This is because, using Nigeria as an example, more people have access to mobile phones than to the Internet. Mobile phone penetration as of October 2008 is 80% (http://www.itnewsafrica.com/?p=1527) with over 60 million subscribers (http://fixed-mobile-convergence.tmcnet.com/topics/mobile-communications/articles/52139-report-nigeria-outpaces-south-africa-mobile-telecom-market.htm) while internet penetration as of June 2009 is only 7.4% of the population (http://www.internetworldstats.com/africa.htm). Our mobile communications also have an edge over the system in the United States because we do not pay to receive text messages on our phone – the only person who gets charged is the person sending. So while the OFA had limitations because they did not want their supporters to get charged, a campaign in Nigeria would not have this problem. In terms of fund raising we have another edge in Nigeria because the mobile phone is being used now for financial transactions with people sending and receiving money through their phones – a much easier and much more transparent way for campaigns and not for profits to raise money as opposed to the internet.

The reason why the Internet would not be a successful platform to raise money is because apart from the low penetration, we face limitations with raising money over the Internet because of restricted ability to transact financially over the Internet as few people own credit/debit cards and even fewer trust the online security enough to conduct financial transactions online.

However when it comes to videos, the competitive edge that Nigeria has over the United States in terms of using text messages, narrows. As indicated in the article and class discussions, video is a very power tool for communicating. I think this power is even more evident in places with low literacy rates and multiple languages. This means video arguably has a wider reach. People all over the world can share ideas and transmit messages through videos even if we do not understand each other’s languages. Trust me, I know this for sure after years of watching Indian movies with my illiterate aunt without the aid of translating text. Neither of us speaks Hindi.

It is inevitable that the use of video content in Nigeria for campaigns and for development communication is slowly catching on but its reach is hampered by distribution. (A search on youtube for ‘Nigeria’ turned up only 65,900 videos compared with over 200,000 for South Africa and almost 1 million for a search for ‘united states’.)  If the Obama for Africa model for videos was to be adopted the key problems would be, one, internet access i.e., few people have access to the Internet and two, access to broadband which enables quick and easy downloading and viewing of videos.

Nonetheless, the answer for us lies again in the mobile phone. Mobile phone technology is making it possible to make (http://edition.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Movies/03/24/phonemovie.competition/index.html) and share movies (http://www.techworld.com.au/article/305095/movies_coming_soon_mobile_phone_near) and this might be the way we can increase distribution and the impact of videos in this part of the world. As for OFA copycats, not –for-profits and people looking for an issue to organize around – how about getting the cellular networks to stop charging users for receiving text messages?

Why do we want to do this? We think this type of information is useful and in a developing democracy where ethnic identity holds greater sway over ‘national identity’, we hope this will give citizens more options to help decide how to cast their votes and who to give their support to. In other words, we would like to foster good followership as a bottom up catalyst for good leadership by creating a groundswell to drive participation in the election process.

Pippa Norris in Electoral Engineering provides research analysis which links many sometimes conflicting things to poor voter turn out and participation; illiteracy, affluence, other alternatives for driving social change (e.g., interest groups) apathy and disillusionment with the system. People are sometimes reluctant to participate in elections when they feel disempowered and believe their votes will not count. We think this website will help by giving Nigerians a semblance of control especially since we would have to rely on crowdsourcing to gather information about these representatives.

As soon as I read about POST (people, objectives, strategy and technology) in Chapter 4 of Li and Bernoff’s Groundswell, I was curious on how our project would hold up under this analytical framework and if it would work for ‘non profit making ventures’.

People:  Nigerians are highly political. We talk politics all the time. People are hungry for information (usually to confirm their views and not to change them, but that is another subject) and we have ‘readers’ clubs which form around newspaper vendors where there is a tacit understanding that those who cannot afford to buy the papers are allowed to read on the spot and share the information with those around them. So it is not uncommon on a drive anywhere in the city to spot groups of people widely gesticulating and passionately arguing around a newspaper under the watchful eye of the vendor. We are ready to move from being mere spectators and passive critics to being joiners. This readiness is also borne out by the many posts and comments which follow online news articles and blogs on Nigerian issues.

Objectives: we want to energize and hopefully this will lead our users – the average citizen – to embrace the principles behind the website and applying it to every sphere of public life i.e. shining transparency on all transactions.

Strategy: As we take off, the strategy would be closely linked to the objective i.e., to get people to develop across the different levels of the social technographic profile and create a movement for political and eventually, social, change.

