humanitarian.info

Obviously, this blog is dormant but we don’t often have good news to share; so, here we go…

The  baseless and preposterous charges of banditry against humanitarian.info’s friend, Zimbabwe Peace Project National Director Jestina Mukoko were yesterday bounced out by Zimbabwe’s Supreme Court. Zimbabwean Chief Justice Godfrey Chidyausiku, quoted in  the BBC, said:

“The state, through its agents, violated the applicant’s constitutional rights… entitling the applicant a permanent stay of criminal prosecution.”

I do not have a copy of the judgement, so it’s unclear to me whether this is a ruling on the procedural conduct of the authorities in failing to bring Jestina to court, or their complicity in her (and others’) abduction and torture. I hope  that this ruling opens the prison door for those who are still missing,  likely imprisoned in off-the-map places of detention , before the bitter fight to bring to book their abductors begins and closes it again.

• Following my mini-rant about how ReliefWeb hasn’t made the most of the potential of the web, a couple of projects surface which point the way to a better future for the humanitarian community’s hub. The ReliefWeb News Monitor is JRC on the pipes again, with an aggregated feed of news stories that can be sliced for your serving pleasure; more interesting for the aid worker is the Briefing Kit, which gives you the opportunity to build your own document package by country or emergency. One of the primary uses of ReliefWeb is for pre-deployment briefing, so this is a definite value-added service.
• More MapAction… er, action, at an Alertnet-hosted workshop in London on June 4 looking at how the aid community can use maps effectively. I understand from Liesbeth that the event is fully booked, but Mapping for communications, planning and advocacy will be streamed live for those of you who can’t make it. Plus:

We want your questions. Given the rise and rise of mapping technologies, what would you like to know about how NGOs can better use geospatial tools in their work? Use the comments section below, or submit your questions using the Twitter tag #askmaps.

• In the Financial Times: Tainted data hide the cost of Africa’s upheavals. Slightly contrarian article about the use and abuse of statistics in conflict situations. The FT casts its beady eye over IRC’s DRC statistics (which always looked a bit fishy to me) and UN statistics more broadly, and who knew I’d have an ally in the FT regarding funding for government statistics offices?

The first step towards compiling an accurate picture is to make assistance to Africa’s under-funded statistics departments a priority in international aid programmes… Accurate statistics, objectively gathered and responsibly used, are as essential as compassion in tackling Africa’s plight. Tracking its crisis without reliable data is like exploring the continent without a compass.

• Amnesty rolls out the sms bad times: Guatemalan activists receive death threats by text message. Part of the ongoing debate about how technology empowers both sides in a conflict. If there are in fact two sides in any conflict like this, which I somehow doubt. There’s even more complexity at the tail end of the “Twitter Revolution” story – I had so much to write about this nonsense. Now everybody except Evgeny has forgotten it by now (because yes that is how long the web’s attention span lasts), but this article is still worth reading:

So, while the events don’t fit the Western media’s narrative of a city full of protesters converging on Twitter and almost pulling off a revolution, technology did play an indispensable role in telling the story of April 7.

• From the Just Shoot Me files, In Iraq with Web 2.0 luminaries, as if they weren’t already filled with their own self-importance. If you don’t think this entire concept is self-parody, then read this extract and see if you can spot the deliberate mistake:

The idea is to use the brains of this small collective to give ideas to Iraqi government officials, companies and users that will help it rebuild. Iraq is short on the mojo that widespread internet can bring and the fast-track economic jolt that entrepreneurs feed on. Who knows that stuff better than a contingent of internet goombahs heavy on the Google juice and includes the guy who thought up Twitter?

Uh-oh … events overtake blogging. After writing the previous post about how Jestina Mukoko’s bail had been revoked, the following happened:

Zimbabwean rights activist Jestina Mukoko and 14 other people were ordered freed on bail Wednesday after the president and the prime minister forced a judge to reverse the previous day’s decision that had sparked outrage.

