This week, the commission held a two-day workshop entitled How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age? -- the purpose of which is "to explore how the Internet has affected journalism."

There's been lots of blogging, Tweeting and journalizing about it. Some people think it was a valuable exercise. I question that, especially the FTC chairman's announcement that the situation might well call for government intervention.

The event came under the FTC's Office of Policy Planning. Here's its mission:

The Office of Policy Planning assists the Commission to develop and implement long-range competition and consumer protection policy initiatives and advises staff on cases raising new or complex policy and legal issues.

One of the Office of Policy Planning's primary roles involves competition advocacy, submitting filings supporting competition principles to state legislatures, regulatory boards, and officials; state and federal courts; other federal agencies; and professional organizations. The Office also organizes public workshops and issues reports on cutting-edge competition and consumer protection topics, addressing questions of substantive antitrust law, industry-specific practices, and significant national and international policy debates.

In addition to the Office of Policy Planning, several offices throughout the Commission, including the Bureau of Competition's Office of Policy and Coordination and the Policy Studies unit within the Office of the General Counsel, also provide policy advice.

Ah, we learn more in a Federal Register Notice (also PDF-only, naturally). The notice observes, in a promising start, that the Internet has created unparalleled possibilities.

The commission could have stopped there, and not bothered to hold the workshop. It could have recognized that we're in the early days of a transition from one set of business models (most of which have not been very competitive) to an emerging, hyper-competitive sphere. There's never been more reason for optimism than there is today, given the massive amount of journalistic and business experimentation going on all around us.

But the commission staff and many speakers found much to fret about, spurred in large part by the incessant whining of the newspaper industry in recent times. (Could it also have been influenced by the fact that the FTC chairman is married to a Washington Post opinion writer? No, this obviously had absolutely no bearing on anything.) The commission has discovered that the advertising model which once supported many kinds of journalism has eroded. Quoting several economists, the workshop notice says "public affairs reporting may indeed be particularly subject to market failure."

Market failure? What about the market failure -- which as far as I can tell never got any attention from a succession of FTC people during the past half-century -- of the monopolies and oligopolies created by media organizations during that period? The public affairs journalism was, for the most part, a modest spinoff of the extortionate advertising prices they charged when they had near-absolute market power to charge anything they wished. Only when there's real competition does the FTC get interested.

The commission, inevitably, is asking for opinions on whether federal taxpayers should subsidize journalism more directly than the indirect subsidies of low postal rates for print; giveaways of publicly owned airwaves (spectrum) to broadcasters; the odious "Newspaper Preservation Act" granting partial antitrust immunity to community newspapers, etc. (Believe it or not, meanwhile, the commission is asking if Congress should give journalism-related businesses even more antitrust immunity. Good grief.)

There's only one subsidy that makes sense, only one that wouldn't put government meddling squarely into the practice of journalism, an inevitable result of the direct subsidies being pushed by well-meaning but misguided media thinkers. It's not on the agenda, however.

As noted, taxpayer-assisted infrastructure -- especially the postal system and low rates for sending publications -- helped create the newspaper business, and enabled a lot of other commerce. Bring forward that logic to high-speed Internet access for all Americans, and enable the 21st Century communications infrastructure for all competitors.

As it is, we're moving toward a market failure of frightening proportions, as the telecom industry clamps down, or threatens to, on people's ability to use Internet connections as they see fit. We're moving toward a media business consolidation that would terrify make any real champion of open markets: a cable-phone duopoly. Maybe the FTC could poke its nose into the truly scary potential of the just-announced Comcast buyout of NBC Universal? That would actually be useful.

The Federal Communications Commission has jurisdiction over telecom, and is looking at the issue. But when it comes to how journalism will thrive in (not just survive) the Internet age, this should be high on any list of competitive issues of interest to agencies that push for competitive markets.

The word "broadband" was nowhere to be found in the FTC's planning document. Coming from an agency that says it wants to promote competition, that spoke volumes.

(Cross-posted, with updates,from Mediactive.)

In recent years, the organization spawned Denver Open Media, the Open Media Project, and a number of web-based initiatives through the Civic Pixel web & design department launched in 2008. The new name and website were officially announced November 19 at a fundraising breakfast hosted by Ashara Ekundayo and featuring presentations from Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!, and Leslie Matthews, president of the OMF board of directors.

"Its not just a name-change," stated Leslie Matthews at the event, "the organization has grown significantly over the years, launching Denver Open Media in 2006, and merging with Civic Pixel to offer high end web & design services in 2008. While these efforts have been aligned with our strategic vision, the multiple brands and independent websites made it difficult to understand the cohesive design of the organization."

The new OpenMediaFoundation.org website aims to convey the concerted strategy behind the various business activities of the organization, from high-end media and technology services, to training and education, and ultimately, access to the media and technology tools.

"The end goal is a community where every organization and individual, not only the privileged and wealthy, have the ability to engage in mass communications and reflect their own perspective in the larger social conversations that happen through media and technology," said Brian Hiatt, director of IT for the Open Media Foundation. Today, over 200 local nonprofit organizations have a website or video produced by the Open Media Foundation. "We train hundreds of individuals each year, and we operate three public access television channels in Denver" adds Hiatt. In addition, the Open Media Foundation manages the Colorado Channel, a statewide version of C-Span, for the Colorado State Legislature. This year, the Colorado Channel and OMF add daily Senate coverage to the mix, after two years of broadcasting the State House of Representatives.

"Everything we do is aimed at putting the power of media in the hands of our community" Hiatt said.

