humanitarian.info

Protests in Moldova Explode, With Help of Twitter!

A crowd of more than 10,000 young Moldovans materialized seemingly out of nowhere on Tuesday to protest against Moldova’s Communist leadership, ransacking government buildings and clashing with the police. The sea of young people reflected the deep generation gap that has developed in Moldova, and the protesters used their generation’s tools, gathering the crowd by enlisting text-messaging, Facebook and Twitter, the social messaging network.

Here’s how it went down:

The related posts on Twitter are being posted at a record-breaking rate – I’ve been watching the Twitter stream for the last 20 minutes – and I see almost 200 new Twitter messages marked with “pman” (virtually all of them in Romanian, with only one or two in English)… All in all, while it’s probably too early to tell whether Moldova’s Twitter revolution will be successful, it would certainly be wrong to disregard the role that Twitter and other social media have played in mobilizing (and, even more so, reporting on) the protests.

Or did it?

In fact Twitter did not play that big role. The story is quite simple – young and active bloggers decided to have a flash-mob action, lighting candles and “mourning Moldova” because of Communists victory… They agreed on the time and place of the action through the network of Moldovan blogs (blogs aggregator blogosfera.md), and social networks like Facebook/Odnoklassniki, etc…. That was a civic protest, which grew up out of a flash-mob initiative organized through blogs and social network connections, and then which grew even bigger as the protesters used mobile phones to summon their friends and classmates.

Apparently it didn’t.

Mihai Muscovici… suggests that the Twitter community in the whole of Moldova is around 100 to 200 strong and there is scant mention of the organisation of the protests at all apart from a rather vague quote the Times has put in at the end of the piece… As it stands, the Twitter revolution is a myth. What happened, and is still happening, in Moldova is a protest organised using social media.

Last word to Evgeny:

It really helped that even non-technology people in the U.S. and much of Western Europe are currently head over heels in love with Twitter. It’s really good that the Moldovan students didn’t organize this revolution via Friendster or LiveJournal (which is still a platform for choice for many users in Eastern Europe). If they did, they would never have gotten as much attention from the rest of the world.

Indeed. The reason I’m posting this – even though it’s not strictly speaking “humanitarian” – is because it shows three things which to some extent follow from each other:

1. It’s hazardous to use press coverage to determine what tools are being used and what tools are working in a crisis. The press frequently have even less understanding of the tools than they do of the crisis, and they <em>will</em> focus on what’s “popular”. It’s very difficult to verify the claims about these tools while the crisis is unfolding, so I find it hard to blame them – they need people to read their stuff – but the people making the claims need to be more careful.¹
2. They need to be more careful because media coverage of technology is the product of the echo chamber that dominates the technology sector – and steers the media when it comes to reporting on technology. No offense to all those tech guys providing their opinions to the media – they are smart, no doubt – but because they’re tech guys they love Twitter, and discuss it a lot, so that’s the headline we read.
3. The good news is that Facebook (and other social networking sites) have demonstrated their utility as organising tools in advance of a protest; mobile phones we already knew are of maximum utility even while the crisis is full on (right up until the network goes down). Twitter – maybe good visibility for people on the periphery or further out, but I’m just not convinced that microblogging in general is of much use in a crisis. Head over to Jon’s place for the opposing point of view.

1. To be fair, in that initial article they only refer to Twitter as part of a suite of tools, but the general tenor of coverage has been “The Twitter Revolution” or something similar. [↩]

Ken Banks has almost written a manifesto for himself in Time to eat our own dog food? I think there’s a lot of potential in his project FrontlineSMS – mainly because it’s a platform. Like any good platform, it’s up to the end user (in this case, grassroots NGOs) to work out how they want to use it, and how they want to incorporate it into their organisation and activities. I need to work out why I feel more positively towards FrontlineSMS than I do towards Ushahidi, particularly since the two projects have a good working relationship, but right now I want to focus on something that Ken says in his blog post:

If we draw parallels between the concerns of Easterly and Schumacher and apply them to the application of mobile phones as a tool for social and economic development, there’s a danger that the development community may end up repeating the same mistakes of the past.

I don’t think I’ll put myself in any danger by predicting that the development community will absolutely repeat the mistakes of the past, since that’s one of the things that the development community is good at. Ken rightly feels that we need to avoid developing an “NGO digital divide”, but once again I don’t think there’s much danger in stating that there’s already an NGO digital divide. It’s been quite clearly identified, at two levels.

