A quick post, but a beautiful story that I wanted to share.

You’ve seen the image from the 1968 Olympics. Two American runners - Tommie Smith and John Carlos - stand on the medals stand, bow their heads and raise their fists in the air in a black power salute. They were promptly ejected from the US olympic team, but the image of their protest is one of the lasting icons of the Olympics and a powerful statement about race relations in America - and globally - in the 1960s.

In an excellent piece for the BBC, Caroline Frost reminds us that there was a third man on the podium, silver medalist Peter Norman. An Australian caucasian, Norman had no special reason to be in solidarity with his co-medalists. But he was - it was he who suggested Smith and Carlos share a pair of black gloves when Carlos discovered he’d forgotten his. And Norman wore a badge from the Olympic Project for Human Rights which Smith and Carlos had given him.

The reaction from the Australian athletic community was swift and harsh. Norman was censured, and was left off the subsequent Olympic team. 32 years later, when the Olympics came to Sydney, he was the only Aussie olympian not invited to participate in the opening ceremony. The US olympians embraced him instead, inviting him to stay in their lodgings during the game and honoring his role in the civil rights struggle. When he died two years ago, Carlos and Smith travelled to Melbourne to serve as his pallbearers and to offer eulogies.

The comment thread on Frost’s story is interesting as well. Some Aussies are saddened to learn about a sad chapter of their Olympic history; some Americans (myself included) are proud that our athletes honored Norman’s solidarity. John Turnbull from the UK offers a contrasting point of view:

People should be careful how they conduct themselves when representing their country. Something that a lot of international sportsmen and women all too easily forget. The moment you accept the invitation to wear that jersey, and represent your nation, you must accept that your personal views are no longer your primary objective. I have great respect for men and women who stand up for their beliefs, but I wonder how much more Mr Norman could have achieved if he had become a spokesperson for the subject and used his fame from the Olympics as a springboard, rather than ending his career (albeit unfairly) under a shadow.

Don’t especially agree with that point of view, but thought this was one of those well-crafted stories that does a great job of inviting reactions, positive and negative.

“But enough about me. What do you think about me?”

That old joke was my response to the idea that Global Voices might choose to cover the 2008 US Presidential election. When Rebecca and I began discussing the Global Voices project in 2004, one of our motivations was a belief that US media paid too much attention to stories in the US and not enough to international, especially developing world, news.

Fortunately, I got voted down and Global Voices partnered with Reuters to produce Voices without Votes, a blog aggregator that portrays the US elections through the eyes of individuals around the world. There’s no doubt that there’s widespread interest in the US elections in many corners of the world and a desire to understand the decisionmaking that American voters are going through in our apparently perpetual election process.

Al Jazeera wanted to give their hundreds of millions of viewers a slightly different perspective on the convention, covering not only the speeches in the convention center and stadium, but watching the speeches on television with average Americans in a suburban Colorado town. After some investigation, they chose Golden, Colorado, the home of Coors Brewing and of 18,000 opinionated and vocal citizens, a gold-rush town 14 miles west of Denver.

Initial plans for Al Jazeera’s presence in Golden included broadcasting from a (pork-free) barbecue at City Manager Mike Bestor’s house. After extensive local debate, Bestor revoked the invitation, citing the concerns about perceived slights to the local veteran’s community.

(Update: Golden, Colorado mayor Jacob Smith clarifies that the barbecue was moved to another house, where it went off without a hitch. Please see his comment below.)

While no longer invited for barbecue, the Al Jazeera team has been embraced by the owner of the Buffalo Rose bar and roadhouse, Murray Martinez, who has invited them to broadcast from a corner of his establishment. This decision has been controversial in Golden, gathering a group of protesters across the street from the Buffalo Rose and motivating Martinez to post a copy of the First Amendment to the US constitution outside the bar.

It’s worth watching the above video, produced by the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, as well as reading his written piece for the Post. The article sounds as if a major confrontation is underway, reporting a truce from three biker gangs so that they can protest Jazeera’s presence at the bar. The video’s significantly more lighthearted, showing a wide range of Golden’s citizens, including a pro-Jazeera (or at least, pro-welcoming international reporters) citizen riding a six-foot tall Penny Farthing, as well as a wide range of angry people wielding air horns.

