Have you seen that wonderful video that reports on the American Library Association’s annual conference as a nature video? The one that narrates the gathering of librarians as you might describe herds of bison or flocks of penguins?

Yeah – watch that first.

Okay, so I’m at Canada’s largest gathering of librarians. There are likely 4500 librarians from across Ontario in a conference center located in the funky-shaped shadow of the CN Tower. I’m here because I’ve been asked to give a keynote this afternoon. When I got the invitation, I assumed that the Ontario Library Association had wanted to invite David Weinberger, realized he was busy and invited me instead.

To my surprise and pleasure, the folks who invited me, knew my work and hoped I’d come to Ontario to talk about some of the issues I addressed at the Idea Festival in Louisville late last year – the internet in the developing world, homophily, serendipity, xenophilia. Which should be fun… for me at least.

What this means is that I’m, yet again, at someone else’s conference. There’s librarian jargon and in-jokes that I don’t get. I’m vaguely tempted to look for sessions on topics I know the least about – providing public library programming for the elderly, for instance, or the workshop on book preservation. But, of course, geeks and librarians have vast areas of common cause, and the first session I find myself in is very much at the intersection of my interests and those of global librarians.

Three librarians affiliated with EIFL – Electronic Information for Libraries – introduce the audience to the value of open source software to libraries in the developing world. EIFL is a project I know pretty well – it’s supported by Open Society Institute’s Information Program, who I’ve worked with for the past four years. It’s a really admirable project – an effort to open digital resources to libraries in developing nations. Access to online journals and databases in incredibly expensive, and accessing these resources is usually outside the capacity of developing world libraries. EIFL has helped these libraries access free digital resources, negotiate lower prices for some key resources, and embrace the use of technology to modernize and connect their libraries.

Now EIFL is focusing on the importance of Free and Open Source Software, or FOSS. Bess Sadler, a research librarian and software developer from Virginia, offers the standard “free beer versus free speech”, then gives a wonderful twist I hadn’t heard before: “free as in free kittens”. Sure, the kitten is free, inasmuch as you don’t pay for it, but it’s going to cost you a ton of time and money down the road. This is true of open source software – if you’re going to love and use it, you’ll be tending to it and caring for it for the forseeable future.

Sadler outlines Richard Stallman’s Four Freedoms associated with free software (numbering them from 0-3, just to prove her geekiness.)

0: Free to run for any purpose
1: Free to study and learn from, and to adapt for your own purposes
2: Free to redistribute to your neighbors
3: Free to improve and release your improvements.

Without these freedoms, we face “information imperialism”, control of information by established powers. She offers some useful examples of the importance of free and open systems in developing nations:

- In Zimbabwe, where the currency is collapsing, it’s unrealistic to expect librarians to pay hard currency to library management systems. FOSS systems may be the only systems that are affordable.

- In Georgia, most library management systems are available in English or Russian… any student of eastern European politics will understand why Georgians don’t want to use a Russian-language tool. Open software can be translated and adapted into different languages.

In Bhutan, there’s a great desire to preserve the local language – Dzonghka – against the encroachment of Mandarin Chinese. Local authorities wanted a Dzonghka version of Windows, and raised some money to demonstrate a market for the software, but weren’t able to persuade Microsoft to create the product. But it wasn’t difficult to localize Linux, and there’s now Dzongkha Linux, with support for Open Office, GAIM, Mozilla and other key pieces of software.

- There’s a strong desire in developing world libraries to put digital collections online… which suprises many library professionals in the developed world, as they’re just moving towards digital collections now. Sadler quotes a Ghanaian librarian: “Students in Ghana can view artifacts from Britain more easily tha they can artifacts from their own heritage.” Open source software systems like Greenstone are allowing libraries to scan and preseve documents and share them online. There’s a hope in the future for a pan-African digital library which will allow libraries across the continent to share their resources.

While there are a lot of obvious upsides to FOSS for the developing world, there are challenges as well. It can be harder to support, and especially hard to find support contracts to cover open source. Documentation can be sorely limited, and seeking support from open source communities can be very intimidating.

Despite these obstacles, developing world librarians, like Palestinian Nasser Saleh, are enthusiastic advocates for open source, on ideological as well as practical grounds. He points out that many developing nations are signing onto trade agreements which force them to aggresively enforce anti-piracy laws for the first time. As a result, librarians in developing nations are finding they have to suddenly revamp their software strategy when they find they can’t pay for the tools they need.

The ability of librarians to work in their own languages is encouraging a movement towards celebrating and preserving those languages. But it’s still difficult to involve people in the project unless they speak English or Russian – there’s a strong concentration of EIFL projects in English and Russian-speaking nations, and a real need to expand the work into Latin America and francophone Africa as well.

