One of the most oft-repeated statements I heard at conferences last year: "our problem isn't information overload, it's crappy filters." In other words, we shouldn't complain about all that amazing, free information out there. We just need to get better at finding what we care about and ignoring the rest.

The podium speakers suggested that this would happen in two ways. First, through a variety of crowd recommendation sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, NewsTrust, and Delicious.

These algorithm-based, automated services would then be supplemented by a new wave of mega-content sites that are curated by human (often volunteer) editors: True/Slant, The Daily Beast, Global Voices, Huffington Post, Global Post.

But increasingly I'm finding that neither the crowd recommendation sites nor the human edited sites are my first stop for news. I still read quite a few blogs and I still check in at NYTimes.com, but at least half of what I read these days comes from links on Twitter. To everyone's surprise, Twitter has turned out to be less an inane lifelog of what we ate for lunch and much more a streaming list of cleverly editorialized headlines with links to the main article. For many of us, Twitter is becoming the front page of our morning newspaper. Either in perception or in practice, our reporters are becoming our friends and our friends are becoming the editors of our Twitter-based newspaper.

As a curation of news and interest, Twitter has its pros and cons. The re-tweet function spreads news across networks of followers. Cultural rituals like "Follow Friday" introduce new individuals into like-minded networks. Hashtags allow discussions to take place around certain topics or events.

But perhaps no form of communication - other than arguments between couples - has a more frustrating permanent archive than Twitter. What you post today is just about gone forever tomorrow. (You can only search for a message that has been posted on Twitter in the past 10 days. After that it disappears into the deep sea of the forgotten.)

Twitter as a tool for curation has helped a few special twitterers become practically professional curators. Maria Popova is a native of Sofia, Bulgaria now based in Los Angeles who describes herself as "a cultural curator and curious mind at large." Which is to say that she graduated from college in 2007, started a blog ("curating eclectic interestingness from culture's collective brain"), and then began posting interesting links on Twitter as if it were a way to earn income. In a way it was. Maria was featured in a New York Times blog post by Nick Bilton which drew the conclusion that "we are all human aggregators now", and which also drew a lot more attention to Miss Popova. In addition to her day job at TBWA\Chiat\Day, she has also taken her curatorial skills to TED, Good Magazine, and Wired UK.

Last year we thought that the problem of crappy information filters would be solved either by fancy algorithms on crowd recommendation sites like Digg and StumpleUpon, or with the help of new, human-edited portals like the Huffington Post and Global Voices. Instead it seems that many of us are increasingly depending on individuals; talented curators of the web like Popova, Gina Trapani, and Andrew Sullivan.

In 2005 the rise of the weblog was supposed to turn us all into pundits, voicing our opinions on this matter and that. Five years later, notes Marisa Meltzer in The American Prospect, and everyone seems more interested in curation than opinion: "With blogs, everyone became a critic. With Tumblr, everyone's a curator."

If "crappy filters" was one of the big conference talking points last year, then "online curation" is quickly making a name for itself this year. Robert Scoble - a conference careerist - says it is the word he hears the most these days, especially at last month's SXSW. (Though Andrew Lih said that 'curation' was also the word of the day at the 2009 SXSW.)

All of this talk about the individual curator has me wondering about the future of news organizations. When someone visits Global Voices or the Daily Beast are they coming for a view of the world through the eyes of the entire organization, or do they come specifically for particular writers and editors who they've come to trust?

Personally I visit The Atlantic for Jeffrey Goldberg and Graeme Wood. When I go to Foreign Policy it's specifically to read the latest from Joshua Keating, Evgeny Morozov, and Marc Lynch. I have absolutely no interest in TechCrunch, but I do try to keep up on the latest from Paul Carr, who happens to write there.

Maybe I am the outlier here, the one who spends too much time reading news and too much time following the evolution of thought and interests of certain individuals. But I also feel like this is a general trend for everyone - that we all are increasingly depending on individuals and not organizations to curate the day's news for us.

Everyone who had the opportunity to do so pointed out that we were just a few blocks from one of Beirut's Hezbollah-controlled neighborhoods. But we were also just a couple blocks from a Starbucks, snuggled comfortably in a new shopping center with more security guards than window shoppers. Over the next couple weeks such juxtapositions would form the basis of how I viewed most aspects of Beirut. On the second floor of the Hazmieh Rotana Hotel - catering to foreigners, the wealthy, and anyone who enjoys snail-paced internet connections - Razan Ghazzawi was getting a little worked up. Ghazzawi, a highly respected and sometimes hot-tempered Syrian blogger, was criticizing the Berkman Center for Internet and Society for a study they published in July of 2009, a "mapping of the Arabic blogosphere."

It soon became clear that Ghazzawi's frustration and downright anger about the study stemmed less from its findings (which were, by all accounts, rather self-evident for anyone who has paid much attention to blogs from the region over the years), but rather from how they conducted the study and the labels they used to categorize networks of bloggers from throughout the region:

This whole labeling issue is first very simplistic and second it does not really help anyone to understand the Arab blogsphere as it is self-representing itself. Bloggers are not anti-homosexuality merely because they're Muslims, and Islam is certainly not the reason why they're anti-homosexuality. Moreover, if these bloggers were representing themselves as "Muslims against homosexuality," doesn't that mean that they, too, are reformists? Who is a reformist? And who decides so?

No one likes to be placed into a narrow box, especially when that categorization comes from a group of outsiders, and even more so when that group of outsiders comes from an elite research center at the wealthiest university in the world's most powerful country. To truly understand the Arab blogosphere one would need to facilitate a conversation among both Arab bloggers and outsiders who have been observing the space for years. But most researchers don't seek to facilitate conversation so much as produce seemingly authoritative papers that are widely cited at academic conferences. The co-authors of the Arab blogosphere research study would have been well served to have paid a visit to fellow Harvard researcher, Howard Gardner of the GoodWork Project. Part of his research looks at ways to overcome the inevitable problem of individuals who hoard expertise. He distinguishes between social and antisocial expertise, noting that antisocial expertise often benefits the individual while social expertise benefits the entire institution, and even entire networks of individuals and institutions:

Antisocial expertise has a more complicated side. There is an inherent inequality of knowledge and skill between expert and nonexpert. Antisocial expertise emphasizes the sheer fact of invidious comparison. One obvious consequence of emphasizing inequality is the humiliation and resentment this expert can arouse in others; a more subtle consequence is to make the expert himself or herself feel embattled.

I am sure that all four co-authors of the study felt embattled after reading Ghazzawi's harsh critique, just as Ghazzawi felt resentment at their antisocial expertise and at the extensive resources at their hands to conduct this research. Still, it must be pointed out that the Berkman Center is light years ahead of most research centers when it comes to sharing information. Their study of the Arab blogosphere after all was written for a pretty specific audience: the United States Department of State. In 2007 the Berkman Center was given a $1.5 million grant by the State Department to "examine how the Internet influences democratic norms and modes, including its impact on civil society, citizen media, government transparency, and the rule of law, with a focus on the Middle East." Hence the politically charged labels applied to Arab bloggers.

This type of highly paid, commissioned research is commonplace. The State Department needed to better understand Middle Eastern cyberspace in order to meet their diplomatic objectives and so they commissioned the Berkman Center to do the research for them. The Berkman Center should be applauded for publishing the resulting research publicly and disseminating it via blog posts, Twitter, and conference presentations. (Though they could have been more transparent about who was funding the study.) But it is time to open up the research process even further and encourage the expertise of individuals across the network. Had they done so, ideally Razan Ghazzawi would have shared her extensive knowledge of the Arab blogosphere with the researchers. And if she didn't, well, then she wouldn't have a right to complain about the final study and its conclusions.

A New Model of Media Research

At Global Voices we were recently commissioned by Open Society Institute's Information Program and the Omidyar Network to help them gain a better understanding of the current state of online technology projects that increase transparency, government accountability, and civic engagement in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, China, and Central & Eastern Europe. They could have gone about this the traditional way and contracted two or three well established academics to sit in their offices, poring over dozens of websites, conducting a few interviews, and eventually publishing a lengthy white paper to be distributed at academic conferences and stuffed away in ivory tower filing cabinets.

Instead we built a network of regional researchers - experts in their field and region - and a platform that enables collaborative participation from anyone with an interest in better understanding the impact, effectiveness, and sustainability of technology projects that aim to improve governance. I don't pretend to know all the best metrics to measure the impact and success of these projects, but I do feel confident that by opening up this research to the larger public we will be able to come up with better parameters to think about the projects' impact online, in government, and in civil society.

I couldn't be happier with our team of researchers, advisors, and with the amazing Drupal-based platform built by Dan Braghis and Gleb Kanunnikau. So far we have published eight case studies - all complete with audio or video podcasts (you can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes here). Over the next ten weeks we will publish thirty more case studies and a number of blog posts looking at the intersection of transparency and technology.

Promoting Research Collaboration and Cross-Platform Data

Back in October of last year, after attending the Salzburg Global Seminar on "Strengthening Independent Media", I stressed the importance of promoting more collaboration between media funders, media researchers, and media development workers. All three groups want to gain a better understanding of media's role in a country's governance and development, and yet all three groups tend to seek that understanding in isolation.

Last month, in the hope of encouraging better coordinated research on media development, Open Society Institute hosted a meeting of major donors, researchers and project implementers to discuss some of the challenges facing media research. Anne Nelson, an advisor for the Technology for Transparency Network, was at the meeting and documented it on MediaShift. There seemed to be consensus around the obvious - that we need more in-country research about the impact of media, especially digital media - but few ideas about next steps forward. CIMA has built up an impressive dumping ground of PDFs, but it's a clunky way to understand the role and impact of media anywhere. IREX's Media Sustainability Index is a more user-friendly overview of the world, but it still leaves much to be desired. Global Integrity, Audience Scapes (still not launched), and the Mo Ibrahim Foundation are all trying to build more interactive and comprehensive frameworks for thinking about the media's impact on governance and transparency, but what we lack is integration of that research in ways that inform funders and project implementers where they should focus their time and money.

