How do 70 opinionated people from around the world make up their collective minds?

Easy. They use an opinion spectrometer.

After a day-long brainstorming meeting about human rights issues online and a two-day conference, the Citizen Media Summitt, we’re now spending two more days discussing the future of our collective project. That means passionate, difficult conversations about big issues, like whether Global Voices editors and authors should be permitted to express strong personal opinions in their articles on the site.

The opinion spectrometer in use at the Global Voices 2008 Summit

We were introduced to the opinion spectrometer by Allen Gunn of Aspiration, though our deployment of the technique may be slightly different. If you’re interested in deploying the technology, we offer the technical description below:

With line segment AB, bisect the opinion plane equidistantly.

(Take a roll of toilet paper and unroll it down the center of the room.)

Designate A as representing the extreme of the opinion spectrum and B as te opposite extreme.

(People who really think GV should pay correspondents on one side of the room, while folks who favor volunteerism on the other side. More neutral positions in the middle of the room.)

Line C bisects segment AB perpendicularly, creating a two-dimensional plane. The C axis operates in terms of inverse absolute value, reflecting intensity of opinion.

(If you feel really strongly that GV should have a physical office, stand real close to the toilet paper. If you don’t care that much or could be swayed easily, stand towards the edge of the room.)

Interrogate points on the plane with regard to their two dimensional position. All other points are free to replot in response to interrogation. Iterate through a subset of the set of points.

(Pass around a microphone so people can explain their views. People will move around in response if their opinions are swayed.)

The resulting graph is a reflection of community opinion… which may reflect polarization, agreement or indifference.

It’s amazing how well this technique works. There’s a tendency in group discussions to attempt to come to a single conclusion. It’s actually way more helpful to know how strong feelings are about an issue, how polarizing that issue is, or whether an issue is truly unsettled for most speakers. It requires good moderation to make sure no one dominates the debate… but in a high-functioning community, people who find themselves at an extreme of the graph get visual feedback that they’re in a minority… and real-time feedback on whether an argument is persuasive.

A good method for running a meeting? The Global Voices folks are tightly clustered on the affirmative end of the toilet paper.

In putting together the Global Voices summit, the program sometimes ends up changing to reflect recent events. We added a panel a few weeks ago focused on the Chinese blogosphere and issues of bias, misunderstanding and miscommunication. It’s become very clear to those of us who watch blogopshere conversations that there’s a great deal of anger in China about percieved media bias in the US, and deep misunderstanding between Chinese bloggers and western human rights activists.

My co-founder Rebecca MacKinnon, a former CNN bureau chief in China and an expert on Chinese media, offers us a timeline on the incidents that have led to these discussions of bias. With China hosting the 2008 Olympics, there’s been a western expectation that China would be more open in terms of media, and that human rights situations would improve. On March 10th – the anniversary of the Chinese army march into Lhasa, a day that’s remembered with protests every year that remember Tibetan people’s resistance against the Chinese army – protests turned violent, sparking clashes between protesters and police.

Rebecca points out that there are very different ways to understand these protests. Western activists tend to feel, “the Chinese are denying Tibetans basic rights and opressing them.” Han Chinese tend to offer reflections like, “These ungrateful minorities – look what we did for their economy! We built infrastructure and sanitation for them and this is what we get?”

The violence in Tibet helped give support to movements to protest the Olympic torch passing through cities around the world. Western rights groups expected that Chinese people would be grateful for these protests against their “government oppressors”. Instead, they were deeply angry over percieved media bias in American mainstream media. This anger became most visible at Anti-CNN.com, a site designed to challenge narratives in Western media about China and to check facts reported in those media. Text on their front page is instructive in understanding their motives: “We are not against the western media, but against the lies and fabricated stories in the media. We are not against the western people, but against the prejudice from the western society.”

Anti-cnn got its name because commenters there revealed that a photo shown on CNN – which showed Chinese tanks in the streets of Lhasa – was improperly cropped from the original AFP photo… which showed Tibetans throwing rocks at those tanks. Writers on the site did excellent fact-checking, discovering cases in which photos of Nepali soldiers beating Tibetan protesters were mischaracterized as Chinese soldiers abusing Tibetans.

Is it possible, Rebecca wonders, that instead of preventing cultural disconnects, the net is capable of ampifying them?

Rebecca shows us maps generated by Dave Lyons of the Mutant Palm blog that show weblinks to the Athens Olympics site and to the Beijing Olympics site. They point out that there’s two separate clusters of people linking to the Beijing site – a cluster of Chinese blogs centered on certain media outlets, and everyone else’s blogs centered on other sites, suggesting two isolated conversations.