Randy Metcalf is EIFL’s new FOSS program manager. A long-time FOSS enthusiast, he’s now in a position where he can unambiguously promote free software. But he’s realistic, telling us that “advocacy is not enough” to bring free software into global libraries. EIFL FOSS is managing a project to bring two open source ILS (integrated library systems) into six libraries around the world and to docment the process. The project involves the libraries working closely with the developers of Koha and Evergreen, two leading ILS systems. The goal is to make these systems more usable in developing nations, and to develop the necessary documentation to allow thee tools to be used effectively in the developing world.

This is a long process – it can take two years or more to set up an ILS, and the libraries he’s working with are anxious to get started. If the project works well, the libraries end up with better systems to manage their operations, and the world gains some major open source success stories about IT in very challenging environments.

• :: Falconcity of Wonders (L.L.C) ::
  Perhaps the most absurd of all Dubai real estate projects, a walled city that includes larger than life replicas of the eiffel tower, the pyramid, the taj mahal… which has been remad into a 5 star hotel. Baudrillard would be proud.
  (tags: realestate economics UAE arab simulacrum globalization)
• Dollar Auctions and Deadly Games
  Atanu Dey looks closely at the economist’s game, the dollar auction, and extrapolates lessons about arms dealing and geopolitical conflcit, especially in the context of Kashmir
  (tags: india pakistan economics arms’)
• Global Voices Censored
  Very interesting site that believes that GV is censoring news from left-leaning blogs, esp. in South America and the Caribbean. They’re wrong, but it’s a useful critique and reminder that the bloggers we cover aren’t always politically representative of t
  (tags: globalvoices censorship bloggers media bias)
• Thejesh GN ‽ Global Voices On Map
  A Yahoo Pipes mashup shows the georgraphic location of everything posted to Global Voices. Very cool.
  (tags: globalvoices mashup mapping geocode)

Many Americans are praying that we’ll have a different place in the geopolitical order after the 2008 presidential elections. In an excellent piece in yesterday’s New York Times magazine, Parag Khanna makes it clear that the US’s position in the global order of things is changing, like it or not, and that whoever is leading our nation in a year will need to understand that things are radically different from the world order of 1992.

Khanna is a fellow at the New America Foundation, working on a book called “The Second World”, slated for release in March. His piece in the Magazine is digested from the book, and is a dense summary of his take on a new, multipolar world. Basically, Khanna sees three powers in today’s world – the US, China and the European Union – and identifies a set of “second world” nations that are part developed, part developing, and whose loyalties are very much in play in this new world order.

It’s hard to get a sense for the rules that define the second world – in another interview, Khanna offers, “Some good examples of second world countries are: Ukraine, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam.” They’re not just emerging markets, Khanna argues, but countries in strategic regions that will shape geopolitics for the forseeable future. (Near as I can tell, the only non-strategic regions on Khanna’s globe are sub-Saharan Africa and the Pacific Islands…)

These nations aren’t looking to be democratized by the US – instead, “Right now, from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, the hero of the second world — including its democracies — is Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore.” These second-world nations are governed by self-interest, not ideology, and if cozying up to China or seeking inclusion in the EU will make them stronger, all the ideology in the world may not be enough to make siding with the US appealing. Khanna clearly sees himself as a realist, inviting readers to see themselves as the Henry Kissinger of this new administration and asking what steps the US should take to position itself in this new world.

His suggestions include a refocusing of America’s diplomatic efforts, turning teams of diplomats into regional teams (as the Pentagon deals with security) and putting more diplomats on the ground, observing, “There are currently more musicians in U.S. military marching bands than there are Foreign Service officers, a fact not helped by Congress’s decision to effectively freeze growth in diplomatic postings.” He advocates for a massive expansion of the Peace Corps, programs to teach English and offer job training overseas and increased student exchanges.

While this sounds like the standard left-wing xenophile pro-engagement line you’ll usually hear me endorsing on this blog, I’m pleased that Khanna throws a framework around these ideas – the concept of the “marchmen”: “Europe is boosting its common diplomatic corps, while China is deploying retired civil servants, prison laborers and Chinese teachers — all are what the historian Arnold Toynbee called marchmen, the foot-soldiers of empire spreading values and winning loyalty.” I continue to believe that the most devastating impact of 9/11 is going to be the wave of American isolationism it’s triggered. At precisely the geopolitical moment where Americans need to be finding ways to engaging with a rapidly changing world, we’re (understandably) terrified, looking at the world as a hostile, dangerous place that we encounter through military might, not through cultural engagement.

I have no idea whether Khanna’s reordering of the world is the correct one. I’m intrigued that he doesn’t follow Tom Friedman in trumpeting the rise of India – indeed, he sees India as far behind China and constrained geographically in its ability to project power. And he appears to avoid the entire narrative of “the Muslim world”, perhaps recognizing that a worldview that attempts to treat Wahabiism in Saudi Arabia with the same tools as we address syncretic Islam in West Africa is a disastrous oversimplification.