Fortunately that conversation is starting to take place. There is understanding that we need to have an inclusive conversation about the metrics used to evaluate media projects and their impact on government and society. Also, most researchers seem to now believe that their research should be published in an open space that is publicly available rather than in exclusive and costly academic journals. In the future we need to focus on sharing content and data across platforms. For example, on the Technology for Transparency Network's website when you click on a country in the map I'd like to see more than just a list of technology projects that we've evaluated; I also want some basic contextual information from Wikipedia, Global Integrity, and Audience Scapes.

Similarly, I'd like to see Global Integrity's country reports not just show analysis and indicators, but also list the projects that we've reviewed so that readers have a sense of what is being done to address corruption and where they can lend their support. Their country report for Kenya, for example, should include a section on Kenya-based projects reviewed by the Technology for Transparency Network. We will all need to develop API's for our platforms before such data sharing becomes the norm, but my hope is that soon enough it will in fact become the norm.

Internet technologies give governments an unprecedented ability to monitor our communication, internet activity, and even the microphones on our cell phones. The Internet, however, also empowers citizens with new tools and tactics to hold their elected officials accountable, increase transparency in government, and promote broader and more diverse civic engagement.

Rising Voices, the outreach and citizen media training initiative of Global Voices Online, has launched a new interactive website and global network of researchers to map online technology projects that aim to promote transparency, political accountability, and civic engagement in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, China, and Central & Eastern Europe. Over the next three months eight researchers and eight research reviewers will document at least 32 case studies of the most innovative technology for transparency projects outside of North America and Western Europe. By thoroughly documenting and evaluating each project with a standard methodology we aim to come to a better understanding of what tactics, tools, and tips are most effective in 1) making government information accessible to the general public in a meaningful way, 2) holding political and corporate leaders accountable to the rule of law and their campaign promises, and 3) promoting civic engagement so that a wider and more representative portion of citizens are involved in policy making and political processes.

Over the next three months we hope to find concrete answers to the following questions: Can technology for transparency projects be evaluated individually for impact, or should they only be seen as part of a larger accountability ecosystem? Does citizen participation in such projects lead to greater overall citizen engagement and more widespread demand for accountable public institutions? Do public institutions change their policies and behavior based on the input from citizen-led initiatives? To what extent does the usage of technology tools drive action around transparency?

The Need

As of January 19, U.S. cellphone users have donated more than $22 million in text-message donations alone. In fact, roughly one-fifth of the $112 million total that the American Red Cross has so far raised for Haiti has come via text messaging. Technology has clearly had an impact on global giving for humanitarian relief efforts. The priority right now is that the money gets to Haiti quickly and is spent as effectively as possible to save lives, and provide medical care and shelter. But in the longterm, as billions of dollars of aid money flow in to help rebuild infrastructure and entire industries, how can both Haitian citizens and donors hold institutions accountable so that development programs are run properly and without corruption?

As traditional media companies are forced to cut their budgets because of falling advertising revenue, investigative journalism and international coverage are the two most common areas to be disappear. David Simon, in his testimony before Congress about the death of the newspaper industry, said that with a vacuum of investigative journalism, "it is going to be one of the great times to be a corrupt politician." Meanwhile, Transparency International's 2009 Corruption Perceptions Index reveals that corruption is still a severe and worldwide problem.

However, there is also growing enthusiasm about the use of social media as a powerful tool in promoting transparency and fighting against corruption. But how does the use of technology to promote transparency differ across regions, cultures, and types of governance? What skills and expertise are missing from the current technology for transparency projects? What types of relationships have they formed with media, government, and civil society organizations to increase their impact? We will document in-depth as many technology for transparency projects as possible to gain a better understanding of their current impact, obstacles, and future potential.

The Team

Global Voices has long been reporting about uses of digital media and technology to improve governance and fight against corruption. Several veteran Global Voices contributing authors are joined by leading transparency activists around the world to make up our team of researchers and research reviewers. We are also fortunate to count on the experience and insight of a board of advisors made up of the leading thinkers in the field of transparency and good governance.

For those of you on Twitter we have made lists of our researchers, reviewers, and advisors.

The Results

As of today you are able to read three case studies documenting projects based in Jordan, Chile, and Kenya. Ishki.com is a complaint brokerage which collects and organizes complaints from local citizens about the public and private sector. Vota Inteligente uses technology to provide Chilean citizens with more information about their elected officials. Mzalendo tracks the performance of Kenya's Parliament by documenting votes, publishing records, and providing analysis and context.

Over the next two weeks these three case studies will be joined by eight others. In addition to publishing at least 32 case studies over the next three months, we will also facilitate 16 discussions on Global Voices that provide more context and background information about the state of transparency, accountability and civic engagement in specific countries and regions. We are also building a toolset of the most effective tools used by the projects that we document. Click on any of the tools and you will see which projects have incorporated it as part of their strategy.

We realize that these are busy times and that few readers will be able to read all of the thorough case studies, background discussions, and tool profiles that we publish. For this reason we have created a weekly podcast that will feature five-minute interviews with leaders of some of the most interesting technology for transparency projects that we come across. You can click on this link to subscribe to the podcast in iTunes. So far we have interviews with Waheed Al-Barghouthi of Ishki, Ory Okolloh of Mzalendo, and Felipe Heusser of Vota Inteligente.

At the beginning of May we will also publish a traditional PDF report which highlights the most innovative and effective tools and tactics related to technology for transparency projects. The report will make recommendations to funders, activists, NGOs, and government officials regarding the current obstacles to effectively applying technology to improve transparency, accountability, and civic engagement. It will also aggregate and evaluate the best ideas and strategies to overcome those obstacles.

Our research will complement - and collaborate with - the work being done by like-minded mapping, discussion, and toolset projects including ParticipateDB, Participedia, the International Association for Public Participation, the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation, ePractice, MobileActive's mDirectory, and LocalLabs.

How to Help

This is a collaborative research project which is open to the participation and input of anyone interested in the intersection of technology and good governance. If you have suggestions for case studies that we should document and evaluate please get in touch via our contact page. If you are interested in contributing as a volunteer researcher you can register for a user account.

You can subscribe to our RSS feed for newly published case studies and to our podcast for interviews with leading doers and thinkers in the field. Please follow us on Twitter and become a fan of our page on Facebook to receive extra updates about daily news and information related to technology for transparency. Finally, if you would like to engage in debate and discussion about the application of technology to improve governance in countries outside of North America and Western Europe, please subscribe to the Transparency for Technology mailing list.

For years now there has been an ongoing debate about whether the Internet is good or bad for democracy. But we have few case studies and even fewer comparative research mappings of Internet-based projects that aim to improve governance, especially in countries outside of North America and Western Europe. Hopefully the Technology for Transparency Network will lead not only to more informed debate about the Internet's impact on democracy, but also to more participation and interest in projects that aim to empower and improve the livelihoods of citizens who were previously excluded from political participation.

But perhaps the most successful experiment in bringing so-called marginalized communities to the attention of the mainstream came not with community radio or the Internet, but rather the cassette tape and the boombox. With roots in the traditions of griots in West Africa, work songs from the Mississippi Delta, and dancehalls from the Caribbean, the birth of Hip-Hop as we know it today is generally credited to the Jamaican-born DJ Kool Herc (Clive Campbell) who organized parties at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, New York where he joined two turntables to mix rhythmic beats with funk music. Partygoers were invited to grab the microphone and rap on top of the music as a way to creatively express themselves and show off their verbal dexterity. Those early parties on Sedgwick Avenue helped form the sound and community that would influence what are now seen as the pioneers of hip-hop: Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, and The Sugarhill Gang.

In the early 1990's hip-hop's center of gravity migrated from New York City to Los Angeles, where N.W.A., Ice T, and others popularized gangsta rap as a genre of hip-hop that focused on the violence, partying, and hustling on the rough streets of Compton, California. It was only with the release of "Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)" in 1993 that New York City was once again nationally recognized among hip-hop fans.

From Hong Kong to Staten Island to Liberia

Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman recently caught an interview on Tom Ashbrook's public radio program, On Point with Wu Tang Clan leader Robert Diggs, also known as "the RZA." During the interview we discover an unlikely intersection in the 1980's between the lives of Ashbrook, a Yale graduate and career journalist, and Diggs, a poor, aspiring rapper in Staten Island who sought shelter in a seedy movie theater that specialized in pornography and kung fu flicks. Ashbrook, it turns out, was a foreign correspondent at the time based in Hong Kong where he supplemented his income as a journalist by dubbing kung fu movies into English. It is entirely likely that one of the many kung fu films that influenced the Wu Tang Clan's unique style of hip-hop featured the voice of public radio's effusive Tom Ashbrook.

New York City's outer boroughs today are barely recognizable yuppie incarnations of their former selves. Gentrification has taken over Brooklyn and is increasingly creeping into the Bronx. In fact, a long and costly protest campaign has sought to protect 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, the birthplace of hip-hop, from being converted into a new development. But Park Hill, the home community of the Wu Tang Clan, has changed far less than neighboring Brooklyn across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. While tourists often take the free Staten Island Ferry from Manhattan for its uninterrupted views of the Statue of Liberty, rarely do they spend anytime exploring Staten Island itself.

One of the most sudden changes to the island's demographics came in the late 1980's and early 1990's when civil war broke out in Liberia, a West African country that was founded by freed American slaves. Liberian refugees fled violence that was stirred up by the American-educated warlord, Charles Taylor, and arrived to Staten Island by the thousands. They now make up the largest community of Liberians living outside of Liberia and their troubles in assimilating to a New York state of mind have been featured in Mother Jones, The Village Voice, WNET, and twice in the New York Times.

Ruthie Ackerman is a freelance journalist who is currently writing a book about the social impact of the Liberian Civil War and the integration of Liberian refugees in the same Park Hill community that gave rise to the Wu Tang Clan so many years ago. But rather than merely speaking on behalf of Liberians Ackerman decided to launch Ceasefire Liberia, a citizen media project which teaches Liberians living in Monrovia and Park Hill how to use digital media to tell their own stories.

