DigiActive.org

Tactic: Kenyan Farmers Use Mobiles to Secure Crops

Description: Whether it is a new home or a television, having good insurance is a pretty important thing to have to maintain a sound mind and prevent future problems for the many investments in our lives. So, it is no surprise that farmland should also be given the same consideration for protection. A new insurance policy in Africa is using technology to take care of some of the world’s most vulnerable farmers.

Digital Tool Being Used: Mobile Phone

What Are They Doing: Last year’s droughts throughout Africa were some of the worst in decades, causing higher food prices, illness among both people and animals and destroyed crops that took months to repair. To address these problems, the Agricultural Index Insurance Initiative at the Syngenta Foundation launched last week Kilimo Salama, Swahili for “safe farming”, to provide insurance plans for Kenyan farmers.

Here is how it works: When purchasing seeds from an retailer, farmers register to insure their seeds by filling in the insurance card. The registration process is completed when the farmer sends a text message on their mobile phone, and a record is created in a database. A local weather station records the rainfall and sends the data to the insurance company, which then calculates a payout according to an agronomic model. At the end of the season the farmer receives a text message if there is a payout and can pick up their payout at the original retailer where the insurance was purchased.

What is the Impact: Kilimo Salama actually began as a small pilot project last year with a group of 200 farmers in the central region of Laikipia. Most of the farmers were highly impressed with the program, as many of them received a payout of up to 80 percent. This year the insurance program will cover at least 5,000 maize and wheat farmers in Central, Rift Valley and Western provinces, which is at high risk of drought. This program shows that even a simple tool like a mobile phone can make a big difference in the lives of many.

Campaign:”I Know” Targets US Young Adults on HIV

Description: According to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), over 33 million people worldwide are living with HIV. In the United States most aid for preventing and treating the virus tends to go towards those living in the developing world. However, there has been criticism by many American advocates that the U.S. government has neglected to provide the same aid to a group in its own country which has been the most affected by the virus – African Americans. While African Americans represent over 12 percent of the U.S. population, they account for over half of all those being infected yearly and living in the United States with HIV. As the Obama administration starts to put together a national HIV/AIDS strategy – the first one in 20 years, other HIV activists are taking their message directly to the people via digital activism.

Digital Tools Being Used: Facebook, Twitter, Text Message, Radio & Video

What Are They Doing: The “i know” effort is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Act Against AIDS campaign, which uses multiple social media platforms to reach out to African American youth with facts about HIV/AIDS with the aim to engage them in open conversation.

“By supporting frank conversations through social media, ‘i know’ creates an opportunity for young people to talk directly with each other about the issues that fuel this still-deadly disease,” said Kevin Fenton, director of CDC’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention. “Their ideas and involvement will be a critical part of the solution.”

The campaign uses a mix of both old and new media. Followers have a choice of using Twitter, Facebook and texting to get alerts and status updates on HIV knowledge and attitudes, as well as links to information about HIV testing and prevention. The campaign’s website allows users to identify local HIV testing sites and campaign events and video stories of those living with HIV. There are also radio and online video public service announcements that has actor Jamie Foxx calling for a new discussion on HIV.

What is the Impact:Since the campaign’s launch on March 4, hundreds of users have become followers of the various platforms and it seems that the campaign has initially succeeded in engaging users, as can be seen with the many status re-tweets and discussion. While it is good that social media is being used in this campaign, it should also be highlighted that the campaign’s radio use is just as important, as many African-Americans still see the significance of this medium for getting out information within their community. However, it will take a longer amount of time to actually determine if both the online and radio efforts turn into offline actions.

Tactic: Rage Against the Olympics Machine

Description: Controversy has not only marred the 2010 Winter Olympics because of the tragic death of 21 year old luger Nodar Kumaritashvili, but also with 200 masked protesters who smashed windows of department stores and splattered red paint across Olympic venues in Vancouver.

Police said the group marched through the shopping district, vandalizing cars and stores. Protesters also threw metal boxes on display windows of Hudson’s Bay Company, where Olympic souvenirs are sold.

Vancouver has been facing problems ever since the run-up started to the games. Lack of actual snow, hundreds of millions in losses as NBC expected to take broadcasting the games, and now the luger death spelling riots.

