet... is discussion possible?

The Chinese system of Internet censorship and media propaganda  may have a lot of holes, but when tested by events like the Tibet unrest this past week, so far it's holding up well enough for the regime's purposes.

For those living in the West who didn't realize that there's little sympathy for Tibet independence among ethnic Chinese in the PRC, this blog post on Global Voices will be a shocker. John Kennedy has translated chatter from Chinese blogs and chatrooms that generally runs along the lines of: those ungrateful minorities, we give them modern conveniences and look how they thank us... where have we heard this before? Reuters has a roundup on the Washington Post that begins: "a look at Chinese blogs reveals a vitriolic outpouring of anger and nationalism directed against Tibetans and the West."

Of course, pretty much anything presenting more nuanced views that don't show the Chinese government actions in a good light are censored anyway. YouTube is of course blocked again. Bloggers are reporting that many BBS and chat channels are being closed or cracked down upon, and that mobile SMS's coming from or about Tibet are being heavily filtered.

"Davesgonechina" at the Tenement Palm blog has been translating the chatter coming from Chinese netizens on Fanfou and Jiwai - Chinese versions of Twitter. Click here, here, and here, specifically.

Dave has done more than translate: he points out that this Tibet situation is a real challenge to all people who believe that the Internet can help foster free speech and bring about better global understanding.  Here is his challenge to all of us:

I've argued, citing the words of the Dalai Lama himself, that if you

1) Believe in democratic principles and free speech
2) You believe the Internet is a tool for unfettered global communication
3) There's something in China (or any other country) that bothers you

Then you ought to put some energy into communicating directly with Chinese netizens about the problem. For years now I've seen alot of Chinese netizens discussions be completely ignored or simply missed by English-speaking netizens, who too often think that Chinese netizens are all completely brainwashed. Well, guess what? Some of them think you are too. Instead of dismissing each other as fools, how about we try to talk? So I say, Tweet Back! Tweet in English, alot of Chinese people know some. If you know Chinese... what are you waiting for?

He goes on to propose some specific ways to engage Chinese people in discussion of the Tibet issue, starting by signing up for accounts on a Chinese version of Twitter, Fanfou. In an earlier post he writes:

This is the perfect opportunity for Tibet internet activists like Oxblood Ruffin and concerned netizens everywhere to engage Chinese people on the Internet in discussions about what is going on. As I previously outlined in a primer to engage Chinese people, these are channels where one can register a free account and launch dialogues with Chinese individuals about Tibet. Many of the people I've included below are neither kneejerk nationalists or xenophobes, and some of them know some English too. It wouldn't hurt to try. You can respond by clicking on the username link at the beginning of each tweet, sign up, and talk back.

Dave also makes an astute observation that the East-West miscommunication madness is here to stay - and likely to get worse - between now and the Olympics. In a post titled SchizOlympics he reflects the feelings I share, and why I've not been looking forward to August:

Watching the build up to the Olympics has been, for me, like watching the world's biggest, slowest traffic accident. For a while now its been pretty obvious that alot of contentious issues about China were going to come to the front as we approach August 8th, but the problem is that there are two completely separate parallel worlds on these issues: the Chinese one, and the rest of us. Westerners have been exposed to rhetoric and information about Tibetan discontent, Darfur's international and Chinese dimensions, and of course old chestnuts like Tiananmen provide a larger context of long term, ongoing problems. Meanwhile, Chinese mainlanders by and large have no knowledge of these events or issues. While for the rest of the world the Olympics will be largely a referendum on China's ability to deal with what everyone else has talked about for years, for Chinese citizens it will be about China winning a beauty pageant of sorts.

Two Worlds, Two Dreams: prepare for the SchizOlympics.

Are we ready?

Meanwhile, here are some other online must-reads from the past couple of days:

• The China Digital Times has been doing a fabulous job of aggregating both professional and amateur reports from Tibet. Here is a collection of mobile phone photos they linked to, for instance.
• Roland Soong translates a first-hand account from a Chinese person in Lhasa. He also has a long update today including links to contrasting YouTube videos that paint different pictures of what's happening.
• Will at Imagethief has some astute observations about how Chinese government messages that work well on domestic audiences often don't work well on foreigners, but he points out that the Chinese official communications strategy is getting more sophisticated.

