Sick of the US election dominating all media coverage? Dreaming of a future date, perhaps two weeks away, when it’s possible that headlines won’t feature Sarah Palin?

You could always turn to international news, where the question seems to be, “What does the rest of the world think about the US election?”

In other words, “Enough about me, what do you think of me?”

That was more or less my response some months ago when some of the Global Voices team came to me and suggested we try to cover the US elections through the eyes of the developing world. Through the brilliant work of Amira Al Hussaini, support of authors like Hoa Quach and others, we’ve put together Voices Without Votes, a website that collects international blog perspectives on the US elections. Read today and you’ll discover reports on a shortage of pro-Obama yamulkes,
Voices without Votes, comments from the Philippines about a suspicious misspelling on New York ballots, and the reasons Cubans are hoping for an Obama victory. It’s been one of our most successful projects and one that I’m now inordinately proud of.

Just shows what I know.

Dominique Moisi at Real Clear World has an interesting essay wondering whether Europeans are “blue state voters” and Asians are “red staters”. Her argument is that Asians may be resistant to change and concerned about an Obama victory:

…a majority of Asian elites are awaiting the growing possibility of an Obama victory with some bewilderment and even apprehension.

For example, Japanese elites tend to favor continuity over change. In their mind, the hard power of the United States is more important than its soft power, and their vision of a United States that is “bound to lead” is largely unchanged. For them, Washington is above all the strategic counterweight needed to balance Beijing.

Recent image from theworldfor.com.

Guess those Asian elites aren’t participating in the various online polls designed to show how the world would choose to vote. TheWorldFor.com has Obama leading McCain 89%-11%, with only Afghanistan, the Ukraine and the Svalbard Islands favoring the Republican. Those change-phobic Japanese favor Obama 89-11, the same as the rest of the population sample.

Using a similarly unauthoritative methodology (allow people to identify whatever country they represent), the Economist has assigned the world an electoral college, offering electoral votes based on population. Obama’s dominating that competition, 8,954 to 88, with McCain claiming votes from Sudan, Georgia, Cuba and Macedonia. (How’s that for a voting bloc?) Oh, and the Japanese are 86/14 for Obama in their poll.

Foreign Policy’s map is lots more interesting to me, though somewhat less reassuring to fellow Obama supporters. Using data from the Gallup World Poll - which surveys people in 140 countries - they asked slightly more complex questions than “Obama or McCain?” Voters had the option to answer that they didn’t know or refused to answer. And they asked a second question - whether voters thought the US election would affect their own lives.

The addition of the third answer - don’t know or don’t care - is a fascinating one. In the Phillipines - one of the four countries where Gallup saw an advantage for McCain (28 versus 20), the majority (52%) didn’t express an opinion. Don’t know was the overwhelming majority in India, where 7% favor Obama, 2% McCain and 91% don’t have an opinion. Only 6% of Indian voters thought the US presidential election mattered to them - 87% answered that they didn’t know on that question as well. Given the shortage of undecided voters at this stage of the endless US election, perhaps it would behoove Obama and McCain to move their campaigns to the swing states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

Even more interesting are the people who actively assert that the US presidency won’t make a difference to their country. 72% of people in Palestine state that it won’t matter who becomes the US president. (Israel is not included in the survey.) They lead a pack of nations that includes oil-rich Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, conflict-ridden Burundi, Pakistan and Lebanon, and some nations that are harder to explain: Estonia, Peru, Chile, Austria. The Palestinians, unfortunately, are probably right. And so are the Burundians, I fear.

For anyone who hopes that global support for Obama leads inexorably to victory… well, it’s worth reading up what happened when The Guardian’s “Operation Clark County” urged readers of that liberal British newspaper to send letters to citizens in a swing county of a swing state. Some argue that the letters - which were not well-received by many voters - swung the county for Bush instead of for Kerry.

One way or another, it’s safe to say that you won’t hear Obama claiming global support via any of these polls any time soon.

In the meantime, I’m getting a great deal more from the comments from individual bloggers from the rest of the world. An interesting - and cautionary - note from Naseen Tarawnah of the excellent Black Iris blog (from Amman, Jordan):

My reluctance to get on the Obama bandwagon has mostly been due to the fact that he has this seemingly cult-like following. He is seen as this messiah of change, and is described and depicted as almost prophet-like. I have a problem with anyone who puts that much faith in a single politician, especially an American president. If the on-going history of America has shown the world anything, it’s that change (in the positive sense of the word) is not a big factor in a US presidency. So I am constantly astonished by any Arab who is entranced by Obama and have to constantly remind myself that most of the fan base in this part of the world comes from a particular more-westernized demographic and have been swallowed up by the wave of US election culture that is dominated by Obama. Everyone is entitled to their own perceptions but I remain realistic to the degree of change that is expected with either candidate in the Oval Office.

It’s been good fun hanging out in Barcelona with my fellow speakers, both the wonderful organizers like Juan Freire and Ismael Peña-Lopez and guests like Carol Darr, Andrew Rasiej and Tom Steinberg. Tom was kind enough to hunt me down for dinner on Thursday, and we had an excellent conversation that I’ve been chewing over for the past 48 hours.

Tom is the brilliant founder of MySociety, a British organization that it relentless in its quest to make UK politics more open and participatory. Smart people around the world look to Tom and the folks he works with for ideas on how to make elected officials more accountable, link disconnected people in local communities and use distributed reporting to document social ills and push for change. Given the opportunity to pin Tom down for insights, I asked him about his thoughts on getting people to connect with people across national and cultural lines.

