For Tuesday’s Berkman lunch, we’re blessed with a visit from DJ, blogger and ethnomusicologist Wayne Marshall, one of my favorite chroniclers of the future of digital culture. His talk is titled “The Unstable Platforms and Uneasy Peers of Brave New World Music“, a title that we could probably spend an hour unpacking.

Wayne’s talk is timely, perhaps, because of the current attention to the events of Wikileaks cablegate and the takedown of Wikileaks from Amazon. “What people take to be public platforms turn out to be anything but, and our spaces for free speech are not necessarily so free.” They’re unpredictable spaces for public speech because they’re commercial spaces. And what happens to music in these spaces may prefigure other developments in online spaces. “The ways in which culture and music are routed through the web show us some of the fault lines in public culture,” Marshall argues. “We can hear some of these songs and dances as ‘canaries in the coal mine’” of online culture – sometimes, these works disappear before our eyes due to decisions made by tool and platform owners.

One of the signatures of new world music, Marshall argues, is the watermark. Many of the audio tracks and videos that define new music scenes are marked with watermarks left by unlicensed demo software. He suggests that these watermarks may be becoming part of the aesthetics of these new forms. The people producing them are using professional-grade tools and pushing them to a public that’s potentially limitless in size. But the watermarks suggest they’ve got a different set of priorities than most producers – they’re less concerned with polish than with immediacy and immersion in the moment.

He shows this video from LA dance crew Marvel, Inc. This is one of the groups associated with the “Jerkin’” movement, a street dance associated with a small set of high schools in LA. Dance crews often take their names from comic books and cartoons, hence “Marvel Inc.” Marshall points out that the dances take place in public places, on sidewalks and in traffic-filled streets, and suggests that jerk is about public performance, both “in public places and in places as public as YouTube”. The video is a promotion for them as a crew, and for the music they’re using – the tracks danced to are listed, as is digitaldripped.com, a site that shares links to new hiphop beats and tracks. (The tracks associated with Jerkin’ are usually not available for purchase, Marshall explains – they’re downloads, not traditional releases.) And the video is heavily tagged, not just with the Marvel Inc. name and “jerkin”, but with names of rival crews and other artists associated with the movement. Despite the watermark on the video, other aspects of production and distribution suggest a high degree of care and savvy, creating a non-commercial circulation mechanism intended for their local (and perhaps, global) peers.

Watermarks appear in audio tracks as well. One of the key Jerkin’ tracks is “Buckle My Shoe” by Fly Kidd. Every few seconds, a British female voice announces “AVS Media Demo” in the midst of a catchy track. Marshall has looked for an “original” version of the track without the audio watermark and hasn’t been able to find one. The track used to be available on YouTube, but it’s been taken down, perhaps due to a copyright complaint. Now it’s available on Dailymotion, where you can’t see the video until sitting through a 30-second ad. “These are our public platforms,” Marshall tells us, “riddled with pop-up ads and watermarks”.

These platforms and tools may be rough around the edges, but they’re easy to use and easy to learn. One of the seminal Jerk tracks – “You’re a Jerk” by New Boyz – was produced using Fruity Loops, a commercial software package designed for easy loop creation. (The program offers a downloadable demo, and Marshall tells us that unlicensed and unlocked copies change hands frequently online.) It’s easy to find instructional videos on YouTube that show you how to make hiphop beats in Fruity Loops, which lowers barriers to producing new tracks. The New Boyz put a beat together, added rhymes over it and uploaded the audio track to their MySpace page. People in the Jerkin’ community began making videos of themselves dancing to the song and posting them to YouTube, which allowed the Boyz to track their success by searching YouTube for their names.

You’re unlikely to find a good version of the song this way anymore. The track became so popular that the New Boyz were signed to a small record label, and that label’s parent company (Warner Brothers) evidently asked YouTube to identify videos using the music. You can find the “official” version of the video (above), which has been viewed over 45 million times on YouTube. (I mention that last statistic for those who, like me, hadn’t heard about Jerk and briefly thought we had an insight into underground American youth culture. Little late for that, evidently…) People who’d posted videos using the song were told by YouTube that they either needed to mute the audio or choose another musical track to accompany their videos. That led to some very strange videos like the one below:

This video shows the Action Figures crew dancing to “You’re a Jerk” – it’s one of the videos that helped break the song, and Action Figures are featured in the “official” You’re a Jerk video. But this video now sports a strange, synthesized, neo-tribal beat that’s pretty far from anything the dancers originally performed to. Action Figures get to keep their video up, and perhaps benefit if anyone buys the (dreadful) track they’re now featuring, but the original video, important in popularizing Jerkin’ is now a very different document.

Whole sites and the ecosystems they support can disappear as well. Marshall shows us a screenshot of Jamglue, a site that served as an audio YouTube, allowing you to upload, sequence and remix audio tracks. A search for “Jerkin” revealed 775 mixes and 812 tracks. When the site shut down, not only did the content disappear, but people’s profiles, information on what tracks they’d liked and disliked and other metadata was lost as well. (I suggested to Marshall that there’s an odd parallel to traditional ethnomusicology here. Pioneers like Hugo Zemp spent their careers visiting people whose cultures were in danger of extinction from assimilation or the death of elders and recording their music. Perhaps we’ll start seeing modern ethnomusicologists documenting fragile digital cultures before their extinction.)

If the platforms that support this new music are unstable, Marshall tells us, the peers involved are uneasy. The people building the Jerkin’ scene were using digital tools to communicate with local friends, often people they knew in the “real world”. But the tools they used ensured that their work circulated more widely, which in turn led to some fascinating remixes.

This version – “El Paso del Jerk” – from Panama uses the backing track from “You’re a Jerk” and updates it with a Spanish rap. The accompanying video steals large chunks from the official video, but inserts scenes of Panamanian youth performing the dance steps… and also sporting some of the fashions and cellphones featured in the American video. Marshall sees this as “Panamanian kids inserting themselves into global styles,” demonstrating that they’re part of a global trend, not just in music, but in fashion and style. Marshall notes that it’s harder for YouTube to automatically remove videos like this one – because the track has new vocals, it’s not visible to YouTube’s systems in the same way as slightly distorted versions of the original are.