My friend and colleague Jillian York points out that Al Jazeera has had a very hard time finding tolerance, never mind acceptance, in the US. Burlington, VT, one of the most liberal communities in the US, has been one of only two communities that’s offered Al Jazeera English on their local cable system. Based on “dozens” of complaints from subscribers, the local cable system manager decided to drop the network from the system’s offerings. This led to a set of public meetings where passionate debate on both sides led to a decision to keep the network on the air. York notes that the debate has largely been between people who’ve actually watched the channel - who want to keep it on the air - and those who haven’t. One wonders how many of the air horn wielding folks outside the Buffalo Rose have watched the network, a channel that’s so popular in Israel that it’s recently replaced BBC World and CNN International on major cable networks, and which is the network of choice for many US soldiers stationed in Afghanistan.

Al Jazeera wanted to film in Golden because they wanted to show their viewers how the election is viewed in different American communities. The protesters for and against the network’s presence, as well as the Buffalo Rose customers who simply appear bemused by all the attention, are probably a pretty good representations of the mixed feelings many US communities have about international attention to a domestic election. (Remember the Guardian’s plan to have readers around the world write to undecided Clark County, Ohio voters in the 2004 election? That went well.) While I’m embarrased that some of the citizens of Golden would demonstrate agains the right of a network to report news, I’m hopeful that the coverage will include some of the citizens who were excited about welcoming international perspectives as well.

By the way, it looks like an excellent night to be at the Buff Buffalo Rose, as the locals evidently call it - it’s ladies night, and there are $4 pitchers of Coors Light for the fellas. And death metal band Grimoire starts playing at 9pm, right after Obama’s speech. Bet they’ve thought very little about the possibility of building their Qatari fanbase.

(Smith clarifies that, whatever visiting journalists think, “I’ve never heard it called the Buff. It’s either the Buffalo Rose or the Rose, and I have a great deal of respect for Murray (one of the owners) and his staff for being so stalwart. They never blinked.” Thanks for weighing in, Mr. Mayor, and thanks for your willingness to engage with these issues.)

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?

There’s understandable outcry about revelations that reporters covering the Olympics in Beijing will be using censored internet connections which block access to sites on sensitive topics, like human rights and Falun Gong. In classic fashion, a Beijing Olypics spokesman, Sun Weide, offered statements that verge on self-parody: “I would remind you that Falun Gong is an evil fake religion which has been banned by the Chinese government… I said we would provide sufficient, convenient internet access for foreign journalists to report on the Olympics…”

Andrew Lih points to another major constraint on internet access - the cost. His wife is staying in the Media Village in Beijing, and discovered a pricing structure for ASDL connections that beggars belief:

* 512/512 it costs 7712.5 RMB (1,131.20 USD);
* 1M/512 it costs 9156.25 (1,342.95 USD);
* 2M/512 it costs a whopping 11,700 RMB (1,716.05 USD).

Those costs are for a single month’s worth of access. I guess if you’re planning on uploading videos from the games, you’re making a pretty serious investment in your filtered bandwidth. As Lih points out, not a big deal for the NBCs of the world, but tough for smaller entities.

I’m sitting in a conference room at Microsoft right now and remembering just how much filtered internet sucks. I realized that most filesharing ports were blocked when I tried to download footage from the last day of the Nagoya basho - no go, without tunneling through ssh or via Tor… not something I really wanted to do. This morning, as we tried to set up a backchannel via IRC, we discovered those ports were blocked, so folks are now IRC’ing via Mibbit.

The temptation in these cases, I think, is to find creative ways to break the filtering and thumb your nose at the authorities. At the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia - ludicriously held in a nation that extensively censors the Internet - a favorite game was to use proxies to evade censorship, then photograph the evasion with a WSIS backdrop visible. The photo above is of me loading the (censored) website of Citizen Summit, held by a Tunisian human rights organization in opposition to the summit with the map of the WSIS booths in the background. (I don’t think there’s any utility at all to this sort of nose-thumbing, but it does feel really good when you’re frustrated by a situaltion.)

