Chris Conley leads one of the most difficult research projects we’ve undertaken at the Berkman Center – the surveillance study of the Open Net Initiative. Over the past five years, the good folks at ONI have gotten very smart about how the internet is filtered in nations around the world. What’s much less clear is how the internet is monitored and what governments, law enforcement agencies, corporations and others are able to track as far as online behavior.

One problem: if surveillance is performed competently, it should be undetectable. Second problem: it’s often to someone’s advantage to claim that surveillance is taking place, even when it’s not, as it can change behaviors. (Think about “dummy” cameras mounted on your house as part of a fake “security system”. If they’re convincing enough, perhaps they don’t actually need to work.) Conley mentions my comments about the panopticon effect of surveillance in a recent Newsweek article – I assert that Zimbabwe isn’t able effectively monitor the Internet… but by stating that they will, they’ve forced a large number of users to remove sensitive information and conversations from the Internet.

In attempting to understand and explain surveillance to academics, activists and the general public, Conley would prefer to study what’s actually happening. Unfortunately, that data’s pretty uncommon. We know about situations where surveillance is discovered by the target and cases where information is either leaked or publicly released, but these situations are quite rare.

Instead, in many cases, we do better to study capabilities. What tools are available that individuals or governments could use to monitor networks? What tools can be used to scan a hard drive over networks? What are the capabilities and vulnerabilities of tools like GMail, Google Docs and Facebook? How is the network laid out and what does that mean about technological constraints on monitoring?

It’s been widely reported – though only very thinly disclosed – that there’s widespread domestic surveillance taking place in the US with the intention of monitoring suspected terrorists. And CALEA – the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act – provides a legal framework to enable wiretapping of traditional, mobile and VOIP phones in the US. These facts have implications for privacy, for civil liberties and human rights.

Conley wishes that those doing surveillance will consider more carefully the possibility that transparency is sometimes in their best interest. Unfortunately, that’s very counter to the ethos of the surveillance community. He quotes Ed Giorgio, a security consultant to the NSA, who says “We have a saying in this business: privacy and security are a zero-sum game.” The fear is that revealing surveillance would allow potential targets to avoid detection and monitoring. But he believes that there are cases where transparency might make surveillance more effective for the surveillers.

Transparency can raise awareness of surveillance – which might be to the advantage of a program designed to alter the behavior of people under surveillance. He notes that the effects of transparency depend on the purpose of the surveillance. Facebook, for instance, surveils your activity constantly to report it to your friends, but users really disliked it when Facebook began surveilling purchasing behavior on other sites via their Beacon program. He also suggests that transparency might need to be very specific to achieve a desired end. The RIAA can claim to surveil filesharing networks, but most users believe they won’t be caught. If the RIAA advertises that they can detect 5% of all illegal filesharing, that might be an incentive to stop sharing. But if they announce the can detect only BitTorrent sharing, that will likely drive people to alternative tools.

If Conley could influence those implementing surveillance, he’d suggest that the following types of disclosure might benefit the people performing surveillance – this is information with “limited negative effect and substantial benefits to disclosure”:

- the mere existence of surveillance programs
- the purpose of the program
- the scope of the program – is it targetting everyone, or just pre-selected targets
- third party cooperation which is nominally voluntary

There’s a complex set of legal issues that arise over surveillance in a digital environment. For one thing, there are many more channels for surveillance – systems like OnStar, a vehicle tracking system, can be turned on for law enforcement purposes. What are the legal rights for an OnStar user? What sort of US Fourth Amendment (privacy) restrictions apply to data you’ve stored online? As the project goes forward, analysis of these legal questions needs to complement research on what we know about surveillance and what might and might not be possible.

• Sierra Leone: Bio Diesel
  Wonderful post about making biodiesel from palm kernels in Sierra Leone. Via Afrigadget, Emeka Okafor
  (tags: africa sierraleone energy green innovation)
• Gin, Television, and Social Surplus – Here Comes Everybody
  Clay gets snippy with a TV interviewer who wonders why people “waste time” on Wikipedia. Observes that TV functions as an energy sink for global minds and that if we could tap this energy, we could build 2k wikipedia a year
  (tags: attention communication culture ideas internet wikipedia television)
• Change.org
  Interesting part-time job offer for bloggers focused on social change issues
  (tags: blogging environment activism)
• Homophily, xenophilia and empathy. ‽ andrew golis
  Excellent post from Andrew Golis connecting my thoughts on homophily to Barack Obama’s talk about an “empathy deficit”
  (tags: uspolitics blogs xenophilia homophily)
• Urban miners look for precious metals in cell phones | World | Reuters
  At current precious metal prices, recycling of e-waste, especially mobile phones, looks like an economically wise activity
  (tags: environment gold green recycling ewaste)