As the above video shows, Liberian refugees have had a difficult time assimilating to Park Hill's established community and culture. But music - especially hip-hop - has been an effective channel to help narrow the cultural divide. Genocide Records is a collective of Liberia-born rappers and MC's whose music is clearly influenced by New York's hip-hop legacy, but with lyrics that emphasize the struggle of West Africans living in the United States. They performed this past July at Park Hill Day:

From New York to Mongolia, Madagascar, Colombia, Bolivia, and the World

As noted above, those early hip-hop parties hosted by DJ Kool Herc at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue were most definitely influenced by his early years in Jamaica were DJs at dancehall parties would talk over the records they were playing. Hip-hop then evolved further in New York during the 1980's and it hasn't stopped evolving in its spread from New York to California to Mongolia and Madagascar. Zuckerman notes in his post that shortly after the release of Wu Tang Clan's "Enter The Wu Tang (36 Chambers)" he began seeing graffiti all over the world - including Mongolia - celebrating the hip-hop group.

Wu Tang graffiti in Ulaanbaatar.

Hip-hop's universal appeal has made itself apparent in countless blog posts across many of the Rising Voices citizen media projects. In Bolivia both Cristina Quisbert and La Mala Palabra of Voces Bolivianas honored the life of Aymara rapper and El Alto resident Abraham Bojorquez (the post has also been translated into Aymara).

In Madagascar Tahina, Joan, and Stéphane of Foko Madagascar have each highlighted some of the impressive Malagasy hip-hop acts, including Raboussa:

You can learn more about Malagasy hip-hop at the excellent blog HH Dago. Tahina also recommends "Zazavavin-drap" by Malagasy female rappers Nah and Bug:

The award-winning Colombian citizen media project HiperBarrio even has a rapper among its members. Last year Jorge Jurado used his rhyming skills to compose a song about citizen media and its link to his community's graffiti culture. Henry Barros from HiperBarrio also produced two short documentary videos about rappers in San Javier La Loma.

Finally, from the REPACTED project in Nakuru, Kenya blogger Eric Owanyama says that hip-hop is the "single biggest movement that allows youths to explore their creative minds independent of class rooms and allow them to learn from the society and speak philosophies that have proven to teach more than most educational systems and syllabus teach."

As awkward as it may be, even Vladimir Putin has recognized the importance of hip-hop as a medium of communication with young people around the world. Whether "hip-hop is dead" as some have argued of late remains to be seen, but its global domination over the past twenty years reveals just what can be accomplished when a culture of remix, creative expression, and technology collide.

Now, compare that to the map of San Javier La Loma created by HiperBarrio and freely available with nearly unrestricted use on Open Street Maps:

There is clearly an aspect of amateurism to the cartography, but anyone who has been to La Loma will tell you that the second map is a much more useful representation of the community. All of the roads are represented, as are the church, school, and the labyrinthine network of steep footpaths which carry constant pedestrian traffic.

A resident of La Loma carrying a washing machine down the road.

In fact, much of the world is still a blank void on Google Maps, especially slums and lower income communities. The majority of Rio de Janeiro is remarkably well-mapped, and even includes public transit information. But if you live in a favela like Santa Marta (where Michael Jackson shot the video to "They Don't Care About Us") there is no street information at all:

Access to geographic information is crucial to the development of any community. As Mikel Maron, an evangelist of Open Street Maps, puts it: "Without basic knowledge of the geography and resources of [a community] it is impossible to have an informed discussion on how to improve the lives of residents."

Last Saturday Fredy Rivera, a leading mapper of Open Street Maps based in Bogotá, organized a workshop at the small public library in La Loma to teach its young residents how to make a map of their own community.

Gabriel Vanegas, the librarian in La Loma whose dedication is responsible for much of HiperBarrio's success, explained the background that led to the workshop:

In March of this year, thanks to the free software community, I had the opportunity to meet Fredy Rivera, a master of Linux and cartography, who will be with us to help us better understand the collective creation of maps. It will be an excellent opportunity to continue recognizing the community from the public library and through exercises of citizen journalism, free culture, participative history, and citizenship.

The workshop was later covered and summarized on the website of Medellin's Network of Libraries, a recipient of the Gates Foundation's 2009 Access to Learning award. Fredy Rivera posted a very useful summary of the contents of the workshops (in Spanish) on his blog.

Mark Graham has mapped the total number of of geotagged Wikipedia articles per language, location, and population. He found a "highly uneven geography of information." An article in The Guardian notes:

Almost the entire continent of Africa is geographically poorly represented in Wikipedia. Remarkably, there are more Wikipedia articles written about Antarctica than all but one of the 53 countries in Africa (or perhaps more amazingly, there are more Wikipedia articles written about the fictional places of Middle Earth and Discworld than about many countries in Africa, Asia, and the Americas).

The article goes on to optimistically wonder if this imbalance of information presents a new opportunity for Wikipedia's declining number of active editors: to democratize not just access to information, but what kind of information is made freely available. At one point iCommons was involved in organizing Wikipedia Academies to encourage local experts to fill in Wikipedia's sizable information gaps. (Unfortunately iCommons now seems more interested in publishing research reviews.)

Like Wikipedia, Open Street Maps, has seen an almost unbelievable explosion of activity in the past few years. But unlike Wikipedia, contributions don't seem to be declining. There is a strong commitment from within the community to produce valuable information not just about North America and Western Europe, but all communities regardless of class or location. In fact, last month a group of Open Street Map activists headed to Kibera, Kenya, one of the world's largest slums, to produce a better map of the area. Already their information has been integrated into Ushahidi to provide a real-time interface to local news events:

A similar project in Rio de Janeiro led by Viva Favela is also trying to integrate local citizen media with community-produced maps of favelas (including Santa Marta).

It is too early to know whether this flurry of cartographic activism will lead to any sort of sustained social change, but Robert Neuwirth's Shadow Cities offers a clear example of how access to information can serve as a catalyst for improved livelihoods:

A few years ago, the Water and Sanitation Program, a nonprofit affiliated with the United Nations and the World Bank, became interested in the water supply question in Kibera. The group issued a report on Kibera's water kiosks. By reading the fine print, you can determine how much Kibera people -- and by extension, residents of all the mud hut communities of Nairobi -- are being ripped off by the kiosk system. At 3 shillings per jerry can, Kibera residents pay 10 times more for water than the average person in a wealthy neighborhood with municipally supplied, metered water service. And that's when water is plentiful. When there's a shortage, metered rates don't go up, but the prices in Kibera do. So at those times people in Kibera pay 30 or 40 times the official price of water.

The group published a brochure about the study. They presented it to local and national politicians. There was only one bunch of people who never saw the study: the residents of Kibera.

Japeth Mbuvi, Operations Analyst for the program, explained why. "Our audience for this was not the people of Kibera, but the political structure," he told me. Then he added, "Anyway, maybe it's better not to publicize this: there could be riots."

I applaud Mbuvi for his frankness. He is one of the few people I have met at any of the large nonprofit agencies who was willing to be candid about his agency's shortcomings as well as its achievements.

Still, there's something sad about his concern.

Perhaps it's true that people in Kibera could riot over water. After all, Kibera has been the scenes of riots in the past -- most of them involving landlord tenant issue -- and scores of people have been murdered in the melees. Still, Kibera's people deserve to know the facts about their lives. What's the point of studying the water kiosks of Kibera if, when the study is done, the information is not shared with the people who are most at stake?

I recently received an email from NowPublic, a popular citizen journalism website in North America, with the subject "Now Hiring." This is a rare thing in the field of journalism these days - citizen or traditional - and so I wanted to see what they are paying for and how they are covering the expenses. It turns out that NowPublic is not paying you to be a journalist - that is, not to publish content, but rather to read it. And, more importantly, to get others to read it. They will pay you for "views, visitors, and ad clicks." And they will pay you to refer others to view content and click on ads. In economic terms we would say they are paying to create a false demand for an overabundant supply.

For me, this exemplifies the state of news media: there is now, for the first time in the history of the world, an abundance of content and a scarcity of attention. But how did we get here? To better understand that we need to go back to 1435 in Northern France when Jean Miélot, a French priest and scholar, first began working as a scribe for Philip the Good, the Duke of Burgundy.

Since the invention of the papyrus scroll in Egypt over 4,000 years ago, this is how books were always produced: by hand, and one by one. Scribes almost always worked either for the church or for the aristocracy, and so princes and priests decided which books were to be copied, and which were to be banned. In 1435 Jean Miélot was given what was at the time thought to be a very prestigious job, just as prestige was associated with journalism as little as five years ago.

But then something happened. Just one year after Jean Miélot was given his job as a scribe for the Duke of Burgundy, a German goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg began working on a new invention. Taking inspiration from mechanical presses that helped produce olive oil and wine, Gutenberg invented movable type, which allowed for the mass production of books. In retrospect, it is hard to overstate the importance of this invention in Europe and, eventually, throughout the world. Previously it took months just to produce a single copy of a book. Now in a week you could create thousands.

Slowly, ever so slowly, books began to spread across Europe. In the 1440's, 50's, and 60's the book was the new media of the day. And just like it has taken the world a long time to understand the power of the internet, it took Europe many decades to understand the social impact of the printed book.

There is a great irony that Johannes Gutenberg is best known for printing the Gutenberg Bible in the 1450's. Previously, every bible was hand copied by scribes, and only priests and princes had access to what was considered the great book of wisdom. Other Europeans depended on priests to transmit the contents of the bible during their weekly sermons. I say that there is irony in the Gutenberg Bible because the Gutenberg printing press was eventually responsible for taking power away from the Vatican and the Catholic Church.

70 years after the Gutenberg Bible was published it finally became common for European authors to publish their own books using the printing press. Martin Luther was one author to do that. In 1522 he published a translation of the Bible in German rather than standard Latin. This was a direct challenge to the power of the Catholic church. Instead of relying on the few trained priests and scholars who spoke Latin, the Bible was now accessible to all literate Germans.

He then published his 95 Theses which quickly spread all over Europe, led to the Protestant Reformation, and the fall of the Vatican as the center of power in Europe. Without the printing press the Reformation could not have never happened.