I’ll be interested to see what sorts of creative nose-thumbing press folks in Beijing will engage in. For folks heading to Beijing, BoingBoing has a lovely list of possible circumvention strategies, a few of which will work on the Great Firewall. CitizenLab’s guide to Circumvention is probably the best single resource on the topic - it’s available as a PDF. To offer a very quick piece of advice - if you work for a news organization that has even a minimum of tech resources you want to either set up an instance of Psiphon or learn how to tunnel your net connections via a SSH connection.

Happy nosethumbing.

Another day, another book chapter. No, not the book I’m hoping to write over the next n months - a book on citizen media in crisis situations being put together by a pair of academics in Britain. Given that some of the folks mentioned in this piece periodically read this blog, and that lots of readers are interested in how citizen media might be used in crisis situations, I thought I’d post a draft here in the hopes that y’all might have additions, subtractions, corrections and thoughts. Please feel free to use the comment thread to offer any thoughts you might have. Apologies in advance if I don’t respond to all comments promptly - I’m about to stop pretending to be an academic and pretend to run a global citizen media organization through its “annual” meeting.

Citizen Media and the 2007 Kenyan Election Crisis
Ethan Zuckerman, Harvard University
Draft - 6/20/2008

The crisis surrounding the disputed 2007 presidential elections in Kenya served as a stark reminder of how fragile young democracies can be. It also put into sharp focus the power new media technologies give citizens of developing nations to report news and organize responses to crisis situations. A number of Kenyans demonstrated how technically sophisticated and globally connected their country is at precisely the moment when their leaders demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice the nation’s reputation for stability in exchange for continued governing power.

While Kenyan citizen journalists and community organizers have a great deal to be proud of in their response to an electoral crisis and the concomitant ethnic violence, information technology was also used both by the government and civilians to amplify tensions and coordinate violent attacks. The technologies used by citizen reporters and community organizers were the same ones used by forces in the government who sought to rig the election, and agitators who attempted to expand ethnic violence. One lesson from the use of information technology in the Kenyan crisis is that the technology itself is neutral. It can be used powerfully to give citizens a voice in crisis situations, or used to aggravate those same crises.

A Brief History of the 2007 Elections

Mwai Kibaki became the third president of Kenya in 2002 after winning a landslide election against Daniel arap Moi, who was widely accused of corruption. Kibaki promised to address problems of government corruption and experiences some early victories, leading the IMF to resume lending. The resignation and flight of John Githongo, anti-corruption advisor, in early 2005 was a major blow, and suggested that corruption problems might be endemic to the Kibaki government.

Kibaki, who had promised a new constitution when elected, put a draft constitution up for vote in November 21, 2005. The constitution consolidated presidential power, making it easier for the President to fire uncooperative ministers. Raila Odinga led the opposition to the referendum, choosing an orange as his campaign’s symbol, opposed to the banana chosen by Kibaki. The defeat of the referendum was viewed as a major embarrasment for Kibaki as well as a precursor to a challenge by Odinga in the next presidential elections.

On December 27, 2007 presidential and parliamentary election pitted President Mwai Kibaki and his Party of National Unity (PNU) against Raila Odinga and the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM). Odinga led in polls before the election. Early results showed substantial losses in parliament for the PNU, and suggested that Odinga led Kibaki - at the same time, delays in announcing election results raised concerns about possible election rigging.

Three days after the elections, the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) declared Kibaki the winner of a closely contested election, with a margin of 230,000 votes. Kibaki was quickly sworn in as President as members of the ECK held a press conference to express concerns about voting irregularities. Riots erupted in the Kibera neighborhood of Nairobi, an opposition stronghold. The new government banned live television coverage of the protests and deploying troops to keep the peace and block demonstrations. Odinga attempted to hold an alterate inauguration on December 31st, but the event was banned and Uhuru Park, where it was to be held, was sealed off by riot police.

