imran*ali

With the Israeli-Hamas conflict entering its third week and the war zone still off-limits to the world’s major media organisations, it’s increasingly difficult to get balanced reporting.

Whether balanced coverage is even possible or desirable, both sides are employing information warfare as a central strategy, with the Israeli authorities even deploying Twitter and Youtube to illustrate their perspective.

Last week, in discussing Israel’s Roof Knocking operations, I lamented ‘the lack of an Ushahidi-like service’ to enable grassroots coverage from residents of the afflicted areas. Fortunately, Al Jazeera Labs has taken up the challenge with its custom deployment of Ushahidi’s open source software – War On Gaza.

Mashing up text messages, maps of the strip and Twitter, the service is beginning to aggregate user-submitted reports from Israel, Gaza and even the West Bank, though according to Wired, the submissions are verified before publication.

It’s difficult to see how balanced coverage might be – but it’s certainly less filtered than official Israeli or Hamas sources, of course there may also be the usual accusations of partiality that’re made against Al Jazeera’s coverage.

It’ll be interesting to observe how War On Gaza pans out – as aid agencies and humanitarian aid begins to enter a potentialcivic and political vacuum, perhaps they’ll need to utilise the service as a guide to where assistance needs to be applied.

Ushahidi raises some important questions about how civic services could evolve – with emergency services and first responders utilising civic adaptations of Ushahidi, perhaps the deployment of police, fire and medical teams in peacetime environments could also be enhanced by grassroots reportage.

Eariler this month, one of Iran’s most prominent opposition groups, the National Council of Resistance,reported that the country’s clerics had imposed regulations on the use of text messaging across the nation.

The government’s commuications regulator has applied restrictions on sending SMS to the extend that mobile owners have to submit to security and background checks on the country’s intelligence apparatus in order to be granted clearance for using text messaging.

The new laws are policed by the country’s Ministry of Culture & Islamic Guidance in quite a haphazardly random manner, including random public searches of a citizen’s mobile phone for ‘innappropriate messages’ as innocent as pictures of unsafe public transportation

According to MyAdhan, Iranians are receiving 20m text messages daily, including a healthy proportion of communications between opponents of the government, notably in organising protests.

With Iranian presidental elections due in a little over 6 months, it’s plausible that we’ll see further restrictions on public communication in order to restrain anti-government and opposition planning.

Read more at http://blog.myadhan.com/2008/11/13/iran-sms-use-regulated/

In every recent US election cycle, commentators have breathlessly exhorted the arrival of the first web/blogospheric/internet candidate. It’s a pretty safe bet to say that Obama is the first mobile candidate – go M’Obama…will we see some Joe-bile campaigning shortly?

For good or bad, mobility has played an increasingly important role in the Obama campaign.

Yesterday, GigaOM guest columnist Brian McConnell, broke down some of what’s unique about the use of mobile media in the campaign, including sending 10m text messages to announce your VP is never gonna work (ask Twitter!) and speculates on where mobile users might be targeted to increase voter turnout amongst younger people -from registration reminders and event notifications to reminding voters to actually vote!

Read more at What Obama’s Text Message Campaign Reveals…

Recently, MIT’s Technology Review highlighted trends in social media, Web 2.0 businesses and the future of the web, with many industry notables commenting on mobility as one of the strongest and most promising threads.

Buried amongst a round-up of the most exciting startups to track was, David Talbot’s story of Ushahidi, a platform enabling Kenyans to use their mobile handsets, text messages and the web to report incidents of political violence witnessed in the aftermath of the December’s disputed elections.

The post-election violence that swept the country and scepticim of official figures led a number of web developers to develop a service that enabled Kenyans to log reports by text message, then aggregate and render incoming reports on a Google Maps powered web site.

The service is similar in tone and use to Sciponius, developed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to track block-by-block incidents across the disaster zone.

Talbot goes on to explore the future potential of Ushahidi as a non-profit that can repidly deploy its service to other crisis areas, noting that a mutation of the service is already being used to monitor anti-immigrant violence in South Africa.

What’s particularly unique about Ushahadi is its foundation in fundamentally mobile technology – as noted by Global Voice’s Ethan Zuckerman in the same piece; in countries where mobile penetration far exceed that of broadband and the web, services such as Ushahadi provide a uniquely empowering voice to those who would otherwise go unheard.

Last month – I had the good fortune to sit in on Ethan Zuckerman’s ETech 2008 session, The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism, summarising his insights into global activism and his role at Global Voices Online.

Ethan’s a research fellow at Harvard and has spent the last few years exploring activist usage of the web, mobility and social media across the developing world; Global Voices is an aggregated manifestation of bloggers and citizen journalists across this community.

Ethan’s talk was oriented around the notion that tools built for activism generally remain unused whereas mainstream tools adapted and adopted by activists remain the most popular channels; particularly when mainstream services are censored, driving even apathetic users to activism when they can’t reach their favorite sites!