This can be a tricky topic for political organizers. Most organizers are deeply concerned about the erosion of local civic life, as documented by thinkers like Robert Putnam. It’s easy to misunderstand my obsession with pushing people to connect across lingustic, cultural and national barriers as a lack of interest in connecting locally. I see a great deal of importance in both, though I’m sobered by Bill Bishop’s new book, “The Big Sort“, which makes a pretty good case that Americans are sorting ourselves into homophily traps geographically, and that connecting with our neighbors may increasingly mean connecting with people who share our perspectives and prejudices.

Rather than fighting the local versus global battle, Tom offered interesting and provocative advice about what might work to get people who aren’t otherwise inclined to connect to do so. His projects are finding interesting ways to use games to get participation that would otherwise be difficult to organize. For instance, MySociety wanted to align thousands of hours of taped debates in the House of Parliament with transcripts, so that these videos would be wholly searchable. When automatic methods failed, he and his team built a tool that asked users to complete a simple task - watch a video and push a button when a certain person began speaking. Participants would be scored on “league tables” for the number of times they’d pushed the button, aligning the video - some participants ended up coding hundreds of videos for the project, and all the video was tagged within a few weeks.

Using the same technique, Tom’s now trying to get people to classify Yahoo groups for him, specifically Tahoo groups that mention the term “residents” or “neighborhood”. There are 45,000 of these groups, and Tom wants to know what geographies they address. That way, he can build a service where you send a text message containing your zip code to his servers, and they respond with information on online groups you could join that cover issues in your neighborhood or community. (You should pitch in and help him, if you have a chance.)

So riffing on the idea of games and league tables, Tom wondered whether the way to engineer more international connection is football. Specifically, he suggested that Global Voices or some similarly globalizing entity organize online chats around World Cup matches. Chats would invite nationals from both sides represented - Ghana versus Brazil, for instance - to chat online during the game. Trashtalking would be heartily encouraged, but the hope would be to get beyond insults to an actual conversation about football heroes, national pride, politics, etc. I’m guessing this would require a certain amount of careful engineering - we’d probably limit participation so that one side didn’t overwhelm the other (20 Brazilians, 20 Ghanaians per chatroom, for instance) and recruit some bridge-figures, people who spoke both English and Portuguese and had some understanding of each country and culture.

Tom offered another idea, which is either a great way to start intercultural conversations or a surefire way to start a war. He proposes putting together an online database of regional and national prejudices, offering as an example a recent trip he took to Germany where conference organizers declared they’d be taking “a Belgian lunch”, i.e., a very long lunch. What do expressions like this reveal about what we think about one another? Are these opportunities for conversation about cultural quirks, or are these invitations to flamewars and fisticuffs? (I offered the data point that, when I visited Yerevan, Armenia, a few years ago, one of my hosts excused himself to go to the bathroom with the phrase, “I need to visit the Turkish embassy.”)

Ghana’s one of the healthiest societies I’ve ever seen in terms of resolving tensions between ethnic groups. One of the reasons, I think, is a healthy sense of humor. A great deal of Ghanaian humor depends on ethnic jokes and laughing at each other’s perceived quirks. (I watched a Ghanaian comedian bring the house down in Accra by stepping onto stage and singing a song. When my companion finally recovered enough to explain the joke to me, she told me, “He’s an Ewe, and he’s singing a Ga song, but he’s singing it in Twi.” And then she collapsed into laughter again. Guess you had to be there.) So maybe a wikipedia of ethnic stereotype - Tom calls it a “hatebase”, but I prefer the time “haterbase” - isn’t quite as crazy as it sounds in sparking conversation about and across our differences.

I suspect I’ll be rolling around Tom’s ideas around games and crowdsourcing until I can think of a clever way to harness this power for Global Voices. We are, after all, a community based around voluntary participation - finding a way to make that participation more fun, less involved and easier to accomplish is probably a smart thing to think about. I susect that folks like Tom are likely to find a profitable line of work somewhere soon figuring out how complex problems can be broken into crowdsourcing tasks and outsourced either to volunteers or to systems like Mechanical Turk.

Talking about the decision to use volunteers rather than Turkers, Tom argues that people are looking for ways to participate in useful projects. That squares with my experiences as well. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, I lent a hand recruting volunteers to enter data on missing persons in the southeastern US - we were completely overwhelmed by people’s interest, and a task we thought might take two weeks was done overnight. I’ve lately been wondering whether one of the keys to getting people interested in international news is attaching the ability to get involved in social change projects. It seems logical that people who are interested in changing circumstances in Darfur are likely to be especially interested in news from Sudan. Is it possible that this runs in the other direction as well, that attaching an opportunity to get involved with a protest or a fundraising effort would make people more likely to read a story on Somalia?

In other words, it was a very good decision to have dinner with Tom, rather than staying in my hotel room and answering email. That’s now my official excuse for everyone’s email I’ve recently failed to answer…

One of the great fears as a speakeris that you’re going to give a talk too similar to the person you’re sharing the stage with. Clay Shirky and I gave talks at an event a year or so back, and discovered that we were using two of the same stories in our presentations. (I, unfortunately, found this out by listening to Clay’s talk and frantically editing mine in response.)

That wasn’t a problem today at the seminar on the Information Society in Barcelona I’m participating in. I had the good fortune to share the stage with Carlos Domingo, who runs the R&D unit for Spanish telephone giant, Telefonica. Domingo is working hard to bring some of the most successful tools and techniques of web 2.0 into a large and often conservative telehone company. He’s a classic
early adopter, with a Nabaztag and a Pleo in his office, and a blog that he’s abandoning so he can spend more time Twittering.