The situation took a brutal turn on January 1st when more than 100 ethnic Kikuyu (the tribe Kibaki belongs to) were burned to death by a gang of Kalenjin, Luhya and Luo men (tribes associated with Odinga) in a church outside Eldoret, in the Rift Valley. Over the next weeks, as African and international leaders flew into the country to mediate, clashes between ODM and PNU supporters, and between Kikuyu and minority ethnic groups were responsible for more than a thousand and at up to 600,000 internally displaced persons.

In early February, as party leaders began negotiations in earnest, violence slowed, possibly reflecting the political nature of the clashes, or perhaps as a result of the separation brought about by internal migration of threatened ethnic groups. On February 28th, a power-sharing agreement mediated by Kofi Annan was signed by Odinga and Kibaki, establishing a new position of Prime Minister, to be held by Odinga. Lengthy negotiations led to agreements on composition of a new cabinet, creating seats for 40 ministers, an unprecedented and expensive number.

Digital Media in Kenya

Understanding the role of citizen media in the elections crisis requires a brief history of Kenyan digital media as well. With an estimated 3 million internet users, Kenya has one of the highest levels of internet penetration in sub-Saharan Africa, at 7.9%. (Of major sub-Saharan African countries - i.e., discounting those with populations under a million - only Zimbabwe and South Africa have higher net penetration.)

More than 12 million Kenyans - roughly 30% of the population - have mobile phones, as compared to a continent-wide penetration of 20%. Kenyan companies have been early adopters of mobile money transfer systems like M-PESA and complex SMS-based systems like Kazi560 which matches jobseekers and employers via their phones.

Against this backdrop, it makes sense that Kenyans would emerge as early adopters in citizen media. Prominent Kenyan blogs, including Daudi Were’s “Mental Acrobatics” have been online since early 2003. Starting in 2004, Kenya Unlimited has aggregated posts from individual blogs on a central site and provided a “webring”, a navigation mechanism that links related weblogs together. In 2006, a nationwide blogging contest - the Kenya Blog Awards or “Kaybees” - helped bring together individual Kenyan bloggers into a community. Afrigator, an African blog aggregator based in South Africa, cites two Kenyan blogs in its list of top twenty blogs, giving the country the second best representation on that list (after South Africa, which dominates.)

Kenyan bloggers have an influence beyond their online readership. They’ve emerged as source for ideas and stories for mainstream papers. Indeed, this influence has included cases where newspapers have taken stories, word for word, from blogs and have been forced to apologize for their plagarism. (See my paper, Meet the Bridgebloggers, for more on this story). Kenyan bloggers have not been shy about using their online platforms to agitate for political change. Ory Okolloh, author of the popular Kenyan Pundit weblog, launched Mzalendo in early 2006 , a site designed to provide increased transparency and insight into the Kenyan Parliament.

Blogging the 2007 Elections

Several Kenyan bloggers took pains to document the 2007 election, but there’s little indication from their posts that any anticipated the unusual events that would follow the election. In the midst of a thorough post describing his voting experience, and the precautions taken by the ECK to prevent election fraud, Daudi Were observed:

“One thing I noticed was that no one was wearing any political party merchandise and the conversations in the queue were distinctly non political. Rather than being divided, by queuing together to exercise our civic duty and responsibility we were bound together in a sort of patriotic camaraderie. We all felt it was worthwhile to take part in the vote and that ultimately was what mattered.”

The joy in a smooth functioning democratic process extended through the 28th, as it became clear that the elections had ousted a large number of incumbents. Ory Okolloh noted:

“Folks this is a historic election by Kenyan standards, regional standards and international standards - I don’t think there is a precedent for the number of incumbents that are going down despite having massive resources behind them and attempts to bribe voters. And I challenge you to find an election in the Western world in recent times where people have come out with such determination, conviction, and a strong sense of civic duty . I’m very very proud of Kenyan voters and you all should be no matter who you are supporting.”

