G.ho.st and online operating systems: Much Ado About Nothing?

I was forwarded a recent New York Times article on G.ho.st by Patrick Meier. Perhaps Patrick thought I would be interested in this because of the references to peacebuilding in the Israeli-Palestinian context. .

Even before I clicked on G.ho.st I knew what I was in for when I read this quote by Zvi Schreiber, the creator of the online operating system:

“I felt the ultimate goal was to offer every human being a computing environment which is free, and which is not tied to any physical hardware but exists on the Web,” he said. The idea, he said, was to create a home for all of a user’s online files and storage in the form of a virtual PC.

The notion that cloud computing / online web services are not tied to any physical hardware is sadly given undue credence by articles such as this. The semantic confusion here lies in making services and online products run on any (local) OS versus being tied down to run on any one of them. The solution to the bane of the latter can be achieved even on local operating systems using Java, Air, Flash or open source tools. Ubuntu’s growing adoption lies in its ability to give a Windows like user experience at a fraction of the cost associated with Microsoft latest desktop operating avatar, Vista. The potential of the web to transform organisational transactions (within and between organisations) however is not, in any way, linked to online operating systems. While the point is made and true to a degree that cloud services lack a certain standard look at feel (in terms of their UI) that local operating systems have, in terms of market capitalisation I don’t see that’s been a problem for the most successful cloud computing platforms and services to date – Facebook and Myspace, two social networking platforms wholly different to each other probably get more users still in a day that I think G.ho.st would have signed up since its inception!

The writer also fails to compare G.ho.st with dozens of other online operating systems. The impression given here seems to be that G.ho.st is worth highlighting because, inter alia,

• it has some peripheral connection to an Israeli peacemaker’s family (quote added for good optics)
• there is a peripheral interest in peacebuilding through the business (no concrete evidence is provided save for some passing anecdotal intent).
• that it is located in one of the world’s most troubled regions, with the romanticised Israel – Palestine people to people contact (“at a rundown coffee shop on a desert road frequented by camels and Bedouin shepherds near Jericho”) as some vague marker of its potential to foster communal reconciliation

This is at best disingenuous writing and closer to being downright dishonest. A serious writer would have weighed the pros and cons of G.ho.st for what it is – an online operating system – a breed of cloud computing platforms that’s seen a growth spurt over the past 2 years (largely in the US) but which have largely failed to gain market traction because we are all still dependent on the local operating systems that run our desktop PCs, which are the repositories of every single byte of information we upload to YouTube, to Facebook Photos, to Flickr and to podcasts on iTunes.

See reviews of online operating systems here an an even larger selection here – What does G.ho.st offer that these don’t? What does G.ho.st do better that these don’t?

G.ho.st also offers just 5Gb of space. That’s about the size of Microsoft’s SkyDrive. And with new services and technologies from Microsoft itself (in addition to others) making it terribly easy to access your computer / computers from anywhere (and in the future, even from mobiles) the future for G.ho.st & Co. seems very bleak. (This does not even take into account devices such as the XO laptop, Intel’s Classmate and Microsoft’s Flexgo intiative, that with all their failings are based on the essential idea that the importance of local operating systems and local storage will not diminish even with the growth and reach of the web).

I did spend some time on the rather garish looking guest login to G.ho.st. It’s nowhere near as polished as some of the other online operating systems out there, so in this respect, fails to pass muster even when compared to the competition. However, the most egregious oversight is in opening, by default, a document on Zoho written by Zvi Schreiber in November 2006. There are some real tragi-comic assertions in it:

• The real threat to Windows is that the very concept of a Personal Computer and of a local operating system is being subtly eroded. Microsoft Windows installed locally on the PC is not being beaten by competition but it has started down inevitable path to irrelevance.
  
• Over the next two years, find partners to create hosted version of every single Windows program and help users migrate their data to the new world.
  
• In the meantime you can use G.ho.st for those services which you must be able to access from everywhere or where the hostered (sic) services are superior, while still using Windows for software which is unavailable or inferior online. Starting in 2 years time you can consider retiring Windows and performing all your computing activities on the Web via G.ho.st.
  
