RConversation

Papa Gets Hitched!

My family expanded this week when my father, Stephen MacKinnon married Anne Feldhaus. In addition to being an all-round wonderful person, Anne is also a distinguished scholar of Maharashtran folk religion, speaks fluent Marathi and has a house in Pune, India which I hope to visit one day. It appears that in future, the happy couple will divide their time between their scenic home located behind the Phoenix Zoo in Tempe, Arizona (home to Arizona State University where they are both professors), Pune, India, and various parts of China where my father frequently does his research on Chinese history. The globe-trotting family just gets more globe-trotting!

I took a bunch of pictures of the wedding and will probably be adding more from other attendees.   It was held on the dock of the South Bar Club on Harbor Island, in the Bahamas. It would be pretty hard to find a more beautiful location.

After a private civil ceremony in the morning to make everything legal, the public wedding  was led by my father's college roommate, Sam Deloria, who lived up to his reputation as a "famously funny and witty person" - among the many other things he is notorious for.

I am thrilled to be related to Anne, and especially thrilled to see my father so happy, after a rather difficult few years.

My dad seems to be the only person in my immediate biological family capable of having a stable long-term relationship. I'm afraid my own natural instincts on such matters came out after a few drinks at the end of the wedding dinner, when the bride made a beeline in my direction with the bridal bouquet. I swiftly ducked under the table. (My CNN-era war zone training keeps coming in handy in unexpected ways!) A much younger female relative of Anne's was forced to catch it instead... heheh...

Global Voices Summit: Emergence of a Conversation Community

(cross posted from Global Voices)

(photo by Beth Kanter)

Thanks to everybody who participated - both in person and online to make our Global Voices London Summit such a stunning success!

The conversation was so intense that few people noticed a movie star sitting quietly in the back of the room, listening intently to what bloggers from around the world had to say.

A full, real-time transcript of the meeting has been posted on the GV05 Conference Blog, courtesy of SJ Klein (who typed), Angelo Embuldeniya (who posted and edited) and others who helped.

(photo by Georgia Popplewell)

MP3 audio files of the full meeting will be posted soon. Brendan Greeley of Radio Open Source and Ben Walker of the Theory of Everything also conducted some wonderful one-on-one interviews with many of the bloggers present. We hope to post those as podcasts over the coming week or two.

Meanwhile, the blog posts about the conference - by people in the room as well as by people who followed the discussion online - are popping up like mushrooms around the web. You can track them on Del.icio.us, on Blogpulse,  the Technorati "globalvoices" tag, the Technorati "global voices" search, and on Flickr.

As many pointed out, one day was too short. It was really just the beginning of a conversation that needs to continue over coming year.  We have three main online spaces in which to continue this conversation:

(Photo by Enda)

The e-mail list-serv: This will be used as a place to start conversations, make announcements and provoke discussions which can be continued on:

The post-conference brainstorm wiki: I have created several links for subjects people clearly have an issue in pursuing: translation, “bloglogue”, outreach, etc.  Feel free to add more. When you add major ideas or want to get discussion going on these pages, please send and email to the list and ask everybody to join you there.

IRC: The globalvoices IRC is open 24/7 at irc://irc.freenode.net/#globalvoices  If you haven’t been there before, click  here for instructions on how to get on it.   People can email the list and schedule “meeting times” to discuss specific issues, then post the transcript and follow-up summary notes on the wiki so we have a record of what was discussed and planned.

Above all, the important point here is that Global Voices will become what the community makes of it. GV’s future is not within the control of me, or Ethan, or our Regional Editors, or the Berkman Center Reuters, or any of our other sponsors or funders. We are really just trying to facilitate, support, enable, and draw attention to the conversations people want to have. The more initiative you as a community member take in shaping and contributing to GV, the more it will become what you want it to be.

Coming out of the 2005 Summit, it appears that commitment to our core mission - enabling and amplifying voices that otherwise wouldn't be heard - remains strong. But I learned something important on Saturday: Global Voices really is a Conversation Community, not a media organization in any sense that a conventional  journalist or editor would recognize. GV exists as much to serve the interests of the contributors and their blogging communities as it does for our "viewers" or "users." People may look at the website, hear about its 300,000 viewers per month, and think of GV as another form of media in the conventional producer-to-audience relationship. But that is to miss out on a great deal. Here's how I break things down, at least initially:

CROSS-BORDER DIALOGUE:

As Ethan points out, when this group of amazing people start to interact with one another, powerful things happen. Like a soul-searching dialogue between a Palestinian-born and Israeli blogger. These are two very influential voices in their communities. The fact that they have established a personal relationship will have long-lasting, positive impact on a lot of people who do not blog and who do not read GV.