Where Khanna’s work is probably most disconcerting for American readers is his enthusiasm for the European Union. We’re used to worrying about China here in the US, but we tend to consider the EU a coddled, over-taxed, ageing and increasingly irrelavent set of nanny states. But the EU offers a model for affiliation, a model that nations can hope to join – the US doesn’t offer anything similar, and Khanna sees this as a key weakness. Turkey can aspire to become part of Europe, and even if it doesn’t, there are massive economic and cultural ties between Turkey and much of central Europe. Canada’s not exactly lining up to request membership in the United States…

I’m looking forward to Khanna’s book. And if you’d like to have your illusions of American hyperpower blown into little, tiny pieces, I recommend his article in the Times.

Late next month, I’ll head to Monterey, CA for the TED conference. The conference organizers were kind enough to invite me three years ago, and I evidently made them happy with my conference blogging, as they’ve invited me to three subsequent conferences, including the amazing TED Global in Arusha, Tanzania last summer. TED is quite an experience – it’s a mix of the best speakers on the circuit with a set of celebrities that you’ll rarely see at other top tier conferences, like Pop!Tech, possibly my favorite conference. According to Business Week, it’s entered a celebrity tier of conferences that includes the World Economic Forum in Davos. I’ve been to both, and TED’s quite a bit more fun than Davos.

I’m glad that TED treats me as a member of the press, because tickets ain’t cheap. They go for $6000, and they’ve been sold out since shortly after they went on sale. If you’ve got a spare $35,000 or so, there’s an interesting opportunity for you. Cameron Sinclair, the head of Architecture for Humanity, has a seat at the conference as a past recipient of the TED prize. With TED’s permission, he’s auctioning it on eBay, and bids are currently up to $33,535.

(Of course, bidders may be more excited about the bonuses included with the ticket – coffee with Pierre Omidyar of eBay, lunch with Meg Ryan, and cocktails with my friend Sunny Bates, one of the world’s leading networkers, who will help the lucky (wealthy?) winner connect with interesting people at the conference.)

A lot more people have heard about TED this past year in the wake of their decision to make videos of many past TED talks available online. Historically, these top tier conferences have treated videos of their talks as a revenue stream, selling video of talks to people who couldn’t be at the event… or sometimes to people who’d been there. (The last couple of years, TED has sent DVDs of all talks to anyone who was at the conference, dispensing with this latter revenue stream.) No, you can’t see the talks in real-time online, and you can’t see every talk given at TED at this point… but you can get a hell of a lot of the content of a TED conference with a good internet connection and some free time.

Clearly, the availability of this online content isn’t cutting down people’s interest in paying big bucks to attend the conference. That wouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who’s sat through any of the dismal panels at Davos – people aren’t paying huge sums of money to Forum members talk about geopolitics, but for the opportunity to talk to them in the hallways…

So if the audience is what people are paying for, it makes me wonder whether the organizers of the BIL conference are doing something truly brilliant. The BIL conference is “an open, self-organizing, and emergent science and technology conference,” held just after TED in Monterey. It looks like the conferences will overlap on the last day of TED which should make it quite easy for people attending TED to cross the street to BIL, either at the end of the conference, or if they’re looking for a break from TED.

The conference site says that BIL wants to be “to TED, what BarCamp is to FooCamp.” For those who don’t get the reference – FooCamp is an annual event convened by tech publisher Tim O’Reilly. FOO stands for “Friends of O’Reilly”, and the invite-only conference is a gathering of some very bright tech industry people. who are invited to camp out at O’Reilly’s corporate headquarters and design their own “unconference”. Past FooCamp attendees, including Tantek Celik, decided they’d had a great deal of fun at Foo and wanted to participate, invitation or not… hence, BarCamp, which is a joke based on the programming term “foobar”…

BIL is also operating on the unconference model. If you want to speak, go to the conference wiki, post a talk description and, presto, you’re a speaker. There’s a couple of interesting talks listed already, including a talk from longevity researcher Aubrey de Grey, who gave a fantastic talk at TED in 2006. It’s not hard to imagine several of the TED speakers deciding to give a second talk at BIL – personally, I’m trying to figure out if I should use BIL to warm up the talk I’ll be giving at eTech a few days later, or whether there’s another talk that would be good for a BIL audience… whatever that turns out to be.

So, if the appeal of conferences isn’t solely the content of the speeches, but is related to the calibre of the audience… what does it mean if lots of TEDsters come and join the BIL folks? If there are amazing people at BIL – both folks who came to TED, and amazing people who simply decided to come into town for BIL – does it become as exciting and important a conference as TED? More exciting because it’s got a different and broader audience? Less interesting because it doesn’t have a $6k pricetag and the chance that you’re standing next to someone famous is much lower than at TED?

My guess is that TED will turn out to be a fan and supporter of BIL. TED organizers are well aware that running a conference with a huge pricetag and a limited number of seats is bound to piss some people off. The organizers are already planning to move it to Long Beach next year so they can expand the audience. Opening up TED via blogs and video has made it better. Encouraging TED speakers and guests to come down the street to BIL would make it better still.