As Roland also points out, romantic fantasies and propaganda about Tibet aren't exclusive to any one side. Perhaps it's time to go re-read Orville Schell's book Virtual Tibet.

Congo park rangers blogging from the front line

Tired of blogs chewing over the same old fat? Four elite park rangers in eastern Congo are now armed with cameras and blogs as well as rifles and know-how, as they work to protect the few remaining mountain gorillas in Virunga National Park from rebels, poachers and land invasions.

read more | digg story

The above post is what happens when you use the automatic "Blog It" function in Digg. This is definitely a good way to generate traffic on a website. Here is the sequence of events:  I saw this post on Global Voices linking to this blog post by a Londoner named Fred blogging from the DRC about how Congo park rangers are blogging. At the bottom of his blog post was a "digg this" link. I was so enthused about what I learned from  his post that I felt that I must help bring more attention to it with my little vote. Fred (who interestingly has a button to auto-translate his blog into Chinese) writes:

...I highly recommend taking a look at what may be the only Congolese blogs written in English (Diaspora excluded - if I’m wrong about that, please let me know). Wildlife Direct deserve bounteous credit for arming three elite park rangers in Eastern DRC with cameras and blogs:

• Elie Mundima commands the Rangers in Virunga National Park, where he says nearly 100 rangers have died protecting mountain gorillas from land invasions, poachers and rebels in the past 10 years
• Atamato is based at Ishango, on the northern shores of Lake Edward. His job is to protect the last remaining hippos in Virunga
• Aloma Major has been using his blog to have a conversation with a school in Colorado (more of a monologue, so far: I wish they’d leave some comments)
• Paulin Ngobobo is a senior warden with the Congolese wildlife authorities. His most recent post includes pictures of a newborn mountain gorilla called Ndeze

I was just poking around their blogs. Great stuff: wonderful pictures and videos, and real windows onto the lives of some dedicated Congolese park rangers. If you care about African wildlife you should definitely follow their blogs. A great example of one less thing I ever would have known about if it weren't for Global Voices.

There are, by the way, many more Congolese blogs written in French - from which Alice Backer frequently translates excerpts. You can see them all on GV's DRC page.

When talking about the difference between blogs and conventional journalism, why the two complement each other, and why I think we need both, I love to point to GV's DRC page and contrast it with the New York Times' Congo page... The NYT has some excellent journalism which GV cannot duplicate, but I would note that the last NYT story on that page is from November... while GV continues to link to and sometimes translate fresh blog posts coming regularly out of the DRC - whether or not there is some new disaster or conflict or election.

GV's coverage of some countries and regions is stronger than others which is due in part to whether it is easy or difficult to find active volunteers to help us represent their country and region. We're strong on China but weak on Japan and Korea for example, because we've had problems finding Korean and Japanese bloggers who are interested in spending the time to introduce the conversations from their blogospheres to the English-speaking world. If anybody out there knows some strong bilingual Korean and Japanese bloggers who would like to help us out, please have them get in touch with me.

Reuters Africa: breaking new ground

Reuters has taken an important and trend-setting step with Reuters Africa.

It is important in several ways. First, it demonstrates Reuters' commitment to covering Africa not only as a general news story but also as a global business story -  to an extent that I have not seen in other global English-language media.

As Reuters Africa editor John Chiahemen told The Guardian: "We want to show that Africa can be covered as a business story, not just a disaster story. While it is true that African information is available from other sources, there is no single media I know that has the breadth of content Reuters has available."

A press release elaborates further:

Reuters Africa features an interactive map to access local Reuters news across the continent, organized by country. Reuters Africa also provides extensive economic, business and financial news and data, including stock and currency market data and company information, from around the continent. Reflecting the importance of commodities to many African economies, the site features exclusive online content on metals and mining, energy and oil, and agricultural commodities.

This is important. My friend and colleague Ethan Zuckerman has written a great deal about how the global English-language media (and entertainment industry) needs to start treating Africa like a place and an opportunity - not just a crisis. In his work on global media attention, he shows how Africa gets the least amount of media attention than anywhere  else (nobody is too surprised at this), but more interestingly he also argues (original pdf article here) that there is a connection between this lack of global media attention and the inability of businesses and policymakers in Western developed nations to take African countries seriously as destinations for investment and business.

Is China's growing business influence in Africa now an added incentive for Western news organizations to take Africa seriously as a business story? At any rate, Reuters deserves kudos for taking the lead.

