If it’s Thursday, this must be Rome. And this conference must be the Web2 for Development conference, hosted at the FAO in Rome. My impressions of Rome thus far come exclusively from what I can see of the city from the roof of the FAO complex. According to a friend at lunch, this building is where Mussolini planned his colonization of Africa – there’s more than a few bad jokes about whether FAO is continuing that work.

One of my pet peeves is speakers who show up only for their session at a conference, parachuting in and giving a talk without understanding the tone of a meeting, the speeches that have come before, the context for their words. Today, I’m that jerk. Given the vastness of the topic – how does the world of web 2.0 intersect with the world of international development – I’m left guessing at how to pitch the remarks.

The talk went well, I think, judging from good questions after the session and throughout the day. Ismael Peña-López, who blogs brilliantly on ICT4D at ICTlogy has good notes on the talk, and Tobias from Kabissa has reflections on my suggestion that interactive voice response systems should be a serious priority for international development. You can check out the slides here if you’d like.

I got to catch less of the rest of the conference than I had hoped – I did several interviews, and missed a couple of talks. But some of the highlights from what I caught:

- Thomas Metz from the International Rice Research Institute, who’s led implementation of two major web2.0 projects for his group, observes that there’s a potential culture clash between the behaviors web 2.0 encourages and the hierarchies that tend to characterize bureacratic organizations and research centers. In organizations where every public utterance needs to be scrutinized by a PR department, it’s really hard to encourage open collaboration via a tool like a wiki – Metz regrets that one of his projects was built in a closed, password-protected environment, but it was the only way to make everyone comfortable with the process.

- Kwame Ahiabenu from the International Institute for ICT in Journalism (PenPlusBytes) in Accra, Ghana, makes a persuasive case for the importance of basic tools in online education. His team offers free online trainings for journalists on how to incorporate IT into their journalistic practice and better use IT tools for reporting. The courses are offered via email, and while they encourage the use of fairly complex online tools, they’re accessible to anyone who can participate in the email lists, which helps explain their popularity with users throughout Africa, and as far away as Bangladesh and Australia.

Two overall impressions:

- There’s a great deal of enthusiasm for the tools of web 2.0, but I worry that people are embracing tools because they’re worried about falling behind.

- Those of us who have been working in ICT for development for a while may – or perhaps should – be starting to feel like it’s “put up or shut up” time for these tools. We need to get beyond discussions of how these tools might benefit people and get closer towards ensuring they do benefit people.

More reflections when I’m not so sleep deprived, I suspect.

• Map of economic protests – ALTSEAN Burma
  Annotated map of Burma, listing fall 2007 protests with arrest information
  (tags: burma myanmar mashup GIS mapping maps)

I’m at the Picnic conference in Amsterdam, not long enough to see my friends who are speaking here (David Weinberger, danah boyd, Cory Doctorow and others), but I’m enjoying a couple of hours and some excellent talks, before I wander off to the Hague and then to Rome. A series of brief talks on Alternate Reality Games is quite fascinating.

Greg Trefry from Gamelab, a very cool NYC-based designer of lightweight games, talks about his work on Case of the Coveted Bottle“>”The Case of the Coveted Bottle”. The game was a promotion for Sarah Jessica Parker’s new perfume – Greg freely admits that he’s a corporate whore, and expresses his willingness to promote J.Lo’s fragrance if she’ll just call him.

The challenge of a game like this is making it possible for reticent audiences as well as rabid fans to participate. The team set up the project with a puzzle a week, introduced by a new character – these puzzles often appeared on the public web, usually introduced via a character’s MySpace page. Some problems involved finding a series of images on Flickr and making a sentence from the tags on the images; another involved mapping addresses on a Google map and discovering the patern that emerged. The puzzles were designed to be fairly easy to complete, but Greg was surprised that devoted fans solved some problems in less than an hour.

The game needs to be more than a puzzle, he tells us, “or they might as well be doing sudoku.” Instead of writing a narrative thoroughly, Greg found himself writing characters and scenarios and allowing the players to help build out the storyline via the forums and message boards.

Greg is considering future projects that invite people to play with archival content from New York City libraries, looking at old photos and taking photos of the current locations. This is the sort of game that might work well within the context of Come Out and Play, a festival that encourages people to play games using the streets of a city as the gameboard. Amsterdam will host Come Out and Play this weekend.