Other adoption of Jerkin’ are closer to a fusion – “Yaba Daba Du” is a new “Jerk Bow” song that combines aspects of Jerk with “dem bow“, a distinctly Dominican version of Jamaican reggaeton. The dance steps featured in the video include elements that are recognizably from Jerkin’, as well as moves that are clearly local. And you can see elements of Jerkin’ fashion (backpacks, tight jeans, neon colors) meshing with other fashion statements.

The frontiers of this new musical space are being documented in blogs like Dave Quam’s “It’s After the End of the World” and “Ghetto Bassquake“, which document local dance genres around the world: Cumbia, Bubbling, Dancehall, Chicago Dancehall, Jerking, Kuduro and more. This music isn’t generally termed “world music” – it circulates as “global bass music” or “global ghettotech”. Marshall wonders about the motivations in featuring this music, noting that on some blogs it can turn into “flavor of the month”. Generously citing my work, he wonders whether we’ll see more blogs acting as bridges between musical cultures, not just featuring what’s going on in Angola or Panama, but translating and contextualizing. At present, though, that sort of translation doesn’t always happen.

This new musical space challenges the old definitions about “world music” – it’s no longer about the West and the rest, the Global North and Global South, Marshall offers. Jerkin’ can circulate around the world, moving from one “ghetto” to another, whether or not those neighborhoods are actually poor or are simply asserting themselves as part of global urban culture. We need to think through the problems that come from these uneasy peers – how do we understand each other and learn from each other’s adoption and remix of these influences? And how do we solve the problems we face with our platforms. It’s great to celebrate the ways people have worked through and around these constraints, but we also need to address the limitations.

David Weinberger and Jillian York both liveblogged the talk, and did a better job getting down comments and questions than I did, as I was moderating the discussion. And if you’ve got time, you might enjoy the video of the talk and the questions and answers that followed.

I should also mention that Wayne is a tremendous blogger and writes about these issues at length at Wayne and Wax – if you’re interested in what he had to say, you should go there immediately.

There are at least two big ideas I’m deeply interested in that came out in Wayne’s talk, which is why I was so thrilled he joined us at Berkman. First, the issue of corporate control of platforms and its influence on the spread of media is something where lessons from the music world may spread into other realms. You can argue that Wikileaks is, in a weird way, an outgrowth of Napster: once you digitize something, a song or a secret, its spread online may be inevitable. But that spread can be checked by decisions made by people who own the platforms on which we exchange digital information. YouTube might have argued that an original dance video to a copyrighted track could be entitled to a fair use defense and forced copyright holders to challenge “offenders” one by one, rather than building tools for mass content removal. Amazon could have demanded an injunction before ordering Wikileaks off its servers. I don’t mean to suggest a moral equivalence between these actions – I’m far more sympathetic to YouTube than to Amazon here – but it’s worth recognizing that platforms are shaped by corporate decisions, made for business reasons, and that these decisions may not be in the best interests of free speech or free culture. Whether the answer is pressuring corporate actors to change their behavior to protect public forms of expression on their platforms or to build platforms more free of corporate influence isn’t clear to me. But Wayne’s examples are a reminder that these platform constraints can be subtle and far-reaching.

Second, I’m interested in the idea that music might have more mobility in crossing national, linguistic and cultural borders than other forms of media, and as such, I’m pretty fascinated in what global bass music might tell us about cultural adoption, fusion or bridging. I’ve been thinking about encounters between cultures through a lens provided by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart in their book “Cosmopolitan Communications“. Norris and Inglehart are interested in the question of whether encountering media from other cultures changes ones cultural values. They look at the spread of news and entertainment media across national borders and analyze the World Values Survey to try and determine whether encountering media from other cultures changes local values.

They suggest that four things might happen when we encounter media from another culture:
- We might embrace it and it could overwhelm our local culture. (This is a fear often cited with regards to the spread of US culture – the fear of the McDonaldization of the world – and used to justify cultural protection legislation.)
- We might violently reject the other culture and ban it, as the Taliban has done with aspects of western culture
- We might embrace the outside influences and incorporate them into a hybrid culture, creating something new and interesting, like the majestic Bánh mì sandwich, in my opinion, the tastiest byproduct of European colonialism yet discovered.
- We might encounter the other culture, acknowledge it as different and choose not to incorporate or reject it.

Norris and Inglehart suggest that reaction #4 – which they refer to as “cultural firewalls” – is the most common, which explains why Paris is still Parisian despite the invasion of Ronald McDonald. Good multiculturalist that I am, I’m excited about reaction #3 and am patiently waiting for my local McDonalds to begin serving kelewele with their new Ghanaian Chicken Shitor Din sandwich. Wayne’s stories offer a good chance to test the possible models of cultural influence.

“Jerk Bow” looks a lot like evidence for reaction #3, the fusion of cultures, with LA meeting Jamaica in the Dominican Republic, and perhaps especially in the Dominican neighborhoods in NYC. At the same time, watching videos of Jerk around the world gives some support for outcome #1 – if you think that McDonalds is a powerful cultural force, take a close look at the international spread of the New York Yankees baseball cap. Hiphop, an art form built atop sampling and appropriation is either being appropriated all over the world, or is America’s leading weapon in a battle for global cultural dominance. I’m not sure I buy Wayne’s assertion that we’re beyond “the west and the rest” that categorized some types of world music – it seems like much of the influence in these musical spaces is flowing out from the US into other cultures and not flowing back into American hiphop. (Wayne points out that Mexican teens in the US are getting down to cumbia and Dominiyorkers to dem bow. And he points to MIA as bringing global influence into mainstream US dance music. I remain unconvinced until Kanye drops a Kuduro single.)

Music apparently has superpowers to leap across cultural borders. I listen to Baaba Maal’s Senegalese pop and I hear piano lines from Cuban jazz… which in turn came from West African influences filtered through the American South and cities along the Mississippi. Baaba Maal doesn’t speak Spanish, but he was able to pick up influences from latin jazz records popular in Senegal in the 1960s and 70s – musical influence can spread without the sorts of translation or cultural contextualization that we need to appreciate much media that crosses national borders on the internet. This superpower can be a curse – the ease of sampling means it’s quite possible to fall victim to “flavor of the month”, as Wayne warns, or to using source material badly or unfairly. The same technology that makes Yabba Dabba Du possible allows Deep Forest to appropriate a Solomon Islands lullaby and pass it off as pygmy music from Central Africa.

