A quiet revolution is underway in Africa

Many of us take the Internet for granted, but what about locations that are too remote or economically impoverished to enjoy the hi-tech benefits of the developed world?

The Shadow Chancellor in the UK, George Osborne, illustrated in a recent speech that people in the developing world - even in the poorest of circumstances - do care about having access to technology.

In a visit to a remote village in Rwanda in 2007 he and 40 other Conservative Party volunteers were working on transforming a once derelict orphanage into a school.

When it was announced that they were going to fix up the buildings and improve the water supply there were cheers from the villagers, but the loudest shouts were received when it was announced that the school was to be equipped with a computer.

Osborne was at first surprised with the reaction - access to a computer is not a fundamental of life. But even villagers in the remotest part of Rwanda knew about computers and the Internet and didn’t want their children to be excluded - as they had been - from something that could help lift them out of poverty.

While computer penetration is still low, Africans are buying mobile phones at a world record rate with take-up soaring 550% in five years. Now one third of the population in Africa owns a mobile phone.

These devices are being used in Africa to do all sorts of things never dreamt about by their creators. Transferring money via SMS between people who don’t have a bank account is now a huge business.

They are also acting as a link to get information out from rural areas and onto the Internet.

In Kenya, soon after violence erupted in 2007/8 elections, Mashada- a prominent online forum - launched an SMS hotline to help share information. Several prominent Kenyan blogs also accepted comments via SMS. Perhaps most prominently, BBC Africa’s ‘Have Your Say’ received over 3800 and published over 1300 comments after requesting updates from Kenyans.

While these innovative SMS tools are allowing more people to contribute opinions and information, none of them can yet directly reach the majority of the population, who need Internet access to see the posted messages.

Twitter is perhaps the most promising tool because of its ability to deliver messages to mobile phones. In the Kenyan elections twitter was used by journalists in trouble spots to warn people in real time to avoid these locations as well as to inform the world of what was happening.

Now, finally, Africa is getting the new high-speed Internet connections developed countries have had for years. In September 2009, a new cable linked up East Africa and this, combined with widespread mobile access, is promising to revolutionise business and communications, acting as a check on corrupt regimes by exposing malpractice and lifting areas of the continent out of poverty.

The Internet won't create success for Africa but perhaps the freedoms it brings will.

The Mob rules – Crowdsourcing MPs expense claims

There is a growing importance of a new kind of journalism, participation between trained, experienced, professional journalists and the citizen.

Trumped by the Daily Telegraph in exposing the British MPs expense scandal the Guardian is fighting back in a unique way using crowdsourcing (using the talents of the crowd) to sift through 70,000 receipts and expenses claims submitted by MPs.

The Guardian has developed an “Investigate Your MP” tool with the idea that “many hands make light work”. The best themes that emerge will be published in the newspaper, with credits for the author.

The application allows users to point out whether a claim from a set of PDF images realised by Parliament is interesting - such as a duck island - and worthy of further scrutiny.

This is very similar to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk which uses the power of crowds by enabling companies to outsource manual tasks for a small financial sum to workers at a lesser cost than hiring staff to do tasks computers struggle with.

The difference is instead of being used as a semi exploitive commercial enterprise, crowdsourcing is exposing MPs abuses and improving governance in the UK.

It’s also fun. There is a voyeur feeling in wading through pages of MPs claims and discovering how much of - our money - they have spent on their new bathrooms.

Hats off to the Daily Telegraph in breaking the scandal but it cannot be good that a single newspaper with its own bias continues to set the agenda by dripping feeding stories into the public domain.

In engaging thousands of people, passionate to get something done the Guardian is showing how citizen contributions can compliment professional journalism by uncovering stories that the political class would prefer never to see the light of day.

International Organisations in a Connected World

Today citizens increasingly expect to be able to collaborate with their governments online and no institution funded by the tax payer can ignore the need to interact and be transparent with the people it serves. Today's tech-savvy world demands tech savvy global institutions and the complex challenges faced by organisations such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), United Nations (UN) and the Commonwealth will increasingly test them. To respond effectively to this new depth of challenge, these world bureaucracies must redefine how they make policies, share information and manage operations and move away from the industrial age and into the information age.

Although progress is slow international organisations have begun to leverage the power of Internet based-based tools that have been used for decidedly non-governmental and more social or consumer based activities.

Surprisingly it is the Commonwealth with its limited resources and the lower profile that has been more adept to the web2.0 challenge. By using wikis, blogs, folksonomies rating and comments on its website the Commonwealth shows itself to be more willing to open up and engage with the population of its member countries than many of its larger brothers in the international arena.

