Chelsea's Charity

Chelsea Clinton, in a rare interview, discussed everything from her parents to her own advocacy work to the crisis-mapping social media enterprise, Ushahidi, in this interview today with talk show host Charlie Rose at the Clinton Global Initiative. Clinton said she is "optimistic about politics" and hopes that more young people will ultimately go to the ballot box and vote for candidates "who will write the laws and scale the solutions for the change they want to see." It's easier to raise money than ever before, Clinton said, partly through SMS technology but also because there is a growing sense among people across sectors "that we are all in this together and that is good to see."

The full video is below:



-- Marcia Stepanek

Rethinking Africa

Erik Hersman -- a cofounder of Ushahidi; founder of the group blog, Afrigadget; the author of the blog, White African, and the founder of iHub, Nairobi's innovation hub -- offered this week's PopTech conferees contemplating the world's geopolitical power shifts a new definition of the term, white space. "In business, it is defined as a place where rules are vague, authority is fuzzy, budgets are nonexistent and strategy is unclear," said Hersman, who was raised by missionary parents in Africa and spent his childhood traveling between Sudan and Kenya. [Hersman still lives in Africa, with his wife and three children in Nairobi.] "...Business white space is the space between the organization chart, where the real innovation happens" -- and this space right now is Africa, he says.

Hersman told conferees that 313 million people are now moving into Africa's middle class ranks -- a figure that comprises 34 percent of the continent's population. Additionally, 98 percent of Internet subscriptions in Africa are for mobile service, and five of the world's Top 10-fastest growing economies are in Africa. "Ghana has beat Qatar for pole position," Hersman said. And mobile Web innovation is at a peak. He cited three recent Web startups as examples of what he called "reverse development" -- the creation of new tech ideas that Africa is exporting to the West rather than importing from it: Ushahidi, the crisis-mapping service; M-Pesa, the mobile, peer-to-peer money transfer service that has so far conducted more than $8 billion of transactions within Kenya, and MXit, a free instant-messaging application in South Africa that has become an alternative to Facebook in that country and has some 24 million users around the globe -- some 13 million in South Africa, alone. "The mobile revolution that you hear about in Africa? It's real," Hersman said.

And Africa is also transforming itself culturally and spiritually, says Unity Dow (photo above). Young people are "beginning to question why they should mold themselves" into Western notions of what should be "normal" at home and abroad. Dow, a high court judge and human rights activist in Botswana, told conferees "there is a new generation that is not yoked to the past of colonialism" and it is "rethinking Africa. ...And they're asking, 'How can I move forward without having to be Western?'"

"...When people begin to have three meals a day and a warm bed at night, they begin to think," Dow said. "What is happening in Africa right now is that [young people] now have full bellies, cars to drive, and access to the Internet. They're beginning to look around and ask, 'What did we lose as a country in our attempt to be part of 'the Other'? What did we lose when it was un-Christian to be African and to dance the way we danced' and talk and wear our hair differently?"

Dow said this "new awakening" also is creating new diplomatic and economic friends for Africa -- chiefly China. "Africa has a right to extend its friendship across the world without people thinking it is being exploited," Dow said. Africans want to break the image of dependency on the West and rebalance its global relationships. "...When a Westerner sees a shoeless African, he thinks, 'How can I donate shoes?'" Dow said. "But when a Chinese sees a shoeless African, he thinks, 'How can I sell her cheaper shoes?'" China is catering to the continent's fast-growing middle class, she said, by offering inexpensive goods to Africa's new consumers. "It is more expensive to deal with Europe and America that it is to deal with China," she said. "...You can get a flight from Botswana to go to China, and when you land there, there will be a translator and a car waiting for you," Dow said, referring to buying trip services being offered by some Chinese companies seeking inroads into the Africa market. "For many Africans, this is their first trip outside of their country. ...You cannot afford these things in British pounds or dollars but you can if you go to China," she said.

"In the past," Dow said, "all of this would have been unimaginable. But in the last five years, we're seeing a reclaiming of what we lost when we tried to go global." The result? A new and different future for the continent. Said Dow: "The future of Africa is brown, the future of Africa is gendered, and the future of Africa is fair."