Nor would have the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century or the Enlightenment of the 18th century. Both movements depended on the rapid and broad dissemination of ideas such as Copernicus' On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Vesalius' On the fabric of the human body in seven books and Descartes' Discourse on the Method. Perhaps the scientific revolution was actually ready to spread much earlier, but there was no way for the thinkers to publish, share, and build on the ideas of others.

And, of course, there would be no journalism were it not for the printing press. This is a copy of the London Gazette, which was the first regularly published newspaper, and began as the Oxford Gazette in 1665.

The point that I am trying to make is that some technological innovations are so revolutionary that they change everything. The Gutenberg Press led to the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, journalism, the Enlightenment, and, arguably, representative democracy. It created what is today a European continent with near universal literacy.

Before movable type, Europeans depended on priests to know what was inside of a book. Now they simply open its cover. That is a revolutionary difference. But what is important to remember is that not everyone benefited from the printing press. Scribes all across Europe protested. There aren't good records of their protests, but I can just imagine their reasoning: that people would be overwhelmed by too much information; that they would become isolated reading at home rather than coming to church; that mediocrity would prevail if publishing was put into the hands of ordinary people. Basically, all of the same criticisms we hear of the Internet today. In the end, the scribes lost and the printing press won. With the benefit of historical perspective, we view the result as inevitable. And we are seeing the same dynamic play out today with traditional journalism and the participatory internet.

In the US a major newspaper closes down just about every week. Those that haven't closed down yet are all losing money. There is no single major newspaper in the US right now that isn't losing money. The question isn't if the old model of journalism will die out, but when.

Which brings me to the next topic: that the World Wide Web is proving itself to be just as disruptive of a technology today as the Gutenberg Press was in the 15th century. The internet is growing up. There are now more Chinese internet users online than Americans.

Pew Internet found that one out of every five internet users in the United States uses a service like Facebook or Twitter to regularly update their status. For Ukrainians it might be LiveJournal and Kontact.

Two American researchers, Denis G. Pelli and Charles Bigelow, argue that we are charting a path toward "nearly universal authorship." In their study they charted the rise of book authors per year from 1400 to today and compared that data with the number of blog authors, Facebook authors, and Twitter authors over the past ten years. As you can see in the above chart, it took 600 years to reach one million book authors per year. In contrast, it only took five years to reach a million blog authors, three years to reach a million Facebook authors, and two years to reach a million Twitter authors. What will be next?

There are some technological innovations are so revolutionary that they change everything.

What is the role of media if everyone is part of the production process? I believe that we will continue to see a rise in what Jessica Clark of the Center for Social Media calls "people centric media," which spreads information, communication, and social capital across networks based on location, issues, and events. But how will media organizations and projects survive in an era where content is so abundant that no one is willing to pay for it? I want to stress that no matter how many conferences are held and white papers are published, there will never be a silver bullet to save the media industry. It is as useless of a task as convening scribes in the 15th century to discuss how they can save their industry. However, several new models and strategies are emerging which offer a glimpse into the future of people centric media.

Make the readers the journalists. In August 2008 the New York Times published a beautiful visualization of the final subway stops for every subway line in New York City. To do this they sent out reporters to take pictures, collect audio, and file their reports. A year later, a similar project called Mapping Main Street accepts contributions from anyone. It still requires an editor and designer, but in Mapping Main Street there is no distinction between reader and reporter.

Remove unnecessary reporters. Newspapers used to hire reporters to go to the police department, ask for the crime report, and then copy and publish it in the newspaper. Today that information can be published immediately and directly. Everyblock scrapes information from government websites and makes it available for ordinary citizens via web browser and mobile phone. Just as Europeans used to have to rely on priests to understand what was in a book, citizens used to rely on newspapers to understand about their community. Now they can see and engage with the information for themselves.

Remove unnecessary editors. Newspapers have a limited amount of space. Editors had to decide what was included in that space and what wasn't. They were the ultimate gatekeepers of the day's news. Today we are not limited by space, but rather time and attention. NewsTrust is a collaborative editorial site open to anyone which seeks to collectively rank the most relevant and trustworthy news.

Some reporting will always be expensive. For example, a 13,000 word New York Times article on events at Memorial Medical Center following Hurricane Katrina took two years and $400,000 to produce. With a $35.6 million loss last quarter, the New York Times can't invest $400k in a single story. Fortunately for the Times, a non-profit organization called ProPublica footed most of the bill. ProPublica is funded by billionaire Herb Sandler who founded the Sandler Foundation in October 2006 after he got out of the finance and mortgage industry. (Good timing!)

Get your local community to fund local reporting. You can either get a few very wealthy individuals/organizations to fund your work, or you can get many people to donate a small amount of money to pay a journalist to report a story. This is the model of San Fransisco-based Spot.us, which describes itself as "community funded reporting." Any journalist can make a pitch on the site about a story that he or she would like to report on. For example, in early July Lindsey Hoshaw was given an opportunity to board a ship to visit the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and report on it for the New York Times. But apparently, neither she nor the New York Times had the $10,000 to pay for the travel expenses. And so Hoshaw recorded a video of herself explaining why the reporting was important, why people should pitch in to help her cover the story.

Ellen Miller, the executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, pitched in $20. Tim O'Reilly, a well-known open source technologist and publisher, pitched in $100. Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, pitched in $100. Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, pitched in $50. Zoe Keating, a well known cellist offered another $20. Jennifer 8. Lee, a reporter for the metro section of the New York Times, donated $30. (Perhaps she felt bad that the New York Times was still able to pay her, but not Hoshaw.)

Four months after Hoshaw made her pitch on Spot.us her story was published in the New York Times with an accompanying slideshow.

Give some away for free, charge for the rest. This is the business model that is mentioned most often these days as a way to keep news organizations afloat. It is the strategy of GlobalPost, an international news site. You can go there now and read more articles for free than you likely have time for. But if you're a real international news junkie, then you can pay an extra $200 a year for their "Passport" membership, which "offers an entrée into GlobalPost's inner circle." A couple weeks ago GlobalPost founder Phil Balboni claimed that so far they have 500 paying subscribers to Passport. He also claimed that GlobalPost is on pace to generate $1 million in revenue this yaer. (Their annual expenses are $5 million.)

At Global Voices the majority of our expenses are covered by private philanthropic foundations. The rest of our funding comes from four other sources: content commissions and underwriting, advertising, consulting, and online donations.

As you can see, it is becoming more and more difficult to find funding to support both media organizations and journalistic coverage. Then again, it might prove to be even more difficult to find anyone to pay attention to what you publish. It seems that the scarcity of attention is even more severe than the scarcity of funding.

In part one of this series I looked at the history of media development, the major players in the field, and some of the current obstacles - from regulatory reform to linguistic divides - that stand in the way of a healthy media ecosystem. In part two I examined points of agreement and tension among those directly involved in media development, and the recommendations that they made to a group of donors who gathered in a subsequent meeting. In this third and final post I will attempt to summarize the main themes at the meeting of funders, and look at the field of media development from the funder's perspective.

Has Media Freedom Waned Since the Fall of the Berlin Wall?

Eric Newton, Vice President for Journalism at the Knight Foundation, began the three-day meeting at the Salzburg Global Seminar with a series of maps from Freedom House charting media freedom since 1989 until today. While it is difficult to aggregate imperfect data across entire countries, much less the whole world, these global maps show a slight decline in media freedom over the past twenty years. Why is there an alleged decline in media freedom worldwide when over $600 million has been spent on media development during that time? For Newton, the explanation lies in the fact that "governments and funders have failed to recognize and take advantage of the incredible potential of digital media." He points to the Knight Foundation's own $25 million News Challenge initiative as an attempt to push the innovation and adoption of digital media tools and applications. Newton says that this is the third major meeting of funders involved in the field of media development. "It didn't work in London," he said, "it didn't work in Paris. So now we're trying Salzburg."

Amadou Ba, the co-founder of AllAfrica.com and executive director of the African Media Initiative then took to the podium for his keynote address. He began by quoting Thomas Jefferson: "If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn't hesitate to choose the latter." He also cited Amartya Sen who claims that "no substantial famine has ever occurred in any country with a relatively free press." Ba feels that media is "an essential public good, which informs people of their rights." He recounted a conversation he once had with an unpopular African leader who Ba had hoped would increase federal media investment. "Why would I help feed the monster that wants me out of my seat?" the leader responded. For Ba, the response shows why healthy media is such a crucial ingredient in the recipe of democracy.

But, despite the clear importance of press freedom, he feels that funders have little to show for their millions of dollars of investment. Unlike Newton, Ba doesn't see a lack of engagement with digital media to be the problem, but rather a lack of trust by donors in the local leadership of African media outlets. Unsurprisingly, his answer is to invest more in networks like the African Media Initiative, which brings together owners and operators of major media companies in Africa to increase cooperation, coordinate on relevant research, and advocate for better media regulation.

More Investment or a Better Understanding of What Works?

Troy Etulain, the senior advisor for Independent Media Development at USAID left the first evening's discussions unsatisfied:

"There was talk tonight about 'underinvestment.' That's too vague. What's the logical math? If there had been more investment would there have been more development?

Much of the conversation during the next day remained stuck on this issue of whether or not funding in media development over the years has been effective or not. Marguerite Sullivan of CIMA presented numbers from a study which found that globally $600 million has been spent on media development. Forty four percent went to training and twenty eight percent was direct assistance to support the operational costs of media organizations. Sullivan noted that among US government funders there are almost no experts in the field of media development (four people in USAID and one person in the state department) and that media development at USAID is a sub-sub sector of the Democracy Assistance program. For Stewart Chisolm, the senior program manager of OSI's Media Program, the level of direct investment in the media organizations is still too low.

Mark Koenig, challenging the assertion by Newton and Ba that media development has failed, presented research which showed that media assistance had the highest degree of positive correlation of impact among all of USAID's Civil Society initiatives. Brian Levy, an advisor at the World Bank, also presented research which shows a positive correlation between information access and effective development.