Technology: this is the hardest part because access to the Internet is still something that is largely for the elite and the elite make up a mere 15-20% of the population of 150 million people – and some might argue that this is an optimistic number. Epileptic power supply and weak infrastructure are the main obstacles to easy access but still there is evidence that the interest in the Internet and the vast resources which it brings is phenomenal. Our challenge would be to find a way of making our websites more easily accessible to all – would mobile cinemas work – so that we travel around small towns and villages, airing documentaries and sharing parts of the website to create awareness? Will SMS messages help create awareness, along with well-placed ads? For us in Nigeria, thinking of technology has to extend well beyond the platforms available on the Internet.

To paraphrase Li and Bernoff, “The biggest challenge in groundswell is accomplishing a useful business goal and measuring this success and proving that the groundswell effort was worth it” and what’s missing from the POST analysis is how to measure this success but I feel a lot more confident that if we build it, ‘they will come’ and it will be worth it.

“This is not just a competition between sites but a competition between business models –and between ideas. Blogging belongs in the world of web 2.0, the world of Gillmor’s “we, the media,” where the ‘former audience’, not a few people in a back room, decide what is important.”

The inability of a number of mainstream journalists to accept this and embrace it is telling – journalists, the pillars of the Fourth Estate, finally understand how hard it is to give up the status quo.

Maybe I can offer something to ease acceptance? In reading the musings of an accidental revolutionary on Linux and Open Source in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, I was struck, over and over again on how appropriate, almost prophetic, some of Raymond’s lessons where to blogs and why it was too late to bolt the stable.

Lesson: Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.

Blogs started the same way and bloggers are furiously scratching personal itches. Some of these itches have public aspects to them such as Larry Lessig and his duo itches of institutional corruption (Change Congress) and cyber law (http://www.lessig.org/blog/) and some are personal – and that’s why I cannot provide any examples.

Lesson: Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).

There are different levels of bloggers. Those who inspire their 1000 ‘true fans’ and those who are content with 10; the art of blogging is evolving along with the definition of a ‘great’ blogger. However, if we stay true to this Lesson– we might be able to close the gaps in citizen journalism and blogging – journalists can rewrite and reuse bloggers content to create the masterpieces they are so good at. But if journalists are too busy with angst…eventually bloggers will fill this gap themselves.

Lesson: Plan to throw one away; and you will anyway. This refers to the fact that as humans we often do not really understand the problem until after we’ve tried to solve it, but if we want to get it right, we must be ready to start over at least once.

Blogging is one way in which thousands of people write to express themselves and talk about the world in which they inhabit. And the more we write, the more we understand and the more we understand the better we become. Sometimes, we discard ideas and shut down blogs (Justin Hall) and start all over again – because like another Lesson says: ‘the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong – as we get rid of the bugs in our writing and our ideas, we get better – – just like software.

Lesson: treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.

This applies to bloggers who blog alone and improve their writing and their theories due to the comments and criticisms of their readers and to all collaborative bloggers like Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos who use teams to keep their blogs relevant to their followers.

Lesson: Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.

The frequency of blog posts ranges from several posts a day, to daily, weekly or sporadically. What works for open sourcing, works for blogs: the more frequent and consistent your blogs, the happier your followers will be. This principle unsurprisingly applies to a lot today as consumers want better and more, faster and faster.

Lesson: given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.

To paraphrase Raymond, what this means for bloggers is that “given enough eyeballs, all mistakes will be spotted’.  When I write and share my thoughts and ideas about things which fascinate me or keep me up at night, my readers are my co-developers because they sometimes spot a weakness in my argument or position and help me make my theories stronger.

I do not think Web 2.0 is the last stop as far as innovation on the Internet goes and it is easy to predict this. Already companies are beginning to realize that control over data might be their chief source of competitive advantage how willing will they be to continue to ‘leave things open’? But that is another story; unfolding the same way the story about bloggers and journalism is still unfolding.

Investigative Journalism

Everything from the stories in Say Everything, to Shirky’s ‘Unthinkable’, Sharesleuth, pro am collaboration on OffTheBus and crowd sourcing at the Guardian; prove that investigative journalism is not the exclusive right of main stream journalists. As Carey says “…in a world where investigative journalism is being abandoned because it is costly and risky, I think we’re doing a public service.”

It is people with passion and interest, who now follow stories to the end of the world – so why should what they write be less credible than mainstream journalists?  Because we keep being told that by journalists struggling for relevance and survival? For me the most interesting thing in Shirky’s article was his allusion to the fact that the ‘fear’ that accompanied printing in the 16^th Century is the same fear that permeates the current freedom that citizen publishing on the internet wields. Horror stories about ‘untruths’ and ‘unreliable information’ abound – the same things that journalists have been guilty of for years (CBS, Rather and the GW Bush Service story & Joe Klein on Congress deliberations are just two examples).

Citizen Activism

While political scientists ponder over the apathy of US voters (who along with Switzerland have the lowest voter turnout records amongst 1^st World countries) – and Putnam and co theorize about the ‘generational replacement’ where the last great voters of the pre New Deal era have been replaced by their ‘vote apathetic’ post New Deal children and grandchildren; others beat down bloggers and sneer at citizen activism. Isn’t this arguably the way by which the post-New Deal generations express their civic duties?

