I got ludicriously useful feedback from blog readers regarding the two posts I made in preparation for the talk Joi and I gave at O’Reilly ETCon. I just spent a couple of days revising the post I made on Feb 2 into something resembling an academic article. God and editors willing, it’s slated for inclusion in a book O’Reilly is planning to publish on Emergent Democracy. With that in mind, I’d love to solicit feedback on this piece, tentatively titled “Making Room for the Third World in the Second Superpower”.

An ugly HTML formatted version of the piece is available, as is a prettier PDF version.

I’m particularly interested in projects that I should include that I either don’t know about, or egregiously forgot to tip my hat to. Also, what do folks think of the title? I hate the term “third world”, but feel like it’s worth it for the consonance of setting it against “second superpower”.

Any and all feedback gratefully appreciated.

Christian Science Monitor is reporting development of a weed that helps detect land mines. A Danish company, Aresa Biodetection, has developed a strain of Thales Cress, a fast growing ground weed, that turns red in the presence of nitrogen dioxide, which most land mines give off.

This is potentially fascinating technology for places like Angola, where the majority of arable land goes unused because it’s mined. Finally, genetic engineering we can all feel good about!

Jim Moore writes yesterday about outsourcing in the IT industry, an issue that seems likely to be a major part of the debate over economic policy leading up to the US presidential elections. John Kerry is reported in the New York Times today (which has three separate pieces on outsourcing) to “castigate(s) ‘Benedict Arnold companies and CEO’s’ for moving jobs overseas”.

Jim asks us to frame the issue from a Ghanaian perspective:

Think of it this way. If you lived in Ghana (where I have done recent research on economic development and information technonology), would you think it better if Ghana did its own white collar work, or worse? You’d think it better, because of the anciliary benefits that come with having high tech and white collar workers in your local economy and society: educated people, stronger middle class, more effective political advocacy, higher value on education, etc. etc.

He goes on to make an important observation: it’s not just the jobs associated with outsourcing that matter to Ghanaians, it’s the fact that IT can act as the “special sauce” that make existing industries more efficient. By having IT competency in the nation, other industries have a better chance of competing on a global stage. I refer to this as “digital independence” and suggest it’s what developing nations should be striving for, rather than developing a sector that can compete with India for software outsourcing contracts. While some developing nations may be able to make money through call centers or offshore development, all will need indigenous IT expertise to be able to export agricultural or manufactured products to the wired world.

My views diverge from Jim’s halfway through his post. He worries that

We are outsourcing our high value information technology and financial services jobs, and relocating them into other economies and societies. This is a good thing for the world–it is perhaps the most generous thing this country has ever done–bigger than the Marshall Plan after World War II.

But the way we are doing this, we are losing our own core competencies in our economy. We are reducing our local access to information technology and financial services expertise. Long term, this means less and less spillover of expertise into our other businesses, and slowing innovation.

It’s a scary scenario, but not one the facts back up. Yes, the number of high-skilled IT jobs in India and China are growing. But they’re growing in the US as well, just not as quickly. The Forrester report that has everyone talking predicts a some of 500,000 software jobs overseas by 2015 – that’s a modest number in a US economy with 130 million workers, where literally millions of jobs are created or eliminated every month.

I believe that the jobs really in danger are the jobs already in danger of being lost to automation – customer service and data entry. It’s quite hard to outsource the most creative and interesting IT jobs, the ones where technically skilled people work with customers to design products. Indeed, the NYT reports that IBM will simultaneously move 3,000 white collar jobs overseas, while creating 4,500 new jobs in the US, particularly around designing software for specific customer applications. So I think Jim’s worry that we’re going to lose out core competency is premature.

What I do think we should be worried about is the alignment of outsourcing with a larger trend in American society – the dissapearing middle class. One thing the wonderful tools over at Gapminder will show you is that the distribution of income in the United States shows two distinct peaks – a large upper class and a large underclass. The low-paying jobs – retail, custodial – aren’t going anywhere, as they require physical presence. It’s that disappearing middle class – unionized manufacturing jobs, low-end white collar jobs – that are in the most danger of moving overseas.

Kerry’s firey rhetoric aside, there’s no easy solution to this problem. When Bush took steps to protect the domestic steel industry, he didn’t just piss off other countries – he pissed off the domestic auto industry, which suddenly faced a higher price for steel. The same economics apply to customer service jobs – firms that can access high quality, low cost service people overseas will be at a competitive advantage over those who can’t. Protect your domestic industries too aggresively and very quickly your domestic markets suffer.

About a year ago, I was at a trade show in NYC, giving a standard Geekcorps pitch for digital independence. I got accosted by a passerby, who called me a traitor for trying to build the middle class in Africa. “It’s people like you who are trying to destroy our country.” I expect to hear a lot more of this in the next nine months as everyone tries to figure out just what we want the US economy to look like.