Wayne’s talk suggests to me that web video has this same sort of superpower. Not only can it convey music, it carries dance and fashion as well. And if we want to know if we’re assimilating, rejecting, fusing or ignoring cultures as they bump against one another, watching youth culture through the lens of YouTube may be our best lab to carry out these experiments.

Jon Udell is senior technical evangelist for Microsoft and a long-time technology writer and analyst. David Weinberger introduces him with a story about pitching his company to Udell at Byte Magazine in 1990, reminding us all that Weinberger, Udell and anyone who remembers Byte magazine that we’re all getting pretty old.

Udell’s talk is titled “Rethinking the community calendar: A case study in learning and teaching Fourth R principles“. He begins by pointing us to the webpage for the event, and tells us that the page fulfills one of its two functions. It enables human beings to find out about the event, but it doesn’t provide the data that would allow us to syndicate this event to other calendars or other automated systems. If we look at the data field that’s available – the RSS feed – we get pretty frustrated. There’s machine-readable tags in that feed, but they don’t include event location and time data, clearly specified – you’d need to dig it out of the human-readable text fields.

This is partly the fault of technologists, who’ve told people “thou shalt publish RSS feeds”. Website publishers responded: “we hear and obey”. And now users wonder why we can’t make sense of calendars. We did the right thing the wrong way – the feed is right, but the data is wrong.

RSS is mostly a newsreader format, which means it’s mostly in the human-readable data space. It’s the key protocol that makes possible a powerful ecosystem around blogs, where people can publish, aggregate, subscribe to blogs. Some tools do just one thing – WordPress lets you publish. Others are more complex – Google Reader both aggregates and acts as a reader. With these tools and the underlying protocol, feeds can be connected in arbitrary topologies.

Jon notes that one of the key ideas that makes RSS work is the idea that the feed is you, authoritatively representing yourself to the web. The idea that I control this data and publish it at a URL, bound to my identity, in a usable format makes syndication work as a concept, not just for blogs but for any form of data syndication.

If RSS is the key protocol for the blog space, iCalendar is the protocol for calendaring. The protocol is 12 years old, and all major calendaring systems accept .ics files. But the ecosystem hasn’t really emerged yet. There are publishers – systems like Eventful and Eventbrite… and, moving down the long tail, iCal. And there are groups that publish calendars, like the Harvard Gazette or Wicked Local Cambridge. But we don’t as of yet have an aggregation engine. That means that, if you’re promoting an event in Cambridge – Jon’s talk, for instance – you need to contact each publisher, feed in your data in their format, etc. To avoid this repetition, we need aggregators – a hub that can route between publishing and subscribing calendars.

Jon’s project, Elmcity, is that hub. It’s a free service, running on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. It uses open source code and open data, and focuses on routing the data between publishers and subscribers. It’s a useful tool, but Jon tells us, it’s also a way to invite people to think about how we collectively build the data web. We are all authoritative sources for one sort of data or another – when we are those authoritative sources, we should be able to put that online.

This is hard for people to understand. They have a hard time distinguishing between putting something online as a .pdf or as an XML feed. He references a high school principal, who asked him “We posted weekly.pdf to the website – isn’t that good enough?” People have a hard time distinguishing between data that people can read and data that computers can read. And people are very bad at understanding that transformations of data are not necessarily reversible – turning structured data into a formatted web page is a one-way transformation (unless the formatting rules are well know…).

Jon references computer scientist Jeannette Wing, who has argued that patterns associated with computing are broadly generalizable and should be broadly taught. She refers to this as “computational thinking“, and suggests that this form of thinking be taught as a fourth essential set of skills to reading, writing and arithmetic – “the fourth R”. Educators are thinking about this, Jon tells us – these ideas manifest as digital literacy or systems thinking. But we may need to get very deep into this space. Developer and entrepreneur Phil Libin suggests that “the basics of asymmetric cryptography are fundamental concepts that any member of society who wants to understand how the world works” must understand.

What are the concepts that might make up this fourth R? Jon suggests some ideas focused on data:
- Structured data can be represented many ways
- Some representations are best for people, others best for computers
- Machine friendly data can syndicate without loss of fidelity
- Data feeds have globally unique names – URLS
- URLs enable the “small pieces loosely joined” effect
- URLs pass by reference, not by value – their contents can change
- When data syndicates from an URL, the publisher controls it

We may think that “digital natives” automatically understand these ideas – Jon argues they don’t. These ideas need to be taught. And we need to teach them because these principles don’t just underly calendars – they lie beneath science 2.0, library 2.0, government 2.0, edu 2.0 and identity 2.0. When we think of government data in terms of “government has data – release it and we’ll use it to do good things”, we’re missing the point that this data is something we’re jointly contributing. We all shed data as we move through the world, and we are allowing others to own and control it. If we better understood the fact that we were the authoritative sources for this data, we might handle identity issues differently.

Jon’s talk is followed with a lively debate about the idea of this fourth R – will individuals actually need to be literate about these low-level principles, or in a hundred years, will this conversation seem as naive as demanding that everyone understand the basics of electric motors? Is the failure to create collective calendars actually a reflection on our poor understanding of data syndication, or the product of habit? Is it fair to beat up the school principal for using a PDF – perhaps he’s serving his users’ needs? Good questions, though the resolution to them is unclear.

Whether you believe Julian Assange should be Time’s Man of the Year, or whether you’d like to see him tried for espionage, rape or other crimes, you have to admit the man keeps things interesting. While the revelations in Wikileaks recent releases haven’t toppled governments, or perhaps even led to major journalistic revelations, they’re forcing important discussions about secrecy, privacy, rights of free speech and the architecture of the internet.

In the wake of “cablegate”, Wikileaks’s release of secret, confidential and unclassified US diplomatic cables, the Wikileaks website has been under sustained distributed denial of service attack. Craig Labovitz, chief scientist for Arbor Networks (a leading firm focused on mitigating DDoS attacks), reports that the site experienced a 2-4Gbps attack on Sunday and a more significant 10Gbps attack on Tuesday. The analysis of Sunday’s attack is interesting in part because it shows how deep the interest in the Wikileaks documents has been – the site was generating well over 10Gbps in legitimate traffic prior to the attacks.