• EveryBlock: A news feed for your block.
  EveryBlock is live, currently for Chicago, NYC and SF. A huge mashup of data from numerous sources, though lighter on the government info than I might have expected. Very much a model for the future of geocoded info
  (tags: aggregator business cities crime data design innovation journalism local mashup urban news visualization web2.0)
• Understanding art for geeks – a photoset on Flickr
  Wonderful, hilarious set of mashups of great art with geek jokes.
  (tags: art humor gek mashup memes)
• BIL
  An unconference, designed to be the “bar camp” to the “foo camp” that is TED. Looks like it could be fascinating – I will certainly cross the street when I’m done blogging and listen or speak…
  (tags: conferences TED blogging)

Global Voices reached a totally arbitrary milestone recently – we broke into the top 100 blogs listed by Technorati. It’s very hard to tell what methodology Technorati uses to make this top 100 list – search for “globalvoicesonline.org” or “www.globalvoicesonline.org” and you’ll find a profile page giving us a rank of 202… which is lots lower than it’s been past months, generally hovering around 130 or so. Perhaps the top 100 page is an aggregate rank, combining the links we get to our various language sites and to sites like Rising Voices and Global Voices Advocacy – it’s hard to know.

Given that I recognize that this ranking is arbitrary, you’d think I’d be able to take our appearance as good news and then go about my business. Nope. I’ve probably checked it half a dozen times so far this week. It may be arbitrary, but it’s one of the goals I’ve told supporters and funders we were trying to reach with Global Voices, and I feel really good about reaching it.

Rebecca and I started GV because we saw very little attention being paid to blogs from the developing world, and we felt that some of the stories being told in those blogs would be interesting to readers and journalists around the world. That’s proved to be true… at least, it’s true when the stories we’re covering are also getting attention in mainstream media. When there’s a sudden focus on Pakistan due to the Bhutto assasination or Burma due to the Saffron “revolution”, we see American and European media leaning heavily on our blogs for voices from the affected regions.

The rest of the time? Not so much. According to Alexa, we get surprisingly little traffic from the US and Europe. 22.4% of our visitors come from the US, 3.6% from the UK, and the other 74% are spread around the world, including substantial userbases in China, India, the Phillipines, Brazil, and Qatar. Compare that to the New York Times, with over 50% of users in the US, or BBC, with over 30% in the UK, and it’s clear that we’ve got something of an unusual audience pattern. (Actually, it’s one quite similar to that of our friends at OneWorld, who also produce media from the developing world and have a strong developing world audience.)

Rebecca and I thought that we’d found an interesting way to hack the media by leveraging our connects with the growing blog community, and working through those top bloggers to get mainstream media attention. In truth, it hasn’t really worked out that way. Some mainstream news sources have gotten into the habit of looking at our coverage. And we don’t get a ton of traffic from English-language bloggers.

Looking at sites linking to us on Technorati, I see a few English-language sites… but I also see sites in Argentina, Denmark, Iran, Brazil and Taiwan, just in the first twenty links. I’d always assumed that reaching the top 100 on Technorati would mean that we’d be regularly and extensively linked by top American and European blogs. Instead, it’s possible that there are simply so many international bloggers linking to our work that it’s possible to break into the top ranks from their collective influence, much as Beppe Grillo has achieved his status primarily from links by Italian bloggers.

(This isn’t black or white, of course. We get a lot of love from top blogs, including BoingBoing, Huffington Post, GoogleBlog, O’Reilly Radar and Scoble. It’s my sense, from watching incoming links to the site, that the vast majority of our traffic comes from Google and from non-”A-list” blogs from North America and Europe.)

If this is true – that we’ve been less successful at capturing the attention of mainstream media and western bloggers, and more successful at winning the respect of new bloggers in developing nations – does this milestone constitute success? I’m conflicted on this point, in part because I have a hard time evaluating success of projects I’ve worked on.

Since 1994, I’ve helped launch four major projects – one for-profit, three non-profit. All continue to exist in one form or another. One had its heyday around around 1997 and has been on the decline ever since; one is largely dormant since my successor moved on to another job. A third continues to be a prominent web presence, but I had a person falling-out with the founder and no longer work on the project. It’s hard for me to bask in the success of any of these projects. Even before Geekcorps went dormant, it wasn’t working the way I wanted it to. And for me, the success of Tripod was less about hosting web pages than it was about running a world-class internet company in Western Mass… and Tripod hasn’t been based out here since 1999.

I spent a good part of my college years working for a local nonprofit organization, Center for Common Security. I watched the organization crumble when its visionary founders left to pursue another project. Since then, a criterion for success in my book has been an organization’s survivability – if the founders walk away from the project, will it continue to thrive?

More than anything else I’ve worked on, I think Global Voices will achieve this metric of success. I still work – a lot – on Global Voices, but I have absolutely nothing to do with the content that ends up on the website, nothing to do with our translations, and almost nothing to do with the Rising Voices and Advocacy sites. We’re near the end of a hiring process for an executive director, and I have the fond hope that I won’t be working (so hard) on fundraising, organizational structure and strategy at some point in the future.

