Blogs

"Social Innovation Hacktivism" - my slides from Social Innovation and Social Media (SISoM2011)

The  Deterritorial Support Group (DSG) have written a must-read post called 'Twenty reasons why it’s kicking off in cyberspace'. It's a necessary close reading of recent dynamics among political hackers which highlights the emergence of a social cyberwar alongside the Arab Spring. I hope their text inspires more people in social movements to pay attention to hacktivism.

On the other hand, it behoves hackers and their supporters to connect more directly to the social movements on the ground. For one, it is a dualism to separate online and offline; while the internet establishes certain conditions of possibility it is not immaterial and neither are the hacktivists themselves. To carry on talking about cyberspace without being explicit about it's connection both to the bedroom and the street is unhelpful.

Secondly and more practically is the hard-won experience of social movements around defendants campaigns. Back in the day, I pointed out that "you'll know social media is making a social difference when people start getting arrested for it". What I see in the Lulzsec press releases is an intoxicated mishief making but no sense of the sheer brutality that The Man is capable of. After a popular carnival of creative opposition to the Poll Tax was converted into a pitched battle by police heavy-handedness, wise heads realised that the next step would be to blame & arrest the protesters. So they set up the Trafalgar Square Defendants Campaign, an agile, nationwide and community-based movement of legal defence for people being railroaded in to court. (Sadly, being a pre-digital social movement, it's history is yet-to-be written online).

I think we can see a similar evolution around Anonymous; as Spain arrests Anonymous suspects a Facebook group emerges which seems to be calling for solidarity demos. I'm not saying we should stamp the Lulz out of activism - the cheeky communique has been a feature of political activism from the Angry Brigade to anti-globalization.  The hope is that the savvy around solidarity becomes stronger as online & offline social movements intertwine more closely.

The overlap seems to be accelerating. One part of the 'splintered politicisation' of Anonymous observed by the DSG is the appearance of an Op against Monsanto - so hacktivism joins a movement who's main prior activism has been the very embodied and sweaty work of pulling up GM crops by day or night.

And as DSG rightly call on us to master seemingly-immaterial tools like diaspora, flattr and bitcoin, others have taken a tip from the complete Internet shutdown in Egypt and are busy trying to cook up alternative network infrastructures. How do we best merge these efforts with older infrastructures of legal defence and solidarity?

Smashed PCs and blood stains: Images from the police raid on the Diaz School, Genoa 2001

I'll be doing the keynote talk in July at the First International Workshop on Social Innovation and Social Media (SISoM 2011). Here's my abstract - comments welcome (help make my talk better - the workshop participants will thank you!)

Social Innovation Assemblages

This talk interrogates the link between social innovation and social media through the idea of assemblages, as developed by Deleuze & Guattari and later by de Landa. Starting with the rapid prototyping and radical interdisciplinarity of Social Innovation Camps I will examine the hybridity of social media in social innovation, and it's expression in the crisis camp response to Haiti's earthquake. I will theorise this digitally-enabled social innovation as the dynamic destruction and reassembling of practices heralded by an ontology of assemblages, in particular the 'relationships of exteriority' that mean it's impossible to predict in advance the capacities of a particular combination of entities. I will draw out the practical implications for policy, in particular the replacement of modelling with concrete experimentation as well as the need for agile policy making. As I will be freshly returning from Social Innovation Camps in Kyrgyzstan and Sarajevo I will make a preliminary ethnographical report of those experiments and the contention that 'social innovation' also implies an innovation of the social based on a renewed sense of agency. In conclusion I will draw on this work to propose approaches to speed and scale for social innovation.

The video and slides from my presentation at CityCamp Brighton, March 5th 2011. It draws on case studies from Egypt's revolution, open data experiments and the NHS to propose hybrids of social movements & service organisations. The critical framework is largely drawn from Deleuze & Guattari and the proposal for practical solutions are digital-social assemblages building on Social Innovation Camp & Crisis Camps.

abstract:

This paper argues that this use of pre-digital technologies to form the kinds of infrastructure afforded by modern social technologies is evidence of a radical change in people’s perceptions of their world and its connectedness. Social media has constituted a real change that goes beyond specific technologies. This flies in the face of many sceptical critics who argue that new technologies only reinforce old practices and social structures.