• In the West, Windows is affordable but still an annoyance to a young generation who are used to getting e-mail, instant messengers, social networking, news and so much more for free. In the developing world, the price of Windows is a real barrier to the adoption of computing. With the Global Hosted Operating SysTem, the price of an operating system becomes, like the price of looking through shop windows, zero, as it should be.

Windows may be on the “path to irrelevance” but to prophesise its imminent demise even two years after this article was written still puts one in the category of thinkers dealing with substance abuse. Given that it’s nearly two years ago Zvi wrote this, I wonder how far G.ho.st has gone in creating hosted versions of “every single Windows programme”. Sadly the NY Times doesn’t also ask how users are able to migrate their data to the “new world” (smacks of some Biblical Garden of Eden for information in the clouds) with only 5Gb on offer.

It’s unnecessary to belabour the point. G.ho.st simply tries too hard to be taken seriously. Ms. Kraft should know and write better, given her experience in the region’s vexing challenges. It is not as if the region is in the information dark ages – a World Bank report released in January 2008 suggests that comparisons between other countries in the region put the West Bank and Gaza ahead of or on par with usage / ownership / access of PC’s, ICTs and mobiles. So clearly, there’s opportunities to use ICTs to address peacebuilding in this region.

There’s already a lot happening. Blogging’s already hugely influential and growing apace. (How many use, would need to use, know of or would care to use G.ho.st?) The growth of online real time translation (text plus those afforded by services such as vernacular Skype conversations and Skypecasts) suggest very real possibilities for inter and intra communal engagements on issues related to peacebuilding even when they can’t or won’t be seen together. (e.g. هل تتكلم العربيه؟)

Simple questions, amongst others, that should have been asked and observations made – the NY Times has a photo of the G.ho.st office with some laptops. How many do you think store all their data on G.ho.st? How may rely on G.ho.st for their email or just go directly to the online email service provider of their choice? How many surf the web through the G.ho.st web browser (a browser in a browser?!) How many can print a Zoho document created through and hosted on G.ho.st to their local printer?

These aside, there is in this article a criminal oversight of just how difficult peacebuilding can be, with or without ICTs. The fact that everything is hunky-dory in the offices of G.ho.st is possibly because this is a business tethered to making profit with few unlike-minded individuals in it and where coding takes precedence over conflicting histories. This is Ms. Kraft’s fault. G.ho.st’s own is that it fails to see that online operating systems add a layer to cloud computing that’s unnecessary and unwieldy.

I don’t go to and use the cloud to replicate or replace my desktop. I go to it, use it and leverage it to complement what I do with my desktop and to strengthen my advocacy by using services / products / tools / platforms that are hard for repressive regimes to track down, disrupt and shut down. Particularly in the context of unreliable and costly connectivity and dealing with hundreds of megabytes of information generation and dissemination a day, online operating systems just don’t cut it for me and anyone else in a similar context.

G.ho.st may well turn out to be the blanket monicker for the genre for online operating systems still born in to a graveyard of good intentions.

UDPATE
As noted on Download Squad, Glide has launched an updated version of its web-based “operating system.”

“Like its predecessors, Glide OS 3.0 provides users with a desktop-like space within a browser window. You can use Glide’s web-based applications to create Word documents, spreadsheets, or presentations. You can also play music, manage photos and videos, and send and receive email. In other words, you can do many of the same things you’d do with a desktop operating system, but in a web browser.

What sets Glide apart from many of its competitors is that Glide offers a suite of tools that let you synchronize your files with a Windows, Mac, Linux, or Solaris machine. There’s also Glide Sync software for a number of mobile phone models. Free account holders get up to 5GB of web space, and if you need more, you can shell out a few bucks a month for additional storage.

One of the new features in Glide OS 3 is a Glide Group tool that adds social networking features. You can communicate with other Glide users by sending messages or sharing media files.”

New media and networked communications environments

I received advance notice of what looks like an interesting meeting organised by International Media Support in Denmark that will be held on 15 and 16 September 2008 on the opportunities and threats presented by new media and networked communications environments for press freedom and democratization.

As the IMS PR notes,

This event will bring together civil society groups and new media industry innovators, with panelists including Linus Thorvaldsen creator of Linux,  Jussi Impiö from Nokia Research and others.