The tone - and focus - of coverage changed sharply on December 30th, as it became clear that the disputed election would be declared in Kibaki’s favor. The ban on live media reports particularly incensed Okolloh, who had been monitoring TV, radio, the internet, SMS and local gossip to produce several election updates per day. When the live coverage ban was announced, she declared:

“All live broadcasts have been suspended by the government. The order was released as ODM was addressing their press conference. This is now officially a police state. So we have no idea what ODM is saying, and what the security situation is around the country. ”

In the wake of a ban on live media, some Kenyan bloggers responded by redoubling their efforts as citizen reporters. Reeling from the violence in her native Eldoret, Juliana Rotich began posting brief bulletins on
refugee movements, fuel shortages, road and airport closures. Some were posted via SMS using Twitter to disseminate messages to a wider audience; others featured photos and were uploaded to Flickr using a GPRS modem. Daudi Were took to the streets on January 3rd, following ODM activists as they attempted to march to Uhuru Park to attend a banned rally. His photos document the empty streets of the usually-bustling capital and the tense standoffs between activists and security forces, and provided insights on the confrontation hard to find in international media covering the confrontations.

As it became clear that Kenya would be in crisis for more than a few days, bloggers began to search for ways to share their workload. Okolloh, who resides in Johannesburg, returned home on January 3rd, after a difficult debate over whether she should stay to document the crisis or prioritize the safety of her young child. Three days after arriving in South Africa, she added a new feature to her blog: “diary entries” written by guest bloggers and submitted to her via email. In the month the diary was active, it featured 26 posts from a variety of Kenyans, including regular bloggers who sought an opportunity to reach a larger audience and from people who had not previously published online. The tone was sharply different from Okolloh’s opinionated, but news-focused, reports - the diaries were personal reflections on the crisis, providing context for readers interested in how the crisis was affecting individual Kenyans.

In her first post on returning to Johannesburg, Okolloh proposed another form of distributed reporting, a Google Maps mashup that showed incidents of violence reported throughout Kenya:

“Google Earth supposedly shows in great detail where the damage is being done on the ground. It occurs to me that it will be useful to keep a record of this, if one is thinking long-term. For the reconciliation process to occur at the local level the truth of what happened will first have to come out. Guys looking to do something - any techies out there willing to do a mashup of where the violence and destruction is occurring using Google Maps?”

The reaction to this idea, one of nine points in a long roundup, helps demonstrate Okolloh’s influence and reach in the blogger community. (Technorati lists Kenyan Pundit as the #15,282nd most popular blog in its index, a very high rank for an Africa-focused blog. At the peak of its popularity during the crisis, 0.004% of all blog posts on the internet linked to Kenyan Pundit, a level comparable to regular linking to Global Voices Online, one of the 200 most popular blogs in the world. Within three days of her January 3rd blog post, a prototype version of the system she proposed had been built. By January 9th, it was live at Ushahidi.com. (The term
Ushahidi means “witness” in Swahili.) A day later, a partnership with Kenyan mobile phone operators allowed Kenyans to post reports using an SMS shortcode.

The authors of the Ushahidi system were, without exception, people deeply involved in Kenya’s citizen media community. David Kobia, the lead author of the system, administers Mashada.com, the leading bulletin board site for Kenyans and the Kenyan diaspora. The chief architect of the system was Erik Hershman, author of the Afrigadget and White African blogs. Bloggers Daudi Were and Juliana Rotich built partnerships with NGOs in Kenya to promote the service and generate reports from outside the web community. Hershman reports that 75% of Kenyan blogs linked to Ushahidi by January 10th, helping launch the site to local and global audiences.

Ushahidi is best understood as a form of collaborative citizen journalism. Individuals submit reports of violent incidents - as well as of peacemaking efforts - via a web form or SMS message, including details of the incident, its geographic location and supporting information, including photos or video. Ushahidi’s administrators attempt to verify reports, cross-checking against mainstream and citizen media reports, resolve multiple reports into a single record and make the reports visible on an interactive map. The result is a powerful visualization of the complexities of violence and peacemaking in post-conflict Kenya.

The Ushahidi project is now focused on creating a sustainable, open-source platform to allow citizen crisis reporting anywhere in the world. The platform was adopted in late May 2008 by United for Africa, a South African project that documents xenophobic violence. On May 28th, Ushahidi won the NetSquared N2Y3 mashup challenge, a prominent software competition which awarded the project a $25,000 first prize.