Some activists made efforts at trying to break down this echo chamber – she points us to an instructional video on YouTube designed to help Westerners talk to Chinese users on Fanfou, a twitter-like site, and engge in conversations via Google Translate. It’s not wise to come in with the perspective, “If only we could break down their wall and give them the information, they would be free.” (This statement gets a lot of laughs from the audience.)

There’s a systemic problem with getting alternative voices about subjects like Tibet from China. It’s difficult to post about the Dalai Lama without being effectively filtered on the Chinese-hosted internet… which means it’s hard to see these perspectives online.

John Kennedy, GV’s China editor, argues that anti-CNN was amazingly effective in critiquing western media coverage, and that there aren’t very good responses to their critiques – CNN didn’t offer an apology for their photo-cropping decisions, which made bloggers even more angry.

“How different are the Chinese views on Tibet? I don’t know, and we don’t know,” Kennedy offers. “If you’re not in a dialog with Chinese bloggers, does your opinion matter? Some people in China are really pissed off – how do you talk with them?”

Kennedy points out that he’s sometimes accused of picking the most extreme voices in the Chinese blogosphere and amplifying them. He offers a counterexample – a surprising post about Chinese bloggers finding common cause with Burmese monks, a subject that challenges perceptions about Chinese bloggers as supporting authoritarianism.

Isaac Mao points out that biases come from the absence of information. We need to understand that there are interlocking layers of media. There’s official media – words directly from the government. There’s professional media – which often critiques official media and helps interpret it. Now, we’re seeing the rise of grassroots media, which has emerged very quickly in China and now challenges these other narratives.

I offered an observation and question from the crowd: There are a lot of situations where we end up with cultural misunderstanding and failure to communicate due to a failure to consider the audience of remarks. Sermons Reverend Wright offered to his congregation were understood very differently by the reporters at ABC news than they were by his congregants… and this almost cost Obama the democratic nomination. Comments made by Jack Cafferty on CNN led to a law suit from Chinese citizens… it’s unlikely that Cafferty thought of himself speaking to a Chinese audience while speaking to his viewers. How often do we misunderstand because we’re not part of the intended audience for something?

Xiao Qiang offers the example of Chinese party secretaries writing about the Dalai Lama as “a wolf in lambskin”. This was pretty routine when talking to other party members – once translated into English and promoted worldwide, it led to outrage and a PR disaster.

Xiao offers the hope that projects like Global Voices can help build bridges of cultural understanding. He offers a story about Tang Danhong, a Han woman who’s lived in Tibet for ten years and has been writing epic poetry to try to encourage understanding and build bridges between groups:

Yes, I love Tibet. I am a Han Chinese who loves Tibet, regardless of whether she is a nation or a province, as long as she is so voluntarily. Personally, I would like to have them (Tibetans) belong to the same big family with me. I embrace relationships which come self-selected and on equal footing, not controlled or forced, both between peoples and nations.

If you’re not with us here in Budapest, please join us on the video stream. All the coverage is archived, which means that if you’ve got a very dull weekend planned, you could spend at least 20 hours with us. If you’ve got a bit less time, but read Spanish, El Pais is here to help you out. Rosa Jíminez Cano has an excellent article on yesterday’s sessions on free speech online. It’s a great complement to an article on Rising Voices, reported from Colombia, a few days back, with a strong focus on our remarkable David Sasaki.

If there’s a single subject that gets bloggers excited, incensed and interested, it’s elections. Our beloved managing editor Solana Larsen points out that we know we’ll see a flood of posting from a particular country a few months before an election, and often for some weeks afterwards… or for months, in the case of a disputed poll. Four GV authors and editors look in depth at political blogging in their countries, spanning Kenya, Iran, Venezuela and Armenia.

Hamid Tehrani, our Persian editor, offers some thoughts on Yarane Baran, a pro-reformist association of bloggers. The name of the group is a reference to “a blessing like rain”, the idea that electing a reformist leader (again) would be a blessing as welcome as rain. The network is one in support of “serial losers”, a group of politicians who’ve lost municipal, parliamentary and presidential elections. The network functions almost as a support group, providing hope to the participants who are curently deeply marginal in Iranian politics. But he wonders whether it’s working, as the traffic to the network is quite light, suggesting less support for the movement than the involved bloggers might hope. On the other hand, it’s an interesting network inasmuch as it includes blogs from senior politicians like former vice-president Mohammed Ali Abtahi, who uses the online space to publish stories on subjects that are rarely covered in other Iranian media.

Onnik Krikorian, our Armenia correspondent, documented the power of digital media in Armenia’s recent presidential election. Krikorian explains that Armenia hasn’t had very many free or fair elections, and that many people saw the 2008 election as a coronation for Serzh Sarkasian, backed by serving President Kocharyan who was constitutionally banned from standing for an additional term. The opposition candidate, Levon Ter-Petrossian (the first independently elected President of Armenia in 1991), had strong support from bloggers, and when he polled very poorly in the election, some argued that the elections hadn’t been free and fair.