Larry Lessig may be a Harvard Law Professor but his Change Congress site is citizen activism and the site a sort of blog about his opinions, supported by convincing facts. I see nothing wrong with this and I see nothing wrong with people with fewer credentials but no less passion or interest speaking up for what they believe in. I think it is more interesting to discuss why people are not being influenced by this information. May be because we filter what we read based on interest, our desire to be right and our values. According to Drew Westen, in Political Brain (http://www.thepoliticalbrain.com/videos.php) when it comes to politics, people do not decide rationally, they decide based on emotions and that is the relationship I think people have with information in general – it washes over most of us or makes us nod our heads in understanding, before we proceed to doing exactly what we were doing before we got the information – so why ‘fear’ what is out there? The internet and all it brings including blogging and citizen journalism is a double edged sword but it cuts heavier on the plus side. Ironically, blogging has helped journalists gain the freedom to follow their passions. There are stories of journalists who, forced to toe the publication line with a story – use blogs, to unburden themselves and share what they consider the ‘real story’.

People are realizing that journalists are not the only ones who can cover stories and the internet or blogs are not the reason the newspapers are failing…they are failing because the model is unsustainable. The model is unsustainable because: the revenue base is shrinking, technology makes it easier and cheaper to stay informed and there is less trust in government establishments and by default ‘major media’ who like everyone is susceptible to the corrupting influence of money. Journalists and publishers all over the world have, for money or bias, been deciding what we get to hear. All that has happened is that we have more options and we can now decide for ourselves what we want to hear.

Is the information which I pay for more valuable to me than information which is free? And is information which I give away for free more or less valuable than information for which I am paid? Maybe these are the questions we need to answer before we conclude that citizen journalism has no place in providing and analyzing news. The prestige of ‘old journalism’ failed to hold Marshall because there was something much more important to him than the byline in print, the dollars per word articles that he wrote; this was self determination- the unalienable sovereign right of all individuals.

There is a strong relationship between information and freedom and blogging in all its glory and ‘inglory’ may be the link between these two – at least for those of us who find that we discover more and understand better when we write about the things that we struggle to understand.

When Evan Williams gave us ‘blogger’ to capture our thoughts, share information or publicly ponder about random or life shattering issues – he gave us a tool for self-determination and freedom. However how many people have taken up this tool today? As mind shattering as this number might be to the Greg Knauss’ of the world, it is minuscule if you think what the power of self-determination can do. Self-determination is what has led to all the inventions the world benefits from and will continue to benefit from.

Information or the search for it is a road that often leads to self-determination and innovation. However, this is not always true. For members of the old guard (‘journalists’) who worry about the souls of humans being tainted with the badly written and researched news/opinions of bloggers – I will share a secret: Most humans gravitate towards what they already know or what confirms what they already know. About a year ago an insider (http://www.jonathanball.co.za/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1717&theme=Printer) published a detailed expose on an allegedly inflated arms deal involving the South African government. While the expose resulted in damages including Mbeki’s ‘retirement’ from the office of President, the deal was not reversed and the public remained largely unconcerned with it. They did not protest and did not seek to get ‘justice’ for the other parties connected with the deal. However, if for example, information was released (either by a blogger or a journalist) which suggested that the rise in crime was caused by immigrants (never mind any distinction between the legal and illegal ones), then suddenly citizens would latch on to this and the country would be gripped in xenophobic fervor.

My point: let information flourish, let people who want to write about Nebraska football teams do so and those who want to track the corruption of public officials in Nigeria do so (http://www.saharareporters.com/). The Internet is home to hundreds of thousands of blogs and online news sites manned by traditional journalists, yet how many of the six billion people are aware of this? Ironically, despite this, some bloggers put themselves in personal jeopardy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog) in the pursuit of self- determination and freedom. Some of us will read it and respond and most of us will ignore it. However when we are ready to find it, we will know where to go and we will use our conditioning, social norms or our advertising addled brains to decide which medium suits us best.

Those who want to be influenced by supposed narcissistic, doubtful content will always find a way and those who want enlightenment (as they define it) will find their way too. I say: Viva la bloggers!

Would anyone give up power willingly?  No – and while this is so much truer in some contexts than in others, it is true all over the world. So it is with journalists and the desire to control the content of news and opinion. However things will never be the same again; it is too late to turn back now that bloggers have tasted the power of ‘simply being heard’ and in turn being followed. They too will not give ‘power’ up willingly.