There’s been a small but fascinating blog conversation going on surrounding the term “homophily”. Journalism and media critic Amy Gahran encountered the term in an interview I and Solana Larsen gave with Chris Lydon of Radio Open Source and explored the concept in an extended riff and a set of bookmarks. Tom, an educator living and working in Ankara, weighed in with a moving story about learning from a Guatemalan colleague. Michele Martin, an education blogger, worries that the internet as a whole is a source for homophily and may be making her (and all of us) dumber. (Here she’s pulling on some threads explored by Cass Sunstein in Republic.com and Infotopia. More on that in a bit.) And yesterday, my colleague and friend David Sasaki invoked the conversation in an important post on the difficulties of getting people to pay attention to voices from the developing world.

I love it when smart people join a conversation I was trying to get started. So here’s my attempt to flesh out a bit more of why I think homophily, serendipity and xenophilia are useful concepts, what little I know about the academic literature about them, and what I’m reading to learn more.

I was introduced to the term “homophily” through a post on Nat Torkinton’s blog titled “Homophily in Social Software“, which led me to an excellent piece by Shankar Vedantam titled “Why Everyone You Know Thinks the Same as You“.

“Homophily” is a remarkably useful term, a compact word that succinctly expresses the idea that “birds of a feather flock together” – that you’re likely to befriend, talk to, work with and share ideas with people who’ve got common ethnic, religious and economic background with you. It’s not a new word – it was coined by Lazarsfeld and Merton in 1954 in an essay titled “Friendship as a Social Process” – but it’s never quite caught on. A Google search for the term gives you 51,000 results, roughly as many as my favorite obscure, Greek-derived sociological term, “xenophilia”. (One of the high ranking results for “homophily” is an interesting question on Yahoo Answers with the unhelpful answer, “Homophily does not exist as a word although homophile (gay)does.”

I’ve been talking and writing about homophily as one of the concepts that helps explain the challenges and issues that surround Global Voices and my larger media attention work. It’s my contention that living in the 21st century requires understanding what people think, feel and want in different parts of the world, given that both the challenges and opportunities of next several decades are global, not local ones. (Understanding Iraqi attitudes towards a US occupying force and Shia/Sunni/Kurdish tensions better might have mitigated the disastrous invasion of Iraq. Understanding Chinese and Indian economic aspirations is probably a prerequisite to figuring out how to regulate carbon emissions while those nations embrace automobile ownership. And activists trying to change Chinese policy in Darfur would benefit from better understanding of Chinese pride, the concept of “face” and the power of nationalism.)

Historically, our understanding of attitudes and opinions in other cultures is a heavily mediated one. As Kwame Appiah elegantly outlines in Cosmopolitanism, it’s only in very recent times that most people have been able to directly encounter people from different parts of the world. And despite air travel, most Americans have an impression of Nigeria through newspapers, movies and 419 emails rather than from travelling to the country or spending time with Nigerians. We understand the world, for the most part, through what we hear about it, not what we encounter of it. To the extent that our understanding of the wider world is a poor one, it’s worth asking questions about our media is working correctly.

There’s no shortage of voices reporting a crisis in the world of journalism. In 2001, media critic David Shaw reported that foreign coverage had shrunk “70% to 80% during the past 15 to 20 years” due to economic and cultural factors. He quotes a 1998 study from UC San Diego which saw international news coverage in American newspapers shrink from 15% to 2% of total content. More recently, Alisa Miller – president of PRI – produced an elegant short video that graphically depicts the paucity of international news coverage on American television.

(News isn’t the only way we encounter other countries – movies, television and music shape perceptions as well. But journalism has an explicit public service function, a social responsibility to inform citizens so they can make political decisions. Some of the blame for an isolated, ill-informed citizenry has to fall on the news media.)

The shift from broadcast media to read/write media has the potential to shift this equation. Rather than encountering people through the filter of professional media, perhaps we can reach them directly through their blogs, videos, photos. (This isn’t always possible – the digital divide is very real, and I’d argue that many of the arguments I made about digital exclusion in “Making Room for the Third World in the Second Superpower” still hold.) We no longer need to wait for CNN to connect us with people and stories in Bangladesh or Brazil – the explosion of personal publishing means that someone is likely speaking up in those corners of the world.

The rise of the read/write web turns the problem of paying attention to the rest of the world from a supply to a demand problem. You can find Brazilian, Bengali and Bulgarian voices, but only if you bother looking for them, stumble across them or are led to them by creators and curators of content.

This new “digital disorder”, as David Weinberger describes it, requires new systems to make navigation possible. Some systems rely on trusted guides, editors who we trust to help us sort through the mess. (Think BoingBoing and the crew who man that ship, or any prominent site capable of driving traffic to smaller sites.) Others rely on collective intelligence of their users to suggest stories – Digg, Reddit, etc.