This view of the effects of social media presents a challenge to its study. Technological studies and formal analyses of relationships inscribed in social networks will never be able to capture fully the way people understand and interact with these technologically-enabled structures.

In this paper, I use the internet shutdown in Egypt to raise issues that I believe need to be considered in analysing the influence of social media on social movements. I discuss how existing models need to become hybridic, heterogeneous and responsive to the grassroots appropriation of technology, especially the future creation of alternatives to the corporate internet. In conclusion, I analyse the phrase 'Egypts Facebook Youth' as the emblem of social media's impact.

Social Media and Activism

The role of social media in enabling social protest has been the subject of significant commentary, especially since the so-called 'Twitter Revolutions' in Moldova in April 2009 and in Iran in June 2009. Widepsread coverage was given to Malcolm Gladwell's article in The New Yorker which dismissed the role of Twitter in Iran ('Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted') and to Evgeny Morozov's book 'The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom' which articulated a number of reasons why social media is potentially more useful to autocratic regimes than to citizens or activists. Researchers like Ethan Zuckerman have attempted to resolve the debate in specific cases through an analysis of relevant Twitter data sets without being able to draw definitive conclusions.

I've been involved in spreading both practical social media skills and a critical framework for their deployment in social change. In 2009 I led a workshop in Riga where Sami Ben Gharbia, a leading Tunisian exile and online activist, shared his skills and experiences with civil society activists from across Central and Eastern Europe. Sami is co-founder of nawaat, a Tunisian collective blog which was a key online aggregator during the overthrow of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011. As a participant in the eCampaigning Forum I see the frustration of practitioners who feel that their nuanced efforts to use social media for positive social change are overridden by the aforementioned cyber-skepticism or recuperated by the State Department to be used as a tool for US foreign policy My contention is that social media is neither the cause of major change, nor irrelevant to it; but that it's impact is most powerful in cementing new ways of thinking and acting based on connectedness.

Events in Egypt

The young opposition in Egypt as been using social media to organise since the 'Kifaya' (Enough) movement in 2004. According to researcher Jillian C. York of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard,

“demonstrators were seen pre-planning online strategy nearly a week prior to January 25. Egyptians on Twitter discussed the best hashtag to use days in advance, settling on #jan25, while the hundreds of thousands of members of the “We are all Khaled Said” group on Facebook collected e-mail addresses in a Google Doc in case of a Facebook ban. As the demonstrations got underway, members of that same Facebook group posted updates from around the Web, sharing videos, photographs, and first-hand accounts.”

At the time of writing 659,627 people had signed up to the “We are all Khaled Said” Facebook page and 35,995 were signed up to the “January 25 Revolution Day on torture, poverty, corruption and unemployment” which was also used to organise for the demonstrations. On January 25^th hundreds of thousands of people gathered for peaceful protests in Tahrir Square in Cairo and in other cities around Egypt.

According to activist and technologist Ahmad Gharbeia “The role of the internet was critical at the beginning. On the 25th, the movements of the protesting groups were arranged in real time through Twitter. Everyone knew where everyone else was walking and we could advise on the locations of blockades and skirmishes with police.”

The Cut-Off

On the first day of protest on January 25^th 2011, reports began to emerge of interference with the online social networks that were being used to coordinate the demonstrators. Despite denials from an Egyptian Government spokesman, Twitter put a message on its official PR stream saying that use was being restricted:

"Egypt continues to block Twitter & has greatly diminished traffic. However, some users are using apps/proxies to successfully tweet”.

Indeed, some people in Egypt were quick to discover ways to circumvent the blocks. It emerged that the mobile version of the Opera browser used a proxy server to reformat web pages, thus enabling people to evade the block on specific sites. The first pragmatic deconstruction of the social web was visible, as people circulated direct IP addresses for Twitter and Facebook. For people in the central Tahrir ('Liberation') Square, the situation was more difficult, as reports came in that mobile reception was also being blocked and Vodafone subsequently stated that they complied with an order from the Egyptian authorities to to suspend services in selected areas. It was reported on social media that residents around Tahrir square removed the passwords on their wifi routers so protesters could reach the outside world.