As Curt Hopkins points out, powerful things can also happen when bloggers from vastly different parts of the world interact, even when their communities are not in conflict. Curt writes:

Global Voices Online (GVO) should encourage more conversations between groups that are not commonly seen as conversing. The Chileans and the Chinese, say. There is an implicit notion that a Chinese blogger involved with GVO and a Chilean who is involved may speak to one another via GVO. But what about encouraging direct, back-channel conversations, events, conferences, online actions? GVO is primarily a facilitator. It should attempt to facilitate these conversations overtly, then step out of the way.

I agree. We should help to enable conversations beyond the exchanges begun at or through GV.

FROM TALK TO ACTION:

In some countries (but not in others where it's too politically dangerous) people want tools like Pledgebank that can help them take action on issues they have been passionately blogging about. In other countries, the act of merely speaking is tremendously courageous. We must continue to support bloggers in such countries with the tools (like Ethan's anonymous blogging guide) that can enable them to continue speaking out despite governments' efforts to stop them.

OUTREACH:

Bloggers recognize they are early-adopting elites - and that the conversations happening on the blogs in most countries are not representative of the population as a whole. There was great interest expressed on Saturday in doing outreach to communities that currently have some internet access but are not currently blogging. People feel the need for better training materials and guidelines for outreach so that they can spread the blogging gospel more easily and efficiently.

There is also a recognition that many people simply are never going to blog, but may be talking online in other ways. Offline speech in lectures, on radio call-in shows, etc., should also be collected and connected somehow. Farid Pouya hopes to develop his bloglogue idea toward this end.  We need a lot more discussion of how discussions on blogs can better interact with conversations going on in otuer mediums.

Maybe in the third world where a lot more people access talk radio than the internet, Radio Open Source can be used as a model for how you get offline people interacting in conversations with online people?

THE LANGUAGE GAP:

As somebody pointed out, the most difficult barriers to communication between people are not national borders but language. How can GV help break down the barriers? Does the answer lie with some distributed translation system like Blogamundo or with various non-English versions of GV - which don't just translate GV material but which would aggregate content from a particular language's blogosphere, then make perhaps highlights available for translation and summary into English and other widely-spoken languages beyond the original?

RELATIONSHIP WITH MSM?

A number of people, especially several bloggers observing the proceedings from afar, expressed cynicism and skepticism about the fact that Reuters sponsored the conference and will sponsor parts of GV, and that we may be on the verge of turning ourselves into some kind of cheap stringer network. I think the discussion above shows this is not the case. Reuters will certainly gain new information and perspectives by being connected to the Global Voices conversation. It will also be able to offer its audience the ability to connect to that conversation, and I hope also to join the conversation. In exchange for this Reuters is giving us some modest financial support. I personally feel this is a fair exchange that will enable us to do more towards accomplishing the goals articulated above, and which is intended to benefit members of the community. I would not be in favor of the partnership if I didn't feel strongly that the people who will benefit the most from it will be bloggers themselves.

"CONTENT" IS ONLY THE MEANS TO AN END

Put it this way: for a conventional media organization, "content" is the end goal and "content creation" is the primary activity. For a Conversation Community like Global Voices, "content" and "content creation" are means to a larger end: conversation and dialogue. The first step towards conversation is having one's voice heard around the discussion table. By linking to people's blogs, our editors and contributors are in effect inviting people to the discussion table and moderating the conversation. 

Nobody has ever done this before, so we're sure to make lots of mistakes. You don't learn any other way. In the coming year we will be working to figure out how best to bring more people to the conversation table, how to ensure that their voices are heard and not drowned out, how best to structure the conversations so that they can be meaningful, and how to maximize the impact of these conversations. It's an exciting project. Please help us figure it out!

Global Voices 2005 Summit: Join us online!!

In just a few hours, bloggers from the Global Voices community plus a number of groupies, fans, and supporters will be gathering for the Global Voices London Summit. 

Our site has gone a long way since a smaller group of us got together a year ago... and then began to ramp up with our first global blog roundups in late April of this year. Saturday's meeting will be a chance to take stock, examine our strengths and weaknesses, discuss what works and what doesn't, and try to figure out where we go from here.  Last year a number of bloggers from around the world - many of whom will be in the room on Saturday - jointly authored a powerful mission statement:

We believe in free speech: in protecting the right to speak -- and the right to listen. We believe in universal access to the tools of speech.