1. Between the richer UN agencies and the (usually) Western NGOs who do most of their contracting, and their poorer cousins (particularly national NGOs in the developing world). As the two groups diverge further (which I admit will be a slow process) communications between them will become increasingly problematic. When one organisation has a 24/7 broadband connection and the other needs to go to the local internet cafe twice a day, you’re going to feel it.
2. Slightly less alarming but potentially more damaging is the digital divide within organisations. In most organisations, the further out into the field you go – both geographically and organisationally distant from headquarters – the poorer the ICT capacity is. Considering that field offices are our eyes and ears on the ground – the source of nearly all the baseline information our organisations need to do their work – this is something which needs to be fixed.

Ken’s proposal for how we can avoid this:

To do this we need to think about low-end, simple, appropriate mobile technology solutions which are easy to obtain, affordable, require as little technical expertise as possible, and are easy to copy and replicate. This is something I regularly write about, and it’s a challenge I’m more than happy to throw down to the developer community.

It’s a challenge that we all need to deal with, and one of the critical things that Sahana has (and continues to) wrestle with. I think that this approach – exemplified by projects like FrontlineSMS – is the right way to deal with the first point I discussed above, because the most likely common denominator between organisations is the mobile phone. However while mobile phones can play a role in improving communications within organisations, there are deeper political and cultural questions that need to be addressed regarding priorities within the structure.

Read Ken’s full post and leave him a comment – this is a discussion which needs to be continued and expanded.

Alex Evans at Global Dashboard:

The point about Twitter and other social networking technologies is that in our hyper-networked age, we just haven’t yet had the time to develop the collective mechanisms to make sure that this awesome power to aggregate, to build positive feedback loops, is channelled safely.

Erik Hersman at The Ushahidi Blog:

Since we don’t believe there will ever be one tool that everyone uses for gathering information on global crisis, we see a future where a tool like Swift River aggregates data from tools such as the aforementioned Twitter, Ushahidi, Flickr, YouTube, local mobile and web social networks. At this point what you have is a whole lot of noise and very little signal as to what the value is of the data you’re seeing.

Anyone who has access to a computer (and possibly just a mobile phone in the future), can then go and rate information as it comes in. This is classic “crowdsourcing”, where the more people you have weighing in on any specific data point raises the probability of the finding the right answer. The information with greater veracity is highlighted and bubbles to the top, weighted also by proximity, severity and category of the incident.

The question is, how viable is a tool like Swift River as one of the “collective mechanisms” that Alex correctly identifies the need for? I think the Ushahidi developers are on an interesting track, but I think that there are limitationss to what crowdsourcing can achieve – not a problem when it’s a forum like Digg (for example) where the weight of numbers has a levelling effect on any individual distortions, and where the ratings are trivial.¹ However I’m still waiting to be convinced about the value of crowdsourcing in an emergency, because it’s crowdsourcing of the type which Alex describes in his example of a potentially dangerous Twitter meme.

1. I don’t mean “trivial” in a derogatory way, only in the sense that nobody’s going to make potentially life or death decisions on the basis of a Dugg article. [↩]

Now that I’ve got my snark out of the way regarding Twitter’s role in breaking the news about the earthquake in China, it’s time for some more positive. One of the projects going on behind the Burma cyclone is the development of Geochat – basically a spatially-enabled Twitter – as a disaster response tool. Given that I’ve just snapped at the likes of Robert Scoble for cheerleading about Twitter as a news source, why do I think that something like Twitter has a role to play?

I’m not saying that Twitter (and others like it) is useless – far from it. It’s a tool and, like many tools, it has many uses. The example from the earthquake today shows that Twitter can provide a wealth of details on current events – but that wealth of details is difficult to filter and has no quality control. If you know of a particular Twitterer who is a reliable source, then you can follow them – but for the casual reader, most of the flood of detail won’t rise above the level of gossip. Essentially, the Twitter stream isn’t targeted enough to be particularly useful to me.

As both of the regular readers of this blog will know, I’m interested in how these tools can be used in humanitarian operations. In this case, we want to see how microblogging via sms can be harnessed for reporting – for logistics updates, for example, or reporting security incidents. We want to see how co-ordination activities might benefit from having sms notifications as an extra stream of communications, on top of email and telephone. We want to see how beneficiaries might be able to use these channels to build their own picture of their situation and to increase accountability (that one’s a bit optimistic, I admit).

If the technology community really wants to show that Twitter is a force to be reckoned with, that’s where we need to be headed. It’s fine to gloat about beating the mainstream media to the news story, but that doesn’t actually help anybody. Let’s see where this Geochat development takes us – it could be the start of a beautiful friendship.

So, cyclone in Burma followed a week later by earthquake in China. Business as usual, I’m afraid – we live in a world of accidents waiting to happen. When an accident does happen, though, how do we know about it?