One of the games that people will be playing at Picnic is called “Can You See Me Now?” It’s the project of Blast Theory, represented here by Dickie Eton, who explains that the game pits players in a virtual one against those in the physical world. Players from around the world can move around in a virtual city. They are chased by “street runners” who are armed with GPS-equipped PDAs. The runners win when they come within five meters of a virtual player – who is visible on the PDA, but not in the real world – and they document their captures with digital photos of the empty space in the real world.

Dickie explains that players quickly figure out strategies that take advantage of the constraints of the other space – virtual players try to force runners to climb steep hills or to pass through heavily trafficked areas, which slow them down in real life, but are just as permeable in virtual space as any other area. Runners, in turn, learn to force the virtual players out of back alleys and into wide-oped spaces, where GPS works better.

Tom Kenyon presents a pilot project he and colleagues have built at the BBC which brings together virtual and real spaces in a fascinating way. Working within the “creative futures” mandate of the BBC – a project to expand the BBC’s reach into web and mobile media, as well as TV and radio – he asked the question, “How do we bring Travel 2.0 to TV?” He wanted to build something radically different from BBC’s “The Holiday Show”, which shows expensive package tours to exotic parts of the world – these shows are a dream job for presenters, but aren’t much fun for the audience, and the show was cancelled. He contrasts this to Trip Advisor, a user-generated website that provides advice for every budget, peer to peer, and has been hugely successful.

Tom offers the questions he and his co-creators asked: “What if the presenters didn’t know where they were going? What if the community controlled their trip? What if we journeyed with the presenters instead of having them lecture to us?”

The result is a show that takes two presenters – Tom Price and Olivia Lee – through the great cities of Europe, guided by advice from a community of viewers, who can view their progress through the cities in realtime through geotracing. The show functions as a competition – each host has to have certain experiences – a fashion experience, a food experience, an experience of being pampered – which are recommended by the viewers. The loser in each round has to play backpacker in the next round, taking recommendations for cheap places to eat and sleep – the winner gets to travel in luxury.

The reason for the format is the dictates of television – a show has to be somewhat predictable, has to follow a model that’s replicable show to show. But the innovative bits of the program have gained the most interest – viewers describe the experience of watching Tom and Olivia move through the map of Amsterdam as like “watching the Marauder’s Map in Harry Potter”. Tom speculates that the most important aspect of the show will be the long tail – the ability for users to follow the travel guide online and replicate the travels of the hosts when they visit the Netherlands. Unfortunately, the show hasn’t made it past pilot yet, and Tom doesn’t seem optimistic that you’ll be able to tune in any time soon. Still, it’s a great idea, and I predict someone will build a travel show in this way soon.

Picnic looks really fantastic. The venue is a remarkable complex of brick industrial buildings – I want to come back at some point when they’re not filled with geeky revelers and photograph them. There’s an amazingly high concentration of smart people at the event – in the three hours I hung out, I saw at least a dozen of my favorite people, including Berkman friends, Global Voices co-conspirators, and half a dozen card-carrying members of the “moving circus”, Yossi Vardi’s term for weird global network of people who spend their lives appearing at these sorts of conferences.

But I’m heading in a different direction today, first to the Hague to talk to one of Global Voices’ key funders, then to Rome to give a talk at the Web 2 for Dev conference at the FAO, where I’mm have fun hanging out with an entirely different crew of friends. (One day, I’ll be able to clone myself and attend both. Or I’ll make a radical change in my lifestyle and attend neither, so I can spend more time at home, growing blueberries.)

• Cyberactivism 101: notes on emerging distributed advocacy in the case of Usmanov vs Murray | Daily EM
  Evgeny looks at the Usmanov vs Murray controversy, which pits an Uzbek billionare against a former British diplomat in an online free speech case and offers suggestions for blogers whose content is likely to be controversial
  (tags: freespeech blogs blogging censorship UK uzbekistan)
• Alisher Usmanov: Alisher Usmanov, potential Arsenal chairman, is a Vicious Thug, Criminal, Racketeer, Heroin Trafficker and Accused Rapist
  Craig Murray’s post accusing Alisher Usmanov of a criminal past
  (tags: blogs freespeech censorship uzbekistan football UK)
• BBC NEWS | Technology | ‘$100 laptop’ to sell to public
  You’ll be able to buy an OLPC XO machine for $400, which also provides one machine for developing nations. But some are seeing this as a sign that nations are slow to step up and purchase machines for their educational systems
  (tags: activism computer olpc technology developingworld)
• Buzztracker – World News – 2007-09-24
  Lovely visualization of what global cities are hot in world news
  (tags: GAP cities geek visualization media)

