Category: technology

mobile activism in african elections

A paper I wrote for Anne Nelson’s New Media in Development Communications class last semester was published this week on DigiActive and reviewed by Pambazuka News. The abstract:

The proliferation of mobile phones in Africa is transforming the political and social landscape of the developing world, empowering people to source and share their own information and to have a greater say in what comes to international attention. This paper compares the use and impact of mobile technology in three recent African elections: Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Kenya.

In Nigeria’s April 2007 presidential election, a local civil society organization used free software to collect over 10,000 text message reports from voters around the country, boosting citizen participation in a political process many Nigerians doubted. In Sierra Leone’s August-September 2007 elections, trained local monitors used mobile phones to collect data from designated polling sites, enabling the independent National Election Watch to compile and release an accurate, comprehensive analysis of the election almost two weeks before the official report. And in Kenya’s December 2007 election, a group of local digital activists developed and implemented a citizen reporting platform to allow Kenyans to report and track post-election violence during a month-long media blackout, collecting and publishing a comprehensive account of riots, displacement and human rights abuses that serves as one of the best available records of the crisis.

You can read the whole paper here.

update
Katrin Verclas posted a critique on MobileActive.org. Many of her comments are spot on, and she sheds valuable light on the role the December 2008 elections in Ghana play in this discussion.

cupcakes and robots: Wednesday at We Media

I’m in Miami this week for the We Media conference, which brings together “leaders and ideas shaping media, business, communication, technology, education and participation in the connected society.”

Among yesterday’s events, which included a video presentation by David Plouffe and a brainstorming session on the future of business, media, education, philanthropy and government (in under two hours, no less), my favorite was something called “Decoding the Culture.”

Led by marketing strategist John Fischer, along with TheKnot.com founder David Liu and Darryl Perkins of the Hip Hop Caucus, Decoding the Culture started with Coca-Cola and cleaning products and ended with teledildonics.

Maybe I should explain.

Fischer’s job is to make generalizations about culture — to look at human desires (like concern for the health of one’s family) and connect them to trends (like the growing interest in organic food), then predict what comes next. After the most beautifully simple slide presentation I’ve ever seen, Fischer encouraged the participants to flip through a stack of old magazines and rip out anything we found that seemed portentous (I should add that he warned us ahead of time that culture-decoding “takes practice”). He asked that we tag each image with a post-it note describing its significance and then paste them all together in a giant collage that would eventually help us complete the statement:

Because [blank] is happening today,
[blank] will happen tomorrow.

My group’s generalization started with a slew of ads emphasizing individual choice and ultra-personalization: coffee pods that come in 40 flavors! Mini cupcakes so you can put together your very own combination of half a dozen flavors! A portable digital photo printer that lets you express your Epsonality©!

And then Nathan James of the Media & Democracy Coalition found this Svedka ad:

That’s right. It’s a hypersexualized female robot handing you a cocktail.

This led us to a discussion of objectification, during which we wondered if robots are allowed to be gendered, whether female robots were the greatest dehumanization of women or whether, by focusing desire on inanimate objects, they represent the highest freedom. Regardless, we agreed that the robot was clearly designed to appeal to a specific desire, and the fact that it was built piece by piece means it is the perfect customization of that desire. Will personalized sexbots be the way that the current waves of individual expression and technology ultimately meet?

Because customized cupcakes are happening today, robot marriages will happen in the future.

I’m not sure if that’s exactly the takeaway Fischer was hoping for, but I think the exercise is still useful. For example: technology use is both increasing and diversifying in Uganda — more people are using more and more services and applications in more and more ways. What does this trend indicate for the future of, say, politics in East Africa? What are the implications for entrepreneurs, for web developers, for ICT companies? I’m not as good at culture forecasting as Fischer (um, clearly), but I kind of wish someone would send me a copy of African Woman so I can keep the creative collage juices flowing.

Twitter Diplomacy


San Francisco Demonstration in Solidarity with Gaza, from isa e

Unless your holiday season involves complete and total hibernation, you’ve probably heard about this weekend’s attacks in Gaza. More than 350 Palestinians and four Israelis have been killed so far, and neither Israel nor Hamas shows any sign of backing down.

A few minutes ago I got an e-mail from Jill York announcing that the Israeli Consulate in New York will be holding a press conference this afternoon to field questions about Israel’s offensive. Slight twist: they’ll be holding it on Twitter, where they set up an account yesterday.


Anyone can submit questions to @israelconsulate, and David Saranga, Consul of Media and Public Affairs in New York, will do his best to answer, either via Twitter or by posting a link to the Consulate’s blog.

Israel isn’t alone in using Twitter to communicate with the public; the United States is getting some Web 2.0 diplomacy action as well. Last week Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Colleen Graffy published an editorial in the Washington Post on her own usage of Twitter to connect to people in the countries she visits. She writes:

Not that long ago, communicating diplomat-to-diplomat was enough. Agreements were reached behind closed doors and announced in a manner and degree that suited the schedule and desires of the governments involved, not the general population. In fact, the public was by and large an afterthought. But the proliferation of democracies and the emergence of the round-the-clock media environment has brought an end to those days. Now, governments must communicate not only with their people but also with foreign audiences, including through public diplomacy.
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In short, public diplomacy is the art of communicating a country’s policies, values and culture. If diplomats want to engage effectively with people, we first need to listen, then connect and then communicate. In the part of the world that I know and cover, Europe and Eurasia, most people are tuned in to television, and the younger generation is using text messages and the Internet. So, we need to be there, too.

Graffy’s tweets tend toward the personal (Need to get a new laptop. Have always had a PC. Friends are telling me to get a Mac. I’m scared. Have others survived the transition?), while the Israeli Consulate has focused so far on the upcoming press conference. Still, both efforts represent genuine ventures on the part of government representatives to engage one-on-one with people around the world.

Related:

it’s just you: jackfruit of the week (11.30.08)

For more jackfruit pictures, check out all the Jackfruit of the Week posts.

For those of us who have spent long hours in front of blank computer screens, watching the empty status bar at the bottom of our browser windows, hoping to see a tiny increment of movement that would indicate our desired site was finally loading: wait no more.

A fellow GV-er has just sent out a list of three simples sites that will tell you whether it’s worth your time to keep anxiously biting your knuckles and hitting refresh:

Down for everyone or just me? will tell you whether everyone is having trouble accessing a site, or whether it’s just you. Blunt? Yes. Helpful? Absolutely.


Notify me when it’s up! and Ding It’s Up! both allow you to enter a URL and be notified when the site in question is operating again. Both sites will send an e-mail alert; Ding will text you or send an @reply on Twitter and also offers the option to be notified when a site goes down — a nice perk for web developers or site owners.



The sites were developed in response to the Twitter fail whale, but they clearly have a number of possible applications. Pretty snazzy.

Web 2.0 by farmers, for farmers

The Busoga Rural Open Source and Development Initiative is a local Ugandan non-profit that uses digital technology, including a blog, SMS and online forums and audio files in English and local languages, to help farmers in Uganda share information about health, agriculture and education. Check it out:

via Kabissa