Labovitz references claims of responsibility from “The Jester”, a hacker who’s claimed responsibility for low-bandwidth, application specific attacks against sites he feels promote jihad or damage the US’s standing in the world. The Jester is an interesting figure – he claims to use a technique that allows users to cause serious downtime to sites without harnessing a botnet’s worth of servers – it’s unclear whether this is a technique like the known Sloloris attack, or something novel. And his choice of targets suggests a future where knowledgeable individuals are able to advance their personal political goals online without recruiting thousands of others to “help Israel win” or going on 4chan to organize attacks on the RIAA.

(Slashdot recently reported that the Jester had been arrested and had equipment confiscated in connection with an attack on Wikileaks. However, the article cited doesn’t mention an arrest. A site in the UK references the Jester’s blog as reporting an arrest by local authorities. Update, December 2: This appears to have been a hoax, and the comments thread under the Slashdot reflects this.)

In response to DDoS attacks, Wikileaks moved from servers in Sweden to Amazon’s web servers. This makes good sense – Amazon offers a “cloud” of servers with a great deal of capacity and a team of sysadmins who can fight off DDoS attacks. I’ve encouraged human rights organizations like Viet Tan to use sites like Blogger to host sensitive sites for similar reasons. Unfortunately, multi-Gbps DDoS attacks are really hard for sysadmins to fight off, and crouching behind a big rock is one good response to an attack.

It does, however, have downsides – you’re relying on that company’s continued willingness to host your site. I wrote a chapter for the recent Access Controlled volume on intermediary censorship – censorship conducted by an internet service provider or web service provider, on their own or acting on government instructions. If you’ve got a provider like Bluehost who decides they can no longer host sites owned by Zimbabweans, you may discover that the company you’re counting on to enable you to speak online is acting to silence you.

That may be what happened to Wikileaks earlier today. According to the Guardian, Sen Joe Lieberman (CT-Nutjob) is taking credit for pressuring Amazon to kick Wikileaks off its servers. Recent traceroutes for wikileaks.org and cablegate.wikileaks.org have led to servers in Sweden, suggesting that Wikileaks has changed homes.

It’s going to be very interesting to hear how Amazon justifies this decision. If the company was required by a court order to remove the content, that’s one thing. If they simply responded to pressure from a US Senator, or to boycott threats, it sends a very disturbing message: that Amazon will remove content under political pressure. Yes, Amazon is within its legal rights to refuse service to a customer… but as I’ve argued previously, they’re a private company responsible for a public space. That’s the nature of the internet – we use it as a space for public discourse, though the sites we use for much of our discussion are owned by private corporations and controlled by terms of service that are significantly more stringent than restrictions on public speech.

The rise of internet hypergiants like Amazon that host servers for hundreds of thousands of clients makes these potential conflicts more clear. If you are dissatisfied with the terms of service of your hosting provider, you can always find another… up to a point. There’s been massive consolidation in the web hosting market, and companies like Amazon are likely to control large shares of the market in the future, both because there are economies of scale in providing low-cost service, and because large server farms can more effectively defend from attacks like DDoS. But if large providers like Amazon won’t take on clients like Wikileaks, they’re forced onto smaller ISPs, which may be more costly and less able to thwart DDoS attacks.

If Amazon did respond to pressure from Lieberman, it should open a conversation about the responsibilities of cloud providers towards clients who host political content. If Amazon’s policy is “we can terminate you if we’re uncomfortable with what you say”, that cannot be acceptable to anyone who is concerned with freedom of speech online. I’m looking forward to hearing more about Amazon’s actions and justification, and to hearing from folks like Rebecca MacKinnon and Danny O’Brien who follow issues of free speech and corporate responsibility closely.

Update: It’s worth mentioning that Wikileaks is using peer to peer networks to distribute the actual cables. DDoS may be effective in removing their web presence, but it’s going to have a much harder time removing the sensitive material from the internet. The DDoS attacks are actually a useful reminder that we still don’t have a good way to serve web sites on a purely peer to peer architecture. That would be one response to the problems of consolidation I’m talking about here…

My dismay about Amazon’s apparent censorship of Wikileaks doesn’t constitute an endorsement of Wikileaks or this recent data release. I have complicated feelings about the organization and its methods. Two pieces I’ve found useful in thinking about Wikileaks:

- Dan Gillmor asks some tough questions about Wikileaks’s organizational transparency and motivations

- Blogger zunguzungu gives a close reading of an essay believed by be written by Assange in 2006 which suggests motivations for the Wikileaks project. This post is worth a close read – I find it both a satisfying explanation of some recent Wikileaks actions and a good reason for skepticism about aspects of the project.

My friends at the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT are engaged in a very interesting crowdsourcing project. You may remember Moldova’s “Twitter Revolution” of April 2009, when activists took to the streets of Chisinau to protest what they saw as a rigged election. The events were neither a revolution, nor did they really involve Twitter (my posts on that matter here and here), but they were certainly relevant for the activists who participated and were detained by Moldovan authorities.

The Romanian Center for Investigative Journalism has come into possession of video feeds from the square where the protests took place and is working with the Center for Future Civic Media to put those videos online and encourage Moldovans to view the feeds and annotate the footage so that we have a better understanding of what happened during the protests. Were protesters behaving violently? Did security forces use excessive force? RCIJ is a very serious and credible reporting organization, which helps assure me that this won’t be a witchhunt for security officers, but a crowdsourced project designed to understand what happened and help dispel rumors about the protests.

You’re probably not going to be very helpful in unpacking the footage unless you know Chisinau well, speak some Romanian and understand local politics, but it’s interesting to see and perhaps you can forward to the favorite Moldovans in your life. The footage lives at dickgregoryforpresident.com, one of the best domain names I’ve seen in years (clearly the work of Civic Media co-founder Chris Csikszentmihalyi…)

While we’re at it, allow me to mention that I’m going to be spending more time at the Center for Future Civic Media in the near future. I’ll be a visiting fellow there this coming semester, and I’ll be trying to split my Cambridge time between Berkman and MIT.