The One Laptop Per Child team has responded to a good idea offered by countless bloggers, wellwishers, critics and journalists: sell the XO-1 laptop to the general public in a way that helps subsidize uptake of the device in the developing world. Nicholas Negroponte has announced a program called “Give 1 Get 1″, which will allow people in the US and Canada to pay $399, and receive a laptop. The laptop costs approximately $188 to produce, which means that the remainin $211 subsidizes the purchase of an additional laptop for use in the developing world. The laptops go on sale at xogiving.org on November 12th and will be available for only two weeks. (I would recommend signing up for an email reminder on the site if you’re planning on buying one. Walter Bender is quoted on the BBC as saying that the first 25,000 would ship before the end of the year – I suspect this may mean that there’s an anticipated first run of 25,000 and that anyone not in that first group might have a long wait.)

It will be very interesting to see what the market for the laptop is like in the US and Canada. I’m buying one – obviously – because I’ve been fascinated by the project from its inception and look forward to having a device to play with, customize and get to know. I suspect it will occupy a place of honor in our living room and serve as the “lender laptop” to houseguests who show up without one. But I wonder whether there’s much of a market outside the hardcore geek market. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, while the machine is an amazingly slick piece of engineering, it’s not really scaled for grownups, and most business users would be better served with a used laptop than adapting to the OLPC’s itty-bitty keyboard.

What may be most important about this project is the fact that it’s going to put laptops into the hands of the watchers and critics of the project, some of whom are getting downright cranky. My friend Cyrus Farivar has a deliciously nasty article on Slate today with the memorable subtitle: “The latest sign that Nicholas Negroponte’s cheapo-computer scheme will never work.” He points out that the price of the laptop has increased from $100 to $188, moving in the wrong direction to achieve $50 by 2010, and that Negroponte has adjusted the number of laptops a country needs to purchase to participate from a million to a quarter million and now down to 100,000. Despite these reductions, “How many countries have signed up now? Still zero.”

The New York Times is reporting that there are firm commitments by at least four nations to purchase the machines:

Peru, for example, will buy and distribute 250,000 of the laptops over the next year — many of them allocated for remote rural areas. Mexico and Uruguay, Mr. Negroponte noted, have made firm commitments. In a sponsorship program, the government of Italy has agreed to purchase 50,000 laptops for distribution in Ethiopia.

But the article goes on to mention that large orders from Brazil and Nigeria have yet to materialize. And Negroponte is upfront about the frustrations in bringing the project to scale:

“I have to some degree underestimated the difference between shaking the hand of a head of state and having a check written,” said Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the nonprofit project. “And yes, it has been a disappointment.”

It’s worth drilling into that comment. Negroponte has been amazingly effective in selling the vision of a laptop for every child in the world. He hasn’t been very effective in selling the actual laptops.

I don’t think this is because the laptops are disappointing, but because those sales tasks are very different. It’s not hard to convince a nation’s leader that he or she wants citizens to be able to compete in a global information economy, invoking visions of Nigeria turning into an oursourcing center like India. But it’s much harder to get a Minister of Education to commit a huge percentage of an annual education budget to a project that hasn’t been implemented widely anywhere in the North. If I were an education minister, I’d have hard questions about whether my teachers would use these devices, how I’d train them to use them, how we’d develop locally approriate curiculum for them, and so on.

Some nations are interested in the project, but have been chased off by the massive investment required to participate – lowering the minimum purchase will help, but so will putting thousands of machines into the hands of developers, enthusiasts and educators, who may take some of the steps neccesary to demonstrate how the XO-1 can be a useful tool in and out of the classroom.

I think Cyrus is wrong – and I think he knows he’s wrong – when he harps on the price point of the device. Everyone who follows consumer electronics understands that devices drop in price when they’re produced in volume. With larger orders, we’d expect the XO-1 price to drop substantially. Also, as a commenter on Slashdot observed, we’ve seen the value of the US dollar drop sharply since the announcement of the project – that combined with increases in the costs of some raw materials might help explain why the current salesprice of the laptop is higher than promised.

Wayan Vota, another friend and critic of the laptop project, is more sympathetic in his assesment of the announcement:

But rather than kick a man when he’s down, I’d like to say “Thank you” to Dr. Negroponte. He’s surprised me by actually admitting his mistake; I didn’t think his expansive ego would’ve permitted it. In addition, he is trying to correct his mistake and save OLPC production.

See, the OLPC USA sales plan shows failure in Negroponte led sales plan, not the overall idea. The developing world still wants XO laptops, and wants to buy “$100 laptops”, just not in million-unit blocks with no maintenance plan.