The systems that rely on network effects, as Torkinton points out, are deeply affected by homophily. (So, as it turns out, are the systems based on human editors.) Some of these systems ask you what stories you liked, then find others who liked those stories and recommend their favorite stories – this is a technique called “collaborative filtering“, and it’s become increasingly popular as a paradigm for navigating a complex, choice-rich world of media. You can see how CF could be a homophily trap – tell Netflix that you liked the film “Sneakers” and it will find you other people who liked “Sneakers” (most of whom are, like you, ageing computer geeks), and suggest other films they liked. The recommendations you’ll receive are likely to be good, but are less likely to be surprising and challenging.

Systems simpler than CF fall victim to homophily traps as well. A site like Reddit attracts a lot of young men who work technical jobs and lean to the left politically – rely on Redditors for your news and you’re unlikely to encounter many stories from the developing world, from the political right, from non-technical disciplines. (Yes, I’m writing in huge, sweeping generalizations here – comments pointing out a single Africa story on Digg to refute this aren’t especially helpful.)

Why is homophily a trap? Cass Sunstein argues that it can polarize us – in Infotopia, he cites a study he helped conduct that demonstrates that deliberation of political issues with like-minded people leads subjects to a more politically polarized stance. From this, and from a close reading of political polarization in the blogosphere, he argues that the Internet may make it easier for us to share information with likeminded individuals, and that in a political context, this could be a bad thing.

I’ve made a much less persuasive and elegant argument summarized by the aphorism “Homophily can make you stupid.” My argument, basically, is that it’s possible to miss huge trends, changes and opportunities by talking solely to people who agree with you. I use myself as an exemplar of this sort of stupidity – I found myself so baffled by the results of the 2004 US Presidential election that I invited Republicans to come have a beer with me to explain what they were thinking. (One did. Thanks, Ian.) If homophily is capable of misleading Americans about local politics, just imagine what we fail to understand about Egypt, Pakistan and Fiji by virtue of not consuming media recommended by people from those places?

Writing from an engineering perspective, Torkinton suggests that authors of social software need to first decide whether homophily is a feature or a bug. If the goal of an application is to broaden your information universe, homophily may be a bug, and designers may want to include “less relevant but also likely to be interesting” recommendations. He recommends framing this as a feature, searching for ways to deliver “serendipity”, which he defines as “pleasantly surprising the user”.

(”Serendipity” is a fascinating term. It was coined in 1754 by Horace Walpole, a prolific British novelist and correspondent. He referenced a Persian fairytale, The Three Princes of Serendip, referring to a set of characters who “were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” While that definition – and, indeed, the story cited – don’t precisely map to current usage of the term, Richard Boyle offers a long essay tracing the coinage of the term and feels that Walpole’s invention was the definitive first use. “Serendip”, incidently, was a Persian name for Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. Always nice to discover that a concept like serendipity has global origins.)

Serendipity is harder than it sounds. It’s one thing to surprise someone – it’s another to surprise someone helpfully. It’s even hard to define – lately I’ve been arguing with David Weinberger about whether certain examples constitute serendipity. Looking on a library shelf for a particular title, discovering it isn’t particularly interesting, but discovering the exact book you need nearby? (Fortunate, but also a consequence of the power of a topical organizational system.) Finding a newspaper story you never would have searched for but found very useful because the editors put it on the bottom of the front page, in what Dan Gillmor has called “the serendipity box”? (Again, very fortunate, but hardly surprising that editors would drive readers to less-read content.)

The reason serendipity is important to consider is that it’s one of the few affirmative ways to get people to pay attention to news from the developing world. I’ve argued that there’s three basic paths to get people to pay attention to, say, Somalia:
- Fear: There’s no government there, and there are lots of angry Muslims. If we don’t pay attention, we’re ignoring the next hotbed of terrorism
- Guilt: People are dying there. If things get out of hand, you might see Ethiopia slaughtering large numbers of Somali. Let’s not ignore another Rwandan genocide.
- Greed/Opportunity: Sure, it’s a mess, but did you know that Somali Telecom is making a fortune in the north of the country?

These arguments always put me in the mind of Melissa Rossi’s book, “What Every American Should Know About the Rest of the World“, a book which seems to be designed solely for people who are embarrased at cocktail parties when countries they can’t find on a map become topics of conversation. My guess is that avoiding embarrasment is not an especially powerful motivator for engaging with international issues and opinions.

