internetartizans's blog

One of the darkest things about war crimes is that most of the perpetrators get away with it. From Pinochet to Serb paramilitaries, the men (& it's mostly men) involved in acts of vile horror carry on with their lives untouched by justice. Will the digital age have any impact on impunity?

If you need convincing about impunity, the Guardian's Datastore has taken the data provided by the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague and compiled a spreadsheet of the cases that have been concluded. Set against the scale and duration of the horror, this is an essay in ineffectiveness. And listen to the women from the Omarska concentration camp recount their experiences on BBC radio. Their job was to clean the torture rooms of skin, teeth, hair; at night they were raped. Having bravely returned her home town of Prijedor, one the muslim women regularly comes face-to-face with her tormentors while the war memorial in the town glorifies the Serb 'war heroes'. I know from personal accounts that the spectacle of the ICTY is wholly failing to bring closure to those who experienced ethnic cleansing.

But behind the horror there's the determination of some women to fight for justice. Having set up an association for women victims of war in Sarajevo, they have also become a detective agency, taking witness statements and tracking down & photographing perpetrators based on 'crowdsourced' identification of the men in the statements - a process that starts to sound a lot like the citizen journalism ushered in by digital tech. What impact could citizen journalism & social reporting have in unblocking the politically-motivated inertia of official war crimes investigations?

(Photo from Calling the Ghosts, A Story about Rape, War and Women by Women Make Movies)

Another challenge is highlighted by the Kenyan election violence of 2007. On the one hand, this was the stimulus for Ushahidi, open source software which uses the lessons learned from Kenya to create a platform that allows anyone around the world to set up their own way to gather reports by mobile phone, email and the web - and map them. Ushahidi has now been used in many critical situations around the world including the first European application at our Social Innovation Camp Central and Eastern Europe by the Map Your Nazi project. Ushahidi is an exemplar of bottom-up digital innovation, but more than 2 years later no-one in Kenya has been prosecuted for the crimes against humanity that it helped to map. It turns out that neither a mashup nor the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court can have much impact on the political forces that trade power for impunity.

My contention is that the real impact of digital comes from it's catalysis of horizontal process, social action that routes around institutional complicity. Could Ushahidi or something like it be used to convene activities of transitional justice - people-powered initiatives that take on the need to confront legacies of mass abuse? I'm not talking about the real-world equivalent of a Twitter lynch mob but holistic additions to criminal prosecutions that promote accountability and create just and peaceful societies. These would need to be more active than digital memorials. Perhaps we should apply the radical transparency of wikileaks to the archive of the war crimes court for the former Yugoslavia and pipe the results through citizen-up initiatives like we20?

Whatever the challenges of transparency 2.0, the alternative is to freeze societies in a state of denial. Despite the efforts of Michael Portillo most Brit holidaymakers are still unaware that the beaches of Malaga contain mass graves of Republican sympathisers shot by Franco. Even though I count myself knowledgable about the Spanish Civil War, I visited Granada without knowing that the hills we strolled over still conceal 10,000 bodies. The psychic damage to Spanish culture is still in full effect thanks to the 'Pact of Forgetting' and the 1977 amnesty law. The transparency of the digital age is not just about open data but the surfacing of suppressed histories as starting points for transformation.

(Photo credit Mike Elkin & archaeology.org)

Lawrence Lessig's New Republic article 'Against Transparency' really rattled the cages of transparency fans and led to a spirited defence from Ellen Miller and Michael Klein, the co-founders of the Sunlight Foundation.

Lessig's opening diatribe is long-winded and sets up some straw men that Miller and Klein dispose of - like saying that transparency will increase cynicism because the public don't have the attention span to make proper judgements. I suspect the need for a complete throwdown comes from his lawyer-genes :)

But IMHO he wins out by addressing the core issue; that the only way to capitalise on transparency to increase trust is to actually change structures. So if we can never be sure whether a certain political donation did or did not influence a vote, we should take donations out of the process altogether. As Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El Fattah tweeted during the debate: "amazing how people r missing the point of @LESSIG article. disclosure useless without changing uderlying dynamics".