The first day will be an ‘expo’ of new media and technological developments with relevance for press freedom and media development advocates, particularly those working in countries affected by conflict and press freedom repression – organized by the Kaospilots (www.kaospilots.dk).

This will include hands-on presentations on areas such as secure web-based and mobile communications, ‘guerilla’ broadcasting, hidden audio-visual recording, safeguarding and defending websites, and more.

The second day will be debate-style discussions based around three themes, these being:

• Changing the way media operate
• Building the capacity of press freedom and civil society groups
• Deepening democracy

I’ve been associated with IMS since its establishment in 2001. In fact, one of their first projects was in Sri Lanka – a mapping exercise and comprehensive report of the media landscape in the North and East of Sri Lanka in 2003 and we’ve also done a Conflict Sensitive Journalism handbook, conducted a post-CFA media assessment and most recently, conducted citizen journalism work in Sri Lanka with their support.

The background document accompanying the conference announcement was clearly aimed at stimulating some discussion. There’s a yes / no format to key questions posed in the document that while serving well as an instigator of discussions, doesn’t mirror the realities of new media and traditional media landscapes. Traditional media isn’t going to die anytime soon. New media and citizen journalism have their own problems. What we consider media and the distinction(s) between the traditional and the new today will blur into insignificance tomorrow.

For example, the IMS conference background note avers that “the sheer amount of information available prompts many to look only at sites that support their own opinions, resulting tin the polarisation of public opinion and the fragmentation of the public sphere”. If you ask me, the public sphere is pretty fragmented in a country like Sri Lanka and new media and its long tail actually serves as a bridge between those who hitherto only had access to, or by choice only consumed, one side of the story.

The background note also mentions that “Communications technologies themselves do not have the capacity to make political systems more democratic or to change historically embedded formal and informal political institutions”. Of course they don’t per se. But the USE of communications technologies by citizens does. While it’s true that governments such as the UK are increasingly invasive and anal retentive in their approach to and understanding of new media use, it’s also the case that in many countries around the world – even with repressive regimes – new media / citizen jouranlism and mobiles are changing the dynamics of polity and society.

These are vital discussions I hope the conference will encourage. There are no broad generalisations possible, but I hope the conference underscores that the potential of these new technologies to support and strengthen democracy and peace very much comes from the encouragement of their use by civil society committed to both.

Snooping into mobile communications in India

Research in Motion (RIM), the folks behind the Blackberry, are reportedly close to finalising a deal with India’s Home Ministry to allow it to monitor communications and access customer data.  As Ars Technica notes,

The issue first became public in early March, when the ministry threatened to ban BlackBerry service entirely, unless it was given unconditional access to any and all of the information passing across RIM’s network at any given time, for any given person… The ministry claimed it needs access to customer data in order to protect the country from terrorists operating in Kashmir, who may be using BlackBerrys to communicate with each other.

In 2006 India noted that it was using mobile phones to track insurgents and terrorists in Kashmir. 

“Earlier, we thought it would help terrorists in their communications and help their subversive activities,” army spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel V.K. Batra said. “But it is proving counterproductive to them.”

Two years on the the government now seems to think that the interception of Blackberry communications will help in its struggle against terrorism. There are conflicting reports on the status of negotiations with RIM, with some newspapers suggesting that RIM has agreed to conditionally turn over all customer records and others suggesting that RIM is unwilling to budge on the issue of customer privacy. 

As the Ars Technica article notes however,

It may be a month or two before Research In Motion announces the details of its agreement with the Union Home Ministry, but the information coming out of India is at least plausible. RIM has yet to state, point-blank, that it will not allow the Indian government to access its network traffic in some form or another, and until that happens, all bets are off. 

Google Earth in the browser. So what?

I’ve been working on Google Maps (GM) quite a bit lately to map incidents and trends related to humanitarian access, election violence and human rights. It’s exciting to note that Google has now released a Google Earth (GE) plug-in for browsers that allows for a richer, 3D experience provided you have the bandwidth to spare.

