MediaShift Idea Lab

New Citizen Journalism Newsroom Launched in South Africa

Harry Dugmore — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 04:57:19 -0500

During the massive Highway Africa conference, two Knight Foundation funded projects, the Iindaba Ziyafika ('the news is coming') Citizen Journalism newsroom and the Nika content management system, were launched.

The Iindaba Ziyafika newsroom has 10 computers and the ability to download photos and content from any cellphone (both wirelessly and through the most amazing collection of cables!). This means anyone can walk in, write a story, download a photo and get it published on the Grocott's website, or in the twice weekly print edition of Grocott's Mail.

You can watch this great SoundSlide show which captures the vibe and importance of the launch. Even the local mayor attended and cut a ribbon!

The newsroom is being used to provide ordinary South Africans with computer, cellphone and journalism skills. About 2,000 people will be trained over three years, and a third group of 40 teenagers from a local school have just completed a six-module, 10-hour course. For many of these students, this was their first time on a computer. Being able to send an SMS story (almost everyone has a cellphone) and see it show up on a website was an amazing experience.

First time on a computer, first email address

Most of these initial learners have had no prior access to computers or even email, and opening up their first email account and getting an email address was a big deal for them. If you can remember the thrill of sending your first email -- do you remember? -- you'll probably recall that something in your head told to you 'this is important and cool.' That's exactly what happened for the young people who completed the first course. They were thrilled to have a Gmail account and to be able to use it!

Check out this little video that some journalism students at Rhodes made about this first group of young citizen journalists. It's amazing to see how such a short course can open up so many possibilities.

Many of these students will be working on creating school newsletters and a school yearbook or annual magazine. All the well-resourced schools in Grahamstown produce these items, but none of the poorer schools can afford them. We're also hoping to receive more photos from their cellphones as well as stories and story tips. We are working on creating a new half-hour weekly show on community radio, "What's Up Grahamstown," that will launch next year and be filled entirely with citizen journalism content.

The Nika content management system

The launch of Nika content management system was also very successful. We have an online version of this very powerful CMS, which is build on Drupal. Nika is a citizen journalism platform that incorporates SMS and other forms of mobile messaging. In order to explain what it does, below I have included the text of the invite we sent out to all the attendees at Highway Africa. It covers all of Nika's new features and explains a bit about our decision to launch first with an online version and only supply the stand-alone LAMP based system to newspapers who want it later on. The text:

FOR DELEGATES WHO WORK ON NEWSPAPERS, OR ARE INVOLVED IN MEDIA DEVELOPMENT

At this year's HA conference the School of Journalism & Media Studies will be demonstrating a content management system (CMS) that we have developed over the past few years with funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The system, called Nika after the isiXhosa word for "give", is a Windows-based programme built on the Open Source Drupal platform. After a year of testing it at our own newspaper, Grocotts Mail, we are now ready to make it available to other newspapers.

Nika, which has a user-friendly and customisable interface - the "Dashboard" - provides the following functionality:

Create stories or import them from other applications, run spell checks and word counts.

Add or edit headlines and slugs, add photos, add captions and write notes.

"Workflow" stories, simply by dragging and dropping them, through five queues:
-In Progress
-Newsdesk
-Subbing
-Layout

On the page. (Stories can also be dragged back into previous queues if they need revision or are held over.)

Archive stories, captions and thumbnails of photographs.

Retrieve earlier versions of stories in progress Search for archived stories using keywords or by previous edition or date range.

Receive text messages sent from cell phones directly into Nika: tip-offs/full-length stories/Multimedia Message Services (MMS) drop directly into the "In Progress" queue.

Send SMS news alerts and headlines to subscribers.

Grocott's Mail's version of Nika is a stand-alone system running off its own server. However the installation of this version requires a good deal of technical ability and capacity. For this reason, and to simplify access to Nika, we have also developed an online version which is easy to install and which runs off a secure server hosted by Rhodes University. However, it requires that users have broadband internet access.

From early next year we will make the stand-alone version available to users who have the technical capacity and support to install it themselves, or to those who are geographically close enough to Grahamstown for us to assist them.

At this year's Highway Africa conference we will be running two workshops on Nika where we will demonstrate how to use the system. Each workshop participant will be given a CD containing the installation software for the online version, as well as a user manual and installation guide. The costs for this are being met by our funder, and the software and documentation will be made available under a Creative Commons licence.

I'll blog more about Nika soon, but we've received a lot of great feedback, and we're looking forward to helping South African and African community newspapers get going with this powerful CMS.

Journalism Teachers Get Mobile-ized in South Africa

Guy Berger — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 07:19:41 -0500

Most Africans don't have computers or access to the Internet. Cell phones are a different story.

So why aren't journalism schools around the continent integrating the use of mobile devices fully and squarely into their courses? It's a question that could also apply in many other places -- even in places with access to computers and the Internet.

Answers to this challenge were provided in Grahamstown, South Africa last week, when MobileActive's Katrin Verclas, a Knight grantee, ran a workshop with a selection of African journalism teachers at Rhodes University.

Participants were brought together under the auspices of another Knight project, the Knight Center for International Media at the University of Miami. Veteran multimedia teacher Rich Beckman put together five days of high-powered training for a handpicked group from countries as diverse as Sierra Leone, Kenya, Senegal and South Africa.

The group learned about audio-driven slide shows by MSNBC's Jim Seida, and online video storytelling by the University of Westminster's David Dunkley Gyimah. Debate around digital ethics was led by Sam Terril from the University of Miami.

But it was the session with Verclas that brought home the obviousness of why there should be a strong focus on mobile in African journalism schools. Take Muda Ganiyu, head of the Lagos Polytechnic, who told colleagues that he had seven video cameras for 1,200 students. Video-enabled cell phones, he pointed out, could fill a rather large gap.

He proved this point when he and colleague George Nyabuga used a cell phone to capture dramatic images and video of a shack being set on fire and the arrest of the alleged arsonist -- all while out on a workshop exercise.

Second-Rate Technology

"What about the problem that cell phones don't usually have as high end capabilities as specialized video cameras?" asked Verclas.

