indra de lanerolle

talking about big media companies...

2011-11-29T09:35:00.001+02:00

others have pointed to the apparent paradox that over the same period tha the Internet opens up the one to many world of mass media, that world itself has been consolidating. I just found this interesting info graphic from frugal dad on US media (thanks to my friend Faiza Ambah). While he tells the story front he point of view of an American media consumer, the same companies have grab sway across the rest of the world, including South Africa. (I speak as a father to a girl who's television viewing is monopolized by the Disney Channel). His sources are listed at the end of the graphic.

Source: Frugal dad

Is Google the World's Biggest Media Company?

2011-11-25T12:56:00.000+02:00

Google receives almost $5 of every $10 spent on online advertising worldwide. Its total income from advertising last year was over $29bn. To put this number in perspective, the total advertising revenues of all US newspapers combined last year was less than $22bn. And the major US television networks (excluding cable and local stations) earned $21.7 billion in advertising.

Using Neilsen estimates, the global advertising market may be somewhere north of $400bn so internet advertising is still a relatively small part of the total market which is still dominated by television. But television is a local business, not a global one. The global networks like CNN, Discovery and MTV are small players in the global advertising market. CNN International's advertising for example accounted for no more than 10% of CNN's income of some $500m in 2009. And Viacom, owner of MTV which they claim as the worlds biggest television network broadcasting in over 160 countries, earned less than $1,5bn in ad revenues in 2008.

Of course advertising is not the only source of revenue for media companies - though it is the only significant source of revenue for Google. News Corp owns 20th Century Fox which makes movies which people buy at the cinema and on DVD. Sony owns a studio too - Columbia - and a music company Sony BMG which sell CDs. But music sales are in decline and for many years the film industry has been largely dependent for its profits on television sales. And looked at globally, the television business is dependent on advertising.

What appears clear is that Google is, by a long way, the biggest advertising platform in the world. And the world, at the end of 2011, is one where getting people to pay directly for the cost of generating media is getting tougher and tougher. Google, of course does not make any content. But the major businesses never made their money by making content. They made their money by aggregating audiences. And Google is now the greatest audience aggregator in human history and the first truly global one.

Reading the Writing on the Wall

2011-11-16T09:26:00.001+02:00

In Business Day today are two stories about the health or otherwise of South African newspapers.

One reports on the decline in newspaper and magazine sales shown in the latest data from the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC). It reports that: "Overall, 72000 (5,1%) fewer newspapers were sold than in the same quarter last year". It also quotes Gordon Patterson, Vice-Chair of the ABC: "The loss year on year is equivalent to the closure of an average- sized title. And this is in spite of an increase in questionable distribution at less than 50% of cover price."

The other story (on the same page by the same writer) is rather more upbeat. It claims that "Research shows that advertising spend across all media channels in the nine months from January to September is up almost R3bn compared with the same period last year" - an increase of 14%. Pretty good given the state of the economy. And the article makes clear that while print may not have benefitted as much as television, it is a winner: "since January," it goes on, "advertising expenditure had increased ... 55% for print" As the UK Satirical Magazine 'Private Eye' used to put it - clearly a call for "trebles all round" for those in the print (newspapers and magazine) industry.

So can both stories be true? And what do they tell us about the state of South African newspapers?

The ABC data - available on its website - shows that daily newspaper sales declined in the last quarter. This is part of an established longer term trend. Daily paid newspapers sales have fallen from 1,6m in the 3rd quarter of 2008 copies per day to a little over 1,3m in the third quarter of 2011. Of the top six titles, the Daily Sun (number 1) is down almost 9% year on year, Son (number 3) is down over 9% and The Star (number 5) is down 15%. Only Isolezwe (number 2) is up (over 9%). All the top weekend newspaper titles are down also, year on year with the exception of Ilanga (up over 6%). In addition, the ABC report notes an increase in discounted sales.

So if newspapers sales are declining can they really be earning (lots) more money from advertising? Well the first thing to point out is how nonsensical Business Day's reading of the data was. This is a graph from the Media Shop report they credited in their story.

From http://www.mediashop.co.za/Press-Room-News.aspx?id=29

It shows data of total ad spend across all media over the last three years from January to September. In all of them, January is the lowest month and September the highest or close to the highest (last year was the world cup so unsurprisingly, May and June were higher then). So stating that "advertising income has increased... by 55%" by comparing September to January is not the best way to look at whether newspapers are doing well.

It's more useful to compare the period January - September this year against last, which shows that, across all media, ad spend was up 14%. And 14%, in our current environment still looks a healthy figure. So, in spite of the circulation declines, is this good news for the earnings of newspaper publishers? Well I'm not convinced.

To take a view, you need to understand a little bit about how these figures are generated. Neilsen produce these figures by measuring the number of adverts in newspapers, on radio and television and then multiplying these by the Rand rates published in media channel's rate cards (their price lists). But media channels do what many retailers do from time to time, they offer discounts and special deals. Especially when times are tough. These deals are not published, so not available to Neilsen. In other words, we have no idea in fact whether the media owners actually got 14% more income this year.

And even if they did, the ABC data shows some interesting things about print inflation that put into question newspapers ability to sustain their earnings.

ABC Report 3rd quarter 2011

This chart shows that Daily newspapers advertising rates have increased by 7,86% year on year while their readership has declined by 7,67%. As a result the cost of newspaper advertising when measured by how many people are reached per R, has gone up by 17,46%. The comparable increase for weekly newspapers is 12,77%. The story in free to air television is the reverse, with their increase in prices being less than the increase in their audiences. Bottom line: print is becoming m(a lot) ore expensive compared to other media at the same time as it is loosing audience.

This puts a big questionmark on their ability to sustain their earnings.

And a last point on these stories. If professional journalism is going to survive, let alone thrive in the brave new world we need journalists to get a lot better at reading and writing about data. Business Day's ad spend story doesn't cite the original source of the data it uses (Neilsen). It takes the apparent increase in income on face value without demonstrating any understanding of what the data actually means . The comparisons of September and January figures is entirely misleading. And this is a publication writing about their own industry. Everything I've written here would be common sense to the advertising sales staff sitting a floor away from the desk of the journalist who wrote the story. And this is Business Day, a paper that deals daily in numbers - stock prices, economic data and more.

Guarding the Guardians - transparency, censorship and online spying

2011-11-02T11:54:00.000+02:00

Which governments are most active in restricting information online?

Last week Google published an interesting report on government requests for removal of content on their sites. So which countries come top of this list? Well you may find it suprising that China comes in at number 16 with only 3 requests, well below the US, which comes in at number 3 with 92 requests. Brazil made the most requests (224).

Also revealed by Google are the numbers of requests for information on users. Russia made 42 requests. The US, at the top of this list, made 5,950 requests.

Google should be applauded for publishing this information, which also includes data on how many of these requests Google acceded to (93% of US requests for user data). As Google point out on their site though, to get a real picture, we will need many other organisations (Facebook, Visa, Mastercard and Amazon come to mind) to publish similar information.

And which institutions are leading in letting information free?

I've been attending some sessions at 'Power Reporting', an African journalism conference at University of Witwatersrand, where I research and teach. A number of sessions have focused on online datamining and how useful it can be for journalists. Journalists from the New York Times, the BBC and News 24 have all shown very interesting work. One things I've noticed though is that media organisations, even where they mine and present important data to their audiences, too often they do not make the data itself available to their audiences.

Andrew Trench, who heads the investigations unit at News 24 is a leader in using data-mining techniques in South Africa - essentially freeing information that is either secret or so inaccessible as to be hidden from the public. He presented a very interesting study on using government information on the awarding of mining licenses to create stories and maps that tracked the process which has been a source of significant political and economic controversy. You can read his blog on how he did it. But the database that he created by scraping official websites is, as yet, unpublished. By contrast, Google's transparency report also offers users the ability to download the data so they can undertake their own analyses.

If journalists are going to maximise their contribution to 'guarding the guardians' in our societies we need to see them liberating more information. Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, is credited as the source of the meme that 'information wants to be free', an idea that media owners, unsurprisingly, respond negatively to on most occassions. But whether information is made free in the financial sense or not, what all journalists and academics for that matter should be committed to is 'free' as in 'freedom' and as in 'freedom of information' - the rights to which investigative journalists rely on in getting access to the information in the first place.