Those arguments were bolstered by videos posted to YouTube, and bloggers promoted street protests against the election. This led up to clashes in the streets on March 1, where ten people died. The government shut down all independent media, but – oddly – didn’t shut down online media. Bloggers used YouTube to call attention to videos of police shooting at demonstrators, which eventually forced the police to respond to accusations of excessive force and brutality. During the twenty days that blogs were the only media, the Armenian political establishment began to understand the importance of blogs. After Sarkasian took power, he requested a meeting through his press advisor with bloggers to ask how blogs work and what they can do. Krikorian tells us his blogger friends say, “We’re not really going to tell them, are we?”

Luis Carlos Diaz, who covers Venezuela for Global Voices, explains his country’s political situation with a number of one-liners. “We have a new hegemony in power, without blood,” referring to Chavez’s vision of socialism. “Our problem: we have too much petroleum,” which he argues is bad for government accountability.

Venezuela is well-wired by developing world standards. Of 27 million people, 16 million voters, 5.7 million have net access. And since Venezuelan life is filled with political discussion, so are the blogs… at least when in election season. (And we do mean season – Diaz tels us that there’s at least one controversial election a year, which means that “voting is a sport in Venezuela”.) Digital media, he tells us, is perhaps the strongest media in Venezuela, and projects like the Elecciones en 3D project from to2blogs have emerged as major sources of media information during Venezuelan elections.

Daudi Were, the godfather of the Kenyan blogosphere, father of the Kenya Unlimited blog community, offers some reflections on Kenyan blogs in the wake of the 2007/8 electoral crisis. He’s kind enough to reference a recent article of mine on the topic, and I’ll recommend that for anyone who needs background on the election.

Daudi argues that Kenya was especially prepared to cover the situation due to the richness and maturity of the blogosphere. There are at least 800 Kenyan bloggers, who are both fiercely independent and tightly linked together. “If you build a new Kenyan blog, if you put it into the webring, you’ll have a thousand viewers the first day.” Many of these bloggers were anxious to cover the elections. Daudi tells us he was out on the streets at 6am, photographing lines and polling places; other bloggers were out at 3am. Some bloggers were actually standing for election, others were embedded with foreign diplomats, visiting polling sites as election monitors.

Everyone was cognizant of the polarized political environment. Before the election, Odinga was polling at 46.6% versus 46.3% for Kibaki. SMS was being used to spread extremely scary political messages: “If we vote in this guy, he’ll kill your grandmother. So vote for the other guy, or we’ll kill your grandmother,” quips Daudi.

On December 30th, Daudi made a post titled: “Something is not right“. Voting counts were turning up odd discrepancies, and presidential election results had not been released. As optimism eroded, violence began. Bloggers quickly found themselves as citizen reporters, using twitter, photoblogging and other tools to document the situations.

Daudi offers some reflections on lessons learned from the coverage of violent incidents and the protested election:

- Kenyans often complain that digital media isn’t important because bandwith penetration is only 7-10%. That’s a mistake – radio DJs often pick up blogposts and read them over the air, potentially reaching 95% of all Kenyans.

- Kenya’s human network is critically important. Bloggers had support locally, nationally and globally through existing networks, and they drew a great deal of attention to protests.

- Reputation matters. Daudi reported an incorrect rumor one day, stating that two people had been killed. The next day, he went to a press conference and photographed the two people there. “Because I was being transparent, my reputation didn’t suffer.”

- “Bloggers aren’t aliens – we’re just a subset of society. If society has some crazy people, some bloggers are going to be crazy as well.”

I’ve spent the last two days as the MC of the Global Voices meetings in Budapest. It’s a deeply rewarding activity, as it means I get to be part of every conversation and listen in on every discussion. But it’s exhausting, and has been extremely sweaty work, as Budapest is going through a heat wave. The main downside of the activity, for me, is that I don’t get to blog. But we’re in a room filled with more than eighty of the world’s finest bloggers, and basically there’s no doubt that every event is being covered thoroughly, usually using Cover It Live, a tool designed for liveblogging. Let me recommend some bloggers accounts in particular:

- Rebecca Wanjiku, one of my very favorite bloggers, is both covering sessions and her travels through Budapest.

- David Sasaki, who will be MC-ing today’s sessions, has a great summary post of yesterday’s activities.

- Jose Murillo, who’s helped bring voices from the Brasilian community into Global Voices, is offering his perspectives in English and Portuguese.