Despite the Sunlight folks efforts to 'annually directly train more than a thousand reporters and bloggers on how to use these datasets, tools, and sites to better inform their investigations' their aspirations stop at cleaning up the existing system. In this they follow the democracy geeks at MySociety, believing that current mechanisms would deliver fairness if only they were cleansed of unethical gunk.

For sure, we need transparency around finances, but cash is just a proxy for power. And power is a far trickier thing to map than money; it ranges from the psychological to the physical and involves us all in complex and contradictory networks. Our current institutions accrete power in ways that amplify its abuse while simultaneously producing narratives of denial.

Us liberal Twitterati have flexed our Streisand effect in the last few days to challenge the old trappings of power, in the specific shape of UK libel laws and #Trafigura. One rightful rallying cry for this was the 1688 Bill of Rights. But it's ironic that so many other flaws of our system are still glossed over, despite the fact that in the Putney Debates of 1647 the Levellers were predicting the need for a better system than the one we have.

While Sunlight say "the very idea of exposing government data feeds for outside developers is, at its core, about spurring innovation in the way we all perceive and contextualize data" I'm still troubled by The Unbearable Lightness of Mashups and the increasing tendency of information mashup initiatives to align themselves with the status quo rather than with movements for social change.

Last word goes again to @alaa: "activism that limits its ambition to exposing and reporting is useless if not harmful. work on redefining reality behind what is measured."

Observ. LIII. Of a Flea., from Micrographia by Robert Hooke

Gartner analyst Andrea Di Maio has penned a couple of sparky posts this week about the more trenchant realities of government 2.0. In 'Will Politics 1.0 Swallow Government 2.0?' he characterised Tom Steinberg's decision to advise the Tories as heralding the way that gov 2.0 leaders will inevitably align with politics 1.0:

"What interests me, though, is how people like Steinberg in the UK or like Beppe Grillo in Italy feel the urge to join or take sides with a party, although they have been making independence and grass-root approach their mantra."

The reason being that bloggy tweety aggregation is all well and good but if you want to get stuff to stick in the real world you need established structures. "Perhaps going back into existing silos is the price to be paid for moving from vision to execution". That's the bit that makes me smile - the idea the the government, or any large incumbent institution, represent the best hope for executing anything flies in the face of experience, especially when it comes to anything that involves tech.

My sense is that it's easier for mySociety types to cleave to The Man because their agenda is to make current modes work more smoothly, rather than to question the distribution of power at a basic level. Shame, because the interesting thing about Stuff 2.0 is its potential to leak a bit of power back to a peer-to-peer model. That's not to deny the challenge of sustaining bright ideas in a hard economic reality, which is why I wrote about Lightweight Structures for Social Innovation Startups after the first SICamp. But politics 1.0 has the gravitational pull of a black hole and the only way to break the paradigm is to connect digital innovation with social movements that are the soil for its participatory roots. So, for example, if you really want to see government 2.0 you'd be better off doing digi with Transition Towns than with the Green Party.

And that's why I was rocked to see the title of Andrea's follow up post 'Why Government 2.0 Has Little To Do With Government'. Critiqueing the idea that gov 2.0 is about the ways "organizations and institutions can leverage technology to improve effectiveness and efficiency and to better engage constituents" he reframes the issue: "The problem is that government 2.0 is not about organizations and institutions. It is about the way in which constituents aggregate and socialize knowledge in ways that change their expectations and how they relate to government institutions." It's nicely articulated but stays on the safe ground of information and knowledge. I'd contend that the bolder win is for people to aggregate and socialize solutions i.e. actual functioning answers to social needs, whether stand-alone, grant funded or direct hacks of gov operations. That's what Social Innovation Camp has been trying for, and it'll be interesting to see which side of the wavy grey line that folk at the myPublicServices unconference will plump for.

Image courtesy of edmittance: part of his work with Transition Towns.

My slides from the civil society workshop in Tbilsi in May 2009. Questions, suggestions and comments welcome!

When I was trying to explain Social Innovation Camp to NGOs & journalists in Tbilisi I settled on the phrase 'Making Things To Make A Difference'.