If you’re interested in spending time at the Center for Future Civic Media, there’s a terrific opportunity open. The program is recruiting two masters students. Students will be working towards masters degrees at the MIT Media Lab, but would work closely with professors, researchers and fellows associated with the Center, and would focus their degree work on projects about civic media. It’s also possible to work with Center for Future Civic Media through MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program, which looks at civic media through a lens more focused on analysis and less on producing new products and systems.

What’s civic media? Any media that a community uses to strengthen social bonds and lead to civic engagement. The program is looking for media geeks, people with some programming background, an interest in journalism or community media and the willingness to study the civic media space and build new projects to address needs of local and global communities. If you fit the description, hope you’ll apply – would be exciting to have fun new folks to work with.

Mica Pollock from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, an anthropologist focused on education, speaks at the Berkman Center about OneVille, an educational project focused on communication between people involved in young people’s lives. She tells us she’s written three books with one punchline: young people do better when the people in their lives communication about their progress. These communications need to be regular, normal and not extraordinary – communication should be about specific, everyday activities necessary to support student success. Innovative educational ideas like Children’s Zones or promise neighborhoods focus on building communities that nurture children. Building those communities requires conversation.

Pollock tells us that teachers always tell us that they don’t have sufficient time to communicate with students and parents. At the same time, kids are constantly communicating. The average teenage girl communicates her status 4000 times a month via text messages. “How do we normalize this ongoing conversation?”

Her research focuses on her home community, Sommerville, MA, a suburb of Boston. She notes that there are 5,000 students in the Sommerville schools. The majority speak one of four languages – English, Spanish, Portuguese or Creole. There are four “villes” within Sommerville in class terms – a group of immigrants, a group of “new gentrifiers”, a group of white working class residents, and a fourth group of “techies and students”. The OneVille project is an attempt to connect people in the educational community who work with young people and support their learning – parents, teachers, tutors, coaches, other students, and so on.

In the first year of the OneVille project, Pollock focused on learning about existing communications through interviews, focus groups and other gatherings. The group hosted multilingual happy hours so the community could think through issues of language and translation. Community reading hours were useful to bring people together, but made clear how difficult planning events was and how much time the process took. She discovered that a listserv held a critical role for part of her community – the parents involved with a magnet school. During a debate about integrating that magnet school into a larger district, she discovered that the parents on the listserv were far more knowledgeable about the issues than those not connected. Work on data entry gave a sense for what educational data was and wasn’t available. And studying social networks allowed her to figure out that getting young people to join new social networks was unlikely – reaching them via text was the way to go.

She now thinks of communities as ecosystems of communication, governed by who does and doesn’t get different pieces of information. That ecosystem includes the teams who surround a young person, information shared within a classroom, within school communities, and within cities and nations. There’s a lot of discussion about how to share numbers in these communities, but Pollock notes that much more information needs to be shared. The goal is to create a student dashboard that incorporates multiple measures of success and to offer data at different speeds in different settings. The dashboard also needs to overcome barriers of language, and preferably, should use free and open software.

There are now six community working groups that are using “design based participatory research”, a method that focuses on building tools for the community with the community. One focuses on building the aformentioned dashboard. Another focuses on building texting support teams around each student. That process begins with student/teacher texting, and is expanding to include mentors the young person chooses. The communication is based around Google Voice, allowing in-group communication via text messages.

Another team is helping students build e-portfolios, expanding from paper portfolios to online folders that represent a full range of a child’s interests, passions and skills. A fourth team is designing a school level communications toolkit, designed to help bring information to parents. This project, in particular, focuses on language, and bilingual parents are serving as bridges to their language communities, using private wikis to collect inputs from monolingual participants and share them into the dialog.

One team focuses on sharing information across the city – that project focuses on a multilingual community events calendar. And a final team is focused on expanding access to computing infrastructure, working with a project that refurbishes computers and brings them to housing projects, supporting users with training classes.

Bringing technology into the equation has sharpened a set of core educational issues for Pollock. Building a dashboard for student information raises the issue of how difficult it is to get data on student progress. How much can we require teachers to do? Some teachers will put every quiz result online, while some won’t put any information online. How do we show scores in context? If you show someone’s scores against the other class scores, is that motivating or demotivating? Should we share information like disciplinary records, and what are the privacy concerns with sharing that data? She notes that one best practice suggests that students should be able to build support teams from members who don’t know that each other are on the team – this challenges many existing social network models.

There are, of course, technical constraints as well. While using the phone as the fundamental platform has bridged many gaps, what do you do for a student who’s texting plan has run out of messages? How do you help parents learn online skills so they can navigate a school’s website and download the necessary information. The limits of Google Translate have become apparent, and Pollock is now experimenting with paid and volunteer translation systems to allow better translations to take place. Finally, she notes that simply having an open channel doesn’t mean that access to the channel will be equal – a motivated, tech savvy parent can send a hundred emails in the time a disconnected, inexperienced parent will take to send her first message. At a certain point, overcommunication can become an issue, and people will complain about being drowned in communications from a school. (Clay Shirky warns that overcommunication may lead to degradation of a channel, at which point people simply learn to ignore it.)

The really deep issues with a project like OneVille are more conceptual. What’s the line between being supportive and being overly handholding? The notion of support teams for students worries some of the educators who’ve viewed the project, while others believe it’s a critical step in education. Pollock tells us she’s most fascinated by the question of whether people will see the education of other children as central to the education of their children. Unless they do, the community approach she’s advocating can’t fully succeed, no matter what technology comes into play.

I posted a tweet yesterday afternoon: “The good news: I’ve found the co-working space I’d been searching for. The bad news: it’s in Nairobi.”

Beth Kanter speaks at the iHub

I’ve spent most of the past two days at the iHub, part of the vast (non-profit) corporate empire that is Ushahidi. I’m lucky enough to have known three of Ushahidi’s founders from before their launch of their crowdsourcing platform, and my friends invited me to join their board of directors. Wednesday afternoon was a board meeting, and members flew arrived from three continents to review a chaotic, crazy and incredibly productive year. A team at the Fletcher School used Ushahidi to coordinate information and relief efforts in the wake of the Haitian earthquakes. A team of bloggers and activists in Russia used Ushahidi to provide aid to people affected by Russia’s forest fires, an effort that was so popular, it briefly broke our system. Ushahidi launched Crowdmap.com, a platform that makes it possible for anyone to start a crowdmapping project with no more than a few mouseclicks, and everyone from individuals to the BBC tried it out.

