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Vital information - to and from crowds

Thursday, January 24, 2008

IT’S FAR FROM OVER, even though many international observers have left. And, despite mediation efforts by ex-UN chief Kofi Annan, it’s getting to look distressingly genocidal. Kenya’s bloodletting in the aftermath of its disputed general election shows no sign of diminishing, and every sign of worsening.

Western media are now giving greater credence to locally long-held suspicions that – quite apart from the anti-government demonstrations and the killing of protestors by government forces – plans were prepared in advance by supporters of both President Mwai Kibaki and nearly-and-possibly-should-be-president Raila Odinga to commit the vengeful communal murders that have spread across the nation.

 

Prominent among the reports has been a New York Times dispatch from Jeffrey Gettleman (at last getting into his stride after a shaky start as the paper’s East Africa correspondent) which itemized … the early finding of an arms cache in a government minister’s car …  the digging of craters … and the building of sturdy road blocks – both of these operations aimed, ahead of time, at cutting off authorities’ access to massacre sites. Gettleman perhaps could have reported, but didn’t, accounts which the BBC found credible enough to broadcast … of youths being paid $14 per killing and $7 per house-burning.

 

As often in massive national disruptions (be they a natural disaster or human-made, like this one) we’ve seen the internet come further into its own as an information gathering and sharing resource.

 

In the lead is one of Kenya’s most forceful web presences, Ory Okolloh (a.k.a. kenyanpundit.com) - who accrued her cyber-savvyness at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and who was stung into fresh innovation by her distress at “how the Kenyan media has just rolled over and played dead during this whole crisis”. She got together with Daudi Were of the Kenya Bloggers Webring and a range of multidisciplinary communications experts to create a remarkable phenomenon – Ushahidi.

 

Ushaihidi (the Swahili word for ‘witness’) is a website that combines Google’s mapping software with reports of post-electoral violence throughout Kenya. Okollah and her colleagues were quickly convinced that killings and population expulsions have been happening at a much greater rate than the media or politicians have acknowledged.

 

The web’s ability to empower a vast legion of unofficial information sources is powerfully demonstrated here. It's a very positive application of New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki’s provocatively-phrased notion, “The Wisdom of Crowds”.  Much of the reporting - just to underline its non-elite provenance - comes in via text-messaging from cell-phones, which are much more widely used in rural areas than are desk- or lap-top computers.

 

 

ONE HEART-CLUTCHING EXAMPLE OF A USHAHIDI POSTING COMES from January 19, at 7.00 in the evening, in Alda, just south-west of the already much-ravaged town of Eldoret:

 

“as i write, my parents are in a house that is under attack with many people with arrows. this is near soko mjinga shopping centre in the bonjoge area and kaimosi tea estate. the farm is on fire, the kitchen burning … all my parents are doing now is hiding in the upstairs part of the house.”

 

Each account of a murderous incident is verified, at least to the fullest extent possible, before appearing on the Ushahidi map (as above left, a screen captured earlier today of the western part of the country, with red flames indicating the locations of attacks). Further information is requested from anyone who can help.

 

Already a horrifying picture has emerged, especially in the western Rift Valley, where tensions between the often dominant Kikuyu people and Kenya’s other ethnic groups have long bubbled, but only rarely surfaced so violently - until now.

 

The site is achieving action as well as witness.  It is channeling contributions in the form of both cash and volunteer effort, through the Kenyan Red Cross and other agencies, to help the thousands of displaced families who are now scattered across the country – a country which (because of its archaeological pre-history) is still known to many as The Cradle of Humanity.

 

 

 

**AN AUDIO VERSION OF THIS COLUMN IS AIRED WEEKLY BY ROBIN HOOD RADIO**
LISTEN TO A PODCAST by clicking HERE

 

 

 

I HAD AN ALMOST ENTIRELY OPPOSITE REACTION TO A DIFFERENT “wisdom of crowds” development on the internet.

 

The actual occasion is laudable enough in itself. The 208-year old  Library of Congress is posting something like 3,000 of its stored public-domain, copyright-free photographs on the 4-year old, but fast-growing Flickr photo-sharing site.

 

In addition to winning a wider audience, the Library sensibly hopes that web-users, in their hundreds of thousands or even millions, may be able to help identify the photographs’ often somewhat mysterious subjects (like just who and from where are the four farmboys atop a truck, pictured above for the Farm Security Administration, evidently in 1942 Texas?) Such detailed information will of course be used as captions –  tagging, in other words, to use the widely-adopted web-search term for this essential cataloguers’ function.

 

But here’s what concerns me. Just reflect, if you would, on how a Flickr spokesperson has been promoting this pilot joint venture with the LoC. It’s George Oates, who’s a user interface designer for the site. Perhaps, in view of the forename, another thing to know is that - as she says in her own web-bio - “I’m Female”. More importantly, though, the way George chose to praise the initiative when questioned by National Public Radio was as follows:

 

“It breaks down that idea that museums are something special, and authoritative, and - you know - important, you know”.

 

Well, call me old-fashioned  …  But I really thought the very point of a museum was exactly to be special, authoritative and – you know – important.

 

I’m delighted that the LoC is giving many more people access to its material  – even if some of them don’t seem to appreciate what they’re getting.

 

 

 

THIS IS PROBABLY TOO FLIPPANT A REMARK, IN A WEEK OF EVERY MARKET INDEX from the Nikkei and the Shanghai Composite to the Dow wildly bouncing up and down, but I think it’s fair to say that HBO’s stock with TV viewers has slumped badly since the premium cable channel lost The Sopranos and Six Feet Under. It’s trying an interesting and pretty bold attempt at recovery starting next Monday, January 28.

 

In Treatment is a new series of half-hour dramas, with more than a dash of dark comedy to them, through which HBO intends to carve out a new style of “appointment television”, even if the appointments are unprecedentedly moveable in these days of TiVo and other digital video recorders. There are to be, under current plans anyway, a somewhat mind-boggling total of 45 episodes.

 

The idea is neat.  A psychiatrist - who of course, true to television's convention, has emotional problems of his own - sees patients for one session a week (just five patients, to make the story arcs manageable) and we follow their sessions as they unfold over nine weeks. The shrink is played by the multi-faceted Irish actor - and writer and producer - Gabriel Byrne (above right) who’s had to master 1,000 pages of dialogue for the part.

 

The show’s original incarnation, "Be Tipul" - meaning in Hebrew the same as the English title – was on Israeli national television, where the central role was taken by Asi Dayan, the actor son of the wayward military and political hero General Moshe Dayan. I know from my time making a television biography of the General, with considerable help from his daughter, parliamentarian Yael Dayan, that Asi grew up no stranger to family dysfunction.

 

In picking up the US version of this psycho-soap, HBO found it reassuring that Mark Wahlberg (already valuable to the channel for Entourage) is among the executive producers (- my, he’s come a long way since Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch!)  But more critical to the show’s success, I believe,  will be the uniting of talents between Byrne the star and the show’s principal director, Paris Barclay – one of Hollywood’s most intense and yet still simply workmanlike, consistent crafters of episodic television (from NYPD Blue to ER and House, to West Wing, Lost and CSI).

 

Byrne once upon a time, when we were each of us going through tough times, nicknamed me after the Charles Dickens character “Mr Micawber”, not so much (I’m glad to say) for my simplistic sense of economics, but for that optimistic fellow’s unfailing determination to suit up and show up for whatever any given day might bring.

 

In my turn now, as he begins a job described in quotidian terms on HBO’s posters as “One doctor. Five sessions. Five nights a week”, I’d like to wish Byrne well in an enterprise that’ll be a tough on-going row to hoe.