It's not to early to start making sure that your SXSW 2012 experience is fully awesome. How you ask? Why, by voting for awesome panels to attend. To start off with some absolutely shameless self-promotion, I will be presenting with the my colleagues at Ashoka Changemakers on "Open Growth" and systems change. Create an account and vote for us here: http://bit.ly/ripcrowd . Changemakers has a blog post on all our panels. Some more panels worth voting for: Care about there actually being some interesting tech talks at SXSW? Vote for Brandon Wiley's panel here: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/13647 on launching your startup completely in the cloud. Want to talk pirates and innovation? This might be your ticket: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/12602 Is the state of journalism getting you down? Check these out: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/11846 and http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/11106 Is it just your content strategy? Hear some real content horror stories: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/11034 Just unhappy in general? Work with happiness to make your business better: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/9647

One of the sad truths that emerged at the Technology Salon on ICTs and M&E was that failure in development is rarely about the project performance, but about winning the next contract. This means that monitoring and evaluation is less about tracking and improving progress towards social change and more about weaving an advertising pitch.

This is not for a lack of frameworks, tools, mapping measurements against a theory of change, or even the need for more real-time data in development. It is about incentives. What is incentivized at the macro level is getting big numbers on the board and nice clean upwardly-trending graph lines. Micro-level incentives for filing reports to fill out the monitoring side of things focus on report filing as a requirement for salary payments or other basic carrot/stick-driven models. Neither of these actually encourage accurate, honest data, yet only with that accurate data can we remotely hope to tweak models and make improvements.

So, let's break monitoring apart from evaluation.

The events in London over the past few days have been deeply interesting in the wake of last month's conversation on mobile and online activism during and after #ArabSpring. In this case, the actors are different, but the response patterns are similar - the embattled government pushing on technology providers to share private data or turn off mobile messaging services. In this case, it's RIM/Blackberry in the middle, with calls from MPs to "curfew" Blackberry messaging, and RIM itself offering to help policy by sharing message contents. This promptly led to the Blackberry site being hacked, with the hacker posting:

"We have access to your database which includes your employees information; e.g - Addresses, Names, Phone Numbers etc. - now if u assist the police, we _WILL_ make this information public and pass it onto rioters ... do you really want a bunch of angry youths on your employees doorsteps?"

Obviously, that's not a very nice thing to do, particularly considering it's unlikely any of these employees had much to do with this decision in the first place. The lines are not quite as clear as one would like, though. All protests are messy, and it's rarely clear who is in the right. Many countries claim to be representative democracies of one flavor or another. If youth were protesting a regime in yet another Middle East/North African country, we would be globally shaming RIM/Blackberry for cavorting with the government. Of course, in the case of London, it seems to be more a gang of thugs and looters than a political statement. The challenge, of course, is that the technology vulnerabilities might be useful to authorities during a riot, but are also useful to authoritarian governments in squelching a revolution. Not unlike wikileaks, you don't get to pick and choose who benefits from the technology, or who is made vulnerable by it. Ashoka Changemakers is hosting a competition supported by Google to source innovative ideas in the Citizen Media space solving some of this tension around privacy, speech, and trust. There's some amazing thoughtwork in the space getting recorded at the Ashoka News and Knowledge blog. All of that is a long introduction to the better-late-than-never summary of the July ICT4D Meetup. You know that it's a good technology discussion when it turns into a people discussion, and so went our conversation around Online Activism after #ArabSpring : What's Next?. Our panelists discussed the strange role of being an Egyptian following along from abroad via social media, the roles of traditional and new media in civic engagement, and examples of online activism around the world, from Azerbaijan to Spain. The core topic we kept coming back to was that the excitement around new technologies was justified, social media is a tool, not a movement. So while a cat-and-mouse game around technology will likely continue, the core of any social change is the people involved, not whatever tools they are using. Check out the twitter stream here. Remember to join us online for future ICT4D meetups and get on the email list for ICT4Drinks!

Thanks to amazing work by eBay's TOP team and Gray Productions, we have not one, but two fab widgets to help you vote for innovative market-based solutions that create economic opportunity! Vote on Facebook here: apps.facebook.com/changemakers/TOP, or check out the embedded widget here:

If May 3rd gets to be World Press Freedom Day, then after today's events, July 14 (in addition to already being Bastille Day) should be Citizen Media Day. The "celebrations" really started yesterday, with Ashoka Changemakers (with the support of Google) launching a global competition (fully supported in nine languages, no less) to source innovative ideas in citizen media. I've got to say, I love how the timeline goes "backwards" in Right-to-Left languages like Arabic. Many thanks to our work with Ashoka Israel in launching Kikar (loosely, "Market square") in Hebrew. Today, the Changemakers blog is buzzing with amazing citizen media stories from Ashoka fellows and others, leading up to a #SocEntChat today on Twitter at 2pm EDT. Later in the day, at 5:30pm, I will be moderating a panel on "Online Activism after #ArabSpring : What's Next?" - there are a few seats still available, more information and RSVP at http://www.meetup.com/intlrel-76/events/23103221/ . Follow along on twitter with the hashtag #AAS, and there's a remote possibility we may be able to livestream the event. Finally, we get to wind down at Circa Bistro with a happy hour co-hosted with ICTWorks - information and RSVP here: http://ict4drinks-july14.eventbrite.com/.