I think that’s right on. I think that making it possible for countries to experiment with OLPC, learning how to train teachers and develop content before making commitments in the hundreds of millions of dollars is a smart way to go. And I think there’s a bit of schadenfreude taking place in the geek community when Negroponte gets beaten up. He’s done an astounding job of getting people excited about this device, and until people have the device in their hands – and more importantly, in the hands of the children who are supposed to benefit from it – some people are going to be upset about promises outpacing reality.

I’m at home for a few more hours before departing on a trip that involves Boston, Amsterdam, the Hague and Rome in five days, including two or three talks, several meetings and, I hope, some excellent food. While this trip takes me to the end of September, a month that’s featured an average of one public speech every five days, it begins phase two of autumnal insanity, a six week period in which I travel to and from Europe four times.

As I rapidly descend into madness, it’s reassuring to look back on my blog and discover that I’ve been here before. I started writing a story about the artist Jenny Holzer and how she managed to miss the entirety of autumn in the Berkshires and realized that I’d told the story here before, a year ago, as I wrestled with a crazy schedule last fall. Turning to my colleagues is reassuring as well: danah appear to be embarking on a conference season that’s even more action-packed than mine, with 13 talks in 12 cities in three countries. She, wisely, is announcing a period of hibernation after this speaking binge to finish her dissertation. That notion makes me want to enter a PhD program just so I could have an excuse to stop travelling for a bit.

I realize posts like this one generate no sympathy whatsoever. I’m incredibly lucky to have an employer that seems equally happy to see me in the office or read my blog from the road, and an unbelievably supportive, long-suffering spouse who not only tolerates my long absences, but encourages me to take advantage of the opportunities I’ve been lucky enough to stumble into. I write this in part as explanation for why I haven’t blogged some of the stories I’d love to report and written about others only cursorily. And as a reminder for myself, because as much as I’d like to change, there’s a good chance that I’ll be feeling this crazed again some point in the future and be grateful for the reminder that I’ve felt this way before and survived.

• Zambia Conservation: Think again America…
  Striking post from a Zambian conservationist – notes that people in Zambia are using donated mosquito nets to drag-fish local rivers with disastrous consequences.
  (tags: zambia africa environment malaria)
• Guest Editorial: The Congolese Dilemma ‽
  Excellent editorial on curent situations in the DRC, including frustration that DRC’s natural resources have not led to prosperity, and that the situation in eastern DRC gets so little international attention.
  (tags: drc africa attention GAP)

I spoke last evening at MIT’s Communications Forum on a panel titled “What is Civic Media?” (One of the questions I’m hoped to have answered is whether what we call citizen journalism at Harvard is what they call civic media on the other side of town.) My copanelists are Beth Noveck, Henry Jenkins and Chris Csikszentmihalyi , and we gave a pointillistic impression of the world of civic media.

Henry and Chris are two of three principal investigators of the newly founded Center for Future Civic Media, funded through generous support of the Knight Foundation as part of the same grants series that supports Rising Voices, the Global Voices outreach project. Leading off the evening, Henry quickly dispells my fears about a confusion between civic media and citizen journalism, offering a very broad definition of civic media: “Any use of any medium which fosters civic engagement.” He defines a “medium” as more than just a technology, but “a communication technology and the social protocols around its use.”

To illustrate, Henry offers two photos, one of a group of men reading a newspaper on a streetcorner together in the 1930s, and another, contemporary photo of young Japanese women taking photos of something offscreen. The first clearly looks like an example of civic engagement – it’s people interacting with journalism, talking about civic issues. The second might or might not be civic engagement – it has a great deal to do with what the girls are photographing and what they’re planning on doing with the photos.

These images raise the question: “What does democracy look like?” In American iconography, we tend to use images of colonial America and the Founding Fathers to illustrate democracy, or images from the 1930s: Norman Rockwell, Frank Capra. “Contemporary images of democracy are almost always retro,” he argues, which raises the question, “How do we reinvent the set of images of democracy?”

In Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” – a text that’s been offered to frame our conversations about civic media – a retro image of a 1950s bowling league is offered as an exemplar of civic engagement. We meet to go bowling, but we have conversations and engagement that help strengthen us as a community. This contrasts with television, which makes us more solitary and less engaged. Henry accepts the first part of the argument – television does lead to privatization, a move of entertainment to the home – but people do build communities around television. “We can’t just look at the technology – we need to look at how it’s used. If his example of civic engagement is the bowling league, people are meeting for entertainment, not to exchange news content.”