To that end, we seek to enable everyone who wants to speak to have the means to speak -- and everyone who wants to hear that speech, the means to listen to it.

Thanks to new tools, speech need no longer be controlled by those who own the means of publishing and distribution, or by governments that would restrict thought and communication. Now, anyone can wield the power of the press. Everyone can tell their stories to the world.

We seek to build bridges across the gulfs that divide people, so as to understand each other more fully. We seek to work together more effectively, and act more powerfully.

We believe in the power of direct connection. The bond between individuals from different worlds is personal, political and powerful. We believe conversation across boundaries is essential to a future that is free, fair, prosperous and sustainable - for all citizens of this planet.

While we continue to work and speak as individuals, we also seek to identify and promote our shared interests and goals. We pledge to respect, assist, teach, learn from, and listen to one other.

We are Global Voices.

 

To further that mission, here are some of the questions we'll be asking:

• What more should we to amplify the online voices of people around the world who want and need to be heard?
• How do we create a better global conversation?
• How do we foster an international citizens' dialogue online that transcends the agendas of national governments and medias? 
• How do we ensure that blogging expands beyond a conversation amongst the world's techno-elites?
• How do we help people who currently do not have access to the technologies of citizens media to gain better access?
• How will Global Voices sustain a reputation of credibility, integrity, and fairness over the long run?
• What responsibilities do our editors, volunteer authors, other contributors have responsibilities when it comes to upholding Global Voices' integrity? 
• How do we interact with the mainstream media and what is our relationship with professional news media?
• What tools should we be using that we're not?
• How do we expand into other languages while remaining a lightweight, distributed, and largely volunteer-driven organization?

If you're not here in person we very much hope you'll join us online, starting at 10am London time (GMT). You can listen to what everybody says via audio webcast, and join in the conversation through live IRC chat.   There will also be a live blog.

Please click here for all the links and instructions for how to join us.

We will have a designated IRC Advocate who will make sure questions and views from the online chat room get brought into the conversation.

Hope to see you there!!

Les Blogs: technology and democracy

Here is my favorite image of the Les Blogs conference: this cartoon drawn on the back of my namecard by Hugh McLeod.  I have enjoyed his blog tremendously since I discovered it a year and a half ago or so. He nails it on the head when it comes to the future of marketing, micro-branding and personal branding. During his panel Tuesday he talked about how blogs enable us to free our personal image or "personal brand" from the identities of the companies and organizations we work for. As he put it: "We have these identities that transcend our jobs, which is very good because most jobs suck." 

David Sifry of Technorati said: "The internet is starting to be used in a new way and we need a new metaphor to better describe the way we use the web."

He described the web as no longer a succession of pages but a "conversation stream" or "event stream," enabling individuals and companies to enter into a more direct conversation. "In next 10 years the whole idea of the consumer economy will shift and we'll be calling it a participant economy." He also believes a new model of civics will emerge as a result of this transformation. Citizens' media, says Salim Ismail of PubSub, sitting on his right, makes it "impossible for corporations to manage their message." 

They're right. Companies - and increasingly I believe governments - can no longer control their messages. Their employees' reputations and identities (and thus market value) are less dependent on employers. Citizens' identities may also become more independent of their governments' national "branding."

Ben Hammersley gave a very provocative talk about the future. (Provocative not only because he was wearing a kilt!) He believes "We are on the tipping point of the next step in the evolution of human society." Ethan blogged an excellent summary of it here.

I must admit, I don't believe that technology - or anything else for that matter - is going to enable human beings to transcend our fundamentally flawed human nature. I tend to feel that we're better off if we plan for the future based on the assumption that human capacity for evil and stupidity will remain pretty much constant, and then make sure to build in the requisite institutions and systems to protect ourselves from the dark side of our own nature.

Yat Siu of Outblaze made some really good points about how a lot of these conferences make assumptions about the future of technology based on the assumption that it will emerge from a Western cultural context - which is a wrong assumption, given that soon the largest group of internet users in the world will be Chinese, and given that Northeast Asian companies and consumers will increasingly be driving information technologies of the future.
In our Monday afternoon media & blogging panel, both Ethan and I raised the point that you can't assume that a more democratic society will result just because blogs have emerged. Censorship technologies can be baked into the software and hardware, and people in some online communities exercise a great deal of self-censorship. You also see waves of nationalism and polarization emerging in some blogospheres, which can lead to tyrannies of the majority and herd mentalities -  which are not particularly conducive to democratic discourse.

