humanitarian.info

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. [↩]

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. [↩]