She then answered her own question: "Having second-rate technology to tell a story is better than no technology at all."

More than that, participant Harold Gess argued that journalism teachers need to focus on storytelling; the technology is secondary to this task. So, if a cell phone can enable students to learn to tell stories effectively, that amounts to mission accomplished.

Ayesha Ismail, another participant, added that the value of teaching students to use the power of their phones is that they can then do reporting at any time, and not be constrained to times when they booked out a school's scarce equipment.

That point brought home the importance of students learning to use -- to the fullest extent possible -- their own phones.

Highlighting the value of capitalizing on having a communications tool in your pocket, Verclas herself snapped pictures on her cell phone of a smashed window at the local newspaper, Grocott's Mail. Overnight, thieves had stolen a TV set located in the window bay that had been part of the Knight-supported Citizen Newsroom, launched the previous week during the Highway Africa conference in the city.

Newsroom co-ordinator Michael Salzwedel and editor Steven Lang had also grabbed a picture on their cell phones with the aim of posting it online and generating community discussion around the crime.

Reporting by SMS

Back in Verclas' class, another participant, Brian Garman, proposed that classes on mobile journalism should start with the most basic of a phone's capabilities by teaching the principles of reporting via SMS. Courses could then move to images, audio, video and multimedia packages done on -- and sometimes for -- cell phones.

Garman also argued that when students have access to higher-end equipment, they tend to replicate familiar genres and formats. Conversely, if they are required to experiment with the new medium of mobile, there's a greater chance that they could drive change.

This point put the participants at the workshop into temporary pause mode, the reason being that using cell phones for journalism is as new to them as it is to students.

As realization of the possibilities set in, it was almost as if the room became energized with light bulbs flashing, brainwaves churning, and spirits soaring.

In assorted projects for Verclas during the day, the group came to grips with practical production using cell phones. They came up with pretty creative content, such as a documentary made in French using cell phones, as well as the shack fire story.

Innovative Use of Cell Phones

The groups also cooked up clever schemes for using cell phones in innovative ways. One idea was to sign up people during the 2010 World Football Cup in South Africa and, using a signal sent via text message, trigger an avalanche of user-generated photos of what was happening at that given moment in time.

Another proposal was for software tools that would enable an entire audio slideshow to be edited, compiled and compressed for upload on a cell phone. A third idea planned to enlist carriers to load phones with social mobilization images and audio, which would kick in to users when calls were made or received.

It wasn't all blue skies, however. Verclas highlighted the importance of context in that powerful cellular carriers can determine what lives or dies on their network. Along with that, metadata about locality can be abused, prices are insufficiently regulated in some countries, and privacy can never be guaranteed.

There's no problem in acknowledging the downside. Journalism teachers need to convey the negative aspects to students as well as the positive potential.

And thanks to the workshop, they know they can do both.

Mobile Projects Shouldn't Overlook 'Dumbphones'

Adam Klawonn — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 11:50:05 -0500

This week, CityCircles (formerly Daily Phoenix) attended a lunch event at Arizona State University that allowed us to have one-on-one conversations with college seniors who were interested in our project. (The event is summarized here.)

This was a crucial event. ASU has a huge footprint in the Phoenix area because it has 69,000 students. They buzz around the Valley in cars, on bikes, on foot and yes, on light rail. This makes them a huge group for us as potential users and collaborators.

As we talked to them, we realized that an assumption we made early on -- one that many other projects probably make as well -- was not accurate. In the hype surrounding the race to 3G and 4G and touch-screen phones and do-it-all applications, only a fraction of the market uses these smartphones. The rest of us have, for lack of a better term, "dumphones."

This means that designing a platform for smartphone users could lead one astray. Every student we spoke with had different versions of phones that used a native web browser. We initially considered this reality and were encouraged by our advisors to do so, but we didn't realize how dead-on the advice was until we interacted with some of our users.

So there are two takeaways here: organize events that allow you to interact one-on-one with different groups of your core users; and gear your mobile development towards dumphones. You can always build that slick mobile app later.

For more on our ASU experience, check out our video:

CityCircles at ASU from Adam Klawonn on Vimeo.

How Talking into a Mobile Phone Can Help Change Lives

Prabhas Pokharel — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 10:00:00 -0500

The pre-cursors to mobile phones were two-way radios, also called Walkie-Talkies, that transmitted voice signals. The first generation of mobile phone networks were similar in that they also only supported voice communications. Second generation networks, and a happy accident, gave us SMS, and third generation networks provide even more advanced mobile data services.

Most mobile phone applications now use these newer channels of communication -- SMS and data. But even though we sometimes forget, voice is still a major part of mobile phone communications. And when it comes to performing social work, voice communication is actually the most important feature in many parts of the world. I'm going to profile some of the most interesting of these initiatives, but first it's important to understand why voice is playing such an important role.

Voice has a big advantage over SMS and data transmissions because it channels spoken language directly. People of varying literacy levels are able to use voice technology with keypad and voice navigation, and this means applications can be run in local languages. Users can issue commands and requests and thus communicate more effectively. The downside of using voice comes on the receiving end. Voice data is much harder to process than text or other data. It requires considerable technical effort (or a lot of people power) to parse and separate voice data. Even then, the accuracy isn't perfect. Searching through voice data also remains a near-impossible feat. On top of that, airtime costs tend to run higher with voice than for text message.

Yet, even with these challenges, there are several notable projects that leverage the voice capabilities of mobile phones to deliver important information in interesting ways.

Question Answering Services

Two of the more notable projects provide a very simple service: they answer people's questions.

Question Box provides a service in India and Uganda. In India, phone boxes are installed in slums and villages that connect users to operators that will answer questions. In Uganda, users can call in from any mobile phone and ask their questions. The operators have access to a repository of previously asked questions (and their answers), and they can also occasionally consult the Internet. A special search engine and database were also built specifically for the project.

Another initiative, Avaaj Otalo, provides an audio community forum for farmers in rural Gujarat, India. Working with an organization that produced a popular radio program, Otalo provides a call-in number where farmers can exchange questions and answers. Users are also able to listen to archives of the radio program.