Succeeding on this metric involves finding people who share your vision, then getting the heck out of the way. I’ve been watching David Sasaki throw himself into the Rising Voices project with a passion that makes me slightly jealous. He’s currently in Medellín, Colombia, working with HiperBarrio, one of the recipients of Rising Voices funding, which is teaching blogging in working-class neighborhoods, helping bring online some voices that are rarely heard from in global media. He’s on the ground, working with bloggers, seeing new places and making new friends, which is one of the more rewarding things you can do with your life. (I, on the other hand, am filing paperwork in the Netherlands, which is not.) And near as I can tell, he’s loving it, and is justifiably proud of the work he and his teams are doing.

There’s no possible way I could be doing what David is doing, even if I had the language skills and the time to travel. Nor could I be translating our words into Malagasy or interviewing dissidents in Saudi Arabia. If you’re lucky, you reach a point in an organization where folks who’ve joined the project after you did are smarter, more passionate and more skilled than you are, and your job is to get out of their way. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting close.

In one of my darkest moments after leaving Geekcorps, I remember telling Rachel, “I’m not going to start any new projects. Either they fail, or you hand them off to people who don’t understand them, or you end up doing them for the rest of your life.” There’s another option – handing them off to people better and smarter than you are, and letting them build something more audacious than you ever would have imagined. That’s success.

• AudioMonk.com – Privacy Policy
  Speech to text service focused on the podcast market, interesting for people who want to create transcripts from podcasts
  (tags: audio speechtotext transcription)
• CastingWords: Podcast Transcription
  Another transcription service focused specifically on podcasters
  (tags: audio podcast transcription speechtotext)
• Silobreaker: Welcome
  Fascinating news site and aggregator which tokenizes news stories and graphs relationships between people and firms
  (tags: aggregator media news tools visualization web2.0 journalism)

Remember that image of the polar bears trapped on shrinking ice floes?

Yeah, that one. Or any of the hundreds of others that have been used to illustrate stories about global warming. Polar bears have evolved to swim long distances, but they use ice floes as places to rest, raise young and feast on the kills of seals. The shrinking of Arctic sea ice means that scientists are now seeing more polar bears on beaches, and fewer on ice floes, and that some polar bears are drowning after swimming long distances between sheets of ice. These stories are being reported on the sites of environmental organizations like the NDRC, but also in notoriously left-leaning newspapers like the Wall Street Journal. (That was a joke. The whole left-leaning bit. Actually, the WSJ piece is one of the better summaries of scientific concerns about climate change and the effects on wildlife – you need to move even further right to the Dittosphere to find commetators cavalierly dismissing stories about changes in polar bear habitat.)

It’s a useful photo because it’s iconic shorthand for a complex and frightening set of issues. Will the melting of sea ice raise ocean levels around the world, swamping nations like Bangladesh and the Netherlands? Will it destroy the habitat of charismatic megafauna like the polar bear and of other less-photogenic species? Will melting ice change the salinity of North Atlantic oceans and break down the thermohaline circulation system that carries warm ocean water towards northern latitudes, cooling and recirculating it? To what extent are these changes caused by human impact, and to what extent can humans control and reverse these changes? You can easily fill thousands of pages exploring and arguing about those questions – the photo of polar bears on an ice flow is an eloquent summary of those complex issues.

If you were looking for an icon to represent scary questions about globablization, failed states and international trade, the photo above is a good place to start. The figure in the white polo shirt is Viktor Bout, a legendary arms trader who sold guns to brutal rebels in Sierra Leone, taking payment in raw diamonds, armed both sides of wars in Afghanistan and made small fortunes shipping South African flowers to the United Arab Emirates, and South African chicken to Nigeria. The above photo, snapped by photographer Wim van Cappellen on a landing strip in the eastern Congo, was the only known photo of Bout for many years – Bout, who maintains at least five passports, was understandably publicity-shy, even before he became an internationally wanted man.

Bout is well-known to students of African conflicts – as intelligence experts in the US and Europe tracked arms shipments supporting brutal conflicts on the continent in the 1990s, they found Bout and his various companies at the heart of much of the arms trade. His trade with the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan was largely ignored… until one of his planes was forced to land by the Taliban and his crew held hostage for a year… after which, the plane was allowed to leave, and analysts believe he began supplying the Taliban and, perhaps, Al Qaeda as well.

But the real kicker was when Bout’s companies began working for the US Army and Air Force, shipping equipment to Baghdad airport and refueling with US government-provided fuel… despite the fact that Bout was facing Treasury department sanctions and was wanted by Interpol and the Belgian government. The Air Force, to their credit, stopped working with Bout… the Army did not until late 2005, arguing that they had no responsibilities of oversight over the subcontractors of Kellogg, Brown and Root. There’s nothing like a situation where a wanted international criminal, who’s helped arm Al Qaeda, is working as a subcontractor to the US military to make you realize that this whole international arms trade business is kinda complicated.

