Digital Tool Being Used: Mobile Phone

What Are They Doing: Last year’s droughts throughout Africa were some of the worst in decades, causing higher food prices, illness among both people and animals and destroyed crops that took months to repair. To address these problems, the Agricultural Index Insurance Initiative at the Syngenta Foundation launched last week Kilimo Salama, Swahili for “safe farming”, to provide insurance plans for Kenyan farmers.

Here is how it works: When purchasing seeds from an retailer, farmers register to insure their seeds by filling in the insurance card. The registration process is completed when the farmer sends a text message on their mobile phone, and a record is created in a database. A local weather station records the rainfall and sends the data to the insurance company, which then calculates a payout according to an agronomic model. At the end of the season the farmer receives a text message if there is a payout and can pick up their payout at the original retailer where the insurance was purchased.

What is the Impact: Kilimo Salama actually began as a small pilot project last year with a group of 200 farmers in the central region of Laikipia. Most of the farmers were highly impressed with the program, as many of them received a payout of up to 80 percent. This year the insurance program will cover at least 5,000 maize and wheat farmers in Central, Rift Valley and Western provinces, which is at high risk of drought. This program shows that even a simple tool like a mobile phone can make a big difference in the lives of many.

Description: Controversy has not only marred the 2010 Winter Olympics because of the tragic death of 21 year old luger Nodar Kumaritashvili, but also with 200 masked protesters who smashed windows of department stores and splattered red paint across Olympic venues in Vancouver.

Police said the group marched through the shopping district, vandalizing cars and stores. Protesters also threw metal boxes on display windows of Hudson’s Bay Company, where Olympic souvenirs are sold.

Vancouver has been facing problems ever since the run-up started to the games. Lack of actual snow, hundreds of millions in losses as NBC expected to take broadcasting the games, and now the luger death spelling riots.

Vancouverians have been upset about the way the Olympic games have been handled by the government. The Olympic projects have come in well over budget.

Some feel that the money would have been better spent going to social services, particularly as the city grapples with the effects of the recession.
But now, the protests are beginning to turn violent.

Digital Tools Being Used: Video

What’s Going On: Despite the violence, various activist groups have been leading largely peaceful protests since it was announced that the Games were to held in Vancouver in 2003. Many of these protesters have used viral video to effectively get their message across to a wider audience.

While most of the grievances by anti-Olympics protesters stem from the growing presence of corporate corruption in the Games, the largest resistance has come from indigenous groups in Western Canada, who claim their “stolen land” is being used by the government “for the benefit of corporations, including mining, logging, oil & gas, and ski resorts.” In addition, some activists say that Indigenous peoples suffering social ills caused by the Olympics, such as higher rates of poverty, unemployment, environmental degradation, police violence, disease, suicides and violence against women.

What is the Impact: Many grassroots activists have been flooding the Internet with videos about their complaints. Many of which are low-budget, but effective in telling their side of the story, like this one and this one. While the Olympic Games will go on in Vancouver and Games officials are not giving in to the complaints, anti-Olympic digital activism has allowed a point of view that would otherwise not get covered in the mainstream media.

Authors: Nathan Eagle, Ken Banks, Redante Asuncion-Reed, Anil Naidoo, Amanda Atwood, Christiana Charles-Iyoha, Becky Faith, Joshua Goldstein, Christian Kreutz, Tanya Notley, Juliana Rotich, Berna Twanza Ngolobe, Bukeni Waruzi

Subject: SMS Uprising gives an overview of the use of mobile technology for development and empowerment in Africa.

The book is made up of two parts. The first four chapters explore the context of mobile activism. Christian Kreutz has contributed a great summary of future trends and software developments in African mobile activism. Another essay by Ken Banks asks whether “social mobile” is “empowering the many or the few”.

The second part consists of seven case studies from several African countries. The fields they describe are equally diverse, ranging from e-agriculture to dissemination of political news. A special focus lies on the empowerment of women. Anil Naidoo from South Africa describes how mobiles are used in the UmNyango project to empower women in the rural region of KwaZulu Natal, and WOUGNET from Uganda aims to ameliorate the economic situation of female farmers in Uganda.

I especially liked the essay by Rotich and Joshua Goldstein on “Digitally networked technology in Kenya’s 2007–08 post-election crisis”. It is a short version of a case study written for the Berkman Center’s Internet and Democracy Project. The chapter looks at three facettes of social media in a conflict situation: “SMS campaigns to promote violence, blogs to challenge mainstream media narratives, and online campaigns to promote awareness of human rights violations.”