Henry offers some pictures of high-end “home television entertainment complexes”, specialized rooms designed for television viewing. All include more seats than are neccesary for the nuclear family, implying that the use of this space is for inviting friends and neighbors over. We may see computers as isolating and as a solitary medium, but what are we to make of guild behavior in World of Warcraft – he shows us a guild posing for a group photo. “Whatever they’re doing, they’re not bowling alone.”

Cornell professor Benedict Anderson posits the idea of “imagined communities”, the group of people we imagine to be connected to us through a shared identity or a shared piece of media. The London Times created a social connection throughout much of the British Empire, allowing readers to be engaged in a type of conversation. These are imagined communities, since we’d never meet all the members of the British Empire, but they’re real and powerful. (He invokes Red Sox nation, the nebulous set of baseball fans currently sick to our collective imagined stomach that we’re only 1.5 games ahead of the Yankees.)

These imagined communities are vital in understanding diasporan identites. People living in the America in the Caribbean diaspora may be reading newspapers and listening to radio broadcasts from home. Perhaps they’re disengaged from local civic culture, but very tightly engaged with their home country’s civic life, despite geographic distance. We need to reconsider whether local civic engagement is the only important factor to track. Henry points out that the coffeehouses that Habermas romanticizes in his discussion of the public sphere were not just local centers of discourse – they tended to have themes, communities of interest as well. He offers as a parallel MeetUp, which builds physical gatherings that are both local and subject based.

“Is Flickr civic media?”, Henry asks. It can be. Australian researcher Jean Burgess writes about how people in Queensland have found each other through Flickr, realizing that people photographing the same scenes likely live nearby. This has turned into a social circle, where people meet up, take photos of locations in their cities and has led to a type of civic activism.

Video can be civic media, as recent outrage over the University of Florida taser incident has proven. But so can action figures – Henry reports a protest in Singapore against an anime distributor staged with five-inch tall action figures carrying signs. The protest was quickly shut down by authorities, demonstrating that different media can be equally threatening in a closed state.

Who’s producing civic media? The blogging community and citizen journalists, of course. But also high school journalists, Henry tells us, who sometimes serve the function of local newspapers. Ethnic newspapers become an important source of information in diaspora communities, and projects that bridge generations through media, like Silver Stringers, are worth studying as well.

“Democracy is kept alive by local rituals” – paegants, parades, festivals and gatherings. There’s a need for new social rituals to preserve democracy, a way to move democracy from something that’s a periodic event (voting) to one where it’s part of everyday life, not just a single decision, but a multiplicity of decisions.

Chris Csikszentmihalyi explains how the new Center for Future Civic Media intends to work on subjects like new social rituals for democracy. He points out that the $5 million in funding that the Center received comes from Jack Knight and his brothers, the founders of Knight Ridder newspapers. Knight Ridder provided an interesting form of wire service, a consortium of smaller local papers that worked together, sending their best journalists to assignments in Washington DC and overseas, but maintaining a commitment to circulating those journalists back home to their local newspapers.

Knight Ridder was acquired by McClatchy, which continued the Knight Ridder syndication service, which has been having difficulty keeping market share. Stories from McClatchy, Chris tells us, have been hard to sell because “they’ve been predicting what’s going on in Iraq so well that newspapers stopped buying their content.” He offers the paradox of “journalism so good that there’s no market for it.”

The difficulty of doing good journalism in a digital age is the reason for the Knight News Challenge, which is soliciting proposals for innovative new media projects. MIT will be the leadership center for the challenge, inviting winners of Challenge grants (like Global Voices) to MIT each spring to share our work. We’ll be hosted by MIT’s Media Lab and by MIT’s Comparative Media Studies department, collaborators on the project.

Chris offers a meditation on technology, context and selfishness. He notes that the device of the television, by itself, doesn’t prescribe who can and will use it. “If I take my TV out into the street in Cambridge, no one will watch it with me. They’ll probably watch me instead.” That’s a sharp contrast to behavior in many developing nations, where sharing your TV in this way leads to social interactions.

He offers a concept from anthropologist Bruno Latour: “Technology is society made durable”, a reification of social structure and order. He offers a Latourian example – imagine you work in an office which is a large, shared space. People leave the outside door open, and it makes the room warmer. You put a sign on the door, hoping people will read it, close it and preserve the air-conditioning. They don’t – information doesn’t lead to action. So you ask your boss to buy a door closer, a piece of hardware that closes the door. He eventually agrees, the janitor installs it, and your preference is embodied in technology. But your co-worker, who sits directly below the air conditioning vent is now less happy. Technology, Chris argues, makes the individual who asked for it happier and another individual less happy.

