Peter Durand is one of the unsung heroes of the Pop!Tech conference that I had so much fun at last week. While the rest of us in the audience had the luxury of paying rapt attention to some presentations and partial attention to others, Peter was charged with turning each of the 36 presentations offered into a 2×3 foot poster.

He did a brilliant job, and the collection of images he offers online gives you the opportunity to experience the highlights of Pop!Tech in about half a hour. His summary of my talk may well serve as inspiration for my halloween costume this year.

Peter refers to this art – summarization and notetaking in an accessible, highly graphic fashion – as Graphic Facilitation. It’s something I’d love to see more of, especially in large conferences where multiple talks take place at the same time. Also, I’m in an auditorium at UCLA, celebrating the 35th anniversary of the Internet – John Perry Barlow, Tim O’Reilly and Dan Gillmor are on stage as the moment, and I’d like to see them all caricatured as superheroes as well.

I had a blast at Pop!Tech this past week. I’ve attended conferences where I’ve heard one or two better talks, but Pop!Tech has had the highest degree of consistent quality I’ve ever seen at a conference – there were literally only two or three presentations out of thirty that caused my mind to wander. And Thomas Barnett, Ben Saunders, Richard Alley and half a dozen others gave fantastic, memorable presentations. Plus, I didn’t have a single lunch or dinner that sucked because the conversation was lame. Very cool, and I hope to attend again.

I was deeply nervous about the talk I agreed to give on the last day of the conference. Most of my fellow speakers have multiple books published; several of them are known for making very good money on the speaking circuit. David Weinberger, who’s spoken at the conference previously, warned me that the quality level of presentations was uniformly high.

But my paranoia had less to do with my worthiness to share the stage with some very smart people than it did with the fact that I was giving the first big talk I’ve delivered since leaving Geekcorps. I gave a lame talk at Wizards of OS in Berlin because I basically gave my Geekcorps talk, mentioning only in passing that the organization basically didn’t exist anymore. So this was my first talk where I tried to cover both the past five years with Geekcorps and the work I’m doing now on media attention.

I was sufficiently nervous that I did something I’ve never done before – I wrote the whole damned talk out. There’s three good things this led to:

- I got to sleep the week before the conference.

- DavidW and my beloved Velveteen Rabbi got to read it over and reassure me.

- I’m now able to post my notes online. (They’re probably about three times as long as the talk – they’ll be useful for the next two hour gig someone hires me for.)

So yeah – it went pretty well, the bloggers seemed to like it, and people said nice things. (Thanks to David Polinchock, Buzz Brugerman, Alex and David for some of those nice things.)

ITConversations is posting audio of the talks, poco a poco – check out Barnett’s terrific talk and I’ll post the link to mine once it goes up. Thanks to everyone who made Pop!Tech such a good time.

BBC – one of the few globally-visible media sources which provides thorough coverage of African issues – has a regular feature, called “Have Your Say” which asks readers to comment on key issues. To the BBC’s great credit, they frequently pose Africa-focused questions.

A current question asks whether radio phone-in shows in Africa should be banned. The question explicitly alludes to an ongoing conversation in Ghana over whether talk radio should be, somehow, constrained, leading up to the December 2004 election. The National Committee for Civic Education is suggesting that, since there is no mechanism to prevent defamatory or incindiery speech on talk radio, statements made could lead towards violence.

This has evidently been a concern of the NCCE for some time. I heard rumors of a talk radio ban when I was last in town in June. I raised the issue in a conversation with the deputy minister of communication, but couldn’t get a clear answer on whether the ministry was or was not concerned about the issue.

In my opinion, talk radio in Ghana has been one of the most profound forces for positive change I’ve ever seen in a developing nation. When I lived in Accra in 1993-4, radio was a dead medium. You’d walk down a street in Accra and hear the same music coming from every single radio – it was oddly Orwellian. A year or two later, there was competition to GBC, and when I returned to the country in 1999, there were dozens of competing stations in Accra, including several dedicated to news and public affairs.