There’s lots for a board member to understand about Ushahidi – three core products, developers around the world, a web of partnerships and collaborations. One part of the mix I’ve never entirely understood is the iHub, which serves as the team’s Nairobi offices, but is lots more than that.

The space is located on the top floor of a five story building on Ngong Road, one of the major arteries of the city. Across the street from a well-known supermarket, it’s easy to get to via cab or matatu, the minivans that carry the majority of the city’s passengers. The space is open, high-ceilinged, and surrounded by windows. There’s a coffee bar in one corner, staffed by Pete, Nairobi’s barrista champion. Above Pete’s shop is a narrow loft, the offices for the space’s managers – they’ve got access to the servers and other gear, as well as a panoramic view of the room below. They look down on a cluster of worktables, a raised area with couches and comfy chairs, and a loose agglomeration of wooden patio furniture. The walls are vibrant blues and greens, lit by the sun streaming in from all sides. One wall features a half-finished map of Nairobi matatu routes – Ushahidi co-founder Erik Hersman tells me, “so much of this space could have been anywhere in the world, we needed something to remind us of Nairobi.”

By 10am, virtually every seat in the house is taken, occupied by young Kenyans and a few expats, almost all wearning green badges around their necks. These badges are the first clue that the iHub isn’t an extremely hip cybercafe. It’s an incubator, an invitation only space open every day to the 100 entrepreneurs who’ve applied for and won badges from the iHub team. For those who’ve won a green badge, there’s no charge to access the space, which is a pretty amazing asset, as it’s not just an extremely cool space – it’s got some of the fastest connectivity available in he city. Erik tells me that more than 1800 people are members of the iHub, using the online tools the group makes available and coming to selected events. From that pool, 100 pitched projects or ideas that earned them a green badge and membership in this exclusive club. Another small set, wearing red badges, pay 10,000 Ksh (about $125 USD) a month for a reserved desk space and a locker within the shared work space. The rentals help defray the cost of the space, as does renting the room out for technology trainings and events.

The end result of the space, the connectivity and the membership policy is that many of Kenya’s best and brightest young geeks can be found at the iHub on any given day. This helps explain why there’s also a crowd of expats – the iHub has become a pilgrimage stop for people hoping to understand the future of information technology in Kenya, and in the developing world as a whole. In the few hours I spent yesterday, I ran into a CBC crew filming a segment on the center, a reporter with the Economist, and half a dozen visiting NGO professionals, looking for contacts, ideas and insights.

Several of the green-badged folks are old friends from the Kenyan blogosphere, and I spent most of Thursday sitting on a couch, catching up the best and brightest of the Kenyan geeks. Rebecca Wanjiku is one of Kenya’s most talented tech journalists, writing for domestic and international publications, including Global Voices. I hadn’t realized she’s also become a systems integrator, designing, purchasing and installing the essential components of network infrastructure for Nairobi businesses. As we lounge on the couch, Rebecca walks be through the installation work she and her team did procuring the wifi hotspots and servers support the iHub’s users. “Being a journalist is an incredible resource for being an integrator,” she tells me. “You learn who’s reliable and who’s not, who you want to work with… and you see opportunities that others don’t see.”

One of those opportunities involves working with NGOs to help them use social media to reach a Kenyan population that’s rapidly coming online. Rebecca works in this space as well, where she’s a friendly competitor to Daudi Were, the blogger behind the celebrated Mental Acrobatics. Daudi is working with Open Society Institute’s Public Health program, helping organizations around the East African region use new media to reach their audiences. We talk about Facebook, which is catching on in Kenya at a ferocious pace. (In a brief walk through downtown, I encountered Facebook ads plastered throughout a downtown shopping center, and a man pushing a bike with a back fender made of a cardboard Facebook sign.)

Daudi tells me that most Kenyans find Facebook when they complete secondary school – some of their friends stay in their hometowns, while others go to Nairobi, off to university or out of the country. They’re separated physically, but Facebook – which most Kenyans access through their phones, allows them to stay in close touch. Daudi tells me about Ghetto Radio, a station that’s built a youth audience around the idea of being an “underground” station… though it’s probably the most popular station for its target demographic. “They run polls on Facebook and get thousands of responses. Lots of the folks responding can’t actually hear the station.” They heard it when they came to Nairobi on holidays, decided it was cool and now follow it online. “You see guys requesting songs via Facebook – they’re in Eldoret, so they can’t hear them, but it’s a cool way to interact with a station.” Daudi and I talk through the implications of the rise of Facebook for Kenyan politics – given the size of the youth vote, and the number of youth who feel alienated from the political process, the ability to leverage personal social networks to build support for candidates could be a powerful force in Kenya’s next elections.

If this country burns, we burn with it, a video from Kuweni Serious

Rachel Gichinga of Kuweni Serious is thinking about elections as well, and specifically about the importance of attacking apathy, which she identifies as a key evil affecting certain Kenyan communities. She identifies herself as part of a group of educated, well-to-do young Kenyans who have disproportionate power to influence politics, but who are usually sidelined by a sense of frustration and futility. Kuweni Serious, a group that came together in the wake of conflict after the 2007 elections, uses viral video to reach this group of young Kenyans. One of their secret weapons is Jim Chuchu, member of electronica band Just a Band and the man behind the remarkable Makmende viral video. (Kuleni Serious’s videos have the same timeless, sun-drenched look as the Makmende trailer – I’m wondering of one of Kenya’s next tech exports will be an Adobe AfterEffects plug-in that gives you the Chuchu look.) The work Rachel and others in her group are doing reminds me of Enough is Enough and other groups trying to use both political and social issues to convince Nigerian youth that they can have a voice in civic affairs – it’s exciting to think that there’s a movement in different corners of the continent to mobilize youth around the idea that they can and should have a voice in politics.

Jessica Colaco wonders whether the next generation of Kenyan youth are starting to use social media in a different way than peers a decade older. When not managing the iHub, she’s an MBA student at Strathmore University, building experiments to test the ways different groups of Kenyans interact with social media. She suspects that there’s a generation gap and that Kenyans under 25 expect to be in dialog with everyone online, from individuals to corporations. When older Kenyans have problems with Safaricom, she tells me, they complain to one another, while younger ones start messaging the company on Twitter and Facebook, demanding the company respond in much the way we’d expect an individual to. For her, the iHub isn’t just an incubator, but a lab, where she’s able to watch the behavior of Kenyan early adopters change in real time.