Nationwide Impact

In 2008, together with Civic Pixel, the OMF team re-built the software that transformed Denver's public access TV station into a constituent-led, Net 2.0 media hub, and made it available to anyone through Drupal.org. Dubbed the Open Media Project, this year the OMF has helped to install the software and unique community media model in seven beta test stations. New partners continue to join every month, including Free Speech TV and the Bay Area Video Coalition, all looking to contribute to the open-source software that could help unite noncommercial media institutions as a new kind of user-driven media network.

Early next year, the OMF plans to release the Open Media Project software as a new kind of free software package, a Packaged Drupal Installation Profile being designed with support from the Drupal Association and fellow Knight News Challenge winner, Quiddities. At the same time, the Open Media Foundation will receive word on the $2.2million stimulus grant requested through the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program, aimed at extending the Open Media Project with 20 new community media partners. The final stage of the Knight News Challenge grant concludes in 2010, with a focus on content sharing among the Open Media Project beta test stations.

Denver Open Media Turns three

In Denver, one of the three public access cable TV channels is automatically scheduled based on votes from the website and SMS/Text, featuring the best of over 5,000 shows submitted in just the past 3 years. In 2010, the same software that makes this possible will also enable Denver Open Media and its partner stations to share top-rated content from across the nation, allowing each station to feature the best of their combined content. The Open Media Foundation will celebrate these and other accomplishments this Friday, Dec 4th at the 3-year anniversary of Denver Open Media. The festivities will be shared live on Denver Open Media, Comcast Channel 56, online at denveropenmedia.org, and on the radio via KGNU 88.5FM-Denver and 1390AM-Boulder. The event will feature musical performances from Sole and Itchy-O and interviews with a number of Open Media Foundation partners and members.

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.

For those not familiar with the project, I'll offer a quick description. Large glass storefronts in two Greater Boston area neighborhoods, Brookline and Roxbury, will be transformed into video screens, providing pedestrians of each neighborhood with a portal into each other's worlds. Running 24/7, these life-size screen images and AV technology will enable real-time interaction between residents of the neighborhoods.

These portals will also act as media centers for news collection and dissemination. The viewing and sharing of news will be brought out of private spheres and into a public forum to create a kind of virtual town hall meeting. Though only 2.4 miles apart and connected by the Route 66 bus, people living in one of these two neighborhoods rarely visit the other. Using technology developed to bridge geographical distances, Virtual Street Corners instead traverses the social boundaries that separate two important cultural and transportation hubs with significant historical connections.

Citizen Journalists in Each Neighborhood

There will be both planned and spontaneous interactions. Three different citizen journalists from different parts of the neighborhood will be employed to deliver daily news reports about what is happening in their area at specified times each day. There will be a website with live feeds streaming from each location. Both storefronts are located next to a bus stop, and riders (or anyone else) will be able to download podcasts or videocasts.

Virtual Street Corners is closely related to a project that I created with Liz Canner called Symphony of a City, which premiered at the Boston Cyberarts Festival 2001. Symphony of a City used headcams, projections and streaming video to paint a portrait of Boston through the eyes of eight different residents.

Both pieces evolve out of earlier work I've done that aimed to create participatory community public art projects across Boston. While doing those projects, I was struck by the diversity of culture, as well as the segregation that still permeates Boston. Residents appear to treat the situation as normal, and little dialogue appears to take place around the issue. These works invite people to confront this reality, reflect and dialogue about it. It also allows them to experience the city in a new way outside their daily routines.

Art or Activism?

Virtual Street Corners first took shape in 2006 when I received a "Public Art Incubator" fellowship from the Berwick Research Institute in Dudley Square, Roxbury. This grant provided me with an opportunity to have a studio in the middle of Dudley Square, and feedback from two curators, Susan Sakash and Andi Sutton. I was able to test early models, which culminated in a one-day trial at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT.

During this process there were several issues that came up repeatedly and are worth mentioning. One is about how to classify the project. Is it art or activism? Journalism or humanities? In fact, it fits within several different fields of practice, and it is more important to me that it is engaging and useful, than whether or not it falls within one category or the other.

I think there is an evolving openness to cross-disciplinary projects. Nevertheless, it continues to be an issue I repeatedly confront from many sides, including funders and academics. Within the art world, it was brought to my attention that similar projects had taken place. Most frequently mentioned is Hole In Space by Erkki Huhtamo. I have found his work to be particularly insightful. What I take away from him is that it is not so important that we come up with new and "groundbreaking" ideas. Ideas or works of art are not better because they are "new"; often, what we perceive as new is a restatement of an old idea. (He labels this a "Topoi.") But capitalism and consumerism is driven by this idea of coming up with the latest hottest thing.

Just the fact that Virtual Street Corners will be seen by a completely different group of people, that it is executed in a different context and at a different time, makes it worthwhile. I'm thinking of this as a cooperation rather than a competition. And that's something I appreciate about the Knight Challenge -- that it is centered on building and expanding ideas, rather than making them exclusive.

User-generated comments, and text messages in particular, are causing umbrage in Namibian government circles. Their unhappiness highlights the historic shift of media away from unidirectional, univocal information.

This case underlines the politics entailed when the media becomes a platform for broader communication, which is exactly what's happening with mobile phones in some
African countries.

Things came to a head in Namibia in early October at a political rally held as part of the build-up to the country's November elections. A torrent of abuse and threats were issued at the event, and they emanated from the Namibian minister of justice, who also serves as the secretary-general of the ruling Swapo party.

In what amounted to a tirade, Ms. Pendukeni Iivula-Ithana launched a racist attack on the editor of The Namibian, Gwen Lister, and accused this celebrated journalist of personally writing the critical SMS messages that have been published in the paper.