Joi and I gave our workshop at the Digital Democracy Teach-In at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego yesterday. Daniel Steinberg, writing for O’Reilly, has a good overview of the day – Doc Searls links to a dozen different accounts of the event.

David Weinberger has the best account of our session, a rough transcription of what Joi and I both said. Jeff Jarvis has a similarly stream-of-thought post. And Joi’s posted a list of URLs we used during the presentation.

As it turned out, we were the last speakers on a long day. Almost all our fellow presenters focused on the influence of new ‘net-based systems on American politics. In many ways, the day was a day-long meditation on the Dean campaign. Danish friend Tomas Krag got increasingly annoyed at the US-centricity of the discussions. Tomas certainly has a point – Joi and I tried hard to steer the discussion overseas, especially towards Africa… but there’s a strong feeling within this conference that the interesting stuff in emergent democracy and social software is happening in the United States.

One great counterexample to this is the Iranian blogosphere. Pedram Moallemian from Eyeranian.net is here – he’s been talking about the explosion of Farsi-language blogs (more than 100,000 at last estimate) and the decisions Iranian bloggers made to start blogging in English so that a larger audience to participate in the conversations.

All this has gotten me thinking – is there a good way to take advantage of the collective resources of the Internet to do translation of key blog posts? How about a plug-in that allows you to push a blog post through Babelfish or Google translation services? Or a service that lets you offer to translate an entry for someone, opening the post in a wiki, allowing you to translate and others to tune your translation?

My last post on Emergent Democracy posited a lot of questions and very few answers. It got some terrific feedback, for which I’m very grateful. But I’m concerned that a session that just offers critique will be received badly. I’d like to be able to point to some of the great work being done out there to ensure that new Emergent Democracy communities are open to the entire world. And I’d love help from folks reading my and Joi’s blog on identifying projects worth celebrating.

I’m looking for projects that do one of three things:

- help address media attention gaps by reporting on underreported parts of the globe, or work explicitly on increasing people’s understanding/caring about these parts of the globe

(for example: BlogAfrica, Open Knowledge Network, Blogalization, etc.)

- help include people from developing nations in online deliberations, or work on removing barrier to participation (translation, support for local languages, etc.)

(for example: TakingITGlobal, Kabissa

- bring online/distributed decisionmaking into real-world action, including activism, fundraising, elections, etc.

(for example, the use of cellphone-enabled smart mobs to organize protests in Kenya or to monitor elections in Ghana)

Please, help me find projects I haven’t stumbled upon yet – I’d like to share as much good news as possible with the folks at the Digital Democracy Teach-in.

Databank, run by the very brilliant Ken Ofori-Atta, is reporting that Ghana’s stock exchange had the best returns of any equity market, worldwide, in 2003. Ghana’s stock market returned 144%, in US dollar terms, for 2003, followed closely by Uganda at 140% and Kenya at 112%.

Ghana’s tremendous performance owes something to the Ashanti Goldfields takeover by Anglo American and something to the dollar’s decline. But Databank points out that, as a whole, Africa returned 37% on equity markets. Remove Zimbabwe, the world’s worst performing stock market (for obvious reasons) and that return rises to 44%. Which means:

This compares favourably with a return of 30% by the MSCI global index, 32% in Europe 26% in the US (S&P) and 36% in Japan (Nikkei).

Throwing a little cold water on this news is Andrea Bohnstedt for World Market Research Centre, who points out:

Although often delivering unexpectedly good performances, many stock markets in sub-Saharan Africa remain small and therefore illiquid. This indicates that they are primarily of interest for specialised investors with a long-term investment horizon and a higher risk tolerance.

IRIN, an amazing UN project designed to provide information from conflict areas, has a brilliant set of quotes on media attention in a story today on the refugee crisis on the Sudan/Chad border.

For those of you not keeping up with the Sudan, the front of the almost-over 20+ year civil war in Sudan has recently shifted to the southwest of the country. (The conflict in a nutshell – “Arab”, Muslim north versus “African”, Christian and Animist south. Much more sophisticated analysis on BBC, in a country profile and timeline.) Amnesty International reports that the Khartoum government is supporting a camel and horse-mounted militia called the Janjaweed, which is brutally crushing rebellion in the region around Darfur. Independent journalists on the Chadian border, recently crossed by over 100,000 refugees, report that the Janjaweed is being supported by military airstrikes, described by Amnesty as “indiscriminate”.

(Not up on the current Sudan situation? S’okay – neither is President Bush. In yesterday’s meeting with Kofi Annan, the leaders congratulated each other on “the progress toward a comprehensive peace in the Sudan.”)

IRIN turns the spotlight on media attention and its role in the crisis on the border.