I guess this sort of rapid turnaround is what the otherwise wholly wretched Twitter was invented to report. Anyhow, this is far far better news, although the political intervention clearly shows the Zimbabwe legal process for the sham it is.

The humanitarian community and the aid worker blogosphere are afire with responses to the ICC indictment of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir – which was a long time coming – and the subsequent expulsion from Sudan of at least 10 major NGOs currently working in Darfur – which was pretty much immediate. The general consensus seems to be: it was a stupid idea, and we knew it would have terrible consequences.

In some respects, this line of thinking is entirely correct. From the humanitarian perspective there are many, many arguments against indicting Bashir, and the Sudanese government’s response – coming down hard on humanitarian organisations as a way of drawing attention away from how politically impotent they are – was entirely predictable. The government will kick you out of the country at the drop of a hat, and one of the key factors in undermining organisation and staff confidence has been the uncertainty about whether your next action might see you on the next plane out of there.

The debate focuses on whether peace or justice comes first, and most people agree that peace must take priority. Not least of those people are those in Darfur themselves – the priority of most communities displaced by war is to regain some sort of security so that they can rebuilt their lives.We have conflicting reports of the response in Darfur – on the one hand Reuters gives us:

Darfur activist Hussein Abu Sharati, who says he represents residents of 158 displacement camps, said most people there were overjoyed by the ICC’s decision, but were too scared to show it.

While Rob Crilly reports that, of those in the camps,

Few have time for this debate. Few have heard of the International Criminal Court. Those that have are worried the government will come down hard on anyone celebrating Bashir’s indictment. And most seem to think that going home is more important than anything else.

These two perspectives are not mutually exclusive, since IDPs are rarely a homogenous body of opinion. Frankly, however, I’m in a difficult position. I welcome the expansion of the mechanisms available for extending (and hopefully enforcing) human rights law, but at the same time I don’t want to see communities in Darfur suffer any more than they already have. Given what’s happening now, how can I reconcile those two?

The short answer is that I don’t think I can. I think I have to make a choice and come down on one side or the other. The side I choose is the side that presses for justice, no matter how ill-conceived it might be. My reasons are cloudy, even to myself, and I hope that I can clarify them over the next few weeks. The feeling that drives this is the same feeling that drove me into humanitarian work in the first place – first a desire to prevent genocide, then a desire to see justice done more generally, finally translated into the practical action of humanitarian work. It wasn’t the perfect match, but it was close enough.

I understand the Thirsty Palmetto’s frustration with those who argue that you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs, and I have no desire to be painted as the sort of person who’s willing to gamble with people’s lives in order to prove their point. Yet it’s vital to remember one thing here: any suffering that occurs in Darfur is the responsibility of the Sudanese government. They are the ones who have failed the citizens of their country, and I’m not prepared to feel any more guilty about the situation in Sudan than I’m prepared to feel guilty about any other humanitarian crisis.

One reason not to feel guilty is that it’s exactly what the Sudanese government is banking on. Generally speaking, the government does not particularly care about its citizens, and the reason that UN and NGOs were allowed to operate in Darfur in the first place was because it suited their broader political purposes. Their calculus was that our self-imposed sense of responsibility would outweigh our sense of anger, that we would continue to work in appalling conditions to help people whose terrible lot was unlikely to get better any time soon – and more, that we wouldn’t kick up too much fuss about the role of the government in perpetuating that lot.

This is a difficult line to walk, and it’s one which the humanitarian community wrestles with continually in every complex emergency, one way or another. Yet one of the reasons that we continue to wrestle with it is because there have been no mechanisms which might really bring the justice that we want to see. The ICC might not be that mechanism, but I find it impossible to discount. At the same time, I don’t feel very comfortable standing alongside those standing outside the humanitarian situation entirely; perhaps the reason is because it feels like giving up the sense of solidarity that is vital for humanitarian work.