Inside Telefonica, Domingo’s hoping to unlock information and increase communication between members of his team by aggresively embracing social media. Rather than trying to dig ideas out of a giant document repository, the knowledge management system that so many large companies have embraced, he’s instituted an internal video sharing service. Researchers working on projects get two minutes to explain their work to their colleagues - some break the rules and run long, but most as well-behaved, and it’s possible to get the gist of most projects with just a few seconds of video, making it far easier to surf through than a huge document repository. (I assume they’re heavily tagged and annotated to make them highly searchable.) Using Yammer, 350 members of his team share ideas on a Twitter-like network that’s closed to the company, and encourages employees to share what they’re working on and what problems they could use help with.

I’d been asked by the organizers to talk about how NGOs and social change organizations innovate, with the special challenge that I wasn’t supposed to celebrate innovative projects so much as I was to talk about the process of innovation. As I thought about this, I realized that I a) didn’t have much understanding of how social entrepreneurs innovate and b) didn’t have much confidence that social entrepreneurs generally did a good job of innovating with social media tools. Generally, I think that social entrepreneurs place far too much faith in social media tools and assume that they’ll be more popular, useful and powerful than they actually turn out to be.

So I offered a talk about some very different types of innovation - African innovations including the zeer pot, William Kamkwamba’s windmill, biomass charcoal, and endless examples of innovation using mobile phones. My argument was that innovation often comes from unusual and difficult circumstances - constraints - and that it’s often wiser to look for innovation in places where people are trying to solve difficult, concrete problems rather than where smart people are sketching ideas on blank canvases.

I offered seven rules that appear to help explain how (some) developing world innovation proceeds:

- innovation (often) comes from constraint (If you’ve got very few resources, you’re forced to be very creative in using and reusing them.)

- don’t fight culture (If people cook by stirring their stews, they’re not going to use a solar oven, no matter what you do to market it. Make them a better stove instead.)

- embrace market mechanisms (Giving stuff away rarely works as well as selling it.)

- innovate on existing platforms (We’ve got bicycles and mobile phones in Africa, plus lots of metal to weld. Innovate using that stuff, rather than bringing in completely new tech.)

- problems are not always obvious from afar (You really have to live for a while in a society where no one has currency larger than a $1 bill to understand the importance of money via mobile phones.)

- what you have matters more than what you lack (If you’ve got a bicycle, consider what you can build based on that, rather than worrying about not having a car, a truck, a metal shop.)

- infrastructure can beget infrastructure (By building mobile phone infrastructure, we may be building power infrastructure for Africa - see my writings on incremental infrastructure.)

The most experimental part of a very experimental talk was applying these seven principles to three ICT4D experiments - One Laptop Per Child, Kiva and Global Voices. Ismael has a review of my talk including the scores I offer for each of the projects on these criteria.

The talk was pretty well received, and it’s great, great fun to try out new ideas on stage. I’m looking forward to thinking through whether these seven rules are the best way to characterise the lessons of the sorts of innovations I watch on sites like Afrigadget, and just what these rules mean for those of us trying to use internet tools for social change - thanks to my friends in Barcelona for a chance to start playing with these ideas, live on stage.

Polymeme, my favorite source for news that’s not all Palin, all the time, led me to a fascinating set of photos this morning. They’re from Ilakaka, Madagascar, a town that’s grown from little more than a truck stop into a wild west mining town in about a decade. Ilakaka is currently the source of roughly 50% of the world’s sapphire, and it’s a fascinating case study in what happens when something very valuable can be pulled out of the ground without much capital investment - you get a gold rush.

The main street of Ilakaka, October 2008. Photo by Roberto Schmidt, AFP

What I appreciated about the Globe story - and, as it turns out, several other stories I found on Ilakaka, is that most of the authors avoided, “this is terrible, something must be done” narrative that characterises so much northern reporting about Africa. Ilakaka is clearly a tough place - Jonny Hogg writing for the BBC focuses his narrative primarily on the dangers of the town - but Schmidt’s photos are much less predetermined. He’s got shots of kids working the mines, which are hard to see, but also shots of kids playing, a reminder that mining in these towns is likely far more lucrative than other forms of employment in Madagascar, which helps explain why families are drawn to Ilakaka. I appreciate the ambiguity of the photos and of the frame Alan Taylor puts them in for the Globe.

And then there are the gem blogs. Having almost no interest in precious stones, I hadn’t realized that there were gem bloggers. The answer may be that there’s Vincent Pardieu and people who travel with him. Pardieu and Richard Wise offer a thorough sapphire and ruby tour of Madagascar, touring the forest ruby camp of Moramang as well as the desert around Ilakaka. Richard Hughes, with Pardieu and Dana Schorr, offers the excellent “Sorcerors & Sapphires“, a comprehensive look at corundum in Madagascar.

My favorite observation in this latter piece is the observation that it makes perfect geological sense that Madagascar is blessed with sapphires and rubies. So are Tanzania, Sri Lanka and parts of southern India. And if we go far enough back in geologic time, these countries are close neighbors. (Looking at this map, I’m tempted to research the possibility of gem mining on the Indian Ocean coast of Antartica.)

Perdieu also has an excellent solo article on gems in Madagascar complete with videos of mining sites and photo sets. In all three articles, there’s a good sense of humor about the difficult travel and living conditions associated with these mines - I take this as a reflection on the fact that most mining towns aren’t easy places to work, and that while Ilakaka may be a tough place, it’s got more than a little in common with northeastern Burma or parts of Afghanistan.

How do we get stories from places like Ilakaka, remote locations in Africa with no permanent press presence? Historically, we’d have to wait for something bad to happen - a mining disaster, an outbreak of disease. I see the photos in the Globe as evidence of what might be a healthier form of storytelling - a picture of a place that’s fascinating, whether or not it’s especially “newsworthy” today. The gembloggers are an interesting complement to this sort of reporting. In some corners of the world, the majority of citizen media comes not from locals, but from missionaries and aid workers living and working in these communities. Some, like Sleepless in Sudan, become important spokespeople for these communities.