Cellphones are certainly a form of technology that can makes others around us less happy. Chris talks about a student of his who’s produced a piece of jewelry which turns off cellphones within a three meter field of it. It’s a piece of technology which should be (and probably is) illegal, but makes an example of the way technology we want for ourselves (to preserve silence) can impact negatively on others.

“People who can design technologies are usually trying to promote their own values,” Chris argues. “When people say technology is neutral, it’s usually because they’ve zoomed out to the point where everything looks like a speck.” He offers an example of trying to argue that toothbrushes are dangerous because they can be used to kill someone, much like a handgun – you only make this sort of absurdist argument when you’re so far removed from the idea that a largely practical and safe device blurs with an inherently dangerous device.

Technology develops a sense of purpose in its users: a melon baller has the seductive suggestion that melon should be served in balls; an automobile suggests we should spread ourselves out in space instead of clustering close together. A leaf blower suggests that we use cheap energy to move leaves, and holds the consequences that you wake up your neighbors and damage the environment. The intended effect empowers the consumer, while side effects tend to effect others.

“It’s much easier to produce a device and sell it to individuals than to sell devices to institutions for mass usage.” This explains why it’s easier to sell cars than to sell mass transit to communities. Chris shows FUH2.com, a site that “uses democratic media to let people flip off Hummers.” The Hummer, like most SUVs, is marketed as a safe car, but it’s profoundly unsafe to the environment.

The intention of the work done by the Center for New Civic Media is to create open spaces not just for civic engagement, but for a specific kind of civic engagement. We’re hoping to generate Frank Capra-type social capital, not the social capital that leads to lynch mobs. In outlining the sorts of work that Chris and others have done that lead to this sort of capital, he lists Silver Stringers, Mitch Resnick’s Computer Clubhouses project, his work on autonomous boats to protest at Guantanamo Bay, his work on Government Information Awareness and a new voting site called Selectricity.

Beth Noveck, a law professor at NYU known for her work in a broad range of civic media areas, including the world of “serious games” and patent reform, uses her time to outline the foundations in American law and culture of civic media. She points out that the the first amendment of the US constitution signifies the importance our founders put on the role of media. “Media plays the central political role in fostering independent public discussion as a political duty.” The fourth estate has a role in political accountability, providing a critical check on the workings of government.

But we have a romanticised vision of the role media can play. Our traditional conception of media is failing us. Deliberation doesn’t work the way we think it should. Public exchange of reason doesn’t actually lead to participation. The bowling league does not impact world events. Talking to neighbors does not parlay into voting or into civic engagement in general, and we feel as disengaged from Washington or Brussels as we ever have before.

As we rethink civic media, we need to get beyond the assumption that individuals are consumers of information and reconsider ourselves as producers of media. This means breaking the sociological boundary of authority and expertise that currently surrounds news production. Experiments like NewAssignment.net and OhMyNews (as well as Wikipedia) show that there are new ways authority can be generated.

Civic media is a call to action, but it’s a call that demands we build models that work well. These models need to encourage participation as a lifestyle, not just a periodic engagement. Peer production is not the model to build all media, Beth asserts. The models we build are dependent on the questions we’re trying to solve. That said, we’ve got some early indicators of what the Web 2.0 space is good at doing:

Web 2.0 is good at finding gaps in information and filling in those gaps. She points to the Peer to Patent project she’s launched, which invites experts and non-experts alike to review and challenge technology patents.

This process shows that we can bring diverse expertise to a problem, as participants in the project come from a wide variety of professional backgrounds, including lawyers, engineers and interested others.

We can make sense of data in groups, using visualization and GID to “connect information, expertise and power”. She offers a Connecticut-based visualization project, CPEC.org, as an example of powerful visualization technologies and their importance for problemsolving.

We’re good at contributing enthusiasm to problems. She points to the protests that have taken place on Democracy Island, a territory in Second Life that she makes available for civic activism, making her a “democracy slumlord.”

We can use these new technologies to uncover assumptions. She shows a tool that allows Swiss voters to find candidates whose opinions align with your own, showing you people you might not have considered voting for.

She suggests that these new tools are excellent for breaking government logjams, pointing to Global Voices as a site that uses new media to offer transparency, tackle corruption and spread awareness of political problems.

Finally, she suggests that these technologies let us do things, not just talk. Specifically, we can take action by using the visual medium, finding new ways to promote ideas and causes in this space.

The goal is to use these tools to “revisit the deliberative ideal” and to “strengthen our democracy by doing, not just talking. We need to “click together, not bowl alone.”

