The Practical Radical
Whose Tweet Counts Anyways? A response to Malcolm Gladwell.
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Recently the twitter/facebooker/bloggers sphere has all been a-twitter about Malcolm Gladwell of Tipping Point fame’s slam of social media as a tool for advocacy. Seems Gladwell does not believe that social media creates very strong “links”, which especially effects those who would wish to use twitter as an advocacy tool. He states that the twitter revolutions that happened in Moldova or Iran were overstated; siting the fact that there are very few twitter users in these countries.He gives some detailed overviews of how REAL advocacy happens in the form of recounting key events in the civil rights movement.
I agree with him on some counts – technological advances in my mind are always overhyped – and there is nothing more hyped than facbook and twitter. Yet, I think that his analysis is flawed in one way -it is written almost solely from a developed world perspective. Yes, we in the developed world might be spoilt with our ubiquitous bandwidth, but it is not in the developed world that social media is having the biggest impact. It is the developing world, those places where millions upon millions of people are queuing to buy mobile phones, getting on the internet and social media, and using those phones for all there worth. I have written a few posts on the impact of mobile technologies which you can link to here.
So I have posted my response on the Social Capital blog (a great blog by the way). Here is a brief on the blog and my response to it.
Why the revolution won’t be tweeted
Twitter Revolution – Flickr Photo by FrauleinSchiller
Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting column in the October 4, 2010 New Yorker called “Small Change.”
Gladwell asserts that claims of Twitter’s role in various uprisings in developing countries (like Moldova or Iran) have been exaggerated. He cited Evgeny Morozov, a Stanford-based scholar who notes that “Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist.” And he cites Anne Applebaum who suggested in the Washington Post that the protest “may well have been a bit of stage-craft cooked up by the government.” Golnaz Esfandiari in Foreign Policy wrote in Summer 2010 about Iran: “It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events of Iran right…Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.”
Steps into Mapping the Unmapped – via Mapping: No Big Deal
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No big deal?? Yeah right! This is an excellent and detailed step-by-step process on how to do mapping in remote areas, and for a great purpose as well (the successful referendum held in Kenya. Check out my blog post Transparency + Accountability = Democracy, Kenya Style to see how mapping was used there).
Here are the steps in quick preview (go to the main article to see the details):
1. Season planning.
2. Try to acquire existing maps or make people create them from memory.
3. Get contacts in the area prior to your arrival.
4. Meet community leaders.
5. Find a guide who knows the area and the people.
6. Go to a local bar and have a beer. ** key to any successful mapping process! – DR
7. Go for it. Map!
8. Write a working diary.
9. Present the results to the community.
10. Finish your work.
11. Stay in touch.
Keep up the good work and keep us posted!
Doug
Mapping hardly accessible, rural areas, is always a challenge. Each area differs so you have to tackle it in its own special way. Yet some basic steps are always the same. I have written some of them down. In July, Mildred and I went mapping on Mount Elgon as contractors for the National Democratic Institute (NDI) on behalf of Map Kibera.
They needed information regarding polling stations in the area for their work on election monitoring. The information included geographic location, accessibility – both physical accessibility and the availability of cell phone service, information related to infrastructure of these stations, and speed of travel to each individual station.
Tags: @openstreetmap, Africa, Cartography, Geography, Global Positioning System, kenya, kibera, map, map kibera, Mobile phone, Mount Elgon, research, Science and Technology, Social Sciences, Technology, Youth
What it means to “get it” – Mikel Maron on Building Digital Technology for Our Planet
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I am going to go out on a limb here and state that I think Mikel Maron and his crew of openstreetmap people are some of the leading experts globally in understanding how technology – specifically spatial technology – can be used in the developing world.
Why you ask? Why them? Well, because they aren’t at 10,000 feet, nor 5,000 feet, or even 500 feet — they are at ground zero. Yes, they passionately believes in technology, Mikel is a self-described techno nerd, but he, like many of the others involved in openstreetmaps movement, are on the ground seeing how technology ACTUALLY works, not how we would love it to, or how we report it to our funders to get more money, or how it works for just enough time for our research to be done (read about the hole-in-the-wall project in his blog post).
I wrote a management-nerdy blog post a while back on one of the projects they were involved in — mapkibera — and if you get past all the graphs my main message was that the people in the project were asking the right questions — basically — how can this project be sustainable past the initial “wow” phase. The answer to this question is quite simple, and one not often followed by aid agencies — the answer is “LIVE THERE”. Yup, be there, not in a hotel, or the UN compound, or the ex-pat enclave, but actually in the place you are working at. Find out where all the gnarly bits are, and then maybe it will be successful — or at least have a better chance. Parallel and just as important is WORK with the people that live there. Seems self explanatory … but something that is not always done.