The hope, of course, is that we start getting reports and perspectives from people who live and work in these communities. Our friends at FOKO Club are working with Rising Voices to help Malagasy youth report on their communities via blogs. I don’t know if it’s realistic for FOKO to work in Ilakaka, but it’s pretty exciting to think about the possibility.

I head off to PICNIC in Amsterdam tomorrow night, and I’m a slide-making machine. I’ve sketched out the four talks I’ve committed to giving, and am now working on developing the visual accompaniment to the three where I have the luxury of using a slide projector. (The fourth talk is at a conference called Mastermundo, which won’t involve a stage, but in which speakers and listeners will be wandering through the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam wearing headphones, then travelling to the Hague by train. I chose to give my talk on the train for the simple reason that I’ll have an easier time looking at my notes if I’m sitting down.)

I used to put lots of text on my slides. Then I spent a couple of years attending really good conferences and discovered that the speakers I really like rarely put any text on their slides. (Lessig is the exception that proves the rule.) Now my slides usually feature webpages I’m referring to or photos vaguely related to the topic I’m discussing.

My preference is to use Creative Commons licensed photos so I’m not violating anyone’s copyright or artistic rights. So developing a talk means coming up with a detailed outline of what I want to say, then coming up with the ideas for the images I’d like to illustrate each point, and then searching for those images on Flickr.

Sometimes this works better than others. I wanted photos of African shopping malls earlier today - “african mall” works very poorly as a search, while searching for “mall” and the name of African cities works wonders. And then there’s the occasional search that just is custom-made for this method.

One of the talks I’m giving is about publishing and filtering in a digital age, and I wanted to refer back to the bad old days before citizen media and talk about how hard it was to get your voice heard. So I figured an image from Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park would do nicely.

Photo by Rüdis Fotos

Photoby ben hanbury

The choices!

Photo by markandrew

By the way, if anyone’s figured out a way to customize search on Flickr, I’d love your tips on how to do it. I’ve saved this URL - http://www.flickr.com/search/?l=cc&ss=2&ct=0&mt=photos&w=all&s=int&q= - as a bookmark. It tells Flickr that I want only photos, only Creative Commons licensed, no concerns about Safe Search, and please search the text of image descriptions as well as tags, and search the results by “interestingness”. It works, most of the time. But what I’d really like is for the search box on Flickr to behave this way when I’m logged in, unless I override those settings. Any hints?

By the way, a congrats to my Creative Commons friends. This method used to give you pretty thin gruel on Flickr - now lots and lots of the images are CC-licensed, and it’s a very reasonable prospect to do a photo-rich talk using only other people’s cc images. Very cool.

Two excellent articles in major American newspapers recognize the importance of bloggers and online authors in building bridges between people in different countries. If you want to understand what’s going on in other parts of the world, it helps to read not just stories about those countries, but the stories people in those countries are telling. It’s hard just to dive in and start reading blogs without context and without knowing who’s worth reading - two stories give excellent advice for ways to dive into current conversations in Zimbabwe and China. (This sort of guided bridging is just what we’ve tried to accomplish with Global Voices, so it’s nice to see a mention of our project in one of the pieces.)

As the political stalemate in Zimbabwe heads towards an apparent conclusion, it will be worth following Zimbabwean bloggers closely. The LA Times interviews two of my favorite Zimbabwean bloggers, Brenda Burrell and Bev Clarke, the founders of Kubatana, a civil society organization in Harare. Some of the passion and perseverence of these amazing women comes out in the interview as they talk about the frustration they feel with groups that want to change Zimbabwe… but are no longer based in Zimbabwe. Bev is very much rooted in today’s Harare, and her posts on Kubatana’s blog veer between careful political analysis to frustrated musings on how one winds down or pumps oneself up in a city that lacks power, hot water and food much of the time.

The Times piece features a few activist Zim bloggers I know and read, like Comrade Fatso as well as some I hadn’t encountered before, like Philip Barclay and Grace Mutandwa, writing from the British High Commission in Harare. It’s pretty amazing that British diplomats have this much online space to speak freely about their impressions of Zimbabwe and surrounding countries.

I wish Robyn Dixon had commented on whether there are bloggers offering different points of view - I’ve been accused (correctly) of failing to represent pro-ZANU-PF voices in my posts on Zim, in part because, with the exception of my friend Dumisani Nyoni, I don’t see many ZANU supporters blogging. (Dumi pointed me, the other day, to an interesting post from a member of parliament affiliated with the faction of MDC that supports Arthur Mutumbara, not Morgan Tsvangarai - it’s a good example of just how complex negotiations are surrounding transfer of power in Zimbabwe. The same parliamentarian, Senator David Coltart, offers a useful outline of the pending powersharing agreement posted on his personal blog - his analysis is a good deal more informative than anything I’ve seen in the media thus far.)

The Wall Street Journal’s Asian edition focuses not on a whole national blogosphere, but on perhaps China’s most remarkable blogger, the incomparable Roland Soong. Roland’s blog, EastSouthWestNorth, functions as an edited aggregator and translator of Chinese media. It’s required reading for anyone who’s interested in China, and it’s been an inspiration to a number of projects around the world. Leslie Hook notes that EastSouthWestNorth helped inspire Global Voices - that’s absolutely true, and Roland’s skill at filtering, translating and contextualizing is something I often point to when I explain the hard work neccesary to bridge between cultures online.

Great to see such inspiring bloggers getting some love from the broader media community.