Perhaps Ethan’s key insight was the importance of mobile phones as a light platform for activism and blogging; echoed by another speaker, Joel Selanikio, on Africa as a hothouse for mobile development. Their observations included…

• Egyptian activist Alaa Abdel Fateh’s use of Twitter and SMS to periodically indicate his status, such that when he stops updating, supporters can surmise that he’s being detained and begin agitating for his release as well as ensuring his blog
• Again in Egypt, anti-government activists organised resistance to the arrest of Malek Moustafa simply by coordinating themselves via SMS to block the street at his place of arrest.
• As early s 2004 there were 82m mobile users in Africa in 2004, but even as recently as 2007 only 4.7m broadband users.
• SMS could and should be the principle media for communications and content – from medical information and healthcare records to banking and commerce.
• Limited bandwidth and limited computing power aren’t necessarily barriers for digital innovation.

Though such insights aren’t unique – we’ve covered them previously – they point to an increasing disconnect between the services designed and offered versus those lashed together by the ingenuity of end users – the activism for open government embodied by those such as Alaa Abdel Fateh isn’t echoed by the closed nature of most mobile platforms and networks…I suspect Android and Openmoko will have a more profound effect than OLPC on the democratisation of technology and culture.
[ Note: You can see Ethan Zuckerman's full presentation at his blog ]

Last summer, my inaugural post for Mobile Messaging 2.0 criticised the use of Twitter by politicians such as Barack Obama, John Edwards and the UK’s Alan Johnson, using emerging communication channels simply to talk, not to listen.

I’m not sure candidates are listening any more effectively, but mobile messaging seems to be playing a key role in turning out voters for the US presidential primaries.

Today Wired is reporting that the Obama campaign reminded registered supporters to vote by text message and included instructions on locating their local polling station, helping to tip the last four primaries in Obama’s favour.

I’m not so sure the official Obama ringtones or viral campaign recruitment text messages would encourage people, or turn them off with their cheesiness…but hey, I like that America can spend bilions removing a guy called Hussein from power, only to elect another ;)
Perhaps if Gordon Hussein Brown got into the ringtone business for the 2009/10 UK election, we could use ringtones as a sleep aid?

Brown certainly isn’t the new Black :)

I last visited Pakistan in April 2006, to spend a couple weeks visiting family in Karachi and Lahore. Even as a British-born Pakistani, I’m constantly amazed by the generosity and warmth of the Pakistani people…

One of my strongest impressions during my last visit was the proliferation of mobile phones – most people I met under 30 had at least two handsets, and invariably a third. Upon further investigation, Pakistani users – like many others – utilise multiple handsets and SIM cards as a form of presence management and a means to mediate their various social relationships – whether friend, family, or coworker.

It comes as no surprise that the proliferation of mobile technology in Pakistan is increasingly playing a part in directing the country’s civil and political life. America’s hapless War On Terror has intersected twice with this proliferation, once with the capture of Al Qaeda’s ‘20th hijacker’ Ramzi Binalshibh as he boasted over a satellite phone that he’d indefinitely evade capture….one for the Darwin Awards!

Secondly, and more acutely, with the assasination of former PM and kleptocrat Benazir Bhutto last month, Pakistan’s military government didn’t understand how rapidly SMS, mobile video, voice calls and photomessaging would undermine their barely plausible explanation of the assassination. See this blog for a useful photo+video account of events. Collectively, Pakistanis had unwittingly shot a multi-dimensional Zapruder film,

As the nation’s 75m mobile subscribers overwhelmed Pakistan’s mobile infrastructure, the Interior Ministry began to concoct a narrative based on TV coverage. (I based this on some specious commentary from Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria on the Daily Show!).

As the accidentally crowdsourced evidence – snippets of photo messages and mobile phone footage – emerged, the government was forced to backtrack and eventually agree to re-open investigations with the assistance of detectives from Britain’s Scotland Yard.

Though the focus of coverage has been on delayed elections, nuclear security, geopolitics and extremism in Pakistan. I believe something more subtle and fundamental has been overlooked – the empowerment of Pakistani citizens with democratising technologies. As successive civilian, and military governments have failed Pakistanis, perhaps this is the beginnings of a bootstrapped civic culture, carefully asserting influence over the country’s future.

It’s hard to silence 75m cameraphones.

…is ‘Ready‘.

A hateful, cynical and manipulative movie trailer (‘…a people perverted’?) or a political ad from a candidate who could only get a 6% election erection?

From a review of Michael Moore’s Sicko, at Salon.com…

When Moore interviews Tony Benn, a leading figure on the British left,
his larger concerns come into focus.

Benn argues that for-profit
healthcare and the other instruments of the corporate state, like
student loans and bottomless credit-card debt, perform a crucial
function for that state.

They undermine democracy by creating a docile
and hardworking population that is addicted to constant debt and an
essentially unsustainable lifestyle, that literally cannot afford to
quit jobs or take time off, that is more interested in maintaining high
incomes than in social or political change.

…and perhaps that an indication of broader civilisational health. Our motivators, measures of success, quality of life – indeed all the metrics of modern civilisation – are economic functions…that cannot be right.

…ahem, I mean President Barack Hussein Obama…he’s running.