So I swing back to the other side: the unforeseen consequences (and the foreseen consequences, for that matter) from the indictment are potentially colossal, and not necessarily in the best interests of the people of Sudan. Some of those potential consequences I’m not that concerned about – the breakup of Sudan, for example, seems inevitable within the next 50 years (one for the prediction fans, there) – but some of them are serious enough to weigh against. Maybe I’m wrong – this isn’t the first stone in building an international order based on human rights, but a crisis in human rights that will pull the whole house of cards down. What choice do we have? These things have to start somewhere, and it’s hard to believe that the situation can get worse for the people of Darfur.

I told you I wasn’t clear, didn’t I? Oh well.

BBC and Alertnet are echoing the wires that the bail applications of ZPP’s Jestina Mukoko and Brodrek Takawira, and others have been granted.

The Police have routinely ignored previous court orders, so I hope that this is true. The lawyers seem to think so though. I await some confirmation from colleagues and if so, it’s terrific news.

The perpetrators of this event have caused deep and profound personal damage to a lot of decent people. If I were somehow involved in the abduction and torture of a fantastically eloquent, popular and relentless globally-known campaigner, who then became one of the world’s most prominent prisoners of conscience, and she were released, knowing my identity, with the world’s media baying for information, I’d consider the following:

a) Packing my bags (of money, that is),

b) Booking a ticket to  Hong Kong,

c) Trying to get that dirty amnesty agreement sorted out double-quick time.

Update 3 March 2009:

Seems to be true. From hospital, though looking unwell, Jestina is reporting as saying:

I am free now and I must concentrate on my health … The time will come for me to comment to the media. I am still being attended to by the doctors and I might be in here for some weeks to come.

Here’s three reasons why the debate about the Refugee Run is important; the event is making claims about the refugee experience, it’s doing it at the behest of the UNHCR and it’s targeting the rich and powerful. What’s wrong with any of those three items? Nothing at all, if you subscribe to the standard narrative about refugee management. The problem is that this is a mediated version of the refugee experience – an attempt to tug on the heart strings, and in this case the purse strings, of the participants.

The unfiltered refugee voice is hard to find. There are a host of organisations – not just UNHCR, but many many NGOs – that seek to present the refugee voice to the non-refugee, but that voice is being used to further the agendas of those organisations. That agenda may or may not be closely tied to the agenda of the refugees themselves – but how are you to know, when all you have is the filtered, mediated version of that voice? If you want to hear a more direct version, then the Kakuma Refugee Newsletter shows the way forward.

The Kakuma News Reflector is an independent news magazine produced by Ethiopian, Congolese, Ugandan, Rwandan, Somali, Sudanese and Kenyan journalists operating in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya

A print version of the online news magazine is circulated in Kakuma camp and town. We will publish on a monthly basis until funding allows us to increase our publications to twice a month.

This is the best news from the humanitarian sector I’ve heard for a very long time, and something I’d hoped to see since I started working on information management and can strongly support. The project is made possible by a Fulbright Research Grant from the US Institute of International Education, and their email address is via Cornell University, so it’s not entirely unfiltered – but it’s good enough.

I found out about this via the Humanitarian Futures Programme, who heard it in turn from Linda Polman (author of the book We Did Nothing). The HFP blog reports that

The blog and newspaper has been causing some serious kinds of hair pulling within the UNHCR and is an absolutely fantastic example of citizen journalism, empowered by the web, completely changing the game of humanitarian business.

Why is it causing serious kinds of hair pulling? It should be clear from headlines such as UNHCR Processing Delays Refugee’s Study Abroad and questions like “Why does UNHCR maintain an incentive policy that does not provide refugees with equal pay for equal work?”

First, it’s accountability in practice, a direct threat to business as usual for aid organisations. Second, it’s unmediated – exactly the sort of refugee voice that UNHCR won’t present at Davos. Third, it demonstrates how information empowers people – something that we’ve been talking about for ages but failed to put into practice. Extending information rights to beneficiaries – in this case, the residents of Kakuma Refugee Camp – is no longer optional, and this are just the beginnings of the next stage of growth for the aid industry.