These projects differ in that Question Box avoids having to process users' questions by adding a human listener in the loop; Avaaj Otalo avoids processing by organizing their collection of audio prompts with into a menu. Both programs, however, have yet to deal with the problem of cost because they subsidize the service for users. Otalo operates with a toll-free number and Question Box provides the phones to call from in India. In Uganda, Grameen Community Knowledge Workers provides the mobile phones.

Wikipedia and News on the Phone

MobilED, which operates in South African schools, developed a program that delivered Wikipedia content via mobile phones. Users texted in a query and were called back by a speech synthesizer that read the text of the relevant Wikipedia entry. Users could also upload voice-based edits to articles, or create audio entries if nothing existed on a given topic. The queries were easier to handle because they were text-based, but the information delivery utilized voice in order to deliver the entry and ensure comprehension. Unfortunately, the service was expensive to maintain and MobilED eventually abandoned the project in favor of purely data-based services.

FreedomFone, a Knight-funded project based in Zimbabwe, is working on providing news using an audio channel. In an environment where the press is highly censored and access to news is scant, FreedomFone plans to implement a solution so users can either call or text and receive the latest news information. The cost structure has yet to be determined.

Recreating the Web, or Wikis Over Audio

Perhaps the most ambitious project is IBM's Spoken Web (also known as the World Wide Telecom Web) Project. The idea is to create an all-audio version of the web. The project aims to create voice-sites that are linked to specific phone numbers, much in the way a website has a URL. The project has already built a system called VoiceGen that creates VoiceXML content from an audio input. The group deployed part of the technology in the form of VoiKiosks, a service that allowed users to listen to information from different NGOs and upload professional advertisements. It proved to be a popular test service.

The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is also developing audio wikis, or "local repositories of audio information," that can be edited and created using audio. It essentially recreates wikis on a mobile-accessible audio platform. The system is not fully developed, but is expected to be deployed in India in conjunction with Microsoft Research India.

The barriers to voice services

Voice communication offers several benefits, especially when it comes to low literacy consumers. The question, then, is why voice-based technologies are not more of a player in the world today? The automation of these types of service is difficult, but Question Box, Avaaj Otalo, and IBM have shown that challenges can be overcome.

Cost seems to be the biggest issue when it comes to deploying and maintaining these services. MobilED ended its voice-based program because of cost. It's important to note, however, that airtime is particularly expensive in South Africa. The International Telecommunication Union reported in 2008 that costs for one minute of on-network airtime during peak hours was the equivalent of U.S. $0.59 when calculated using purchasing power parity. Airtime is much more affordable in India. The same minute in India costs only U.S. $0.07. Hopefully, this will encourage other voice-based mobile services in India, and we can eventually see the cost issue resolved once and for all.

Photo courtesy of gopal1035 on Flickr, CC BY 2.0.

The Power of Proximity: Possibilities for Hyperlocal Journalism in South Africa

Harry Dugmore — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 06:44:45 -0500

Newspapers everywhere are being forced to rethink their role as simply providers of the news of the day. There is (and always has been) an appetite for immediate information and news you can use that is hyperlocal and also more detailed and granular, to use an increasingly popular word for the kind of gritty features implied.

Take crime for example: a newspaper might learn of a dozen small incidents taking place in their town, but only cover a few that are deemed newsworthy according a set of gate keeping decisions that differs by paper. Sometimes only bigger crimes get reported or, in South Africa, crime where there is actual violence. Cell phone snatching or clothes being pilfered off someone's clothesline is not likely to earn any column inches in even the smallest papers.

And yet it might well not be the size of the crime, nor its nature, nor the levels of violence that are interesting and newsworthy. Rather, it might have everything to do with proximity. You may already know if your immediate neighbor's laundry got pinched off the line, but you might not know that such deeds are happening two or three blocks away. A veritable small-scale clothesline crime wave may be happening (and may be coming your way!) without you knowing.

Of course it's very hard to cover all crime comprehensively using the print medium. But doing it online, and using various forms of visualization like crime incident maps -- elements of which can easily be reproduced in the print edition -- is an approach that holds a great deal of promise for small newspapers eager to reinvent their role in local communities.

There are lots of organizations, including the Knight Foundation and its grantees, that are looking hard at making this kind of hyperlocal information available. EveryBlock is the most famous and has done pioneering work. (It was recently bought by MSNBC.com.) David Sasaki, also a Knight News Challenge winner, wrote a very useful overview earlier this year about how maps can create social change and community involvement.

Inspired by these pioneers, what we have in mind in South Africa is to pursue a focus on the visual presentation of material, with map overlays and mouse-overs that reveal an incident and link it to further reports, context etc.

Mapping out a strategy

We are focused on launching at least four kinds of maps this year, and we know there are a lot of issues. Knight grantee Leslie Rule, in a thoughtful post about hyperlocal mapping, talks about being at a conference where an audience member argued that hyperlocal crime mapping websites can "reinforce stereotypes about where crime occurs, and more importantly, who commits it.... And don't necessarily inform the community, offer insight into issues, or shed light on potential solution"

David Sasaki also made the point that "2009 I believe will be the year of developing map-based interfaces which enable neighbors to share information with one another, leading to direct action and increased community involvement." (This is as opposed to, I suppose, just receving the information.)

We want to inspire people to take action, find community solutions, and pressure police to do their job well (arriving to help when called to do so is a big deal here in South Africa). We also want to help communities and the police see patterns of crime, For example, Grahamstown seems to be South Africa's leading city for laptop theft, with more than one pinched every day.

To do all of this well, we know we'll have to move beyond information provision and stimulate, encourage and possibly even facilitate organized responses. Hopefully,this powerfully conveyed new information and accompanying investigative journalism will spur action by readers and users.

We are of course looking beyond crime as well.

At Grocott's Mail, and as part of our Knight funded Iindaba Ziyafika project, we're also looking at ways of combining citizen reporting and local sources of data such as daily police reports, property valuations and sales, information about government services (such as opening times of government health clinics and when specialists are on duty), as well as a range of information about entertainment, sporting events, and upcoming community events.

