Things I like

Arab Media & Society: The end of the beginning: The failure of April 6th and the future of electronic activism in Egypt

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:27:08 -0500

Arab Media & Society: The end of the beginning: The failure of April 6th and the future of electronic activism in Egypt:

Excellent article/analysis on the use and failures of using Facebook for organizing and mobilizing in Egypt.

"Brilliant quote: “There are two kinds of political activists. The first kind, the kind who..."

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 16:02:54 -0400

“

Brilliant quote:

“There are two kinds of political activists. The first kind, the kind who changes the world, points to something that seriously needs to be seen, and cries out, “Look at this.”

The second kind, the kind who changes nothing, barks in a voice every bit as insistent, “Look at me.”

Who are you?

”

ctrl-alt-delete on the Wall in the West Bank. Not sure where...

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:45:08 -0400

ctrl-alt-delete on the Wall in the West Bank.

Not sure where this picture is coming from, but powerful.

11 Volcanoes in the Americas To Climb

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 22:58:01 -0400

11 Volcanoes in the Americas To Climb:

Video

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:13:00 -0400

Human-Centered Design Toolkit - Case Studies - IDEO

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:18:24 -0400

Human-Centered Design Toolkit - Case Studies - IDEO:

IDEO created a toolkit for applying Human-Centered Design to inspire new solutions to difficult challenges within communities of need.

IDEO says: “Human-Centered Design is a process used for decades to create new solutions for companies and organizations. Human-Centered Design can help you enhance the lives of people. This process has been specially-adapted for organizations like yours that work with people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Human-Centered Design (HCD) will help you hear people’s needs in new ways, create innovative solutions to meet these needs, and deliver solutions with financial sustainability in mind.”

About the Recount - An Iranian's Opinion

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:32:00 -0400

From a friend in Ira who emailed me to express his opinion about the recount of the ballots in Iran:

I think Khamenei and his establishment are taken aback by the strength and scale of people’s reaction to the election result. It is pretty amazing that after declaring Ahamdinejad victory a victory for the nation and essentially ordering the other candidates to join in backing him, he has now done a U turn in ordering a recount and/or investigation.

His priority is above all else the survival of the Islamic Republic regime, even if it means losing face and even if it means sidelining Ahmadinejad, although I doubt it’ll come to that. The recount and the investigation could simply a be formality.

This may be a bigger story of Rafsanjani trying to oust Khamenei. He wants to remove the Supreme Leader post in the Islamic Republic and replace it with a Leadership Council. A change in the Constitution.

It also has personal dimensions. Think of every high ranking clergy as the “boss” of a family in the Godfather with bits of their own “interest”.

Goes back to the family feud. Don Corleone died and now the rest are jostling for position.

Strange as it may sound the only cleric candidate Karrubi is the mostreformist of the lot. He’s much more outspoken, his plans for reforms more radical, including women’s rights…

One is for sure: all the above people will argue, fight, defame each other, but ultimately behind closed doors will do what’s need to make sure the Islamic Republic survives. “The Firm” must live.

From a friend in #iran - a different view.

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 13:59:50 -0400

I started twittering what a friend — who needs to stay anonymous — is relaying to me from Iran. But to keep it coherent and in the spirit of what this friend is trying to say, here is what he is syaing in its entirety.

Provoking violence and confrontation is not the answer. Iran does not need another revolution. But lawful and peaceful evolution.

There lies the path to a blood bath and possible civil war. Do not underestimate the power of social, cultural and political divisions created by 30 years of post revolutionary oppressive rule.

Tell Tehran Bureau saying burning and throwing stones is our only voice is utterly irresponsible.

This election crisis is really a power struggle at top of the Islamic Republic hierarchy, heirs to Khomeini. More like a family feud over ideological and material inheritance.

After 30 years the revolution has reached a troubled “adolescence”, now convulsing in new unpredictable directions. Its chief architects have fallen out. Backed by peaceful people power they will be forced to fight it out among themselves, as they are right now.

Grand Ayatollah’s in Iran’s ‘Vatican’ are taking different positions protecting their respective camps. Theirs is the real power, for now. There’s much behind the scenes activity going on.

Let them fight it out, rather than get people beaten on the streets. Let “political’ blood be spilled rather than the real thing.