I had an opportunity to share my observations about “citizen propaganda” in the Russia/Georgia conflict with someone far more knowledgeable than myself - Gregory Shvedov, the editor in chief of Caucasian Knot, a leading alternative news publication focused on the Caucuses, joined the fellows at the Berkman Center for a brief discussion yesterday. Shvedov has been following the conflict closely, both through the reports of journalists associated with Caucasian Knot who are on the ground in Georgia and Ossetia, and through the panoply of blog accounts that have accompanied the war.

Shvedov confirms that there’s been deep interest in “eyewitness accounts” of events on the ground, and that the blogs he’s read seem to include people in Moscow or Tblisi misrepresenting themselves as being on the ground, usually to forward a political agenda. He worries that people are paying more attention to these bloggers - some of whom are misrepresenting themselves - than to reporters he and other publications have on the ground.

This situation presents interesting challenges for those of us who advocate for citizen media or who are involved with projects that aggregate and promote citizen media. If it becomes clear that many blogger eyewitnesses are simply amateur propagandists, it’s going to be harder and harder for journalists to reference and amplify the opinions of bloggers on the ground. It puts an interesting pressure on projects like Global Voices - in citing a blogger writing from Ossetia, are we authenticating that blogger, certifying that the person in question is really an eyewitness?

We can’t offer that authentication - that’s not what we do. We study the blogosphere closely, and we know who’s been blogging for a while, and can often offer background information on the bloggers we amplify. But we’re not a news agency, we don’t have reporters on the ground in Ossetia, and we’re discovering that there’s a real challenge presented by fast-breaking news events: news inspires people to start blogging. It’s not hard to believe that someone in Ossetia would begin blogging shortly after Georgian and then Russian troops came into the region - that blogger would be an eyewitness, and would likely have some interesting insights on the conflict. But she wouldn’t have a reputation or a track record, and it would be difficult to evaluate whether she was actually on the ground, or writing from either Tblisi or Moscow.

We all make decisions about the authenticity of information we receive, either online or offline. I tend to take a story more seriously if it comes from the New York Times than if it comes from the Montgomery County Bulletin. (Friends of mine who lean to the right may suggest that this is an error on my part.) We rely on the reputation and brand of the Times, and the fact that the paper is widely read and fact-checked by bloggers and readers. The Times gets it wrong sometimes - Jayson Blair, Judith Miller - but the reading public tends to be quite aware of those errors.

Reading blogs demands a different strategy. Reputation matters, but it’s less about brand than about longevity, links and comment threads. It’s not hard to manufacture a single, incorrect blogpost and have it survive some scrutiny - it’s harder for a blog to survive scrutiny over a long period of time. If a blog has no history, no incoming links, no active comment threads, it’s hard to value the opinions expressed there any more (or less) highly than those from a stranger on a city street. A blog that’s made controversial and questionable statements will often generate discussions, either on comment threads or on blogs linking to the blog - reading those threads often helps establish whether this blogger is viewed as reliable or with skepticism, as mainstream or fringe within a particular debate. These methods certainly don’t guarantee that a blogger is neutral or non-partisan - they simply make it easier to determine whether that person is a respected voice in an existing community of interest.

These reputation mechanisms don’t work well in the case of breaking news. We don’t check the previous blogposts or the incoming link count of the people who sent mobile phone photos from the underground during the 7/7 London bombings. Those images were believable to the recipients because they came from known contacts - they were believable in the press because the photos were consistent with other individual and professional press accounts. How do we make decisions about authenticity of observations coming from a war zone that’s not closely covered by the professional media?

My sense is that we’ve generally assumed good faith in reading citizen accounts of wars and other disasters. We may need to re-examine that assumption. As citizen media becomes a more influential and closely watched space, there’s a greater incentive to fight information wars on blogs and video-sharing sites, not just in the traditional press.

As I mentioned in my earlier post on citizen propaganda, the Ossetian conflict isn’t the first time we’re seeing propaganda efforts in digital media. We’ve seen evidence both of professional, paid posting by the “fifty cent party” and well-organized amateur efforts in the Chinese blogosphere, especially around riots in Lhasa.

We’ve covered these efforts on Global Voices because our job isn’t to report news, but to report what’s being discussed in a nation’s blogosphere. If that discussion includes amateur propaganda videos, or organized campaigns to post pro-government comments on blogs, we need to cover those posts… but we also need to provide context, helping people understand where these comments are coming from. Are these the spontaneous expression of angry individuals in China, Georgia, or Russia? Are they part of a larger, orchestrated campaigns? How do we value an opinion expressed as part of an organized campaign versus the opinion expressed by an independent individual?

My colleague Judith Donath offered a very useful framework in considering these questions. She suggests that what we’re trying to determine here is the “authenticity” of a particular voice. There are a number of factors we consider in considering authenticity… and perhaps we overvalue some and undervalue others.

In discussing the “fifty cent party” (a group of bloggers paid by Chinese authorities to publish pro-government comments on blogs and in forums), the fact that commenters are being paid makes me tend to take their contributions less seriously. It isn’t clear that we should draw this conclusion - it’s quite possible that the people who choose to work with Party authorities are generally in agreement with Party position on most matters… but somehow the presence of money causes me, personally, to consider these comments as less authentic.

Spontaneity also appears to be a characteristic that we correlate with authenticity. If I find a comment on a New York Times story comparing Vladimir Putin to Vlad the Impaler, it looks like a spontaneous, heartfelt response. If I find 100 comments all making the same analogy, it looks like an attempt to organize a campaign drawing associations between a world leader and the inspiration of vampire novels. Should I take the apparently spontaneous comment more seriously? Doesn’t the attempt to engineer a meme about Putin and vampires reflect a seriousness of sentiment that’s at least as authentic as an offhand comment?