Yesterday’s sessions at the summit focused exclusively on human rights and freedom of speech online. While these topics are critically important to our community and a huge focus of their work, it’s easy to udnerstand how ten hours of this discussion could leave everyone ready to head to a bar. Which GV folks did, en masse, occupying the hotel bar here with the ferocity of a visiting army.

David Sasaki notes that he thinks of Global Voices as a global party. He envisions Sami ben Gharbia, our advocacy director, as a cape-wearing crusader who fights “the evil bartender”, the guy who wants to keep people out of the party. (We’re all looking forward to photos of Sami in a red cape in the near future.) David sees himself, in this party metaphor, as the guy who shows up at an intimate dinner party with a few busloads of friends. The goal of Rising Voices, the project he runs, is to fight elitism in global blogging by radically expanding the pool of people participating in online conversations.

To give us a sense for what’s happening with Global Voices, David offers a video overview of the ten projects Rising Voices is supporting, ranging from an effort to help people within prison in Jamaica blog to working with the One Laptop Per Child project in Uruguay to blogging women’s issues in Bangladesh. The folks here on stage in Budapest are grantees, including Lova Rakotomalala, our moderator for the first session. He introduces himself, saying, “Yesterday, we had a dentist from Pakistan. I’m a molecular biologist from Madagascar.” That’s pretty typical of this sort of event.

Collins Oduor, from the REPACTED community theatre project in Nakuru, Kenya, starts his presentation with a story – my paraphrase of it:

A young girl is very sociable and likes to play with all the children in the village. Her mother is worried that she’s too friendly and doesn’t want her playing with the boys in the village. So she tells her daughter, “You can’t climb trees with the boys because they will look up your dress and see your underpants.” So the next day, the girl takes off her underpants and climbs the tree.

Oduor ends his story with the single word, “Communication” and the room breaks into laughter. REPACTED specializes in communicating through community theatre. “We don’t have a lot of streets, so we don’t call it street theatre – it’s village theatre.” The productions use a wide range of techniques to get communities talking about HIV/AIDS. One popular strategy is to run rap battles, where two MCs compete to offer the best free-style rhymes on a randomly selected topic, like condom use. They do a great deal of work in prisons, and the community photographer and videographer, Fidel, is a former participant, who took an HIV test at REPACTED’s urging while in prison. Oduor is helping REPACTED use blogging to spread the impact of their work nationally and internationally, documenting the techniques the group uses, and helping the people they work with to understand and use technology tools to communicate online.

Catalina Restrepo of the HiperBarrio project in Medellin, Colombia, presents in Spanish, translated by Jules Rincon. The focus of the HiperBarrio project is to transform the image of the communities of La Loma and Santo Domingo. Both communities have historically been viewed as violent slums, places that no one should visit. By letting people in their communities tell local stories, they’re challenging the impressions people have of these neighborhoods, and are starting to see visitors from both Medellin and around the world who want to learn about these communities.

Mialy Andriamananjara is one of the coordinators of the remarkable Global Voices Malagasy, and a co-founder of FOKO Madagascar. The project is encouraging high school, college and journalism students to explore citizen media. This is a challenge, given both digital divide issues (the cost of connectivity, frequent electrical blackouts) and perception issues. Blogging is seen as an activity that isn’t very serious, and that Malagasy community society frowns on people “standing out” through writing online. But the project has been very effective at technology training and in helping people break into journalism. It’s had some unexpected side effects as well – one of the FOKO groups ended up organizing the first translation and performance of the Vagina Monologues in Malagasy. Another project, “Helping Kamba“, called attention to child who was born with a severe deformity. The project has raised sufficient money to bring the child to the capital city, and yesterday, he had surgery to correct his condition based on money raised from online activism.

Voices Bolivianas, led by Christina Quisbert and Edward Avilla, focuses on the voices of indigenous people, especially indigenous women in Bolivia. Christina explains that there are strong tensions between the majority indigenous population in Bolivia and the Spanish-speaking minority. In digital spaces, people who speak languages like Aymara are much less well represented than Spanish-speakers. Christina’s blog, Bolivia Indigena, focuses on these issues, and Voices Bolivianas is working to try to get more people writing and talking about these issues.

I’m blown away every time I read about the work the Rising Voices grantees are doing. It’s a huge treat, and a major inspiration, to see folks like this on stage.

Sorry for my comparative silence, friends. We’re alive and running at the Global Voices 2008 summit here in Budapest. There’s a hotel conference room packed with Global Voices authors and activists as well as with journalists from around Hungary and throughout Central Europe. And there are dozens of folks covering the event via liveblogging and other methods – you can see their coverage on the summit website.

Not me, though. I’d love to liveblog, but there’s a great deal going on here, and I’m going to be busy as one of the master of ceremonies.