This friend is a very wise and informed person whose words needs to be heard. I will update as needed.

Iran after the Election - Moving photos

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 23:23:20 -0400

Iran after the Election - Moving photos

Lebanon Election - Citizen Reporting Video 2 (LADE) (via...

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 11:06:34 -0400

Lebanon Election - Citizen Reporting Video 2 (LADE) (via LADELEB)

GOOD Magazine data visualization on transparency — great...

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:44:42 -0400

GOOD Magazine data visualization on transparency — great examples. Relevant for FAIR MOBILE.

50 Great Examples of Data Visualization | Webdesigner Depot

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:42:30 -0400

50 Great Examples of Data Visualization | Webdesigner Depot

Mexican Bands Find Success via Cellphones - NYTimes.com

Mon, 11 May 2009 10:13:56 -0400

From: Mexican Bands Find Success via Cellphones - NYTimes.com

“We have to be honest; we wouldn’t exist without cellphones and ring tones,” said Francisco Gonzalez (who goes by the single name Pancho) of Los Pikadientes, whose new album is scheduled for June, complete with an elaborate ring-tone marketing plan. “We ended up doing eight months of promotion in the United States because of that one song. We’re the ultimate cellphone success story.”

As most sectors of the music industry scramble to cope with the way the Internet and online stores like iTunes have changed how music is distributed and consumed, the regional Mexican industry is focused elsewhere, on the power of the cellphone as both a one-stop music source and a symbol of working-class immigrant identity. This is no small news, considering that in the United States regional Mexican music — the term is an industry label that groups together norteño, ranchera, banda and other traditional styles — is responsible for close to 60 percent of all Latin sales, outperforming all other genres of Latin music, including pop and tropical….

Because fans of regional Mexican music tend to be working-class immigrants and their United States-born children, they don’t fit the typical musical consumption patterns of the digital age. They most likely don’t own a home computer, don’t use a credit card and don’t have broadband at home, all prerequisites for an iTunes account. Inters used to only want to write for pop artists,” said Delia Orjuela, assistant vice president for Latin music at the performing rights organization BMI. “Now they all want to write for regional Mexican artists. This is a direct result of demographics. Mexicans are everywhere now.stead they buy prepaid phone cards with cash and use their cellphones as mobile, personal jukeboxes, often downloading ring tones from their cellular providers for about $3 each, three times the price from iTunes or Zune.

In China, Knockoff Cellphones Are a Hit - NYTimes.com

Mon, 11 May 2009 10:11:26 -0400

In China, Knockoff Cellphones Are a Hit - NYTimes.com

Good crisitunity = good call to action on email

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 22:18:46 -0400

Good crisitunity = good call to action on email

The Trouble with Outside Activists | Do-gooders from out of state are still flocking to help New Orleans rebuild. Are they actually doing as much harm as they are good?

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 13:49:06 -0400

The Trouble with Outside Activists | Do-gooders from out of state are still flocking to help New Orleans rebuild. Are they actually doing as much harm as they are good?

World Bank's new Communication for Governance Program, worth watching.

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 13:08:32 -0400

World Bank's new Communication for Governance Program, worth watching.

Rankings - Doing Business in Africa - The World Bank Group

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 17:15:00 -0400

Rankings - Doing Business in Africa - The World Bank Group:

Economies are ranked on their ease of doing business, from 1 – 181, with first place being the best. A high ranking on the ease of doing business index means the regulatory environment is conducive to the operation of business. This index averages the country’s percentile rankings on 10 topics, made up of a variety of indicators, giving equal weight to each topic. The rankings are from the Doing Business 2009 report, covering the period April 2007 to June 2008.

Charity versus Change and Why Aid is Bad - Part 1

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 12:17:18 -0400

It all began at SXSW where there was a panel, organized by a PR firm, about “Social Media for Social Change” - or social good. The discussion there was flagrantly self-serving, promotional and focused on charity — giving aid to those who have less.

That is certainly the pre-dominant paradigm - those who are better off have a responsibility to aid those who have less. Right now, the focus is on kids in Africa, for some reason, and the twitterati are flocking to (and using twitter and various other social media) building schools, raising money for wells, and other so-called charitable activities.