I was impressed with an article on Bout, titled “The Merchant of Death“, by Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun in Foreign Policy. (Subscribers only, alas.) They did an excellent job of bringing out one of the most interesting threads of the story – if Bout hadn’t been dealing in weapons that helped kill millions of people, he would look a lot like an impressive and successful international entrepreneur. I’d been looking forward to their book – with the same title as their FP article – on Bout, and hungrily read my Christmas gift copy on my first international trip of the year.

Unfortunately, it’s not great. I don’t think it’s their fault. Malcolm Gladwell reviewed Michael Lewis’s book, “The Blind Side“, with a comment about degree of difficulty: “The degree of difficulty on telling the story of Michael Oher [the protagonist of "The Bling Side"] was really really high. Trust me. It was… And if you don’t believe me, just try writing an emotionally moving. full-length account of an essentially pathologically shy, inarticulate teenager.”

Well, the degree of difficulty in writing a book about Viktor Bout is even higher. The authors didn’t get to speak to the arms trader, who is believed to live in Moscow, protected from arrest and extradition by figures in the Russian government. Most of the details of his life are in dispute, and the standard “our subject’s childhood and youth” chapter is a confusing mass of conflicting accounts. The story of his rise to prominence is at least as confusing. Farah and Braun do an excellent job of synthesizing research on his shell companies and working methods, but it’s pretty easy to get lost in a maze of similarly named companies registered in out-of the way locales.

What I took away from the book was how easy it was for an ambitious, creative and “ethically flexible” man to create an international empire. Bout benefitted greatly from connections within the Russian military and intelligence community, which made it possible for him to buy surplus military aircraft inexpensively. He took advantage of the willingness of the leaders of the Emirate of Sharjah to turn a blind eye to his activities, in the hopes of turning their dusty backwater into an international trading center. He leveraged the aircraft registry of a number of failed, or failing, states to keep his craft registered and in the air… even if the registry never reviewed the airworthiness of his fleet. And he took advantage of the fact that “nobody shoots the postman”, and that there will always be work for someone to deliver cargo, no questions asked, to difficult destinations.

What’s hard to answer is whether Bout has a unique genius for this business, or whether there are simply so many holes in regulatory systems that it would be possible for a thousand Bouts to bloom were Viktor Bout to be arrested. Farah and Braum offer support for both cases – they talk at some length about Bout’s personal charm, his gift for languages, his force of personality. But they also write about the difficulty the US government had in cooperating with international law enforcement, and the breakdown of even basic contracting safeguards in the rush to war in Iraq. (The single best quote in the book: a former marine general, talking about how a wanted criminal managed to run a company that flew hundreds of flights into Baghdad, noted, “We have an old saying in the Marine Corps: if you want it bad, you get it bad.”)

In this sense, Braun and Farah take a very different approach to the Bout story than Peter Landesman did in a profile of Bout for the New York Times Sunday Magazine. For that story, Bout met with Landesman several times, and allowed himself to be photographed. (The resulting photos are amazing. One is reproduced above – if Bout had been trying to look like a cinema villian, I doubt he could have done better.) Landesman is openly skeptical about Bout’s explanations for his motivations, and is cognistant that he’s getting only a fraction of the story. In a cloak and dagger moment, he gets a call at his hotel from an anonymous source, who asks to meet him at a McDonald’s in Pushkin Square. The source encourages him to think of Bout as the public face of a much larger, much more sinister conspiracy:

He said to imagine the structure of arms trafficking in Russia like a mushroom. Bout was among those in the mushroom’s cap, which we can see. The stalk is made up of the men who are really running things in Russia and making decisions. Looking from above, he said, you never see the stalk.

That conspiracy would likely include Ukranian arms manufacturers, the Odessa mafia, the business leaders of the Trans-Dniestra breakaway “republic” of Moldova, and senior officials in the Russian government. Lanesman concludes that Bout is willing to talk to him because he’s become the fall guy for something much larger… but stops short of investigating that much larger story.

I have no way of knowing which account is closer to the truth – an evil entrepreneurial genius with some good connections, or the fall-guy for a cold-war arms empire. The former scares me a bit more than the latter. If it’s possible for a reasonably smart guy to dominate the clandestine arms world with a few connections and a lot of moxie, that suggests that there may be a whole lot more Bouts out there, trading nuclear material, drugs, chemical and biological agents… and that there’s very little that western governments can do about it.

The problem with telling the story of Viktor Bout now is that it’s not over. He hasn’t been brought to justice, and it’s not clear whether or not he’s got any ongoing arms operations, under the heading of a new shell company. It’s unclear precisely who’s protecting him in Russia and why. The denoument of the Faran and Braun book is the least satisfying one possible – the US government isn’t especially interested in bringing in Bout, and therefore, he probably won’t be arrested. Again, not their fault, but not the most satisfying end to a narrative.