A recent BBC Click story put the number of those who had downloaded Google Earth in the hundreds of millions. But the story fails to note how many of those who downloaded it actually use it regularly and of that subset, how many use it to view the more serious layers available for it (on climate change, on refugees, on genocide) instead of just looking at the roof of their home from space or walking down virtually through the same roads they would travel on in real life…

My experience with GIS with the NGO sector in Sri Lanka is that no one really has heard about it! I’ve been trying without much success to introduce it to the work of HR and humanitarian organisations with a large local footprint for close upon two years, but the significant human resource (and financial) investment that needs to go into data manipulation, analysis, plotting and sustaining that kind of operation is not something that has convinced organisations to embrace this. So what you find are the more hobbyist non-specialist GM / GE activists like moi, who use it with what they have in the hope that by example and by its use in advocacy, more people will see its benefits. (The interest in CMEV’s elections violations maps, the first of their kind in Sri Lanka, suggests that this could be the way forward in getting more widespread awareness and use of mapping for advocacy) .

And I may be the only one, but I find GE sometimes an overkill and hard to use. I find that the GM API’s offer more flexibility in this regard particularly for web integration and web based advocacy, but don’t have the programming knowledge myself to use leverage them, having instead to rely on coders who are already pressed for time with paid deadlines.  

The new GE web browser plug-in may help bring in a lasting “wow” factor to map based advocacy, with as the Google LatLong blog notes, with just a single line of code.Only one problem. Only Windows is supported at the moment.

When the frack will these organisations realise that not everyone runs, or cares to run, Windows?

Anyone interested in pursuing the pros and cons of GE / GM should read Paul Currion’s excellent commentary here and the paper referenced on it. 

The rise of Big Brother in the UK

It’s disturbing to read about the intention of the British Government to create a database to record every phone call, e-mail and time spent on the internet by the public as part of “the fight against crime and terrorism”. It’s this kind of mindless sleepwalking into a surveillance society that reminds me of Orwells 1984. Conrad’s The Secret Agent and V for Vendetta. There’s a necessary debate on how much of our civil liberties we need to sacrifice in the name of public security, but this is surely a nonsensical overkill? As reports indicate, it’s also fundamentally a problem of data analysis and storage.

“About 57 billion text messages were sent in Britain last year, while an estimated 3 billion e-mails are sent every day.”

How on earth the government is going to extract from this information the semantic connections necessary to identify that which threatens the British public is not entirely clear. Or it’s ability to keep these records securely. Or the period of time it will keep these records. Or who exactly will have access to them. Or as the opposition noted succinctly,

David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, said: “Given [ministers’] appalling record at maintaining the integrity of databases holding people’s sensitive data, this could well be more of a threat to our security, than a support.”

It’s also unclear as to how invasive this technology will be. Clearly, if it only records emails SENT or RECEIVED, there’s huge gaping security loophole in the form of DRAFT emails. Simply share an account / password combination over coffee and voila, you have a totally secure form of email communications without ever sending an email (simply update each other’s drafts). It’s also unclear whether this database will tap into instant messaging and if so, just how? What about Skype VOIP that’s encrypted? And how about Blackberry’s? Or the walled gardens of social networks and the IM systems they employ?

For a country clearly obsessed with surveillance, this latest and incredibly absurd step in the guise of “public security” is itself a terrorist’s dream. How many masterminds does the British Government actually think it will take to break into or disable the database in a day and age where DDOS attacks can actually be bought over the web?

To borrow a phrase from Conrad, the future of the proletariat seems very bleak indeed!

Facebook for humanitarian aid?

Eduardo Jezierski, the brilliant Director of Engineering from INSTEDD and I recently exchanged some emails about the usefulness and advisability of Facebook as a platform for humanitarian aid.

First some context. The conversation arose after I emailed him details of the BBC’s recent expose of Facebok’s flaws with its applications platform / framework, which is exactly a year old to date. 

INSTEDD’s official launch earlier this year had details of a Facebook application for humanitarian aid workers I had some concerns on and noted that:

Though the Directory application has a clear disclaimer that information on it will not be shared beyond that which is made possible by Facebook, it’s still the problem for me. Facebook is not a platform I trust with mission critical and highly confidential data and though I have begun a citizen journalism forum to complement Groundviews on it, I’m still to be convinced that it is a platform that demonstrates the potential for mission critical applications without compromising information security.

Eduardo then replied that it was the concept, not Facebook per se, that they were interested in. Fair enough. So here’s the text of our emails, published with Eduardo’s permission.