SMS Uprising combines theoretical groundwork and practical case studies useful to everyone interested in the use of mobile technology for activism and development. While some chapters are a bit longer than necessary, in combination the book provides a good overview of the issue.

SMS Uprising is published by Pambazuka Press. It is available on their website as a paperback plus PDF for £12.99 or the PDF alone for £9.99 as well as on Amazon.

[This is an altered version of a post I wrote for my blog, i like patterns.]

We launched DigiActive in February of 2008 and over the past two years we have built an international team of over 40 participants from 17 countries and 6 continents , published 2 guides on Facebook and Twitter activism (with one on eCampaigning strategy in the works). We released 5 academic papers through our Research@DIgiActive program, wrote over 300 blog posts detailing successful cases of digital activism around the world, and trained over 70 activists in the 3 countries of Morocco, India, and the Philippines. And all this on a budget of less than $1500 per year.

Over these two years I’ve found myself most engaged and excited by the foundational questions of the field: Why do some campaigns succeed while others fail? Where is the intellectual framework to structure our analysis of digital activism? Where is the common terminology to structure our discussions? How can we understand the mechanics of digital campaigns beyond the functionality of the latest hyped app? What is the future of digital activism beyond the implications of the latest digital victory or defeat? If digital activism can create a more egalitarian world by empowering ordinary citizens, what interventions will bring about that outcome?

For the most part, I found that these questions didn’t have answers yet, that the field lacks this type of foundational knowledge. My interests had shifted from the case-based identification of best practices that is the hallmark of DigiActive’s work, to building foundational knowledge in the field. Because I am so passionate about this challenge, I have decided to create a new organization to address it.

In order to fully devote myself to this new endeavor, I will be stepping down from my current role at DigiActive. This Friday the 22nd will be my last active day at DigiActive. I’ll stay on in an advisory capacity but will no longer have an operational role in managing the organization. I leave DigiActive not only in the capable hands of our co-founder, Amine, and editor, Talia Whyte, but also with the wonderful volunteers that have been behind our every success: guide editors like Dan Schultz, guide authors like Andreas Jungherr and Priscilla Brice Weller, trainers like Lynn Casper, who came with me to the Philippines, and writers like Simon Columbus, Tamara Palamakumbura, Hillary Kakooza, Gaurav Mishra, Hamid Tehrani, Frederick Noronha, Tiby Kantrowitz, Alex Frizzell, and, of course, or network catalyst Patrick Meier and outreach director Kate Brodock.

I am excited to see how DigiActive develops as its members constantly seeks new ways to help grassroots activists around the world use digital technology to increase their impact.

Description: Haiti was rocked Tuesday night by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake. According to a report, Haiti’s First Lady Elisabeth Debrosse Delatour said that “most of Port-au-Prince is destroyed.”

While almost all phone lines have gone down on the impoverished island, Haitians have been able to communicate to friends and relatives around the world with the use of new media. Not only has there been a flurry of tweets and photos of the devastation posted online over night, but charitable individuals and organizations have responded quickly with their efforts to help victims.

Digital Tools Being Used: Twitter, Video, Photos, Text Message, etc

What Are They Doing: Victims of the earthquake immediately got on Twitter, uploaded photos and YouTube videos and text messaged to give eyewitness reports on the tragedy like this one:

RAMHaiti: It’s 8:44PM and we’re still getting aftershocks!!I can hear people gathered in the distance singing prayers…people in large numbers are singing prayers downtown

In the last few hours charitable organizations have been able to make initial assessments of victims’ needs and have asked for donations, mostly through the use of digital tools.

Red Cross: Help Haiti right now, text Haiti to 90999 to give just $10 to the Red Cross

UNICEF: Donate now for Haiti on their website

Rap artist and activist Wyclef Jean was among the first to organize online when he sent out these tweets:

@wyclef Help Haiti by donating to Yele on www.yele.org follow @YeleHaiti

@wyclef Another way you can help Haiti after their 7.0 earthquake: Donate $5 by texting YELE to 501501 and by visiting www.YELE.org

News organizations that cater to Haitian communities in the United States have also taken the initiative to give their readers updated information about the earthquake’s aftermath, such as the Boston Haitian Reporter, which has been live-blogging since Tuesday night.

What is the Impact: While a full assessment of the Haitian earthquake will be long term, this latest international incident shows the incredible value in digital activism for quick response and possibly saving lives.