PopTech's conference, "The World Rebalancing," ended today.

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Photograph of Unity Dow by Kris Krug in Camden, Maine, at this week's PopTech conference]

Technology as Social Art

"Once upon a time, in my lifetime, we wondered about the intelligence of computers that could beat geniuses at chess. Now we measure the intelligence of technology in terms of its capacity to address human need and crisis; to change the architecture of human lives; to reconfigure human consciousness. In that context, it seems fitting to recall that the root of technology, the word, is not science but art -- and that there are individuals now on the front lines of developing technology as a social art."

-- Public radio host Krista Tippett

Social media -- chiefly the mobile Internet and short-form video -- are the future of social advocacy and innovation, panelists attending this year's 2010 Clinton Global Initiative agreed. "Mobility is going to be the way we will all be running our businesses and nonprofits in the future," John Chambers, the Chairman and CEO of Cisco said in a keynote panel moderated by public radio host Krista Tippett. "It will empower a decade of productivity in the developed world and allow us to tackle some of the biggest problems in the developing world in a way we couldn't before. Maybe for the first time we'll be addressing the have-nots in the world. Video is the new voice ... and the most powerful force for change now is the power of the crowd."

Jack Dorsey, CEO of Square, and the co-founder and chairman of Twitter, said this new "second wave" of the Web carries with it the potential for large-scale global change because social media are destabilizing tools, making it harder for many in power to speak for others or to manipulate public perception for political gain. Said Dorsey:

"The access to technology and being able to immediately share what you are thinking -- your opinion from anywhere in the world -- allows one to have an understanding with a context that you might not have been familiar with before. When protests were going on in Moldova and Iran, to a lot of Americans and to me in particular, those issues and countries were a black box. But suddenly, we had people on the ground who could share what they were seeing and post videos and it was all happening in real time.

That kind of immediacy and transparency brings a greater social understanding, and we can minimize a lot of the conflict if there is more knowledge...and that is the end goal of this technology."

Arianna Huffington, the co-founder of The Huffington Post and the moderator of another CGI panel on social media last week, cited efforts by authoritarian governments to slow the influence of social media. Chinese government authorities, for example, routinely censor the Internet to try to stem U.S. protest of its human rights violations. "China has learned quickly that shutting down new media -- Facebook and Twitter -- and inviting traditional journalists to have access, instead, will help it spin the official version of events," she said. "...You can always spin traditional journalists ... but it's very difficult to spin millions tweeting."

But most of the change is inevitable, others said. And the most disruptive innovations may be occurring within the social sector, itself -- chiefly in developing countries, said Ory Okolloh, who helped to create Ushahidi, a Web site that crowdsources citizen information to fight information blackouts and government misinformation campaigns, as well as to speed help to those who need it the most in a crisis. Ushahidi's "crisis maps" were used in Haiti to help earthquake survivors find health resources, locate food supplies and track outbreaks of gang violence and looting. Okolloh, a Kenyan activist, lawyer and blogger who lives in South Africa, said social media make it harder for people to be victims of inefficient or corrupt authorities. Africans used to have to "wait for the government" to improve social conditions but "now, we do not have to wait," Okolloh said. "Now, we can self-organize. And just the notion of hierarchy in a traditional crisis on the ground? It used to be Nairobi would have to communicate with Geneva which would have to communicate with New York and it would take forever to determine what people's needs were on the ground. This (social) technology allows the people, themselves, to express their needs in one minute."

Social media also are empowering ordinary people to recalibrate their relationships with one another, Okolloh says. "This technology is agnostic," she said. "It doesn't discriminate man-woman, rich-poor, black-white. African women now have new opportunities," she said, citing as examples the rapid growth in mobile banking services such as M-PESA and the start of thousands of small businesses that can be managed entirely over a mobile phone. "Nobody can tell me, an African woman, to get out of the room because now I own the room," Okolloh said. "Thousands of women can now own the room."