From: Sanjana Hattotuwa  
Sent: Monday, May 19, 2008 9:31
As the BBC’s technology programme Click recently uncovered, Facebook is outrageously open to applications harvesting information that you have classified private. What is more disturbing is that an application installed on a friend’s account can remotely harvest your private data without you even having to install the same application. 

See http://www.bbcworld.com/Pages/ProgrammeFeature.aspx?id=18&FeatureID=726

and read Click’s advice on how to minimise the risk of exposing your private information here – http://www.bbcworld.com/Pages/ProgrammeFeature.aspx?id=18&FeatureID=725 

Please pass this to all your Facebook friends. 

On May 19, 2008 Eduardo Jezierski wrote:
Thanks Sanjana. One of the issues is that the security works both ways –the same way an application is deployed in another server meaning facebook cant get any insight into it is a strength , imo. For example IF someone was crazy enough to do a ‘friends nearby’ app like we did, you would know its up to the app provider (and not facebook!) to secure that info (which given FB’s risks, is a pro if you know the app provider)
Thoughts?

From: Sanjana Hattotuwa
Sent: Monday, May 19, 2008
Hi Eduardo,

Not sure I follow you.

The BBC team has clearly demonstrated that an app, once accepted, can harvest information marked private. It has also demonstrated that this same app can harvest this information from one’s friends. The exercise also brought out clearly the fact that Facebook does not and cannot guarantee that all apps that run on the platform abide by its app design / development and privacy guidelines. Their response to the BBC to me seems very complacent of a very real risk brought about by (a) technical deficiencies, for which Facebook is 100% responsible (b) the psychology of social network which leans towards maximum disclosure in an essentially insecure environment, which of course is more linked to user education.

The point is that FB as a platform is essentially insecure – see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/25/facebook_exposes_private_pics/

To submit then that an essentially insecure platform, where privacy is a big question mark, is to be used as a platform for humanitarian action, where both of these are a sine qua non, is a stretch. What do you think?

From: Eduardo Jezierski
Sent: Monday, May 23, 2008
“The BBC team has clearly demonstrated that an app, once accepted, can harvest information marked private. It has also demonstrated that this same app can harvest this information from one’s friends. The exercise also brought out clearly the fact that Facebook does not and cannot guarantee that all apps that run on the platform abide by its app design / development and privacy guidelines.”

Agreed – the information they get access to is Facebook’s details information (eg your physical address, if you put it there!) NOT THE INFORMATION MANAGED BY OTHER APPS! Because that lives in another server.

“Their response to the BBC to me seems very complacent of a very real risk brought about by (a) technical deficiencies, for which Facebook is 100% responsible (b) the psychology of social network which leans towards maximum disclosure in an essentially insecure environment, which of course is more linked to user education.”

The issue is that FB doesn’t help with the education. They should have more education of users and more ‘consequential’ feeling in the UI to allowing an app access to my details! Does ‘super poke’ require access to personal details to throw you a flying sheep? No!

The point is that FB as a platform is essentially insecure – see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/25/facebook_exposes_private_pics/
Ughhh!That’s a terrible noobie security bug. They have parts which are quite smart but got bit by this – unbelievable. Security is tougher than most people think and most app devs don’t even know threat modeling or think of threats, assets, countermeasures, attack paths, or security patterns.

“To submit then that an essentially insecure platform, where privacy is a big question mark, is to be used as a platform for humanitarian action, where both of these are a sine qua non, is a stretch. What do you think?”

I think you can build apps – secure as hell, with threat models pouring out the creators’ ears – that use FB information e.g. to figure out contact networks.- and that are not built on the FB platform. This is why social network portability is so critical to Social graphs being of any use in humanitarian world. Today not one web host can be the platform of any reasonable solution – I see twitter fireeagle facebook younameit as building blocks (and very immature ones for humanitarian action still!) I would never store anything that is sensitive and isn’t already public in FB. I would not use FB as a platform to build a humanitarian app on. I would it as an information source to such applications, a plug-in, again with all the user education AND technical testing required to make sure you can’t expose information, elevate privileges etc because of that plugin.