Challenges of data-driven information

There appear to be three challenges in providing these kinds of data driven, information-heavy services. The first is getting a regular supply of data so the information is up-to-date, useful, and has a 'news' quality to it. The second is selecting ways of displaying the information so that it is most useful to readers. Will maps do the trick, and how scalable and searchable do they need to be? What kind of filters can we provide? The third challenge is allowing for comments, feedback and their aggregation, which will transform some of raw data into trend analysis type stories.

With the example of crime information, much of the required information appears to be available from local police stations and emergency response agencies. Depending on the country and the police station, it is often free available. In the U.S., the information is available in digital form, which is the whole rationale behind the automated parts of EveryBlock.

In South Africa, both the format and the level of accessibility seem to differ. It looks like we might be able to get access to crime reports at the local police, but only in hand-written form! So there's some work to be done!

This type of approach does take time and effort. It's a very different kind of journalism. But whether it focuses on hyperlocal crime, hyperlocal pollution and health issues, local economies, or information about the provision of local services, this approach provides an essential, missing link between what citizens find useful to know, and information that can inspire them to help change things in their community.

Getting off the ground in South Africa

Four graduate students have received scholarships from the Iindaba Ziyafika project and are working to getting these projects off the ground. They are being supervised by Vin Crosbie, an international expert in new media (among other things). You can read about his recent experiences working with us on his blog.

By the end of 2009, our work will be available online at the Grocott's website and in truncated form in the print edition.

In a separate project, we're also looking at how Grocott's online can be a conduit for greater involvement in civic life. We hope to create an early warning system that can alert people when important local issues are coming up for debate or decision by the government. Too much reporting of civic events is done in the past tense; it is critical, we believe, to anticipate and frame information for people in a way that encourages participation. I'll blog about some of our thinking and plans for that in the near future.

Meanwhile, and to conclude, the big news from South Africa is that the first (as far as we know!) Citizen Journalism Newsroom is opening formally on September 8 in the Grocott's Mail office in downtown Grahamstown. We're already using the facility, providing training and getting ready. (We have computer terminals and other facilities available for people come in and use.)

We're also launching our citizen Journalist "Photo of the Week" competition with a small weekly cash prize, and our CJ "Story of the Week," which also carries a small cash prize. We'll see if the walk-in facility at the office and the incentives start increasing the already impressive flow of stories and photos already coming in.

Finally, we also launching the Drupal based NIKA Content Management System at Highway Africa with two half-day trainings for community newspapers from across the country and the continent. Not only is NIKA a great CMS, but it also facilitates the direct reception of SMS through a modem and some Kannel-based SMS gateway bridges.

NIKA will initially be served over the web, but the stand-alone fully installed LAMP system, with Drupal and NIKA configurations, will be rolled out as users move beyond the web-only offering later this year.

Keep watching this space in September for some links to our official launch and some training photos!

When FM Radio Meets the Mobile Phone in Pakistan

Corinne Ramey — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 10:30:54 -0500

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

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

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

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

Traffic Reports Cover Urban Warfare

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

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

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

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

Dueling Radio Stations

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

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

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

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

This article originally appeared on MobileActive.org

Photo of cricket game by Pete Meade via Flickr.

Help Us Rename the Daily Phoenix Light-Rail Publication

Adam Klawonn — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 19:01:34 -0500

It's been 42 days and counting since the Knight Foundation announced that Daily Phoenix, our hybrid platform to deliver news and information to urban audiences by light-rail stop, won startup funding. Back here in the scorching confines of Phoenix, the interest was immediate. Local TV station KTVK-TV Channel 3 interviewed us on their signature program, Good Morning Arizona.

It was an incredible opportunity and an enlightening experience that really helped us out. For those of you who are thinking about doing a new media project or are already working on one, the TV interview format can be a boon as it forces you to sum up your project in small sound bites (while under the extreme pressure of being on live television).

Apparently, we did a great job. How do I know this? Well, when we laid out the basics of the project (our pitch), the anchor, Tess Rafols, thought it made perfect sense and, in fact, was surprised no one had thought of it yet. (The Internet is a pretty big place, so trust us, Tess -- this idea is floating around elsewhere.) Still, we were very encouraged, and we think we are bringing a great concept to the table.

Now for the fun part: The interview also made us re-think our name, Daily Phoenix.

This has been a source of angst for us since the interview. Why? Well, the word "Daily" doesn't really add much utility to the name and isn't very descriptive. It's on the Web, so, of course, anything can be "daily." Originally, we thought it made sense because it gave people the sense that this is a publication -- which, indeed, is the exact reaction we have received. But others have said that it sounds like "old media."

The word "Phoenix" is also troubling. The bulk of our light-rail system is in Phoenix, but it also runs out to the suburbs of Tempe and Mesa. Although newbies use the word "Phoenix" to refer to the region, using "Phoenix" in our name could alienate local folks (our primary users).

As a result, we've decided to brainstorm a new list of names over the next two weeks. This will be a collaborative tool for the community, so, in that spirit, I'd like to toss out this opportunity to the Idea Lab audience for help. We can't offer fame or fortune, but we can offer that cocktail party "coolness" factor if your name -- or some mashup of names submitted below -- actually sticks.

Here are our basic guidelines:

Our project uses web, print and mobile technologies to deliver information by light-rail stop to urban audiences. They can collaborate or use it to guide themselves around the city's news, events and services.

Because of this, they should feel like they have control over their environment. This is an empowering tool for them.

It's location-based knowledge -- meaning it has an awareness at a certain point and time.

Whatever the name is, it would be nice if it could become a verb among our users (i.e., "googled").

That's it! Although we're coming up with our own list, any suggestions below in the comments are welcome. Thanks!

Saving (or Destroying) Public Radio on a Mobile Phone

Corinne Ramey — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 15:21:34 -0500

Is the iPhone app Public Radio Player the good guy or the bad? The critics aren't so sure. Marshall Kirkpatrick's post on ReadWriteWeb, "How One iPhone App Could Save Public Radio" took the super-hero stance, but Rafat Ali opted for the villain with "Public Radio Dangerously Close To Making Public Radio Obsolete" on PaidContent.