I got enthused about the whole 'Making Things' meme by Chris Thorpe, while helping him cook up the idea for 'Making Things for 2morro' (a hackday for youngsters as part of 2morro 09). Making Things captures the proactive and DIY approach to problems that infuses Social Innovation Camp and marks it out as a social impact that's distinct from campaigning, policy or orthodox service delivery.

And kicking around Social Innovation Camp ideas with the helpful Dan Burgess of Naked Comms reminded me that the powerful flip side is '...because so much is BROKEN'. That's why we must make stuff; because we can all see that it's not just charities that are broken but the financial system, the economy, our cities and all the other fruits of collapsanomics.

There's a great article called 'Alinsky vs. Arizmendi: Redistribution or Control of Wealth In Changing the World' which contrasts two visions of changing the world. One is the campaiging of Saul Alinsky for "the improvement of the distribution of wealth that the system generated to include communities that were systematically excluded or shortchanged because they were Black, Latino, or working class." The other is the Mondragon network of worker-owned co-ops started by an anti-Franco priest in Spain, and which now has has 85 companies employing 130,000 people globally.

The article finds in favour of the co-ops, on the basis that the redsitribution model depended on a social contract that has since been shattered. Personally, I suspect that we'll always need a bit of both. But more than that we need the creative hacktivism that's breaking out as we realise we can (in the words of a Social Innovation Camp mantra) "use online tools to organise offline change". And that's why 'Making Stuff...' appeals to me; not just making tools or whole solutions, but in the process re-making expectations about what's possible. The tools are there and we don't have to ask permission, so...

Image by moleitau

Next weekend I'll be doing some training for journalists and NGOs in Tbilisi alongside Kevin Anderson (blogs editor for Guardian.co.uk). Our mission:

• To popularize and legitimize new media in Georgia for both journalism and civic activism purposes
• To fill the niches that are currently unfilled by both mainstream media and current bloggers
• To create at least one showcase local project - defined by the local audience/blogosphere and designed by the local participants

We've only got two days to achieve all this(!) and I don't want to parachute in with irrelevant training. I've posted below about the background and opportunities and I'd be happy to get any tips here or off-list.

The time is ripe?

According to the project brief "The time appears ripe for new media projects in Georgia, as the situation with the mainstream media continues to deteriorate. Throughout the region, blogs are underdeveloped - even as Internet usage continues to rise - and knowledge of worldwide trends regarding citizen media is largely missing. Few blogs can be characterized as locally driven and influential, as members of the Diaspora or other Caucasus-watchers operate the majority from abroad".

Decreasing media freedom

Freedom of the media in Georgia is on a downward trend. "Significant problems still remain with press freedom advocates pointing to murky media ownership structures, oppressive Internet policies, restricted information access, harassment of journalists, self-censorship, and the cozy interdependence of the state authorities and media outlets...The media in Georgia are relatively free when compared to neighboring countries; however, international organizations have noted the authorities’ creeping control - both direct and indirect - since the so-called Rose Revolution in 2003".

Potential for new media

On the other hand, both the recent war and opposition demonstrations have revealed some of the latent potential for social media to have an impact: after the war with Russia over the disputed region of South Ossetia "many Georgians turned to the Internet to find information not provided by the country’s three major stations. Youtube, for example, provided video of Gori being bombed and other shots unavailable on Georgian media, some of it filmed by normal people with their mobile phones - true citizen journalism". And "the Resistance Georgia blog was launched one day after the Georgian authorities forcibly broke up the 7 November opposition demonstrations, and subsequently attracted numerous citizens with diverse opinions. The discussions, impressions, rumors, and analysis posted on the site helped to better shape on the ground coverage of the unfolding events, and after only a week, even The New York Times was quoting it".

Online civil society

There's a strong interest in developing an online civic space where there can be level-headed discussion of controversial topics across communities. Ahgain, there are positive signs: "another interesting blog, run by a Georgian refugee from Abkhazia, cyxymu.livejournal.com attracts an average of 1,261 visitors a day. Showing the strength of the interactive blog format, the blogger Sukhimi is able to discuss issues surrounding the frozen conflict in Abkhazia with Abkhaz, Russians, and Georgians, all at the same time. The discussions are generally lively and vibrant, and provide valuable insight into what the dialogue between the conflicting sides looks like".

