wRadr: A shot in the dark?

I came across wRadr just after I had read about Microsoft’s Vine. I am not convinced that Vine is all it is hyped out to be. I don’t know how to pronounce wRadr, or why there is this fetish in the US with truncated names of this nature that sound as they have been born of a TinyURL factory for language.

Perhaps overcompensating for its truncated name, wRadr’s website is full of turgid text that promises a great deal. It notes that,

The time has come for a dedicated platform for both Homeland Security and local Emergency Management organizations to engage the general public in the exchange of time-sensitive, hyper-local, critical information with the same ease use and efficiency found in today’s popular social networking and micro-blogging applications. Before, during, and after a public emergency wRadr will help teams and communities exchange warnings and guidelines, collect data ranging from resource status to damage assessments, and coordinate efforts such as evacuations or search and rescue operations.

Whatever all this really means, it look’s like Vine already has a competitor! I’m looking forward to the first real screenshots and implementations of wRadr.

Microsoft Vine: An inebriated approach to emergencies

Microsoft Vine is a programme and service I first saw demonstrated at Microsoft HQ in Redmond two weeks ago. Since then it’s gone to a public beta for testers around Seattle and there are some reports that Facebook integration is present and Twitter integration planned. However, all throughout the presentation in Redmond and now looking at the Vine website, I’m wondering, what makes this special over existing technologies like Facebook, Twitter, Mesh4X, Evolve, FrontlineSMS or Ushahidi?

Vine’s website notes,

Get involved to create great communities. Use alerts, reports and your personal dashboard to stay in touch, informed and involved.

Almost perfectly describes Facebook doesn’t it? In typical Microsoft fashion, this is bloatware that only runs on, you guessed it, Windows. This is not even a mobile application – you need a PC to use it (even though there is a way through which mobiles can text or email updates to it). And Microsoft claims that this is an emergency response tool?!

Online Dispute Resolution (ODR), the financial downturn and innovation

Tucked away recently in the Real Estate section of the New York Times was an article that resonated a great deal with the evolution of Online Dispute Resolution since 2004. The E-Mail Handshake is a fascinating take on how the current economic downturn is influencing modes of communication in real estate deals.

In the current market, with fewer apartments being sold and buyers waiting to scrape the bottom of the market, many brokers say that the immediacy of e-communication often helps them keep deals alive… Can a negotiation be conducted entirely via e-mail? How much and what kind of information can be shared online? Are there times when agents and clients should put their BlackBerrys away and pick up the telephone? Are exclamation points and smiley faces unprofessional?

These are questions that the ODR community has grappled with for years. While the article does not once mention ODR or demonstrates any interest in the resolution of disputes that may arise on account of miscommunication, this is an area rich in study and experience for the ODR community. There have been exhaustive studies on, for example, the intepretation of emoticons particularly between cultures. Again, as this paper notes,

It takes more than computer skill to be able to negotiate one’s interests successfully online. The notion that English serves as a neutral lingua franca is a dangerous myth. Although both disputants may seem fluent in English, natives and non-natives English users do not perform on a level playing-field. Many claim that English is the world language. But to describe English in such terms ignores the fact that a majority of the world’s citizens do not speak English, whether as a mother tongue or as a second or foreign language

And while the greatest minds involved in ODR suggest that avatars may help with negotiations, applications of ODR in the real world suggest that low-bandwidth, textual communications amongst stakeholders (e.g. email, SMS / texting) especially amongst relationships anchored to a one off business interest (e.g. a buyer and broker of a house) are far more common than the usage of full blown ODR systems.

The NYT article does note that, “One of the keys to a successful online negotiation is to make sure agents and clients have met to establish a relationship.” This may work well in real estate client – broker relationships, but in my own adaptations of ODR for more complex work in peace negotiations, this is not always possible or in fact desirable.

The article prompted me to think briefly about some topics I hope the up-coming annual ODR Forum, to be held in Haifa this year, will address.

• I’ve gone into some detail about technologies I believe will define the evolution of ODR systems. Most ODR systems out there are and look really antiquated. They cannot for example leverage business opportunities that present themselves in the form of resolving disputes that arise in, and must be mediated in, the mobile domain (e.g. communications on Blackberry’s and iPhones). There is only one ODR system I know of today  – the Canadian engineered Smartsettle – that is being engineered to run on a iPhone. How can the industry be nudged to realise that there are business opportunities for innovative ODR solutions and mechanisms especially within the current global economic downturn?

• Can ODR systems that leverage virtual face to face technologies, like synchronous or asynchronous video (from recorded video testimonials stored in and accessed from the cloud, to Skype and telepresence) be promoted as alternatives to expensive, inter-state or international travel?