I’ve argued for some time that a different model exists – xenophilia. There are people in the world who are genuinely fascinated by the very breadth, complexity and difference of the world. Many of these people are “third culture kids”, people who were raised in one country but “from” another country. Others are people who live, work or love outside their home cultures. My colleagues at Global Voices are, for the most part, people identifiable as xenophiles. I think there’s an argument to be made that xenophiles are uniquely equipped to thrive in a globalizing world and that cultivating xenophilia should be both a personal priority and an aspect of a nation’s educational and diplomatic strategy.

But xenophilia’s hard. It’s one thing to say to oneself, “I really should pay attention to matters in Somalia” and another thing to do it. Joi Ito has talked about “the caring problem“, the difficulty of really caring enough about people in another part of the world to engage with news from that community. At Berkman, we’ve been discussing the problem in terms of broccoli and chocolate – you know you should eat broccoli because it’s good for you, but there’s just so much tasty chocolate out there!

Serendipity breaks the chocolate/broccoli paradigm – it gives you broccoli as you’re searching for chocolate, adn it turns out to be just the right thing at the moment. It doesn’t require you to identify as a global citizen – it just means you’re following your interest in sumo wrestling and find yourself discovering a debate about Japanese identity and Asian politics.

So… that’s more or less an outline of the ideas I’m wrestling with right now, trying to figure out if they might represent the outline of a book. Specifically on the questions of homophily and serendipity, I’m interested in these questions:

- Do people who are ethnographically/psychographically similar consume the same media? Where’s the causality in this? Do we both read the NYTimes because we’re both liberals, or are we liberals because we read the NYTimes?

- Does consumption of the same media lead to the polarization Sunstein sees in deliberation, or is that a feature/bug of the deliberative process?

- Is homophily in terms of bridging and bonding social capital? If so, is Putnam right that bowling leagues create bridging capital? (There’s a lot of middle aged white dudes in my bowling league.) What do institutions that create international bridging capital look like in an internet age?

- How do you create serendipity? Is this something that’s algorithmically possible in collaborative filtering systems or other recommendation engines? Is serendipity a function of breaking out of your existing, homophilic social circles, or is it better generated within those circles?

On my immediate reading list:
Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks, by McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Cook
Lazarsfeld and Merton’s essay introducing the term “homophily” in Freedom and Control in Modern Society, edited by Berger, Abel and Page, 1954
Putnam, both Bowling Alone and his recent, worrying research on trust and socioethnic diversity

Would love your suggestions, directions, critiques and feedback, both from people already in this conversation and those who’ve been watching from the sideline.

• Technology Review: Una Laptop por Ni‽o
  Extremely useful review of OLPC deployment in Peru by David Talbot. It’s both enthusiastic about the ambitions of the Peru effort and fair about the challenges OLPC has suffered so far.
  (tags: olpc peru education development developingworld)
• El Oso ‽ Blog Archive ‽ (Really) Breaking Outside of the Echo Chamber
  David Sasaki looks at some of my writing on homophily and the supply/demand problem in international media to discuss the challenge of getting people to read and support Rising Voices bloggers
  (tags: globalvoices homophily xenophilia journalism attention blogs)
• CNN now sued for $1.3 billion – $1 per person in China | U.S. | Reuters
  Two Chinese citizens sue CNN over Jack Cafferty;s “thugs and goons” comment. Why $1.3 billion? One dollar per insulted Chinese citizen.
  (tags: china uspolitics journalism homophily)
• Military Said to be Running Zimbabwe
  Zimbabwean journalist makes the case that what’s going on in Zimbawe is really a military coup, not Mugabe’s personal last stand. “What a lot of people have missed is that Mugabe agreed to avoid a bloody coup by the military. It was better him than the mi
  (tags: africa zimbabwe)

• Tryangulation: homophily self exam
  An excellent post on “homophily self exams” by a Texan educator based in Ankara. Very cool to see people exploring the homophily/serendipity concept
  (tags: communication homophily psychology xenophilia blogging education linguistics guatemala)
• Zimbabaloola in Zimbabwe – Letter from Harare
  One of the best – and most depressing – analyses of the situation in Zimbabwe. Explains in some detail how the economy continues to function despite outrageous inflation, and how this system benefits a small elite.
  (tags: Africa zimbabwe economics inflation politics elections)
• YouTube – sciencedissemination’s Channel
  Video of ping-based research attempting to calculate available bandwidth to African universities over the course of several months
  (tags: Africa internet video bandwidth statistics)
• Foreign Policy: Think Again: The Peace Corps
  A fierce critique of the Peace Corps from a former Cameroon country director who now lives in Madagascar. His main thrust – Peace Corps isn’t a development organization and may not be very functional for public diplomacy
  (tags: peacecorps xenophilia development uspolitics)

As the post-election crisis lurches on in Zimbabwe, the question on everyone’s mind is “What next?” The ZANU-PF government briefly signalled an interest in a “transitional government of national unity” – headed by President Mugabe, of course, but involving opposition MDC politicians as well. The Herald – a state-owned newspaper which floated that idea of national unity – has changed course and now runs an editorial titled “Unity govt not feasible“. Deputy Information Minister Bright Matonga renounced the previous statements about unity and emphasized that ZANU-PF would challenge MDC in a run-off election.