Who’s the Audience for Crisis Media?

Since Ushahidi is built by SMS and web submissions, but chiefly visible via the web, it’s worth asking whether the main audience for the site is inside or outside the country. This question is complicated by the fact that the possible audience for these projects inclues Kenyans living domestically and Kenyans in the diaspora as well as non-Kenyans. Kenya’s diaspora is a powerful political and economic force - some estimates put remittances from the diaspora at more than $1 billion US per year, more than 2% of GDP. Diaspora Kenyans have held political debates in Washington DC and stay deeply involved with national politics through groups like the Kenyan Community Abroad.

Some of the most innovative efforts in response to the Kenyan crisis were aimed, wholly or in part, in motivating the Kenyan diaspora to support reconstruction efforts. Mama Mikes, an online business that accepts payments via the web and delivers goods to addresses within Kenya (a system some have termed “alternative remittance”). During the crisis, they began offering diaspora Kenyans the opportunity to give online, purchasing relief materials which the company staff delivered to displaced persons camps in the Rift Valley. Mama Mikes documented the materials purchased on their staff blog, thanking donors by name and documenting their trip to the camps. To encourage donations and support, either through Mama Mikes or directly to the Red Cross, Juliana Rotich began photographing conditions in displaced persons camps and food distribution efforts One effect of this coverage was to add transparency to the relief efforts and reassure donors in the diaspora that goods were reaching people in need.

It’s difficult to determine the extent to which citizen media efforts affected news coverage and perceptions of Kenya outside the diaspora population. (It is beyond the scope of this essay, but a future research project might consider the extent to which Kenyan citizen journalists were cited in the mainstream press in the weeks the crisis was most intense.) But it is apparent that many Kenyans were concerned with the international perception of their country in the wake of the crisis.

A group called Concerned Kenyan Writers, led by celebrated Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina, sought to organize Kenyans to write op-eds in international newspapers with intent “to present a human face to the Kenyan post-election crisis; to counter the static images and impressions of escalating violence and anarchy in the foreign press and to document this turning point in our nation’s history for posterity.” In editorials like Wainaina’s “No Country For Old Hatreds” in the New York Times, authors challenged portrayals of the crisis as an eruption of ethnic hatred, suggesting instead that the events reflected systematic manipulation of ethnic stereotypes by political parties seeking political gains. Bankelele, a popular blog focused on banking and investment in Kenya, challenged the narrative that Kenya would become another Rwanda with sober, thoughtful analyses of the implications of the crisis for Kenyan economics.

It’s also clear that many Kenyan were interested in raising their voices, either through projects like Ushahidi, Concerned Kenyan Writers, Kenyan Pundit’s diaries, or via their own blogs. On December 30, 2007 - early in the crisis - Daudi Were posted instructions on starting your own blog in response to the avalanche of comments he’d received on his own posts. Many of these comments criticized existing bloggers, or demanded that certain posts or comments be removed from the Kenya Unlimited blog aggregator. Daudi responded, “If someone writes something you disagree with by all means let your voice be heard as you present your counter view, and the best place to do this is on your own blog.” This raises another open research question: did the Kenyan elections crisis cause more Kenyans to start blogging? Will they continue beyond the crisis? Should efforts to introduce citizen media to new populations focus on crisis response efforts?

A Darker Side to Citizen Media

It’s an oversimplification to view online reactions to the Kenyan crisis purely as a proud moment for citizen media. One of the most dramatic lessons of the crisis is that technologies useful for reporting and peacemaking are also useful for rumormongering and incitement to violence.

As the Kenyan crisis unfolded, many cellphone owners received SMS messages that urged them to drive neighbors from their houses: “If your neighbor is a Kikuyu, just kick him or her out of that house. No one is going to ask you anything.” Messages included expressions of ethnic hatred, warnings that one ethnic group would attack another, and rumors that implicated Kenyan companies and institutions in promoting violence. The Nation Media Group, a major Kenyan media company, was forced to issue a press release specifically to counter rumors that its vehicles were being used to transport arms throughout the country to increase violence.