The importance of this became clear during the 2000 elections, when a number of my geeks in town reported that citizens used radio talk shows to help monitor polling places. When people saw violence, or people being prevented from voting, they used cellphones to call radio stations. The stations aired the reports, which precented the police from being able to claim they hadn’t heard about possible voting rights violations. So the police showed up and ensured people could vote. The result: a free and fair election in which the opposition won. Which, historically speaking, is quite amazing for an African nation.

Every morning I’m in Ghana, taking a cab from wherever I’m staying to my first meeting, my cab or trotro driver is listening to talk radio. Usually, there’s a minister or parliamentarian on the program, taking calls from the general public. My Ghanaian friends marvel when I tell them that this rarely happens in the US – they’ve quickly grown to expect the right to ask their politicians hard questions and get immediate, public answers.

There’s an interesting diversity of views expressed on this subject on the BBC site. Many responders point out that there’s a scarcity of free speech in many developing nations and that radio talk shows should be encouraged. A few readers point out that the people able to afford to call into talk shows are usually wealthier than average and therefore there’s a skew to the dialog that takes place. I don’t see a lot of concern that allowing free political speech in Ghana is going to lead to widespread violence, though. Let’s hope that the Kufour government continues to trust its citizens and allows open discussion up to and throught the elections.

I’m at Pop!Tech this weekend, a conference I’ve wanted to attend for years, but only made it to this year. It’s a great venue for for a conference – a beautiful opera house in a lovely coastal Maine town. The audience is very bright, the speaker roster is excellent and the presentations have ranged from pretty good to downright terrific.

(Since I’m speaking on Saturday, that’s a little intimidating.)

Lots of folks are blogging the conference, including the always eloquent David Weinberger, and I’m generally a better listener when I’m not blogging.

But Thomas Barnett’s presentation really blew my head back, so I’m paying less attention to the current presentation and sharing my notes.

Dr. Barnett is a professor at the US Navy War College, a prolific blogger and a Green Bay Packers fan (a big plus in my book). He’s sharp, snarky, a brutal realist and gives a hell of a talk – I’ll be buying his book presently.

His talk, which he shortened from 3 hours to 30 minutes:

During the cold war, the US focused forces in Berlin, Northeast Asia (Korea and Japan). Our goal was containment: boxing the Soviets in.

In the early 1970s, the fall of the Portuguese empire helped shift focus to Southeast Asia. European detante helped us pay less attention to the Soviets in Europe, and pay more attention to Soviet influence elsewhere. The “Reagan Doctrine” had the US match direct aid to socialist governments with the cheaper model of selling arms to rebels.

In the mid 1970s, two events forced a shift of focus to the middle east: the 1973 oil crisis, and the fall of the Shah of Iran. By the 1980s, US military attention was strongly focused on the Middle East. And subsequent to 1980, 50% of the US military’s crisis response – 70% of the response using US Marines – has been in the middle east.

The Bush regime accused President Clinton of overfocusing on economics and underfocusing on security, and started his administration with a strong focus: China. Not coincidentally, this is also the power American businesses saw as most threatening…

A country participates in globalization if:

- it’s capable of coping with global connectivity and content flow. (An example of a country that isn’t coping: Iran, which freaked out when Barbie dolls started getting imported. Evidently, the mullahs introduced a rival doll clad head to toe in black… she didn’t sell as well, so a Barbie fatwah of sorts was issued…)

- it’s ruleset is harmonized with the global ruleset. This sounds like Americanization, but that’s more because America is the world’s oldest economic union, not the EU

The direction of a nation’s change is more important than the magnitude. China, despite being 30% marxist leninist, and 70% The Sopranos, is moving in the right direction even if the magnitude is not great.

Who’s global and who isn’t:

Global:

the NAFTA countries

the EU

Russia under Putin

coastal China

Argentina Brazil Chile

India, at least in parts

South Africa

These nations total roughly 4 billion people. Barnett refers to these as “the core group”

Everyone else is the “gap”, which represents security threats for the US: almost all of Africa, the middle east, most of Latin America, Central Asia, Indonesia and the pacific island states. These countries represent 90% of the global security threat.

Mutually assured destruction works in the world of globalization. For the rest of the world: preemption.

There’s a bilateral agreement the US government has signed with 93 nations that states that, should the US invade preemtively, the country won’t sue the US in the International Criminal Court. 91 of these agreements are with countries in the “gap”. These countries have “signed up for the service”.