Over the following days the circumvention efforts became more systematic, building on the base of knowledge within the human rights community about tools like Tor (a network of virtual tunnels that hides the connection between a user and the website they are viewing). By keeping some of the network entry points hidden, Tor is also able to evade many internet censorship systems. The Tor project reported on January 30^th that “Over the last three days, 120,000 people — most of them Egyptian — have downloaded Tor software”. The Tor project was a platform for participatory solidarity as word spread across the social web of the need for people to run Tor relays and bridges on their computers, and graphs on the Tor blog show the dramatic rise in the number of bridges around the world after 25^th January.

However, on 27th January 2011 the government of Egypt took the unprecedented step of shutting off internet access for the entire country. In a statement that day, the internet monitoring firm Renesys reported:

“In an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet...At 22:34 UTC (00:34am local time), Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet's global routing table. Approximately 3,500 individual BGP routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt's service providers. Virtually all of Egypt's Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide”.

The graph of Globally Reachable Egyptian Networks against Time on Jan 27^th shows Egypt falling off the the Internet. Examining the above data in detail, the Renesys analysis concludes “this sequencing looks like people getting phone calls, one at a time, telling them to take themselves off the air. Not an automated system that takes all providers down at once; instead, the incumbent leads and other providers follow meekly one by one until Egypt is silenced”. As the former White House Deputy Chief Technology Officer (& former Google executive) Andrew McLaughlin wrote:

“Since the internet age dawned in the early 90s, no widely connected country had disconnected itself entirely. The starkness and suddenness of Egypt's reversal – from unrestricted to unreachable – marks one of the many tragedies of the Mubarak regime's brutal and hamfisted response to last week's emergence of citizen protests”.

Google's own Transparency Report (which provides information about traffic to their services from around the world) shows the drop off late on Jan 27^th and the flatline on Jan 28^th in a graph which has uncanny similarities to the signal trace on a cardiac monitor.

The only ISP to stay connected was Noor Group, the connection provider for the Egyptian Stock Exchange. A few people connected via Noor were able to provide some net access to their fellow citizens until Noor, too, was taken completely offline in the evening of 31^st January^.

The Response

People inside and outside of Egypt collaborated to re-create the missing networks using the still-available technologies of landlines, dial-up and ham radio. The mainstay of this effort was analogue: setting up international numbers for users in Egypt to connect via dial-up modems. Some ISPs, like FDN in France, offered free access to Egyptians specifically in response to the government's actions, and internet activist groups like Telecomix set up modem links and circulated lists of dialup numbers. On their blog they report their experiences:

“No data was flowing. As the phone lines were working, this was the solutions: Modems. Technology form the last millenium lying dusty in some boxes. We built them in our computers and reactivated them. Some of us still had them working. We set up servers which could answer modem calls via landline. Many of the Telecomix agents who were setting up this were even not born when this technology was considered modern and they had to do many hours of try and error till they got them up and running. Some touched their first modem on these very days.”

Telecomix was also at the forefront of experimenting with much older technologies as a way to re-establish horizontal communications with people in Egypt, such as ham radio:

“#SOS Please avoid #hamradio transmissions near 7080.8 kHz #cw transmit frequency, esp. region 1. Listening for #egypt. #dx #swl #hamr”

They established a fax-to-web bridge which would receive faxed messages from Egypt, remove header lines which might identify the sender's location, and publish the content to their main web page. While it is not clear if any faxes were received, it seems clear that the ham radio option wasn't viable for the situation in Egypt.

Another pre-web technology being used during the internet blackout was the Bulletin Board System, or BBS. This system for exchanging news and messages allows users to connect and log in directly over a phone line using a modem, and uses different technical protocols to the TCP/IP of the internet to network BBSs:

“Block web 2.0 - counter with Net 1.0 - BBS networks springing up in #egypt to connect people - it's the 1980's all over again.”