Kader Asmal - a personal post

2011-06-22T21:50:00.000+02:00

This post is not about media, communications or the internet... please forgive the digression. This is not, usually, a political or a personal blog. But of course politics affects everything and politics in South Africa has been and often continues to be, a matter of life and death. And South African political history is also for me, personal.

This evening I learnt that Professor Kader Asmal, ANC leader, former Minister and human rights lawyer, had passed away. As I write, I'm listening to Jackson Mthembu, the ANC's Spokesman, on the radio at the moment speaking of how Kader 'embodied the values of the ANC'. He asked: 'How do we learn from Mandela, how do we learn from the Sisulu's and how do we learn from the Kader Asmals of this world about maintaining those values?'

I was at Kader and Louise's wedding as a baby. After the last time I saw him in March, he sent me a photograph of me at his wedding. He was a close friend of my mother's, the Godfather of my daughter and throughout my life, he was a kind and generous mentor. I will miss him greatly and tonight I'm thinking about his family - Louise his wife who was not only his partner in life but his partner in all his political work, and their children, Rafiq and Adam.

On the last occasion I saw him, we discussed his birthday in 1995, the year Kader turned sixty. It was one year into the first democratic parliament, and Kader held his party at the Parliamentary Sports Club in Newlands, Cape Town. On the walls were pictures of white MP's cricket teams. My mother had died about a year before, so he asked me tol speak on her behalf in a way. I was in very august company I remember and very nervous. Thabo Mbheki and Julius Nyerere I remember were amongst the speakers. But what made the biggest impression on me was the audience. Most were now MPs. For the first time earning a salary for what they had previously spent their lives doing as volunteers. Many of course had risked lives, or been imprisoned. The person I remember best is the late Ma Ellen Kuwayo, who I knew little. A woman then in her late sixties I think who had been a member of the Soweto Committee of Ten, trying to protect her own children and their comrades who had taken to the streets in 1976. And now she was a politician! Now she could pass laws!

I remember looking at this group and comparing it to the politicians I knew and had followed in Britain - a professional class, an elite. I looked around that room that evening and saw all kinds of people - none of whom could really have been described as career politicians. And I remember thinking what a wonderful source of strength this body politic was - one made up of people who had chosen values over self interest. And that is only sixteen years ago. And it could be another age.

Kader frustrated many people. Me too sometimes. He could have listening failures of huge proportions. But no one I ever heard criticise him ever challenged his values. No one ever acused him of modesty, but he and Louise have lived in the same modest house they moved into when he returned to South Africa. He was always curious. He was honest. As a child and as an adult, Kader would debate with me, as he did with everyone. Like others of his generation of political leaders I grew up with, he believed that analysis and debate could change the world.

Listening to the calls on the radio I hear the same nostalgia I heard after Albertina Sisulu passed away a few weeks ago. We miss a generation of leaders who sacrificed and who expected no payback. The current generation of leaders of course do not measure up. It is probably not a reasonable standard. But as I mourn Kader's passing, I mourn the loss of that standard too.

Adwords and Revivo Tea: episode three (featuring Nicholas Sarkosy)

2011-05-26T09:03:00.000+02:00

The story so far: last week I found an ad I objected to on the website of a leading South African media group. The ad promoted a herbal concoction which, according to testimonials on the website the ad linked to, could be sued to treat the symptoms of AIDS. The ad had been served by Google's AdWords. I then complained to AVUSA, the owners of the site I saw the ad on, Google, who served the ad and to the South African Advertising Standards Authority. This week I learnt that mine was not the first complaint and that the Advertising Standards Authority had acted on a complaint from a Patrick Linzer in 2009. Today I can report some responses. I have learnt that Google has removed the ad. Avusa have also blocked the ad. And I have received an acknowledgement of my complaint from the ASA.

The lesson? Well complaining to 'old' and 'new' media companies seems to have worked pretty well in this case. Whether the ('old' media) self-regulatory system (the Advertising Standards Authority) is working for new media is another question. We will see. There's a lot at stake in this. Yesterday, the French President spoke in Paris to an audience including Mark Zukerberg, Rupert Murdoch and Eric Schmidt about Internet regulation. He said: "The world you represent is not a parallel universe where legal and moral rules and, more generally, all the basic rules that govern society in democratic countries do not apply." But he also acknowledged that national regulation does not work (see this week's story of Ryan Gigg's 'superinjunction' to see just how it doesn't). I agree with the Open Right's Group's Jim Killock that "The idea that the internet resembles a 'wild west' is nonsense," but the Internet does undermine the ecology of national law and regulation and self-regulation that has managed and controlled 'oild' mass media. As online citizens our interests will not always be aligned with those of global Internet businesses or of national governments. Finding ways of influencing how a new ecology develops will be an increasing challenge in the next few years.

Adwords and Revivo Tea episode two

2011-05-23T23:24:00.000+02:00

Last week I recounted my travails in trying to get a Google ad for a herbal remedy for Aids removed. This evening I thought I'd check on whether I'd had any success. When I went onto the site where I'd seen the ad (timeslive.co.za), it wasn't there. So far so good. Then I did a google search for revivotea. This is what I found.

So, the ad is still there. But then I clicked on the third of the un-sponsored links. And I discovered that I am not the first person to try to get rid of this little piece of evil. It turns out that more than two years ago, one Patrick Linzer made a complaint to the South African Advertising Standards Authority about Revivotea's website. So what happened? Well the ASA ruled that the website was in contravention of its code.

The complaint was upheld. So how comes the site is still there? And how comes the ad is still there? Well, first, the company behind the site agreed to take the site that was the subject of the complaint down. The ruling includes the following: "the respondent confirmed that it has permanently closed the www.revivotea.co.za and www.herbalpharmacy.co.za websites".Well the first point is still true. The site http://retrovivotea.co.za no longer exists. The site that google now advertises is http://revivotea.com. But www.herbalpharmacy.co.za is still there.

So what does this all mean? Well first its pretty clear the ASA is not as effective in dealing with internet sites or ads as it is with mass media ads. Second, its notable how all Revivotea's distributors needed to do to evade sanction was to change the domain of their url. Third, on the positive side, all of this history is easily accessible via a google search. Fourth, all of this has not had any impact on Google's business - which has continued to earn fees from Revivotea's distributors and has not been a party to any of the reviews by the ASA. So we have a paradox. Google brought me to this history of previous complaints. Thank you Google. Also, as my contact at Google mailed me today, "We serve hundreds of millions of ads a day and the vast majority are very well targeted to the content and useful to users". But in the move from oligopolistic mass media to the global and open internet we loose some control - to stop lies and misrepresentations that can kill. I await the results of my complaints to Google and the ASA. Who, in the new global communications network, will take responsibility for vetting the messages we consume? Maybe we need to abandon the idea that any agency - a self-regulator, a Government, or a global corporation that commits itself to doing no evil - can act on our behalf. Maybe we have to imagine doing this for ourselves?

books in Africa

2011-05-23T22:02:00.000+02:00

On Saturday, I went to the launch of 'Diepsloot', by my friend Anton Harber. It was at one of the best bookshops in Johannesburg - Boekehuis in Melville. Its a great bookshop. In the invitation for the event, they included a reading list of related books to Anton's that I might be interested in. And while I listened to a very interesting discussion about Anton's book, I looked around at the shelves and was drawn to many books that I didn't know but thought - 'I'd like to look at that'.

This morning, I read a Bloomberg report that Amazon's ebook sales now exceed its paper book sales. This is bad for Boekehuis but good for Africa. Because (printed) books don't work in Africa. Most South Africans cannot get access to books. Even Boekehuis cannot make a sufficient profit to justify its existence for its investors. And that's in the centre of one of Africa's great metropolis'. Ebooks represent the greatest hope of distributing, at reasonable cost, a wide selection of books to people in Africa because distribution no longer requires geographic concentration to be viable.

If you want to understand convergence in Africa - look at AdWords

2011-05-19T23:37:00.000+02:00

I saw these google ads today on a South African news website (timeslive.co.za). I rarely look at AdWords (consciously anyway) and almost never click on them. But this time, I did.