We’re thrilled that people are paying attention to the work we’re doing at Global Voices and our involvement via Global Voices Advocacy in issues around free speech online. My friend Evgeny Morozov has an article in this week’s Economist on the cat and mouse game around free speech online – we’re thrilled to be mentioned in that context.

More news as I’m able to break away from the conference and share the conversation with you. Wish us luck!

We’re off and running at the Global Voices Summit in Budapest, Hungary. Depending on how you’re counting, this is a two day or a five day meeting. Two days of the meeting – tomorrow and Saturday – are open to the general public and will be a conversation first on free speech online, then on citien media around the globe. As a precursor to our conversation on internet filtering, we’re doing a one-day workshop today on free speech online. In our conference room, we’ve got an amazing cross-section of free speech activists in censored nations – several people introduce themselves by talking about their banned websites, or the prison sentences they’ve served due to their online speech.

(Some of my colleages are using a tool called Cover It Live to liveblog the event. Please check out their coverage as well for real-time updates on the conversation.)

The speakers at today’s workshop are experts on different aspects of internet filtering – we’re asking people to give a presentation and to spark discussion with the crowd here. My friend and colleague Rob Faris, the research director for the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, leads off today with an overview of the work of the Open Net Initiative, a four-university project that studies technical filtering of the Internet around the world.

Rob first points out that there are a number of strategies for filtering the Internet, not all of which involve technical means. Government-based filtering can include:

- copyright and intellectual property restrictions that restrict online speech
- registration, licensing and ID requirements that discourage and chill online speech
- liability for defamation that chill certain types of speech
- arrest and intimidation of onine authors
- filtering of search results to hide dissenting speech
- indirect censorship via denial of service attacks and hacking
- monitoring and surveillance of networks, which causes a chilling effect
- technical filtering, blocking specific websites from users in a country

It’s important to remember that the bigget impediment to free speech is lack of access or the expense of access. If people can’t afford to be online, or can’t find ways to be online, they’ve been effectively silenced and prevented from accessing key pieces of information online.

ONI distinguishes between four times of filtering – policial (blocking opposition websites or independent news websites), social (blocking pornography, gambling or alcohol/drug websites), security (blocking websites used by separatist, violent or terrorist movements), and internet tools (tools used for internet circumvention, like Tor or proxy servers.) There are at least two other topics worth adding to this list: blocking of mobile content (which ONI is not currently studying) and blocking of social media sites (which we study and map at Global Voices Advocacy).

As we look at filtering around the world, there are open questions about whether governments are cooperating with one another to filter the internet. ONI researchers in the middle east point out that there’s an emerging unified set of standards agreed to by some Arab information ministers for filtering satellite television. Our colleagues believe that we’ll next be seeing a discussion on common standards for internet filtering, possibly on the agenda of the next meeting of the information ministers. It’s easier for the Middle East to agree on filtering standards, given a common language and some common issues. While there’s a great deal of conversation about China exporting its powerful filtering tools, it’s not clear this is actually taking place. If anything, a major exporter of web censorship is the US, where companies produce and market tools like SmartFilter that are commonly used to filter the net on a national basis.

Rob Faris offers some interesting provocations, wondering whether there are better and worse ways to filter the net. He points out that some filtering efforts are simply ineffective – when Sweden blocked the website Pirate Bay, traffic to the site actually increased due to publicity to the site. Rob argues that we’d like to see filtering that is transparent, specific, subject to judicial review and due process. But this raises another issue – should we allow people to make the argument that there’s a right way to filter? (I’ve argued in the past that Saudi Arabia, which is quite transparent about net filtering, is a better way to filter than non-transparent regimes like Tunisia’s.)

Rob points out that arguments about net filtering always bump up against three issues: child pornography, violence and hate speech. Should we be arguing that governments can’t block these kinds of speech? This opens a wide and challenging conversation:

- Elijah Zarwan wonders whether we actually want to argue for a fully open internet. Perhaps it’s okay that these types of content are blocked, transparently. Are we locked to a libertarian idea that opposes all content restriction?

- Robert Guerra points out that there are proposals at the ICANN level to ban certain top-level domain names based on possible offense or inappropriateness. These debates over censorship can go to the highest levels of the internet administration.

- Danny O’Brien of EFF points to a possible alliance between free speech advocates and copyfighters who are trying to prevent networks from being locked down to prevent the spread of copyrighted materials.

- An activist from Singapore points to the importance of net filtering in large nations to people in smaller nations – the policies that large nations adopt often influence the policies of smaller nations.

- Rob points out that Saudi Arabia didn’t allow the internet until they were able to filter it – is there a sense in which filtering is advantageous if it gives us access we otherwise would not have had? Would Turkey be better of if they could filter only some videos rather than all of YouTube?