The United Nations with its membership of 192 countries, huge budget and the expectation that it will provide a lead to solving global problems is shamefully the worst performer in its use of collaborative technologies on its public website.

The UN.org is about as read only as can be, neither do they have a social network of their own or a presence on one such as the Commonwealth has on FaceBook. Although the UN Secretariat is doing a woeful job of using networking tools some of its agencies such as UNESCO UNICEF and WHO do use these them as another channel for their news. As does the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) which is both on FaceBook and has developed its own networking tool.

Where the UN scores higher is with its use of YouTube. In 2008 the United Nations launched its television channel on YouTube in an effort to reach a broader and younger audience. The World Bank, World Health Organisation and OECD also have a YouTube channel.

Although these organisations want to use YouTube to reach a younger audience the content on their sites is very corporate and unappealing to youth. The Commonwealth is the one organisation that has made an effort to use YouTube to involve youth in their channel by pioneering user generated videos at major conferences and with an innovative proposal to highlight its unique diversity by running a Commonwealth YouTube talent contest.

Blogging helps to give some personality to faceless bureaucracies and many international organisations have developed their own blogging areas. The World Bank has an informative private sector development blog site which gathers ideas about the role of private enterprise in fighting poverty. The UN Secretariat does not have an official blog but there is a site developed by the United Nations Foundation called UN Dispatch. The OECD also operates a separate blogging site called Spotlight which provides a forum for discussion.

The Commonwealth has gone a step further having recently trialed live blogging from the health ministers conference in Geneva and will do the same from the education conference in Malaysia where youth participants will also contribute. At the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting to be held in Trinidad in November attended by the Queen and many country leaders, the Commonwealth Blog Network will offer unique personal perspectives from one of the world's largest regular summits.

At this summit the Commonwealth will also use Twitter, a free micro blogging platform that connects people in real-time and enables its users to send and read other users' updates known as tweets which are limited to 140 characters from either a mobile phone or a computer. Twitter is about as hot as you can get on the social web and is never out of the press with celebrity endorsements from Paris Hilton, Demi Moore, Oprah and the UK's own Stephen Fry.

While the United Nations Secretariat misses an opportunity by not using twitter some of its agencies are showing UN headquarters how it's done: UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Health Organisation all have twitter accounts through which they distribute their news. The OECD also has a twitter account but the Commonwealth has taken it a step further by following 10 Downing Street's lead and integrating the twitter feed into the homepage of the Commonwealth website.

Perhaps wikis offer one of the most useful platforms for international organisations to collaborate on information sharing. A wiki is a user editable website which allows its members to be able to add new content or alter existing material. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is an example of how successful wikis can become.

International organisations have begun to dabble with wikis: OECD has created wikigender to facilitate the exchange and sharing of knowledge on gender issues and the United Nations has water wiki developed so that water sector professional can find and share experience and knowledge about water related work in the international (UN) context. The Commonwealth has also recently launched a wiki called Commpedia so that all 90 Commonwealth organisations can add their own information and promote their cause on a single site.

Although a wiki offers a superb platform for collaboration it is also vital that international orgaisations open up the data they collect so that it can be used in innovate way allowing citizens to co-design in the digital age to make services better. Many governments are already doing this with the UK offering a £20,000 prize for the best mash-up that improves lives.

The World Bank has been collecting massive amounts of data, for the past 50+ years, and now possesses one of the richest repositories of information about economic development in the world. To help people use this data they have developed World Bank Open API that opens the wealth of the World Bank's global economic data to the outside world, in a standard, easily accessible way. Open API allows third parties to develop mash-ups (a combination of data from different sources) and applications with the World Bank data and easily create different kinds of interesting visualizations and insightful reports.

International organisations also need to be aware of and ready to utiilise new technologies as they are developed. An example being Google Wave which is being released later this year and is likely to be as revolutionary to collaboration as email has been to communication.

So what more could international organisations be doing in today's web2.0 world:

• Follow the example set by companies such as Dell and Starbucks in the private sector. In their online idea storms customers submit their ideas, then fellow-customers vote on them - some gain a following, others die on the vine - and the companies implement the best of them. I would love to see this platform for mutual engagement used by institutions such as the UN, IMF and the Commonwealth to make them more relevant to the people that they serve.
  
  
• Learn from the example of micro financing sites such as Kiva that empower individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs around the globe allowing them to lift themselves out of poverty.
  
  
• Make more use of wikis by studying how municipalities such as the City of Melbourne are using wiki technology for public consultation and collaboration allowing people for the first time to directly contribute their ideas to enhance and develop the city.
  