Uncertainty over the future provides great fodder for discussion. At Harvard University in Cambridge MA this evening, a group of very smart Zimbabweans and Zimbabwe-watchers got together to discuss possible scenarios. Brian Chingono, a student at Harvard, offers a frame for the discussions which will be familiar to readers of this blog:
- It’s been almost a month, and no presidential election results have been released
- Robert Mugabe, in power for 28 years, has a history of political violence, dating back to violence against the Ndebele in the 1980s
- Thousands of Zimbabweans have been displaced by post-election violence
- Parlimentary results, which showed a victory for the opposition MDC, are now being “recounted”
- Chinese arms shipments to Zimbabwe raise fears that the denoument to the current situation may be a violent one.
He shows a video report from SkyNews – who have been doing excellent video journalism from within the country – showing violence against MDC supporters, and a system of reports on paper and by SMS that the MDC argues prove that they won the presidential election.

Chaz Maviyane-Davies, an award winning activist graphic designer, is a Zimbabwean exile. In the lead up to the 2002 Presidential election, he ran a series of striking ads, aimed at Zimbabwean voters. His aim, he tells us, was to “raise consciousness about the situation”. He spent 2-3 hours a day on the pieces and distributed them globally via email. While it might have been more effective to distribute the pieces on print, cost made it impossible for Maviyane-Davies – instead, he relied on sending them globally and hoping people would distribute, print and be moved by them. A later project, Portal of Truth, offered stark graphic commentary on the stolen 2002 Zimbabwe elections. His images are a tour of some of the darker moments in Zimbabwean political history, touching on the church’s unwillingness to enter into politics, Zimbabwe’s incursions into the Democratic Republic of Congo, the government’s willingness to print money to contest elections, voter intimidation by the military and efforts to prevent election observers from monitoring elections. Many feature Zimbabwean proverbs: “If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a small room with a mosquito.”

Maviyane-Davies didn’t create images for the 2005 or 2008 elections, but he’s been working on images in the last few weeks, including one for the poster that advertised today’s event, featured above.

My friend and colleage Tawanda Mutasah, the executive director of Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, is asked to address the thorny question, “How has Mugabe managed to stay in power?” He offers two answers – domestic repression, and a pretense of African legitimation. For decades, Mutasah tells us, Mugabe has terrorized voters throughout the country, with particularly severe cases in Midlands and the southwest of the country, to rig elections. While rigging efforts this decade have received more attention, it’s really a very old strategy.

A key date for Zimbabwe was March 2001, when SADC (a regional trade body) agreed to a new set of norms and standards for elections. (Tawanda clarified by email today that the 2001 agreement was by the parliamentary forum of SADC. An agreement in August 2004 by SADC heads of state cemented these changes.) The fact that Zimbabwe signed on to these standards “makes it easier to say the elections have been stolen without people complaining about UK and US influence,” as these are African norms and standards, agreed to by Zim’s neighors.

The real problem, Mutasah explains, is the “joint operations command”, a group of six generals who are functionally in control of the government. “They’ve told Mugabe he can’t reliquish power” because they’re afraid of what will happen when they are no longer in power. They’re (understandably) afraid of being prosecuted for political murders and crimes against humanity.

Mugabe has been a master at leveraging his revolutionary credentials, but Mutasah tells us that “we’re seeing cracks in this pretense. The chink is now clear in Mugabe’s armor.” For years, he’s claimed that all of Africa supports him against the rest of the world and that he’s leading an African revolution. But now the president of Zambia has declared that any country in SADC which allows the Chinese arms shipment to be delivered will be violating SADC election codes. The president of Tanzania, who is currently heading the AU, has described the situation in Zimbabwe as “unacceptable”. President Mbeki of South Africa is looking increasingly isolated.

That said, Mutasah gives us a quick history lesson: in 1971, the Byrd Amendment overturned a ban on US trade with Rhodesia, allowing the US to import minerals despite Ian Smith’s deeply repressive regime. “Mugabe has been aware from long back that the politics of the international community has tended to be fickle, and I dare say, unprincipled.” The hope, today, is that the international community is changing and that it’s not monolithic. There needs to be a movement around global human rights solidarity that marginalizes Mugabe in terms of supporting the rights of poor people in Zimbabwe.

Andrew Meldrum, a journalist for The Guardian and The Economist who lived for years in post-independence Zimbabwe before being imprisoned and deported, sees cause for hope in the current situation. His proximate cause for hope is the international community’s refusal to allow an arms shipment from China to be delivered to Zimbabwe.