Vanessa Mazal of the Bill & Melinda Gates Global Development Program felt that media development has traditionally been too focused on training reporters, and that more resources should be invested in the business and management aspects of journalism in order to make the organizations sustainable. Nazeer Ladhani of the Aga Khan Development Network stressed that funders should help establish locally managed institutions like the Aga Khan Universities in Pakistan and Nairobi to foster indigenous leadership and implement sustainable training programs in partnership with local companies.

Metrics for Success

How do funders know if their investments have an impact not just on the media landscape, but also in terms of better governance and more effective development? None of the funders seemed content with the current metrics for evaluating media worldwide. Some felt that IREX's Media Sustainability Index was outdated, to which Mark Whitehouse, director of Media Development Programs at IREX, responded that, rather than criticizing metrics, the conversation should focus on how to improve them. Pia Hallonsten of the Swedish International Development Agency would like to see more longterm longitudinal studies which look at the impact of media development programs over many years.

Peter Goldstein, the director of online communications at InterMedia, presented the initial findings from AudienceScapes, a new media analysis initiative funded by Gates Foundation and set to launch in January 2010. AudienceScapes aggregates data about media from a variety of sources and supplements it with their own questionnaires. Among the topics in their surveys: demographic information, access to ICTs, usage patterns, mobile phone use, internet use, personal finance, health, and agriculture. Goldstein says that AudienceScapes' data will be available to the public without a subscription, but that they are looking into a business model which would make special information and reports available to paying customers. A sample of AudienceScapes' policy research with focus on Ghana was presented.

Pippa Noris of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government presented the some of the research and conclusions from her latest book Public Sentinel: News Media and the Governance Agenda, which she has summarized in a post on her blog. Norris stressed that data about the impact of media, and about governance in general, is far from perfect, but suggested that the media development community should collaborate more closely with academic researchers from the International Communication Association, which focuses on the impact of media on society.

Good Media for Good Governance

Much of the conversation over the first two days treated media development as a goal in itself, or as part of a strategy to further other development objectives (like health and agriculture). James Deane of the BBC World Service Trust said he would like to shift the conversation to focus on good governance first, and media as a part of that. Most of the speakers on the panel represented multilateral development agencies like the World Bank, the UNDP, and the Asian Development Bank whose clients are national governments. Deane feels that good media is a requirement for good governance; that quality media outlets serves as irreplaceable public watchdogs. He also notes that good media can help spur economic development by battling government and corporate corruption. (BBC World Service Trust published a 40-page report on "Governance and the Media" in April, 2009.)

Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which documents how Liberian women blockaded the Presidential Palace until a peace agreement was signed, was one anecdote cited as an example of how media can lead to improved governance. But there were also murmuring whispers of the role of radio stations during the Rwandan genocide, and how media can also lead to chaos and brutality.) Both Brian Levy from the World Bank and Bjorn Forde from UNDP alluded to internal distrust at their organizations toward media. They insisted that they weren't involved in outright media development, but that they value the role of transparent information in making development more effective. Both David Hoffman of Internews and Eric Netwon of Knight Foundation felt that large development agencies should cooperate more closely with media development initiatives to further the goals of both.

Final Thoughts

As a mostly silent observer, it seemed to me that the representatives from funding organizations were more concerned with convincing one another that they were making an impact than in thinking of ways to more effectively support the work of their grantees and promote cooperation to engage all aspects of a dynamic media ecosystem for the 21st century.

During the first meeting of media development practitioners there was general agreement that most funders were not sufficiently aware of the needs of the organizations implementing projects, and that funders are not up to date on the latest innovations taking place in the media field. One idea was to organize an online one-week fair so that media development organizations and funders can each learn more about the needs of each other. Unfortunately, when this idea was presented at the meeting of funders, there was apparently little interest.

I have personally witnessed several worthwhile media development projects die out because there was no clear pathway from initial seed funding (often won through some sort of competition like Changemakers or Ideablob) to "mezzanine funding" in order to scale up and then sustainability funding to support basic operating costs. If there was more open dialog between practitioners and funders - and among funders - then there wouldn't be such a high turnover rate and so little expertise in the field.

In part one I looked at the history of media development, the major players in the field, and some of the current obstacles - from regulatory reform to the linguistic divides - that stand in the way of a healthy media ecosystem. In this folow-up post I will continue to summarize the discussions which took place at a meeting earlier this month at Salzburg Global Seminar where representatives from the field of media development and funders who have supported their work all gathered to discuss how to more effectively "strengthen independent media."

The week-long meeting was divided into two parts, first convening practitioners involved in media development projects for three days, and then representatives from funding organizations for a separate, succeeding three-day meeting. (Some funders were resistant to participation from non-funders, I was told as an explanation for why the two meetings were held separately.)

Better Access or Training?

A recurring tension during the meeting of practitioners was whether investment in the field should focus on lowering the barriers to participation (by bringing down the cost of connectivity and making intuitive tools easily accessible), or on training programs which teach participants how to use new media tools to build community, monitor government, and promote development. Erik Hersman, one of the co-founders of Ushahidi, feels that if enough citizens have access to participatory media tools like Ushahidi, then a culture of tinkering will necessarily follow without costly training programs. Josh Goldstein echoed Erik's observation, pointing to the pervasive use of MXit, a mobile social network in South Africa. Ramsey Tesdell of 7iber, however, was skeptical of the "if you build it, they will come" mentality. "Technology is easy," he said, "it's building a community that is hard." Others added that there is no shortage of online tools available to all, but that active participation is still restricted to mainly elites.

The role of "quality" in media development was another repeated tension. Joyce Barnathan of the International Center for Journalists felt that the conversation was too focused on quantity - in terms of encouraging a larger number of media producers - and not enough on the quality of the content that is produced. Ivan Sigal of Global Voices, in language reminiscent of Pierre Bourdieu, observed that "quality" is often a coded word to distinguish those who are allowed to speak and those who aren't; that the concept is often meant to serve individuals inside exclusive institutions. Benjamin Glahn, the facilitator of the meeting, put it in more diplomatic terms: "quality is a process, not a static achievement."

Rob Faris of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society noted that much of the conversation over the three days focused on augmenting the supply of media - that is, encouraging more people to produce more and better content - but that there was little discussion about the issue of demand for content, especially from developing countries. All participants agreed that media literacy education is a fundamental component of a healthy media system. At Global Voices, for example, we have been encouraged by high school teachers and university professors who integrate our content into their syllabi.

During the second and third days of the meeting a number of the participants presented their projects. In addition to some of the latest work of Appfrica Labs and Overmundo, which I wrote about previously, we also heard from Tihomir Loza and Alexey Leonchik of Transitions Online, Serhii Danylenko of the pro-am journalism Ukrainian journalism portal Highway, Alex Park of Moby Group, John West of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, Arturs Mednis of Jaffa.lv, and Ramsey Tesdell of 7iber.com.

Generational Divide

A generational divide between younger activists who grew up using digital tools and older representatives from major institutions who are wary of the changes taking place in the media field was readily apparent. Arturs, Ramsey, and Sergii - all in their late 20s - said they couldn't be bothered with the paperwork, bureaucracy, and reporting requirements that are necessary to receive funding from major foundations. They would rather spend their time holding workshops, building websites, and creating community. Older participants in the room were all appreciative of their work and their voluntary ethos, but were concerned that the lifestyle isn't sustainable once marriage, mortgage, and children enter the picture.

By the end of the three-day meeting the participants agreed on a summary of major discussion points to be presented to the funders for their consideration. There was agreement that funders need to find ways to support the work of passionate and talented individuals like Arturs, Ramsey, and Sergii. One possible solution is to support intermediary funders like Rising Voices and Mobile Active which can give more attention to small scale innovation that often stays off the radar of large philanthropic foundations. Funders should keep in mind the need to reduce barriers to access as much as implementing training programs. This can be done by working with telecommunication companies to convince them that lowering their fees will increase their number of customers, or by working with regulatory agencies to increase competition and encourage more service providers to enter the market.

There should be more cooperation among donors so that successful media development projects have a clear pathway from initial start-up funding (for example, a microgrant to test the idea) to second stage funding in order to scale up, and finally sustained funding of staff and recurrent costs. Donors can also cooperate to streamline the application process so that media development project leaders spend more time on their work and less time writing separate proposals for each funder. Donors should avoid financing closed, proprietary tools and rather invest in open source tools and open source communities. Funders should be more up-to-date with innovations and trends in digital media and there should be more open communication between the funding community and the media development community. Funders can also take better advantage of their role to encourage cooperation between complementary (and even competing) projects.

In the third and final part of this series I will summarize the discussions that took place in the funders' meeting. Were they receptive to the suggestions made by practitioners? How do funders measure the impact of their investments? What do they see as the hallmarks of healthy media? What can be done from the funder's perspective to encourage sustainability in a field that is as chaotic and fast-paced as media? All this and more coming soon.

During the first meeting I gave the following presentation about my experience funding citizen media projects over the past two and a half years.

HiperBarrio began when a Colombian media professor teaching in Norway met a librarian in the small town of San Javier La Loma on the outskirts of Medellín, Colombia. It is part of Comuna 13, which was one of the epicenters of violence during the 80's and 90's. These days the town is mostly safe, but the only thing that outsiders knew about this place was its violent history.

The librarian wanted to record and share the small town's cultural history. So he taught ten of his regular library users how to blog, make podcasts, and short video documentaries. The project has become ridiculously successful. They have since secured more funding from local institutions, and they were cited in a proposal by the Fundación Empresas Públicas of Medellín, which led to a one million dollar grant from the Gates Foundation to build on the work that HiperBarrio has proved successful. Gabriel has since been invited to Chile to share his knowledge with their national library network. They won the Ars Electronica Award in digital communities this year and a 10,000 euro prize. These ten initial participants are now trainers who are paid to give workshops in other marginalized villages on the outskirts of Medellin.

In contrast, one of the Rising Voices grantee projects that so far has struggled to make an impact is Blogging Since Infancy, the blogging project of Plan Ceibal in Uruguay. Plan Ceibal is simply too large of an organization and too much bureaucracy stood in the way of quick and effective implementation.