Looking at the world map, where it’s thick with globalization and connectivity, we’ve got peace. Where it’s thin, that’s where we have genocide, terror and rape as a weapon of war.

US military theory pre 9/11 was an “area denial, anti access asymmetric strategies” – let’s deploy so many forces to an area that it would be suicidal for the enemy to fight us there. Clearly, this is a strategy that only works for military on military strategies – it doesn’t work against insurgencies. Saddam’s army ran away – that’s how you find yourself in a condition of “catastrophic success”.

We’re good at the start of a conflict, but aren’t so good at the second half of the game. we can access any conventional combat space with very few casualties. What we’re bad at is creating the peace space, turning things over to the UN and State Department.

To move from battle space to transition space and peace space, you need proportional force, not overwhelming force. Rather than projecting power, it’s about staying power. We’re mostly hat, not much cowboy in the transition phase. That’s why India wouldn’t come in and help us in Iraq – they didn’t believe we’d be able manage trannsition.

How do we establish a ruleset for politically bankrupt states? A proposed model:

Treat the UN security counsel as the “grand jury”. Incapable of doing anything other than “severely warning”, condeming or abhoring. Then there’s the US-enabled war-fighting force. And then way downstream is the International Criminal Court, who will happily prosecute things once all the fighting is done.

So we need to fill the gaps – use the g-20 nations as a “functioning executive”, who decide when a UNSC indictment becomes a US-supported invasion. After the invasion and before the criminal court, there needs to be a functioning peacekeeping force.

The US has basically no interest in building this force. The current buzzword in the military is “4th generation war – force transformation”, which is designed to allow us to fight major wars in China, Taiwan, Russia, etc. There’s another class of operations – “military operations other than war” – crisis and peacekeeping operations which is official military code for “we don’t want to do this”.

The military sold us one model of war – the 4th generation model – but we actually have to fight using an entirely different mode – the MOOTW model.

—

I don’t buy everything Barnett has put forward – I think he glosses over the distinctions between failed, failing and developing states, and I think it’s a mistake to group together states where ideology is a major motivator for unrest as opposed to states where poverty is the main motivator. But the analysis that we should be worried about the developing world, rather than traditional powers is right on. And the realization that peacekeeping is the main thing we need the US military to do is a critical one. It’s very refreshing – and more than a little chilling – to hear a military expert speak so frankly about these issues.

The reaction from the crowd was somewhat mixed. While Barnett got the loudest applause from the audience of any speaker, he also rubbed several listeners the wrong way, who heard his bluntness about the use of force as dehumanizing and amoral. That’s not the impression I came away with – I felt like the bluntness was a function of Barnett’s history of giving this talk to military audiences, rather than the globalist do-gooders hanging out here in Camden.

From the shameless self-promotion division, three links to projects I’m involved with online:

WorldChanging – Another World is Here is one of my very favorite web communities. It’s an ongoing conversation on social, environmental and political change around the world. I was just asked to join the extraordinary community of authors there and have just posted my first piece, on Human Rights Watch and blogging – please check it out, as Human Rights Watch is looking for bloggers and wikipedia authors who can help them figure out how to get information from their reports into the blogosphere and then into the media.

Jon Lebowsky and Mitch Ratcliffe have spent the past year assembling a book called “Extreme Democracy”. My chapter – posted here, benefitted greatly from folks commenting on this blog and on Joi Ito’s blog. So thanks…

And my Norwegian architect friends just let me know that the English description of their DE-tro-IT project is available online. They give me far too much credit for providing a framework for their work, but I’m thrilled to have a chance to collaborate with cool people I’ve never met.

Okay, enough egoblogging. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

If you’ve not yet sent electronic Ramadan greetings to your wired Muslim friends, allow me to suggest Eid Mubarak’s flash greetings from President Bush to Muslims worldwide.

Post (temporarily) removed.

Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government held a forum on Darfur tonight, focusing on the critical question, “What can we do?” It featured some of the key figures who’ve helped make the world aware of the catastrophe taking place in western Sudan: Romeo Dallaire, Samantha Power, John Pendergast and Omer Ismail, and was hosted by Michael Ignatieff. I arrived ten minutes late and the room was packed to the rafters, as was the classroom being used for overflow.