In highlights of other social media discussions at this year's CGI:

* Molly Melching, Executive Director of the African women's health and human rights NGO called Tostan (meaning "breakthrough" in Wolof), said cultural differences need to be acknowledged in the advocacy community's push to put social media tools into the hands of local communities. "You need, in many villages, to explain the benefits and let people work out for themselves how (or whether) they want to proceed," she said. But once consensus is achieved, she said, social media and mobile technologies can change nearly every aspect of local life. Melching, who has lived in Senegal for the past 36 years, said "women no longer have to walk for hours or days to visit the health worker, only to find out he or she isn't there; kids no longer have to go physically from one village to the next to announce a birth or a death. Now, they can just text it. Hours, days are saved. It creates the time and space for new opportunities."

* Pierre Omidyar, founding partner of the Omidyar Nework and founding chairman of eBay, said that social media "fundamentally are changing the relationships between citizens and government." During the post-election uprising in Iran two years ago, he said, "the other side of the story" of the 2009 Iranian elections got out to Americans. Through Twitter, Facebook and video, "Americans began connecting personally to people in the streets and began to realize that people there were, in many ways, just like they were," said Omidyar, a French-born, Iranian-American entrepreneur and philanthropist. "The change in perception that created among Americans about the average Iranian and the connections we now still have will affect what American international policy can be. You can't have an American president standing up and saying we're going to bomb these people anymore. It won't happen now; it can't. Social media fundamentally change the balance of power between ordinary people and government elites."

* Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, said mobile social media can help people get better and more immediate health care. "Think about the mobile technology that exists to enable the poor to have a chip in their phone that will contain their whole health record," she said. "...I met a daily wage earner in Pakistan who got a multiple fracture in his leg. Normally, it would have taken him 2-3 months to get care" but through one of the foundation's grantees, Heartfile, the man's health records are now digital and far more quickly accessible. "We were able to validate him within 72 hours of his injury to receive the care he needed," Rodin said.

* Cherie Blair, a lawyer and the wife of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, told delegates that "we should stop thinking about mobile phones as just a place where we have a chat, and start thinking about these phones as a poor person's computer, where we can all get access to the world of information."

* Mohammad Kilany, co-founder of Souktel Mobile Phone Job Service, offers job-hunting services via text message to thousands of unemployed Palestinian youth. In the Palestinian territories, youth unemployment is nearly 36 percent, Kilany says, but it is difficult for young job-seekers to move from one city to the next in search of work. Few have access to the Internet or to smart phones. "But everyone has a simple cellphone, and it's cheap to text," Kilany says. Souktel asks users to register with the service by texting information about themselves. A user who then texts in "match me" will get job listings that fit his or her skills, including phone numbers to dial. So far, so good. Souktel reaches 15,000 Palestinians and links them to more than 300 employers. "At first, people thought we were idiots," Kilany said. "They didn't believe we could help them find a job with texting. So we invested lots of effort going to universities and talking with employees to convince them of the benefit of letting all people have access to the job market."

For more on CGI's take this year on social media, click here for panel videos.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Photo: istock.com)

Bucket Club

An environmental nonprofit called the Louisiana Bucket Brigade has created an online crisis-map that is crowd-sourcing reports of health problems, job loss, water quality issues and other news about the Gulf Coast oil spill as its impact spreads. The group is using social media -- including mobile video, email, and text-messaging -- to aggregate eyewitness accounts from people living in the coastal crisis zone. Organizers are then plotting these reports, in near real-time, on a Web-based map to track the spread of environmental and economic impact.

In this way, the New Orleans-based nonprofit hopes to build on work done by online crisis-mapping pioneer Ushahidi, which developed crisis-mapping technology in Kenya in 2008 to track the spread of post-election violence. More recently, Ushahidi created a crisis-map in Haiti to help aid workers identify which areas needed the most urgent help in the hours and days following the January 12 earthquake.

According to Anne Rolfes, the founder of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, "this is a tool for all of us to understand the extent of the damage. We are trying to compile and map eyewitness accounts of the spill's effects in real-time." In that work, the group -- fighters for better air and water quality in New Orleans and California -- is partnering with specialists at Tulane University. Ushahidi also is providing coaching and mapping help to the group.

Reports to the Louisiana Bucket Brigade can be made and viewed here, and mobile phone users living in the area re being asked to text reports to (504) 27 27 OIL.

Chief benefits of crowd-sourced crisis maps? Aggregating citizen reports of a crisis can lead aid workers to better target supplies, doctors to better deploy medics and environmental workers to better plan for ways to combat the crisis over time.