So, I've been beating this drum for a while - oppressive governments are increasingly quick and intelligent in responding to protests that use mobile and new media to organize and get the word out. So, join us in July (http://www.meetup.com/intlrel-76/events/23103221/) to hear from an amazing panel and discuss the next steps in this cat and mouse game:

The Twitter Revolution.  The Cellphone Revolution.  The Facebook Revolution.  While the "Arab Spring" uprisings succeed based on real-world organizing, protests and democracy-building, it's no secret that mobiles and social media provided tools to broadcast, coordinate and amplify these movements.  Oppressive governments are responding both faster and smarter to these digital tools.

Please join our panel of experts discussing the role of online activism going forward.  What are the next steps in information empowerment in a more hostile environment for online activism?  What is the role of mobile and new media in affecting change in government, and what are the risks?

We will begin with a discussion by the panelists, then move into an open question and answer session.  Afterwards, we'll transition to a happy hour at Circle Bistro.

This meet-up is co-hosted by IREX and Appropriate IT.

Online Activism after #ArabSpring : What's Next?

May 3 is World Press Freedom Day. To celebrate my ability to post things I find inspiring to the Internet (where as many as 10 people other than my mother might read it (Hi Mom - happy mother's day in advance!)), here is a collection of tangentially related links on freedom, privacy, and the role of ICT in press freedom and citizen voice. Does Facebook have int'l development impact? http://www.ictworks.org/news/2011/05/04/does-facebook-have-any-international-development-impact (What about SMS? http://researchspace.csir.co.za/dspace/bitstream/10204/3419/1/Butgereit3_2008.pdf ) Freedom of the press in India: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/28/technology/28internet.html Finally, someone is building an SMS listserv: http://www.mobileactive.org/smsall-growth-sms-mailing-list-pakistan-1 How governments censor: http://www.cpj.org/reports/2011/05/the-10-tools-of-online-oppressors.php Getting around government censorship: http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=383&report=97 Nearly half of NYT reports have sourced WikiLeaks so far in 2011: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2011/04/over-half-2011s-new-york-times-issues-use-wikileaks/37009/ The US government doesn't think it needs a warrant to search electronic communications: http://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech-technology-and-liberty/does-government-want-read-your-texts-and-emails Live from Uganda -- political unrest, strikes, and an attempt to block Facebook and Twitter traffic: http://globalvoicesonline.org/2011/04/19/uganda-government-attempts-to-block-facebook-twitter-as-protests-continue/ , One ISP stands its ground: https://twitter.com/#!/MTNUGANDACARE/status/58844526369976320

A few weeks back, I saw this show, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" at the Woolly Mammoth. It's by Mike Daisey, and is a work of non-fiction, describing his experiences infiltrating electronics factories in China (read a bit about that at ABC News, and watch the embedded TechCrunch interview. It's playing in Seattle soon, and might come back to DC eventually. It is absolutely worth watching. It perfectly captures the Apple fanboy, and technology enthusiasts in general, and will have you howling with laughter at you see yourself in his portrayals of these characters. By the end, however, you may not want to touch your iPhone. Or buy one. Or consider the conditions under which it was made.

To add on to that, Apple just got named as the least green tech company by GreenPeace, focusing primarily on their coal-powered data centers. Facebook came in second, while Yahoo, Google and Amazon were praised for their use of clean energy.

Via MobileActive, I got to reading this article at the WSJ. Unsurprisingly, the Libyan cell network is built to be Tripoli-centric, "giving him and his intelligence agents full control over phones and Internet" according to the WSJ. If that's not a stark reminder of the challenges of using SMS and mobiles in human rights work that I've been concerned about, I don't know what is. The brilliant response here has been to wrest control over segments of the Libyan mobile network. This has taken some outside effort, external government support, and massive funding - it is, at least for now, successful at creating an independent domestic network with limited external access:

A team led by a Libyan-American telecom executive has helped rebels hijack Col. Moammar Gadhafi's cellphone network and re-establish their own communications. The new network, first plotted on an airplane napkin and assembled with the help of oil-rich Arab nations, is giving more than two million Libyans their first connections to each other and the outside world after Col. Gadhafi cut off their telephone and Internet service about a month ago. That March cutoff had rebels waving flags to communicate on the battlefield. The new cellphone network, opened on April 2, has become the opposition's main tool for communicating from the front lines in the east and up the chain of command to rebel brass hundreds of miles away.

This is brilliant, and a bit funny. Until some innocent person taking a stroll is killed for insurgency. A long quote from this blog by way of Warren Ellis and BoingBoing, emphases mine:

In summary, several Chinese language, but overseas based, websites have been blogging on the creation of a ‘Jasmine Revolution’ in China. This has been motivated, of course, by events in MENA, and the timing has been significant because it has coincided with two important political conferences in Beijing, but it appears to have no real-world substance whatsoever, to have begun as a hoax at best, and to exist only in cyberspace, and cyberspace outside China at that. But the interesting bit is the real world effect it is having inside China, and the momentum it is generating.