But like most other places the existing NGO sector seems poorly prepared to make the most of the digital opportunities: "many throughout the civil society and NGO sector are unfamiliar with these new technologies, do not understand how to use them effectively, or lack tools for their particular setting. Despite the growth of new media in recent years, NGOs have yet to adjust their outreach strategies, ignoring the possibility of using platforms such as blogging and social networking sites to promote their activities and research, in the process attracting members of the younger generation".

Looking for impact

My starting point for digital impact is to match the memes (patterns) of the social web to the faultlines of the social situation. In other words, how can the power of the web to increase transparency or organise mass collaboration be used to strengthen civil society.

Of course the best way to do this is with inspiring examples, like the ones we used in the workshop on 'Interactive Tech Tools for Transparency' in Riga a few months ago. I want to show how straightforward it can be to assemble an online campaign from the giant toolkit that the web has become.

Mashups and Mobilisation

Mashups are great next step because they combine compelling visualisation with the potential for engagement that we also explored in 'Crowdsourcing for transparency'. Here in the UK, initiatives like Mash the State and Tony Hirst's Googledoc ninja skills are starting to put the power of mashups in the hands of the non-programmer. (Tony's gone in to overdrive recently with the data on UK Members of Parliament's expenses).

And it's the potential for engagement and mobilisation that the social web offers to nascent social movements, especially in an environment where discontent is high. I want to shift the conversation in Tbilisi from 'websites' to the social web as a cloud of possibilities for participative campaigning. How much that applies to the online and offline situation in Georgia is something I hope to learn when I'm there.

Twitter activism and repression

The spectrum of online campaigning was well represented in our Riga workshop, from the sophisticated probing of MySociety projects to the guerilla activism of the Tunisian blogosphere. But in Tbilisi I plan to explore more about Twitter activism, examples of which are breaking out all over the place. Those sterling folk at DigiActive have produced a Guide to Twitter for Activism which is a good starting point. The reality becomes more complex when contesting claims that recent protests in Moldova were a Twitter Revolution. And Guatemalan police recently arrested someone for a tweet they claimed was "inciting financial panic" - in reality, the twittering was part of a widespread & outraged response to the assassination of a lawyer for threatening to expose government corruption.

Social innovation and civic futures

Although online campaigning is of interest to both journalists and NGOs, the real innovations will come from people thinking outside of those disciplines. If the web is going to catalyse in Georgia then people need to to think differently and feel more empowered.
In the UK we've pioneered SocIal Innovation Camps to unlock the potential of the internet to deliver different solutions to social problems. I'm co-organising a SICamp for CEE countries in Bratislava in September, and while there's no space in Tbilisi for that, it'd be good to run a version of the 'SICamp express' that we use at meetups.

Journalism and tipping points

One big win of doing the training alongside Kevin is that we'll be able to cover the blurred zone where mainstream & social media collide with online activism. The events around the G20 protests in London are an interesting case study which has challenged the previous dynamic of police impunity on protests. It sounds like civil rights in Georgia may be approaching a critical point and there's a chance that new media can help tip the balance the right way. At the very least I hope the participants in the training come away with an idea of what's possible, feeling inspired and feeling able to act on that. Your thoughts, as ever, very welcome.

Tbilisi by pazavi

The Carnegie UK Trust is running an Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society in the UK and Ireland. Unsurpringly, the first phase identified new media < cough > as one of the "burning issues" meriting further futures work and asked Suw Charman-Anderson to look at the way social technology and the internet is going to evolve over the next 15 years, and what that might mean for civil society organisations. Suw has kicked off by video interviewing social tech luminaries like Chris Messina & Ross Mayfield.

Carnegie's report on The shape of civil society to come says that “The purpose of futures work is to ‘disturb the present’ and to help organisations understand and manage uncertainties and ambiguities. Futures thinking operates on an assumption that there is not one future but multiple possible futures, dependent partly on how we choose to respond to or create change.”