• Ushahidi offers some fascinating and near real time visualisations of ground conditions for various situations – from elections to refugees – along with seamless integration with mobile devices. Can this technology be leveraged for the resolution of some land and resource based conflicts? I believe it can, and I am actively working on a system based on Ushahidi to demonstrate just this.

• FrontlineSMS offers today a remarkable technology called FrontlineForms, “FrontlineForms allows you to create copies of very simple paper forms on your computer, which can then be sent to a Java-enabled mobile phone through a text message. This phone can then be handed to staff or partners who can then take it to the field and enter the information they are required to collect directly onto the phone (by following a trimmed-down version of the on-screen form you have created for them). Once the data input is complete, the information collected can be sent back to FrontlineSMS as a compressed text message, giving you up-to-date and real-time information. Other solutions are available that provide data collection functionality, but many rely on data connectivity via the mobile phone network, or specialist devices or PDAs. FrontlineSMS does not, and only requires that you have a basic Java-enabled phone and a mobile signal. If forms are completed in an area where there is no signal they will be held in the phone until a signal is detected, after which they will be safely sent.” (Emphasis mine).

• What implications will this technology have for ODR applications in developing countries (and even in North America)? Can one for example imagine the growth of one business model for ODR that adapts lightweight forms for data collection and dispute resolution amongst clients using only mobile devices, which as the NYT article suggests are in any case their primary means of communication?

Any other ideas? I am really sad to miss Orna, Ethan, Colin, Daniel, Ayo, Frank, Mohamed and others in Haifa, but I know they and others present at the meeting will discuss these issues in greater detail. I believe there is a heightened importance for effective and pervasive ODR in the current economic downturn, where it’s not just about cutting costs, its about getting the best value from existing assets. And that frankly means looking at mobiles and as the NYT articles highlights, new negotiation and communication models that are emerging as a result of changing times.

More innovation, not less, is called for.

The problem of comments

Comment is King in the New York Times uses the case study of an American political journalist living in Poland writing to the Washington Post and Slate to highlight the problems associated with comment moderation on websites, as well as the poor quality of comments found in online news sites.

I can fully identity with the following.

This echo-chamber effect is unpleasant, and it makes it hard to keep listening for the clearer, brighter, rarer voices nearly drowned out in the online din. Which is too bad: newspaper journalism benefits from reader comments. Creating registration standards, inventive means of moderating and displaying comments, membership benefits for regular posters and ratings systems for useful comments are just some of the ways that other news outlets like Slate have improved the quality of reader responses.

On the other hand, the Slate comments on a recent Applebaum column are hardly models of astuteness. What’s more, making commenters more accountable for their posts doesn’t exactly transform them into the reverential chorus that every writer probably thinks he deserves. See Slate’s Joshua911, on Applebaum’s column about a renovation at Monticello: “Awful place. Awful change. Awful analysis. Awful writer. Awful country. Awful.” The audience for incantations like this one has got to be mostly Joshua911 himself. And maybe nothing can — or even should — be done to curb entirely the brute urge of readers to defy what they’ve read.

With over 3,700 comments to date, two and a half years of single-handed comment moderation after Groundviews started, the pattern is strikingly similar even in Sri Lanka.

Second Life runs out of steam?

Highlighting the Second Life, the BBC noted recently that,

It was once the most talked-about web development on the planet, but it has gone very quiet of late. After the gold rush of companies seeking to establish virtual premises in the 3D world, many have now pulled out or left their digital empires to mothball.

Echoes what Time magazine said of Second Life over a year ago. Augmented reality on mobile devices, which seem to hold far more potential in my mind than virtual reality on PCs, even if Second Life was (unofficially) ported to run on some mobile phones last year.

And as I’ve noted earlier,

… I have my doubts about using SL (and this is the vital point) to achieve some of these goals which may well be done better, cheaper, for a wider audience, in a more accessible and sustained manner, in more languages and with more interactivity and responsiveness. I guess it’s revealing that most of the social and political activists who propound the use of SL as a viable platform to galvanise action, even in the real world, come from the US. And perhaps I am wrong to judge them by my own reality and access to technology. My concern however is that some of these initiative tend to get more than a little carried away by their own hype and forget completely just how atypical it is to have a PC and Internet connection able to run SL.

News Timeline on Google

Google News recently introduced a feature that leverages its exhaustive archives of news as well as priviledged connections to content providers.

Google News Timeline. Click for larger image.

Called Google News Timeline, this is a beta version of a tool that could be of tremendous value for researchers looking for coverage of a particular issue over a period of time across a lot of media.