Dallaire, the Canadian general who worked so hard to bring global attention to the genocide in Rwanda while his outmanned force tried to protect fleeing Tutsis, spoke first, drawing parallels between the situations in Rwanda a decade ago and the current situation in Darfur. His basic parallel – lots of talk, and very little action. He outlined two possible intervention scenarios for Darfur:

- If we really wanted to intervene – 44,000 troops, lots of backup, including helicopters, air and land support. The area is enormous, and there’s 9 major camps scattered over the area the size of France. At minimum, 24,000 troops are necessary to protect and maintain the delivery of humanitarian aid.

- If we wanted to cooperate with the Khartoum government, and trust that they were trying to disarm the Janjawid, we would need 10,000 troops, with a bare minimum of 4,000. This would allow us to protect observers, but wouldn’t protect Darfurians unless the government were extremely cooperative.

What Dallaire believes should have happened five months ago is meaningful intervenion by the UN. He points out that the UN deployed 17,500 troops to Sierra Leone, and 19,000 to Liberia, and that a global force deployed 65,000 to Yugoslavia. But, at the moment the AU has 300 troops on the ground to protect observers, and are scaling up to deploy 3,500 Rwandan and Nigerian troops.

Dallaire strongly believes that the US, French and British cannot deploy troops without facing criticism over colonialism or imperialism; he believes it’s critical for African nations to intervene with extensive financial and logistic support from world powers.

Samantha Power, whose Pulitzer-winning A Problem From Hell is required reading for anyone interested in the US’s (in)actions on a global stage, explained the success of Khartoum’s PR efforts. She argues that Khartoum has done a masterful job of framing the question in terms of an unruly rebel group who need to be controlled, rather than acknowledging a government ethnic cleansing campaign that happens to use a proxy army.

Power has travelled to Sudan recently and found the Khartoum regime very accessible and willing to talk. She described travelling around the country on Sudanese government helicopters with one of the leaders of the Janjawid, listening to “Arabd and nonarabs sing kumbaya for my benefit” in Potemkin villages set up to deceive journalists. She saw this as a government effort to draw a (false) distinction between the “rabble” Janjawid the government promises to stop and the forces they’re using as a proxy army.

She pointed out a simple thing humanitarian aid agencies could do to dramatically improve the situation Darfurian refugees face: provide firewood or kerosene to allow women to cook the food they’re receiving from aid agencies. Women wander increasingly far from the camps to find firewood. They often encounter Janjawid, who patrol the perimiter of the camps. Systemic rape as a tool of ethnic cleansing is a major part of the conflict in Darfur, so providing adequate fuel to women in the camps becomes a way to prevent brutal gang rapes.

One might wonder why the 300 troops in Darfur aren’t able to monitor the camps and protect the women within them. Power points out that the 300 observers are spread over 6 sites. Since they’re on 3 shifts, and not all observers carry weapons, there’s 12 or so monitors on duty at each camp, six of whom patrol the perimiter. It’s unsurprising they’re unable to provide meaningful security. Power urges that the next troops be deployed as a large “reaction force”, rather than scattered throughout the country.

Former Clinton official, and advisor to International Crisis Group, John Prendergast was asked how one gets the Khartoum regime to respond to outside pressure. He explained that the regime is not the Taliban, nor Saddam Hussein – they’re pragmatists and they’ll respond when they believe there’s political will behind rhetoric.

Prendergast pointed to pressure put on Sudan in the 1990s – in response to Sudan’s hosting of Osama Bin Ladn, the US named Sudan as a state sponsor of terror, imposed strong unilateral sanctions and pushed for UN security council sanctions. For the most part, those efforts worked – Sudan expelled Bin Ladn and took meaningful steps to oust terrorists.

There have been eighteen months of ethnic cleansing, a situation Prendergast says is unrivaled since Rwanda… and not one punative messure. In fact, the US has sanctioned the Darfur rebels, not the Khartoum government! He alleges that Powell abused the word “genocide”, by using the term to describe the situation in Darfur, then sending a diplomat to Khartoum to tell people that the term “genocide” is in reaction to “domestic concerns” in the US. This action, Prendergast argues, cut the legs out from the UN Genocide Convention.