These individuals belong to Foko, a citizen journalism training initiative and community of bloggers in Madagascar. They first began their work not too long after DreamWorks released their 2005 animated film by the same name. A group of Malagasy bloggers living in the diaspora was tired of the fact that the only international awareness of their home country had to do with cartoon animals. So they partnered with a few social groups - including several English language clubs - based in different parts of the island, and showed them how to blog.

They were mostly writing about what donors would consider "non-serious" content. Occasionally they would post short videos about environmental and social challenges in Madagascar, but a lot of the content is what would be considered diary writing. Then something unexpected happened: on March 17 a coup deposed president Marc Ravalomanana. 15,000 protesters took to the streets, many countries froze their aid programs, and misinformation was frequently spreading on the airwaves of the radio stations that managed to continue broadcasting. Amid all the chaos, this group of Foko bloggers became the go-to sources of information for the international press. They were featured on CNN live, the BBC, New York Times, and Reuters.

Looking back at it, Foko is an excellent example of what John West from the Institute for War and Peace Reporting called "pre-crisis training". It also underscores the importance of 1.) citizen journalism training programs, 2.) the translation and contextualization of local content for a global audience, and 3.) networks of media groups so that local voices can be amplified and understood when breaking news hits. A few months ago Malagasy bloggers and traditional journalists met to discuss how both can work together more effectively during times of crisis.

3) Act more like a social network and less like a parent

Funders are in a role to promote co-learning and collaboration among grantee projects. I recommend focusing on creating a sense of community among your grantees, but also make sure to bring in outsiders so as not to become exclusionary. Focus less on oversight and making rules, and more on encouragement and making connections.

4) Leave comments, make suggestions, don't hide

For some reason many funders feel that they shouldn't be seen in public interacting with their grantees. I think that they are also afraid that they will write something that they might later regret. That's OK - we all make mistakes and as long as you're humble about it, internet users are more forgiving (and less attentive) than you would think. I have yet to see anyone from any of the organizations which fund Global Voices (with the exception of Kristen Taylor when she worked at Knight) leave a comment on what we publish. Engage, interact, show that you care, don't be anti-social.

5) Don't waste their time with unnecessary paperwork

Much of my job is simply to act as a buffer between the lawyers, researchers, accountants, and auditors who want to maintain their institutions, and our grantees who are trying to do innovative work in communities with few resources. I know the psychic burden of trying to navigate through the various paperwork-lined hallways of bureaucratic mazes. It is enough to prevent almost any project from succeeding.

6) Invest in risk and learn from failure. Don't fund repetitive white papers that no one reads

This is the point I want to emphasize today. Citizen media is still a new field and most funders don't like to invest in a new field until they feel that they have sufficiently researched it. The research is costly. Big-name academics like Henry Jenkins and Jonathan Zittrain and are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to come up with self-evident (though barely comprehensible) conclusions, including that there is an online participation gap and that generative technologies are good.

This money can be and should be invested more effectively.

At Rising Voices the micro-grants we award are so small (between $2,000 - $5,000) that we are able to easily invest in high-risk projects that may seem doomed for failure. One such project was "Think Build Change Salone", which aimed to develop an internship program to place Sierra Leonean youth (including ex-combatants) at select development NGO's and then pay them a small stipend to blog about their experiences. It would have been an ambitious project anywhere in the world, but we must remember that at the time of the project Sierra Leone was ranked the least developed country in the world, and is still recovering from a brutal decade-long civil war.

In the end, the project did no pan out. But from a funder's perspective, Vickie's fascinating report about what went wrong and what went right during the project is absolutely worth the $2,000 we invested. Rather than funding costly research (almost always by western academics) about the challenges to local development, it is better to invest in high risk, local projects and learn from the challenges they encounter.

(As a brief aside, I'll mention that three other high-risk projects we have invested in are 1) Ceasefire Liberia, which has trained avid bloggers in Monrovia, 2) Nomad Green, which has established a committed group of environmental citizen journalists in Mongolia, and 3) Drop-In Center, which has helped give voice and credibility to Ukraine's nascent harm reduction movement. All three should have failed, but succeeded because of the passion of their coordinators and participants.)

7) Invest in what you're interested in. Build networks of expertise

This is especially true for intermediary funders like Rising Voices. You'll notice that many of our grantee projects are based in Latin America. This is, in part, because I speak Spanish and I spend a lot of time there. Grantees shouldn't be selected solely on the whims and interests of funders and program officers, but on the other hand, I believe it is healthy for funders to invest in projects that they can and want to help find success.

You do this by building networks of expertise. Again, this goes back to "act more like a social network, less like a parent." Encourage international conference organizers to invite participants to speak on panels. Encourage your grantees to focus on their relationships with local institutions - after all, local citizen media projects should be funded and sustained by local groups.

Personally I don't know too much about the field of AIDS prevention and HIV/AIDS activism. But it was clear after our first round of micro-grants that there was considerable interest in the use of citizen media to improve communication and advocacy efforts around the rights of HIV-positive individuals and the activities of HIV/AIDS-related NGO's. So we let a core group of passionate activists use our chat room, brand, and network to organize. We also provided a small amount of funding to produce a guide on "Blogging Positively."

The success of the initiative shows the importance of what Ivan earlier called the network effects of digital media. Because these activists were able to tap into the Rising Voices network, they also benefited from the Global Voices network, which helped amplify their cause, translate the guide into other languages, get it into the hands of local NGO's, and connect with the BBC and other mainstream media outlets.

9) Have fun

Mikel Maron works on international outreach for OpenStreetMap, an open-source Wikipedia-like version of Google Maps. He organizes events in Palestine, India, Kenya, and elsewhere to show citizens how to use basic GPS devices to build open-licensed maps of their communities. But he calls these events "mapping parties" rather than "workshops" our "capacity building events." The point is to have a good time, and to develop some valuable information in the process.

I know this sounds like something a young person feels compelled to include in his presentation, but the reality is that the return on investment for fun is extremely high and under-recognized by funders. One of the most difficult activities to fundraise for at Global Voices is our annual summit where our tireless volunteer authors and translators from around the world come together once a year for discussions, strategizing, workshops, and most importantly, to have fun. A couple years ago we asked our volunteer authors what incentivizes them to work so hard on Global Voices without receiving pay. A few of them mentioned the importance of giving greater voice and representation to the citizens of their countries. Others pointed to the benefits of belonging to a global, supportive community which values free speech and tolerance. But just about everyone said they hoped to be invited to the annual Global Voices Summit. If a funder is willing to invest in three days of fun, the return on that investment is a year of valuable content from volunteers based all over the world.

I will end with what I see as a need in the space of new media development. Even though it is easy to glance at YouTube and make the assumption that everyone under 30 knows how to produce a video in less than an hour, in fact, there is a severe shortage of individuals who have both the ability to produce digital media, but more importantly, the know-how and experience to teach it to others in an effective and responsible way. Production techniques should be integrated with media literacy discussions and a strong ethical framework which includes privacy issues, respect, and tolerance.

We need to train more trainers, and we need a directory of experienced new media trainers which is categorized by geographic area, language, and area of expertise.

• Internews, which was formed in 1982 during the Cold War dynamic of international relations.
• IREX, which was founded in 1968 and was similarly established to promote more free-flowing information between the Soviet Union and the United States.
• Panos, a UK-based network of NGO's that focus on media development in the Caribbean, Eastern Africa, Francophone Africa, South Asia, Southern Africa, and West Africa.
• BBC World Service Trust, which works on media development focused on six topics in over 40 developing countries.
• The International Center for Journalists, which was founded 25 years ago and specializes in providing fellowships to journalists who share their expertise in developing countries.

Then there are hundreds, if not thousands, of smaller media development groups at the regional, national, and local level. The Media Institute of Southern Africa, the Southeast Asian Press Alliance, CALANDRIA, and the Liberia Media Center are all examples. Many - though not all - of these groups are members of the Global Forum for Media Development, which organizes a global conference once every three years (most recently in Athens in 2008) and, more frequently, smaller regional events.

The transition in the media industry from the broadcast and print era to digital, participatory media has led media development organizations to re-think their strategies and investment priorities. That's why I'm at the Salzburg Global Seminar in Austria this week with a group of media development professionals, new media enthusiasts, and a handful of researchers and funders. We are gathered here for a three-day meeting to make recommendations to funders as to how they can most effectively help bring about a healthy global media ecosystem.

Ivan Sigal - Obstacles to a healthy media ecosystem

Ivan Sigal, executive editor of Global Voices, kicked off the first day's discussion by pointing out several obstacles that currently stand in the way of healthy media systems on a global level. These include:

• Public and private telecommunications infrastructure
• Regulatory and media law issues
• Language and translation
• Social and digital divides
• Technical issues (eg. available fonts in local languages)
• Access to equipment, training, and tutorials
• Access to generative technologies

I suggested that 1.) censorship and 2.) audience (or lack thereof) are two other obstacles to a healthy flow of media, information, and participation.

Ivan went on to stress that these different obstacles vary and manifest themselves in different ways in different parts of the world. He noted that 'country' is not always the best lens to think about where the obstacles exist and how to confront them, and that culture has an impact on how digital communities are incentivized.

Josh Goldstein - Working against or with telecommunications companies

Josh Goldstein then followed up. He explained that he would present both from his perspective as a fellow this past summer at Appfrica Labs in Kampala, Uganda and in his new position at UNICEF Innovation, which is looking at how to spur and implement more innovation throughout UNICEF's 191 country offices. Or, as he put it, his summer experience in Uganda revealed to him what obstacles stand in the way of success for tech-savvy web entrepreneurs like Jon Gosier. In his new job he will try to leverage UNICEF's position to help bring down some of those barriers to entry.

One of the greatest obstacles for a healthy media ecosystem, Josh points out, is simply the cost of access to information. Rwandans, for example, spend an estimated 65% of their disposable income (and 17% of total income) just on mobile access.