Attacks Target Namibian, User-Generated Content

Significantly, as the Editors' Forum of Namibia (EFN) noted, "it is not the first time politicians have called for an end to the publication of the cell phone-generated SMSes."

EFN went on to defend "the rights of citizens to approach print or electronic news media to offer their opinions on current affairs, matters of state politics and other issues of public debate in the form of letters to the editor, SMS or by direct participation in interactive programs."

An alternative newspaper founded 24 years ago to fight against South African occupation, The Namibian has been fiercely independent and has played a major role in exposing corruption and poor administration in the post-colonial period.

The publication today maintains the most visited website in Namibia, even though the country has very high-cost and low-penetration Internet access. This digital deficit notwithstanding, Namibians at large have seized upon SMS technology to express themselves, and a range of newspapers are jam-packed with their personal adverts and political opinions.

While some publications charge premium rates for SMS messages and make money out of the service, The Namibian provides the same access at cost.

MISA Takes on Information Access

Coincidentally, as the row raged over the minister's remarks, a group of media activists gathered in the capital, Windhoek, to plan a campaign over the next 18 months. They were brought together by the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA), an influential lobby in the region that has achieved the following milestones:

• This organization was a product of a conference in the city on 3 May 1991, which also gave birth to the "Windhoek Declaration." In turn, that statement secured endorsement by both UNESCO and the United Nations General Assembly, and it is the reason why World Press Freedom Day is commemorated worldwide every anniversary.

• In 2001, MISA convened a follow-up conference, this time concentrating on the need to end state monopolies of the airwaves in Africa. The "African Charter on Broadcasting" that emerged from the event helped to do exactly that.

Now, with "Windhoek +20" looming on 3 May 2011, the focus is being put on information access. The MISA argument is that freedoms without access to information are hollow and inimical to deepening Africa's democratization and clean governance.

This aligns with a long-standing campaign around the world for the right to information. The traditional focus in this area has been on securing sunshine laws which will give members of the public the means to look into the hidden realms of official information. But changing technology requires changes to a paradigm that has historically put exclusive focus on rights to government-held information.

As The Namibian SMS case shows, the issue now has to go beyond this. With public expression enabled through cell phones, access to information needs to embrace society's rights to have citizen-produced content seeing the light of day.

In part, this issue is a question of cost. Although a commercial entity, The Namibian treats SMSes as part of its public service. In contrast, in neighbouring Zambia, the state-owned broadcaster charges premium rates. Labeled "participation at a price" by academic Fackson Banda, this practice is diametrically opposite to real public service media, such as providing toll-free numbers.

What's also critical is that governments keep their hands off of media entities that are publishing user-generated content. It is entirely inappropriate of the Namibian authorities to try and entrench a model of one-way, push media. This model intrinsically facilitates control.

As Lister wrote in March, long before the current controversy, "When people are given public platforms to voice their opinions, such as the call-in shows and the SMS pages in this newspaper, our political leadership soon takes exception when they're exposed to criticism."

In other words, for this particular government information is okay, but communication is taboo.

Registering Journalists and Bloggers in Botswana

What's scary is that in next door Botswana, a draconian law was passed which requires the registration of all media, including bloggers. The system of course could allow for their de-registration and criminalization.

Despite these heavy-handed approaches, the genie of user-generated content is out of the bottle. A totalitarian regime would be required to stop all SMS messaging in order to prevent political criticism, and both Namibia and Botswana count themselves as democracies.

Nevertheless, the Namibian politicians have set out on a problematic path that needs to be countered. MISA and its activists must campaign for information, and also for communication.

Access to information subsumes -- but is much more than -- the right to information.

In turn, this also points toward causes such as defining the remit of public service in new media in a way that does not exclude poorer people who can't afford premium SMS rates. It also emphasizes the importance of advocating for progressive policies which ensure that Internet access is available and affordable to those citizens who want to add their voices to the media mix.

In a column responding to the attacks from the minister of justice, Lister wrote that Namibians "see the SMS pages as an opportunity for dialogue with government and others on matters close to their own hearts."

Her final assessment was that "Our SMS pages are an important voice for civil society, and if in the process their views are not always to the liking of leadership, then it is high time they get used to it."

Another story I've written on The Namibian experience

• 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.

With gadgets guzzling evermore energy, New York City faces a looming energy gap. New Yorkers will have to cut back on our electric use or start generating a lot more power. Our game lets people explore the options that are on the table, along with a few that aren't. Should the city ban air conditioning? Harness the tides? Go nuclear? Warning: the game is addictive.

Switch is a concentration-style game that deals each player 18 pairs of cards, each representing an opportunity for the city to conserve or produce electricity. As players match pairs, they're asked to decide whether each policy initiative is a good fit for New York City. At the end (or whenever the player grows bored!) players "flip the switch" to see how the measures they've accepted would add up against the city's predicted 2030 energy needs.

We worked with Will James of Tekimaki, whom we met through his very cool subway map project at onNYTurf which, in addition to being both early and awesome, is the only online NYC map I know of that is available in Estonian.

We've learned a lot about gaming and news games over the last two years, and a lot about building them on the cheap. More on that after you've all played Switch!

For example, I attended a session on government and data and sat next to a deputy CTO from the White House. I was surprised by the sincere and urgent dialog that was taking place with information activists and coders. The White House and geeks? What's not to like?

As I write this, I'm sitting in a huge room in the third sub-basement of the Grand Hyatt in D.C. Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer is speaking, so it's a good chance for me to reflect on what I have seen so far.