How else are social media being used to help spill victims living along the Gulf Coast? Let us hear from you if you have new examples to share.

Crowdsourcing Aid: Haiti

The earthquake in Haiti is becoming another important test of social media in advocacy: Catholic Relief Services is using Skype and Facebook in its efforts (phone service is down), while Oxfam is making use of the audio blog site ipadio, so its people can broadcast live updates about their efforts in and around the disaster zone.

Ushahidi, a social media platform that crowdsources and maps crisis data, also got off to a running start, deploying a site for Haiti—Haiti.ushahidi.com—within hours of the quake. Ushahidi's goal in Haiti: to provide people with real-time information about any quake-related violence as well as up-to-the-minute data on where to find the closest doctors, supplies, medicine, and shelter.

Ushahidi—which means "testimony" in Swahili—was initially created as an early-warning system amid the savage, inter-tribal violence that followed the Kenyan presidential election in late 2007. A government ban on live media throughout that crisis made Ushahidi one of the only places where citizens could share information about the attacks.

In Haiti, Ushahidi is again producing "heat maps"—visualizations of places where civic passions overheat or where help is most concentrated and available. If Haitians can "see" where violence or aid is concentrated in real time during the crisis, says cofounder David Kobaya, they can manage their survival more effectively. Further, those sending aid can target it more precisely to the areas that need it the most.

Ushahidi asks citizens to call, text, or email site editors with eye-witness reports or accounts passed along from people on the ground; the nonprofit then aggregates the reports and makes a map, which is posted and updated in close to real-time. The more people who send in information, the better; Kobaya says more information tends to verify itself over time.

For more on Ushahidi, see "Mob Protection," a Cause Global profile of Ushahidi from September 2008.

For other examples of how social media are coming to the aid of earthquake survivors in Haiti—and to some of the aid groups trying hard to get medicine and supplies into the devastated capital of Port-au-Prince, see the following:

* Haitian singer Wyclef Jean sent out the following appeal on Twitter before most aid agencies knew whether their people on the ground were safe: "Haiti needs your help if you r in the US text Yele to 501 501 and 5 dollars will go toward earthquake relief in Haiti. International donations can be made @ http://www.yele.org."

* techPresident reports that SMS donations to the Red Cross are being passed through without any carrier fees or processing fees, with the Mobile Giving Foundation and MGive handling the transactions and declining to take a cut. Texting HAITI to 90999 sends $10 USD to the Red Cross. Donations are flooding into the Red Cross by text message: within a few hours of operation Wednesday, the program had raised $750,000 from about 75,000 individual contributions, according to Red Cross officials. According mocoNews.net, a news blog covering digital media, mGive's co-founder and chairman, James Eberhard, was awakened in Pakistan by U.S. State Department social media advisor Alec Ross to get the short code up and running. Since then, #Haiti and #RedCross have all become major trending topics on Twitter, mocoNews reports.

* The State Department is tweeting updates from the ground and from Washington.

* Partners in Health, led by Dr. Paul Farmer (Mountains Beyond Mountains), is leading an aggressive online fundraising drive for the country in which it has been working for many years now.

*Hundreds of tweets per minute have been pouring into Twitter's #haiti hashtag feed, providing added perspectives to the digital narrative of the suffering, and Twitter user @troylivesay, based in Port-au-Prince, has been posting updates of the aftermath. His tweets have included: "Leaving to look for a list of people; will try hard to report back" and "church groups are singing throughout the city all through the night in prayer. It is a beautiful sound in the middle of a horrible tragedy."

* GlobalVoicesonline.com, a crowdsourced news site from citizen journalists around the globe, has been providing first-person accounts from the ground and independent news stories since minutes after the quake.

* Twitpics—photographs taken on mobile phones and transmitted instantly around the world via Twitter—are helping to provide a visual narrative of the suffering, both to the public at large as well as to established news organizations, including CNN, which otherwise would not have had access to immediate video and photographs of the devastation. @CarelPedre, the Twitter handle for Carel Pedre—one of Haiti's most popular radio and TV hosts—has been sending out dozens of photographs (including the one illustrating this post, above). Check updates on his Twitter feed.