In fact, on the tails of The Economist's recent cheerleading of mobile phones in development, Josh published a cautionary note at VentureBeat explaining that a single text message can run as much as ten cents per message in Uganda, a prohibitively high cost for most Ugandans.

Earlier this year Appfrica Labs programmer Felix Kitaka developed Status.ug, a local Twitter-like clone for Ugandans which allows them to update their Facebook and Twitter statuses directly via text message. The service has yet to really take off, however, because most Ugandans still aren't able to afford frequent text messaging. Twitter has proven itself to be an important (although often overstated) tool for activists. Those same opportunities aren't available in Uganda, however, because there is not enough competition in the mobile wireless industry to bring down the price of participation. Josh points out that there are two strategies to lower the cost of access to information. First, you could seek government support for regulation which forces telecommunications companies to lower their fees. This is the type of advocacy work that the Knight Foundation has been involved in with the Federal Communication Commission in the United States. The second option, which Josh seems more enthusiastic about, is meeting directly with the telecommunications companies to convince them that if they lower their costs they will make up for it in greater volume.

Felipe Vaz - LAN houses as informal spaces of digital inclusion

Felipe Vaz of Overmundo shows an example of how informal digital media development is frequently taking place outside of government, education, or civil society organizations. Those more formal organizations must then decide if they will co-opt, support, oppose, or stay away from the informal structures that have developed.

In this case Felipe introduces us to LAN houses, which Paula Goés has written about extensively on Global Voices. These LAN houses initially began as local networks where (mostly) young people would go to play multiplayer games like World of Warcraft. More recently they have connected to the internet and are used for social networking, chatting, and job searching. The estimated 90,000 LAN houses across Brazil account for 50% of available internet access in the country. These are illegal operations which don't have business permits and don't pay taxes. The Brazilian government so far has taken an adversarial position toward the LAN houses, arguing that they encourage young people to miss class. But others, like Brazilian blogger Jeimy Remir, think that LAN houses have a positive impact both for their owners and customers:

As a fruit of creativity and entrepreneurship, starting lan houses has changed the lives of their owners. Usually attached to their own houses, the lan houses come in stylized environments, often set up in their home garages with different lighting and decor. […] Another feature of the lan houses is to serve as meeting points for young people, looking to make friends, interact and flirt. With the communication tools currently available, such as instant messaging, orkut and chat, the use of space for similar purposes has increased and confirmed such environments as a reflection of society. […] For this reason, the lan houses assert both their power to bring digital inclusion by providing access to the Internet for people with low-incomes and their unique characteristics: they provide a source of income for those who manage them and meeting points for youngsters.

Felipe reminds us that illegal cyber-cafes are popping up in favelas and neighborhoods where business entrepreneurship is at a low level. Also, peer to peer training - such as how to upload a video to YouTube - takes places at these LAN houses. He believes that the government should legalize their operations and provide tax incentives so that Brazilians in underserved communities still have easy access to the benefits of the internet.

Final Thoughts

The three presentations highlight some of the various obstacles that currently stand in the way of a dynamic, participatory media ecosystem. They also show different ways in which funders can use their resources to promote more inclusive communication and access to information. They could engage at the government level to promote better regulation which brings down the costs of mobile internet access or, for example, starting a cyber-cafe. They could support translation efforts to bridge linguistic divides which prevent the sharing of information across cultures and communities. They could also support training initiatives so that online participation and digital media production is more representative of a community's entire population.

In the next post I'll dig deeper into some of the more specific issues related to donors giving money to fund new media development.

The Blogging Positively project began two years ago when Kenyan blogger Serina Kalande, volunteered to lead a working group to discuss how citizen media can best be implemented in the field of HIV/AIDS. Many of the project proposals we've received at Rising Voices have been related to spreading awareness about the pandemic. We wanted to learn from those proposals - and also from existing citizen media initiatives - to better understand how new media tools can be used most effectively to spread awareness and encourage discussion about HIV/AIDS-related topics. We also wanted to better understand some of the risks and obstacles facing bloggers who are HIV-positive, or who regularly write about HIV/AIDS-related topics.

Three online chats brought together people from all over the world, and from a wide range of fields. In addition to the creation of this guide, the participants of the chats collaborated on the creation of a map-based directory of HIV-positive bloggers who bravely defy stigma and discrimination to communicate their situation to the rest of the world.

To celebrate the release of the Blogging Positively guide, which has been two years in the making, today we begin a one-week campaign to update our map of HIV positive bloggers. If you are a positive blogger, or if you have suggestions for links to add to the directory, please send a message to Global Voices Public Health Editor Juhie Bhatia.

The Blogging Positively guide was authored by Janet Feldman of the Kenya AIDS Intervention Prevention Project Group and ActAlive, which encourages the use of the arts and media to address HIV/AIDS and other human-development challenges. Additional contributions were made by Solana Larsen, Sahar Romani, and Juhie Bhatia. Daudi Were coined the term "Blogging Positively."

The importance and impact of this guide depends on our collective ability to get it into the hands of activists, and to encourage their contributions to the global conversation that is curated and amplified everyday on the Global Voices website. Please consider sharing this with your network of friends and blogging about it. If there are HIV/AIDS organizations and support groups in your region, please send them a copy of the guide.

Finally, if you would like to learn more about what bloggers around the world have to say about the AIDS pandemic, don't miss our Conversations for a Better World series which has so far featured commentary about HIV/AIDS from bloggers based in Africa, China, Cambodia, and the Middle East & North Africa.

Photo of Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson and Hillary Clinton by Glenna Gordon

Glenna Gordon, a Monrovia-based American journalist who was involved in a training workshop for Liberian bloggers, notes in an article for Time Magazine that the United States government has given Liberia over $2 billion since 2003, "the highest number of aid dollars spent per capita anywhere in the world."

Most of the news articles about Clinton's visit to Liberia focus on the basic facts about Liberia. Writing for Xinhua News, the Chinese government's official news agency, editor Li Xianzhi observes:

Liberia is a country on the west coast of Africa, bordered by Sierra Leone, Guinea, Cote d'Ivoire and the Atlantic Ocean. The history of Liberia is unique among African nations, notably because of its relationship with the United States, according to Wikipedia."

Few, if any, of the articles quote Liberians or describe what everyday life is like in the capital city Monrovia. For that you will need to consult Liberian bloggers.

Ruthie Ackerman is a freelance journalist who is writing a book about Liberian refugees living on Staten Island in New York. Rather than simply writing about the refugees, however, Ackerman wanted to help them tell their own stories. With a small amount of funding from Rising Voices she started Ceasefire Liberia, a blogging platform for Liberians living in Staten Island and Monrovia. Much to her surprise the Monrovia-based Liberian bloggers have so far contributed more content to the website than their New York-based peers.

Nat Nyuan-Bayjay, a Ceasefire Liberia blogger in Monrovia

Writing from Monrovia, Wellington Railey has described the life sentence handed down to 23-year-old Nigerian Chuku Diwl Afika who was convicted of murdering a Liberian youth after a scuffle outside of Apple Night Club. Nat Nyuan-Bayjay, Ceasefire Liberia's project manager in Monrovia, posted his photos and observations of two opposing protests related to Liberia's controversial Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Describing the pro-TRC group of protesters Bayjay writes:

The demonstration, widely believed to be a state 'stage-managed' demonstration was held under the auspices of the National Consciousness Movement of Liberia (NACOMAL), a pro-advocacy group and well organized as hundreds of people flocked upper Broad Street downtown Monrovia where they assembled as they were transported from various suburbs of Monrovia in arranged commercial buses.

A view down Broad Street in Monrovia

Nyuan-Bajay also published a post on Clinton's visit titled "Clinton Reaffirms US Support To Liberia: Pledges US$17 Million But Wants Action on Corruption." Most impressive though has been Nyuan-Bajay's investigative reporting on issues like Bushrod Island's recent water shortages. He also routinely collects opinions from ordinary Liberians on issues ranging from the death of Michael Jackson to Independence Day celebrations.

So far Liberians living in New York have shown less interest in text-based blogging, but are enthusiastic about video. Garretson produced a 4-minute video about his son on his way to school. Some of the members of Ceasefire Liberia in Staten Island belong to the hip-hop collective Genocide which performed at Park Hill Day last month. Their manager Liz shot this video of their live performance. You can hear another Genocide track on the most recent Ceasefire Liberia video of a celebration of Liberia's Independence Day in Trenton, Jersey.

Stay tuned to Ceasefire Liberia to learn more about Liberian realities on both sides of the Atlantic.

The XO-1 laptop. OLPC is now engineering the next version.

Designing the laptop, it turned out, was probably the easiest piece of the puzzle. OLPC founder and chairman Nicholas Negroponte had originally touted the XO as the "$100 laptop", but in order to produce the machine at such a low cost they would need to convince dozens of national governments to purchase tens of millions of laptops. Instead, the program was until very recently only able to convince the government of one single country, Uruguay, which ordered 100,000 machines back in October of 2007 at $188 per machine. Fast-forward 20 months - and 200,000 more laptops - and the Technological Laboratory of Uruguay (LATU) is just a couple month's away from delivering the very last green and white laptops into the hands of every single Uruguayan primary school student.

As I described in an earlier article, the first two years of the OLPC deployment in Uruguay "have been characterized by implementation and incubation. The laptops have been deployed to schools, manuals have been created, tech savvy volunteer groups have been formed, wireless internet connections have been established, teachers have slowly learned how to implement the laptops into their curricula and classrooms, and, as Rezwan has covered previously, a community of open source programmers has developed educational applications for the laptops."

Last week I visited Uruguay myself to witness how teachers and students were incorporating laptops and wi-fi connections (now in over 1,000 schools) into the classroom environment. My first gray blistery morning in Montevideo I joined a van full of professors and students from the Universidad de la República who were headed to Santa Lucía, a small town in the department of Canelones just an hour's drive from the capital. After a few accidental detours and several thermoses of mate tea, we pulled up to Santa Lucía's one and only primary school. Dozens of primary school students in white frocks were sitting on steps and tree trunks with their XO laptops, pecking away as if they were in a wi-fi café in Tokyo or New York City.