My take is that the disturbance will come where the faultlines in civil society are most pressured by the patterns and memes of the social web. The Shape of Civil Society identifies key faultlines such as

• Voluntary and community associations lose their distinctiveness due to increasing partnership with the state,
• Traditional political engagement on the wane
• Diminishing arenas for public deliberation
• Marginalisation of dissent

These are clearly on collision course with memes like Openness, Transparency, Agility and the return of The Commons.

To get a picture of possible futures we'll need a sense of history; maybe even Friedrich Kittler's 'recursive history' where the same issue is taken up again and again at regular intervals but with different connotations and results.

And it's not just about history but about how to re-imagine society through the digital which means going wider than the social tech scene. I enjoy taking part in the #4Change Twitter-conversations about how social media is helping to create change, but we'll only appreciate the network mindset by widening our view and looking at marginal philosophies and hidden histories.

And I don't really believe that the NGO sector can read the tea leaves of it's own future either. The Carnegie report highlights the blurring of the voluntary sector and the state, which goes hand-in-hand with the corporatisation of nonprofits. It's hard for bureaucracies to change their spots; expecting them to collaborate even across their own internal silos is like asking the tongue to taste itself. They may wish that the pixie dust of social media will restore their humanitarian sparkle but it may simply be that charities are broken.

So all power to social startups mashed with the Coalition for Independent Action. And in the mean time, where do we look for hints of a digitally enabled future of civil society? On the margins, I think; taking a punt that the interesting social innovation happens at the edges where the dominant paradigm is migration. In fact, the very term civil society is too static for these times; we need a term that's more about flow, turbulence and transition. Perhaps I'll see you out there in the civic turbulence; in the mean time, keep an eye out for how you can contribute to the important work that Suw is doing.

The social web is a Re-imagination Machine. It prods and encourages us to imagine how things could be different. In part, it's about how we collectively reorganize society for different outcomes. But re-imagining the world operates at a deeper level - by shifting the frameworks through which we make sense of reality.

People are starting to seize on the way that social technologies enable us to organize differently, outside the choke hold of established institutions. Books like Charles Leadbeater's We-think and Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody show how the early examples are predictors of mass collaboration, creativity and self-organisation.

And practical initiatives like Social innovation Camp forge more social startups under the rubric 'using the web to help the world organise itself better".

But a symptom of something wider is the way that online modes of organising seem to be seeping offline. Rigid formats for events, office space and leisure time are giving way to barcamps, co-working and flashmobs. In the same way that the term Open Source became a rallying cry for Open everything else, the collaborative and non-hierarchical tendencies of online organisation are being taken offline. A tendency that Rohan Gunatillake calls Ungeeking: "Ungeeking is what happens when behaviours developed online make their way into areas of our lives independent of the technology through which we learnt them."

While the fantasy of the independence of cyberspace has passed, folk like Dougald Hine are realising that the impact of the social web also comes from "the spread of real world spaces which reflect the collaborative values of social media" and are applying it to the crunchiest of problems (see Social Media vs the Recession?)

I'm intrigued by the way these new modes echo forgotten models from the past such as the cooperatives of the nineteenth century or the medieval Guilds. One reason why the chance to disturb the present means having a deeper sense of history that you can get from the latest web hype.

But there's more to it than history. History itself is really a shorthand for 'seeing things differently' and social history isn't a straight line but a strange attractor of different patterns that ebb and flow depending on the era. The problem, as neatly stated by the otherwise bitter-seeming Nick Carr, is that the practitioners of the social web upheaval and the people with the ideas to give it a body are generally separate; "As we move deeper into the shallows, so to speak, we naturally seek a guide. Contemporaries offer little help. Those that know the technology cannot see beyond it, and those that don't know the technology cannot see into it. Both end up trafficking in absurdity. So we look to the past for our prophet. McLuhan is the natural candidate, but it turns out his vision only extended to 1990, and even then he was half-blind."

So we need new frameworks, and there are some likely-looking ones to hand in the ideas of the postmodernists. Carr looks to Baudrillard, as does digital practitioner Simon Collister whereas social media educationlist Josie Fraser invokes Barthes, Foucoult & Derrida. This is the inevitable effect of a remix culture in a post-deferential era where it's common to think that online readers compose their own beginning middle end and in order to exist online we must write ourselves into being.