I’ve just read “On the Brink of the Precipice: A Human Rights Account of Kenya’s post-2007 Election Violence” (.pdf, 169 pages, ~2mb), an ambitious report by Kenya’s national human rights institution, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) with the technical help of my alma mater No Peace Without Justice.

The bulk of On the Brink is a detailed narrative overview of the violence that occured in Kenya between December 2007 and March 2008. Whilst there is some discussion about the antecedents of the political crisis, the most solid stuff is in the analysis of the recent violence. Here, the authors slice the same source material different ways to give nuanced assessments of the violence through the lens of Kenyan criminal law, international criminal law, and Kenya’s commitments under international human rights law.

KNCHR find ample evidence of crimes against humanity, but note that they din’t find enough information to sustain the argument that these were in furtherance of any state or organizational policy. They also found that whilst much of the violence was motivated by ethnicity, genocide was not committed since “the intent was not to destroy but to create means by which to leverage political power following the disputed presidential election results.” The report’s standout recommendation for action is likely to be highly unwelcome, particularly now everyone’s friends again:

The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) should open investigations on Kenya to determine who bears the greatest responsibility in the commission of crimes against humanity detailed in this report.

This is the fourth major outing for “conflict mapping”, the investigation methodology behind this report. In 2004, I co-wrote a similar report for Sierra Leone using the same method. Investigators take lengthy statements from a key persons in all areas affected by violence throughout the country. From the statements, data analysts draw out references to unique “episodes”, simple information about which is then put into a database.  Episodes can include a wide range of topics, from a source’s recollection of specific acts of violence, to information about gangs, troop movements,  public statements of local politicians, and other sit-rep style information. It also includes hearsay, or information about things that the source was not a direct witness to. From the 1102 statements collected by KNHCR in the early part of this year, 7500 distinct episodes were separated out and databased. From these, it’s possible for analysts to build a “low resolution” picture of a mass event, and identify its scale, severity, major incidents and overall dynamics.

This wide not deep approach is designed to look for evidence of policies, planning and systematisation, all critical to the judgement about whether patterns of violence can be framed as crimes against humanity. As Kenya is a State Party to the International Criminal Court, this is something Kenyan policy makers and activists must consider anyhow, but other information available to help them with this is likely too narrowly focussed, raw or detailed, to be useful to this particular decision. In this respect, conflict mapping is fit-for-purpose; at this early stage, attempting to individually investigate every incident, of which there will be tens of thousands, is not.

The immediate deployment of investigators across across a wide geographical area is a good demonstration of capacity which might help a national human rights instituation fend off attempts to marginalise it.  It also creates an immediate context to the severity and significance of criminal incidents, something that it is hard to assess as events are unfolding. The popularly known atrocities aren’t necessarily either the most sure-fire winners for prosecutors, or the worst things that have happened. This, and the mapping exercise’s rapid generation of leads, can help prosecutors later by giving them a guide to where to invest investigative resource.

The report certainly won’t stand up in court, but it’s not designed to, and it wouldn’t be possible to produce a document of that sort in anything like a useful timescale. This is designed to provide timely analysis as part of the complex decision making process of bringing to account those most responsible for the violence.  Framed this way, On the Brink may have lost a lot of impact due the long period of drafting. I hope the recent appearance on Wikileaks of an embargoed confidential annex to the report (.pdf, 59 pages, ~2.5mb) containing the names of 250 alleged leaders, planners, faciliators and perpetrators of the violence makes up for this.

David Sasaki joins the conversation, which is great – it was starting to feel a little bit like a mens singles tennis match between me and Patrick. Now it’s mens doubles, or something. David starts with a strong serve, although his accusation that

Both men seem to have the academic tendency to speak in aphorisms

seems a little unfair – the heuristics post he’s referring to was simply me reminding myself that I’m not the great oracle on these issues, and that I should get ready to be wrong.¹

If I understand Paul correctly, his two main criticisms of Global Voices are that 1.) it doesn’t matter if you highlight moderate voices discussing the news of their countries because it is the extreme voices who will always make the headlines and 2.) during times of conflict and emergency, focusing on participatory websites rather than humanitarian institutions will lead to lots of conversation, but less action.