Tim O'Reilly is pushing the idea of Government as operating system or platform. I interpret this to mean that if Government allows "OS calls" or "APIs," then civil society and commercial services will be able access government in new ways. Think of the strategy behind Google Maps: Google releases the API, offers some hosting, and as a result tens of thousands of developers create mapping applications. If an API was released for accessing a government process or service, users would be able to read (and perhaps write) back to it. It's a big idea, and I'll need some time to follow it through completely. Does the idea break down, and if so then where? What happens if the intention or interest of the government suddenly changes? What would writing look like, and would it be subject to misuse? Isn't writing already being done by lobbyists, and do we really want to make that process simpler?

Regardless of the details, something is clearly going on here, sixty feet under street level, in a vast but unreal ballroom. An unholy alliance of free/open enthusiasts, D.C. suits, information activists, spooks, soldiers, and entrepreneurial techies are thinking about government and the Internet, and moreover they are experimenting.

One of my favorite examples of a successful government "hack" is called Amver and it's from the Coast Guard. It was started as a decidedly pre-2.0 app -- or even .4beta! -- in 1958. Amver is a voluntary, opt-in system for ship captains, asking that they simply let the Coast Guard know their departure and destination, and to report their location every 48 hours. That's it. The Coast Guard then keeps track of this, and when any vessel is in danger, it extrapolates the nearest ships and knows whom to contact to ask for help. Amver was used in the recent Air France crash -- indeed, 190 rescues have relied on Amver so far this year. Recently, Coast Guard developers created a graphic-only Web input interface, a virtual spinning globe like the one in Google Earth. This single, banal new feature has significantly increased their capacity simply because so many users of the system speak so many languages.

Why do I like this project? It's a reminder of how much can be done with information, it's opt-in, and it is deathly serious. Also, it demonstrates how important it is to be language inclusive.

Another great moment at the conference was the announcement of the Sunlight Foundation's Apps for America contest winners. GovPulse, for example, won second place by making the Federal Record readable.

Other notable highlights:

• EPA functionary Kim Balassiano's MyEnvironment, a location-based portal for all the EPA data in your area. (Personally, I would have named it EveryBlockTox.)
• Mikel Maron's work with Open Street Map. This is the humanitarian wing of the incredible OSM project. It maps places like Gaza, Afghanistan, or the largest slum in Africa. An audience member next to me asked, "Isn't Google already doing that?" The answer is no, absolutely not. Check Google's map of Kabul versus the one offered by OSM; there is no contest.
• George Clack of the U.S. State Department, who ran a competition for short documentaries answering the question, "what is Democracy?" Using YouTube, they allowed the public to vote on the best video. he videos are kind of tragic, but it is laudable that State is engendering dialog about democracy in contrast to the old approach of "making the world safe" for it. Clack was one of the several people in government who argued that government needs to learn how to let go online. It's okay if users of government sites have opinions, if they contradict your message, if they give you feedback. O'Reilly had a great line in this spirit: "Government does not regulate your political or personal opinions on the roads that it provides and maintains, so why should it be so worried about its Websites?"

And of course there were some lowlights:

• The very same State Department project. They had to throw out two thirds (!) of their finalists because the submissions used music under copyright. The intellectual property lobby is hampering our ability to conduct diplomacy, and thus damaging our national security.
• A presentation on Second Life diplomacy. Like most Second Life presentations, I had a great deal of trouble understanding what was actually happening, or how the use of bad 3D graphics helped or hurt the dialog. It did not take long for the presenter to start echoing the worst cyber-utopian spiel that we have heard since virtual reality made its debut: that this new media would finally create a massive global consciousness... If this is the new face of diplomacy I am cleaning out my bomb shelter.
• Are You Safe. This is an iPhone app that uses crime report databases to show urban "danger zones" and help people navigate through a city. We must have seen at least five such projects throughout the conference, all of which walk a dangerous line between being useful, ethically complicated, and potentially disturbing. There are laws that prevent this sort of information being used by real estate agents because it leads to more segregation an less social mobility. I question the utility, though, as well as the ethics. Does such an application in any way reduce crime? Does the app differentiate gang-on-gang, domestic, or other relational violence from professional robberies against strangers? Moreover, would Wall Street have shown up bright red and glowing over the five or six years preceding the mortgage crisis, during one of the longest and largest crimes in American history?
  

In many cases, the successful applications demoed at Gov2.0 reflected collaborative, two-directional implementations. They were often done by real organizations (the state of Utah, BART, the Coast Guard) that already have a working model of needs and users. The worst applications were often done by coders who moved into a new topic and created naive, first-order projects.

Most developers are thinking from databases outwards: they are simply hoping to visualize (or, if they are a behind the curve, "mash up") government databases. These projects offer quick, high returns, but in many cases actual users and uses are not well conceived.

Finally, fewer of these developers are designing around actual mechanisms of social change that might improve the situation they are visualizing. Nor are they imagining how to impact government with the data they are making usable. They should listen to Philip Ashlock, who gave the simple, pithy advice: "The goal is read/write government."

I mentioned earlier how sincerely interested a number of government people, most of whom are new to their jobs, are in accelerating public access. But data is slow in coming; systemic change will take a long time, and it is crucial to remember that not all administrations are as invested in transparency as this one is right now. So I was happy to see that a few of the projects are aimed specifically at expanding the data that's available, with or without goodwill from D.C.

Among these folks, the hero in the room is Carl Malamud who runs http://public.resource.org. Carl is a radical who crowbars open the U.S. government. In the mid-90s, with some urging from information activism god Jamie Love, Carl put the SEC's EDGAR database online against all odds (read the full story at http://public.resource.org/sec.gov), and has been continuing this mission in one form or another ever since.

