Also crossposted this comment at: http://ivonotes.wordpress.com/2008/07/09/gvo-and-early-warning-debates/

Interesting dialogue you’ve got going. I’d like to throw in a few points. I watched Ushahidi’s work with a great deal of interest and considerable admiration throughout the post-election crisis. I was especially interested in their verification claims, and hence was a bit surprised, at the GV Summit, to hear Ory Okollah and Daudi Ware acknowledge that their verification methods was almost entirely ad hoc. I wouldn’t, in this case, expect a project like Ushahidi to be able to create verification standards that could hold up in a courtroom, but I would have liked to see evidence of some system at work.

Ad hoc data collection, together with a lack of clarity on Ushahidi’s site about how they verify, shifts the project from a usable data set for researchers to a starting point requiring more evidence about how the conflict played out. It may turn out that their data is largely accurate – it would be a really interesting study for someone to do, to see what the ad hoc approach netted, what worked, and what didn’t.

This isn’t a reason to dismiss Ushahidi, but to acknowledge where they are. Even thinking of it as a pilot project, it teaches us a great deal about what can work at an entirely ad hoc level, and what it might become with a bit more preparation and experience. The key, I think, is that Ushahidi and similar projects have incredible potential, and should be evaluated from that perspective.

For a participatory media project focused on mob violence, it’s difficult to expect a citizen’s monitoring group to attain standards that could hold up in court – at least at this stage in Ushahidi’s development. It is reasonable, however, to shoot for the equivalent of journalistic standards of evidence. And journalism/media may be the more apt point of comparison in the early warning context.

I say equivalent, because participatory media attain verification through a different process than traditional journalism. Traditional journalism relies on trusted, known researchers working within a rigid, closed hierarchy, with verification of facts along each level of that chain. Its hallmark is a brand – a shortcut for the audience to know that there is an epistemology behind any given claim. At its best, traditional journalism’s authority can be very strong.

Participatory journalism uses a different set of values – values that are part of GVO, but extend well beyond that, because GVO is permeable and elastic. Participatory media values include: transparency, congruence, accuracy, passion, and community. Such values allow for vetting of data to the degree possible in any given situation, and a space for gray areas regarding verification. An epistemology based on them can handle multiple interpretations of events because of its transparency function.

That said, there is room for improvement. I’m very interested to see how Ushahidi and like-minded projects approach the following:

Anonymity v. transparency. In covering conflict, security should always be the first consideration. Both journalism and humanitarian early warning approaches have established methods for anonymous reporting – what’s the trusted equivalent in the participatory media context?

How to encourage learning with the journalism and humanitarian communities. In the Kenya example, both those communities were having similar challenges and discussions. From Ory’s and Daudi’s remarks, it became evident that they weren’t completely aware of them, and vice versa. For instance, the community radio community in Kenya was generally unaware of Ushahidi – see this post for details. Daudi likewise, in his comments at GV Summit, claimed the media failed to cover the conflict because of self-interest. But the media community has another interpretation: they pin their failure to cover the conflict on lack of resources, lack of security, and lack of experience. See IMS and BBC reports for a window into that perspective.

How will participatory media projects approach different kinds of problems? It’s one thing to cover mob violence, another to monitor an election, a third to track disappeared people, etc. CMEV’s project in Sri Lanka, which Sanjana Hattottuwa was very involved with, recently tackled the election monitoring challenge using digital media tools; it would be interesting to hear what worked and what could be better, from their perspective.

Finally, a comment about mission creep and GVO. It seems to me that thinking about GVO as an organization with a set mission misconstrues how they work and grow. GVO is very driven by the interests and passions of its community. It hasn’t developed on the basis of a top-down, institutionally driven strategy. If its community members find citizen activism, early warning monitoring, and election monitoring compelling, then it will be up to them to define whether and how its part of GVO’s world.

http://irevolution.wordpress.com/2008/07/08/second-response-to-paul-curion-on-global-voices/

Paul:
Representative of who? I ask you because while I was reading David Sasaki’s excellent post on the GV summit, I was struck by the following passage:

As incredibly diverse as the global blogosphere is, the ‘blogger demographic’ tends to very homogenous. From Tanzania to Tasmania, most bloggers live in the wealthy neighborhoods of urban centers, most are well educated, and most belong to the majority groups of their countries.

which is something which I would have guessed in more general terms. I don’t know what the profile of FASTs field monitors was, but I’m guessing it wasn’t that much different to the current GV profile?

Patrick:
I misunderstood what you meant in your previous response, so I completely take your point. Representative of who remains an open question. But I also think that this misses the more important point that I was hoping to make. I don’t want to be cornered into arguing about what GV is or is not. What my original post argued was that we (the conflict early warning/response community) may gain from paying more attention to blogs as a source of local information for the purposes of early warning/response. Hence my contrast with FAST. Our colleagues in Kenya were blogging on a virtually real-time basis, providing up-to-date information on events taking place across the country. The point is that they delivered, and took it upon themselves to do so; regardless of whether they live in wealthy neighborhoods or not. Many of them were in the streets as events were unfolding. This is the kind of local information that I value.

Again, I understand that what you’re reacting to are my somewhat sweeping claims about democracy, etc. But I don’t want this to distract from the main point I’m trying to get across, ie, that our community has some things to learn from the GV community and vice versa. Hence my hoping that this dialogue will prompt our GV colleagues to contribute (and possibly correct some of my own statements).

Paul:
What you’ve outlined isn’t accountability in any strong sense – all of the actions that you describe here are certainly part of a dialogue, but I’m not sure they’re accountability mechanisms. I may be being unfair in my accusation here – it’s hard to know what I want GV to be accountable for – but you can be certain that this will be an issue which it will face in future.

Patrick:
I grant you that my take on what constitutes accountability is not the traditional, institutional, centralized version. Perhaps I’m too biased (again ; ) given that I identify more with the open source, decentralized philosophy of the Web 2.0 generation. Again, the piece by Benkler will hopefully convince you that there is a real significant change occurring, but perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself vis-a-vis the probable impact for the conflict early warning community.

Paul:
I wasn’t at the GV Summit, and I haven’t had the discussions you’ve had with people like Ushaidi, so I am not as well-placed as you to talk about their status and plans. However my complaint is that I’m not seeing the evidence that these projects are having the impact that they (you?) claim, and I just want to be persuaded of that impact before I make any claims about them.

Patrick:
We’re definitely on the same page vis-a-vis the critical importance of demonstrating impact. This has been the very basis of my criticisms with respect to the majority of operational conflict early warning systems. So I’m equally interested in identifying whatever impact Ushahidi has had. But that was not the subject of purpose of my post. See this post on crisis mapping analytics where I ask the same question as you do regarding impact.

http://irevolution.wordpress.com/2008/06/23/crisis-mapping-analytics-and-pattern-recognition/

Paul: Patrick, I think your bias is showing. Your use of the word “extremistâ€