“We in the Red Cross, up to now we’ve found it very difficult to fund-raise for Chad,” said Robbie Tomson. “It’s not headline news. Who in Europe or the US knows about this war?” he asked.

This difficulty in raising funds hasn’t just plagued the Red Cross. UNHCR requested $10.3 million in funding to alleviate the refugee situation. It’s recieved no commitments of funds so far.

Compounding this “indifference” has been the lack of media coverage. “People are dying every day, but nobody is diffusing the information because there are no journalists here,” said Sudanese chief, Abbakar Anaw. “Peace Can only come back if the UN puts pressure on the government”, he added.

The indifference of both the international community and the Sudanese government was pushing them to take up arms, added one of the victims. “What the government is doing is encouraging people to fight back,” he said.

A week or so ago, I was on a panel at Davos with the news director of a major global cable news network. He spoke, with some pride, of his network’s role in bringing attention, military intervention and international aid into Somalia. An open question to him, and his bretheren at similar networks: Where the heck are you guys? What has to happen to get you guys interested?

Paolo was kind enough to point me to Gapminder, a brilliant set of tools that help make intuitive sense of complex data, especially international development data. The folks behind the project are a group of Swedish geeks and academics who’ve committed to building free tools in collaboration with UNDP, Save the Children and the Swedish International Development Agency.

The tools that I’ve been able to play with (alas, a number of them are Windows executables…) have done a great job of giving me an intuitive sense of complex statistical issues. My favorite thus far is the set of income distribution tools that help you see distribution of resources over time in ten nations. (Most interesting, to me, is Nigeria, which from 1970 to 2000 goes from a fairly even bell-curve distribution to a curve with two maximums – a large underclass and a small middle to upperclass… making it look a lot like Brazil and the US, two nations with long-term income inequality.)

Most interesting to me, though, is a cool little manifesto buried at the end of the “Experiments” page. In it, Anna Rosling Ronnlund and Ola Rossling observe:

On a daily basis the mass media and the Internet bring us insight into peoples lives from all over the world. It has never before existed such awareness of the great multitude of cultures and traditions on our planet. Maybe this increased understanding of lives of other peple will bring us closer to each other, and serve as a platform for international collaborations. But what if the information we have about each other is not correct?

They go on to offer three reasons why this information so often is not correct: biased media coverage, a tendency to offer over-simplified explanations, and statistical ignorance. On the last, they place some of the blame firmly on the shoulders of statisticians:

Many statisticians are like musicians standing up in front of the audience showing the sheet music instead of playing it.

I’m greatly looking forward to playing with the tools these guys are building, especially Trendalyzer, their tool for animating time series data. Very, very cool that someone is taking on this issue with free software.

Joi Ito and I are leading a discussion at the upcoming O’Reilly Digital Democracy Teach-In (San Diego, February 9th). In preparation, I’m trying to get my head around two essays, Jim Moore’s “The Second Superpower Rears It’s Beautiful Head” and Joi’s “Emergent Democracy”. At the risk of scaring readers off with an unusually long post, I’m sharing some of those thoughts in the hopes of getting useful comments and input from my readers, especially my African readers, before this session next week.

I find Joi and Jim’s documents very useful. Jointly, they paint a hopeful, if sometimes vague, picture of how Internet communities can show us techniques and tactics that could radically change real-world politics. Where I’m uncomfortable with both essays is the fact that they extrapolate from the behavior of the people currently using the Internet to make generalizations about how a larger world might use these tools. I think it’s worth taking a close look at what happens when we try to include the developing world in the models Joi and Jim put forward – in other words, is there room for the third world in the second superpower?

“Second Superpower” suggests that a group of people are changing democracy by using a three-part model for social engagement – collect information, comment and debate, then act. These three steps are all being transformed by new technologies. While we continue to be informed by mass media, we’re also getting information from alternative media, published cheaply on the net, from weblogs, etc. We’re debating and commenting in entirely new ways, enabled by weblogs, discussion groups, instant messaging and mailing lists. And we’re discovering that these tools also make some forms of action more efficient: fundraising, protesting, and meet-ups, to name a few.

“Emergent Democracy” focuses on the third, “action” phase, and suggests that forms of decisionmaking emerging from the world of weblogs might lead to a viable form of direct democracy. In the way that ideas percolate from personal networks, to social networks, to large, political networks, reinforced by positive feedback loops, Joi sees a possible path for decisionmaking to move from individual thinking to group action.

While Jim and Joi have justifiable enthusiasm about the phenomena we’re seeing emerge from interconnected communities – the growth of blogs as an alternative to “mainstream” media, the success of grassroots campaigning in the US – this enthusiasm needs to be tempered by some skepticism about who is currently using them, and who has potential to use them. While these tools, in theory, have the potential to increase citizen involvement in collection, debate and action, in practice, they’re being used by a small, elite group.