I realized, sitting through my colleagues’ talks, that I’d completely forgotten to address Putnam or bowling alone in my talk. I desperately searched for bowling references on Global Voices and only found pages about cricket. That actually tied well into the theme of my talk, which was that these technologies can be used very differently in developing nations. I talked briefly about bridgeblogging, activist blogging, the Cute Cat Theory of web activism, translation and contextualization (using the river crab with three watches as an example.) It was my third of six talks this month and was good fun, though I wish I had notes to share with y’all.

The conversation during the questions period unleashed a couple of interesting ideas as well:

- Shava Nerad from Tor mentioned that our increasing interconnection seems to spread disinformation more quickly than information, referring to three recent cases where people have panicked about the security of Tor. My response, which basically amounted to “that’s the way it is, get used to it”, made no one happy, myself included.

- A question about e-petitions got (overly) fierce reactions from me and from Beth. I thought the questioner was talking about e-petitions in general, and I argued that the amount of effort involved in signing these petitions was so minor that it was hard to believe the documents would have real impact. Beth realized the questioner was talking about e-petitions in the UK, which if they generate sufficient demand get addressed by the Prime Minister, but shared some skepticism about their effectiveness. But this revealed an interesting tension around the “granularity of participation” – Beth argues that it’s great that there are extremely lighweight ways for people to participate in movements online, where I’m more skeptical of the utility of this very lightweight participation (joining a “cause” on Facebook, for instance.)

• International Crisis Group – 132 Zimbabwe: A Regional Solution?
  Excellent analysis of the current Zimbabwe situation by ICG, including a set of recommendations for South Africa and other SADC countries as well as for US/UK/EU
  (tags: zimbabwe africa southafrica)
• Al Jazeera English – News – Indigenous Languages ‘Dying’
  Of the five areas where languages are dying most quickly, two are in North America – Oklahoma and surrounding states, and the Pacific Northwest. Also eastern Siberia, central South America and Australia
  (tags: language peru australia nativeamerican)
• Ranks of child soldiers swell again in Congo | csmonitor.com
  Ongoing conflict in eastern DRC means that local militias are recruiting child soliders, a trend that international observers hoped was reversing
  (tags: DRC Africa conflict children childsoldiers)
• The Salon: DR Congo: Optimism and Fear
  Terrific post from Ali about his mixed emotions as he considers the current situation in his homeland, the DRC, which is both stablizing and is also wracked with tensions and long-simmering internal and external conflicts
  (tags: drc africa uganda rwanda)
• The Fight Over Online Casinos – Newsweek: International Editions – MSNBC.com
  Antigua is suing the US in the WTO over bans on online gambling. It looks like Antigua will win, and one possible settlement could include exempting Antigua from US copyright restrictions, allowing it to become the international center for legalized pirac
  (tags: games gambling gaming copyright WTO trade economics uspolitics antigua)

I was talking with my father-in-law about the new windmill installed at Jiminy Peak, a ski area about five miles from our house. It’s been warmly received by most locals, but I figured my father-in-law – a cigar-smoking, SUV-driving Texan who’s rarely mistaken for a treehugger – would raise the issues of land value, viewshed and other arguments offered by real estate folks about the “dangers” of wind energy.

The 1.5 megawatt turbine on Jiminy Peak. Photo by Swerz.

Nope. “I support all sorts of alternative energy. All except for ethanol. That’s a terrible idea. It’s already making it impossible for the Mexicans to buy tortillas.” He’s right – corn prices have increased almost 70% from late 2006 to 2007, and there’s a strong correlation to the fact that the use of the US corn crop to produce energy has risen from 18% to 25% percent of the total crop. Mexican tortilla manufacturers are usually made from US corn, and as a result, tortilla prices have gone up 3-4 times in some communities, forcing the Calderón government to negotiate a voluntary price ceiling on the commodity.

It seems downright Malthusian to be worried that a global thirst for energy is going to cause people to starve. This seems like the sort of problem that markets are very good at solving in a couple of years – it’s likely that some Mexican and American farmers will see the advantages of planting corn given the high prices and supply will expand to meet demand, bringing prices down. That won’t forestall current tortilla shortages, but it probably means that we won’t see a US/Mexico tortilla war, fighting for the future of the global corn crop.

But the bigger global agricultural picture is much uglier, at least in the long term, if you follow the work of economist William Cline. Like many of the economists I find most interesting, Cline is based at the Center for Global Development, an excellent development thinktank in Washington, DC. Cline’s recent work focuses on the impact of climate change on global agriculture.