Recently, Carl strolled into libraries around the country and managed to collect about 20 percent of PACER, the Federal court record system. PACER costs money to search because the government uses a commercial "value added" (to themselves, apparently) provider. But the government also allowed free access at a few libraries, at least until they noticed that Carl was downloading in bulk. After they closed the Malamud loophole, Carl provided that 20 percent to Steve Schultze and other insurgents at Harvard's Berkman Center and Princeton. This second team developed a Firefox plugin that allows lawyers who need to do PACER searches to do so for the regular fee. But as these lawyers access data it is cached by the plugin and uploaded to the Internet Archive. The next time someone searches PACER for a previously accessed court case, the plugin will intervene and access the now public and free cached data, rather than the private, official-but-expensive data. Steve admitted that his goal in building the plugin was simple: he wanted the plugin to be useful for as short a time as possible. If it works, it will show the government that it should be providing the information for free.

This is great information activism: building applications that provide services but also imply and, through their use, coerce further openness with the goal of a better society. In a sense, these projects are "sticky" -- they function but also transform.

If anyone has a good name for these new sorts of applications, please suggest it in the comments!

If you want to take a look at distribution of discretionary funds by the New York City Council, you have to start with a 400-page PDF full of tables of information. And then you need someone on hand who knows how to pull tables from a PDF into a workable spreadsheet. That, or you need a pencil sharpener and a calculator. And while highlighters and pencil sharpeners are not blowing holes in anyone's reporting budget, the hours required to process this information certainly are. The situation is absurd: this information started out in a database and there's no reason that anyone -- whether they're a reporter, civic gadfly or deli manager -- should have to jump through hoops to put it back into a database.

Of course, those hoops are just for information the city already makes public. If you want to know where pedestrians are being hit by cars, or how parking placards are distributed in a city where curbside space is valuable and abuse of parking privileges is well documented, you'd better know who has that data and have someone on hand who can write an iron tight FOIL request. Want to know about the distribution of lead poisoning cases in the city? For that you'll need lawyers.

FOILs take time, which means money. Lawyers, too, tend to want money for their time. One way to make information cheaper is to step up the data requirements in local transparency laws. New York City is considering legislation that would amend existing public records laws to require that information be made available and that it "be presented and structured in a format that permits automated processing." That is to say, raw data. Just publish it -- don't make us ask.

With the law itself lingering in committee, the mayor's office announced a competition, NYC Big Apps, for applications that will use city data. Perhaps the idea is to deflect attention from the bill, which the mayor is no fan of. The contest, which offers a prize that includes dinner with the mayor, is not really a substitute for making data available.

Steve Romalewski, a pioneer of web-based GIS and community mapping projects, is also skeptical of the contest. He notes that it offers no explicit guarantee that any datasets will be fully available for the long haul, and that no one has offered any explanation of why just 80 data sets are included.

Romalewski also rattles off a good list of datasets that are currently only available on a per-request basis -- which means, among other things, that you need to know they are there. His list includes the types and locations of small businesses, green spaces, recreational spaces and housing violations, as well as interim multiple dwellings (aka lofts) throughout the city. He also points out that land use data currently must be licensed from the city at a rate of $1,500 per year if you want all five boroughs: not a trivial expense to small projects like Gotham Gazette.

Romalewski argues that we shouldn't have to ask for data--that most of what city agencies aggregate belongs in the public domain. I'm with him there, and curious as I am to see what comes out of NYC Big Apps, I'm not convinced that the contest going to help put city data in the public domain in New York City.

I don't know whether or not the legislation currently sitting in committee is the answer we need, but I do know that New York City is not alone in needing far better access to the data that civil servants use and aggregate in the course of their work. I also don't think that simply providing us with the raw data is enough -- but at least it's the bare minimum we need to fill the role of government watchdog.

By the way, if you want that list of under-publicized city data, skip to the comments in Romalewski's post.

In the United States, high-end smartphones like the iPhone and BlackBerry don't have built-in radios. But in Pakistan, even the cheapest cell phones, which don't have cameras or other features, come with the ability to listen to FM radio. Every day, and especially during cricket matches, people walk the streets with their phones pressed to their ears, tuned into their local stations, according to Huma Yusuf, a journalist based in Pakistan.

In Pakistan and other countries in the developing world, mobile phones are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. In June 2009, Pakistan had 94.3 million mobile subscribers, or about 58 percent of the population, according to the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority, a government agency. Mobile phones have become a popular way to tune into radio, a medium that has proven to be a powerful force for democratization and civil society. Although it's not clear what impact mixing cell phones and radio will have, it promises to be a powerful combination.

The evolving relationship between cell phones and radios was one of the subjects of a recent report by LIRNEasia, a think tank that studies ICT policy in the Asia Pacific. The most surprising finding was that in three of the countries studied -- Bangladesh, India and Pakistan -- more people own mobile phones than radios, according to Ayesha Zainudeen, research manager and demand side specialist at LIRNEasia. About 24% of people in Pakistan own radios, according to the study.

The study found that roughly 7% of people in Pakistan listen to radio on their phones. However, Zainudeen said the study likely underreported the number of listeners. In 10,000 face-to-face interviews conducted by researchers, people reported that families will often share a single phone, meaning multiple people could be using it to listen to the radio. This type of use was not counted in the study.

Traffic Reports Cover Urban Warfare

In Pakistan, where radio stations operate under state restrictions, radio operators will find creative ways to share useful information, according to Yusuf. "We have a poor government licensing department," said Yusuf. "There's a lot of stuff that happens, so they forget and don't realize they need to shut something down."