Lots, lots more about Bout in these four articles:
- The Good Soldier Bout, by Dirk Draulans, 2001, translated from Dutch.
- “The Embargo Buster” by Mathew Brunwasser, FRONTLINE/World, May 2002
- “Arms and the Man“, by Peter Landesman, NYTimes Magazine, August 2003
- “The Merchant of Death“, Farah and Braun, Foreign Policy, December 2006

I have some questions about the conclusions of this next article, but it’s a fascinating read, accusing the US government of a good deal of complicity in Bout’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan: “Viktor Bout: From International Outlaw to Valued Partner“, by John C.K. Daly, October 2004.

I was pleased to see this story about death tolls in the Democratic Republic of Congo on the first page of Reddit this morning. The story is, more or less, a press release from the International Rescue Committee, one of the best organizations doing work on forgotten conflicts and refugee issues. The most recent survey sees a death rate in DRC that’s 60% higher than in similarly impoverished sub-Saharan African countries, suggesting 45,000 “excess” deaths per month – deaths that can be statisically correlated to ongoing violence in DRC and the shattered infrastructure destroyed in ongoing conflict. The study suggests that there have been 5.4 million excess deaths in DRC since 1998, the start of the second Congo war.

IRC has been commissioning these surveys for quite some time. I looked back at an essay I wrote, explaining my interest in the topic of media attention, in August 2003 – the centerpiece of that essay was a 2003 study from IRC that reported 3.3 million excess deaths in DRC, making it the deadliest conflict since World War II. A 2006 study put the death toll at 3.8 million. This recent study suggests that elections – which were tainted by violence, but were miraculously carried out successfully – haven’t been able to substantively improve living conditions for people in DRC, which continues to be plagued by violence from Congolese and Rwandan rebels.

“antichrist”, who posted the story to Reddit, notes, “45,000 die in Congo every MONTH and nobody cares”. Sure seems that way from global media coverage. I wrote a piece about 18 months ago titled, “Is Israel a problem for the Democratic Republic of Congo?“, which suggested that overfocus on the Middle East by mainstream media detracts from coverage of violence, refugee issues and death in central Africa. Part of this disparity can be explained by US interests in the Middle East. Part may be explained by racism and systematic disinterest in Africa. And much may be explained by laziness – every international reporter knows the basics of the story of the Intifada, while most need hours of research to identify the basic groups who continue the conflict in eastern DRC. Much as it would be satisfying to write my rant on this topic again, I wrote it 18 months ago… and five years ago… and I suspect I’ll be writing it five years from now as well.

I’ll be interested to see if anyone pulls on a particular thread of the IRC report. The method used to calculate these death figures is an estimation method widely used in epidemiological studies, but which has generated a great deal of controversy when applied to the conflict in Iraq. Dr. Les Roberts was one of the authors of the first DRC death estimation study – he’s quoted in the AP story on the report – and he’s a figure who’s become quite controversial for his study in the Lancet of excess deaths after the US invasion of Iraq. Debunking the Roberts study has become a near full-time focus of some critics on the right, who’ve pointed to the political leanings of the authors as well as methodological questions for reasons to disbelieve the survey.

The Congo surveys use much the same methodology that the Iraq studies use – establish a baseline mortality rate (in Iraq, determine household death rate before the US invasion; in Congo, look at mortality rates in similarly underdeveloped nations); randomly select households and conduct interviews to determine mortality rates; compare baseline rates with the rates established via survey. But I haven’t seen any systematic attempts to debunk the Congo statistics, despite their possible vulnerability to the same methodological critiques as the Iraq studies. (I’d love to read any critiques of the DRC studies, if you know of any – please post links in the comments, or send them to me directly – ethan at ethanzuckerman dot com.)

That makes sense as well – the Iraq study was a chilling reminder of the cost of the Bush administration’s disastrous invasion of Iraq, and its release was calculated to influence the 2004 election. Those who believed that the Iraq invasion would have long-term positive effects had a compelling reason to challenge Robert’s et al’s estimates. The ongoing disaster in the DRC doesn’t even register as a foreign policy issue within the US, and therefore there are no knives drawn from the left or the right around the question of whether 3, 4 or 5 million have died in the past decade. 10 million could have died and there’s not a chance it would compel the Bush Administration to make a substantial commitment to support the DRC government or the UN mission in eastern DRC. No possible policy change means nothing to fight over, at least in the US-centered blogosphere and punditsphere.

If there’s any good news in the recent study – and believe me, I’m stretching trying to find any – it’s that death rates appear to have been decreasing in the easternmost parts of DRC. These are the areas where MONUC, the UN mission in DRC, has been on the ground attempting to maintain a buffer group between armed groups. MONUC has not been above reproach – there have been horrific stories of abuse of the local population by some peacekeepers, and the UN’s attempts to control behavior of peacekeepers have not been entirely successful. But the fact that the recent study hasn’t found death tolls even higher is due to the contributions of tens of thousands of troops, exclusively from low and medium development nations, to maintaining the peace in one of the world’s ugliest and most difficult conflicts.