Rob ends with a challenge – as we think about filtering, we need to think about long and short term approaches. The sorts of circumvention approaches Global Voices generally advocates are short term solutions – what’s the long-term strategy towards building a movement?

I’m not much of a political blogger, unlike many of the folks at the Personal Democracy Forum conference. (Okay, that’s not true. I just write about African politics, not US issues, which puts me decidedly in the minority in this room.) So I wasn’t familiar with either Jane Hamsher, of Firedog Lake, a left-wing blog, or Patrick Ruffini, a Republican activist, organizer and blogger. They reminded me that I’m spending too much time at journalism conferences these days – it was a surprise for me to hear from speakers who are decidedly partisan, decidedly activist and doing work that’s decidedly journalistic.

Hamsher tells the story of breaking an interesting video – a very upset Clinton supporter, Harriet Christian, who was thrown out of the DNC rules committee meeting. She filmed a video of Christian yelling as she left the venue, and tells us that she rushed to get it online before the dozens of TV crews who’d shot the same footage. She was shocked that none of the networks aired their footage… until the video she shot received more than a million views on YouTube, and became a subject of political discussion.

She sees this as an example of liberal blogs ability to direct attention and potentially to shape the news agenda. She believes that liberal blogs were able to power Ned Lamont past Joe Lieberman in the democratic primary in Connecticut (though not actually into a senatorial seat.) This demonstrates that anti-war candidates can win elections. (Hmm. See previous parenthetical.)

Political blogs aren’t just reporting stories – they’re taking action. She shows a political ad that her blog produced with Ricki Lee Jones and the Squirrel Nut Zippers – titled “Had Enough” – which was offered to any candidate who wanted to run against a Republican. “It’s not just about community and commentary, it’s about coming together to effect a change.”

That change may be affected by money. And readers of liberal blogs have a lot of it. Hamsher reports that readers of liberal blogs are “white, male, old, affluent,” with the largest group between 40 and 60 years old. They’ve got an average income of between $100 and $150,000 a year. This helps candidates like Barack Obama, who are discovering that fundraisers may be obsolete – one good speech, documented on blogs and available online, may be the centerpiece of campaigns in the future.

Patrick Ruffini points out that Republican bloggers have largely focused on three issues: the war on terror, the governmental fiscal restraint, and support for conservative judges. Right-wing bloggers have shown their strengths at moments where they’re able to work on specific, concrete issues. He sites the example of the RedState blog as a group that came together to defeat Harriet Miers’s nomination to the Supreme Court. It’s not a minor victory for a community to get a president to pull away from a nomination, Ruffini argues.

The best organized campaign on the right in this election cycle, he argues, was Mike Huckabee’s campaign… and he cites Zephyr Teachout, no conservative sympathiser, as the person who gave birth to this observation. The Huckabee campaign allowed bloggers to add themselves to a blogroll, a group that included lots of “long tail” blogs from the evangelical and homeschooling communities.

For the right to really take advantage of these tools, they’ll need a common cause. He offers the idea of a wiki-based “Contract With America” – could we see another Newt Gingrich-type revolution coming from conservative activists getting together online and putting forward a new governing platform?

There aren’t a lot of questions from the audience at PDF so far, but the question immediately after these two speakers is a doozy. Former independent Presidential candidate Lenora Fulani – who reminds us that she was the first female and first black presidential candidate to make it onto the ballot in fifty states – wonders whether there’s any space opened by these new tools for politics in the US beyond the two established parties. (The answer she gets from the two speakers isn’t very satisfying – Ruffini points out that most “independent” voters voted for Reagan, and argues that most independents will vote for either the Republican or the Democrat this year.)

After a break, we’re back on stage with the left and the right. Chuck DeFeo of Townhall.com argues that we’re now seeing the “true democratization of the 4th estate.” Our new media makes it possible for anyone to communicate ideas in a many to many model. We’ve been waiting for the “1960 moment” – the moment at which television become the most important medium in US politics – to come to the Internet. But perhaps we’re waiting for the wrong thing.

The move to television has made politics less participatory. Voters become an audience to be talked at, not dialoged with. And we can trace a decline in political involvement, DeFeo argues, since we’ve seen that shift in media. As our media shifts towards many to many media, it’s fragmenting and getting more partisan. But DeFeo argues, “I would much prefer involved activism over apathy.”

Following DeFeo is Ariana Huffington, who’s legendarily shed her conservative past to become a leading liberal activist, and publisher of the Huffington Post. She’s very good at one-liners… and very, very angry with traditional media. “Old media has given up the pursuit of truth for a type of fake neutrality.” She points to media debates over climate change, where Al Gore faces off against Senator James Inhofe, a notorious climate change skeptic. (You’ll note that his Senate homepage currently features an oil derrick…) These two sides, she argues, don’t have equal news value:
“The earth is not flat. Evolution is a fact – sorry Mike Huckabee – there is no other side to this issue. The war in Iraq is an unqualified disaster – I am convinced there is no other side to this issue.”