Radio stations have used traffic reports, which are permitted by the government, as a means of reporting gang violence, looting and other unsafe conditions. Yusuf detailed this practice in an article:

The radio journalist Waqar Azmat advised drivers to avoid the area known as Gurumandir, "because the conditions there are not good, there is no traffic in the area." A few minutes later, at 2:26 p.m., he returned to the airwaves to say, "traffic on Shaheed-e-Millat Road is very bad, as it is on Sharah-e-Faisal. There's madness all the way until Tipu Sultan Road. Drivers should choose their routes carefully so that they don't become victims of bad traffic."

Descriptions of traffic became code for urban warfare and violence, warning listeners about where it wasn't safe to travel or be outdoors.

Dueling Radio Stations

In the future, Yusuf thinks the combination of radio and cell phones could become especially interesting in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). "This is the place where radio can have most explosive impact," she said.

Currently, the Taliban has about 150 illegal FM radio stations in the area. The Pakistani government is considering allowing other stations in order to counter the Taliban. "That legislation is expected soon," said Yusuf. "If that passes, I think that lots of incredible things will happen."

Though the government is unlikely to allow community radio stations across the country -- Yusuf said they fear the power of local reporting -- it recognizes the role that community radio stations could have in fighting the Taliban. The Obama administration has also supported the use of cell phones and radio in this area. "The way Obama phrased it is that we're losing the information war against the Taliban," said Yusuf.

As more people in Pakistan and the rest of the developing world listen to radio on their mobiles, the growing number of listeners could have a potentially disruptive, and democratizing, impact. Most likely, these listeners won't just be tuning in to hear cricket scores.

This article originally appeared on MobileActive.org

Photo of cricket game by Pete Meade via Flickr.

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 same proposal has been roundly condemned by people whose knee-jerk reaction is that government money means government control. For this camp, government control engenders the oxymoron of "government journalism." Ergo, a bailout is not a solution for saving an industry that's central to democracy because its independence allows it to question government.

Fear of government money for media is not universal. Many democracies, notably in the Francophone world, have long-standing traditions of public funds for the press, without compromising editorial independence. Sweden subsidizes second papers in small towns so as to preserve a degree of pluralism. Scores of democracies have fine public broadcasters that receive parts of their budget by way of the state. Even the US hasn't been entirely hostile to publicly funded journalism -- as shown by entities like PBS and NPR.

A further point is that an American tradition of keeping state and media finances separate ought not to be seen as ossified and frozen in time. Cultural change happens, period.

So, moving beyond emotional reaction and self-imposed limitations on what's possible, there's a need to look more closely at what it means to have the government giving funds to the press. (For a look at various proposals to change U.S. laws to help newspaper companies, check out this story by Jeffrey Neuburger at MediaShift.)

Political Influence

In the U.S., the concern seems to be mainly about the blurring of boundaries between political power and the private economics of providing public information. The worry is about opening a channel for political power to influence a realm that has historically treasured its independence of the state.

Some might say, with cause, that much of this independence is more myth than reality. In their analysis, the press has generally been uncritically aligned with the two-party political duopoly and with the spin of corporations whose lobby strength anyway determines governmental policy and practice.

Yet even if newspapers to an extent have been in cahoots with established power, that's not been a formally imposed requirement of their institutional make-up. So, it's not a small matter to worry whether government money would turn out to be a government leash on relatively independent watchdogs.

This concern is why a number of commentators have proposed forms of government aid that stop short of direct cash injections. These range from tax breaks and postal subsidies to guarantees of state advertising.

Governments can play tangential (and impartial) roles that can benefit the newspaper industry at large. But while everything helps, there is still the key question of funding. So, how dangerous is it really, and can systems be designed to avoid political control coming with cash?

South African Case Study

The case of South Africa's public broadcaster is salutary in this regard. When the country won democracy in 1994, it needed to transform a noxious governmental mouthpiece into an impartial and independent public broadcaster.

To that end, the power to appoint members to the board of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) was put into the hands of parliament and a charter setting out political independence was enshrined in legislation. Although the institution was later corporatized, with the state as sole shareholder as represented by the Minister of Communications, its board still reported mainly to Parliament and to a constitutionally independent regulator.

Some small sums of taxpayers' funds went into SABC over the years, but the bulk of its budget was met through advertising. In consequence, rather than meeting the lofty criteria of public service broadcasting, much of its programming output was indistinguishable from commercial broadcasting -- but the institution at least was not a government mouthpiece.

Two years ago, this model began to unravel when the ruling African National Congress (ANC) asserted political control over what it saw as a potential government apparatus. As the dominant party, it was able to railroad its choice of board members through parliament. The Minister of Communications also assumed the power of final say (as shareholder representative) over the top executive appointments at SABC.

But then the ANC fractured. And so too did the SABC, with different elements within the agency supporting different factions. In short, a previously politically independent institution fell prey to utter politicization. In the resulting infighting, what had been a viable commercial enterprise was mismanaged into near bankruptcy. The result today is pressure on the South African government to bail out the SABC to the tune of almost $300 million.

The moral of this story is multi-fold:

> Despite best intentions, it is pretty hard to design a politically fire-proof system.

> Furthermore, it was the fact of state ownership -- not governmental funding as such -- that allowed for political interference.

> The likelihood of a bailout could further reduce autonomy at the broadcaster, because any institution receiving taxpayer money needs to account closely to the representatives of the payers.