Remember, the goal here isn’t to determine the accuracy of a statement, but the authenticity. Are people in China really angry about Jack Cafferty’s characterization of Chinese authorities as “goons and thugs” or was this simply an orchestrated campaign? Are thousands of angry Russians commenting on New York Times coverage because they were authentically pissed off? Because someone’s organizing a campaign to encourage them to do so? Does it matter if such a campaign is organized by a clever, web2.0 activist or by the Kremlin? What should we consider as we try to evaluate whether individual blogs are authentic or orchestrated? (Or both?)

Donath had another intriguing suggestion - she wonders whether large-scale text analysis could help detect blogposts that are part of orchestrated campaigns. Assume that there’s a wave of blogposts about, oh, say Sarah Palin. It might be possible to automatically identify blogposts that use similar phrases to attack or defend the VP candidate. A wave of posts all making the same three critiques or offering a similar worded defense might indicate organized campaigns to spread certain talking points. (Or they might just point to the tendency of bloggers to cut and paste arguments from people they read and like.) Even if such a tool didn’t help us figure out the authenticity of sentiment, it could help us avoid reading another half-dozen repetitive posts on the same topic.

Is authenticity the right characteristic to consider when evaluating blog accounts from conflicts? How should we evaluate authenticity when it’s difficult to verify the identity and location of an author?

As Russia slowly pulls out of Georgia and the world of foreign policy wonks contemplates how the Olympics War will change the geopolitical map of the Caucuses, the world of citizen media is busily evaluating its (our?) own performance.

Two good friends have taken the blogosphere to task for its failures during the conflict. Rather than rise to the defense of Georgian, Russian, Ossetian and global bloggers, I wanted to take a look at their critiques and at the phenomenon of citizen media during the conflict and at the emergence of one of the interesting epiphenomena of citizen media: citizen propaganda.

Joshua Foust, a Central Asia analyst who covers Afghan blogs for Global Voices, takes US political blogs to task for, basically, not being very interesting. He notes that “bloggers who normally provide worthwhile insight into conflict provided curiously generic analysis or links to the same”. Most blogs, even those that consistently offer useful analysis, “were still linking to the same narrow set of news sources —sources that offered little more than thin quotes from government officials.” He’s particularly concerned that US bloggers weren’t linking to Georgian and Russian blogs, even though some bloggers were writing in English, and Global Voices was working to round up posts from the region.

I thought of Foust’s critique while listening to journalist David Remnick’s conversation with Bob Garfield on On the Media. Remnick drew a distinction between reporting on the Ossetian war, which he thought was generally good, and commentary, which he thought was pretty poor. His worry was that commentators who don’t know the region well ended up reaching for analogies that might not be applicable: “When you have people who have never been to that region, who’ve probably maybe been to Moscow once in their life, who, God knows, have never been to Georgia or South Ossetia or North Ossetia, never have experienced this and never studied the history of these conflicts. And so, they reach for the first set of adjectives in the thesaurus, ‘thundering tanks’ and all the rest, and the first set of historical analogies that they can possibly reach.”

This problem with analogies is one that occurs in both mainstream and citizen media, in my experience. Early analysis of post-election violence in Kenya made inappropriate analogies to genocide in Rwanda, anticipating uncontrolled, systemic violence that (thankfully) didn’t come to pass in Kenya. It’s probably fair to wag fingers at both bloggers and commentators for comparing Ossetia to the end of the Prague Spring in 1968, but it’s also understandable that bloggers who don’t know the situation well would reach for what appeared to be an appropriate analogy. But Foust’s criticism is on the mark - it only makes sense to look for bloggers in the region and get their perspectives as well.

(Not that I always get this right either. My friend Dumisani Nyoni does a good job of keeping up with my Zimbabwe analysis and tries to balance my conclusions with his perspectives as a ZANU-PF supporter. Looking forward to him extending the arguments he makes in comments on my blog to a longer post sometime soon.)

Evgeny Morozov, a Belarussian journalist who’s fascinated with both citizen media and the different faces of cyberwar, is frustrated by a different form of blogger shortcomings: the absence of citizen war reporting in Ossetia. Morozov acknowledges that Ossetia is pretty far off the beaten path and that it may not be fair to expect there to be many bloggers in the region: “It would be sublimely naive - and condescending - to expect South Ossetians or Georgians to respond to intense shellfire by taking a crash-course in podcasting, even if they did have electricity and and an internet connection.” I’d add that South Ossetia is a region with a very small population - less than 100,000 people in total - and that the population skews high in age, as many young people have left the region, seeking opportunity elsewhere.

Besides the scarcity of blog accounts from the ground, Morozov is concerned with their veracity and reliability: “Most were of poor quality, and many appeared on blogs with no reputation, no previous blogging history (some had been registered only a few days before the war), and carried no identification of a real person with a real name who could claim responsibility for or ownership of them.” On the one hand, one could dismiss Morozov’s expectations as unrealistic… as I did in an email to him, where I pointed out that if tanks rolled into my hometown of Pittsfield, MA (with a population similar to that of Tskhinvali) there wouldn’t be very many local bloggers with established reputations to follow, despite a significantly less serious digital divide.