Kenyan mobile phone operators cooperated with the Kibaki government to send messages to subscribers, urging them not to send or forward inflamatory messages. Juliana Rotich reported receiving the following message on her mobile phone in Eldoret: “The ministry if Internal security urges you to please desist from sending or forwarding any SMS that may cause public unrest. This may lead to your prosecution”. On January 1, 2008 Ory Okolloh reported “Bulk sms has been blocked by the government to prevent guys from sending inciteful messages.”

Firoze Manji, a Kenyan human rights activist and editor of Pambazuka News, pointed out that these messages from the government had the effect of challenging legitimate political organizing via mobile phone. Blocking bulk SMS may have been intended to stop spreading ethnic hatred, but it also created obstacles for the ODM as they attempted to organize rallies and protests. Manji was particularly offended by a message from Kibaki shortly after he was inaugurated, urging all Kenyans to remain calm: “How did Kibaki get my phone number? This is a major breach of privacy.”

The ministry of information may have been premature in threatening prosecution for forwarding messages that incited violence. The Nation reported on March 1, 2008 that the government had compiled a list of 1700 people who had forwarded messages that incited ethnic violence. However, “there is no law governing hate speech over mobile phones, radio and television.” Groups like the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights have been pushing such a law, unsuccessfully. It’s possible that concerns about the role of SMS in the crisis situation may reopen debate on electronic hate speech.

Ethnic incitement wasn’t limited to SMS messages. Bloggers discovered that their comment threads were becoming increasingly hostile and featured many hateful sentiments, sometimes expressed in tribal languages so as to be understandable only to members of that group. Daudi Were’s post on January 4th, 2008, outlining the guidelines to comment on his site left little doubt about the content he was being forced to moderate:

“I am not here to spoon feed you or even debate with you what does or does not make valid commentary. My younger cousins who are just out of their teens and about to join high school know the difference between intellectual and valid commentary and hate speech. So do you. I will not enter into a lengthy debate on whether your comment, that we should “finish” this or that tribe is valid because of some socio-economic-political-historical injustice you quote. For crying out loud our country is burning. You fuel the flames here and I will burn your comment, i.e. I will delete it.”

Moderation problems became so intense on Mashada, Kenya’s leading bulletin board site, that David Kobia had to take extraordinary steps. He shut down the site for a cooling-off period, and briefly explored paying moderators to continue their work, as they were quickly resigning after trying to cope with floods of hateful messages. On January 29th, he shut the forum down entirely, noting “Facilitating civil discussions and debates has become virtually impossible.”

A few days later, Kobia launched a new site, I Have No Tribe. Like Ushahidi, it was centered on a Google Maps mashup. However, this mashup showed posts from Kenyans around the country and around the world wrestling with the statement, “I have no tribe… I am Kenyan.” Kobia redirected the Mashada site to the new site, and it rapidly filled with comments - combative as well as supportive, as well poems and prayers. Kobia reopened the forums on February 14th, having elegantly demonstrated that one possible response to destructive speech online is to encourage constructive speech.

Hundreds of Pakistani lawyers are protesting Pervez Musharraf’s attacks on the judiciary - and the failure of Pakistan’s new government to overturn Musharraf’s actions - with a series of marches from Karachi to Islamabad, referred to as “the long march“.

There’s no shortage of media attention on the protest, including an excellent series of short interviews conducted by the BBC. But it’s reasonable to assume that media outlets won’t be able to watch every encounter between protesters and security authorities.

That’s why noted Pakistani blogger and media activist, Dr. Awab Alvi, is organizing citizen media coverage of the Long March. Bloggers can contribute photos and videos to the blog by sending email to LM@help.pk. Awab is hoping that many protesters will take advantage of Pakistan’s GPRS network to upload photos, video and text reports, allowing near real-time coverage.

The blog currently features a combination of brief bulletins and a mix of citizen and mainstream press photos. Unfortunately, Awab appears to be posting photos to Facebook in a way that makes them very hard to share here, but there are a number of striking images already uploaded.

And, of course, there’s a Twitter feed. Twitter: don’t start a revolution without it!