And, that is what Mikel and his crew have done with mapkibera. They came for 6 months, and have stayed for a year+. They engaged the community in an asset based approach – a la John Mcknight’s Asset Based Community Development – and had the people map their community — and community which heretofore had no community accessible maps. The mapping was done on a platform developed in Kenya after the post-election violence of a couple years ago called Usahidi (you can as well read my yet unpublished blog post on this).
So, this all being said, the following blog outlines the questions he and they are asking, the possibilities and the possible pitfalls. I’ll shut up and let him speak … (but read my bolded bits to see where I think he nails it bang on) .. ok .. i will really shut up now. Promise …
Tags: Asset Based Community Development, kenya, kibera, map kibera, Mikel Maron, Non-governmental organization, Technology
Nairobi Reflection 3: High Touch/Low Tech
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Community Mapping has always been quite an amazing tool – it localizes knowledge, draws on the “mappers” personal and community experiences, identifies interconnectedness – all this coming together and increasing social capital (if you are interested in the concepts of social capital read Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone; to better understand how it relates to mapping, read up on John Mcknight’s Asset Based Community Development). You can check out some of the work that the International Centre for Sustainable Cities and UN-HABITAT has done on community mapping by checking out their draft asset mapping manual.
As I have written about before, the Kibera Mapper’s project take this to the next level by combining the “soft” components of mapping – working with community, getting them to identify their “assets” or “social capital” – with the “hard” components of mapping – turning out maps which can be used in community organizing and advocacy. These organizing and advocacy outputs can be used to influence decision makers such as planners – I like to thing of it as the “pointy stick” of mapping, where you can drive your message home with great success.
What is even more exciting is how low tech this has become. Using what they call Walking Papers mappers are able to draw directly onto a map and then have it scanned and that be uploaded directly to a digital map. No GPS, no uploading to an onsite computer. The definition of High Touch/Low Tech.
A Walking Paper example - the barcode in bottom right allows the map to be scanned and lined up with an offsite digital map
Anyways, I am re-blogging Mikel’s post from the Map Kibera blog. It gives a lot more detail and new insight into mapping — real-time — in the field.
Tags: @mapkibera, @openstreetmap, community, kenya, kibera, map, Mapping, Sustainable Cities, Technology
Skype: A game changer application
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Skype has changed the way international work is done.
For example, 10 years ago when working in Kenya finding any form of landline out was difficult – it was calling cards and a significant expense to get a crackly line. 5 years ago you could use a cell phone, but again, great expense. Skype was theoretically possible back then, but realistically it didn’t work. 2 years ago skype became more usable, but still it wasn’t like talking on a real line
Now, using skype, and especially skype to skype, has seen dramatic cost reductions, and quality improvements. Much of this in East Africa is due to the recent arrival of fibre optic cables in Mombasa.
Is Skype a game changer for you? Sing us a song and fill in this poll!
8 things I wish everyone knew about email by Seth Godin
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Seth Godin is a well know blogger who get’s it right a good percentage of the time. Read on about 10 (I added two at the bottom) email smarts:
- Change your settings so that email from you has a name, your name, not a blank or some unusual characters, in the from field. (ask a geek or IT person for help if you don’t know how).
- Change your settings so that the bottom of every email includes a signature (often called a sig) that includes your name and your organization.
- Change your settings so that when you reply to a note, the note you’re replying to is included below what you write (this is called quoting).
- Don’t hit reply all. Just don’t. Okay, you can, but read this first.
- You can’t recall an email you didn’t mean to send. Some software makes you think you can, but you can’t. Not reliably.
- Email lives forever, is easy to spread and can easily show up in discovery for a lawsuit.
Please don’t ask me to save a tree by not printing your email. It doesn’t work, it just annoys the trees. - Send yourself some email at a friend’s computer. Read it. Are the fonts too big or too small? Does it look like a standard email? If it doesn’t look like a standard, does this deviation help you or hurt you? Sometimes, fitting in makes sense, no?
- And a bonus tip from Cory Doctorow, who gets more email than you and me combined: When you go on vacation, set up an autoreply that says, “I’m on vacation until x/x/2010. When I get back, I’m going to delete all the email that arrived while I was gone, so if this note is important, please send it to me again after that date.”
From Practical Radical: I would add two more –
9. If you wouldn’t say it face to face, don’t say it in an email.
10. Sit on it. I often have a drafted email that i don’t send for a day or more, especially if it is to do with an emotional or really important issue (which are often one and the same).
Doug Ragan
practicalradical
The Practical Radical 