* Dozens of Twitter lists have been created to share detailed information from the ground. See, for example, @georgiap/live-from-haiti

* Msnbc.com is providing a list of #charity organizations active in Haiti

Watch this space for updates.

(Twitpic by journalist @CarelPedre courtesy Mashable)

The Spinternet

In the mid-1990s, people began realizing the Internet would transform the world—but the prevailing wisdom at the time was that it would be mostly for the better. One of today's panels of thought leaders at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford agreed it's time to take another look at that assumption.

 Charles Leadbeater, a social entrepreneur and author of We-think: the power of mass creativity, said the Internet has, indeed, given more people access to knowledge [and will continue to do so, through such sites as Ushahidi, kiva.org, the new Wikimap Aid, and M-Pesa, a mobile phone-based money exchange service in Kenya]. It's also clear, Leadbeater said, that the Web has begun to topple the top-down, Industrial Age way of managing people and projects into more level, lateral types of conversations, relationships and collaborative teams. "I also think the Web has huge potential to allow knowledge to be deployed in different ways which are not determined by profit," he told Skoll conferees.

Panelists also agreed that the Web—particularly cellphone video-sharing—is empowering many people to hold their leaders accountable for bullying: Witness.org Executive Director Yvette Alberdingk Thijm shared citizen videos that her nonprofit either helped to produce or took viral on the Web in an effort to stop human rights abuses. This mobile phone video, about a California man shot and killed by police, led to the arrests of two officers after it went viral shortly after the incident. [Note the irony of the "danger" sign on the closing door of the subway train that appears at the end of the clip.] Another video, shot on a Flip video camera by Witness.org-trained Yemeni activists, showcases the six-year-old daughter of Yemeni journalist Abdulkarim al-Khaiwani, and her recollections of the day authorities broke into the family's home, beat her father unconscious, and imprisoned him for his pro-democracy views. Witness.org uploaded the video and took it viral; a screen shot of that video, emblazoned with The Hub's logo, was then published by an Arab newspaper. A public uproar ensued and led to the release of al-Khaiwani last September. "Once a story is out in the public sphere, it cannot be removed from public consciousness," Alberdingk Thijm said.  "The Web can help shift the dynamics of power."

But citizens, beware. It's getting harder to use the Web for social change. Challenges to the Web's potential for democracy and freedom are growing quickly now, panelists agreed. "The enemy is getting just as smart in using these same tools to silence people yet again," said Evgeny Morozov, a Belarussian journalist who is writing a book about censorship and the use of the Internet by authoritarian states. 

Morozov cited a half-dozen examples of government and corporate "Net-cleansing"—including cases where companies are hiring "reputation cleansers" to bury Web references to poor corporate track records on Web search engines, while nationalist groups in Africa and the Middle East are using Google maps to mashup census data, so as to better pinpoint minority neighborhoods for targeting. Crowdsourcing also is being used by the governments of Thailand and China to drum up lists of Web sites and blogs critical of the current regimes; the Thai government, Morozov says, asks citizens to nominate Web sites to be blocked for content that offends the king; in China, a "50-cent Army" of some 200,000 or more citizens is paid to post pro-government comments on blogs critical of Beijing authorities. Morozov also says denial-of-service attacks are emerging as powerful tools for silencing political dissent in Georgia, Burma, Russia—and the United States. [During last year's debate in California over the controversial Proposition 08, Morozov says, denial-of-service attacks were used by proponents of the anti-gay proposal to stem the ability of gay and lesbian nonprofits and political action groups to fight the measure.]

 "We tend to assume the Net is going to be helping [civil rights advocates] and not the dictators," Morozov says, "but repressive groups and regimes love the Internet, too, and are figuring out how to use it to control others." When asked by moderator Andrew Zolli which side is winning—citizen civil rights activists or the dictators—Morozov said: "Both ends of the spectrum are expanding, but it's very hard for me to deliver an argument that the Net benefits one political side more than the other."

For more on the 50-cent Army and Internet censorship, see Peep Show, an August post on Cause Global about online censorship around the world.  

The Skoll World Forum 2009 ends today.

(Illustration by istock.com)