Cline looks at some widely accepted climate models that project increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and resulting changes in temperature and precipitation. He then projects the agricultural yield of farm land throughout the world in 2080 assuming the predicted climate changes. The result is a decrease in agricultural productivity around the world of 10-25%. This effect is much, much sharper in equatorial nations – he projects a 27% decrease in productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, and drops of 38% in India and 35% in Mexico.

Map of the impact of climate change in 2080 on agricultural productivity. Red spaces are adversely affected, green and blue are positively affected. From Cline’s PDF presentation on the CGD website.

Climate change might not be entirely bad news for agriculture. Since plants process CO2 to produce energy, more CO2 might mean more plant growth. Cline argues that the affects of “carbon fertilization” haven’t been as dramatic in the real world as they have been in the labs, but produced an additional set of numbers that calculate in the possible benefits of increased atmospheric CO2. What’s interesting is that the results show more clearly the separation between winners and losers: Russia, Canada, the US and parts of Europe become much more agriculturally productive, while most of the developing world loses.

Map of the impact of climate change in 2080 on agricultural productivity, allowing for carbon fertilization effects. Red spaces are adversely affected, green and blue are positively affected. From Cline’s PDF presentation on the CGD website.

It’s tempting to attribute projected effects like this one to sophisticated international conspiracies, where North Dakota land barons are rubbing their hands in anticipation of being able to grow crops beyond winter wheat and potatoes. But it’s a great example of how climate change is likely to most affect those who’ve had little to do with causing it.

The seminal example in this case is Tuvalu, the world’s second smallest nation, which is literally drowning as ocean levels rise in the Pacific. Much of the island is less than a meter above sea level, and with sea levels rising at 5.5mm a year, it’s quite possible that the atoll will be uninhabitable in the forseeable future. (The collapse of ice shelves in Antartica and Canada suggests that this rise may be more sudden and dramatic, not just a gradual rise in sea levels.)

As Tuvalans resettle in New Zealand, a debate is brewing over whether they should seek status as “environmental refugees” – a status that would imply obligations to other governments to shelter and resettle people fleeing climate change – or whether it’s more important to fight the larger battle against global warming and attempt to preserve the existence of Tuvalu. In an excellent article on Salon by Alexandra Berzon, she points out that the nation sold one of their few national assets – the .tv domain name – for $50 million and spent much of that money buying a seat at the UN so they could lobby for action on climate change. (Wikipedia suggests that Tuvalu still holds a 20% stake in the company that markets .tv and receives regular payments from its use.)

Even with a few million a year in dot.com dollars, it’s hard for Tuvalu to prevail in a battle about global warming – it’s a deeply asymmetric struggle against power companies, auto manufacturers and enormous governments unable to committ to even modest reductions in carbon emissions. Similarly, it’s going to be difficult for Senegal – predicted to lose 52% of its agricultural productivity by 2080 – to challenge the US and China in court to sue for lost crops.

Tuvalu has threatened to sue the US and Australia in the International Court of Justice – there was a flurry of stories on the topic in 2002, but I haven’t seen evidence that a suit was filed. However, using international institutions to take up asymmetric battles is an interesting strategy, one that may be seeing some early success.

Antigua is currently battling the United States at the WTO over online gambling. Online gambling, which is Antigua’s second-largest industry after tourism, is largely prohibited in the US. The US has asked sites to block access to American users by geolocating and blocking IP addresses, and recent legislation prevents US banks and credit card issuers from processing payments to overseas gambling sites. The WTO determined that this behavior constitues unfair trade practice and is preparing to allow Antigua to sanction the US.

Since raising import duties on US goods in Antigua is hardly likely to damage the US economy, the WTO is considering a novel solution of hitting the US where it hurts: intellectual property. Under a proposal under consideration at the WTO, Antigua would be allowed to violate US intellectual property rights by selling legal pirated copies of US books, movies and software, giving the tiny nation (70,000 people, $870m GDP) an effective trade sanction against the US. Predictably, copyright holders are now lobbying the US Trade Representative to back down before their industries are damaged. The result is likely to be that Antigua manages to change US law and get online gambling legalized. (Thanks to Charlie Nesson, who’s been following this issue closely and pointed me towards this story.)

What sort of legal jiujitsu would be required to get the US, China and other nations to cut carbon emissions? It’s hard to imagine, but that’s the sort of thinking that nations are likely to engage in if Cline is right and we’re heading towards a world where it gets easier for developed nations to harvest crops and harder for developing nations.

For further reading: an excellent collection of media stories on Tuvalu and climate change.