Yes, I agree that information technology and citizens' media are powerful tools - that's why I quit my job in TV to build an international blogging community. World-changing things can be done with these tools. But I believe that truly world-changing solutions can only be the result of concerted human efforts to be less selfish and evil. We cannot sit back and expect technology to do our work for us. If we want the world to be better, we must reach out to other human beings outside our immediate comfortable circle. And human effort - assisted by technology - is ultimately what Global Voices is all about.

(final photo by "altaide")

FON: joining the Wifi movement

My friend the Spanish/Argentinian entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky is speaking on the panel about blogging and business at Les Blogs. He says that his new wifi company, FON, hasn't spent a cent on marketing and advertising. Business is spreading largely through the online word-of-mouth.

FON actually got started just a couple months ago with a blog post Martin wrote, brainstorming about how one could create a new kind of distributed wifi network. In early October he started the company. In late October he got Boingboing-ed. Now it's a rapidly-growing company, launching today in France, already launched in Spain and Sweden.

In a nutshell FON creates a system, using P2P principles, by which members can share wifi with one another.  The objective, Martin writes, is "turning millions of wifi installations into a unified wifi FON network with a standard interface to accept all kind of wifi enabled devices." 

Martin just asked me to join the company's U.S. advisory board. We've got a dream team going, including my friends Ethan Zuckerman, Dan Gillmor, David Weinberger, Joi Ito and Ejovi Nuwere. Very exciting!!

For more about FON, click here.

UPDATE: Ethan has a very good post explaining how FON works. He discloses, as should I, that Martin has offered to share some equity with advisory board members. Ethan mentions that his participation has more to do with his confidence in Martin and interest in the idea - and its potential application in developing nations - than in the equity. In my case, I agreed to be on the board before Martin said anything about equity.

What happened to the Chinese Premier's blog?

About 12 hours ago, I learned via ChinaDigitalTimes, via Danwei, that China's Premier Wen Jiabao  has a blog hosted on the Chinese blog-hosting service bokee.com.

It was pretty straightforward - mainly showing his schedule, plus a summary of an event he recently spoke at. There were no comments enabled on the posts but there was a "chat" function on the left-hand column where visitors could post comments. On the same day that the blog became known, ChinadigitalTimes also linked to this very positive article on the Chinese state-run Xinhua news agency, interviewing Bokee's CEO Fang Xindong, titled "Blogging's Future in China." So I wondered whether hosting Wen's blog was a successful move by Bokee to win official acceptance of blogs.

Now the blog is no longer accessible. Danwei theorizes this probably means it was a fake. 

...or maybe they got freaked out by bloggers from all over the world like this Swede trying to post comments?  Does anybody out there know anything more?

UPDATE: I have confirmed IT WAS DEFINITELY A FAKE, according to somebody at Bokee.  I hope Wen Jiabao's office doesn't get too angry at the blogosphere. That could be bad.. especially given the recent rumors that new regulations dealing with blogs specifically could come out at the end of the year.

Thoughts on the Future of Journalism

I've just arrived in Paris where I'll be participating in Les Blogs, the French blogging conference organized by my friend Loic Lemeur. The program looks like a lot of fun, with some of the usual suspects plus some others I look forward to meeting. I hope this conference will help me learn more about the Western European blogging scene, and hopefully to enlist the help of some European bloggers in Global Voices. So far we have not had much focus on Western Europe because at least in the early stages of GV we've felt strongly that our priorities - given our very limited resources - initially needed to be elsewhere. But it would be valuable to get more European voices and I hope we'll get some volunteers. So far, our efforts to recruit Western European bloggers haven't met with much response. Maybe that's because - unlike many Middle Eastern bloggers - they don't feel so misrepresented by the international media, or are more focused on their own communities, or don't feel so much of a need to engage the broader world outside Western Europe and the U.S.? I look forward to hearing what people have to say on that score.

My panel, not surprisingly, will be on "citizen journalism and mainstream media." I'll be talking a bit about Global Voices, and how I prefer to call it "citizens' media" rather than "citizens journalism," because while some of the blogs we link to are written by journalists and or people who are holding themselves to journalistic standards, many others are simply trying to engage the world in conversation about issues and events they care about. They are not fact-checking and researching. They don't  necessarily want or aspire to be held to journalistic standards, but their voices are I believe important to listen to and engage with nonetheless. We'll be delving much more deeply into that conversation at the Global Voices London Summit on December 10th.