  
• And finally follow President Obama's example from the US election with his use of social networks and the creation of MyBrarrackObama.com. This platform became a powerful tool for mobilising, participation and engagement. All which international organisations need to do if they are to be effective.

The impenitence of the world’s major international organisations has been exposed once again by recent global events and the the need for reform so they represent the world of the 21st century and not that of last century is acute. If these organisations want to stay relevant to the next generation, it will be hard for them to ignore the global reach of social networks and collaborative technologies as a way to interact directly with the digital natives. And this is not just an exercise in youth outreach or PR but an engagement with the future face of the international community.

Journalism in 140 Characters

How useful can communication limited to 140 characters be for serious journalism? If it is about breaking news, immediacy and the linking to source material to establish fact then 140 characters does pretty well.

Twitter is a free social messaging service for staying connected in real-time that enables its users to send and read other users' updates known as tweets which are limited to 140 characters from either a mobile phone or a computer. Sounds easy - well it is - insanely so and although the idea of broadcasting messages of your every movement to the world does at first seem mad it's an incredibly useful tool.

For a reporter that regularly covers a beat twitter is fabously good for networking. Journalists need people to tell them stuff and twitter allows reporters to connect with their community. Journalist Pat Kane describes it as a "folksonomy of knowledge on the move" and a tool that acts as an “expertise archive that enriches and adds to the toolbox of the traditional journalist”. A few years ago we called this desk research.

Being real time and mobile twitter acts as an early warning system for breaking news stories. In the chaos of Mumbai during the terrorist attack twitter gave a sense of what was happening on the ground with more analytical coverage through blogs and traditional news media following later. Journalists monitoring twitter at the time of the Hudson plane crash were viewing the picture of the downed plane before the wire agencies had uploaded a shot. Photographs, audio and live video from the scene and linked through twitter gave these stories a speed and intimacy not possible before.

In Kenya, a country with poor broadband penetration, twitter was used by journalists to share information during the elections. With one text they could send a message to their twitter network, facebook profile and an update to their blog, offering an effective way to share information in real time to a large group of people.

Jon Gripton, Online Editor for Sky News calls twitter a “peoples wire agency” that is of growing importance in news gathering. Perhaps the reason why Sky News has appointed Ruth Barnett as its first twitter correspondent. It allows journalism to break away from the “churnalism” that consumes much of the media today and offers an alternate way for a news organisations to source original content.

Twitter is popular not just because it allows journalists to crowdsource with thousands of people or because it's a fun way of amassing followers and inflating egos. It also gives reporters a chance to create a new system of reporting. In the past, journalists were confined to their words and research methods, all dictated by traditional routines. Now they can create new strategies, use different tools, brand themselves differently, and propose new ideas. Twitter has given them hope and direction to do this because it has given them a public forum in which to loudly speak their ideas.

With tools that allow content to be reported and shared so easily news isn't dying, it's thriving. Google makes news ubiquitous and journalists need to use tools like twitter to help source stories and drive people to what is more scarce - authority.

Follow me on Twitter: @nelliesk

The Secrets of Obama's New Media Juggernaut

One of the many ways that the election of Barack Obama as president echoed that of Kennedy was with his use of a new medium that will forever change politics. For Kennedy, it was television. For Obama, it was the Internet.

Recently I was luckily enough to be able to attend a presentation in San Fransisco by one of the architects of Obama's online campaign, Jascha Franklin Hodge of Blue State Digital.

Obama didn't win the election just because of his use of the Internet. He was an amazing candidate, with a great team and the right circumstances, but the way he used the web as a tool to galvanize support was crucial to the outcome.

These are 6 core principles on how it was done:

1) Drive Action

If you want people to do something then set a low barrier to action. Keep it simple and develop a number of different tools that allow people to become involved. Set expectations high and move people up a pyramid of action encouraging them through easy steps to a higher level of engagement.

On the Obama website the bottom of the pyramid was a simple site registration form whilst at the top it was about multiple donations, action taking and peer recruitment. Reasons were always given to act such as registering so you would be the first to know the name of the vice presidential candidate.

A very active social network was developed which was similar to FaceBook but with a crucial difference, that whilst on FaceBook there are many frivolous activities - poking and gifting - My.barackobama.com encouraged action orientated social networking. Instead of throwing sheep you were asked to help the campaign by ringing a friend or sending an email containing an Obama message.

2) Be authentic

Obama's team realised that emailing potential supporters a robotic press release would result in an instant redirect of the message to the bin. To engage people you need to speak to them as people and show personality. Personal email messages and behind the scenes videos released on YouTube although not polished are more real and effective because of this.