Even when a part of the Internet is shutdown, the social web can give agency to the savvy user. John Scott-Railton is a graduate student at University of California with a network of personal friends in Egypt. When their social media was shut off, he phoned them for updates and posted them online at his Twitter account @Jan25voices. When the mobile networks were blocked, he drew up a list of people he knew with landlines. Even when many journalists were struggling to report from the ground there were live updates from Jan25voices – as Scott says

"Some of the updates I was getting were from people's aunts standing at the window, holding their phone out so I could hear what was happening"

A parallel piece of corporate innovation was the speak2tweet collaboration between Google and Twitter. On January 25^th, Google acquired SayNow, a company with a set of services that connected phone calls and social media. Following Egypt's Internet shutdown, engineers from Google and Twitter collaborated to create speak2tweet which allowed Egyptians with phone access to leave a voice message on the SayNow site. A link to the message is automatically tweeted on the Twitter feed @speak2tweet.This also spawned a crowdsourced translation effort – people entered the translations on a google doc and they were posted on the site 'Alive in Egypt'^.

The Internet in Egypt crackled back to life on February 2^nd 2011, the day after Hosni Mubarak's first defiant post-protest broadcast. Quite why Internet services were restored at the same time that the regime was implementing a violent crack-down was a source of confusion to many observers. This chart of Egyptian Internet traffic from Arbor Networks shows the return as being as dramatic as the cut-off.

The Lessons

Even when the backbone supporting the social networks had been stripped away, people inside & outside Egypt strove to sustain sustain social communications with determination and creativity. Indeed, they sought to craft point-to-point analogue technologies like modems and landlines (and even fax & ham radio) in to a substitute, as well as a bridge back to the rest of the Internet. This approach suggests a radical change in people’s perceptions of their entitlement to connectedness. Social media has constituted a real change that goes beyond specific technologies, flying in the face of many sceptical critics who argue that new technologies only reinforce old practices and social structures.

Arguments over whether a particular social change would have happened in the absence of social media are somewhat sterile; there is no experimentally controlled comparison where we can re-run a revolution without Twitter. But more importantly those arguments fail to go to the core of the impact i.e. that social media has changed the global sense of entitlement to real-time peer-to-peer communication within fluid networks of association.

There are parallels with the unfolding impact of open source software, where the practical affordances of a technology form leveraged a wider impact for ideas of 'openness' (such as open innovation and open data). Internet scholar Wendy Seltzer comments on the Egyptian shutdown by drawing a parallel with the layers model of the Internet protocol.

“We also see that the Internet is not any particular means of data transport. The independence of layers means that applications don’t care what the route underneath looks like, so long as there is one. That meant that even cutting off Internet service providers couldn’t stop information flows: while Egyptians could call out from the country, they could tell their stories at @jan25voices, and through the Google-Twitter-Phone service, @speak2tweet, that automates some of the voice-Twitter connection.”

On the basis of Egypt and other examples, one can say that the social media model of communication now has a social or cultural layer that exists over and above the actual technical platforms that normally facilitate it. This is a generalisation to wider culture of the tendency observed several years ago by anthropologist Jeffrey Juris in his book 'Networking Futures: the Movements against Corporate Globalization' that networking practices

“form part of an innovative mode of radical political practice that has to be understood in the context of an increasing confluence between network norms, forms, and technologies. It is important to point out that, when I talk about networking practices, I am not only referring to the use of digital technologies, but also to new forms of organizational practice. Activist networking practices are both physical and virtual, and they are frequently associated with emerging political imaginaries. It is precisely the interaction between network technologies, network-based organizational forms, and network-based political norms that characterizes radical activism”.

For those of us who have experience of both community mobilisation and social media, this doesn't come as a surprise. Networks are common to social media and to every aspect of social and business life, and it is the disruptive interplay of networked technology and business & social networks which is opening up new possibilities of social impact. The elements of participatory innovation observable in events following the shutdown of the Internet in Egypt have characteristics in common with Crisis Camps (e.g. the crowdsourced and social web-enabled response to the earthquake in Haiti) and our Social Innovation Camps (which bring together interdisciplinary self-organised teams to hack web-based solutions to social problems in 48 hours).