Vancouverians have been upset about the way the Olympic games have been handled by the government. The Olympic projects have come in well over budget.

Some feel that the money would have been better spent going to social services, particularly as the city grapples with the effects of the recession.
But now, the protests are beginning to turn violent.

Digital Tools Being Used: Video

What’s Going On: Despite the violence, various activist groups have been leading largely peaceful protests since it was announced that the Games were to held in Vancouver in 2003. Many of these protesters have used viral video to effectively get their message across to a wider audience.

While most of the grievances by anti-Olympics protesters stem from the growing presence of corporate corruption in the Games, the largest resistance has come from indigenous groups in Western Canada, who claim their “stolen land” is being used by the government “for the benefit of corporations, including mining, logging, oil & gas, and ski resorts.” In addition, some activists say that Indigenous peoples suffering social ills caused by the Olympics, such as higher rates of poverty, unemployment, environmental degradation, police violence, disease, suicides and violence against women.

What is the Impact: Many grassroots activists have been flooding the Internet with videos about their complaints. Many of which are low-budget, but effective in telling their side of the story, like this one and this one. While the Olympic Games will go on in Vancouver and Games officials are not giving in to the complaints, anti-Olympic digital activism has allowed a point of view that would otherwise not get covered in the mainstream media.

Book Review: SMS Uprising – Mobile Activism in Africa

Editor: Sokari Ekine

Authors: Nathan Eagle, Ken Banks, Redante Asuncion-Reed, Anil Naidoo, Amanda Atwood, Christiana Charles-Iyoha, Becky Faith, Joshua Goldstein, Christian Kreutz, Tanya Notley, Juliana Rotich, Berna Twanza Ngolobe, Bukeni Waruzi

Subject: SMS Uprising gives an overview of the use of mobile technology for development and empowerment in Africa.

The book is made up of two parts. The first four chapters explore the context of mobile activism. Christian Kreutz has contributed a great summary of future trends and software developments in African mobile activism. Another essay by Ken Banks asks whether “social mobile” is “empowering the many or the few”.

The second part consists of seven case studies from several African countries. The fields they describe are equally diverse, ranging from e-agriculture to dissemination of political news. A special focus lies on the empowerment of women. Anil Naidoo from South Africa describes how mobiles are used in the UmNyango project to empower women in the rural region of KwaZulu Natal, and WOUGNET from Uganda aims to ameliorate the economic situation of female farmers in Uganda.

I especially liked the essay by Rotich and Joshua Goldstein on “Digitally networked technology in Kenya’s 2007–08 post-election crisis”. It is a short version of a case study written for the Berkman Center’s Internet and Democracy Project. The chapter looks at three facettes of social media in a conflict situation: “SMS campaigns to promote violence, blogs to challenge mainstream media narratives, and online campaigns to promote awareness of human rights violations.”

SMS Uprising combines theoretical groundwork and practical case studies useful to everyone interested in the use of mobile technology for activism and development. While some chapters are a bit longer than necessary, in combination the book provides a good overview of the issue.

SMS Uprising is published by Pambazuka Press. It is available on their website as a paperback plus PDF for £12.99 or the PDF alone for £9.99 as well as on Amazon.

[This is an altered version of a post I wrote for my blog, i like patterns.]

Tactic: Haiti earthquake gets quick response online

Description: Haiti was rocked Tuesday night by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake. According to a report, Haiti’s First Lady Elisabeth Debrosse Delatour said that “most of Port-au-Prince is destroyed.”

While almost all phone lines have gone down on the impoverished island, Haitians have been able to communicate to friends and relatives around the world with the use of new media. Not only has there been a flurry of tweets and photos of the devastation posted online over night, but charitable individuals and organizations have responded quickly with their efforts to help victims.

Digital Tools Being Used: Twitter, Video, Photos, Text Message, etc

What Are They Doing: Victims of the earthquake immediately got on Twitter, uploaded photos and YouTube videos and text messaged to give eyewitness reports on the tragedy like this one:

RAMHaiti: It’s 8:44PM and we’re still getting aftershocks!!I can hear people gathered in the distance singing prayers…people in large numbers are singing prayers downtown

In the last few hours charitable organizations have been able to make initial assessments of victims’ needs and have asked for donations, mostly through the use of digital tools.