At the moment, there’s not a whole lot of sources to choose from and its largely US centric news outlets that are covered (far less than the thousands covered in the main Google News Portal).

This does show however that Google is interested in and capable of good data visualisation. Given the petabytes of news and information at its disposal, this is one service to keep an eye on. For example, this technology applied to the Peace and Conflict Timeline (a suggestion I made over a year ago to its creators), can easily make the rich information on the site more readily accessible.

Mapping violence during elections and voter education

This is not the first time I’ve helped plot violence related to elections in Sri Lanka. In my first post I noted that the map helped journalists better understand the degree of violence on the ground. Things are no better in the lead-up to the Western Provincial Council elections.

View Larger Map

Just like previous maps, this map is so packed with incidents of violence that you need to zoom into some places (e.g. Horana) to see the degree of violence on the ground. Shooting, arson, intimidation, assault, looting are common.

Must democracy countenance the worst of us in public office? How can we improve, through civic education using mobiles and the web, voters more informed about key issues, candidates, their positions and political parties that are contesting?

Kantipur in Nepal ran a comprehensive website in Nepali featuring information on candidates during their key Constituent Assembly Elections in 2004, interviews with them and their stances regarding vital policy issues. I don’t see a comparable effort here. Some leading bloggers have made an effort to interview som candidates and candidates themselves have leveraged web media (including Facebook), but overall there is little real awareness about the (oftentimes criminal and sordid) history of candidates.

I feel that election violence can only be addressed if voter education results in the electoral defeat of those who indulge in such activities. For example, Vote Report India powered by Ushahidi is a great example of just how vexing elections in the world’s largest democracy can be.

But unless awareness campaigns before an election, and advocacy campaigns after which bring to light, including name and shame, perpetrators of elections violence, these exercises alone, including my own, have little chance of really strengthening democracy. The problem with raising awareness before an election is that NGOs can never match the reach of an incumbent government’s propaganda, or even that of a political party, both of which have vested interests in keeping the public ignorant about the history of candidates and their violence.

The problem with post-election advocacy is that placing the violence of winners in public scrutiny will almost always be (a) seen as a conspiracy to undermine the legitimacy of their victory (b) cast as a rival party political bid to discredit the electoral victory and the ‘will of the people’ (c) be seen as some sort of NGO / civil society campaign to discredit the winners.

Technology alone then is no guarantee of cleaner elections. But technology can be part of the solution.

Any ideas?

First Monday features academic paper on Internet and Democracy

Perhaps it’s Obama’s Presidential campaign and interest in e-government that’s fuelling a number of academic studies and articles on the impact of the Internet on democracy.

I wrote about Evgeny Morozov’s Texting Toward Utopia: Does the Internet spread democracy? yesterday. Morozov’s article ended thus,

The problem with building public spheres from above, online or offline, is much like that of building Frankenstein’s monsters: we may not like the end product. This does not mean we should give up on the Internet as a force for democratization, only that we should ditch the blinding ideology of technological determinism and focus on practical tasks. Figuring out how the Internet could benefit existing democratic forces and organizations—very few of which have exhibited much creativity on the Web—would not be a bad place to start.

Emphasis mine.

Sunday Leader and Psiphon win Freedom of Expression awards, but in UAE you can’t access one

After reporting that it was shortlisted in late March, I’m happy to see that the Sunday Leader has won the journalism award in the 2009 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award. The Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression awards honour those who have made outstanding contributions to the promoting of free expression. As I noted in my previous post, the award is richly deserved.

Also interesting is that Psiphon won the Economist New Media award at the same ceremony. An mp3 of how Psiphon explain how he helps people around the world to avoid censorship and surveillance can be download here, featuring Nart Villeneuve.

A ready example of why there is still such significant variance between and within countries over the freedom of expression, in print, in broadcast and online.

The Internet strengthening democracy?

Rarely does one find an article as sober and compelling as Evgeny Morozov’s Texting Toward Utopia: Does the Internet spread democracy? published in the Boston Review.

The article’s echoes Smriti Daniel’s conclusion in an article on Facebook activism in Sri Lanka published recently in Sri Lanka’s Sunday Times, which ended by suggesting that “while it has the potential to be a powerful democratic tool, Facebook simply needs many more Sri Lankans online and engaged before it can be used as such.“

I have in many previous posts addressed the issue of using the Internet and web under repressive regimes, and how blogs, web based tools and services as well as mobiles and SMS are shaping new public discourses around democracy and governance. These vital interrogations aren’t new, but the manner in which they are conducted, communicated and disseminated are in many countries undergirded by developments in telecoms.