What Huffington Post seeks to provide is “transparency, accountability, and community.” The reporters for the site are not unbiased, but they make it clear where their biases lie, rather than pretending they don’t exist. She points to Lou Dobbs as an embarrasing example of someone who pretends to be a journalist, pointing to his remarks linking a (ficticious) rise in leprosy cases to illegal immigrants. She feels that the media needs to pick these stories apart over sustained periods of time. “We need the obsessive compulsive disorder of the new media instead of the attention deficit disorder of the old media.”

Her fiercest words are reserved for Bob Woodward, who she dismisses as “the dumb blonde of journalism, awed by access to power.” Picking apart his career – from bringing down a president to uncritical accounts of the Bush administration – she closes with the admonition, “We cannot sell independence for access.”

While I admire and respect the passion and energy of this set of speakers, they leave me a little worried about my colleages who work on the future of journalism. Friends like Dan Gillmor are passionate about ensuring that new media holds on to what’s best about older journalistic media. But an increasing amount of journalistic media is coming from very partisan sources. Should we expect that readers are aware that media has changed and that we should expect every voice to have strong, visible bias? Or does this point to a need to re-learn how to read both online and offline media to understand that we’ve got far more activist media and far less that’s striving for – real or fake – neutrality?

If innovations in the citizen media community are shaping the political process, it’s worth looking closely at the structures and architecture of that new space. Two speakers at PDF specialize in visualizing and analyzing mass sets of data. Anthony Hamelle of linkfluence builds very pretty maps of the blogosphere, much like the famous Glance and Adamic visualisation, or my colleague John Kelly’s work on Iranian blogs.

The graphs are influence graphs, showing who links to one another within “like-minded” communities. The idea here is to look at linking between political blogs in only a political context, discarding other links that are outside of context. The result is a tight, pretty map that shows a decided red/blue (conservative/liberal) split in the US political blogosphere, plus a small set of common sources used by both sides. The graph is remarkably easy to explore, allowing users to mouse over it and see the media sources referenced.

A new tool (perhaps not yet available online?) tracks the emergence of terms and subjects over time, allowing for trend analysis – Hamelle shows the rise of “FISA” as a key term in discussions last week.

Matthew Hurst, who runs the Data Mining blog and is a researcher with Microsoft Live Labs is the king of these sorts of visualizations. He offers thoughts on a very broad topic – “What can you do with all the social media data – if you’re collecting information from Twitter, Usenet and blogs, simultaneously?”

Hurst points out that, with a bit of creativity, one can extract a great deal of data from blogs. You can often figure out the geographic location and the gender of the poster, and you can nearly always retrieve the complete (public) posting history of the author. One tool Hurst has been developing shows posts, in realtime, on a map of the US, giving a sense for how ideas emerge and move across the physical world.

An early Hurst visualization of the English-language blogosphere. The top cluster is technology blogs, and the two bright dots are BoingBoing and Engadget. The lower, larger cluster is the interconnected US political blogosphere.

Hurst graphs virtual communities as well. One gorgeous visualization, not shown here, clusters blogs based on their location on servers. Livejournal blogs tend to cluster closely together, while Blogspot blogs are evenly spread throughout the linksphere.

What can you do with these sorts of tools and the ability to look at citizen media in realtime? Well, you can watch ideas emerge, based on tools that track words. Matt offers a graph of bloggers talking about Obama versus those talking about Clinton – the lines crossed in February, allowing him to predict Obama’s rise several weeks before it became a dominant narrative in mainstream media. What’s rising now? Conversations about oil appear to be dominating all political discussions.

I’m in New York City today at the Personal Democracy Forum conference, the fifth iteration of a conference hosted by Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry on technology, democracy and innovations in both fields. It’s the sort of event that attracts an amazing audience – I’m sitting between Jay Rosen and Craig Newmark, two people who’ve got a lot to say about technology and democracy. Indeed, there’s a temptation just to talk with my neighbors and ignore the smart folks on stage.

The theme for this year’s conference is “rebooting democracy”. As Sifry explains, “reboot” implies restarting an operating system, perhaps because certain applications are “not responding well”: Congress, the White House, mainstream media. The rebooting has begun with innovation in the online world. “We’ve got blogs that are more truthful and responsive than big pundits.” We’ve got wikis that allow people to share policy ideas, and mashups that reveal otherwise hidden data. “The internet is already starting to reboot our political system.”