That's not to say that the government will use this new relationship for political purposes, but it's also not to say that it won't. The bigger point is that there is no structural counter-balance which could check and limit its potential to do so.

Bringing in Accountability

What could make a difference in South Africa would be to institutionalize an accountability system that includes public constituencies over and above the political ones of the minister and parliament.

This could be by restructuring the board to follow the European practice of constituencies -- like labor, churches, universities, cultural groupings, etc. -- directly electing representatives separately from the politicians. It could also be through setting up standing fora for citizens in general.

Overall, the potential of SABC to survive as an independent public broadcaster will be a function of the civic culture of South Africa. Fortunately, there are numerous and vocal civil voices who increasingly form an alternative pole of influence to political power.

How is all this significant to the matter of public funds, administered by government, going to newspapers in the U.S.?

It goes without saying that any such injections ought not to reward managers who failed to reinvent newspapering nor to benefit external shareholders who condoned bad business decisions like over-leveraging and huge debt ratios.

Neither should there be support for particular papers at the expense of damaging competitors who do not qualify for aid. It is also self-evident that any state funding should be conditional on attempts to create a new business models, rather than shoring up one that no longer works.

But there's also the question of how potential recipients would account for their use of public funds, which returns us to the thorny issue of political pipers calling the tune.

If South Africa's experience is anything to go by, then the answer lies in civil society coming to the fore. The U.S. has a fine tradition of citizen participation, and the consequential slogan should be: "No bailouts without direct representation in governance."

If the price of a newspaper getting taxpayer money is opening up newspaper governance to some form of external accountability, then let this be to more than just government.

Editorial independence in this model may be more constrained as compared to previously. But at the very least there would still be newspapers around to practice journalism -- and a journalism that is not tainted by exclusive governmental power.

By becoming accountable to broader society, some newspapers might also benefit in ways other than just keeping politicians off their backs. They could rediscover public and civic journalism as values in their own right -- as well as recognize the community as an important component of inventing themselves anew. The result could be the enrichment of newspaper journalism as a sustainable pillar of democracy.

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Whether this is about a "growing dependence on the state to provide everything" or just people getting on with their lives -- getting involved takes a lot of time -- is not clear.

Bowling Alone

What has caused this South African equivalent of "bowling alone"? In Robert Putnam's 2000 book, "Bowling Alone: the Collapse and Revival of American Community," the author rails against the how social capital in the U.S., which he describes as "the very fabric of our connections with each other," has plummeted in just one generation.

Putnam came to his conclusions about declining levels of social capital from studies of membership of organizations of all kinds, interest in politics (even the signing of petitions has fallen, his study found) and, surprisingly, the amount of time spent with family and friends. Putnam's bogeymen in terms of this mass disengagement of the social are urban sprawl, television, and the rise of the Internet.

Is it the same in South Africa? Why are studies and scenario exercises picking up on a decline in civic activism, participation in clubs, trade unions, political parties and so on?

To trying to figure this out, and do something about it, at least in one small town. That's part of the Iindaba Ziyafika (isiXhosa for "the news is coming") project, run out of the School for Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. The core proposition of Iindaba Ziyafika is that information and communication technology can enlarge the public sphere by providing the tools that encourage participation and facilitate that participation.

News by SMS

To achieve this, step one has to been to build a content management system, known as Nika, which allows people to send in news and information about what is happening in their communities through SMS. This information is published on the website and in the newspaper of Grocott's Mail, South Africa's oldest independent newspaper. (Grocott's recently relaunched their website, built to receive content from Nika. The site is served from Grocott's office, off a module called THATHA, which is a set of tightly integrated Drupal-based templates for publishing to the web).

Nika (isiXhosa for "to give") is proving its worth. Built on Drupal, it allows any community newspaper to receive SMS messages directly into the newspaper's workflow. By translating SMS messages through a special modem and some clever coding, the messages appear as text in the editor's inbox. Story tips or even full stories can be sent by ordinary people, who do not have access to email or the internet.

The system has been tested at Grocott's Mail for almost year, and is currently being tested at three other community newspapers. It will be available with some installation guidance and operating manuals to any community newspaper who wants to try it out by September 2009. (Watch this space for details of downloads.)

Nika's ability to receive messages from citizens directly into a newspaper's news feed gives ordinary people a voice they might not have had. For example, when teachers at a Grahamstown school went on strike and threatened the life of the school principal, a learner at that school sent Grocott's a message, alerting them to this crisis. Grocott's was able to send a reporter to investigate more deeply, bringing a dire situation to public notice.

Having got the technology in place, the next step is to link the issues to a sense of what can be done and citizen involvement.

GOING BEYOND TECHNOLOGY -- INSPIRING ACTION

For Iindaba Ziyafika, this raises a raft of questions about the limits of "conventional" journalism, the nature of developmental journalism (or journalism for development) and, indeed, about the very paradigms in which journalism is practiced. What is becoming clear is that South African media have to find ways to go beyond just raising the issues, towards framing issues and challenging people to make choices.

Part of the answer to increased participation may lie in more vigorous journalism that is committed to exposing and explaining issues in ways that make more sense to ordinary people and which invite reaction and participation.

What are the main issues in local government? What decisions have to made and when? Where can people participate and what choices are there? Can we enlarge the set of options we need to choose from?

If local media is not going help answer these questions, who will do it? Political parties and organs of participation -- such as ratepayers associations and community crime forums -- don't generally do a good job of this, for various reasons. Indeed, they very often rely on the media to help them make sense of the issues.