Public Radio Player, the new version of the old Public Radio Tuner, is a free application that allows users to access more than 300 radio stations across the country. With a few swipes to the screen of an iPhone or iPod Touch, users can listen to live shows or recorded podcasts from locations of their choice. The app is a collaboration led by Public Radio Exchange (PRX), with National Public Radio, American Public Media, Public Interactive and Public Radio International, and funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

With 1.8 million downloads to date (including Public Radio Tuner, the previous version), the app has given thousands of listeners access to stations and favorite shows -- like Marketplace, Prairie Home Companion and This American Life -- without the geographical limitations of a radio signal.

Relationship between listeners and stations

But while increasing listeners, the app has initiated a conversation about funding for public radio stations and the responsibility of listeners to their local station. In his piece on PaidContent, Rafat Ali wrote, "All of this adds to the issues surrounding local public radio funding in the digital age: If a large number of iPhone app users are not necessarily listening in to the local station, then loyalties start to shift, or even fade away, which in turn affects donations to the local stations."

Jake Shapiro, founder and executive director of PRX, told me that he's not surprised by the controversy. "I think there are definitely some things that this kind of application will provoke," he said. "It does stretch the relationship between listeners and their stations."

But eventually, he would like the app to evolve into something that supports public radio in a different way.

"Our hope and belief is that it expands and grows the total audience for public radio," he said. "Although there's a big question of how to translate that functionality into something that is convenient at the producer and station level."

Ideally, Shapiro would like users to donate directly to the radio stations from their iPhone. With a simple click, a listener in Chicago could see that she was a frequent listener of WCPN in Cleveland, and donate to that station using the credit card stored on her iTunes account. But because Apple currently doesn't allow iTunes to be used for charitable purposes, this isn't an option.

"It's true there isn't much incentive for Apple to solve this," said Shapiro. "But we're hoping there's at least a moral case for how Apple should be involved."

And even if Apple did begin to allow for charitable donations, there is still the stipulation that only paid apps are allowed to have in-app transactions. Although PRX considered charging, they wanted to make the app available to the broadest possible audience. And they also didn't like the idea of Apple taking 30 percent of all payments.

Other ways to connect

Google's Android platform may also offer an easier way to connect users with their stations, said Shapiro. "You'd have the freedom to map however you wanted to do transactions, but not the seamless experience of Apple's ecosystem," he said. Although PRX is not actively working on an Android version, Shapiro said that there has been both discussion and demand. PRX is also working with Doc Searls, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, to develop a way to log user listening patterns and then encourage them to donate to their favorite stations.

And when it comes down to it, listener support is just one of several revenue sources -- taxes, corporate underwriting, philanthropy -- that keep public radio alive. If, at some point in the future, Public Radio Tuner would be able to change the landscape of public radio, Shapiro hopes that it will be for the better. Listeners might not want that free tote bag with the name of their local station, but by increasing public radio's audience and eventually letting people know what stations they're listening to, Public Radio Tuner will not only keep public radio alive, but help it to thrive.

Inzwa: Listen up!

Amanda Atwood — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 01:55:13 -0500

This week, Kubatana launched Inzwa, Zimbabwe's experiment with Freedom Fone, providing audio information via mobile phones. We'll be updating our information every Tuesday, and we are interested in any feedback to help us improve the service.

How does it work?

Tune into Inzwa by phoning +263 913 444 321-8 and . . .
- Press 1 for 60 seconds fresh bringing you current news and views
- Choose 2 to enter the doorway to chibanzi for job vacancies, scholarships or resources
- Press 3 to find out about everyday heroes and take a new look at Zimbabwean activists and activism
- Hit 4 to listen to Zanele unleash the music and introduce us to new musicians
- And . . . Speak Out Sistas and Bruthaz . . . to leave us a message, punch 5

So try it out! Phone +263 913 444 312-8 any time, day or night, and tell us what you think.

Nika System Brings Reader SMS Messages into Newspaper's Workflow

Harry Dugmore — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 07:19:53 -0500

Recent research support the idea that South Africans, 15 years after the heroic levels of participation that led to overthrow of apartheid, are becoming less engaged: Membership of religious groups, trade unions, political parties, and even of sporting associations are all decreasing, sometimes sharply, in the 21st century.

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

Bowling Alone

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

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

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

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

News by SMS

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

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

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

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

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

GOING BEYOND TECHNOLOGY -- INSPIRING ACTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GETTING JOURNALISTS AND CITIZENS INVOLVED

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VLink Offers Robust, Low-Cost Internet Service for Rural Areas

Aaditeshwar Seth — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:30:13 -0500

Internet penetration in rural areas, especially in developing countries such as India, is generally poor. Telecom companies do not find it economically viable to deploy wired broadband such as DSL; satellite connectivity is expensive and often slow; dial-up (if available) is always flaky; and cellular data services such as GPRS or EDGE are quite costly to use. Newer technologies for wireless broadband such as WiMax do promise higher bandwidth, but infrastructure costs for deployment in rural areas remain high. How then can Internet connectivity be provided in such areas in a robust and low-cost manner?

One could, of course, ask whether the Internet is required at all in rural areas, given that most of the population is only semi-literate. But this is a flawed argument. The Internet today goes beyond text and includes video, audio, images, and even caters to local vernacular languages. This makes a lot of content relevant to a much larger demographic. Second, the Internet has also become the primary vehicle for delivery of transaction-oriented applications such as buying a train or bus ticket, or making bill payments, and hence is more relevant to rural areas for making it easier to conduct such transactions.

A number of research groups have developed different technologies to provide connectivity in remote rural areas, and I will talk about some of them in subsequent posts. In this post, I will describe an innovative project called VLink done by the Tetherless Computing Group at the University of Waterloo in Canada. The group, led by Prof. Srinivasan Keshav, has been working in this area for the last four years. There were two main principles behind much of the philosophy followed by the group:

Delay reduces cost: When we normally think about the Internet, we think of it as an always-connected medium where users can surf the web, browse pictures, view videos, etc, all on an instantaneous basis. But this is not always necessary for many applications. For example, if you want to send an email, it is immaterial whether the email gets delivered to the recipient's mailbox instantaneously or a couple of hours later, because the recipient will only see the email the next time that they log onto their computer.