The ad that grabbed my attention is the first one - for a herbal remedy called revivotea. I have worked on media and communications aimed at reducing the HIV and Aids epidemic over many years and this kind of message makes me mad. Clicking on the link made me even madder. There you can find 'tesimonials' claiming that people's 'viral loads' had gone down to undetectable levels and including statements like: "no more visiting the doctors 3 times per week now after taking Revivo", and "With this booster I don't think people should be afraid to die of Aids anymore . It is expensive but it's worth it...". When misleading advertising is about HIV it's not just about consumers getting ripped off. It means life and death. So I decided I wanted to complain to someone.

If this ad had run on the site's sister newspapers, the Times and the Sunday Times, I could get it removed by writing an email to the South African Advertising Standards Authority. I'm pretty confident that the ad would be in contravention of its Code of Conduct. Amongst other things, for example, the code states that "all claims, whether direct or implied" must be capable of substantiation with documentary evidence. I would greatly doubt, based on its previous rulings, that the ASA would take these testimonials as sufficient 'proof'. Nor would they be likely to take seriously the user 'survey' on the site which would appear to fall foul of the ASA Code since it does not appear to have been conducted according to SA Market Research Association standards.

The Code is part of a self-regulation system run by ASA. ASA's members include the newspaper publishers association, broadcasters and marketers. AVUSA, publisher of the Times and the Sunday Times, is a member of the newspaper publishers association. Interestingly the Online Publishers Association (which AVUSA is also a member of) are not members. So as far as I can see the code does not apply to online advertising.

I could write to AVUSA. But of course, though AVUSA sells and controls the ads that appear in its newspapers, it doesn't sell or control the ads that appear here. They have been placed by Google's AdWords. So I could write to Google. Google also has advertising content guidelines. Under 'False health claims', the guidelines state that AdWords 'prohibits false health claims in ads.' But I'm not sure the ad's wording does make a claim. The guidelines also state that if "an ad or landing page contains a testimonial promoting atypical results, there must be a clear and conspicuous disclaimer specifying the endorser's unique circumstances or there must be valid third party verification." But the testimonials don't appear in the ad or the landing page (the writer of the home page appears to have taken care not to mention HIV or AIDS). The only guideline I could find under 'False health Claims' that might be relevant to getting the ad removed is the following: "Ads must comply with all applicable laws and guidelines (such as the FDA, FTC and equivalent regulatory bodies)." Though again, I'm not sure. Is the ASA a 'regulatory body'? It does create regulations but these are part of a system of self-regulation imposed only on its members (Google is not a member). After some research I did find grounds for asking Google to remove the ad under a different section: 'Misleading and inaccurate claims' where it states that 'Google AdWords prohibits the promotion of websites that make claims that are either scientifically impossible, or otherwise extremely misleading to users'. I have now written to Google to ask that they remove the ad. (You can do this too).Though even here there are significant differences between the mass media situation and the online. If I had complained to the ASA I would be informed of the result. Google states that they will not respond to my complaint, but will investigate the matter.

This brings me to a second interesting issue concerning internet vs 'traditional' mass media advertising. How ads are 'served'. What led to me getting two ads today that relate to HIV - not something that's happened before? How this happened I don't know and won't know, in detail, but Google does tell us that it uses three methods to place ads. First, 'contextual targeting' which aims to identify relevant pages for an ad based on the links of a page and some features of its content (The Timeslive site has a dedicated section on HIV and Aids). The second is placement - where the advertiser chooses the sites it wants its ad to placed on (as it does with traditional advertising). The third is by profiling users. When I saw this ad, I was signed into igoogle. I don't know whether or how this affected the placing of the ad. But it may have, and this means I may never get the same adwords that I received today, so I might never know whether the ad has been removed. The ad itself is not in fact public in the way that traditional advertising is - I can cut and paste a picture of it as I have done on this blog but I can't direct you to it. In fact, when I returned to the page, the ad wording had changed, replacing the reference to the 'Greedy AIDS industry' with 'They'.

The third interesting thing this ad shows is the changing face of Internet users in South Africa. A year or two ago I don't think a herbal HIV remedy would have used the internet to reach its target market. But last month South Africa hit five million Facebook users (growing at 11% per month). For the first time we are seeing ordinary working class South Africans online.

So what does all this tell us about convergence in Africa? I think its an example of how complex it is to judge the public benefits of the Internet, especially in an environment like South Africa's. As an Internet advocate, I argue in many forums how important it is to empower the majority with the access to the information and cheap communication that the Internet offers. I am a board member of South Africa's Freedom of Expression Institute and one of the reasons I advocate on behalf of the Internet is that it offers the possibility of the democratisation of freedom of speech (which includes paid for speech). But this democratisation has a price. Google is not the bad guy here but 'Do No Evil' is in fact a very difficult standard to hold yourself to. But in reality we need to balance good against evil. 20th Century mass media offered controlled content, self regulation, a few voices and many (nation bound) listeners. The Internet offers many voices, no coherent regulation (for better or worse) and global conversations.

So I now have to trust Google to do the right thing (knowing how difficult, if not impossible a standard that is to meet on a global basis) rather than trust a cabal of local media owners. I'd like to trust the Internet vs the mass media but, ironically, given the apparently open nature of the web, the decision-making on whether to allow this particular example of (evil) free speech or not, is far less transparent than it would be in the mass media structures of self-regulation. I may never in fact know what Google has decided to do.

But what ever sanction Google imposes on Revivotea, the fact these quacks are advertising shows that the Internet is working in South Africa, not just for the rich but for the majority of working class South Africans. And, overall, I continue to believe that, once those people learn to engage with the opportunities of online communication the discussion that emerges will counteract lies more effectively than any regulatory system. I hope I am right.

This day 21 years ago

2011-02-11T18:20:00.000+02:00

This day 21 years ago was the day Nelson Mandela was released. I was on Vilikazi Street in Soweto outside the house Mandela had lived in before he was imprisoned, organising a live broadcast for the BBC.

As I write, the first reports are coming through that Hosni Mubarak is stepping down. The crowds are shouting "Free at Last" - a phrase used by Martin Luther King and also by Mandela after the 1994 election...

south africa is not keeping up!

2010-04-29T14:29:00.001+02:00

In discussing internet connectivity I've used the analogy of the development of the global train network in the 19th Century before. What the analogy helps to bring to the fore is how connectivity is important not only in absolute but in relative terms. Towns or countries that didn't get connected, started to be disadvantaged relative to those that did. In the case of trains, a major impact was on enabling trade (or not). In the case of the internet, its enabling communication, social networks and transfers of knowledge, ideas and information.

So the issue of internet connectivity in South Africa is not (just) how far are we in getting people connected, and at what speed and price, but how connected are we in comparison to other countries. The graph above is based on World Bank data up to 2008. It shows the number of people connected per hundred people. In 1999, South Africa sat at 4.2 people per hundred, close to the world median of 4.7 per hundred. But by 2008, though the density of connections had more than doubled, South Africa's comparative performance vs the world had fallen to little more than a third of the world's internet density, with a lower figure than many other countries in the continent, including Zimbabwe, and about the same as the West Bank and Gaza.

As concerning is the rate of growth. The steepness of the line running through 2008 shows the growth rate up to that time and South Africa's was slower than any of the other African countries shown in the chart. A recent study by World Wide Works indicates that this growth rate may have picked up recently, and the introduction of uncapped access also give some hope for an improvement but this is now off a low (comparative) base.

Why Keeping Up Matters
Ive written before on why connectivity matters to development. But the graph itself offers a great example of why this matters. It was generated using public data explorer from google labs. I read about this tool reading Hans Rosling on the TEDblog. Professor Rosling developed Gapminder, a beautiful way of representing data which he sold to Google a few years ago.

Here's some of the data above, based on world bank data again, presented using his software. I've added information on mobile density. Click on play!

His blog mentions an exciting development that he and others campaigned for - making all the World Bank's published development data available online for free. Last week the World Bank did just this!

But, you need a connection...

So now (based on 2008 data), eight out of ten Americans, more than one in four Tunisians, and about the same proportion of Mauritian's can get access to some of the best data available on economic and social development in Africa. But even taking the latest ITU data into account, less than one in eight South Africans can do the same.