Anecdotally that was one of the architectural experiments of our FNB app – can we keep data separate and secure and just query FB for contact graphs. Having the FB app expose the UI was just a shortcut. We could have done it off our own servers, violating FB’s TOS by the way…

To summarize we agree on not using FB as a platform, on top of that I think FB has information to be mined that could be useful for humanitarian action.

It didn’t occur to me when I wrote it, but Eduardo makes an important point. The BBC did not prove that applications can steal data from other applications, just the general FB profile of the person who installed it and her / his friends. So each application on the FB platform is, until such time it is proven otherwise, secure. 

I wholly agree with the other points that Eduardo makes about the design and engineering considerations of the Facebook platform.

In attempting to bring humanitarians together towards that Holy Grail of a coordinated and collaborative first response, I wonder whether we need to look at social networking platforms as they exist today and create a similar yet secure architecture anew or suggest that they, in the form they are, can be leveraged for such a purpose. Or perhaps neither. Perhaps the way forward is to not get us all into a single platform, but with technologies such as Mesh4x developed by INSTEDD itself allow us to use a range of platforms as we see fit and yet exchange vital information in a timely, seamless, sustainable, device and platform independent manner.

Incidentally, as noted at the beginning, it’s exactly a year since Facebook introduced its application platform to the world. Jason Kincaid at Techcrunch has a very interesting article that looks at the launch hype and the reality a year hence. 

YouTube wants more citizen journalists

Olivia M. is the new YouTube News Manager and she wants more citizen journalists to send in their content to the site.

YouTube was the only platform I considered for Vikalpa’s Video Channel (the first and sadly still the only citizen journalism video channel in Sri Lanka) but there are other sites, Vimeo and Veoh being two I use, that are fast catching up.

YouTube, because of its sheer size and accessibility for a site of this nature, is still useful, but I use Veoh to syndicate content to both YouTube and Google Video in addition to a copy on Veoh that’s of a higher resolution. Vimeo also supports HD, which is you have a fast connection looks delicious. In general, most of newer video sharing sites have much better resolution than YouTube, but of course this comes at the price of being inaccessible of slower connection (e.g. SLT “broadband”). 

One more impediment to serious citizen journalists and non-profits that encourage it. YouTube has a great non-profit programme, but as I noted in my previous post on it I hope YouTube extends service to non-profits registered outside of the US.

Because of all the sheer nonsense and junk on sites like YouTube it’s sometimes difficult to actually get to more serious content from citizen journalists. And I’m not talking about the TV news services opening up channels on YouTube (BBC, France24 and Al Jazeera to name but three) – those are fairly straightforward to find. But the stuff of issues that I care about related to peacebuilding and human rights are overwhelmed by a endless stream of drivel that makes exploring the site for new content that’s more to my taste tiresome.  

And I’m not too crazy about it’s design either, which looks more than a bit dated. But the thing is, YouTube works for what I do in Sri Lanka, is mobile friendly (you can upload videos directly to the site) and plays nice with slower connections (you hit play, sleep and when you wake up the next day, you can play the video jitter free)… 

So respond to Olivia M., send your videos, send your thoughts and let’s make YouTube better. Together. 

Drum roll. The XO-2.

Ignoring the still born XO, Negroponte’s moved on to bigger and greater things. The XO 2. Apparently out by 2010.

No price yet, but we can expect it to double from whatever is announced before its launch, the launch date itself to go back by around 2 years, the operating system to run a cut down, insecure and crash prone version of Vista, Africa to move out of poverty, global literacy to move in the high 90’s and the UN made redundant, because the XO 2 would be the great equaliser amongst peoples and nations. 

Don’t you just love upgrades?

 

Whipped cream and data backups

So what the does NASA’s Physics of Whipped Cream have to do with data backups? 

Quite a bit. The research is pieced together from data on a melted disk drive that fell from the sky when space shuttle Columbia disintegrated in 2003. 

Why I point to this is not the fact that this incredible feat was achieved, but the careless take of The Guardian on data backup. Writing on this issue, Charles Arthur notes at the end of his article that

“OK, so it may have been expensive. But doesn’t it prove that you can get your data back from pretty much anything?” 