My assertion at the panel was this: All of this activity on twitter and other channels (as described on Beth’s blog, here, for example) does not constitute real change. We need to have a conversation about what constitutes ‘social change’ and how is it different from aid and charity, in its various forms. And, I wonder, whether we are we not perptuating power relationships that should be inversed, if one takes the promise of the web, social media, and the power of the individual to its logical conclusion.

It does not seem to me that there is much inversion of power — it’s simply more of the self-congratulatory PR, cause marketing, fundraising, and probably ultimately self-promotion that says: Look at me, I have 12,000 followers and raised $250,000 for a worthy cause [insert here] and thus, I am cool and, by the way, a social media expert. And I built a [school, well, clinic…insert here] and saved a little black kid from losing its shoes.

Or something like that.

My friend Lina Srivastava writes on her blog:

As a sector, we still have work to do to clarify the distinction between charity and social good/systemic change. The “Social Media for Social Good” panel, in particular, led off with stories of fundraising and good deeds on behalf of individuals, as opposed to scalable social change. I’m not making a value judgment against fundraising here (had they titled the panel “Social Media for Fundraising,” I would have had less of a problem with the focus— though I will continue to argue the prevailing system of fundraising needs a major overhaul). But I and a few other attendees later voiced the view that charity is an entry point, not an endpoint, in sustainable social change.

Amen.

So let me say a few things here in a short series of blog posts, addressing various conversations going on.

1. Definitions

And let me also be very clear about how I define certain terms, so that there is no confusion. First things first: I do not use the term “social good” here. It is too amorphous and open to various interpretations. It’s vague, fuzzy, and rather useless.

I define charity - or, alternately, aid — with a quote from the new book Dead Aid:

There are three types of aid: Humanitarian or emergency aid which is mobilized and dispensed in response to catastophies…charity-based aid which is disbursed by by charitable organizations to institutions or people on the ground, and systematic aid, aid payments made drectly to governments through government-to-government transfers or through multi-lateral institutions.

So, in short — it’s some sort of aid, often in the form of money or goods, given to people perceived to be less well-off, poor, or otherwise in need of such aid. Charity or aid does not, in any way, change the normative social relationships in a society, nor does it address power imbalances or structural reasons for poverty, discrimination, or repression

I define social change in a different way. It is:

the movement of people toward the establishment of environmental, economic, and social justice and the redistribution of wealth, power, and resources as indicated by evidence of:

Organizing and action led by people working to control their own lives;

Educating communities about the root causes of oppression and injustice;

Eliminating barriers to full participation in society;

Focusing on efforts to change cultural, social, political, and economic systems and institutions that create, accommodate, and perpetuate social injustice;

Creating and modeling democratic cultural, social, political, and economic systems;

Connecting local issues with national and global concerns; and

Networking, collaborating, and cooperating with others working toward similar goals.

(courtesy: Appalachian Community Fund)

Notice the word ‘power’ in this definition. It is a critical word in this definition that is entirely missing from all of the conversations heretofore. More on that below.

In short, and to sum it up in 140 characters, I am quoting @rolfkleef who said pithily about this conversation

from “marketing poverty for fundraising” to “catalyst for people’s power”:

2. What’s my problem with this?

My major objection to the ‘social media for social change’ term is that there is, in fact, absolutely no coherent theory of social change. And this is important.

Theories of change are abundant.

Even the most top-down theories of change go something like this:

In a situation that needs changing we can gather enough data about a community and its problems, analyse it and discover an underlying set of related problems and their cause, decide which problems are the most important, redefine these as needs, devise a set of solutions and purposes or outcomes, plan a series of logically connected activities for addressing the needs and achieving the desired future results, as defined up front, cost the activities into a convincing budget, raise the funding and then implement the activities, monitor progress as we work to keep them on-track, hopefully achieve the planned results and at the end evaluate the Project for accountability, impact and sometimes even for learning.

(courtesy Doug Reeler for that one - it’s not the one I subscribe to but it’s a paramount NGO model)

It used to be that NGOs and nonprofits were the locus of such change (or control, as the case may be).

Now, however, in the age of social media, anyone can elevate themselves to a ‘change agent’ and organize. That is, in theory, a great thing.