Will convergence be good for Africa?

2010-02-22T23:55:00.000+02:00

Will convergence be good for Africa? And how do we come to an answer before it happens? This is not a trivial question. For convergence to happen we need significant political support. Regulations and laws need to be changed to enable the growth of broadband connectivity. Threats to existing businesses (including telcos and broadcasters), many of them state owned, need to be managed. And governments need to adapt to losing power in the dissemination of information. So we need to know something of the benefits if we are going motivate them to make it happen.

I've just had a paper on convergence accepted into CPR Africa, a conference on communications policy research in Africa. In South Africa, and a number of other countries on the continent, while we can see (small) steps towards convergence taking place, television broadcasting is being protected from its implications. The paper I've written investigates whether convergence can take place while broadcasting is treated as a 'special case' and whether the arguments for protecting it are sustainable in a converged environment.

But this begs a question that, it turns out, is not so easy to answer: "Is convergence a good thing for Africa?"

Ithiel de Sola Pool defined convergence in 1983 before the internet existed.

"A single physical means - be it wires, cables, or airwaves - may carry services that in the past were provided in separate ways. Conversely, a service that was provided in the past by any one medium - be it broadcasting, the press, or telephony - can now be provided in several different physical ways."

So, convergence entails the lifting of constraints on content and communication services from being trapped in specific systems of transmission.

It might seem obvious that convergence is 'good'. It means being able to do things that were not possible before. But its just as obvious that in the history of humankind, there are many occasions on which the ability to do something new has led to death and destruction.

In developed countries there is already evidence for the economic benefits of convergence. But very little evidence from Africa exists. This isn't suprising. As Research ICT Africa's study of ten African countries in 2007/8 showed, less than one in twenty Africans are using the internet. Notwithstanding this reality, it is clear that the growth of the broadband internet is radically lowering costs of communication, not only in the most developed countries but across the planet. The growth of mobile has also transformed communications for many of Africa's people. But for most of those people, the (mobile) telephone is still a device to talk on, television and radio looks and sounds largely as it did decades ago (though more available and with more channels for some) and computers are still unavailable and expensive with very limited connectivity to each other. In other words, convergence is not yet a fact of life. There are some projects that are showing what can be done with today's technology and connectivity - in Ghana and Uganda, for example, farmers are getting market information that helps them get better prices for their produce. Other projects in South Africa are providing health information. There are many other examples but so far, they are mostly small in scale.

And there are also many voices warning of its dangers. Cas Sunstien, now the head of regulation in the White House, in his book Republic.com 2.0, is one of those raising questions about the political dangers of the internet disrupting mass media. And, of course, many of those who work in, or own, the mass media are vocal in warning of the consequences of the damage to their industries. And in Africa, there is some debate as to whether the introduction of ICTs is creating internal digital divides.

So if there is, as yet, little proof of the benefits of convergence, why are there so many of us so excited about it?

I think the answer is to be found in the social, rather than the economic or political space.
Barry Wellman has argued for many years that we need to understand the internet as a social network, the largest social network in (the history of) the world. And I think it is to be found in the hope of a new set of social possibilities that arise from that network.

So rather than looking for evidence, maybe we need to look for images of what a converged future for Africa could be. And as someone who has spent most of my life working with images in film and television its there I naturally look for such images...

One of my favourite films is Witness directed by the Australian director Peter Weir and starring Harrison Ford. Most of the story takes place in amongst the Amish, a religious community in the Eastern United States who resist new technology (new in this case being anything later than the 19th Century). They drive around in horse drawn carriages, they do not have electricity. They only marry amongst themselves.

There is a famous scene in the film where Harrison Ford takes part in a community ritual where everyone comes from far and wide to help a family build a new barn. With hundreds of people, men women and children, they accomplish this feat in one day, using no power tools, and no paid labour. Just wood, hammers, ropes and nails - and the labour of the community.

Harrison Ford is a policeman from New York. He is alienated from his neighbours, family and even from his police colleagues. In the Amish he finds a community, albeit an inward looking and with values that are not his own. But on the day they build the barn, it is a community in which he is able to participate.

Last year we reached a global tipping point with more people living in cities than in rural communities. Those of us who have always lived in the urban world rarely experience the power of 'community' that Peter Weir captured. For most of us, it is not even nostalgia. Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, has described how many of the practices of "community" - belonging to local social, sports and voluntary groups, for example, are all in decline.

Mass media cannot create community. The nature of mass media is to create one-way one-to-many networks that connect us all but in which we have very limited means of participating. Harrison Ford could have learnt about the amish through mass media (as I did). But he could not have participated in building the barn.

I see in the internet and in convergence, the possibility of community that is no longer entirely or predominantly bounded by space - by geography. And since, for most of us living in dense citiscapes rather than rural villages, we have little opportunity to participate in a 'community practice', convergence offers at least the possibility of achieving this via telecommunications networks. That is a revolutionary possibility.

Many of the internet's pioneers, as well as scholars like Yoachim Benkler, Clay Shirkey and Henry Porter have recorded many examples of this community practice being enabled by the net. Examples they cite include Wikipedia, NASA's Seti project, open source collaborations such as LINUX and the creative commons project.

Possibility and probability are different. Just because it can happen (and just because it has happened in some instances like Wikipedia) does not mean it will happen, in general, and specifically on this continent. In Africa, there are many political and economic obstacles that stand between this vision and its realisation. But understanding and communicating the vision and its power is, I believe, an important step in tackling the obstacles so that these possibilities are realised. So that, not only does convergence come to Africa, but it comes in such as way as to enable the power of community practice to reach all.

The end of (mass) media

2009-04-21T18:20:00.010+02:00

After last month's broadband forum in Johannesburg, I did an interview with Karen Van Schalkwyk of Screenafrica, the leading publication for film and television producers in South Africa.

1 You mentioned that broadband would be the end of content as we know it, could you elaborate on this and how do you think it will affect conventional media?

As content producers we have developed an industry based on a market - and that market is the content distributors - film distributors and cinemas, television broadcasters, etc. The problem content producers face is that the business of content distribution is slowly collapsing under the pressure of the broadband internet. Why? Well some of the (related) reasons are:

costs of content distribution on the internet is virtually free, which means anyone who is connected can afford to do it, and also means that its difficult to make a profitable business out of it.
content distribution via the broadband internet is transnational, so a lot of the business models around division of rights by territory are coming under great pressure
digital content is like a renewable resource - you can copy it as many times as you like and its just as good as the first time!
most users of digital content also have the means to produce or reproduce that content - this a unique situation in the modern history of content distribution
a scary thought for content distributors - peer to peer file sharing - 'audiences' sharing content amongst each other - (almost all of which is 'media' - music and video) is estimated to account for something between 30% and 70% of all internet traffic depending on which studies you read.

If we look at how this is affecting conventional content distribution channels, the music industry is in a structural decline with 7 consecutive years of falling income; free to air television, in markets where cheap broadband is widespread, is steadily loosing share of audience and share of advertising to the internet - the example I gave in my presentation was that Google UK now has a greater share of advertising than ITV1 historically the leading advertising earner in the UK. The CEO of Channel Four in the UK stated over a year ago that he couldn't see how Channel Four could survive the next decade on its existing business model. And remember that over 50% of the financing for feature films in fact comes from television. Pay TV, less reliant on advertising than free to air television is surviving a little better so far, but as broadband penetration and speeds increase they are going to be affected also. Even today, if you have the bandwidth, you can download most of the newest US television series online for free. Of course this is pirating but its exactly the same problem that the music industry has faced for years and is likely to have exactly the same economic effect on even pay tv as it has had in music.

2 What do you think will be the challenges for content producers and how would this affect their income and the way they do business – what should some of their new business strategies embrace?

The challenge for content producers is that the people who have paid them money to make television and film - the content distributors - are unlikely to have money to pay them soon! So content producers are going to need to start looking for new customers. Who will those customers be? Well probably the audience itself. One way of looking at the problem is that we no longer need intermediaries between content producers and those who want to watch, or listen to that content. That sounds attractive but there are three major challenges I can foresee.