On the other hand, Morozov is pointing to a very real problem with blogs focused on Ossetia. There’s a wealth of blogs that claim to give eyewitness reports of the conflict, and these eyewitness reports tend to strongly favor one interpretation of events over another. My friend and colleague Ivan Sigal pointed me to OSRadio, a blog that promotes Ossetian independence in English, and features reports from television cameraman Algis Mikulskis. His accounts are profoundly anti-Georgian and include a blurry mess of first person observation, second-hand recounting of journalist’s war stories, and the repetition of rumor… all legitimated by the fact that the correspondent is on the ground in the warzone. How reliable is Mikulskis? How biased towards one interpretation or another of events on the ground is he? These are questions that have to come into play when considering interpretation of events on the ground. Morozov tells us, “the few blogging accounts I did find enlightening were almost exclusively those written by people I had met on earlier trips to Georgia - and whom I trusted. ”

Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Julia Ioffe finds Russian journalists writing on their LiveJournals, offering opinions and perspectives that are far more extreme than what they’d offer on air or in print. She cites Russian journalist Dmitry Steshin, blogging as “Krig42″, pledging to stay up all night posting his videos of Tskhinvali as “a personal response to the base claims of Human Rights Watch. These fuckers thought there weren’t enough casualties in Tskhinvali.” These accounts, she tells us, are desperately sought out by Russian readers: “Combine a culture already suspicious of all things political with the natural, magnifying outlet of the free-for-all blogosphere, and you get Russian bloggers searching desperately for the necessarily elusive key to the riddle of this war.”

Part of the reason this war is such a riddle is that we’ve entered a new phase in contemporary conflict: the world of citizen propaganda. We expect - or should expect - that the governments of Russia, Georgia and Ossetia would all be seeking rhetorical advantage in the conflict. Remnick, speaking on On the Media, observes that Sakashvili’s proficency in English gives him a decisive advantage in the US media over his Russian-speaking rivals; the framing of the conflict in Cold War terms in western media further this advantage as well. What may be less expected is that citizen media accounts - blogs of eyewitnesses, journalists writing in a personal capacity, the writings of people who know and are passionate about the region - are actively engaged in rhetorical warfare as well. Georgian, Russian and Ossetian bloggers - whether off-duty journalists or ordinary citizens - all want the suffering of their group acknowledged on a global stage and are all presenting the conflict from their personal perspectives. These perspectives sometimes include troubling eyewitness accounts, and sometimes include amplification of rumors, usually ones that support that author’s interpretive frame.

It’s probably naive to expect citizen accounts of a war zone to be less politically biased than those from professional media, but in a situation where one believes professional media to be part of a propaganda strategy, it’s understandable that readers would turn to bloggers for an “unfiltered view” of events on the ground. Interpreting these views - as Morozov observed - involves making judgement calls about trust, reliability and bias… much as reading professional media does, when one suspects that analysis is biased and not neutrally framed.

What’s most interesting to me is the ways in which citizens have become actively involved in these propaganda battles. The “cyberwar” so breathlessly described by many professional journalists is little more than one set of propagandists trying to make the other side’s propaganda inaccessible. Unlike in the Russian/Estonian “cyberwar”, where denial of service attacks made key government services inaccessible, most of the attacks in this conflict are oriented more at defacing Georgian or Russian websites and discussion boards, or simply making them unreachable. (See “Misunderstanding Cyberwar“.)

These rhetorical battles are springing up in a variety of online spaces, not just blogs and message boards. In the San Francisco Chronicle, Morozov reports about a controversy brewing over a segment on Fox News, posted on YouTube. Shepard Smith interviewed an Ossetian woman and her aunt, who blamed the violence squarely on Georgian forces, thanking Russian forces for their intervention. (Morozov implies that Smith is attempting to silence the women - I disagree with that characterization, and invite you to watch the video and draw your own conclusions.) On YouTube, the video has generated passionate comment threads, and as Morozov reports, has launched speculation that YouTube has been supressing traffic statistics on the video to diminish its visibility.

Russians aren’t the first to turn to YouTube to make their case for their nation’s actions. During the Lhasa riots, a number of Chinese videographers produced montages explaining their view that Tibet was an inseperable part of China, or challenging what they perceived as Western media bias in coverage of the riots. These videos were in English, intended to persuade a non-Chinese audience to either change their views or acknowledge another point of view. It’s easy to dismiss the presence of such user-generated propaganda as the result of government initiatives like the “fifty cent party” (wumaodang), a team of online commentators paid to put forth pro-Party views on the Chinese internet. But while David Bandurski’s done a great job documenting Chinese-language commenting that appears to be organized by the Chinese Cultural Ministry, there’s no indication that efforts like anti-cnn.com or the web videos referenced above are anything other than citizen propaganda. (Imagethief has an excellent piece looking at “angry Chinese youth” and reminding us that there’s a difference between being passionate and nationalistic and being brainwashed.)

Even more than the Lhasa riots, the conflict in Ossetia is tailor-made for citizen propaganda. Analysts in the US - removed from the conflict both in distance and knowledge - are likely to rely on existing frames that may not represent events well or accurately. Citizens of Russia and Georgia are well aware that international opinion matters in the resolution of these events and turn to citizen media tools to make their cases. Their audiences, perceiving that professional media is biased against their interpretation, may place more credence on “eyewitness accounts” than they would if not already frustrated by mainstream accounts. Reading anything in these circumstances becomes a challenging task, navigating the stated and unstated agendas of anyone who’s speaking, discounting and revaluing all opinions based perceived biases.

My friend Ulrike Reinhard has just released the first issue of WE Magazine, a fascinating labor of love that explores issues of collaboration and identity, while challenging the notion of what consitutes a magazine. WE is available for purchase or download via Lulu.com, but all the content is available online under a creative commons share-alike license.

Ulrike explains that this release is the preview of a quarterly magazine, focused on the idea of understanding what “we” means in the age of the internet, and what “we” are capable of, collaborating, competing, sharing and creating in different ways. The project was sparked by an observation from Henry Jenkins, commenting that YouTube really needs to be considered as WeTube, a place that isn’t just about individual creators but about the communities that lead to creation.