There’s been a blizzard of coverage in the blogosphere about how Twitter beat the US Geological Survey to the punch with news of the Chengdu Earthquake. Twitterer dtan felt the earth move under his feet in Beijing, and his twitter was picked up by Robert Scoble, one of the world’s best-known technology writers and a man with about 23,000 people following his Twitter stream. On his blog, Scoble explains:

I reported the major quake to my followers on Twitter before the USGS Website had a report up and about an hour before CNN or major press started talking about it. Now there’s lots of info over on Google News. How did I do that? Well, I was watching Twitter on Google Talk. Several people in China reported to me they felt the quake WHILE IT WAS GOING ON!!! Over the next two hours I pointed at anyone who had info about the quake on my Twitter account.

The result has been a whole discussion about how this shows that Twitter is a force to be reckoned with. The Online Journalism Blog goes link crazy on crowdsourcing without managers, so start reading there and follow the trail. The key indicator for the Twitterers (ironically) is a post on the BBC News dot.life blog:

I was beginning to think Twitter – the micro-blogging service that’s all the rage amongst the technorati – was just another fad for people who want to share too much of their rather dull lives. Until this morning. When I logged on to my desktop Twitter application (sad, I know) it was alive with Tweets about the earthquake in China… Let’s see, as this story unfolds, whether this is the moment when Twitter comes of age as a platform which can bring faster coverage of a major news event than traditional media, while allowing participants and onlookers to share their experiences.

Many of the comments on these posts express their skepticism, particularly about the claim about having the news before the USGS – it’s more likely that the USGS was cross-checking their data before releasing it. This relates back to something I wrote a few weeks ago – there’s no accountability on Twitter, so there’s no requirement for people to check facts.

When the World Trade Centre fell, the reason I knew about it was that my Dad phoned me and told me to turn on the television. This Twitter coverage operates in the same way – as gossip, rather than news. Check out the direction of the conversation on Twitter after the initial news breaks – it falls into three categories:

1. This earthquake is terrible, isn’t it?
2. Here’s a link to a news source with some actual detail about the earthquake.
3. Isn’t Twitter great for breaking this news first?

That doesn’t mean that it’s not valid, useful or interesting – but it does mean that you’re not going to find it that useful as a news source. If you think I’m harshing Twitter’s buzz, then you should try Better Living through Software:

It’s silly in the extreme to act like twitter is somehow breaking news, though. Masses of people within China found out about the earthquake as it was happening via messages from friends on QQ (which is massively more popular than twitter), and CCTV carried the news almost instantly. I suppose it’s cute that some English-speaking expats using echo-chamber technology were able to *also* report the event on twitter, but even the tweetscan example seems a bit lame to me. When I search for tweets with the word “地震”, tweetscan gives me nothing — apparently tweetscan doesn’t care about Chinese.

Ouch, but a fair ouch.

UPDATE: As always, Global Voices Online is the solid antidote to Anglocentrism, while the Frontline Club is much more positive about the whole Twitter ride.

So it all kicked off in Myanmar this week, except that it didn’t, because the military regime has managed to bungle the response to Cyclone Nargis. We could get into a long discussion about the whys and wherefores, and there’s some frightening talk about the “right to respond” over-riding sovereignty, but let’s stay focused on technology. At least it’s relatively non-controversial, except that it isn’t, because Myanmar is one of those places where internet access is a non-starter, where satellite telephones are essentially illegal and where the technology infrastructure (e.g. suppliers and maintenance) is close to zero. What that means is that we’re going to be extremely limited in what we can do on the ground. So what is happening?

• A Sahana instance is being set up for the use of anybody who needs it, with the support of INSTEDD and possible uptake by NetHope members.
• Direct Relief International have done up a KMZ file of health facilities in-country, based on the WHO 2002 Global Health Atlas.
• OCHA are prepping a HIC to support the existing Myanmar Information Management Unit, who have already put out some W3 maps. UPDATE: MapAction have also deployed in support of OCHA and have maps available on their website.
• UNOSAT have also got their sat on with a KMZ file of the cyclone path and the usual satellite mapping.
• Ditto ITHACA, who have released a series of satellite maps showing the impact of Nargis.
• ReliefWeb’s info stream on Cyclone Nargis is of course like drinking water from a hose, with their map filter probably most useful.
• The WorldWideHelp blog roars into action with all the news that’s fit to blog.
• A couple of the mailing list discussions that I’m on are talking about ways in which we might leverage cellphone and/or satellite phone communications if they become available, particularly for tracking relief and relief personnel.
• Digital Globe and Geo-Eye have hopped the NASA satellite for an updating KML layer on the cyclone.
• Microsoft apparently have a team on standby to deploy the refugee tracking software that was developed for Kosovo (no reference yet). Microsoft are focused on supporting the HIC, and are ready to respond to other requests from the humanitarian community.
• Telecoms sans Frontieres are also on standby out of Bangkok, waiting for access to free up.
• Also Infoworld points out that – with regards to early warning – IT didn’t fail Myanmar, people did.