Red Cross: Help Haiti right now, text Haiti to 90999 to give just $10 to the Red Cross

UNICEF: Donate now for Haiti on their website

Rap artist and activist Wyclef Jean was among the first to organize online when he sent out these tweets:

@wyclef Help Haiti by donating to Yele on www.yele.org follow @YeleHaiti

@wyclef Another way you can help Haiti after their 7.0 earthquake: Donate $5 by texting YELE to 501501 and by visiting www.YELE.org

News organizations that cater to Haitian communities in the United States have also taken the initiative to give their readers updated information about the earthquake’s aftermath, such as the Boston Haitian Reporter, which has been live-blogging since Tuesday night.

What is the Impact: While a full assessment of the Haitian earthquake will be long term, this latest international incident shows the incredible value in digital activism for quick response and possibly saving lives.

Free Bashir Campaign Begins

Moroccan blogger Bashir Hazzam was arrested on December 7th after taking part in a student protest and posting about it on his blog.  The Free Bashir site is up now at www.freebashir.org.  These types of  sites are getting more and more sophisticated.   This one has clear  background information on the case, banners for you blog, a widget, and presences on Twitter, Facebook, on Flickr.   It would be helpful if the site proposed one clear action that people could take to help Bashir.   It’s all about having a credible theory of change: how will the actions people take online affect the offline outcome of the case?

What the New Facebook Privacy Rules Mean for Activists

Yesterday Facebook enacted a new set of privacy rules, the purpose of which is to expand the information which all users share, making it “easier for you to find and connect with the people you’re looking for.”  However, according to a great analysis by the  Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Looking even closer at the new Facebook privacy changes, things get downright ugly when it comes to controlling who gets to see personal information such as your list of friends.  Under the new regime, Facebook treats that information — along with your name, profile picture, current city, gender, networks, and the pages that you are a “fan” of — as “publicly available information” or “PAI.” Before, users were allowed to restrict access to much of that information. Now, however, those privacy options have been eliminated.

These reductions in privacy protection have significant negative consequences for activists, particularly in repressive regimes where they communicate and affiliate more freely online than they can offline.  When Facebook unilaterally removes barriers of privacy, it leaves activists and their contacts open to persecution by authorities.

If you are an activist whose political activities or affiliations are visible through your Facebook account, you need to scrub your account of political content now.  This means:

1. Un-friend fellow activists
2. Leave any political groups you are a member or fan of
3. Delete political status messages, notes, and links and do not add new ones
4. Un-tag yourself from photos of you taking part in political activities or in the presence of known activists
5. Remove any linkages connecting you to politically dangerous people, ideas, or organizations

Even before the new rules came into effect, activists in repressive regimes should have kept their profiles clean.  A state security officer intent on viewing your profile will find a way to do it.  However, now that an activist’s name, profile picture, networks, current city, gender, friend list, and pages are automatically (and irrevocably) displayed, security personnel can use Facebook to map activist networks more easily.

Social media commentators like Evgeny Morozov and activists like Sami Ben Gharbia of Global Voices Advocacy advise activists in repressive regimes not to use Facebook and other commercial social platforms for activism at all because they are so public.  I would recommend caution but not outright rejection of these tools, which are indeed quite powerful.   In some countries the risks of detections will  be greater than the benefits of use, particularly where only a fraction of the population is using these tools, making the audience for activism limited.  However, in other countries activists may choose to continue using Facebook, but with greater caution.  It is possible to make Facebook use safer, but it is impossible to make it entirely safe.

So what are safer Facebook practices?  Other than the profile scrubbing recommended above, it means that activists need to create separate anonymous profiles for their political activities, which contain no accurate personal information and are completely unconnected to their real friends, affiliations, and locations.  In some cases, it may even make sense to create a “throw-away account,” much as activists use throw-away cell phones: create a fake account to do one sensitive action, and then never use it again.  So that a single IP address cannot be connected to you activism account, you should access that account from different public computers in cyber cafes and never from your home computer.