Future Research

This view of the effects of social media presents a challenge to its study. Technological studies and formal analyses of relationships inscribed in current social network platforms will never be able to capture fully the way people understand and interact with these technologically-enabled structures. What follows are issues that we believe need to be considered in analysing the impact of social movements. We also discuss how existing models need to become hybridic, heterogeneous and responsive to the grassroots appropriation of technology.

The first challenge is the fluid online-offline way these networks work. Restricting an analysis of relationships or dynamics to an online data set neglects the 'dark matter' of offline interactions that are necessary to make sense of the whole. While this is true in general, it becomes even more so when the trajectories of interaction leap from Twitter to mobile phone to street and back again.

Grasping social media in the context of social change also means appreciating the intent of the participants. In the same way that the embedded ethnography of Danah Boyd (PDF) cut through the haze around youth and social networks created by the collision of Pew Research and media punditry, there's a need for participant observation at the interface between social media and social impact. The overlap of social movements and the social web has generated is a tendency for near-real time reflexivity, where participants reflect openly on their experiences and tactics, as exemplified by the Twitter-based debriefs of the UK Uncut activists organised around the hashtag #ukuncutdb. Jeffrey Juris reports that

“contemporary social movements are increasingly “self-reflexive,” as evidenced by the countless networks of knowledge production, debate, and exchange among global justice activists, including listserves, Internet forums, radical theory groups, activist research networks, etc.”

I have observed similar reflexivity in the online movement of #jan25 (the hashtag for the Egyptian uprising).

Retrospective studies of situations like Egypt and Tunisia also need to address the framing bias of pseudo-public spaces like Facebook and YouTube. Technology and policy choices strongly affect the way they are used in community mobilization. This ranges from citizen media videos being removed from YouTube due to 'violent content' that violates the Terms of Service, to the repeated suspension of activists by Facebook for not complying with the “real name” policy for their own safety.

All these challenges may converge if trends catalysed by the Egyptian shutdown come to fruition. Galvanized by the shutdown, a group of tech entrepreneurs started the OpenMesh Project which aims to create with ad hoc mesh networking solutions in a city where the Internet backbone and mobile networks have been silenced. Conversations along similar lines can be observed across blogs and social media (see, for example, the comment thread in the aforementioned Tor post). These initatives and the use of BBS in Egypt echo the call by author Douglas Rushkoff to abandon the current Internet on the basis that it has been surrendered to centralised corporate control. Presciently, he called for a new net of 'the commons' that learns from BBSs and deploys overlapping meshes, ham radio and telephony.

Recognising that if any of this happens it will be as part of a convergence of technology with cultural forms, we can propose that critical frameworks drawing on mesh models will be useful to future analysis. For example, de Landa has developed the idea of meshworks (PDF), influenced by the theoretical work of Deleuze and Guattari. “Meshworks are based on decentralized decision making...self-organization, and heterogeneity and diversity... It can be said they follow the dynamics of life, developing through their encounter with their environments (by “drift”), although conserving their basic structure.”

Conclusions from Tahrir Square

The mis-translation of a protester's sign from Tahrir Square encapsulates the argument about the impact of social media. The photo that shows a middle-aged protestor in Tahrir square holding a handwritten sign in Arabic. The only English word on his sign is 'FACEBOOK', in large red letters carfeully highlighted in black. Many western blog and media outlets published versions of this with the slogan translated as 'Thank you Facebook'. In fact, as I have verified with correspondents in the Egyptian diaspora, the correct translation is 'Thank you, Egypt's Facebook youth'. The gulf between these sentiments is huge; the wrong translation elevates the technology, whereas the real one identifies the youth as agents of change. But in labelling them 'Egypt's Facebook youth' it also recognises that they're acting differently to what came before, that their post-deferential dynamism reflects the character of their favoured tool.

And therein lies the visible impact of social media. It doesn't create uprisings or anything else, but it opens up ways of thinking and behaving because it makes thinking and behaving in those ways (horizontally, self-organised) more effective than before. It opens up new fields of possibilities.

(Background: I was invited by UCL Partners to present at an Innovation Diffusion workshop for NHS London)

As Deleuze & Guattari would say, the NHS is a striated space. The quickest way to add innovative 'smooth spaces' is by combining digital tools and social movements. Slides below, full paper attached: comments welcome.