No. I’m not criticising Global Voices per se, and definitely not on those particular grounds. I think Global Voices is amongst the best that the Web has to offer. What I worry about is making claims about the impact of projects that go beyond a) what the evidence shows to be true and b) what those projects can realistically expect to achieve. Global Voices meets its stated aims convincingly, but what worries me is when people start talking about Global Voices – or blogs in general – as something which they’re not. As David notes,

We often portray Global Voices as the zeitgeist of what the ignored world is discussing when in fact we are an amazing international community of individuals with large online networks and particular interests.

David’s honesty is admirable, and I think that honesty reflects one of the strengths of Global Voices in general. What I was taking issue with more was Patrick’s statement that

Global Voices is a far more effective local information and response network than FAST ever was.

I simply disagree with this.² Global Voices is not a response network in any substantive sense, and I don’t think it’s necessarily a more effective information network either. I agree that there ought to be more attention paid to blogs as a source of information, but the strength of GV is precisely that it is not programmatic. The bloggers involved have not set themselves objectives to provide early warning information, or document human rights abuses – they are just private citizens who are writing about issues that are important to them. The situation is slightly different with Ushaidi, of course, which was conceived and developed specifically in response to the post-electoral crisis in Kenya. In the words of Ory Okolloh,

Ushahidi was mainly intended to be a mapping tool and a repository of information about the post-election crisis as seen from the view point of people on the ground. We were trying to capture information that was not mainly being reported in the mainstream (there was a lot of self-censorship in the media) and also provide a timeline for information for both mainstream and citizen reported events. In the case of real time mapping Ushahidi could be used to track where the violence or the peace efforts were taking place. We hope to be able to provide those people who are “addressing the real needs to real people” with information that might help their efforts and to be part of the “testimony” as it were of what happened.

Now that’s a series of specific objectives that can – and should – be measured in order to judge the impact of the project. However if you look at the underlying requirement for all of those objectives to be met, it seems to me that the basic requirement is a systematic data collection system – which is exactly what Ushahidi did not have. It’s entirely possible to run a Ushahidi instance with a more systematic foundation – but then it stops being the Web 2.0 poster child that everybody wants it to be, and becomes a visualisation tool for a standard human rights monitoring system.

Now I don’t have a problem with that – it’s not as if we’re over-supplied with really great data visualisation in the human rights field – but that’s not why people got excited about it. People got excited about it because it’s a Revolutionary New Way Of Doing Things Just Like Clay Shirky Says, and I’m asking what I hope is a valid question: it may be a revolutionary new way of doing things, but is it a better way of doing things? Maybe it is – in which case, show me.

I think this tension is at the heart of most of these initiatives. Patrick unwittingly gave away one of the reasons why he thinks bloggers are better than the established systems, and it goes right to the heart of this tension.

Unlike the local information networks at FAST and conventional conflict early warning systems, they are not paid informants.

This belief is part of the cult of the amateur that I think the internet has reinforced, but it is not inherently better to do something for free than it is to do it for pay.  Personally I think that as soon as they stop acting as bloggers and start acting as human rights monitors, they will cease to be good bloggers – and they probably won’t be very good human rights monitors either. I also think that the strengths of citizen journalism – the amateur spirit, the personal perspectives, the improvised approach – are in this context potential weaknesses. Joshua at Registan almost nails one of the key problems for Global Voices when he says that

too many internationals, including me, are far more alike each other than they are to their home countries.

Even though many of them are from the regions or countries that they cover, the Global Voices bloggers – in certain important ways – are more like each other than they are like the people in their home countries. In particular, they share “democratic values” just as Patrick describes, and a positive, can-do attitude that impresses people.³ Yet those democratic values may be the very thing that makes them less representative, and that raises an interesting dilemma for David and the others who are interested in Rising Voices.