Omer Ismail, a leading Sudanese intellectual and founder of the Sudan Democratic Forum, explained that the Khartoum government was experienced as tagging any opposition as colonialists, imperialists and enemies of Islam. They’ve turned debate about survival of their regime into a debate about the perpetuation of Islam in the world.

Ismali also pointed out that the government is extremely experienced at dragging its feet, poinging out that it took 22 months to progress from the Naivasha peace talks to actual protocols between the North and South. During those 22 months, the government pumped as much oil as possible from the South (before it lost control of the oil fields) and deployed troops to Darfur. Ismail suggests we can expect Khartoum to move as slowly as possible, because it knows the international community is afraid to push too hard, or all the concessions won regarding the North/South conflict could evaporate.

As the discussion turned towards concrete steps individuals and nations could take, Power suggested that we can seize the initiative, using East Timor as a model.

The Indonesian government agreed to a referendum, and the Timorese people asked for independence. Indonesia sic’d their militia on East Timor and we watched 2000 people being die as almost every structure on the island was burned down. At some point, the world community remebered the pledge “no more Rwandas”, and a UN-led force of 23,000 was permitted in by the Indonesian government. Power feels that it was critical that the force was a UN force and that there was a perception of international unity behind the intervention.

Prendergast agreed that an intervention must be led by the UN, headed by the secretary general. We also need a clear sense of what our objectives are in Sudan. Is it a peace deal? Security for displaced people? It needs to be about a reversal of what’s gone on – bring refugees back to their homes. Protecting the ceasefire is meaningless – the ceasefire isn’t preventing men from being killed and women from being raped.

Ismail pointed out that everyone is aware that the US is afraid to intervene because of Iraq – we’re scared of quagmires. But since the US took the lead in calling it genocide, “you better put your wallet or your gun where your mouth is”.

He argues that we need to negotiate our way into getting the UN involved. Russia and China are not interested in intervening – Russia has arms deals with the government, and China has oil deal. Furthermore, both are concerned that intervention opens the way for international intervention in Chechnya, Tibet or Taiwan.

In the meantime, we are setting up the AU to fail. If we don’t give them funding and logistical support, including satellite imagery, command support, we’re guaranteeing their failure and their elimination as a global stabilizing force.

Both Ismail and Dallaire pointed to the role of the media. Ismail pointed out that so little news from Africa makes the nightly newscast that it’s hard for Americans and Europeans to understand what’s going on. Dallaire holds the media to task for not confronting Powell with the contradiction of a genocide that we’re not preventing.

Power fielded a thorny question from a local Green party representative, who asked how the US could hope to intervene given our bloody oppression of native peoples and imperialist actions in Iraq. She quipped, “The good news is the US isn’t getting involved in Darfur, doesn’t want to be there, and doesn’t care about the situation,” before offering the serious observation that our “bloody hands” shouldn’t prevent us from doing what’s right regarding current events.

She went on to suggest that Americans pressure our legislators, who will pressure the executive. But she believes the UN is really falling down on the job. If they were serious, we’d see a ministerial conference of the middle powers – countries like Japan, Germany and others who could afford to intervene. She would prefer to see an African leader like Obasanjo or Mbeki join with Annan to push for UN involvement.

Any misrepresentations or misquotes are my fault – there was an enormous amount to absorb in a short time. I’ll post a link to the webcast once I can find one online. Many thanks to Jim Moore and Passion of the Present for making me aware that this discussion was taking place.

The last two days in Cambridge have been unusually warm – one of the “Indian Summers” we tend to get here in New England before the snow comes – and I’ve been drinking lots of bottled water. Yesterday, in the law class Berkman friends and I are team teaching, I noticed that the water brand of choice appears to be Fiji artesian well water. (A walk through a couple of Cambridge convenience stores last night reveals that this isn’t just a Harvard phenomenon – it’s stocked in two other stores on Mass. Avenue.)