That’s okay – all new technologies get used first by a band of early adopters before reaching the mainstream. If these early adopters realize they’re not representative of the wider world and work to bring others into the fray, there’s a chance these technologies will evolve in a way that’s inclusive. If that group forgets that they’re outliers in terms of larger society and fails to include others in the shaping of these technologies, it’s unlikely that these tools will be useful to the wider world and that the larger transformations Joi and Jim envision will take hold.

My hope, in the session Joi and I are putting together, is to try to address Jim’s three phases from a developing world perspective. (The absurdity of a geeky white boy from Massachusetts giving the “developing world perspective” is not lost on me…)

As Joi notes, for a citizen to function in a democracy, a free, engaged and critical press is essential. But from a developing world perspective, the mass media in the US and Europe is badly broken. Corporate consolidation of media, the blurring of the line between media and entertainment and the unspoken bias towards US government interests have combined to create a mass media that pays almost no attention to most of the developing world. Alternative media is of limited help in this situation – there aren’t enough bloggers in eastern Congo to give us a sense for what’s really going on, and none but the largest news agencies are able to pay the travel costs and insurance for reporters to cover these stories. The net result – we simply don’t have information about parts of the globe relevant to world debate.

Even when we do have some information about undercovered parts of the world, we have another problem, what Joi has termed “the caring problem”. People pay attention to subjects they care about. They tend to ignore subjects they know little about. Media, trying to serve its customers in a free market, responds by giving them more information on subjects they’ve demonstrated an interest in and ignoring other subjects. As a result, consumers don’t get interested in new topics as they’re not exposed to them. So even if folks blog or report about situations in the Congo, folks don’t pay attention to these reports and the noosphere remains weak in those areas.

To make the first phase of Jim’s model work for discussions of global issues, we need a media capable of covering the entire globe. That media will look a great deal different than CNN – it’s going to be built of citizen reporters reporting local events and travellers with sharp eyes and interesting perspectives reporting on more closed societies.

Rebecca MacKinnon is doing some great thinking on this front, looking for journalists, businesspeople and tourists to write about current affairs in North Korea. Dave Winer and the Berkman center Thursday Night crew are aggregating citizen journalist reports especially about the 2004 elections. But the really amazing work is being done by the folks at OhmyNews in South Korea, where citizen journalists are building an influential news site and a weekly paper magazine.

To address the caring problem, a citizen news network will need to go beyond reporting breaking news. It will also need give readers insights into the daily lives of people in other nations, much as Salam Pax gave readers of his blog an insight into Iraq preparing for, and under, attack.

Both Jim and Joi point out the value of internet-based community tools for enabling intelligent dialogue, even dialogue between people with radically opposing viewpoints. It’s worth asking who this dialogue is open to. My sense is that these discussions are open only to people with the access to the Internet (which cuts out people in countries who censor, people in unserved rural areas, as well as people who don’t have money to spend time online); primarily open to people who speak and write English well; primarily open to people who can afford to spend time online engaging in these dialogues (cutting out many people whose jobs don’t afford them the luxury of working in front of a CRT.)

What happens to a blog discussion when the participants are interacting with the medium in radically different ways? When one has always-on broadband access and the ability to Google for arguments, while the other is writing entries offline and typing them in during a limited window at a cybercafe? When one is writing in English as a third or fourth language, debating a native speaker? Does Clay Shirky’s “fair” power law favor the better argument, or just the more articulate speaker? Or perhaps just the speaker who has more cultural commonality with his or her audience?

(I’m interested in seeing what happens to communities like the Iranian weblog community. Will these communities produce their own A-list of bloggers? And will these bloggers interact with the technorati of the “mainstream” (i.e., American and European) world? Or will they not bother, as they’re writing for a different audience?)

When Joi and Jim talk about action emerging from online community organizing, I get the most skeptical. In many developed nations, especially the United States, the greatest enemy of activism is apathy. Grassroots activism may turn out to be a powerful weapon to fight apathy and encourage engagement. But apathy may not be the problem in other nations. In nations with a high deal of political repression, the enemy of activism may be threats to personal safety. In these situations, transparent public debate leading to action is likely an unwise path to political change. Can we expect democracy to emerge from Internet communities in countries where political activity is constrained and the Internet is censored? Or are we assuming that these democratizing technologies are only applicable in places where democracy and accompanying rights of free expression are already well protected?

I don’t expect anyone to have all the answers to these questions at this early stage, but I’d like to be reassured that the people creating this brave new world have these questions in mind. In designing the tools to enable communities, are we thinking about the full spectrum of people we’d like to use these tools? Are we helping people join our dialogues, or are we content to keep them out? Are we kidding ourselves when we think a set of tools used by less than 5% of the world’s population can lead to behaviors that change the whole world? Or are we committing to the long, hard project of ensuring that the whole world has a chance to participate in our conversation?