In relation to Ushahidi, I wrote

The virtual world isn’t resistant to real-world pressures, and it doesn’t necessarily overcome social divisions – hence the problems with the [Mashada] bulletin board. These pressures can be managed, but it’s no easy thing – but would Ushaidi be any less resistant to hijacking by people intent on promoting social divisions?

I suppose that’s my question, in the context of David’s job – what defense mechanisms do we have against the real world?

1. Besides, academics don’t usually talk in aphorisms – they prefer to maximise their word count. [↩]
2. Although that doesn’t necessarily mean that I think FAST is particularly effective. [↩]
3. However a positive attitude is not enough – I have frequently said that I would prefer to work with people who really couldn’t give a damn about humanitarian issues but who are excellent at their jobs, than work with people who are lousy at their job but who really, really care. I’m not saying that the Global Voices bloggers are lousy at their job – but their job is not “early warning”, it’s blogging. [↩]

My response to Patrick’s response to my original post got a bit out of hand, so I decided to make it a new blog post. What does Patrick have to say?

Citizen media, investigative journalism, the use of Web 2.0 tools to document instances of human rights violations, government corruption, etc. are ways to expose extremist actions. Oversight is an important element of any democracy. See DigiActive.org, for example. This is just a first step, ie, empowering political activists using digital technology to increase their impact vis-a-vis pro-democracy initiatives.

Patrick, I think your bias is showing. Your use of the word “extremist” looks dangerously close to being a euphemism for “things that I disagree with”; corruption, for example, is not an “extremist” action. Now I agree that corruption is a serious governance issue, and that the information revolution may encourage more transparency in this area – but I think you’re eliding these types of concerns with your more specific concerns around conflict.

the issue of legal actions was a point that repeatedly came up during the Global Voices summit.

I’d love to hear more about that, because I think it forms the crux of the concerns that Tom and I have – but that’s the angle that we come from, our own bias. (I also think that this starts to define the borderlands between conflict prevention and human rights work.)

Actually, one of my key arguments is that even if early warning systems such as FAST were linked to policy and operational response, there would still be no early response. Since they were at the front lines, I would recommend touching base with Daudi, Ory and Juliana on exactly how they used blogging to share information and respond *locally* in an informal and decentralized manner. Of course, this is not going to make the headlines; not going to be published in a peer reviewed journal, and so we all too often assume that this type of informal responses do not exist.

But what is the response? I’m still not seeing it – not in the sense that it doesn’t appear in a peer-reviewed journals (I don’t actually read peer-reviewed journals…), but in the sense that I can’t see what the response could be. Let me be clear: blogging is a response, data visualisation is a response, but not the type of response that I think you’re talking about.

I could be wrong, however. I get the sense that you believe that this activity is worthwhile simply for its own sake – as part of the democratic process – and I’d tend to agree. However what I read here – and in the other discussions around the summit – goes beyond simply blogging because it’s worthwhile. It has a programmatic element, a directional element – but that means that the bar is higher.

One reason FAST was not sustainable was because of the expenses incurred by having to pay for 60+ informants to code events. Which is why I’m suggesting that making use of freely available trusted citizen media blogs as a source for local information makes sense. Particularly as these networks are likely to report using pictures, YouTube videos, etc. Unlike FAST’s field monitors, GV bloggers also have a vibrant and pro-active network they can tap into. Hence the possibility of Ushahidi.

Again, your bias is showing – who decides which blogs are to be “trusted”, and what does “trusted” mean in this context? How do you know that GV bloggers have a “vibrant and pro-active network”? And what about the voices on the other side – the “extremist” side, who may be “extremist” precisely because they lack a voice? These are deeper questions which I am sure were discussed at the Summit and elsewhere, but their existence should make you wary of proclaiming their superiority without at least some qualifications.