Second, Reuters Africa extends the news agency's commitment to build synergies between the work of Reuters reporters and the work of bloggers from around Africa, who paint a much more diverse and vibrant picture of the continent than mainstream news reporting tends to do. Global Voices Managing Editor Rachel Rawlins, who used to work as a correspondent in Africa for the BBC writes:

It’s frequently depressing reading accounts of Africa in the mainstream media. Doubly so, in fact. Firstly because what is defined as worthy of reporting is, well, depressing. And secondly because it so seldom engages with the complex and vibrant reality of the continent in all its massive diversity, preferring instead to deal in simplistic stereotypes.

(Disclosure: Reuters is the main funder for Global Voices which I co-founded so there is a reason I'm paying a great deal of attention to its site and its significance - but I'd like to believe that I'd find it significant even if I wasn't connected to GV, and that many people who aren't will.  If you think I'm completely full of it please hit the comments section and let me know - nobody has ever hesitated in the past!)

As  you'll see from the screenshot that Rachel took from the Uganda page of Reuters Africa, each country page not only includes news headlines but also the Global Voices Uganda feed, pointing to blog posts coming from Uganda, selected by people like our amazing Africa editor Ndesanjo Macha.

   

Mark Glaser at MediaShift has a great post titled Reuters Looks to Africa and a Decentralized Future for Media in which he interviews Reuters president Chris Ahearn on why his company has begun to take blogs seriously. My favorite quote: "last I checked, the business we’re in is to inform people."

Yup, and the bloggers we link to on Global Voices are as serious about doing that as journalists are.

Two more key quotes:

...as we start to arm the quote-unquote mainstream with the same tools as journalists, editors and reporters have, there’s an interesting asymmetry here. I talk to a lot of people who say, ‘How come blogging software seems to be a richer news-telling experience than some of the tools we put into journalists’ hands?’ Interesting dynamic, that.

and:

The cost of newsgathering has plummeted. How do we take that and deploy more resources into newsgathering and news presentation? Why is it that right now, at a time when the world is getting more difficult to understand based on everything that’s happening are news organizations pulling out of so many places around the world? Why?

It's worth reading the whole post to get a further glimpse into Chris' vision of where the industry is going, and why news organizations should recognize that we are entering a "golden age" for journalism - not leaving one.

In the same post Mark also interviewed Ethan, who pointed out there's a lot more potential synergy between Reuters journalism and Global Voices' global community of bloggers that so far has not been explored:

There’s a rising tone of anxiety and despair in the Zimbabwean blogosphere, for instance, but it won’t ‘break’ as a story unless the civil service strike goes off tomorrow and sparks a violent government response,” Zuckerman said via email. “In a perfect world, I think we’d find a way to help our friends at Reuters anticipate stories that might break based on our coverage — that hasn’t happened as much as I’d like.

Perhaps that will be next.  But as Rachel points out in her post on Global Voices, the blogosphere  has a long way to go as well:

This is a great step forward, but there’s still a long way to go. There are large and exciting blogging communities in several countries, such as Nigeria and Kenya but there are other areas where coverage is very sparse and still others, such as Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, where online expression is severely curtailed by the government.

We hope that the involvement of bloggers in projects such as this not only gives a platform to those whose voices have long been left unheard but also encourages others to join the conversation and brings pressure to bear on behalf of those who want to speak but cannot.

Amen sister.

Join the Open Source Translation Blogging project

Guangzhou-based blogger and Global Voices language editor John Kennedy is leading an exciting new initiative which Roland Soong has dubbed the Open Source Translation Blogging project.. and which "Letters from China" calls the Great Hall of the Bloggers.

John's idea, which started in a comments thread on LfC's blog, is similar to a dream Roland has had for a couple of years: To build a cooperative of bilingual bloggers who coordinate translation of important conversations taking place on the Chinese Internet - particularly stuff that we think will help the English-speaking world to understand China better.

Roland has become one of the most famous Chinese-English "bridge bloggers," bringing articles, blog posts, conversations, and debates from the Chinese-language Internet to the attention of the English-speaking world.  But there are many other people doing this on their own blogs. They include John, LfC, the good folks at Danwei, Interlocals, the China Media Project, the team at China Digital Times and many many more bilingual bloggers scattered around Greater China and across the globe.