The idea of Digital Reverse Development is an observation and a call to action. It describes the way digitally-enabled social innovations from Brazil, Africa and elsewhere will start to tackle problems in the West. The part that's most visible is the digital: @Ushahidi is moving mainstream, and there's mobile tools from @FrontlineSMS and Android apps from @AppsForGoodCDI. But behind the tech are, as  @giantpandinha says, the social operating systems, the cultural behaviours that drive these innovations from the ground.

Digital Reverse Development is the mutant offspring of reverse innovation and liberation learning. Reverse innovation is a business concept which “...uses developing markets as seedbeds for product innovations to challenge incumbents in world markets” and is a hot topic places like the Harvard Business Review. Liberation learning (a.k.a. critical pedagogy) is exemplified by Paulo Freire, a radical Brazilian educator from the 1960’s who said "There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."

Digital Reverse Development is what you get if you combine new technology with methodologies of participatory development, as in CDI's Apps for Good. What leaks back to the West is innovation from cultures that haven’t lost the idea of community and collective action as much as we have. Innovation from elsewhere allows us to see ourselves differently.

The developing world also has more experience of crisis. Argentina's financial meltdown in 2001 prefigures some of the social consequences hitting Europe following the failures of the banks, and Brazilian favelas are in a permanent state of social crisis. What we know from the developing world is that, in a crisis, people fall back on their informal networks. What do you do in a society which has lost it’s informal networks - can we use digital reverse development to rebuild them? Can we, for example, combine the praxis of Argentina’s neighbourhood assemblies with the UK's emerging hyperlocal sites?

This, then, becomes digitally-enabled community development.  Community development seeks to empower people by providing them with the skills to make changes in their own communities. It involves changing the relationships between ordinary people and people in positions of power. The role of the tech in this is both practical and imaginary. It enables us to organize stuff in the real world, but also to re-imagine how we organize ourselves. The critical edge of Digital Reverse Development moves it beyond the voluntarism of the Big Society to an explicit call for social justice.

Here's a 5-point starter plan to increase Digital Reverse Development  -

1. seed digital social innovation in so-called developing countries via initiatives like Social Innovation Camp and Map Kibera
2. set up structures to encourage reverse digital development, similar to The Ghana Think Tank ("Since 2006, The Ghana Think Tank has been "Developing the First World." Problems collected in the UK and US are sent to a growing network of think tanks in Ghana, Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico, Serbia and Iran. These "Third" World think tanks propose solutions, which are enacted back in the problem-communities, whether the solutions strike us as brilliant or improbable.")
3. build reverse digital development on top of successful South-to-North social innovations such as BRAC
4. encourage the digital imaginary elsewhere through ideas like Afrocyberpunk, and carry out a cultural infection of the Western digerati with proto-movements like #londontropicalismo
5. focus on women, who drive the informal social networks in developing countries and should be central to reverse digital development

Your comments  welcome.

Photo credit: CDI Europe (some rights reserved)

The moment I spotted MentalHealthCamp Toronto I wanted to help make it happen here. Years ago I was a volunteer MIND mental health advocate in the old Hackney Psychiatric Hospital (a former workhouse) which was a schooling in one side of mental health services. Now that I'm an accidental digital innovator I can see the huge potential in a mashup of mental health and digital, which I can’t really put better than the MentalHealthCamp Toronto mission statement :

“We live in a society with access to the newest technologies, open access to information and the possibility to connect through social media and online communities. Our goal for MentalHealthCamp is to ignite conversations around how can we use these technologies to promote better mental health and help improve the lives of people with mental health problems.
Mental health concerns everyone. So if you’re a mental health professional, someone with lived experience of mental health problems, a family member or friend of a person with mental health problems, or have a passion or an interest in the topic, then MentalHealthCamp is for you! MHCTO also welcomes technophiles, change architects and all sorts of social media types.”