First, cash flow. In the old order business models, distributors often advance some or all of the costs of production to the producer. The audience is unlikely to be willing to do this - they'll pay cash on delivery! So producers with access to cash flow finance are likely to be a much stronger position than those that do not. Second, many people are sceptical that online audiences will be willing to pay at all when there is so much content available for free. Hence the preponderance of advertising funded models online. I am sceptical that advertising funded models are likely to succeed in financing the kinds of content we have been making to date unless we can make that content for very much less money though, since each audience is likely to be smaller than the 'old' audiences (up until the 1980s in the Europe it was still possible for ONE channel to get audience shares of over 50%. Those days, it seems to me, are probably over for ever). I think there is some hope in micro-payments. On cell phones people pay quite a lot of money for so-called content (R5 for a ringtone). So wouldn't you pay R5 for a movie? itunes has proved this can work. The third challenge is more fundamental - whether 'audiences' as we understand them, will continue to exist. Content producers rely on audiences - that is (lots of ) people who are willing to sit still and watch something that was made by someone else. Some commentators describe these people as the 'former audience' because in fact the evidence is that they are less and less willing to behave in this way, maybe just because now they don't have to. If they can watch online they can participate. This isn't just that professional content producers now have to compete with amateur tom, dick and harriet. The broadband internet allows communication to be content rich (think facebook, youtube and flickr) and it appears that as this happens young people especially spend less of their time passively consuming content.

3 You mentioned that ITV has lost a staggering amount of ad revenue due to broadband (also that Google does not pay for content) – how will this broadband development affect the broadcast industry and what should they change in terms of business strategy. i.e should they provide downloads of content to audience?

I don't have a suggestion of a business strategy for broadcasters except to accept that they are living through an era of massive (hopefully creative) destruction and that broadcasting as we know it is unlikely to come out the other side of it with much of a role as currently organised and in their current function. Many major broadcasters are investing heavily in various ways of making their content available on line. The BBC iPlayer project is one example. The problem isnt getting the content online. The problem is how are they going to earn a substantial enough income stream from it. The music industry has put its content on line (via itunes, nokia etc) but the ioncome they are receiving is not keeping up with the loss of income from CDs and the record industry estimates that 95% of music downloads are not paid for. One thought that might scare independent producers is that one way broadcasters could think of going is to move to focusing on producing content rather than distributing it.

4 Why do you think SA has lagged behind in terms of broadband development and what are some of the solutions to speeding up this process and making sure we remain competitive?

Data from the International Telecommunications Union shows that South Africa has fallen down the global league tables of internet connectivity. We were fist in Africa five years ago. We are now fourth. Common reasons given for this are:

lack of competition - the long delays in creating the second network operator have left telkom in a position where it can keep prices high to maintain their margins. The recent issuing of new licences following Altech's court challenge and the new cables that start landing in South Africa this year should make an impact on competition and prices.
lack of government support - in spite of many government initiatives, some of which have worked and some of which haven't, we do not have significant focus on this area of infrastructure. Just look at public investment plans over the next few years in electricity generation and distribution, in railways and ports and compare it to the investment in building internet infrastructure.

5 How do changes in the broadband world affect intellectual property/ rights and territories?

For content producers this is a very important question to consider. The key change that the broadband internet brings is that it makes the enforcement of rights either incredibly difficult or impossible. Histrocially content producers have been strong defenders of property rights (their main gripe has been they don't have or retain enough of them). But I think it is time to start reconsidering this position. Its not clear that the rights based system has really been beneficial to content producers and its not clear that it is a sustainable model for the future. So we need to start considering if there are alternatives and how these alternative could provide income and payment for content. The open source movement in the software industry, creative commons and copyleft, these are all new ways of thinking about these issues. So far the film and television industry have not been leaders in this thinking.

6 You mentioned that this development moves us toward something more interesting – what are some of these issues that create a more interesting landscape?

Film and television producers at the beginning of the 21st century may be in a position not so different to scribes - the monks and others who wrote books by hand- at the time of the spread of the printing press. We have some very impressive skills but some of those skills may become redundant over the next few years or decades.

If I am right then the prospects for our professions are not looking too bright. But if you look at the change from the point of view of the audience the benefits are obvious. Printed books may not have been as beautiful as the hand written books they replaced. But they were just so much more useful, so much more accessible and, of course, so much cheaper. Printed books extended literacy, empowered the middle classes and made knowledge accessible to a much wider community. Broadband offers the 'former audience' something similar but also something even more powerful - the ability to connect, to converse, to organise, to find and to share information, ideas, and knowledge across the entire planet at very low cost. I do not think we have begun to see what this will bring.

What none of us know is when and how this is going to happen. Maybe film and television producers have a few years or decades left. Changes on this scale in the past have often involved the old and the new existing in parallel for many years. But if I was just entering the professional world of content production I would want to be on the side of the future, not of the past.

Why South Africa needs Broadband

2009-03-25T16:04:00.014+02:00

I attended the Broadband Forum in Johannesburg this week, organised by Research ICT Africa, the Association for Progressive Communications and the Shuttleworth Foundation. You can read a summary of my presentation on content and broadband the South Africa Connect blog. A number of interesting ideas came out of the presentations and discussions.

1. Broadband and internet growth in South Africa has been slow

According to Arthur Glodstuck of World Wide Worx, there are 4,6m internet users in South Africa and just over 1,0m broadband users (thats less than 3% of the population). Looking at the ITU internet use development index though, its clear that whatever improvement there has been in South Africa over

the last five years, it is much less than many other countries and many of those countries

are much poorer than ours. The table combines information from the latest International Telecommunications Union ICT development sub-index for internet usage with per capita income figures from the CIA (!) 2008 World Factbook. Every country in the table was behind South Africa in internet usage index 5 years ago. Now only Zimbabwe is lower in the rankings.

2. We should look at broadband as a utility

We should treat internet access in the same way that water provision, and electricity are almost universally treated as utilities that should be available to every household. This doesn't mean that the service must be free. Nor does it mean that it must be government that should be the provider. Nor does it necessarily mean that internet access provision shares the

same economic rules of 'natural monopoly' that water and electricity have (at least to date). It does mean though that the state needs to take responsibility for the framework that will enable such provision to be built. It seems to me there are three strong arguments for ensuring universal access:

we need to close, not increase, the digital divide within our society. If we do not we are likely to increase the economic and developmental gaps (already widening in South Africa) between haves and have nots, and weaken the social contract binding common interest in society. This argument is well rehearsed in terms of rights for the poor and is similar to arguments made for access to water, electricity and other utilities.
If we do not provide universal access we will, over time, undermine the social network of the nation - in other words, while people will be connected, we will not be able to say that the nation is connected. If the internet is as important to 21st Century economic development as the railways and postal services were to the 19th Century, then those parts of the country left unconnected will end up disconnected from the country itself. This is not a new argument either. At the height of the development of national postal services, in the 19th century, many services were, in effect, nationalised and most nations created single price post from any point to any point in the country (even thought the costs obviously varied considerably by distance). This was a political act. We need a similar political commitment today.
broadband is undermining, and probably destroying, existing mass media business models, and those media channels have already achieved near universal access. Radio and television in South Africa are good examples of this. If broadband does not offer universal access it could actually leave many (poorer) people worse off than they are now in terms of access to important national and global information sources.

3. How broad is broadband?

In the course of preparing my input to the forum I came across a reference to a very interesting definition of broadband from the US Computer Science and Telecommunications Board: "local access link performance should not be the limiting factor in a user's capability for running today's applications". This addresses what to me is the most important issue: South Africa, just like any other nation, needs to think of connectivity in relation to the rest of the world. That, after all is what the net is about. And how connected you need to be is a moving target. Every year new tools are emerging and those tools are based on assumptions of how much bandwidth its users have access to. If we want South African citizens, organisations and businesses to have access to the best of these tools we need to have the same amount of bandwidth as the other countries who are using such tools.