Activists should also refrain from posting anything incriminating on Facebook or creating groups that will endanger less tech-savvy citizens.  Maybe the Egyptian creator of the fictional group “President Mubarak is a Creep” started the group using an anonymous throw-away account, but the Egyptian citizens that join that group may not hide their identities and may thus make themselves vulnerable to persecution.  In this way activists unintentionally create “honey-pots” that ensnare fellow citizens in politically dangerous affiliations.

The competition between activists and repressive government for control of online speech and action is often referred to as a cat and mouse game where activists find ways to undermine and circumvent  blocks put in place by authorities.  However, as Facebook’s new privacy policy illustrates, this is not really a two-player game but a multi-player game.  Companies which create digital infrastructure also have the ability to give the advantage to one side or the other.  Facebook’s move unfortunately gave the advantage to repressive governments.

Against Crowdsourced Politics

The last post begins with the seemingly benign phrase “the promise of digital activism is to crowdsource global political transformation.”  I wrote it and I was pretty proud of myself.  I thought it succinctly summed up the potential of decentralized politics, where power is defined at the edge and by the grassroot, by thousands of ordinary citizens mobilizing together.   Well, Michel Bauwens set me straight.

Michel is the founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives.  I heard him speak yesterday at the great Internet as Factory and Playground conference in New York.  Michel didn’t set me straight directly, but his definition of crowdsourcing, and its distinction from peer-to-peer collaboration, made me see the error of my ways.

The key is that crowdsourcing is still centralized: the producer is still a cog in a machine, only the machine is bigger.  It’s not a factory, it’s the entire world, and producers are connected by the network, not be shared physical space.  The individual producer chooses which part of the task she will take, she takes a much smaller part, and she decides whether or not to participate, but she does not decide what the overall project is.  Whether the task is something as malevolent as identifying Iranian protesters for the government or as benign as fans re-shooting Star Wars, the task is defined at the center, produced at the edge.   It is no coincidence that the term crowdsourcing derives from another practice of hierarchical labor distribution: outsourcing.

Peer to peer production is different:  it is center-less and it is non-hierarchical.  Even if someone is organizing, that person has no more power than any other member of the project.  There is no center and edge.  There is only the network.  The web site doesn’t make the origins clear, but if Star Wars: Uncut is organized by a group of fans, then their project to re-shoot their favorite movie by piecing together thousands of scenes re-staged by other fans is peer-to-peer.  If the project is organized by Lucasfilm Ltd., then it is being crowdsourced.  It is all about who benefits and where the power lies.

What would this mean in the political realm? Crowdsourced politics means that the center benefits ultimately from the divided labor: for example, a political campaign asking supporters to host fundraisers in their homes or directing citizens to call their Congressman to support or  opposed a piece of legislation.   The effects of crowdsourcing might be in the public interest, but even though execution of the task occurs at the edge, the ultimate decision of what the activity will be is decided at the center.

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DA Interview: Women Tech Entrepreneurs

The first New Media Women Entrepreneurs Summit occurred yesterday with dozens of enterprising women – and a few men – thinking about the business side of the new cyber frontier.  Following the summit, DigiActive talked to future tech entrepreneur Juliana Bozan of Brazil about creating Internet start-ups with a focus on social justice.  Bozan came to the Summit to find inspiration.  

DigiActive: Why is it important for more women to get involved in technology and entrepreneurship?

Juliana Bozan:  I think it is really important for women to get online today because they are so many business opportunities.  Women, especially in the developing world, are blogging and tweeting about issues that affect us.  Just look at the Iranian protests last summer and the continuing human rights problems against women in the Middle East; many of the bloggers are women. Journalism outlets like CNN and BBC are using information on our blogs for free, and we see no profit.  But now is the time to step our game, and figure out a way to create business opportunities for our words, video and audio.     

DA:  Tell me about your blogging experience?