The point isn't to argue over which post-structuralist predicted Bebo, but to grok that digital tectonics requires us to re-imagine the future at a fundamental level. If the point is not just to undertand the world but to change it, then there's partial roadmap in the Causal Layered Analysis developed by the futurist Sohail Inayatullah to help think about circumstances in which values and underlying metaphors are a significant part of possible social change. It's based on the assumption that the way in which one frames a problem changes the policy solution and the actors responsible for creating change. (See Appendix 1 of the Carnegie UK Trust's Scenarios for civil society). The social impact of social media is usually interpreted at the level he calls litany - "quantitative trends, problems, often exaggerated, sometimes used for political purposes and usually presented by the news media", or possibly at the level of social causes - "economic, cultural, political and historical factors where interpretation is given to quantitative data. This type of analysis is frequently articulated by policy institutes". But Inayatullah adds levels of worldview (how discourse helps to constitute an issue not just to cause it) and metaphor & myth (the collective archetypes, the unconscious dimensions of the problem or the paradox).

So Erik Davies did us all a favour by making the utopian side of all tech innovation visible in Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information. The social web and it's siblings are starting to stir ideas at the level of Imagination and we should pile in behind that. At a time when the global scenario is a literal mashup of financial and environmental crisis, we can't afford to simply reorganise the deck-chairs on the deck of the Titanic. The interesting thing is how much the new thinking and new doing are linked; how much the practice of social innovation with digital tools might help us to think differently about the better world that we imagine. And that's why, invoking my own preferred postmodernist thought-gangsters Deleuze & Guattari, I'm betting that the social web can be our Re-imagination Machine.

A couple of us dropped in on Alex, a former colleague who now heads up Media and Events at the Environment Agency's press office. The mission; to get the team thinking about how they could start engaging with people and business through social media, as well as just getting news coverage in print and broadcast.

Thanks to Alex the team were aware of tools like Addictomatic even though they couldn't always access them due to the way publicly-funded bodies block internet access. And for any press office there's some easy social media wins, like switching to a social media style press release.

We started with a sketch of Make your Mark's blogging and Twittering. A lively debate broke out about the suitability of tools like Twitter as people struggled to match the free flowing nature of the social web with the strictures of a government agency. It's a challenge to decribe the value of Twitter to someone who's never tried it. But the bigger challenge with social media is message control; 'what if someone says bad things about us?'. To which of course the only answer is 'they probably already are', so one tool that struck a chord was the USAF's blog response flowchart; a guide to graduating your response between concerned citizen and troll.

We also discussed arms length ways to track and highlight online conversations without having to take responsibility for the content, as evinced by the Cabinet Office Open Source report page on Netvibes. Our visit to the agency coincided with the UK Government advertising for it's first ever Director of Digital Engagement (and I also discovered that the Foreign Office has someone working on Digital Diplomacy!). Alongside the DIUS sandbox of social media innovation in the public sector there's a growing body of evidence that a civil servant can invoke when arguing for more use of social media. If Alex does manage to open the floodgates (sorry!) in their media work, the Environment Agency might start thinking about using the web for agile responses to a crisis, like the quick site put together for emergency school closures. Whether they could catalyse the kind of citizen environmental action of Teeme Ara in Estonia remains to be seen.

The most intense debate in our session was around public consultations. It was easy to see why press folk are wary of opening things up when they've seen how hostile the public can be; no-one want their house demolished to make a flood defense. But the idea of engaging with a digitally-amplified debate provoked people to think behind the surface - for example, asking whether the agency should be consulting before the 500-page expert report is produced rather than afterwards, and whether that could facilitate peer-to-peer debate in the communities themselves.

And so we find that social media provokes people to approach things differently; not just how they communicate, but how they organise stuff. Being authentic is the way to social media success. Mashing up public consultations and social media will end up looking more like thinkpublic's animation The story of co-design.

In the mean time, those of us plowing the furrow inside organisations will carry on having more conversations like Web Tech Guy and Angry Staff Person.

1607 Flood in the Bristol Channel.