4. Who should make this happen?

Especially in South Africa, there is great scepticism regarding the state's ability to provide services. This scepticism is based on very good evidence. But that doesn't answer the other undeniable truth, that this provision is a public good and that

substantial externalities are likely to be at play. In other words, the market alone is unlikely to provide (at a universal level of access). How did South Korea, for example, manage to occupy the position it does in the ITU indices? For the Forum I did a very rough calculation of comparative investment. The figures for the US, EU, Japan and South Korea are from the ITU database of telecommunications investment for 2003. The figure of Africa is extrapolated from data presented by the GSM Association at the 2007 Kigali Summit of planned investment by their members in Africa. If anything these figures understate the problem. By 2003, Korea already had a very high level of broadband use but as these figures show, they were continuing to invest substantially in making this access more available and faster. In my presentation I said that, in order just to keep our current relative place vs these leading broadband nations, we would need to spend R40bn per year investing in infrastructure. The back of the envelope calculation I did to arrive at this figure was:

leading nations are spending between 82 and 149 Euros per head per year on infrastructure

if we spend 100 Euros per head per year we might keep our place relative to them (though certainly not catch up with them)

100 Euros per head is approximately equal to R40bn.

I would love to get some economists to do a more thorough job of working out what level of investment is required.

Then I looked at announced investments by telcos in South Africa. On an optimistic view, the figure I came to was less than R15bn per annum. So the question arises - who is going to fund the investment South Africa needs? The answer can only be: either the newly competitive market is going to lead to multiples of the current level of investment or the state needs to be involved.

Saemergency.info – a response to the xenophobic violence in South Africa May and June 2008

2008-10-30T21:51:00.012+02:00

Some people have been asking about the saemergency.info project so I thought I would write a short account of how it came about, what it was and how it worked… saememergency.info was an online tool to help organisations and individuals who responded to the crisis of xenophobic attacks that occurred in May 2008. It is a partial and personal view. I was one of the people involved and I had a far from complete picture of events as they unfolded.

Timeline of events and the creation of saemergency.info

11th May
A mob attacks a group of immigrants in Alexandra township in Johannesburg. Two people are killed.

15th May
Violence breaks out in Diepsloot, another township in the West of Johannesburg.

18th May
attacks on foreigners spread to other areas. One immigrant is burned to death.

Over these few days, tens of thousands of foreigners living in South Africa flee their homes for police stations, churches and other refuges. Estimates vary but somewhere around 50,000 people are now being housed in temporary shelters, mostly in Guateng and the Western Cape.

Government is slow to respond. But civil society is not. Church and other religious groups, concerned individuals, community based organisations (CBOs) and NGOs respond collecting supplies, providing food, shelter, medical and other services. There is a surge of public participation in church-led and NGO activity to support those affected by the crisis on a scale possibly not known in South Africa since the early 1990s.

19th May
Human Rights Commission (a state institution, independent of Government, established under Chapter 9 of the SA Constitution convenes a meeting of all ‘Chapter 9’ institutions (including, for example, Gender Commission, Youth Commission) and a fairly wide group of NGOs to discuss response to the crisis. The Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) is mandated to co-ordinate information for ‘civil society’ (ie non-governmental organisations).

Sometime before May 24th some people adapt the Ushahidi engine to start a site unitedforafrica mapping attacks.

28th May
At this stage most of the camps are still being run almost entirely on volunteer services, though the governmental disaster management service teams are present. Co-ordination is difficult. A very small number of people carry the burden of being information points. The mobile telephone is the main means of communication. Also some of the key people are now getting exhausted.

A few of the volunteers at one of the camps in Johannesburg (Jeppe Street police station) identify a need for much better communication platform to allow better co-ordination between the myriad of organisations (formal and informal) that are working on the emergency.

29th / 30th May
We phone around of about 20 of the organisations working to support the response to the crisis – church groups (Methodists and Anglicans very active in efforts in the Joburg camps), Gift of the Givers (muslim charity that provided very effective relief at a number of the camps), CSVR, and others. All agree there is a real need for a central information source to aid collaboration and co-ordination of voluntary efforts. A voluntary network established of a group of media professionals (mostly journalists), a web content company, a web development company and CSVR. We draft a very high level plan to create a web-based information platform to improve co-ordination. Start compiling contact lists of organisations to inform and also assemble team of volunteers.

30th May
Gauteng Provincial Government makes “declaration of disaster”.

1st June
Government, with support of international agencies begin moving people from informal camps in Gauteng into new larger camps run by the province.

2nd June
UN estimates there are 7,382 displaced people in informal and new camps in Gauteng,19,486 people in Western Cape and 1,814 people in KwaZulu Natal.

saemergency.info domain registered, email and site hosting established. We build the site using plone open source platform. A basecamp account for all the volunteers and organisations to collaborate, message and share documents on is set up. Later that week the site saemergency.info goes live.

From 4th June
very detailed site reports on each camp in the Johannesburg and Ekuruleni areas are published. The reports are being compiled by CSVR. Site is not covering Western Cape. Attempts made to network better with Cape based groups (many of whom have been co-ordinating efforts via Treatment Action Campaign offices in Cape Town).

We establish a roster of volunteer editors so that there is an editor each day to process and post information onto the site. The skill set we have in strength is journalistic (being able to identify the reliability of sources, verifying information, identifying useful information). None of us working on the project daily have strong technical skills. This creates challenges. We try to train CSVR staff, for example, to use the content management system (cms) to upload their reports directly, but this takes weeks rather than days.

Time is also a challenge. Information comes in, generally, via email. It then takes hours, and sometimes a day, to get it up on the site.

The site soon has an extensive amount of information on it. Detailed reports on each refugee site which describe what is happening, what resources are needed, whether basic needs are being met. It also has a lot of useful resources (access to services to find lost people for example). We struggle to build a strong database backend that would allow people to efficiently search for contacts and this may be one of the site’s major weaknesses.

The site stays active through June. At the beginning of the project we have established resources (all unpaid and voluntary) to run the site through to mid July. We are aiming to find an institutional home for it to maintain it after that. At the end of June the CSVR decide that they need to withdraw from the role they have been playing (since the HRC meeting on the 19th) and focus on their core work: re-integration and the provision of counselling services to those affected.

Over this time the nature of the camps changes radically. The vast majority of refugees are now in Government controlled camps. Government disaster management structures have their own communication systems and we are much more ‘plugged in’ to the NGO sector than the government sector (though a number of managers in the government sector tell us they would like our help which we try to provide.) The role of the NGO and volunteer sectors is reduced and, in some cases, resisted by the state structures that now manage the camps.

July
The site is closed in July.

As of the time of writing (October) , though almost all the camps in Gauteng have been closed, there are still camps operating in the Western Cape. Significant numbers of refugees have left the country. Others returned to where they lived previously or to other places in South Africa. Others remain at sites that have officially 'closed'. Though the SA government promised (and claims it has been carrying out) a well planned 're-integration' programme, it is not at all clear to what extent this has happened. Certainly the crisis is not over.

What role did saemergency and other online initiatives play in the response to the ‘xenophobia crisis?

Saemergency.info was one of very many ‘civil society’ initiatives that sprung up spontaneously in response to the anti-foreigner violence in South Africa. It was created in response to an identified need – essentially to provide timeous information that could be shared between a variety of formal and informal institutions to improve the co-ordination of the responses to the refugee crisis that arose following the attacks. In the section below I have tried to give an overview of the various means that organisations involved in the humanitarian response used to communicate. After that, I've set out some of the learnings that we may be able to draw from the initiatives that were undertaken so we might be able to do better next time.

1. Platforms for communication and co-ordination

Mobile phone

Voice-calls and phone-based networks were the main means by which spontaneous networks emerged and communicated. One of the strengths of mobile based communications in SA is that almost everyone has a phone (there are more mobile phone accounts than there are adults). And its usually with them 24/7 wherever they are. Another strength is that you know your message has been received when you sent it. However this form of communication has some significant limitations.

First, a few people ended up as network nodes and soon got overloaded. A case in point was the leader of the Methodist mission in central Johannesburg. His cellphone number was published in a major newspaper as the contact point for donations at a point when the mission was one of the major refuges in the city. He received hundreds of calls daily from people wishing to help.

Second, there’s a limit on the quantity of information you can get into a phone call!

Thirdly, it’s a poor method of publishing information a lot of people need to receive.

Fourth, the network itself is invisible and inaccessible except via the individuals you know. You need to know people’s numbers! Telephone directories today are no longer effective tools (and there are no telephone directories for mobile phones in SA).