However, what I am observing is the following:

self-promotion as the core rationale for projects disguised as ‘social change’ is sexy right now
no understanding of the actual problem, cause of the problem, or appropriate responses - and thus, the danger of unintended consequences
no coherent theory of change that is thoughtful and can be defended (not even a top-down one as outlined above) and instead a marketing and PR lens (see first bullet above)
no analysis of structural issues inherent in issues like poverty, discrimation, and inequality, including an analysis of who has power and who does not
a concomitant reliance on and promition of NGOs/charitable organizations/nonprofits to dole our aid, often at the expense of public infrastructures and activities that would make “governments more accountable to its own citizens, rather than to a bunch of foreign donors” (as quoted by a post on Aid Watch)
no analysis of unintended consequences of charitable activities such as destruction of local markets, for example
and lastly, one of the most galling aspects: the use and/or exploitation of stories, images, or video of people in very inhumane or distressing situations used simply to elicit an emotional response for the purpose of fundraising or marketing. This has been dubbed ‘poverty porn,’ by the way.

A quote on that:

For too long now, most of the communications we’ve all seen coming from humanitarian, development and non-governmental organizations have been what I’ve heard described as “poverty porn” — words and images that elicit an emotional response by their sheer shock value. Images like starving, skeletal children covered in flies. Overuse of the word “victim.” That kind of communication may get results, but at what cost to those portrayed? I believe that kind of exploitation is nothing less than a violation of human rights, especially considering what the impoverished, oppressed and marginalized have already had to endure.

(quote from photographer Roger Burk who advocates a different sort of story telling).

3. A Theory of Social Change (that takes power relationships into consideration - and why aid/charity does not fit into this theory)

So, I was rightly called upon to explain what the theory of change is in “social change,” as defined above. How do you analyze power, and more importantly, how do you change it? And how does this age of ‘social media’ where theoretically everyone (who is online and can write, of course) has a voice?

Fair enough.

John Gaventa, chair of Oxfam who also hails from the Highlander Center (for which he received a MacArthur genius award) puts it this way:

Critical questions are to be asked. Does this new terrain represent a real shift in power? Does it really open up spaces where participation and citizen voice can have an influence? Will increased engagement within them risk simply re-legitimating the status quo, or will it contribute to transforming patterns of exclusion and social injustice and to challenging
power relationships? In a world where the local and the global are so interrelated, where patterns of governance and decision making are changing so quickly, how can those seeking pro-poor change decide where best to put theirefforts and what strategies do they use? …

All of these changes point to the need fo ractivists, researchers, policymakers and donors who are concerned about development and change to turn our attention to how to analyse and understand the
changing configurations of power. If we want to change power relationships, e.g. to make them more inclusive, just or pro-poor, we must understand more about where and how to engage.

For anyone who wants to see John’s analysis and power cube, see here (pdf) and read his book Power and Powerlessness. (just noticing the Appalachian theme, here — no accident, me thinks…).

One of the tenets of the power cube he presents (for a good overview, see here (pdf) is ‘claimed spaces’ - “spaces claimed by less powerful actors from or against the
power holders, or created more autonomously by them.”

My training is in community organizing and its very clear tenets of leadership building and power analysis. Jackie Kendall of the Midwest Academy has described “power analysis” as the

“Professional systematic gathering of political and economic intelligence….which is evaluated, interpreted and utilized by an organization to develop a plan for direct action.” To a trained organizer, the “power analysis” is the essential first step in a successful organizing campaign.

So let me put it all together: Social change includes a shifting in the power relationships in a society in favor of those who did not have it before. It includes an analysis of who has and who does not have power and why, and a consolidated effort BY those who are powerless to organize in order to better their lives. It does not include charity or aid or handouts of benevolent and well-off (and often white) people acting ON BEHALF of those disempowered and/or poor. (It also does not include micro-credit, by the way, but that is an entirely other conversation — see, for example, this paper on why microfinance misses its mark.)

I will elaborate further on why charity and aid are limited and possibly dangerous, and how social media then fits into this paradigm and theory of change in my next post, forthcoming.

(via idealist) Antigua, Guatemala.

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 20:02:57 -0400

(via idealist) Antigua, Guatemala.