I’m nowhere near being deployed for this one (particularly as the government apparently is still refusing entry to foreign aid workers), but all of this makes me feel that we’re headed in the right direction. However until the government lets agencies start doing their jobs with less restrictions on movement and communications, we’re not going to see the benefits – another example of how the technology can be rendered much less useful when the political environment isn’t supportive. I leave you with the words of Surin Pitsuwan, Secretary-General of ASEAN in his speech last Thursday:

In spite of the technology that we have, in spite of the power that we have, in spite of the network that we have, we still lose lives needlessly… So it is more than just the power of technology, it is more than just the transformation of society through technology, it is certainly a shift in paradigm here in the minds of our people and particularly our leaders. Because if you don’t have that shift, millions and billions of dollars worth of technology cannot deliver effective, timely relief to people when they need it most, because we have reservations about opening up our borders for cooperation, because we have hesitation about cooperating with the outside world, because we have mistrust of the outside world.

• Katrin Verclas at MobileActive and Sheila Kinkade (of ShareIdeas.org) have finished Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in Mobile Use by NGOs [pdf]. The report covers a wide range of uses, including public health, advocacy and disaster response, with some interesting case studies (including the recent post-election riots in Kenya). You can read more about it at the MobileActive website.
• The National Library of Medicine have published Information Seeking Behavior and Viewpoints of Emergency Preparedness and management professionals concerned with Health and Medicine (snappy title, guys). Murray Turoff has the entire text online there, or you can dowload the complete report [pdf]. “The emphasis of the study was on determining the current information seeking behavior, existing preferred sources of information, and unmet information needs of professionals involved with the medical and public health aspects of emergency planning, preparedness, and response.”
• A CSM article on Patrick Ball of Benetech. No great insights into human rights documentation and analysis, but a couple of nice stories about Ball’s experiences (HT: Flowing Data).
• NetHope have opened their West Africa Chapter - very gratifying for me to see these Chapters spreading ever wider. The ICT Skills Building Program is also going from strength to strength this year, with trainings announced for Nairobi, Johannesburg and West Africa.
• LINGOS have their new community website up and running [Warning: SharePoint alert!], with the invitation to register with them. The community is very active, and LINGOS offer a lot of resources on the website. Oh, and I’m sorry we never managed to organise that Webinar, Linda!
• The Economist realises that mobile phones are being used for election monitoring, public health, and advocacy – only a couple of years late, guys! – with the article A world of witnesses (HT: Katrin at MobileActive).

As everybody realises by now, technology is neutral when it comes to issues of war and peace. A lot of the positive stories around the use of sms to mobilise activists need to be balanced out by a recognition that in many cases, the government and private sector are in a position to challenge that use – and of course to use the same technology to promote their own messages. The Eldis community board picks up the story in Kenya:

As tensions and violence began to spill into the streets in Kenya in late 2007, the government decided to ban local live broadcast. Whilst this is obviously controversial, there were fears that radio, in particular, could be used, as it had done in Rwanda, to incite violence. The ban of live reporting meant that SMS began to be utilised as an update method and thus ‘mobile reporters’ were born.

The Government realised that they couldn’t control the internet or the text messages which were being sent to incite hostility, so they countered them with their own blanket text messages stating that the violence was illegal and that Kenyans should be concentrating on peace.

The role of radio broadcasts in supporting the genocide in Rwanda is well-documented (see the Nahimana and Barayagwiza cases at ICTR) and is a valuable cautionary tale. However few people have stopped to think much about how SMS could be an even more powerful tool for those inclined to mass violence. Radio broadcasts can incite the mob, but they are a weak tool for co-ordinating the mob; SMS, on the other hand, has the capability to be much more dangerous in the wrong hands. But when I say “the wrong hands”, what do I mean?

The Kenyan government were acting benevolently in attempting to curtail the bloodshed but others could use it for their own means… It demonstrates how the same information can be used for very different ends and poses questions about safeguards: can and should they be put in place to ensure that ICT tools are used for empowering and not repressive purposes?

The Kenyan government may have been acting benevolently – although it’s worth pointing out that it was in their interests to prevent violence simply because they hold the monopoly of violence. In most countries in the world, if not all, governments are not naturally inclined to empower their citizens. Communications technology should be available as widely as possible, and I don’t want anybody – least of all the government – legislating about who should have access to it on the basis of their ideology.

I think it’s dangerous to talk about “safeguards” to ensure that ICT tools are used for empowering and not repressive purposes; there’s no such thing as the wrong hands. The short version: technology can be used for good or ill, and preventing people using it for ill can only be achieved if you also prevent people using it for good. I’m happy to be challenged on this one – are there cases where I might be wrong?