Lastly its push, not pull. When someone wants information, they need to make a call, and they may not know the right person to call. This, combined with the previous point, was something many people experienced in the first weeks of the crisis, finding the right person to talk to, and then actually getting hold of them was difficult and time-consuming and resulted in a lot of inefficiencies.

email

Email was heavily used in the crisis. Many or most people and organisations involved in responding to the crisis made use of email. The dominant method of publishing announcements and data was via email lists. CSVR, until the saemergency.info site was live, used email as their primary means of distributing their reports to over 100 recipients. The network based at TAC (Treatment Action Campaign) in Cape Town had a list of over 300 recipients. At the time of writing, this list is still active. Email is fast, cheap, and widely used. It works! Also the fact it is asynchronous helps avoid some of the overload problems associated with the phone. However, it also had significant drawbacks.

First, it worked best as a one to many network. As many to many it was clumsy. If everyone on the lists started responding via ‘reply all’ to everyone else on the list it soon become overloaded.

Second, for many if not most of the people on the lists, it was only accessible once a day. At the camps themselves, most of the people who needed information were not online until they got home or back to the office – often at midnight. Very few people had or have email access via their phone.

Thirdly, the information sent via email wasn’t sorted, filtered, indexed or searchable. It was time-consuming to wade through your inbox and find what information you needed – most information was in the form of attachments – and, as importantly, it was not always easy to find what communications you needed to respond to.

The last problem was the recipient lists themselves. Updating, verifying and extending them across the network was a very hit and miss affair. From my knowledge, no-one was really able to spend much time working on this so who was on the list or not on the list relied on a very few individuals and prior relationships. This was problematic in a situation when so much of the work was being done by groups that had not previously worked together and some of whom had spontaneously arisen in response to the crisis.

Web

My first observation on the web is that, to my knowledge, it was used very little as a practical tool by those most involved in responding to the crisis. A search of google groups for example found only one group set up explicitly in response to the attacks (it only had three members). The largest quantity of information available online about the attacks, the subsequent refugee crisis and the response to the crisis was through the sites of the major media organisations in South Africa (for example www.thetimes.co.za www.sabcnews.com www.news24.com ).

Saemergency.info was one of three web-based initiatives I know of set up specifically in response the crisis. The other two were unitedforafrica.co.za and a closed members only site run by a an organisation called igiveadamn - a charitable social networking site and Shade , a church-based NGO supporting displaced people. This site maintained a very detailed daily needs database for a number of the camps in the western cape.

UnitedforAfrica was focused on documenting attacks and mapping them using googlemaps using the ushahidi engine that had been developed by an international group of African and US developers during the post election violence in Kenya.

The shade/igiveada.mn site was a private invitation only network with a powerful database backend that tracked resources provided and required at a limited number of displaced persons locations in the Cape region. It was used by a closed group of organisations that worked at the locations that the site tracked.

The saemergency.info site was open (though to comment you needed to register) and was aimed to be an information exchange for organisations active in responding to the crisis.

Its interesting to compare the purposes and strengths and weaknesses of the three (based on my very limited knowledge of the other two sites).

2. Crisis Incident Mapping

In the context of the specifics of the South African crisis, it turned out that disseminating information on attacks may not have been the greatest need (compared say to the post-election situation in Kenya), at least according to the people we consulted as we set up saemergency.info. This may be because the attacks themselves took place over a relatively short period. It was also true that SA mass media had a lot of resources applied to covering incidents based largely on information from police as well as phone-ins to radio stations when attacks took place. The other challenge of the unitedforafrica model was that, as a ‘crowdsourcing’ project, it required crowds to know of its existence in order to get to a critical mass of informants.

The mapping approach could have been very useful if it had been extended to mapping the situations daily at the camps. If, for example, the information that was being collated at saemergency.info and by the igiveadamn/shade teams had been mapped this could have been useful.

Two other questions arise for me in reviewing the site – is a map always the most useful form of representation, or organisation of information? This may depend on who is using the information, for what purpose and when? By and large the users of saemergency.info and the igiveadamn site were well aware of where the refugees were, and wanted timeous information on what was happening in the locations that they were capable of supporting. So they didn’t really need a map.

3. Gathering and Organising Information

There were significant differences in approach between the igiveadamn and saemergency.info sites in how they gathered and organised information.

Saemergency.info gathered information in three ways. Firstly, it published very detailed reports compiled by CSVR (see above) these were compiled by professional researchers who conducted visits to refugee camps and completed detailed questionnaires. Secondly the site editors collected information from a wide range of organisations many of whom included info@saemergency.info on their email address lists. Lastly, registered users could post information directly to the site.

From my limited knowledge of the igiveadam site I understand the users of the site provided information to the webmasters via email or phone predominantly and the webmaster then updated the database.

The igiveadamn site had a sophisticated database backend which meant information was highly structured and could be searched in sophisticated ways. Saemergency.info published reports but never compiled the contents into any form of database. If you needed the latest available information on a particular camp and say the medical situation there, you could find the report and then search it. But if you wanted to know the medical services situation in all the camps you would have to open each report and search separately. Also the majority of information was posted as documents for downloading. As webmasters we were amateurs and didn’t always know how best to organise the site to make the information as accessible as possible.

4. Networking

The igiveadamn site was largely for the use of a well-defined group of volunteer organisations that were supporting refugees in a defined number of camps. In other words it was an effective on-line tool for the use of a well-defined off-line network. Both saemergency.info and unitedforafrica aimed to utilise the power of online social networking to aid making NEW connections between users. But this was a substantial challenge.

First, even though South Africa is one of the most connected countries in the continent, the number of people online is still very low by developed country standards of comparison (in 2005 11% of population used the internet according to UNDP). From accounts I have read on Ushahidi’s use in Kenya, it was able to rely on an active small group of bloggers (some of whom may have previously been part of some network – at least to the extent of reading each other’s online communications) to achieve its purpose. In our case, our objective was to network a wide range of disparate organisations and individuals, only some of whom were in touch with some others. These people were often members of small organisations with some, though limited, resources. A typical example would be a local church group that found itself close to one of the camps and became involved in regularly supplying help from food to pre-school teaching. The tools they were familiar with were the mobile phone and email. They were not normally users of online social networking or collaboration tools.

We were aiming to create a common benefit of the network effect for users of the site. The threat to our project was that without sufficient participants we were subject to the negative impact of the network effect – if the network is small its value to a current or new participant is low. From google analytics data, it appears that most visitors to our site came directly, probably from emails sent out on a number of email lists, and the vast majority of visitors came from the Johannesburg area reflecting both the fact that we had much better (offline) networks in this area (than in the cape or kwa-zulu natal) and also that the information on the site was largely, though not exclusively, from the Johannesburg and surrounding areas.

In the online world many of the tools to grow the network of users and thereby gain by the network effect are based on the assumption that people are already online. But what if they are not? Then you need to rely on other more conventional marketing tools (word of mouth, mass media, advertising etc). Another way that NGOs and other civil society organisations use is by creating memberships. Of these methods, only word of mouth was used. And we had very little time or resources (certainly no cash) available to work on any of these methods.

So while the site represented a significant step forward from pure email-based networks in many respects, its network power probably didn’t extend far beyond those who were already on email networks.

Learnings - Trade offs and challenges

1. The network is the message
During the crisis and now, I strongly believe that establishing well-functioning accessible networks that exploit the available and appropriate digital technologies to hand is the most important challenge to focus on (ahead of working out what should be available on those networks).

The content and information needs of the users in a crisis change all the time, but if the right people are connected, they will be able to exchange and create the information they need, as they need it.

This has profound consequences. ‘Crowdsourcing’ works, but to get the ‘crowds’, in many of the contexts of use we are dealing with, they need to be located offline first. Also we may need some people who can be assembled online to take responsibility for extending the network into the offline space. Much of this work could be prepared for in advance – creating mailing lists, and creating communities of practice that already communicate online in preparation for emergencies to come.