Rebecca MacKinnon notes this in her blog post

Perhaps the biggest unresolved problem on Global Voices is how to be truly fair to everybody – to minorities as well as majorities, while not appearing to take sides in various people’s independence struggles.

The notion of “fairness” interests me in this context, but that’s for another (more philosophical) conversation.

I’m weary of institution-based action (an oxymoron?), which is precisely why GV appeals to me–a decentralized network of activists who seek (often at their own personal risk) to get information out to the rest of the world based on their own values, which, by the way are democratic values.

I hear you about the weariness, but I just have difficulty making the leap of faith. Especially in the field of human rights, and particularly for the purposes of legal action, organisations are important and will remain important. I’m not arguing that there’s no role for individuals or these new “indistutions” (wow, that’s a really bad neologism) – there is a role for them, but there always was (for example in the community-based approaches to conflict resolution which predate the internet).

GV is far more representative than FAST’s field monitors ever were.

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? It sounds as if Rising Voices is beginning to gain some purchase in expanding the constituency – which interestingly takes GV out of the territory it began on and into what might be fairly considered the usual NGO territory.

In my opinion, GV is accountable. You have taken issue with some of my arguments and have had the freedom to respond accordingly… The issue of accountability is certainly important, but not just for GV. How many NGOs in our field are really accountable? (Just trying to add perspective).

I agree that NGOs are not as accountable as they should be, but that doesn’t make GV any more accountable. 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.

What are GV’s values? GV’s mission? I included this in my blog post by copying and pasting directly from the GV website:

I wholeheartedly support GV’s mission, and I hope that I haven’t given the impression otherwise. There are two worries I have about this, one minor and one major. The minor one is that the reason you pay people is to get them to do things that need doing, rather than things they already want to do. As per David’s post,

No matter how many bloggers around the world are sentenced to jail, most internet users still spend their online hours surfing entertainment sites. Several commenters in the audience argued that activism needs to be made fun or it won’t attract popular attention and support.

Activism frequently isn’t fun; early warning usually isn’t interesting. A distributed network of volunteers is fine – up to a point, which means that you can’t make it the primary track for these projects without exposing yourself to a high level of risk. The major issue is that talking about the role of bloggers in activism – and particularly about explicitly expanding that role beyond observation to action – means moving to a different type of discourse, and probably a different type of structure.

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.

Bearing in mind my previous post, I’d like to take on Patrick – in fact, I’d like to take on his entire Global Voices love-in.  First, though, a word from our sponsors!

Global Voices Online, Ushahidi and the range of similar projects using the web in novel ways are fantastic initiatives that have already started to transform the way in which we do things. Blogging and other forms of internet-mediated communication point towards a radical shift in the way information is transmitted and consumed. The impact of the information revolution on the problem sciences – particularly in areas such as humanitarian action, human rights work and conflict prevention and resolution – will be comprehensive, radical and unpredictable.

It’s precisely because these impacts will be comprehensive, radical and unpredictable that I am wary of gazing into the crystal ball and telling everybody exactly how the game will end. Similarly Patrick isn’t in the game of hype – his critique of conflict prevention mechanisms is unflinching – but when I read his recent posts about global voices think that he’s become over-excited based on the good intentions and winning personalities of the people involved.

Most people, most of the time, in most places are nonviolent. Social extremes are by definition minorities. Global Voices are more informed and moderate. Giving a voice to these Global Voices online is likely to diminish the impact of extremists.

As far as I can tell, there’s no basis in fact for this conclusion. Not only is the media – including the web – skewed towards extreme positions¹ but human cognition is also skewed towards extreme positions. We tend to take more notice of things that are at the edges, especially if those things make us uncertain or afraid. The echo chamber effect of the internet also suggests to me that it doesn’t matter much how many “moderate” voices² you present to the world – the extreme voices will still be in the headlines.