The problem, as John points out, is that so far there has been little co-ordination about who is working on what, and people are often worried about duplication (i.e., whether Roland will beat them to the punch after they spend hours working on something).

While informal coordination has been happening all along, a lot more material could be translated a lot faster and more efficiently if the coordination were made more systematic.

Anybody can sign up to join the project on this wiki - but please only do so if you read both Chinese and English and are serious about being involved.  You can participate in a couple of ways:

1. Sign up as a translator blogger
2. Suggest articles for translation

Roland is already using the wiki actively to list what he's working on. I've posted something in the suggestion list. Etc. The ball is rolling.

I am thinking maybe we may also want to designate a special OSTB tag in Technorati, del.icio.us, and for people to use as a category on their blogs, etc. so that anybody who translates anything as part of the OSTB project, and publishes it on their blog, can then automatically feed their OSTB blog posts into a special OSTB web feed. 

Global Voices Delhi Summit Slideshow

Day 1 of the Global Voices Delhi Summit is well underway and the photos are starting to emerge on Flickr. Here is a slideshow. (Thanks to a cool little Flickr hack.) People are contributing their photos of the meeting (and a few from their travels before the meeting, and from the hotel where many of us are staying) by uploading their pictures to Flickr and tagging them with gvdelhi2006:

There is a webcast and online chat. You can find out all the details of how to connect on this page.

Bloggers, innovation, and China's future

(China's finest ham for the cam
Originally uploaded by Aether Woo)

The second annual Chinese blogger conference in Hangzhou came at a time when Chinese government authorities are feeling threatened by this new grassroots medium and are trying to find ways to control it. The proposed "real name system" policy  (still under discussion, not yet implemented) would require bloggers to register their real names and identities with their blog hosting services and to publish under their real names.  Most seemed to agree that the proposed system would be hard to implement without destroying the business of many blog-hosting companies. More than that - they are bewildered that they should be feared rather than praised for their creativity and initiative. As the A-list tech blogger Keso pointed out in his keynote speech: "Those who think that blogs are violent or threatening only see it that way because they view society as threatening." (I blogged his speech in more detail here.)

(Photo: Isaac Mao speaks 
Originally uploaded by lychen1009.)

Fang Xingdong, head of the blog-hosting service Bokee.com, declared in a presentation that he believes China will drive global innovation in the 21st century.  It was clear that the people in the room would love nothing more than to play a part in making that dream a reality.  Will the authorities allow them to play this role?

Foreign participants could not help but come away being impressed by the creativity, optimism, and idealism of China's Internet generation. The people in this room are not socially disruptive revolutionaries. They are people who would like to get on with the business of finding ways to use the Internet to improve people's lives.  To the extent that politics won't prevent them from doing so, they would prefer not to be involved with politics.  A quick sampling of their values and ideas:

Several speakers spoke about how individuals and companies can build reputation and credibility in ways that have social as well as economic value. A professor from Guangzhou, Cheng Lehua, gave a very interesting talk about the psychology of trust and credibility on the web. Sessions on Chinese wikipedia and Creative Commons led to discussions of how any individual can share their knowledge and creative energies to the benefit of society.

A panel of educators described how they are using blogs to share knowledge in new and exciting ways - to the betterment of China's educational system. (A blog and wiki for geography teachers is helping people pool and improve their teaching materials and methods, for instance.) Teachers have their students use blogs as a way to collaborate on assignments and engage in new kinds of distance learning as well as home schooling.

Members of small non-profit organizations and charities demonstrated how they use blogs not only to raise funds but also to inform donors about how their money is being spent. One panelist, a blind man who leads an organization for the visually impaired, described how blogs combined with voice recognition software is helping China's isolated community of visually impaired people communicate with one another and educate themselves in a society where resources for handicapped education are extremely limited.

(China's e-generation 
Originally uploaded by Aether Woo.)

Bloggers speaking in a mash-up panel and an entrepreneur presenting about microcontent demonstrated how user-centric platforms are being built for content-sharing and creative collaboration. Over and over again, people repeated the importance of respecting the individual user's needs - and the importance of building tools that maximize the user's ability to drive services in directions that the companies themselves might not have imagined. People spoke of the importance of "personal spaces" as well as "public spaces"  online - and the responsibilities that go with creating and maintaining both types of spaces.  One of China's earliest bloggers, Wang Jianshuo said: "keeping things open encourages creativity." At this point, you're not competing on the basis of your content, you're competing on the basis of creativity. 