I’m working my way through the interviews in the magazine, which often include videos as well as transcripts with thinkers like Joi Ito, Dan Gillmor and Sugata Mitra. Ulrike was kind enough to interview me for the magazine about Global Voices while I was still recovering from eye surgery - if you’re interested in watching an interview with me as I squint uncomfortably, please check it out. But make sure you check out the whole thing - I think WE is onto something, and I think it’s great that they’re sharing their thinking with the whole web, customers and browsers alike.

I’ve become a big fan of chef Anthony Bourdain, first through his snarky, obnoxious and profane books about the restaurant industry and food around the world, and more recently through his excellent television show, “No Reservations“. The show portrays Bourdain travelling around the world - or sometimes around the corner - in search of unique culinary experiences. Much of the time, the show makes the case that you should visit a place you know little about simply to eat the food - his show on Ghana was so joyful and positive that the Ghanaian tourist board should simply send DVDs of it to any potential tourists. The very best shows, in my opinion, aren’t just travelogue, but provocative political statements - his show on the US/Mexican border made a passionate case that the border needs to be looser, not tighter, and that anti-immigration activists didn’t understand the unique cross-border culture.

Last night Rachel and I caught up with Bourdain’s recent travels to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and encountered one of his best political episodes. Bourdain freely admits that Saudi Arabia hasn’t been high on the list of countries he’s dying to visit - a former heroin addict and current, unabashed heavy drinker, the Kingdom’s attitudes to alcohol alone seem like they’d be sufficient to keep him away. But No Reservations ran a contest encouraging fans to submit videos encouraging Bourdain to film a show in their hometowns. The clear winner of the contest and interview process was Danya Alhamrani, a remarkable Saudi woman born in Bismark, North Dakota, and raised between Bismark and Jeddah. With business partner Dania Nassief, she’s the founder of Eggdancer Productions, a media production company in Jeddah unique in that it’s run by two women.

Alhamrani is very clear in her videotape that she wants to bring Bourdain to Saudi Arabia to challenge his preconceptions - and America’s perceptions - of what her nation is and isn’t. She succeeds with Tony, at least - he’s surprised by the warmth with which he’s received, and observes on his blog:

Fact is we met a lot of funny, good natured, very, very generous people over there. They actually had the capacity to laugh at themselves. They were all too aware of how they look to outsiders. They watch “Friends” and “Oprah” and “American Idol”.

Many, many of them were educated abroad. They were scrupulously devout in their faith without being humorless.

It’s clear from the show that the humor and warmth which which Bourdain is received has a great deal to do with Alhamrani, who is clearly a remarkable figure, and one of the most natural bridge figures I’ve ever seen on a television screen. Her North Dakota background means she understand more or less precisely what Bourdain is inclined to believe about Saudi Arabia, allowing her to line up and then mow down stereotypes. Because she lives in Jeddah as a Saudi, not as an expat, she knows where to go, who to see and how to show Bourdain the markets and greasy spoons that always serve as his happiest locales. And because she’s apparently a force of nature, her agenda of challenging preconceptions comes through every shot of the episode.

I’ve never been to Saudi, and am not likely to make the trip as a tourist any time soon. But I found myself reacting to certain moments in the show based on my limited knowledge gained through Saudi bridgeblogs. Alhamrani and Bourdain visit a local fast food restaurant, and he’s briefly confused as to whether they should sit in the “family” or “single” sections. Alhamrani explains that the single section is only for single men - the two of them together were a family, and their meal took place in a booth surrounded by translucent glass. Bourdain asked the predictable question - whether this form of isolation was insulting to Alhamrani as a woman - she explained that it wasn’t something she found frustrating, but something that single men often resented… something that had been clear to me from reading Ahmed Al-Omran’s brilliant Saudi Jeans blog. As a young, single Saudi man, Ahmed is a feminist at least in part because he’s frustrated about the ways in which the Kingdom’s attitudes towards women end up marginalizing men as well.

There’s nothing better than visiting another country - preferably in the company of someone who can bridge cultural gaps and help you experience the actual country rather than the tourist simulacrum - for changing opinions and attitudes. Amy Teuteberg, Bourdain’s producer, finds herself - to her great surprise - writing about her fondness for her abbaya, which allowed her to blend in on the shoot to a much greater extent than in other shows.

But if you can’t go, you can always read. Reading the Global Voices Digest this morning, I came across Ayesha Saldanha’s translations from Saudi blogs about slavery and worker’s rights in Gulf nations. The frustration and anger in these posts at the treatment of “guest workers” makes it very clear that some Saudis are very upset about the situation workers face and looking for ways the situation could be addressed:

When I listen to the real complaints of workers, I can’t help but think that they are largely being treated like slaves… Not only do some companies request a month’s salary from workers in order to renew their residence permit, but other companies prevent workers from having a day off in the week, and others won’t allow any excuse or leave, even in the case of illness. One worker told me that he had been working in Saudi Arabia for three years and hadn’t been able to perform Umrah [pilgrimage to Mecca] because the company refused to give him two days’ holiday.

…

The greatest problem with us is not Islam, of course; we take pride in our customs and culture and our Islamic spirit – but we don’t apply it on the ground. One day try stopping at a busy traffic light near a work site or industrial area, and see how, in 45 degree [113 Fahrenheit] heat, the workers are crammed into a lorry meant for equipment, or for sheep at most… But the greed of the factory or company owner prevents him from buying buses, which might cost no more than 40,000 Riyals to transport the workers from their accommodation to their workplace. If the matter was in my hands, a case would be brought against any company transporting its workers in lorries, and it would be ruled that the owner should experience this transport for a week. (In my dreams!)

Ask yourself now, when was the last time you brought a meal from a restaurant for your driver or housemaid? And how often have you let the driver use your mobile phone to talk to his family, and what about the maid? Does she still write letters and send them by post?

Do you have any doubt that this is slavery?