Wrong. As the AP article notes quite clearly,

“And to drive home just what a long shot his recovery had been, [the person who recovered the data in one hard drive] later had no success with two other drives found in Columbia’s wreckage. Blasted by the unfathomable furnace of entry into the atmosphere, their metals had lost the ability to hold a magnetic charge.”

When InfoShare designed the OneText peace negotiations support platform, Groove Virtual Office and its peer to peer architecture meant that data loss was kept at a minimum. All data was synchronised seamlessly whenever computers were connected to the internet and along with on-site / off-site traditional backups, vital information was always secure. This was one of the more hidden aspects of the design, but you only needed to be right once to prove that it was worth it all. 

As a victim of catastrophic data loss myself (losing over a year’s worth of emails and documents one time my hard drive crashed) I’ve since toyed with a number of backup solutions and ended up with Apple’s new Time Machine on Leopard. It’s by far the best I’ve used, but it does take some getting used to in the sense that there’s really no user interaction needed or requested in how it backs up your data. 

The point here is simple. Data loss creates and exacerbates conflict. In a context of violent ethno-political conflict and with many fragile peacebuilding processes at play, data loss can often not just be catastrophic, it can be positively life threatening. 

Backup.

Tactical Technology Collective Citizen Journalism Toolkit – How not to do a toolkit

Tactical Technology Collective has come out with a new Citizen Journalism toolkit, to complement earlier toolkits for NGOs and activists on security, audio and video publishing on the internet and FOSS publishing.

Covering audio, blogs, images and print (strangely no video) the toolkit is somewhat of a useful resource, but as its stands is irascibly incomplete, confusing and badly executed.

Gaps
The lack of an emphasis on online video production and dissemination is bizarre, because this is a vital aspect of citizen journalism on the web (e.g. Vikalpa YouTube Channel). Far as I could gather, it only gets passing mention in the sections dealing with podcasts on WordPress!

There’s also no real media / advocacy strategy talked about in any of the sections. This suggests the authors are more versed in the technical aspects of new media and desk research than with any lived experience of citizen journalism in violent contexts, where I usually find the most innovation and the greatest need for this kind of manual.

Further, there is no emphasis on the strategic complementarity of using a range of services and products (e.g. blog + twitter or podcast + transcript on blog), redundancy or planning for failure. No mention of mobile phones. No mention of RSS and how it can be used to get information across even when websites are blocked by ISPs.

The website is also quite a mess. Content could have been vastly better edited and proofed. Navigation is difficult and not at all intuitive. There’s no PDF to download to read and print content off when offline and bizarrely no search function at all. Some of the pages are also just formatted all wrong (e.g. ironically, the page on best practices for effective blogging). The presentation and grouping of content can at time get very confusing. For example, the page of Distributing & publicising your blog’s content lists Flickr and ourmedia.org as sites that allow you to store, share and view a range of media such as digital photographs, audio files like podcasts, videos. I fail to see the connection here. While these sites certainly help in online content storage and have dissemination mechanisms of their own (without the need for any blog at all) how they feed into blogs and how blogs can be connected to them isn’t made at all clear. 

There are also pages where the graphics don’t show up at all (didn’t anyone actually go through this website before it went public?!)

There’s an emphasis on products like VLC, Songbird Firefox and WordPress in the manuals, but no real explanation given as to why they were chosen above other competing products and services. I blog for example using Safari 3.1 – others may blog just as well using Internet Explorer, Opera or other browsers. While I know the advantages of Firefox, just saying that it’s a better programme isn’t terribly helpful. Ditto with WordPress. Why not Blogger for example? (An exception here is the discussion on the pros and cons of Flickr)

Content
There’s some really useful content here, but I was really struck more by what’s missing. Tactical Technology must live up to its name and reputation and urgently work on this set of resources to make it much better than what it is. As it stands, the section on print media is the strongest, with some really useful insights and tips on how best to communicate one’s message.

As noted earlier, the exclusion of video from a CJ toolkit is wholly unpardonable. This, and an emphasis on mobile phones will make this toolkit far more useful than what it presently is.

 

Updated – 22 May 2008, 7.42pm

Perhaps as a result of the feedback they got and on account of my suggestion below, the website now clearly notes that it is a work in progress and will be officially launched in June 2008. A tactical mistake by Tactical Technology, now rectified.