Meanwhile, on the subject of journalism and the future of professional news media, I thought I would share part of a letter I wrote last week about howjournalism schools need to change:

I did not go to journalism school myself, and have long questioned the relevance of journalism school - especially in this day and age when most faculty are teaching nearly-extinct formats and often know less about the latest information technologies than their students.  However I think we have entered a phase of unique opportunity.

Technology has now evolved to the point at which the most interesting innovations are happening at the edges: users experimenting with open-source software and creating "hacks" that enable them do what they want. Craigslist is just one example of the way in which jobs of mainstream journalists are being affected by innovation at the edges. As Craig Newmark describes it, all he did originally was to create an online "list of stuff" that he and his friends found useful. If Craig can create a revolution in classified advertising with a simple website, why can't journalism students be the source of the next big innovations in news? They can, and they should, if journalism schools would support and encourage them in doing so. Journalism schools should be the R&D centers to which news organizations turn for fresh ideas, and from which new journalistic ventures are launched.

Increasingly, people who want to do quality journalism are having to create - or initiate the creation of - their own jobs. Those who wait to be handed something and then cling to it for dear life amidst constant fear of being cut in the next downsizing usually wind up being mediocre journalists at best. Positions of dependency, perceptions that there are no other job options, and feelings of helplessness are a major reason why today's journalists cave in to editors' demands for info-tainment and piffle, in lieu of supplying fellow citizens with the information they need in order to avoid being duped by politicians.

Journalism schools need to teach students to be more entrepreneurial, and disabuse them of the belief that they will be able to count on a full-time steady job at a single news organization for long periods of time. Freelancing and frequent job-hopping are now the norm. This can be a liberating and empowering situation if one does not fear it and knows how to take advantage of it. To be better equipped for the future, students must learn how to develop their own journalistic credibility and reputations for excellence which they can carry from employer to employer - or from freelance gig to freelance gig. They also need to equip themselves with specialized knowledge and distinctive styles so that they can stand out from the crowd and make themselves uniquely valuable.

Amidst all this change, I believe that the fundamentals of good journalism remain timeless. Fundamentals like good storytelling, a sense of fairness, clear writing and speaking, being able to pinpoint what is really "new" about an event or issue, asking the tough questions, getting past the spin, speaking truth to power, and doing all of this in a way that will get people's attention and make people likely to remember what you're telling them. Fundamentals that serve the ultimate point of journalism, which, as Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach put it, should be to provide citizens with the information they need to be self-governing. ...

...There is tremendous opportunity amidst the crisis our profession now faces - and which broadcast journalism faces most acutely. We live in exciting times. Rarely do young people have such a chance to transform and re-energize our profession.

American journalism is in crisis. What a wonderful opportunity we now have to rethink the whole industry. The question is: Even if journalism schools do train the future's journalists to innovate and think outside the box, will today's news organizations be prepared or willing to take advantage of their fresh ideas?

Global Voices Seeks Managing Editor

Global Voices has been growing faster than we dreamed!! So fast, we need to hire a full-time Managing Editor.

JOB OPPORTUNITY: MANAGING EDITOR, GLOBAL VOICES ONLINE

Global Voices Online (GlobalVoicesOnline.org), a fast-growing international citizens’ media site, is looking to hire a full-time Managing Editor. 

THE JOB: This person will be responsible for coordinating day-to-day content flow on the Global Voices blog, run regular online editorial meetings, manage the work of our rapidly expanding international team of Regional Editors and volunteer contributors, and coordinate daily with editors from our news media collaborators and partners. He or she will also help steer the future of Global Voices into non-text media, other languages, and help to innovate and implement new technologies and tools. As Global Voices is a virtual organization, the Managing Editor would not be expected to relocate. However, he or she needs regular access to high-speed internet connectivity and will be expected to travel. Salary and other compensation will depend on the candidate’s experience. Start date: as soon as possible in 2006.

THE REQUIREMENTS: Our ideal candidate has solid experience in blogging and online citizens’ media and at least some experience with professional news media. He or she has the ability to work independently and responsibly with only remote supervision. Solid English-language writing and editing skills are a must. Programming/HTML knowledge not required but strong familiarity with the use of online social media tools (blogging platforms, aggregators, use of RSS feeds, and tagging) is important. He or she must be a diplomatic team player, capable of communicating effectively with bloggers as well as news reporters and editors, who enjoys pioneering uncharted territory. Ideally he/she will have the ability to read and write well in at least one language other than English and working knowledge of other languages. Preference given to candidates from outside the United States and Western Europe

Interested candidates please send CV and Letter of Interest explaining why you'd be a good candidate for the job to: [email protected]