humanitarian.info

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. [↩]