Santa Lucía's "Escuela 104" (every school in Uruguay is given a number) teaches all of the town's young students in morning and afternoon shifts. That is, half of Santa Lucía's students come early in the morning and stay until lunch, and the other half arrive in the afternoon and stay until the early evening. When Pablo Flores, a professor of engineering at the Universidad de la República and a coordinator of Flor de Ceibo, asked the school's teachers if they had any problems or complaints regarding the XO laptops, one immediately responded, "the kids hang around here all day long. We can't get them to go home. Is there anything you can do to helps us?"

Pablo later told me that such reactions are typical during his frequent visits to schools around the country. However, while I found the comment to be entertaining, Pablo smiled softly with discouragement. On the way to Santa Lucías several of the volunteer students from the Universidad de la República shared their stories of teachers who felt threatened by the presence of the laptops in their classrooms. The younger teachers, they all agreed, tended to embrace the change and try to incorporate the laptops as much as possible into the classroom environment. But some of the older teachers felt that their position of authority in the classroom was threatened by the presence of the laptops and the power they gave the young students. As many university professors have discovered in recent years, laptops and internet connections in the classroom often lead to students chatting behind the professor's back. Or, as George Landow put it in Hypertext 3.0, "Technology always empowers someone. It empowers those who possess it, those who make use of it, and those who have access to it."

I do not want to overstate the point. After all, this particular morning we were in the school's humble computer lab surrounded by eight or so teachers who all took time out of their busy schedules to learn more about the XO laptops and how they can make better use of them in the classroom. They were eager to learn and quick to make entertaining jokes about their frustrations with the new technologies. I imagined myself as a primacy school instructor - with over 20 years of teaching experience - having to learn new teaching techniques from volunteer university students who have never experienced the enormous challenge of keeping a classroom in order.

We were in Santa Lucía to give workshops explaining how to use the EduBlog blogging platform developed by a team of Uruguayan and American programmers. The XO laptops have been great at bringing information from the wider world to Uruguayan students, thanks to projects like Wikipedia and Conozco Uruguay, both of which come pre-installed on the machines. But, as Pablo explained to the gathered teachers, the laptops also permit Uruguayans to contribute content, stories, and knowledge to the vast repository of civilization that is the internet:

Each of the teachers created her own individual blog, and they then created a group blog for the entire school titled, appropriately enough, Escuela 104 de Santa Lucía.

One teacher, who registered under the username "sancac", wrote:

Te cuento que soy una maestra de primer año de la escuela Nº 104 "Leticia Volpe" ubicada en la ciudad de Santa Lucía ,depto Canelones .Se encuentra ubicada en las calles R. Argentina, Tajes, Brasil y Tajes.Es una escuela de doble turno con un total de 700 niños aproximadamente. Estos son mis hijos........

Another teacher, "ladelsanta" published a post with photos of nearby landmarks:

La Escuela Nº 104 se encuentra ubicada en la ciudad de Santa Lucía, a orillas del río del mismo nombre. En sus comienzos, fue escuela sólo para varones, con el correr del tiempo eso cambió y se transformó en escuela mixta como sigue siendo actualmente. Mi madre concurrió a esta escuela, que la llamaban la "escuela grande" porque ocupaba toda la manzana (actualmente compartida con el liceo Nº2). Se destaca en nuestra localidad el primer hotel turístico del país, el hotel Biltmore

You can use Google's machine translation to read the rest of the teachers' entries.

The morning blogging workshop was facilitated by Pablo Flores and Mariel Cisneros Lopez, both professors from the Universidad de la República. But in the afternoon session, attended by over a dozen teachers, the university students took the lead, facilitating an outstanding workshop that got the teachers enthusiastic about the possibilities of blogging in the classroom. Flor de Ceibo will continue to organize expeditions to primary schools across the country in order to show teachers and students how they can share their stories, articles, and homework assignments online by using the EduBlog platform. Later in the year, with the financial support from their Rising Voices microgrant, they will organize a competition which awards prizes to students who publish the best entries about particular topics chosen by a committee of judges.

In the second part to this post, we will examine how EduBlog was created and how the CeibalJam movement is creating a local, dedicated community of open source volunteers who program for the XO laptop.

Map of the 132 calls made to police on April 22nd in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco.

Other examples of projects which have set out to add geographic locations to information found on the internet, and to display that information on map interfaces, include outside.in, WikiMapia, Flickrvision, HousingMaps, Oakland Crimespotting, and hundreds of others.

Many of these projects also make their data available in KML format, which is what Google Earth uses to overlay information on a rich three dimensional interface of our planet. By selecting multiple layers in Google Earth and zooming in on a single neighborhood block, I can quickly filter through what information is most relavant to me including recent photos taken by Google Street View and live streaming webcams aggregated by Webcams.travel.

This abundance of information all displayed attractively on stunning map interfaces is no doubt useful and interesting, but does it lead to local social change? Using Oakland Crimespotting I can see that there was a vehicle theft two streets down from my house on April 21. In fact, I can even sign up for a customized RSS feed of incidents near my house and use Pingie to get notified immediately by text message. But will that information convince me to do anything to help improve my community?

2009 I believe will be the year of developing map-based interfaces which enable neighbors to share information with one another, leading to direct action and increased community involvement.

Garden Registry is a new project of the San Francisco Victory Garden program which enables urban farmers in San Francisco to locate their backyard farms on a map, describe what they are growing, and, most importantly, advertise any surplus land they have available to others who would like to plant there. The map not only allows San Franciscans to peek into the backyards of their fellow farming neighbors, but also encourages shared use of private land to maximize the output of local, organic food.

Unortkataster Köln is a project of Köln 2020 which allows users to document and map what they refer to as "architectural or social deficiencies" around the German city. This could range from potholes to graffiti to sound pollution. The project, led by Professor Georg Trogemann at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, seeks to encourage an inclusive conversation about how Köln can be improved and what improvements should take priority.

Mark Glaser asks, "How Can We Improve Information Needs of Local Communities?" Garden Registry and Unortkataster Köln exemplify a new strategy to move map interfaces beyond mere aggregations of information by allowing users to network and share valuable information that leads to community involvement. Still, these services could be made even more valuable by tapping into the constant stream of information found on microblogging sites like Twitter and Brightkite. Anytime I find a good location for tree planting in my neighborhood, for example, I should be able to upload a photograph of it to Brightkite with the tag "#4treeplanting" and that information should automatically appear on a map like Unortkataster Köln, as well as alert the proper authorities at Oakland Public Works. In this model microblogging tools like Twitter and Brightkite become a command-line interface to prompt community improvement.

Map of El Nula, a small village in the Venzuelan state of Apure along the Colombian border.

One of the world's lesser-known conflicts has endured for over a decade along the Colombia-Venezuela border. According to the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants' latest report:

Colombian guerrillas and paramilitaries, together with the Fuerzas Bolivarianas de Liberación (FBL), a Venezuelan irregular armed group, exercised de facto control over the border states of Táchira, Apure, and Zulia, where most Colombian asylum seekers arrived. Kidnappings, contract killings, forced recruitment, and arms smuggling were common in the border areas. During the year, about 250 asylum seekers in Zulia and four asylum-seeking families in Apure fled to Caracas due to death threats by armed groups in the border area; one asylum seeker was reportedly shot upon arrival in Caracas.

The community of El Nula has been particularly hard hit. According to Child Soldiers Global Report:

During 2006 at least 40 people, including some under 18, died in El Nula and surrounding areas, reportedly during combat or as a result of their links with one of these armed groups. Many children stopped attending school for fear of being recruited. In October 2006 a member of the community of Santa Inés in El Nula, Apure state, was killed by unidentified men believed to be members of armed groups operating in the area. Thirty-two families left their homes seeking safety. In February 2007 a four-year-old girl was killed during an armed confrontation between Colombian armed groups in El Amparo, Apure State, allegedly over control of territory in Venezuela.

But it's not all bad news. My dear friend Luis Carlos Díaz has been working with the Jesuit Refugee Service to call more attention to the region and the crisis that has engulfed it for so long. He has also been training employees of JRS how to use blogs and digital video to share stories about their lives and community. For the Spanish speakers among you, here Luis Carlos interviewing Merlys Mosquera, director of JRS in Venezuela. I love that she emphasizes all the good of the region along with the bad.

And, via Luis Carlos, I discovered this 30-minute documentary by Rodolfo Rico, Rafael Uzcátegui and Robert Calzadilla about the 1988 massacre in El Amparo where soldiers and police officers opened fire on sixteen unarmed fishermen, killing 14 of them. (Here is an interview - with horrendous audio - of one of the two survivors.)

Even more inspiring is a project by the group Ancla 2 which I recently discovered thanks to the prolific Laura Vidal.

Laura has written about the work of Ancla 2 previously on Global Voices (in Spanish here), where she featured blogs written by young people in two of Caracas' most violent slums including the infamous barrio, El Guarataro. (For more on the dynamic between rich and poor in Caracas I highly recommend Secuestro Express.)

But Ancla 2 organizes and facilitates new media workshops all around Venezuela including the village of El Nula along the Venezuela-Colombia border where they have trained 23 refugee children how to publish their drawings, photography, and stories to a blog titled "El Nula for Peace". It offers a wonderful window to El Nula through the eyes of the refugee children living there. There is a picture of one 14-year-old blogger's mother who looks far too young to have a teenage son and another of Laura's studious 12-year-old neighbor who looks like she has already seen more than most adults. There are pictures of the town's plaza, acrobatic brothers, hard-working fathers, and hungry baby calf.

And here is "Crazy Yulieth", who, writes Yuleima, "is 13-years-old, lives with her family, and is one of the craziest friends that I have. She's a jokester, tells stories, is really great, and super crazy like you wouldn't know."

What I love about this project is that it doesn't just represent El Nula as a war zone like every other reference to the community that you'll find online. No, it shows El Nula through the eyes of those who live there. When tragedy hits next then the young people of El Nula will know how to use online tools to spread awareness and seek help. But until then, they also know how to spread awareness about all the good in their lives as well.