In the tradition of our times, MentalHealthCamp UK started with a hashtag (#mhcuk), exchanged in tweets with the organizers of the Toronto camp, and is now working its way into reality.  I hope that #mhcuk will be about positive mental health as much as it’s about mental health problems, which it surely will be as one of the other organizers is Andy Gibson of Mindapples. I also hope that it’ll get gritty and apply digital innovation to some of the more intractable issues around mental health, whether that’s the limitations of statutory care or the stigma of being labelled as ‘mad’. For an idea of topics covered in Toronoto check out their Take Action Videos.

And for me #mhcuk is just a start – an idea generator and constituency builder for the idea of a mental health Social Innovation Camp. There's already been a #sicamp pilot for a specific sector -  the team ran the Jailbrake weekend to find and support great ideas that could break the cycle of youth offending using simple web and mobile tools (see here for the film of the weekend).

There are already pioneering projects exploring the potential of digital for mental health, like Buddy, the social media radio from Sidekick Studios which they're developing with South London and Maudsley Trust. Some studies show that online social support is an effective means of mediating stress and Social Innovation Camp Central & Eastern Europe generated the Betterfly project for psychology first aid. On the other hand, this Psychology of Twitter article asks whether it's supporting self-actualisation or leading to increased narcissism.

Holding a mental health sicamp and extending some prototypes in to really useful working services also fits with my new role at Media for Development and my aspirations for the ways digital innovation at Media for Development can use the untapped potential of media to empower marginalised communities.

But first, #mhcuk. The silos of the mental health scene can only benefit from the peer to peer conversations that’ll  take place at Mental Health Camp UK, and the follow-up could inject a post-digital kind of co-production into the mental health scene. As the folk of MentalHealthCamp Toronto said

“The age of digitization and technology enabled living is here and has catalyzed a new paradigm of participation. Please bring your ideas, questions and open minds as we work on solutions that are possible today and that we are dreaming about for tomorrow.”

At this stage we’re looking for potential venues, potential sponsors, and (of course!) passionate participants. If you are any of the above then please leave a comment, head over to our wiki or join the google group.

photo credit: Lada Brunova

Open data doesn't empower communities. I'm not saying open data is a bad thing, but we need to highlight the gap between the semantic web and social impact. Otherwise we'll continue to get swept along on a tide of technocratic enthusiasm where hope lies in 'a flood of data to create a data-literate citizenry'.

I'm inspired by the idea that nuggets of opened data could seed guerilla public services, plugging gaps left by government, but i don't see any of that in the data.gov.uk apps list. The reasons aren't technical but psychosocial - the people and communities who could use this data to help tackle their own disadvantage and marginalisation don't have the self-confident sense of entitlement that makes for successful civic hacktivism.

So why the big push behind open data and the lack of interest in enabling communities? i think the crude answer is 'bread and circuses'. And anyway, opening up data is a technocrat friendly activity whereas empowering communities is messy and difficult. So we'll continue to be told that we can improve public services and create future economic growth by linking data rather than tackling power.

There are many missing steps between open data & an empowered citizenry that can fulfill David Cameron's claim that “People will be the masters. Politicians the servants. And that’s the way it should be”. It might be useful to contrast the histories of libraries and of Chartism - libraries are a necessary platform for an informed citizenry, but it takes the channeled anger of a social movement to focus that in to historic change.

So which path leads beyond the sterility of SPARQL queries? Part of me says forget the whole thing. In a past life i helped collect data for the NHS, so i know that most government data is fake anyway (massaged beyond recognition as it passes upwards through the layered sphincters of bureaucracy). I'll keep an open mind to the results of the Open Data Impacts survey but i think we should sound the alarm that open data risks becoming (as Becky Hogge says) a kind of cargo cult.

The real struggle, as ever, is on the terrain of meanings. Who will write the narrative that we inhabit? And how much does data actually help here?

Adam Greenfield captures the issue in microcosm when comparing two local crime apps, Asborometer  and SpotCrime NYC:
"In my talks and writing, I frequently argue that 'data' in and of itself is seductive, its dynamic visualization more so, and that we need to be very careful that we don’t get drawn into real-world decisions based on such visualizations without due reflection.... The distinction is between an abstract fear on the one hand, given apparent substance by its inscription in seemingly authoritative numbers, charts and graphs — and the actual texture of street crime on the other, in all its tawdry, banal and occasionally appalling isness. You’re likely to have much more of a sense of agency when confronted with particulars than you would against inchoate percentages. And agency, as far as I’m concerned, is the name of the game".