JB: I used to write for a now defunct group blog for women in Brazil a couple of years back about “Brave Women,” where we would talk about problems women in the favelas like domestic violence, prostitution and single motherhood.  It was great because everyone liked it and we have a lot of unique hits on the site, including from European journalism outlets.  However, some of these journalism outlets reposted some of our blog posts, which was fine at first, but eventually we got tired of them taking our stuff without giving credit to our blog, the bloggers or even asking our permission to repost or paying us for reposting.  We felt like we were being used, you know, like a new kind of colonialism.  Since Western outlets are cutting back on having journalists in the developing world, they now seek out bloggers in countries they want to get information about.  Unfortunately, it is very commonplace these days for Western journalism outlets take information from bloggers in the developing world and not give credit where credit is due.

DA: What are you hoping to take away from this Summit?

JB: I have met a couple of interesting people here who I would like to follow up within the next few days about getting help on writing a business plan.  I want to look into starting an online newsletter or blog about Brazilian women social justice activists, but this time I want to look at having a better strategy for monetizing my site, so my writers will get payment and credit for their work.  I would even consider having more formalized partnerships with journalism outlets.

DA: What advice do you have for other women tech entrepreneurs?

JB: Be strong, be confident and be smart about what you are doing.  Don’t let others take advantage of you or tell you that you can’t do your own website.  When you do that, you have failed before you’ve even gotten started.

Social Media for Social Change in the 1800’s

A massive system of human rights abuse is occurring in the United States.  Activists, intent on putting a human face on the mass tragedy, appropriate photographs of victims and disseminate them through their social networks.  Soon the mainstream media catches on, furthering the outcry.  The year is 1863 and the human right abuse is slavery.

When we think about “social media” we most often think about digital applications: blogs, social networks, wikis, SMS.  Yet Wikipedia defines social media as “media designed to be disseminated through social interaction,” and these practices have existed for centuries.  Looking at historical cases of social media outside the digital context can help to clarify underlying mechanics which are often lost in the hype surrounding current tools.

The image I referred to in the first paragraph is above at left: a man named Gordon who was formerly  enslaved in Mississippi before escaping and taking refuge with the Union Army in Louisiana during the American Civil War.  The photograph was taken by an army doctor and used by activists to vividly illustrate the inhumanity and cruelty and slavery.  While the image was disseminated in mainstream media outlets like The New York Independent and Harper’s Weekly newspapers, and as a projected image in lectures by abolitionists, the social media aspect of the campaign was the “carte to visite”. (source)

Cartes de visites – French for “visiting card” – were a very popular social practice among wealthy and middle class Americans in the 19th century.   The cards, which used to simply bear a visitor’s name,  were originally used in the social protocol of aristocrat Europe.  They became popularized with the advent and increasing affordability of photography and were collected among friends and neighbors.  It would not be uncommon for a collection of cartes de visites to be displayed in the parlor.  Photos of political celebrities were particularly popular and social campaigns also used the practice to spread their message. (source)

So what can we learn about modern social media activism from the analogue social media of the visiting card?  Here are 3 lessons:

1. Effective social media campaigns are built on top of robust social practices.

In this day and age we tend to focus on new tools and what they can do.  We pay less attention to the social practices that surround these tools.  Many nonprofits create Facebook and Twitter accounts because of the hype surrounding them, even if their target audience is not using the application and if there is no clear connection between the organization’s strategic goals and the application’s capacities.

The first cartes de visites were created in 1854 in France, but did not arrive in the US until several years later.  If American abolitionists had come up with a campaign in which people distributed photos of  slaves through their social networks in the early 1850s, the campaign would have fallen flat on its face.   The success of the abolitionists’ carte de visite campaign was reliant on the practice of carte de visite just as much as  the technology of the photograph.

2. Technology creates affordances, making new outcomes possible but not certain

In his great book, The Wealth of Networks, Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler describes technology as creating “affordances”, qualities of the object that make an action possible.   Just as the technology of the social network today allows for free international collaboration and event organization, the photograph allowed middle class urban people in the 1800’s who had never visited a plantation to see the horrors of slavery.  The key here is possibility.   The technology of  the photograph made the grassroots carte de visite campaign possible, but the it was the practice of sharing cartes de visites that made it a success.

3. A successful social media campaign will give equal weight to the technologies available and the practices of the target audience.

Recent history has taught us that successful social media campaigns occur in the sweet spot of social practices and available technology: the American middle class and online campaign donations, Facebook and expatriate communities,  SideWiki and British news junkies.

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