Hall sounded the death knell years ago when he said ‘reporters would leave their jobs to go solo on the web’ and foresaw the ‘long tail’ when he said ‘profits would not come from ‘mass market media’ but from ‘millions of minuscule fees”. Here was a twenty something year old accurately predicting the future and my theory is journalists were unable to predict this because they were part of the status quo – the power base that never wants to give up power. As they fret over every punctuation mark and sweat over trying to make an article as bland sounding and generic as it possibly can so it can appeal to a wider and wider audience, bloggers are talking straight from the human heart – warts and all and connecting with people.

Hall’s prediction has come true – and it says something for the discipline of journalism today that it can take its place on the web, play by the bloggers game and succeed.  Last month Vanity Fair ran a story on four old media veterans who ‘may have solved the future of news’ with Politico (http://www.politico.com/). Started only last year to cover the presidential elections – “Politico now has a larger presence in the West Wing than any other news organization”. I doubt if this would have happened without the example of and pressure from news bloggers.

In my world, we need the threat to journalism – a place where journalists are so firmly part of the establishment that what we get is not ‘news’ but what governments and rich corrupt politicians and oligarchs in the making want us to know. Slowly, blogs in Nigeria are giving us a different story – rough around the edges and most times not written in the lyrical tones of the masters of the English language but what they say resonates strongly with the public. Why? Maybe because we know that if government could – it would stifle such mediums. Sahara Reporters (http://www.saharareporters.com/) is one of few ‘news sites’ who are not only challenging the Nigerian government (and cannot be shut down because they have no physical presence – unlike regular journalists) but also encouraging community organization from the bottom up by getting people to not only voice impotent outrage on the comment links of the site but by actively taking action. With time, our journalists will have to take example from the bloggers, the same way Politico has – but without these blognalism, our journalists will have no incentive to change.

I also think the ‘we are unbiased flag’ of journalists is not real – if they are human then they have biases – they may be better trained at hiding them but this is not one of the virtues for which they should remain relevant. Just as Barger lost his followings because of his controversial links, so mainstream media, like Fox in the case of Obama, are losing links (access to information) for their obvious bias. (As an aside it would be interesting to know if Fox has indeed lost on its ratings due to its obvious anti Obama slant – if it has not; then what differentiates Fox from what Barger did?)

Almost everything you can say about journalists: professional, dogged, committed to truth and justice can be applied to many bloggers today. Will journalists be more willing to ‘follow the truth’ than I am? Who says so? I still need to be convinced on why ‘journalists’ should have the monopoly over news. The dictionary.com definition of journalist is so generic (a person who practices the occupation or profession of journalism or a person who keeps a dairy, journal or other record of daily events) that it is a bit comical for people today to try to make a distinction between what they do and get paid for and what I do for free. There is enough room on the World Wide Web for every seeker of truth and self-mastery: journalists, bloggers and whatever else we decide to call ourselves a few years from now.

For better or worse (I’d say better) the article above is is just one example why we cannot rely on our traditional media to hold politicians and public officers accountable. Arguably they haven’t done a good job in the past (which is partly why politicians have gotten away with so much) and they are still not doing a good job.

Meanwhile ‘accountable journalism’ through blogs (accountable blognalism?) is translating into community organising as we saw recently when Nigerians living in London ‘hounded’ the compromised AG of the Federation, Michael Aondoakaa from his hotel. Through the internet and by mobile phones, Nigerians were encouraged to call the hotel management and ask them (politely) to throw him out and then by calling his room (yes, they had his room number) incessantly and questioning him about corruption.  He fled. Strike one for blognalism; somehow I doubt if term will catch on…

After days of trying to practice the art of meditation and blocking out this ‘quiet noise’, I ask the Library Staff what the policy is for laptops and ‘quiet study areas’…doesn’t it make sense that since we have a mini computer lab and open tables, then those with laptops would be restricted to these areas?Apparently not.

Even the freezing Jouranl Room were I retreated to was not safe. A mere 15 minutes after, someone comes in and whips out the weapon of choice: Mac Laptop. I protest…there are so many other rooms she can go to click away happily: can she leave this room to me and the other very quiet occupant? She just wants to watch a video and will be quiet. 30 minutes later, my equilibrium is shattered – not only by the compulsive throat clearer who has chosen this room to ‘hack’ while reading the paper but the shy tapping of the weapon. I sigh and gather my bags…thinking I guess I can just stay in my room?

But hope is in sight…a Professor at MIT snapped at students with laptops and told them to ‘shut it’ (my words) because the constantly clicking was interfering with his thinking…like minds think alike. Maybe I should start a petition…I wonder how many people will sign it?

However, Google has not only emerged (for now) the kings of our ‘intentions’ but they are totally involved in other things – they haven’t stayed ‘true’ to search: they have google docs, gmail, etc…why has not staying pure worked for Google while it hasn’t worked for others? Could timing be ‘everything’?