The message of this refusal, he tells us, is that Mugabe can’t win at the ballot box – he needs guns. And African leaders are starting to step up and pressure China (against a backdrop of China’s problems with Tibet and Darfur), which appears to have led to China backing down from delivering arms. In the past, Meldrum tells us he advised the US and British government not to condemn the Zimbabwean government because it ends up reinforcing Mugabe’s argument that he’s at war against colonial powers. “But at this point, things are so desperate, all possible criticism should go on.” He suggests that criticism should focus on democracy, the rule of law and human rights – “Who can be against those things?”

He notes that the government’s latest plan (which already appears to be taken off the table) for a national unity government isn’t realistic. “A government of national unity governed by Robert Mugabe is a contradiction in terms.” Mugabe doesn’t behave democratically within his own party. There’s no chance that the opposition – or the international community – will accept that solution.

Dambudzo Muzenda, a blogger and a student at the Kennedy School of Government, sees the recent election as proof positive that the national mood has turned against Mugabe. She believes that the election was “a personal vote against Mugabe and ZANU-PF, and that “people won’t accept a government with Mugabe at the top of the ticket.” Asked about the possibility of a truth and reconcilliation committee, she wonders whether this process will make it harder to oust hardliners, who will be afraid of facing persecution. “If that means trading immunity against justice… I would rather see Mugabe go scott free than see him stay in power and cause so much damage.”

Any conversation about the future of Zimbabwe has to face issues of land distribution. Meldrum unpacks the history of the 1980 Lancaster Agreement, in which the UK agreed to provide fiscal assistance to Zimbabwe to allow for land distribution. “Zimbabwe needed land reform before the seizures. And now it needs it again. No one has benefitted from these seizures.” He believes it will take 15 years, a process that might involve inviting experienced white farmers to bid on large farms and coach black farmers to the point where they’re able to productively take over these farms. Mutasah points out that the UK honored part of the Lancaster agreement, putting up £44m to compensate farmers. Unfortunately, this money rarely made it into farmer’s hands, and farms were given to cronies, not to people who could productively farm them. “Those guys in the upper echelons of the government – each of them owns at least five farms.”

Many of the questions focused on what diaspora Zimbabweans might do to effectively help change. Muzenda points out that roughly a quarter of the nation’s population lives in South Africa. They’re afraid to come out into the streets and protest, as many are in South Africa illegally. But South Africa could negotiate an agreement to allow disaporans to vote, either in an official or an unofficial way. And some activists are organizing protests, like attempts to jam phone lines at ZANU-PF headquarters and at certain ministries and embassies. In a later question, Muzenda is less hopeful, noting that protests within Zimbabwe will likely lead to declaration of martial law. She ends with the hope that Mugabe’s age may become a factor, or that a Jacob Zuma presidency of South Africa would be less forgiving and flexible with Mugabe. Mutasah wonders whether a public statement from Nelson Mandela would help further undercut Mugabe’s anti-colonialist cred and suggests people contact Mandela’s foundation.

An audience member wonders how Mugabe and ZANU-PF managed to allow election results to be published at polling places, which appears to be the key factor in preventing the election from being rigged. Mutasah quotes section and verse: “Section 64-1E is the key provision.” It was added to Zimbabwe election law under pressure from opposition parties. That pressure resulted from international condemnation of violence on March 11, 2007, where government forces broke up a peaceful prayer meeting. The outrage over that violence forced dialog between the government and opposition, and it allowed for a key change in election law.

I asked the panelists how they felt about the issue of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. Zimbabwe has an amazing history of forgiveness – Ian Smith, who led the apartheid government, was allowed to live out his days peacefully under the Mugabe government that fought for his ouster. How much forgiveness were panelists willing to offer in exchange for a change of government?

Chingono suggested that Zimbabweans were so desperate for basic human rights and food that they’d be willing to forgive many of the people involved with the government. Mutasah was far more cautious, warning of the dangers of “premature forgiveness”. “We are ready to go beyond the current impasse, but we see deep-seated anger,” connected to the massacre in Matabeleland, the 2000 killed between 2000 and 2002. The important lessons from the South Africa TRC, he tells us, is the importance of forcing people to confess their crimes in a serious, open, contrite way before being granted amnesty. He believes Zimbabwe will need a TRC, perhaps one in which lower-ranking functionaries are prosecuted while leaders are given amnesty, or perhaps vice versa. “In our experience with transitional justice, we’ve discovered that when anger is bottled up, it doesn’t always come up in a civilized way.” The challenge is not just to oust Mugabe – it’s to build a prosperous and stable country after the fact, which involves facing and moving through decades of frustration and anger.