I assumed that “Fiji” was the clever choice of a marketing department intent on associating bottled water with a tropical island. It’s not. According to the label, the water is a product of Fiji, specifically, of the Yagara Valley of Viti Levu, one of the islands that makes up Fiji. The water bottling operation appears to be the brainchild of a Canadian entrepreneur, David Gilmour, who bought the Fijian island of Wakaya in 1972, later building an “exclusive ecologically sensitive luxury resort” on the island.

Gilmour was struck by the absurdity of importing bottled water from Europe or the US to Fiji, and started bottling water on the island. The bottling plant is now a 110,000 sqft facility, run by an Australian, and supported by marketing operations in the US. The plant has been exporting bottled water to the US since 1997.

So here’s the thing: Fiji is really, really far away. It’s 1,500 miles from Australia, about 5,000 miles from Los Angeles, which, in turn, is 2,606 air miles from Cambridge. And while you wouldn’t want to drink the water from the Charles River, there’s really no shortage of excellent artesian well water in Massachusetts. One of my neighbors, Cricket Creek Farm in Williamstown, is planning on starting a bottled water business in the next year or so. Doesn’t it seem logical that bottled water from New England would be cheaper than that bottled water from halfway around the world?

It’s certainly what I thought. But hey, as so often happens, I’m completely wrong.

Turns out that overseas shipping costs are so unbelievably cheap, they strain credulity. The Agricultural Marketing Service of the US Department of Agriculture maintains very useful data on domestic and international transport costs. The quarterly Ocean Rate Bulletin provides costs for shipping a 40′ container of animal feed, poultry, onions, hay or 13 other agricultural commodities from California ports to a number of major Asian ports. While there’s no available rate for shipping bottled water, the rates for 40′ containers of wine (mmm, 40-foot container of wine…) to various ports range from $920 to $3,770, averaging around $1800.

How much water or wine is in a 40 foot container? According to the fine folks at Export911, 40 foot containers generally carry 24,000kg or less. Since water conveniently weighs a kilo per liter, that’s 24,000 bottles for $1,800, or $0.075 per bottle. Assume that Suva gets less container traffic than Hong Kong and that I’m not considering packaging weight, and the price might rise to the princely sum of a dime a bottle.

Our friends at USDA have some info on domestic shipping costs as well, via the Refrigerated Transport Quarterly. In 2003, it cost between $2423 and $4900 to ship a containerload of mixed vegetables from Southern California to New York. Here, we’d expect rates to be a bit lower, as our bottled water doesn’t require refrigeration. But even at the low end of this range, domestic transport costs exceed international ones.

Assume it takes $2000 to get our water from Suva to Long Beach and other $3000 from Long Beach to Cambridge. That 8,000 mile journey costs about $0.21 per bottle, about a fifth of the water’s retail price. In other words, while it’s probably the major component of product cost, outpacing the cost of packaging and labor, it’s quite possible to make a profit shipping water from Fiji to Boston.

This blows my mind. I’m used to the miracles of digital globalization, the ability to send bits from one end of the world to the other in microseconds for fractions of a penny. But the ability to send atoms halfway across the planet for $0.10 to $0.25 a kilo is the miracle that actually makes globalization possible… the good and bad sides of it. If it weren’t so cheap to ship Asian televisions to the US, it’s possible that the US would still produce consumer electronics domestically. But they’d likely cost more, and wages would need to rise for consumers to maintain their standards of living. In other words, high transport costs are a form of trade barrier – lower the barrier and new types of trade become profitable.

A double bottom line analysis – considering environmental as well as financial implications – raises some disturbing questions. With shrinking oil supplies and oil at $50+ a barrel, how long can we sustain a world where it’s economically feasible to ship drinking water 8,000 miles? The triple bottom line – economic, environmental and social – opens up yet more issues. What happens when Fijian water has an easy time making it into the US but Fijian businessmen – or immigrants – don’t? Why do we have Fijian water on our store shelves, but no Fijian films, music, food or beer?

It’s just another surreal day in 21st century America. And hey, the water’s delicious.

Atanu Day is writing a wickedly funny series on his blog, Deesha, called “You might be a third world country if…” His most recent entry, on indoctrinating Indian children to oppose corruption, is particularly worth a read:

One day you hear that a bunch of children have accepted kickbacks to the tune of hundreds of mllions of dollars in military equipment purchase.