More pointedly, I’m still failing to see what the impact of these projects are in the field of humanitarian and human rights action. Let’s take human rights monitoring as an example for which there are two main rationales – advocacy and legal action. In terms of advocacy, projects such as BrightEarth and Ushaidi both have a role to play; but the question of how to leverage their visibility into effective campaigning activity is not one that is well-defined. In terms of legal action, they have no utility at all, nor are they likely to on their own terms. More to the point, the high visibility of these projects runs the risk of creating a public priority that skews towards advocacy (which is important) and away from legal action (which is more important – and is also what the advocacy should be leading towards).

At one point, Patrick writes

Global Voices is a far more effective local information and response network than FAST ever was. [Emphasis Patrick's.] … Bloggers at Global Voices are directly linked to local social and political networks… As more of the irregularities of the voting [in Kenya] surfaced, bloggers quickly found themselves as citizen reporters, using twitter, photoblogging and other tools to document and respond to the escalating violence.

I can’t quite see how blogging is a “response” in any significant sense. One of Patrick’s key arguments is that current early warning systems – such as FAST, referenced here – are not sufficiently linked to policy and operational decision-making structures. With the case of the Kenyan blogging community, that charge is surely doubled – not only are they not linked to decision-making structures but there are no decision-making structures in sight. That’s not a criticism of “citizen journalism”, which is a worthwhile endeavor on its own terms – but let’s not pretend that its something it’s not.

There are several dangers here. One is that if people who get involved in projects like these don’t see a return on their investment, they are unlikely to come back again – they’ll put their energies somewhere else. Another is that there’s a limited amount of resources out there, and resources placed into one project don’t go into another project. Yet another is that the power of the web skews towards those with the best access, which means that organisations that might be doing better work suffer from not being as visible. Yet another is that by trying to move into a new – and admittedly sexy – area, projects like GVO will start to suffer from mission creep, diluting those elements which made them useful and attractive in the first place. And finally the peer-based nature of this interaction – which is fantastic in and of itself – but which does not necessarily reinforce the institution-based action which is essential for human rights framework.

Now I’m mad for emergent social processes, and the aggregation of all this geospatial data collection, blogging activity and general intertwingling is likely to produce some pretty interesting developments. I wouldn’t want to tell people that they should stop doing things that they feel are worthwhile³ but one of the things that humanitarian organisations struggle with is measuring impact rather than output – basically, did we help versus in what ways did we help. We have a clear idea of the outputs of these projects – in fact some of the projects are just outputs – but not good metrics for their impact, and that means we can’t judge whether they are worth continuing or not.

Participation without purpose creates fatigue – see how quickly the efforts after Hurricane Katrina disappeared as people went back to their everyday lives. Visualisation without intent creates nice pictures – but doesn’t necessarily have the impact in the real world that we might think it does if we spend a lot of our time online, where our efforts will be amplified and run straight back to us. I sometimes feel like a lone and unwelcome voice (well, not lone – my co-blogger Tom has similar feelings) but that’s because I believe that the workings of the Web can help us take this work forward. I just need to be convinced – not just by discussing the possibilities, but actually seeing them working.

POSTSCRIPT: Patrick is entirely correct when he states

the conflict early warning field is still in the middle ages when it comes to the use of emerging information communication technologies

and that’s something that we need to fix. But he then goes on to say that

these factors are antithetical to the observation made by Rupesinghe exactly 20 years ago (!) vis-a-vis conflict early warning and response systems: “a democratic flow of information is the first condition for a democratic and open system of warning and resolution.” Stress on democratic and flow. It is high time we in the humanitarian community pay more attention to Global Voices.

Now while Global Voices definitely fits the requirement for information flow, I’d be very, very careful about calling it democratic. Global Voices is not a representative body; it’s not an accountable body; it’s not even a “body” as such. We like Global Voices because it reflects our own values – but democracy is not supposed to reflect our values only, it’s supposed to reflect everybody’s values.

1. It’s worth noting that this includes technotopianism of the sort we see embodied in Global Voices. [↩]
2. And the question of who decides which voices are “moderate” goes unasked in this discussion. [↩]
3. Although they should always bear in mind the humanitarian fallacy. [↩]