Two bonus readings:

- An amazing post from an anonymous documentary filmmaker in Zimbabwe, unpacking the economics of Zimbabwe under hyperinflation and the people who are benefitting from it.

- Chinese resentment over the China/Zimbabwe arms deal and international press attention to China’s role in Zimbabwe, translated by John Kennedy for Global Voices.

• Meskel Square: Things that make you go huh?
  Andrew Heavens reviews a celebrity campaign to call attention to Darfur and declares “What we have here is a clear case of cultural disconnect.”
  (tags: africa darfur celebrity fame attention)
• Matt Damon leads the star-studded protests on Darfur day of action
  Star-studded “day of action” features celebrities attempting to call attention to Darfur by destroying toys as a metaphor for “shattered childhood”
  (tags: darfur africa fame celebrity)
• Shanghaiist: Attack on an American volunteer by anti-Carrefour mob in Zhuzhou, Hunan: UPDATED
  An American teacher exiting a Carrefour supermarket in Zhuzhao is assaulted by a mob who are protesting the French company and mistook the foreigner for a Frenchman. Complex questions about the accuracy of the report
  (tags: china olympics protest violence nationalism)
• Dr. Antonio Nucci ‽ Blog Archive ‽ Weekend of Olympic flame and CNN attacks
  Good technical piece on DDOS attacks on CNN and related websites by Chinese hackers. TOTH to Andrew Lih
  (tags: china hackers ddos)

• contentious.com – Breaking Out of the Echo Chamber
  Amy Gahran kindly riffs on some of my writings about overcoming homophily. Almost makes me want to dig into research on homophily and serendipity again… :-)
  (tags: culture socialmedia xenophilia serendipity homophily)
• Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . FEATURE . Charlie and Sedar . April 18, 2008 | PBS
  A lovely video essay about a college clasmate of mine, Charlie Buckholtz, and his lifelong friendship with Sedar Chapelle, a friendship that’s crossed racial, cultural and religious lines.
  (tags: religion xenophilia)

Wonder why the Zimbabwe government suddenly finds itself needing 3 million rounds of AK-47 ammunition?

The health minister needs to reload.

Chris McGreal, reporting for the Guardian, begins his story with this paragraph:

ZIMBABWE’S Health Minister armed himself with a Kalashnikov and threatened to kill opposition supporters forced to attend a political meeting unless they voted for Robert Mugabe in a second round of the presidential election, witnesses say.

And I thought campaigning in Pennsylvania had gotten rough.

McGreal’s story, titled “It’s Mugabe or death, voters told” focuses on a climate of rising rural violence, designed to intimidate MDC supporters in a second round of voting. Many of these attacks have occurred in Mashonaland East province, a traditional ZANU-PF stronghold, and the home of the armed and dangerous minister, David Parirenyatwa.

There’s a growing body of photographic evidence to support reports that opposition supporters are being detained and beaten. Sokwanele, a Zimbabwean activist group based in Bulawayo, is maintaining one of the world’s most disturbing photo albums, a collection of photos of citizens hospitalized for injuries they received in beatings. The most recent photos are of a 38-year old man, beaten with chains and fan belts to punish him for driving citizens to MDC rallies before the election. (The previous two links lead to graphic and disturbing images.)

This is useful context for understanding the saga of the An Yue Jiang, a Chinese vessel carrying 3 million rounds of AK-47 ammunition, rocket propelled grenades and mortar rounds for delivery to the Zimbabwean government. The ship attempted to dock at Durban, a South African port, but a strike by South African transport workers and a court decision banning transit of the weapons through South Africa forced the vessel to find another port.

It was reported to be headed for Maputo, Mozambique, but pressure from international trade unions evidently helped the Mozambique government refuse to allow the vessel to dock. It appears that Angola may be a destination for the ship, though the port authorites in Luanda say that the ship hasn’t requested permission to dock.

The ship reportedly turned off its transponder after leaving port in Durban, making it much harder to track. There was speculation that the ship had run our of fuel enroute to Luanda, as it briefly appeared on the Lloyd’s List casualty register – according to blogger “Word Wright”, the vessel was removed from the register this morning, suggesting that it was either refueled at sea or intercepted by the South African navy.

The latter would be very good news, as South Africa’s image as a fair broker in the region has taken some serious hits based on Thabo Mbeki’s insistence that “quiet diplomacy” instead of condemnation was the appropriate way to handle the situation. His insistence that the situation did not constitute a crisis has led to some humorous responses, including a recent strip of Madam and Eve, a popular South African cartoon. (Tip of the hat to Muhammed Karim, writing on Global Voices.)

As the situation spirals into an uglier and uglier configuration, perhaps humor is the best solution. The “recount” appears to be litte more than naked election rigging, as independent observers report that every recounted ballot box has been tampered with. As violence increases and the threat of arms delivery raises the stakes for anyone brave enough to vote MDC, the notion of a fair runoff election becomes harder and harder to take seriously.