Similarly, if you want to buy a train ticket, it should be sufficient if you were to put in a request right now and receive the ticket the next day when you log on. The drift here is that for many applications, technically called delay-tolerant applications, you need not always be connected to the Internet, and even delayed connectivity is fine to a large extent. The insight of this project is that if users are willing to tolerate some delay, it can significantly reduce the cost of providing Internet access, as I will soon describe.

Applications and communication medium are separate from each other: Consider various examples of applications such as email, ticket booking, video download, picture download, etc. None of these applications really depend on whether the underlying medium of communication is a satellite link, or a broadband link, or maybe even a dial-up link. And the Internet has been designed in such a manner that different communication technologies can be substituted for each other, but the applications will still work. In technical language we call this layering, meaning that applications work at a higher layer than the communication medium, and as long as the roles and responsibilities of layers are cleanly separated from each other, higher layers won't care about how the lower layers are implemented.

VLink used these two principles to develop a software framework on which delay tolerant applications could be built, and different communication channels could be used in the underlying layers for moving bits to and from the Internet. These communication channels include the following:

Vehicles to ferry data: Vehicles such as cars and buses that regularly travel between villages and cities are fitted with a wireless router that runs from the vehicle's battery. This router carries a hard disk and supports WiFi. When the vehicle drives past a kiosk in a village, it wirelessly picks up data from the computers in the kiosk, stores this data on the hard disk, and pushes the data off into the Internet when the vehicle drives through a WiFi hotspot that is connected to the Internet. The same process is used to fetch data from the Internet and deliver it to the kiosk.

Even if the vehicle does not stop as it passes a kiosk, the 5-6 seconds of connectivity are sufficient to transfer almost 200MB of data. The system supports all sorts of additional features such as retransmission of data if a vehicle breaks down midway, duplication of data on multiple vehicles to increase the chances of speedy delivery, fragmentation of data so that different parts of the data can be transferred through different vehicles, etc.

USB keys: Probably the most robust method of data transfer, USB keys are cheap, can provide gigabytes of storage, and can be carried around virtually anywhere humans can go. VLink uses USB keys as a communication medium, and, similar to vehicles carrying data, the data can be split across multiple USB keys, duplicated, retransmitted, and reassembly works regardless of the order in which different data fragments arrive at the destination. In fact, some fragments could be brought in over USB keys while others over vehicles, and everything will still work!

SMS: Although a very non-intuitive mechanism, it actually makes a lot of sense. VLink can fragment data into 160-byte chunks that can be text-messaged to the destination and then reassembled. This is especially useful for data that needs to be delivered urgently, for example, a high priority email, which cannot wait for somebody to carry a USB key or for a vehicle to drive past. VLink can internally infer that such short high priority messages can be sent over SMS, while larger non-urgent messages can be sent over video.

Robust and Low Cost

Such non-conventional communication mechanisms actually end up being very robust and low-cost. The cost of wireless routers on vehicles gets amortized across all kiosks that a vehicle visits. Similarly, USB keys are cheap and a key can be handed to practically every single person who moves between a village and city. SMS is also available practically everywhere, and in fact many countries such as India have bulk SMS plans to allow the user to send many SMS messages in one single go.

The VLink group has also built some useful applications on this platform. A Flickr application fetches pictures matching a search term, a YouTube application similarly searches and downloads video, an email application delivers email, etc. An open API is also provided, which allows developers to build other innovative delay tolerant applications as well.

Different parts of the VLink system have even been piloted in many locations. A vehicle-based pilot was done in the village of Anandpuram near the city of Vishakapatnam in India, where VLink was used to move e-governance forms for birth certificates, income certificates, and more to the Internet.

A pilot in Ghana helped connect a central hospital in Accra with rural clinics, enabling nurses in remote locations to consult with doctors in the city. And even at Gram Vaani, we plan to use USB keys to ship logs from remote community radio stations to the Internet so that we can analyze them to find bugs, before sending back upgrades and patches to be automatically applied to the systems running at different radio stations.

For more information, you can either write to me because I worked on many parts of the project for my thesis, or you can write to Prof. Keshav, or leave a comment here and we will get back to you.

First Release of the Gramin Radio Inter Networking System Is Here!

Aaditeshwar Seth — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 02:42:07 -0500

After working countless weekends and days and nights, we are very happy to announce that Gram Vaani's platform for community radio stations is now available for download. We call it GRINS, standing for the Gramin Radio Inter Networking System.

GRINS is an enhanced automation system for community radio stations. Built on Gram Vaani's MINP platform, the current release of GRINS allows radio station operators to schedule broadcasts, preview programs, record live transmissions, and maintain an extensive semantically searchable library. In future releases, GRINS will be enhanced to handle telephony calls, sending and receiving SMS messages, and Internet connectivity to share and stream content with other GRINS deployments. Some of the key features of GRINS that distinguish it from other radio broadcast platforms are as follows:

Commodity hardware: GRINS does most processing in software to eliminate the need of buying expensive audio hardware, and yet imposes very low processing overhead on the system. For this reason, GRINS can be run off commodity PCs and single board computers, significantly reducing the costs of setting up community radio stations.

Service oriented design: All functionality provided by GRINS is handled by different services, such as the Audio Service for playout, Archiver Service for recording, Library Service for storage, etc. Each of these services can be run either on a single machine, or off
multiple machines. This makes the deployment of GRINS extremely flexible to be able to fit into any kind of a radio station setup.

Application development platform: The open API of GRINS allows third party developers to build their own radio applications using the various underlying services that GRINS provides. For example, you can build specific applications for the broadcast of educational programs
or health programs, that allow quick search and playback features for the respective topics. In the future, once GRINS begins to support the telephone, video, and Internet planes, these applications can even be multiplanar in nature.

Easy to use UI: The GRINS user interface has been especially designed keeping in mind the target population of rural areas in India and other developing countries. The use of large icons and simple navigation makes GRINS easy to use even for radio operators who are new to computerized systems.