A good example of this was a report in Grocott's Mail that the municipality had decided to spend R800,000 on new traffic lights at a critical road junction. This sparked debate in the newspaper's letters page, with some contributions coming through the Nika-based SMS line, about alternative plans the council may not have considered, including the creation of a pedestrian-only area in the center of town.

Grocott's Mail provided a venue and facilitated a live discussion among citizens that examined various proposals. It ran stories about a previous (disastrous) attempt to do the same thing years ago, something the council did not seem aware of.

Underlying much of this is a clash between generally poor pedestrians and their needs and wealthier car-drivers. This seemingly simple issue raised issues around creating a common interest as well as a solution that would be to the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

But despite its new level of involvement, the newspaper's coverage highlighted what is generally lacking in civic news in South Africa: the news was about a decision already made. In addition to being about a fait accompli, the news itself was presented neutrally: It was left entirely up to citizens to write in with the new idea of the pedestrian mall.

How can we think about this differently in the future? The paper and the website could have, for example, run a poll on people's views, or framed alternative choices. In an area where unemployment is above the 50% mark, surely the R800,000 could be put to better use creating jobs: having humans direct traffic is a venerable African tradition.

At a local level, there is a strong case that the job of newspapers and their websites should be to alert people in advance about choices to be made, to help frame issues and explain what is at stake. Or is that an abrogation of conventional journalism's neutral "we'll call it the way we see it, and nothing more" approach?

GETTING JOURNALISTS AND CITIZENS INVOLVED

My view is that without the media making initial sense of what is at issue, of where and when interventions could be made and what the possible choices are, the feared decline in popular participation in decision-making is more likely to come true.

To make a difference, Grocott's, particularly in its most recent online reincarnation, is going to work much more actively to identify upcoming issues of importance to citizens and create forums, through cell phones, that alert people not just to issues, but also to their options in terms of those issues. Otherwise, we run the risk of being disempowering, rather than inspiring.

Doing these kinds of things will require a great effort by journalists and citizen journalists to interpret and explain issues. And there will be a related greater effort to reflect on opinions and even gather those opinions using cell phone-based technology.

To this end, Grocott's will look at ways of alerting citizens to critical issues well in advance of decisions about them. Online, we'll run more polls and SMS voting lines. As importantly, will work out new ways to ensure that decision-makers know what the results are of all these efforts. Hopefully they'll pay heed to what their constituents' views are (and if they don't, we'll let the public know that).

It will also be important to work more closely with other media channels, such as community radio, and it may even be necessary to create more spaces for meetings and maybe even step into the realm of calling meetings.

By doing all of this, Grocott's and Iindaba Ziyafika will continue to be a laboratory for the fusing of new technology and a fresh approach to framing issues and motivating public response and participation. We have to demonstrate better ways for the public to get involved in local democracy.

If successful, the model might be replicated all over South Africa and further afield, and be able to make a contribution to better governance in South Africa and Africa. It will allow us, to extend the bowling metaphor, to arrive at the bowling alleys together and to play the same game. But the first step is working out what that game is.

Once we've done that, we're on the path to talking to each other about solutions.

A breaking-news example is the ugly case of Lori Drew, in which a federal judge is in the process of rescuing us from a prosecutor whose legal theories would have created criminals of just about everyone who ever signed up for just about anything online. The judge said last week he's overturning a jury verdict that prosecutors won by abusing the law while appealing to emotion.

The case is ugly not only because of the law-enforcement overreach, however. It started that way because of Drew's actions. She was a ringleader in a cruel online hoax against a teenaged girl in Missouri, Megan Meier, that may well have contributed to the girl's suicide. (See the Citizen Media Law Project's compendium for details.)

Boiling it down, Drew, whose daughter was fighting with Meier, and several others created a bogus MySpace account for a fictitious teenaged boy who wooed and then rejected Meier. It was a heartless act, and Drew and her helpers deserve at least contempt if not a civil lawsuit.

Using Hacking Law

Officials in Missouri had no cause for criminal action, however. But federal prosecutors hauled Drew off to Los Angeles and tried her for violating a federal law, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which had been used in the past to go after hackers who'd plundered others' computers for financial gain. Using a computer, prosecutors said, Drew had:

intentionally accessed and caused to be accessed a computer used in interstate commerce, namely, the MySpace servers located in Los Angeles County, California, within the Central District of California, without authorization and in excess of authorized access, and, by means of interstate commerce obtained and caused to be obtained information from that computer to further tortious acts, namely intentional infliction of emotional distress on [Meier].

As the Citizen Media Law Project reiterated last week, Drew's alleged crime was, boiled down to the actual law as opposed to the emotional element of the case, "nothing other than failing to submit 'truthful and accurate' registration information when creating a MySpace profile. She would have been no less liable for misstating her height."

Think about this. Is there anyone using online registration systems who has always, without exception, given utterly accurate information? As the judge explained in his ruling, allowing Drew's verdict to stand would make everyone who's ever violated a terms of service, no matter how minor the violation, guilty of a crime as well.

The prosecutor, Thomas P. O'Brien, didn't care. As Wired News reported, he was proud of himself. Sure, he said, using the CFAA was "a risk," but his office "will always take risks on behalf of children."

The larger risk was, in fact, to liberty. O'Brien's willingness to twist a law to serve even a well-meaning end deserves contempt, not praise, because he's supposed to know better.

So, one might imagine, would a member of Congress. One would be wrong. Rep. Linda Sanchez, a California Democrat, has praised O'Brien for his overreach even as she urges passage of her federal legislation against "cyberbullying" -- a bill that could looks like a dramatic overreach of its own.

Make no mistake. What Drew did was despicable. But what the federal prosecutor did was, in its own way, just as bad.