Fernando Rodrigues is one of Brazil’s leading journalists, and an innovator in the field of unlocking public information. He writes for Folha de São Paulo, the largest paper in the country, and is currently serving as a Nieman fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

Rodrigues offers some context on Brazil and internet usage in the country, reminding us that the nation is one of the world’s largest democracies, with 186 million citizens, 42.6 of whom are connected to the Internet. Brazilians represent 46.3% of all South American Internet users. The nation is aggresively embracing the use of digital technology in politics – voting in Brazil is 100% electronic, with no paper balloting, and the government is ranked 13th internationally on an e-government survey from Brown University.

At the same time, Internet penetration in Brazil is quite low by the standards of developed nations, with 22.4% of the population connected. And while Brazil has full democracy and a free and vibrant media, it has no freedom of information law, which is critically important for journalists trying to investigate government stories. And while Brazil’s egovernment initiatives are being recognized internationally, Rodrigues raises a distinction between quantity and quality of e-government efforts.

Rodrigues was the founder of a critically important project in the world of Brazilian transparency – Politicos do Brasil. The site lists information on 25,000 political candidates in Brazil who’ve registered since 2000. This information includes critical financial data. Brazilian politicians are required to submit a statement of “patrimony”, their personal assets, which are a matter of public record, but are very difficult for citizens to obtain. Those records have been digitized, or hand entered, and are now accessible for all the users of the site. During the 2006 elections, the site registered 1 million visits in a single day.

The site was funded by Rodrigues’s paper, Folha de São Paulo, which saw it as a powerful tool for computer assisted reporting. While it’s been a resource for the paper, it’s been at least as powerful for competing newspapers, especially for small regional newspapers. Folha focuses primarily on national stories, but a regional paper might focus on the finances of a local politician.

This led to a story, for instance, in O Globo about the former governor of Mranhão state, in the northeast of the country, who reported personal assets of about $250,000, but purchased a penthouse for $1.5 million dollars. Investigation of his finances led to his jailing on charges of tax evasion. Across Brazil, the assets of politicians have increased 41.8% over the course of a four-year election cycle, which vastly outpaces the 3-4% rate of annual inflation in Brazil… which suggests that either that Brazilian politicians are amazingly astute investors, or that there’s continuing political corruption in Brazil.

The success of this project is a strong argument for laws that increase governmental transparency in Brazil. According to Rodrigues, the Brazilian constitution mandates a right of access to information, but there’s no law that mandates this access. He’s now working with the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalists, an organization inspired in part by the US organization Investigative Reporters and Editors, to build a movement towards a freedom of information law in Brazil. ABRAJI is now one of the leading partners in a coalition of 18 organizations supporting this law, along with 15 congressmen from different parties.

The above map, from Privacy International, shows countries that have FOIA laws (in green), pending legislation (in light green) and movements towards FOIA laws (in yellow). It’s worth noting that many developing nations don’t yet have a movement towards FOIA acts – it’s very difficult for journalists to break certain stories on their governments without the legal ability to obtain key documents through legal channels. Before you can build online transparency systems, you’ve got to have ways of obtaining key pieces of information from your government.

In questions after his talk, Persephone Miel pointed out that the Politicos do Brazil project put online 25,000 CPF numbers, the Brazilian equivalent of social security numbers. Miel wondered whether there were privacy concerns from releasing this much personal information online. Rodrigues explained that he’d put a formal question to the Brazilian supreme court asking whether a newspaper or web site could do this. The response: politicians, as public figures, should expect that newspapers and websites could release public information on their fiscal status, including CPF numbers. Not only does the Politicos site make the CPF numbers, they include a tutorial which helps citizens look up a politician’s tax returns based on their CPF number.

I asked two questions – who are these resources for? Are sites like this primarily for journalists and civil society organizations, or for citizens at large? Rodrigues explained that the site gets heavily used by citizens immediately before elections, but generally is a resource for journalists. However, he believes that government information is nearly always demanded by journalists first, then by civil society and the general public after FOIA laws become well established.

My second question asked whether these transparency efforts had helped reduce corruption in Brazil. I mentioned that Transparency International, which publishes an annual index of “perception of corruption” that ranks Brazil as corrupt as China and India. Rodrigues is highly critical of TI’s methodology, suggesting that the reporting of corruption in Brazil both helps make the country less corrupt, but may increase the perception of corruption in Brazil in the short term. He’s a supporter of Global integrity, a new project designed to measure corruption and government effectiveness through the synthesis of over a hundred factors. The hope is that the results are more objective than TI’s thoroughly subjective index. “Our reporting might give the impression that every politician in Brazil is a thief. Actually, the standards for Brazilian politicians are as good as many other countries, but we’re transparent about our corruption, which might be dragging down our international perceptions.”