3) Create ownership

Give people a sense that they own a part of the cause. Why would anyone support a faceless bureaucracy, corporation or political party that they didn't in anyway feel involved with. Obama created ownership by turning people into personal advocates, giving them their own web pages and encouraging them to add their friends to personal fund raising groups.

He also recognised that it is all about the network, he didn't match groups of grassroot supporters with a single wealthy donor as had been done before, he matched them with people like themselves and sent them emails of introduction so they could support and encourage each other.

By keeping it local the campaign created neighbour to neighbour connections. Once signed up on the site you were sent a list of targeted voters in your locality and given materials to door knock, send emails or make telephone calls. This resulted in over six million contacts.

4) Be relevant

Make sure that your message has relevance to the people that you are trying to engage with. If constituents are recently unemployed steel workers then sending them an email discussing the budget deficit may not be appropriate. Also don't just react to events learn to anticipate them.

5) Build a strong open brand

It is vital to brand professionally and apply it consistently across all your communication materials, which in Obama's case was everything from his posters to his jet. However your supporters should be empowered to do interesting things with the brand. The Obama website carried a full list of brand resources (the original artwork) and gave instructions on how to create your own computer wall paper, videos and posters. This freedom led to some novel uses with people illuminating their bicycle with the logo and the creation of iconic art such as the Obama Hope poster.

6) Measure everything

The great thing about the web is it is very easy and cheap to measure the effectiveness of everything. The campaign used this to its full extent testing emails, advertising and fund raising activities on small groups and then adapting the products to be more effective based on this data.

And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make

There are many more reasons behind Obama's new media juggernaut including the creation of an amazing iphone application - that with with the owners permission - scanned the phones address book finding friends in key states to call so you could enlist their support. Also to be where the people are, be it on FaceBook, YouTube or MySpace, Obama had a presence.

But perhaps the most important lesson to learn from the campaign is that you should never underestimate people and the beneficial results that can be achieved by empowering them.

And if you choose not to believe me then just look to the 44th President of the United States of America, one Barack Obama and how he managed to achieve his historic victory.

Follow me on Twitter: @nelliesk

Book review: Throwing sheep in the boadroom

How Online Social Networking will transform your life, work and world

Published by Wiley
Written by Mathew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta

If the title seems strange wait until you start reading. What you think is a book about how social networking will change corporations begins with the medieval Popes army - The Nights Templar. Weird, but effective as it links the web2.0 revolution with historical and anthropological perspectives. The perpetual conflict between centralising institutions and horizontal networks.

The title of the book is derived from the Facebook feature of being able to throw virtual objects at your friends. It would be unfair to describe this as just another web2.0 business title as it covers how society as a whole and not just corporations is being changed and challenged by online social networks.

The book is split into 3 sections which the authors describe as I.S.P - identity, status and power.

The notion of identity online is more fluid and multifaceted than the physical world where we are constrained by institutional norms and values. In cyber space you have more freedom to be who and what you want to be. Liberating stuff but there is a dark side; paedophilia and cyber bulling are amongst some of the more frightening examples given. Also the idea that your past online becomes an indelible digital tattoo that is with you for life. Those funny moments captured flat on your back at university and posted on Facebook suddenly become a lot more embarrassing when Googled by a future employer.

The section on status moves away from the social individual and into the corporate world where there is a command and control model or as the book describes it a vertical structure. Social technologies are horizontal in nature and have a bias towards performance and efficiency. This allows the smartest ideas from whoever and wherever to rise to the surface. Middle managers in particular view this as threatening as they see their ascribed status and position as gate keepers of information undermined.

Power is fundamentally about who is the boss. Social technologies are pushing power to the margins rather than it being monopolised. The old command and control dynamic is dying, now anyone can contribute as the barriers and cost of entry is almost zero. This is resulting in new commercial realities.

In the music industry the revolution of social networking sites and peer to peer networks has forced the development of a new business model.

In corporations the adoption has been slower but web2.0 tools are now being used for communications functions that don't necessitate organisational change.

In Politics, Obama's victory in 2008 is the first Facebook election and a vindication of the power of grass roots technology. The same social tools he used to sweep to power now offer an opportunity to reconnect Government to the people.

The authors conclude by examining the issue of trust and state that the web2.0 revolution may depend on the capacity to find a proper balance between loosening controls and losing control - between self regulation and legal constraints.

Overall this is a good book that is stuffed with well researched examples and is written from the perspective of the realist rather than the evangelist. It knits together the past, present and future in a highly readable narrative.