These changes, coming from the technology community, are “bubbling up from below” and changing government structures. Bureacrats are blogging, and there’s evidence that the TSA is actually listening to comments from readers on their blog. Within the intelligence community, people are using wikis to share information across silos. These early experiments in collaborative governance suggest that the geeks are starting to have an effect on the bureacrats, and that we’re having an influence on the political climate and culture.

Zephyr Teachout, a law professor at Duke University and an online innovator in the Howard Dean campaign has a useful ammendment to Sifry’s hopes. She draws a distinction between two ways of talking about the internet and politics: the industrial way, and the democratic way.

The industrial way of talking about the internet and politics looks at the amazing, huge things that campaigns have been able to conduct online: Obama has registered a million contacts on Facebook, and has raised tens of millions of dollars from small donors online. We tend to talk about these sorts of models with “a certain awe, like looking at a steam engine.” These systems are very powerful, but they’re not very participatory.

“What if we build architectures where people actually have power?” Teachout asks. Here she looks to the long American tradition of voluntary associations. Alexis de Tocqueville believed that these associations were the great innovation in the American system of government, training people in the structures of democracy. Early in the last century, 5% of Aericans were presidents of voluntary associations. “They were able to change the rules of the road”, exerting political power.

Teachout wonders what we’d see voluntary associations focusing on today, if that tradition were not in decline in the US. We might see associations demanding innovation in transportation, organized efforts to reduce private car use, and creative solutions to petroleum dependency. Teachout challenges us to look at the conference by asking ourselves “Is what’s being offered an industrial innovation or a citizen one? Are we distributing power, or just tasks? Are these systems treating us as citizens or as useful volunteers?”

On March 30th, I was at a dinner in Washington DC. Seated near me was a woman I’d just met, a Zimbabwean, and we spent much of the meal glued to my iPhone as election results came in from Zimbabwe. Early reports indicated that the impossible just might be happening – Morgan Tsvangarai was leading the polling, and it seemed possible that Mugabe’s ZANU-PF would go down to defeat, opening a new era in Zimbabwe. My new friend said, “I’m not sure I believe this is really happening. I’m not sure I believe this can happen.”

Unfortunately, she was right. Tsvanagarai isn’t going to become president of Zimbabwe this year. As of this afternoon, he’s pulled out of the race.

It’s been clear for some time now that Friday’s polls would be far from free and fair. But those of us who’d clung to some hope were encouraged that, despite widespread intimidation and attempts to rig the first rounds, Tsvangarai received the largest plurality of votes. Perhaps voters would defy obvious intimidation and be willing to face violence to vote for political change.

This left Tsvangarai and his MDC colleagues with a painful choice. The situation in Zimbabwe has grown so volatile that 86 MDC activists are confirmed killed, and more than 200,000 are reported as being displaced from their homes due to political violence. The final straw may have occurred today as MDC supporters were attacked as they attempted to come to a rally. Sokwanele, reporting via twitter, warned “Avoid Samora Machel Avenue & Borrowdale Road in Harare. Riot police with tear gas. Army are present. Zanu thugs stoning cars. Pls pass on.” The New York Times reports, “Mr. Tsvangirai’s decision came on a day when governing party youth militia armed with iron bars, sticks and other weapons beat his supporters as they sought to attend a rally for him in Harare.”

Part of me wants to criticize Tsvangarai for standing down. But there’s a good chance he wouldn’t have survived the next few days. More importantly, he and his party officials must have been trying to figure out whether it was worth more deaths of MDC voters if – as they surely believe – their votes wouldn’t be allowed to count anyway.

I’m not really in a position to offer insight or analysis at the moment – Rachel leaves for Israel tonight and we’re packing her stuff into the car. In the meantime, I leave you with a link to Tsvangarai’s statement about his decision to pull out and a parting quote from Mugabe, uttered at a rally in Bulawayo on Friday:

“‘Only God who appointed me will remove me — not the M.D.C., not the British,’ Mr. Mugabe vowed in the city of Bulawayo on Friday. ‘Only God will remove me!’”

Are you listening, God?

In an Apple Store, trying to repair Rachel’s crashed MacBook. But watching the Zim headlines go by in the meantime. Some links that are worth your time:

A timeline from the International Herald Tribune on recent events, with details on political violence leading up to the June 27 runoff.

Analysis from Peter Greste from the BBC, who believes Tsvangarai’s withdrawal may make it harder for SADC to challenge a Mugabe election.

An unnamed (i.e., a reporter in Harare) correspondent to Christian Science Monitor suggests that Tsvangarai’s withdrawal will save lives, but worsen the economic situation in Zimbabwe.

Interviews on Voice of America’s Studio 7 suggest broad support for Tsvangarai’s decision to pull out of the election.