Given the richness of the conversation at the iHub, it’s not always the easiest place to get work done. Erik tells me he spends two days a week working from home in the hopes of getting grantwriting and other focused activity done. Limo Taboi is based in the quietest corner of iHub and exudes a sense of calm amd focus that creates a cone of silence around him and his laptop. Better known as “Bankelele“, Limo is Kenya’s top financial blogger, and perhaps, top financial writer. And now he’s the financial manager of Ushahidi, wrestling into submission the finances of an organization with principal players scattered around the world. Blogging at the iHub is a mixed blessing, he tells me – “We’ve got so many great events here, you’d think I’d get blog posts out every day. But I’m so buried in the rest of my work, it’s hard to find the time to get a post into the shape where I can publish it.” My guess is that this is a symptom of the overwhelming nature of the iHub – there’s so much going on, it’s hard to present a thorough picture.

At the board meeting on Wednesday, Erik closed his presentation with a slide titled, “Kenya Matters”. Kenya’s not just part of the narrative behind Ushahidi, a platform used globally but developed by Kenyans to respond to a domestic political crisis. Kenya matters because it’s one of the places where the future of technology is coming into focus, where a generation of creative people are building the future, one experiment at a time. iHub makes sense because it’s the physical manifestation of the creative collaboration that took Ushahidi from idea to project to platform within months. I had to go to Nairobi before I really got it. And now I don’t want to leave.

In 2006, the Knight Foundation tried an interesting experiment. They invited anyone, anywhere to apply for a grant to build a tool, platform or project that helped envision the future of civic media. Global Voices applied for a grant as part of the Knight News Challenge, and Knight provided funding for Rising Voices, a project that’s been one of the most exciting, experimental and interesting things we’ve done at GV. Rising Voices tested – and proved – the idea that citizen media could work in parts of the world where very few people have regular access to the internet. Knight’s support helped us work with projects from inner-city neighborhoods in Bolivia to rural Mongolia. You can see the ongoing impact of Knight’s support in Global Voices’s coverage this week of the ongoing crisis in Madagascar – Knight’s grant supported our work with Foko Club in Madagascar, and some of the people involved with that project years back are sharing the news from Madagascar this week.

Applications for this year’s Knight News Challenge are due December 1, and this year’s challenge offers some great opportunities for applications from the developing world. The foundation is soliciting applications in four areas – mobile services, authenticity (services that help us sort through reports and find those that are credible), sustainabilitty (ideas that create revenue models for news) and community (projects that provide information for specific geographic communities.) Applications can come from anyone, anywhere, and winners in the past have come from around the world. Not only does Knight give financial support, but the community of past and present grantwinners is one of the most interesting and dynamic in the world of news and civic information.

Knight News Challenge 2011: A Q and A with John Bracken from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

Here’s a video from my friend John Bracken, who will be overseeing this year’s challenge. He answers some of the most commonly asked questions about the Challenge, and I hope the message you’ll take from his words is this: if you’ve got an innovative idea, apply. Very cool things have come from the News Challenge in the four years past, and the more global the submissions this year, the better chance we’ll have of cool things getting funded in the future.

Kim Dulin of Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab offered a provocation a week back that I’m enjoying wrestling with. Talking about the future of libraries in a digital age, she offered the stark observation that most research today begins with Google, might occasionally proceed to Google Books or to Amazon, and ends in the library if it looks like the answers are in a book, and that one might borrow instead of buying a book. Librarians would like to reverse this hierarchy, at least in part, and unlock “the good stuff” in libraries for broader audiences.

I’m guilty of approaching libraries in exactly the way Dulin describes. In defense of my library abuse (neglect, I think, is more accurate), I’m often researching topics for blog posts. I rarely work on blog posts over multiple days – I write because something’s caught my attention, and the post is a way to engage with a question thoroughly enough to get it out of my mind for a few days, but not to detract from longer projects. The blog post that requires a trip to the library is the post that doesn’t get written. And because I like to write using links, I’m reluctant to cite material that requires a reader to visit a library to understand the reference I’m making.

But I’m trying to work in earnest on the book I’ve been threatening for some years now, and neither of those excuses apply. Rather than waiting for the promised future where Google indexes the entirity of human knowledge and I can search inside books as easily as I search web pages, I’m trying to take advantage of Harvard’s ludicriously wonderful library system and search the universe of paper books as thoroughly as I try to search online.

(We are, by the way, awfully far away from the Google future. I was trying to learn about the flow of doctors and teachers from Haiti to the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1960s, after Congolese independence, and couldn’t find a way to construct a query that turned up results from a universe in which Haitians were helping another developing nation, not receiving aid.)

One of the topics I hope to write about is serendipity. I’ve written before about the unintended consequences of moving away from structures that lead us to unexpected and useful information – shelves of libraries, the front page of paper newspapers – and am hoping to explore the many ways people are trying to engineer serendipity in online spaces. An etymology of the term leads back to Horace Walpole, antiquarian, author and son of the British Prime Minister. In a letter written in 1754, a missive that primarily acknowledges receipt of a painting sent from Florence, Walpole shares a discovery about a crest of arms he’s encountered.

“This discovery indeed is almost of that kind which I call serendipity, a very expressive word, which as I have nothing better to tell you, I shall endeavour to explain to you: you will understand it better by the derivation than by the definition. I once read a silly fairy tale called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right – now do you understand serendipity? One of the most remarkable instances of this accidental sagacity (for you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for comes under this description) was of my Lord Shaftsbury, who happening to dine at Lord Chancellor Clarendon’s, found out the marriage of the Duke of York and Mrs Hyde, by the respect with which her mother treated her at table.”

There’s lots to pull apart in that paragraph. Neither example Walpole gives his reader does an especially good job of illustrating the idea of unexpected discovery through accidental sagacity, though his definition is one I find more satisfying than later definitions of serendipity as happy accident – Walpole seems to acknowledge a deep structure to serendipity where chance helps the informed mind, but perhaps not the untrained mind.