So, with that in mind, some jokes from Alex Magaisa with Kubatana (with my annotations for those who don’t closely follow Zim politics:

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Morgan Tsvangirai (MDC presidential candidate): Because it wanted a taste of life on the other side of the road. It was exercising its right.

Patrick Chinamasa (ZANU-PF minister of justice): No. The chicken did not cross the road. In fact we need to verify whether in fact it was a chicken. As far as we know, the chicken is still there. It could have been an eagle. We have to wait until verification is done.

Didymus Mutasa (ZANU-PF Minister of State): I do not think it crossed the road. If it crossed the road it’s because the white farmer dragged it. But we cannot allow that to happen. It will have to come back.

Joseph Chinotimba (noted war veteran, credited with leading invasions of white-owned farms): The kichen, no, chicken is a sell-out against the revolution. The ‘O’ vets will have to eat it!

Robert Mugabe (perpetual president of Zimbabwe): The chicken will never be allowed to cross the road. Not in my life time! Let those that run away to Bush and Brown do so. Not my chicken! My chicken will never cross the road. It will never be colonised again!

Thabo Mbeki (president of South Africa): Er … uhm … I don’t see any chicken at the moment … Er … I think it is right for us to wait and see. Let things take the natural course. If if it did cross the road we will be told officially. If it wants to cross the road we will see it when it crosses. There is nothing to talk about at the moment … Er … I don’t see any problem right now.

The good news about Global Voices? We do a pretty good job of giving you access to voices you might not otherwise hear from, translating and featuring bloggers from almost two hundred nations.

The bad news? Not everyone has a blog.

Every intelligent interviewer who asks me about Global Voices asks whether the people we feature on the site are a representative sample of the population of the nations we cover. The answer is “nope”. Bloggers aren’t a representative sample in the US, and they’re certainly not “the man on the street” in a country like Benin or Bolivia.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t listen to bloggers. It just means it’s worth realizing that, for the most part, bloggers in developing nations are better educated, more technical and wealthier than most of their compatriots. In some countries, that leads to recognizable bias – bloggers in Venezuela are more likely than the national average to be anti-Chavez; bloggers in Zimbabwe are more likely than the national average to be anti-Mugabe.

But it does present a challenge for us at Global Voices – how do we broaden the group of people around the world who have access to blogs and other tools they can use to share their experiences with a global audience?

With support from the Knight Foundation, we’ve been running a project called Rising Voices, designed to introduce citizen media to a wider audience, giving people who might not have a chance to express themselves online the opportunity, training and access to tools that allow them to raise their voices.

One of the projects we’re supporting in Rising Voices is Voces Bolivianas, an effort by Bolivians both within and outside that country to bridge political divides, begin dialogs and bring different types of people into the online space. Today, the project is holding Bolivian Voices Day, a nationwide effort to train bloggers and bring more people into the conversation.

Project leader Eddie Ávila wrote to the GV team last night, talking about his reasons for starting the project. I thought his words were moving and asked him for his permission to share them. Here’s some of what he said.

It seems like ages ago, when I noticed a trackback on one of my blog posts that led to a site called Global Voices Online. Soon after came an email from David Sasaki, the Latin American editor at the time, inquiring whether I would be interested in representing Bolivia through weekly summary posts. That began my start with Global Voices. That was September 2005.

Little did I think it would lead me to where I am now, namely 12 hours away from the start of Bolivian Voices Day. In eight sites across the country, approximately 100 Bolivians from “underrepresented” groups will take part in a one-day workshop where they will learn how to create a blog, write posts, and most importantly, be part of this local, national and global conversation. In Oruro, a small mining town, teachers from rural schools will come into town to participate. In Tiqiupaya, an even smaller suburb of Cochabamba, members of neighborhood associations have signed up to take part, and in El Alto, a youth group of young men and women, who go to school at night because they work during the day to support their families, are others who will part of this event. These are just a few examples of who will be present tomorrow…

For me, working and moving back here to Bolivia holds special meaning. The decision of my parents to immigrate and remain in the U.S. some 40+ years ago, as you might guess, changed my world forever, but also instilled in me a special responsiblity to “do something” for Bolivia someday. In prior stays in the country, I’ve volunteered at orphanges, gave donations to buy children presents at Christmastime or other worthy deeds, but it never felt right. This project feels right, and even though it is a small drop in the bucket with a country of 9 million in an increasingly polarized society, it is the first step. Creating meaningful interaction with one another regardless of class, ethnicity, geographic location, is just what this country needs…

Good luck, Eddie, and good luck to everyone involved with this project. Can’t wait to hear what Bolivia has to say.