Diagnostics: A key feature of GRINS, the system can actually detect any network faults or audio cable errors or poor audio quality through DSP, and guide the operators on how to fix the problem locally. This reduces the down-time of the system so that radio stations located in remote rural areas do not have to wait for a technician to visit them and fix small problems.

Please navigate the following links to know more about GRINS:

Screenshots, and download/installation instructions
Configuration wizard to understand how GRINS can be plugged into your existing radio station setup

In just a few weeks, we will do out first pilot with Radio Bundelkhand, the community radio station in Orcha, India set up by Development Alternatives. And we will also demo GRINS during the upcoming C4FCM conference at MIT.

It has honestly been a tremendous effort. Building such a comprehensive system in 5 months, with over 50,000 lines of code is no joke! We are very fortunate to have such a gifted technology team at Gram Vaani.

And do visit the Gram Vaani website to stay updated on our progress.

Student Journalists, Technologists Collaborate on News Innovations

Rich Gordon — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 09:00:37 -0500

Eight computer science students and 11 journalism master's students -- including the third "programmer-journalist" scholarship winner, whose Medill journalism education was paid through a Knight News Challenge grant -- are putting the finishing touches on five innovative new products that combine journalism and technology.

One product is a tool for working reporters, one is a new way of organizing content for mobile delivery, two leverage the growing power of Twitter and one generates baseball game accounts from box scores. All of the projects demonstrate what's possible when journalists and technologists collaborate.

Details of the new concepts will start rolling out with a final presentation Wednesday to faculty, students and invited media industry guests. We'll be live-streaming the presentation. If you're in the Chicago area, come on by: 3:30-5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, June 10, in the Forum of the McCormick Tribune Center, 1870 Campus Drive.

The five projects are the results of the first-ever collaboration between a Medill "innovation project" class, taught by me and my Medill colleague Jeremy Gilbert, and a computer science class run by Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum, who run Northwestern's Intelligent Information Laboratory. Here are descriptions of the projects:

Tweedia

Tweedia is a widget that presents tweets relevant to an article and displays those results adjacent to the article. It is positioned as a tool that publishers can use to enhance engagement with their content. In its appearance and functionality, Tweedia bears some resemblance to the short-format comments (or "quips") included in the News Mixer demonstration site created by the fall 2008 innovation project at Medill. But while quips were posted by users on the same page where an article appeared, Tweedia aggregates tweets on a topic automatically.

EasyWriter

EasyWriter is a tool for journalists to use while crafting an article using Microsoft Word. As the journalist writes, he or she can highlight text and EasyWriter automatically displays news articles and Web pages related to that topic. The idea is to make it easy for the journalist to check facts or do additional research without leaving Word.

News Feed

News Feed is a mobile Web site, optimized for iPhone users, that is designed to help users choose just the right amount of information for the amount of time they have available: 5 minutes, 10 minutes or 20 minutes. This is the project that most directly addresses a consumer need, I think.

Twitter Publishing

Another Twitter-based project, this is a tool designed to help publishers distribute their content to people who have demonstrated interest in a topic by tweeting about it. The basic concept is to identify a target audience based on people's tweeting behavior, then deliver them content they are likely to find relevant by analyzing the content of their tweets.

Machine-Generated Sports Stories

This project doesn't have a clever name (yet), but it is in some ways the most interesting -- and could be the most controversial -- of the projects. This team, which includes "programmer-journalist" scholarship winner Nick Allen, has built a system that reads the box score and play by play of a baseball game and automatically generates a story about the game. It's interesting because the team's software addresses a very real need among a variety of publishers -- from ESPN to college sports information directors to high school athletic directors -- who would like to produce baseball game stories quickly and inexpensively. It's potentially controversial because one might argue that this software will make it possible to eliminate journalists' jobs. I don't think that's the case, because most of the articles the team's software might write would not have been written by a human reporter at all. Furthermore, a tool that auto-generates game stories would free up beat reporters to focus on enterprise coverage rather than game accounts.

Over the next couple of weeks, I'll write a bit more about each of the five projects. If you want to know more now, check out the students' Web site, writeclick.org.

The A Word: Information and Activism

Christopher Csikszentmihályi — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 18:08:29 -0500

One of the central shifts implicit in user-generated information is that in many cases the user will be closer to the subject than a reporter may have been. Journalists, like ethnographers or consultants, are separated from their subjects by factors like structures of reward (salary) and professional codes (organized skepticism, systematic disinterestedness). These factors are sometimes driven by ethical positions and sometimes are byproducts of revenue structures, but have been seen as important to the neutrality and objectivity that characterize recent ideas of journalism.

Citizen-created content falls in a different space; as I have said elsewhere, it starts to look like activism. The word activism is a site of some contention: frankly, for many it evokes "those damned hippies." In our research on civic groups that form spontaneously in the face of adversity, we have seen how people become -- often against their will -- interpellated into activities like fact-finding, document digging, attending public hearings, and public story telling, activities that overlap with many of the those practiced by investigative or beat journalists. We met one software engineer who was working to protect his suburb from corporate development and pollution; he was genuinely upset because he had been written up in a local paper with the caption "activist" under his photo. He told us, "I'm not an activist, I'm a software engineer!" Unwilling or not, in many cases these activists are the ones following an issue and documenting it for the public record. There are clearly many pitfalls to this configuration, just as there are pitfalls in journalism. And certainly, the idea of activist reportage leaves a bad taste in the mouth of many journalists trained in the United States in the second half of the 20th Century.

Of course, the notion of a free press was not always synonymous with impartiality. Newspapers were critical in helping spur and organize the abolitionism movement of the 19th Century. Elijah Parish Lovejoy, a pastor, also published the Alton [Illinois] Observer, a newspaper that would now probably be described as a shrill blog, where he extolled the radical idea that slavery should be abolished and people have the same rights regardless of their appearance. For this editorial position, mobs attacked his offices and destroyed his printing presses three times. The delivery of his fourth printing press to a river-front warehouse in Alton led to a raging riot: Lovejoy was shotgunned to death at the age of 35, his still-crated press dismantled and the pieces thrown into the mighty Mississippi.