In the spirit of putting libraries first, I searched Harvard’s catalog looking for a contemporary version of The Three Princes of Serendip. I couldn’t find one. But, as this is Harvard, where librarians have ongoing debates about whether they should attempt to acquire every single law book published in any given year, or merely the most interesting ones, the library’s online catalog included the 1722 edition of the “The Travels and Adventures of Three Princes of SARENDIP. Intermixed with Eight Delighful and Entertaining NOVELS, Translated from the Persian into French, and from thence done into English” and published by William Chetwood at Cato’s-Head in Russel Street, Covent Garden.

I assumed that accessing a 300 year old book would require a background check, a training course in handling historical materials, a set of white gloves and a convincing explanation for why my interest in serendipity required direct access to a historical relic. What actually happened was this: I visited Houghton rare book library, was instructed to leave everything but my laptop in a locker, signed up for a special collections readers card, requested the book, and ten minutes later, was presented with a small, non-descript brown volume resting atop a plexiglass book stand and a weighted cord to hold pages in place. No gloves, no warnings, no questions.

And so I spent three hours reading the “silly fairy tale” Walpole had read 250 years ago. I can’t disagree with his assessment. The opening story, with a partially blind, dentally challenged lame camel carrying butter, honey and a pregnant woman, is a pretty good yarn. But the subsequent stories have lost something in translation – from Persian to Italian, to French and then to English. By the time we’re encountering a sinister, disembodied hand that destroys humans, and is persuaded to destroy livestock through the deployment of a magic mirror, we’ve moved out of the realm of deductive puzzles and into the realm of magic. At a certain point, the Princes’ journeys take the back seat to the tales of seven novelists, who’ve been brought from every corner of the world, to tell stories and soothe the illness of a great emperor – it’s a classic frame tale, a story that makes possible the telling of several other stories, and it’s hard to see how these “novels” advance the larger plot (until the last, which is a thinly disguised discourse on the king’s existing predicament.) It’s worth asking whether Chetwood, in the business of selling novels to a London audience, may have recharacterized the Persian and Indian tales that make up the volume as “novels”, hoping to sell more adventures of Moll Flanders, “twelve years a whore and five times married.”

As an American, I tend to assume that anything that’s survived 300 years has an importance and dignity associated with its longevity. Handling the Chetwood edition of The Three Princes, it’s pretty apparent that this is a better example of popular literature than of timeless prose. The copy Harvard has is very well thumbed late in the volume, after the Serendip tale has ended and there’s a quick, unrelated romantic novel to fill out the volume. And Chetwood’s other offerings, advertised in the frontspiece, include a weighty sounding French history, and a whole lot of stories that appear to feature women of loose virtue. The history of the book suggests that it’s not the translation of a great Persian literary work, but the collection of a set of popular tales, tied loosely together. In 1557, a Venetian printer, Michele Tramezzino produced a book, allegedly translated from Persian by “Christoforo Armeno” (likely a fiction) that sewed together a set of popular tales, many of them from India. Serendip, a term for Sri Lanka, was used as the title as it was in the news – a Spanish jesuit had recently brought Christianity to the island, and audiences would have found the term both exotic and familiar.

Here’s what I got from visiting Houghton and reading Armeno/Tramezzino/Chetwood’s tale: the Princes were able to make strange and unexpected discoveries not through luck, but through preparation and education. Their father, the Emperor Jafer, has had them taught by the best scholars of his land, who’ve educated them in “Morality, Politicks and all polite Lerning in general”. When Jafer quizzes his sons and discovers that they’re wise, well-educated and humble, he banishes them from the kingdom, not to punish them, but to encourage them to “travel through all the World, to the end that they might learn the Manners and Customs of every nation.” By the time they encounter the tracks of the ill-used camel, it’s no surprise to the reader that the Princes make a Holmesian deduction about its load and rider – with such detectives on the case, we’re amazed that they’ve not determined it’s coloration, age, dam and sire.

This is useful for me, as I’m trying to make the case that serendipity isn’t a product of luck, or being open to benificent chance. I want to make the case that serendipity is the product of hard work, through the careful structuring of a system to encourage chance encounter (the work done to arrange library books by subject on shelves) or the efforts of a sage curator, who uses her knowledge of a field and of her audience to offer recommendations. An understanding of serendipity that favors sage interpretations of random encounters rather than just the happy accident is consonant with my arguments.

I didn’t need a 300 year old book to bring me that insight. Richard Boyle, a scholar who has examined the Sri Lankan roots of a few dozen words that appear in the Oxford English Dictionary, has written a pair of essays that connect serendipity to Walpole and to the three princes. I found them online, a few clicks into a Google search for “serendipity”, and quickly discovered that Boyle is engaged in a debate with the OED about the “correct” – Walpolean – meaning of serendipity, which aligns more closely with the sagacious mind than with the happy accident.

What encountering the book did for me was shatter the illusion that there was, somewhere out there, a brilliant, forgotten text that contained the true origins and meaning of serendipity. There’s not, or at least, the little brown volume I spent yesterday reading isn’t it. The thing itself, the original text, is a little disappointing – the moment of genius is Walpole’s connection between a silly fairy tale and his observations about the nature of discovery. And there’s a little genius associated with Boyle’s quest to get the OED to recognize that “serendipity” may be a vague and squishy term today, but had a specific, if hard to illustrate, meaning when Walpole coined it.

Even if reading the 1722 manuscript wasn’t helpful in advancing my understanding of serendipity, it was viscerally satisfying in a way that research on the web rarely is for me. I mean this not in the Walter Benjamin sense of encountering the aura of the original object – instead, what’s exciting for me is the idea that I may have been the first person in fifty years to touch a particular page. The web, by its very nature, makes things accessible. Even if a page has never been read by human eyes, we know it’s been indexed, cataloged, page ranked and is potentially accessible at a moment’s notice, should someone type the right combination of keywords into a search box. Digging into the depths of Harvard’s libraries, four stories below ground, or in the hush of Houghton’s reading room, there’s the magic of an archeological dig, the possibility of encountering something strange and wonderful below the surface at any turn.

Thanks to the kind folks at Widener and Houghton Libraries, who clearly understand that libraries are as much about magical stumbling as about knowledge and information, and for Berkman for giving me an enchanted sigal that allows me to access these realms.

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