Tactical Technology Collective is the premiere international training organization for rights activists interested in using information and digital technology to create positive change.   They have recently released a film that beautifully presents 10 key tactics in info-activism.  The tactics are:

Thanks to our friends at the International Forum for Democratic Studies and the Center for the Opening and Development of Latin America (CADAL), based in Argentina, we are proud to announce that our guide to Facebook activism is now available in Spanish. Click the image at left to download a PDF copy.

The guide, written by DigiActive team member Dan Schultz, is also available in English and Arabic. Our guide to Twitter activism, by Andreas Jungherr, is available in English and Spanish.

Looking even closer at the new Facebook privacy changes, things get downright ugly when it comes to controlling who gets to see personal information such as your list of friends.  Under the new regime, Facebook treats that information — along with your name, profile picture, current city, gender, networks, and the pages that you are a “fan” of — as “publicly available information” or “PAI.” Before, users were allowed to restrict access to much of that information. Now, however, those privacy options have been eliminated.

These reductions in privacy protection have significant negative consequences for activists, particularly in repressive regimes where they communicate and affiliate more freely online than they can offline.  When Facebook unilaterally removes barriers of privacy, it leaves activists and their contacts open to persecution by authorities.

If you are an activist whose political activities or affiliations are visible through your Facebook account, you need to scrub your account of political content now.  This means:

1. Un-friend fellow activists
2. Leave any political groups you are a member or fan of
3. Delete political status messages, notes, and links and do not add new ones
4. Un-tag yourself from photos of you taking part in political activities or in the presence of known activists
5. Remove any linkages connecting you to politically dangerous people, ideas, or organizations

Even before the new rules came into effect, activists in repressive regimes should have kept their profiles clean.  A state security officer intent on viewing your profile will find a way to do it.  However, now that an activist’s name, profile picture, networks, current city, gender, friend list, and pages are automatically (and irrevocably) displayed, security personnel can use Facebook to map activist networks more easily.

Social media commentators like Evgeny Morozov and activists like Sami Ben Gharbia of Global Voices Advocacy advise activists in repressive regimes not to use Facebook and other commercial social platforms for activism at all because they are so public.  I would recommend caution but not outright rejection of these tools, which are indeed quite powerful.   In some countries the risks of detections will  be greater than the benefits of use, particularly where only a fraction of the population is using these tools, making the audience for activism limited.  However, in other countries activists may choose to continue using Facebook, but with greater caution.  It is possible to make Facebook use safer, but it is impossible to make it entirely safe.

So what are safer Facebook practices?  Other than the profile scrubbing recommended above, it means that activists need to create separate anonymous profiles for their political activities, which contain no accurate personal information and are completely unconnected to their real friends, affiliations, and locations.  In some cases, it may even make sense to create a “throw-away account,” much as activists use throw-away cell phones: create a fake account to do one sensitive action, and then never use it again.  So that a single IP address cannot be connected to you activism account, you should access that account from different public computers in cyber cafes and never from your home computer.

Activists should also refrain from posting anything incriminating on Facebook or creating groups that will endanger less tech-savvy citizens.  Maybe the Egyptian creator of the fictional group “President Mubarak is a Creep” started the group using an anonymous throw-away account, but the Egyptian citizens that join that group may not hide their identities and may thus make themselves vulnerable to persecution.  In this way activists unintentionally create “honey-pots” that ensnare fellow citizens in politically dangerous affiliations.

The competition between activists and repressive government for control of online speech and action is often referred to as a cat and mouse game where activists find ways to undermine and circumvent  blocks put in place by authorities.  However, as Facebook’s new privacy policy illustrates, this is not really a two-player game but a multi-player game.  Companies which create digital infrastructure also have the ability to give the advantage to one side or the other.  Facebook’s move unfortunately gave the advantage to repressive governments.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, this is the first time that online journalists/bloggers represent the largest professional category in prison. The country with the worst record is China.

Global Voices Advocacy has recently published a map — Threatened Voices — to visually display these imprisoned bloggers.

They are currently tracking 191 bloggers, which is a confronting statistic because it implies there are many more bloggers and online activists who have been imprisoned for their blog content.

As digital activits — and particularly those in countries that promote free speech — it’s important for us to remember that some voices are still not being heard. If we genuinely believe in free speech we need to be supportive of those voices by amplifing them, and in a way that maintains the safety of the blogger. One way we can do this is through digital activism. For me, amplifying those voices that are often not heard is what activism is all about.