So either we dump data for narrative, or we 'queer' the data in the full knowledge of its limitations. I'm inspired in that by the counter-cartographies collective (3Cs) who say in their report from a Chicago community mapping workshop:
"One big point of discussion was how to deal with the embedded biopolitics behind data sources like US Census data that we use in our maps — as 3Cs, we often talk about how we ‘queer’ data or statistics by pulling map stories out of them that they weren’t intended for. But data sources often come so tightly bound up with state politics, white supremacist racial policies, definitions of family structure, etc., that queering them might require more conscious work than we always put in".

Open data is not a magic recipe for righting wrongs. What will move things on is the stories that communities tell about their situations and their possible futures. If open data has a part to play in this it will be through the bootstrap empowerment of projects like savvy chavvy,  social startup labs and transition towns.

Although I've only been at Media for Development for a week, I can already see the potential for digital innovation to boost MFD's mission. I hope that a mashup of my background in web & social change and Media for Development's experience of participatory media will produce some pioneering ways to empower marginalised communities. So here's a snapshot of my thinking about where to go and how to get there.

My starting point is the way Media for Development uses participatory media to help transform people's lives. As a digital guy, this seems to me like a good match for the 'maker' meme - people participating in building their own stuff and their own solutions to problems. To my mind, a good starting point for MFD digital projects would be co-creation and the kind of co-design promoted by @thinkpublic and @wearesnook . This can by carried through the technical side of digital projects by appropriating agile development- the tech project methodology that iterates in small stages, keeping the project close to the users and allowing it to adapt as new issues and opportunities emerge.

At the other end, the digital scene is a wellspring of questions about impact and ROI, as embodied by Measurement Camp. The visibilising of social connections that's embedded in the social web makes social network analysis a way in to measuring impact, especially around ideas of social capital. And I expect Social Return On Investment (SROI) will be a useful way to pin numbers to our projects in a way that aligns with MFD's values. Of course, the most powerful way to convey impact is to hear from people themselves and MFD is already expert in the power of narrative.

One of the biggest challenges that faces MFD or anyone trying to build peer to peer support is the investment of time and resources it can take to get self-generating momentum in an online community. My first ideas about tactics is to start with stuff that's simple and useful, and can be applied immediately in people's lives. There were some good examples of this at Jailbrake - an event that applied the Social Innovation Camp approach to making web & mobile services for young people caught up in the criminal justice system. For example, we heard that even a simple text reminder at the right moment can make a difference by helping someone with a fairly chaotic lifestyle make it to their probation appointments.

Daniel from the Nudge Me project at Jailbrake (Photo credit: theps.net)

As one of the founders of Social Innovation Camp, I'd say its approach has a natural fit with media for Development and I'm expecting to draw a lot on @sicamp contacts and experience as I go forward with projects here, including the aim of making enterprises not just projects i.e. innovations that can find a way to be sustainable instead of petering out when the initial funding fades away.

But no statement about strategy would be compete without a 2 by 2 matrix :) so here's mine for MFD-Digital: with communities along one axis and digital along the other, we start with the communities that MFD knows well (e.g. people with experience of prison) and the tech that has already been successful (like the online community of Savvy Chavvy). Innovation on the communities axis means new hard to reach groups, and MFD already has plans to work with military veterans, and with young dad's who are in danger of being excluded from parenthood. Innovation on the digital axis has some straightforward starting points, like mobile and mapping: i've been inspired by the potential of open street mapping to catalyse community mobilisation, and i've already met with frontlinesms to look at ways that toolset can help overcome the digital divide here in the UK. In the future we may convene sicamp / crisis camp style events to catalyse unexpected digital innovations.

At the end of the day, though, it's not about tech but about the potential of digital to enable transformation; a change in people's lives and ultimately in themselves. And also, perhaps, in those of us doing this work. I'm looking forward to reporting irregularly on this journey.