In the final panel on entrepreneurship, Isaac Mao pointed out that if you really want to sustain your company's success over the long run, your focus should be on the value you create for your users, rather than simply on profits. As Chen Xuer put it, the goal of a Web 2.0 company should be to help "fulfill people's urgent needs and also find ways for people to live their lives more fully."

If one extrapolates China's future from this group of individuals, you see a peace-loving, compassionate, humanistic, globally minded, flexible, hard-working lot who are well poised to drive Chinese innovation.... and to drive it in directions that the entire world should certainly welcome. The Chinese government would be crazy not to embrace them as poster kids for China's future. If the government is not capable of doing so, it will be to the long-term detriment not only of China's economy but also of China's global credibility, which in turn has an impact on China's long-term global influence.

Bokee's Fang Xingdong warned in his speech that while the "invisible hand of the market" may have enabled China's blogosphere to reach its present stage, "from now on the hand of the government will play the biggest role."

If there had been time for me to ask him a follow up question, I would have asked him whether he thinks that the result will be an increasingly unfair playing field for Internet businesses in China. Will that stifle entrepreneurship? Will the growing need for businesses to focus on playing politics with regulators - and scrambling to comply with constantly-shifting, vague regulations -  sap the innovative energies of China's entrepreneurs? If anybody reading this has some thoughts about the answer, please hit the comments section.

Has LiveJournal let in the KGB? Some Russian users fear so.

These badges were created by Russian LiveJournal users who are very suspicious (to put it mildly) of a new partnership between SixApart's LiveJournal and the Russian Internet company SUP.  I learned about this controversy by reading Veronica Khokholva's latest post over at Global Voices Online. She writes:

The Russian-language blogosphere (commonly known as ZheZhe) is on fire: some users are shutting down their blogs, others are emigrating to the virtual Trinidad & Tobago - all because LiveJournal.com's owner Six Apart has decided to team up with the Russian internet company Sup, founded this year by Aleksandr Mamut, a Russian "oligarch," and Andrew Paulson, an American entrepreneur.
...
Assurances from managers of Six Apart and Sup have left many unconvinced and still concerned over whether the Russian security services would gain access to their personal information and whether the new Abuse Team would carry out ruthless purges.

[read the whole thing here]

Apparently there is a certain element of anti-Semitisim coming from some of the ethnic Russian LJ users which is of course very bad.   But there is another issue at play here which I think really needs to be taken seriously: local users don't trust local internet companies not to sell them out to Russian security forces. One Six Apart employee tried to assuage Russian LJ users' fears in this post. She answers a  number of questions, including this one:

* Will information from these journals be given to the Russian government? Personal information?
No. Not in any way that would not happen today, such as a court-ordered subpoena. SUP is acting as our agent and will be bound by our Privacy Policy

* Will they have access to Russian users' private account information?
Again, only under our privacy policy, and bound by the same terms.

* Is SUP under any legal obligation to keep users' information confidential?
Yes, they are. They don't own any information, and they can't reuse it in any way not covered by our policies.

One thing isn't clear: will Russian LJ user data now be housed in Russia? If so then it is definitely subject to Russian legal jurisdiction. I am no expert in Russian law, but the question is, does the Russian legal system define "crime" in a way that is consistent with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Or not? Does the Russian legal system guarantee the right to free speech (article 19)? In practice as well as on paper? Or not? Seems like LJ's Russian users don't think so. If they are right, then compliance with a court-ordered subpoena could result in the suppression of peaceful political speech and in the violation of human rights.

One needs only to look at Yahoo's experience in China to see how the path to evil is paved, if not with good intentions, then at least with failures to think things through. Yahoo also promises not to share Chinese user info to except in cases where it is obligated to do so by local law. The problem is that the Chinese legal system defines "crime" in such a way that criticism of the government is also included. As a result, Chinese political dissidents have gone to jail because Yahoo was required to hand over user information in compliance with Chinese law.

Could the same thing happen in Russia under LiveJournal auspices?  I don't know enough about where and how LJ is storing user data, or about Russian law, to know the answer. But it seems like many Russian LJ users think the answer is "yes."

It will be interesting to see how seriously this user trust problem is taken by SixApart, LJ, and their Russian partner Sup.