I would assert that this sort of freedom of press was at least as important to constitutional framers as the right to a stable daily with comics and movie reviews; any discussion of the future of communities and information should question, embrace, or challenge these historical examples at least as much as the examples from recent US history. We can also travel slightly outside American borders and see in stark relief, from Mexico to Korea to Zimbabwe, how activist journalism can be a critical part of the struggle for a free and just society. Our collective recollection of newspapers as stable, reputable, major limestone-and-mortar operations resembles the model of a mid-century GM or IBM far more than they do many of the contemporary institutions that are currently thriving. That isn't to say that we should only value fast companies or that we are beyond stable enterprises, simply that such institutions will probably not look like they used to.

For better or worse, we need to accept that the people most invested in finding out what is happening to a community are often going to be the ones with a vested interest in the outcome. We need to concentrate, then, on how to ensure that the community hears from all the vested interests; not just the richest or most powerful. And we need to discover how to best match information activism with positive social change.

Call for Action Class

This semester I had the privilege of co-teaching a class titled Call for Action: Mobile Technologies and Social Change with the talented Nadav Aharony and the help of David Reed, Katrin Verclas, Ethan Zuckerman, and others. We took Jack Knight at his word, not just that "We seek to bestir the people into an awareness of their own condition" but also that we "rouse them to pursue their true interests." Bestirring sounds quaint, like something one might do to one's mint julep. Rousing is more active, and understanding how technology can help to rouse and support action was a major theme in the class.

Throughout the semester we looked at a variety of methodologies and texts for guidance and inspiration: In political science we looked at Charles Tilly, who made a career of understanding social conflict and change. In Sociology we looked at Manuel Castells, who argues that mobile technologies have created a space for new configurations of the citizen in public space. Closer to home we worked with David Reed, one of the creators of the Internet and a quiet but effective information activist. We worked with and tested Nadav's comm.unity system, and ad-hoc communications platform for smart peer-to-peer networks that prevent information from being centralized and controlled. And we had visits from Katrin Verclas of MobileActive, Nick Matthewson of Tor, and others.

With an experimental class, one never know what the next week will bring. The final week, however, brought many remarkable projects, including:
•A system for Venezuelan doctors to covertly export data about the Dengue epidemic ravaging their country, despite Chavez's recent law forbidding medical professionals from mentioning the disease
•Code that allows for SMS steganography, i.e. the hiding of messages in messages. With this unique algorithm, a few messages like "b sure 2 bring home teh milk, honey!" can be encoded to contain a shorter message like "MDC meeting at Universalist Church 2100 hrs"
•An application that scrapes government web sites for impending timber sales and clearcutting in the Pacific Northwest, mapping them and notifying activists to organize and stage demonstrations
•SMS and iPhone app protest system that allows demonstrators to crowd source their experiences and organizers to better understand what is happening on the streets

One student, who apparently never sleeps, completed two projects in May and even deployed one in the field, resulting in 1,000,000 SMS messages being sent throughout Mexico. The texts initiated a an interactive questionnaire, asking a diverse group of Mexicans about their experience with the flu. A total of 56,000 filled out their experiences, and the resulting data, while a little noisy, seems to perfectly match the rate of infection determined by other, slower, less distributed methods. Andrés argues that this may be the best technique for monitoring early outbreaks, since cellphones are far more common across location, age, and income in Mexico than other epidemiological inputs.

Andés wasn't content with a million text messages, or the top-down nature of the swine flu project, so he also launched a project to help Mexicans report and learn about voting fraud in the elections scheduled for this July 5. By matching Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS with public (or semi-public) government geographic databases, Cuidemos El Voto allows citizens to report or be notified about voting fraud at their individual polling place. With resolution down to a few blocks in the capitol, the system also notifies journalists and accredited elections monitors, allowing them to immediately locate and document fraud.

Rethinking Community Information Needs

Paul Lamb — Tue, 05 May 2009 11:22:53 -0500

Following up on the Knight Commission's work and musings on "community information needs in a democracy", Mark glaser poses a much more targeted question which has yet to be fully addressed: "What is missing in terms of local community needs"?

Most of the discussion in this area focuses on what you and might want in our own communities - things like crime reporting, new local ordinances, and hyper local happenings and events on your block. As David Sasaki points out Everyblock and Oakland Crimespotting are great tools to address these needs.

But what about the folks that are not at and will likely never be at the table for such discussions on "democracy" and "information needs" of local communities. I'm talking low income and underserved communities. How can their issues be addressed in the frenzied and brave new world of media and information technology? Does it take more citizen journalists, more Google mapping projects, and other top down, technogeek solutions to bring everybody in? Or do we need a new bottom up approach that empowers local communities of every flavor and socioeconomic status to identify and develop their own tools and information needs?

I'll admit it. I am as guilty as the next talking head that attempts to speak on behalf of the so-called "voiceless", even though I like to think that many of my ideas (like Locobeat) have been inspired by what I have learned living and working in and around low income communities.

But that's not good enough. If we are really serious about democracy for EVERYONE, each community must speak for itself, design (technology tools) for itself, and have relevant conversations about and among itself.

So the questions then become...

How can we support (and understand) community-based empowerment without a top down, "let me help you" approach? One that's respectful and not condescending?

And how can we get creative tools and resources in the hands of people who can and will use them to directly answer the question of local information needs?

I don't have any great answers, but lots of great projects are already happening in an attempt to address these challenges head on. Things like Global Voices. And this is just the beginning. IMHO the next step is to let go and have communities themselves decide what their information needs are, who and how they will addressed....as well as how they can be sustained without handouts. Frankly, this will take a lot more than blue ribbon panels. and and more "commission" reports.

The tools and commitment are already here. The business and management models are not quite yet figured out. but the call to action has arrived and all of us - and I mean all of us - need to respond. So let's figure it out, together!

p.s. Some really cool mobile tools are emerging in the community empowerment space, many of which will be on display at this month's Netsquared conference in San Jose, CA.