2. Getting the information OUT is in many ways harder that getting information IN
Its reasonable to believe that Jakob Neilsen’s “90 - 9 -1 rule” applies to social action networks as much as any other. And to invert Neilsen’s conclusions, in fact this is good news in terms of content creation. You only need 1% of users to contribute most of the information required to make the network useful to the other 99%. The greatest challenge is in getting to the right 99%, especially if you cant use the web to reach them (because they are not on it, or not regularly enough).

So assembling databases of contacts, especially contacts who may be act as the nodal points in future crises, could be a very useful piece of preparation. So could preparing marketing and publicity plans.

3. The mobile network should be the communications technology platform of choice
In South Africa, and possibly in many other African countries, mobile networks have become accessible to many millions of people. Access is cheap compared to the cost of internet access. If we want to reach a broad cross section of people on the networks we want to create (eg rural/urban, young/old, poor/middle class) mobile networks are the only ones that are capable of meeting the need.

In South Africa we can reach millions not only via gsm but also via gprs. So we can consider using not only voice and sms (text) but also low bandwidth data-based services (mixit the social networking platform networks over 4m (young) people in South Africa). But browser-based mobile internet services may be accessible to only a small minority of phone users for the next few years and maybe considerably longer due to the high cost of handsets and the high cost of bandwidth.

One lesson we learnt was that setting up short codes, negotiating discounted or free rates from telcos took time (much longer than it takes to establish a website). This is work that would benefit from preparation in advance.

More important, there are exciting developments in creating tools for mobile (see mobileactive for a range of examples) but using them also need preparation – some require downloads of apps onto the phone for example.

4. Speed over comprehensiveness
Comprehensiveness of data is less in important in the middle of a crisis than speed especially when there is a trade off between the two (and there usually is). We would have been liked to have been able to send out more headlines, alerts

5. Every situation is different
In reviewing some of the tools now existing and in development, (see for example, InSTEDD or USHAHIDI) its important to acknowledge that every situation is different and most importantly user needs are different.

There are many kinds of crisis (civil/political unrest, natural disasters, refugee crises for example)

There are many kinds of context (political, technological for example)

There are many kinds of active participants (international agency staff, national disaster management professionals, volunteers -organised and individual, those affected -organised and individual.).

Working out what tools are appropriate means being able to be clear on these issues. We may need a lot more thinking on this.

6. Sharing, trust and privacy
Its interesting how wide a range of issues arise around trust, and sharing information (including identify of users) when trying to utilise the power of online social networking for networks that include action and that need to have life some beyond the digital domain. Speaking to some of the creators of Ushahidi, one of the most important issues for them in Kenya was protecting the identity of the source. There are many places in the world and many occasions when this is vital. However in our situation, where we weren’t just trying to collect information but were trying to connect nodes of activity, it was essential that people knew who each other were. The interesting opportunity with many internet based tools is that it is possible to be very nuanced about just how public and just how private a piece of information is. But it requires careful thought to design or adapt the tools appropriately for the situation. For example, a key requirement of many of the individuals and organisations that used and wanted to use saemergency.info was being able to identify other groups and individuals who had resources that could be useful at camps they were working in. A senior disaster management centre manager, for example, one day wanted to find trauma counselling resources. On another occasion, someone working in one of the spontaneously formed refugee organisations wanted to find out who could help with tracing missing relatives. This required having members of the network identified and a significant amount of information about them held and searchable by other members. We never got to the point where this information was well organised on the site. But we also had pressure from organisations to limit access to the very same information, not for reasons of security but because of communication overload. As one manager who was involved in information gathering and trauma counselling said to me, ‘I’m tired of getting calls on my cell (mobile phone) from people offering blankets.’ And she was right, she was working 18 hours a day, she needed to focus on the important work she was doing, so making her information public was not necessarily helpful.

One approach that I think could have worked very well would have been to try to establish online communities of practice – in other words connect people specifically by the kinds of work they were doing. These were often the people who wanted to share with each other. Following this approach, we might also have been able to distinguish the ‘9’ and ‘1’’ from the ‘90’ - in other words identify those who were willing and able to act as communication nodes to pass on and share to others as appropriate.

7. Identifying a need
Although we spent only one to two days researching the need, it was a very important aspect of what we achieved with saemergency.info. Prior to that we had thought of a number of other issues we might focus on: fundraising and advocacy among them. As we develop more tools to help in emergencies, we need to be careful to stay focused on actual needs (rather than interesting features). And we need to aknowledge that the specific contribution that online tools may best make will vary from crisis to crisis and from ‘community of need’ to ‘community of need’. One of the best ways to explain the differences in approaches between the different web based initiatives that developed in SA and also between, for example the work of INSTEDD, USHAHIDI and saemergency.info is to think about who these different initiatives were for.

Lastly, following Patrick Meier’s list of three wishes for crisis mapping, I offer my

three wishes for the development of online tools in crisis response.

1. Focus on usability and accessibility rather than features

Both INPUT and OUTPUT need to be focused on using the technology people have access to…

This means focusing on apps that work with mobile phones with limited or no internet access. In SA case, for input purposes this could include assuming GPRS data services and apps. For output purposes needs to be accessible via text messaging and IVR.

2. focus on networking (communications) rather than information and focus on mobile networking

The politics of crisis response can’t be ignored in understanding the history of the tools we have and the forces dictating the tools we may be getting.

Powerful state and international institutions (the network of UN agencies, international donors, international NGOs and professional disaster management teams) involved in emergencies (whether refuges crises, natural disasters or any other) are very information focused. In order to make decisions (and more importantly get decision makers far from the ground to make decisions) they want data and lots of it.

But small NGOs and spontaneous formations that self -organise already have lots of information concerning the situations they are engaged with. Their need (as I experienced it) was to be able to communicate with others who were in a position to respond swiftly to that information.

And its this ground up ‘organisation without organisations’ (as Clay Shirky describes them -thanks Eric) where networks can add the most value and make the most impact.

There are great network collaboration tools already available (for free) on the net (eg google groups and google sites as well as open source equivalents) that could meet these needs if everyone were online. But we need ways of connecting these tools to mobile devices, or finding similar ones that can work with mobile devices.

3. Defining and identifying models of, and members of community/communities of interest and action is a necessary step in designing appropriate solutions

Lets spend as much time tryng to connect the networks of potential users as we spend on developing the tools. That way we might actually design the tools they need and ensure they are ready and able to use them.

Lastly, a caveat and some acknowledgements. The caveat is that these are my thoughts alone. Many people were involved in creating or made contributions (all voluntary) to saemergency.info. Most crucially the editors who ran the site on a daily basis especially Justine Lang, Michelle Garden, Iman Muldoon. Some of the many others are listed here:

Monica Bandeira, Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation
Hannelie Bekker, Telkom Media
Dr Peter Benjamin, cell 4 life
Professor Anton Harber, University of Witwatersrand
Sizwe Mavuso, Centre for the Study of Violence and reconciliation
Gustav Praekelt, Praekelt Consulting
Jonathan Timm, Mvula Trust
Dr Tim Wilson, Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation
Barry Hiles, Big Media

And finally, I’m not sure I would have completed this account without the inspiration of Eric Hersman and Juliana rotich of Ushahidi, Robert Kirkpatrick of Instedd and Patrick Meier of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, all participants and presenters at mobileactive ’08.

mobileactive08

2008-10-15T22:23:00.003+02:00

just completed three days at mobileactive 08 "a global event for peeople using mobile technology for social impact". Very inspiring to engage with 350 people from Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas at a very well conceived and well run event. Three observations/experiences:

the culture of free open source is very powerful because it immediately builds a relationship of trust (or maybe its the opposite that is even more true - when you are dealing with people producing propriatorial software, you start from a position of distrust because you know you are being sold something).
the reason everyone from africa, asia and south america is excited about mobile is because it offers us the best chance of turning the idea of a networked world into a reality where we live and work. But all of us, including those from these continents are networked on the web and not on our phones. Maybe if we forced ourselves to network via the phone, we would succeed better and quicker in creating the tools we need to turn web 2.0 into mobile 2.0.
the 'rules' of what works and doesn't work in networks are not really much to do with technology. They are largely platform independent and some of the 'platforms' dont use technology at all. Appropriate use of technology in this context means understanding what networks exist already and how we can extend, change or even disrupt them through the additional intervention of new platforms.

More thoughts on knowledge and collaboration... IBM and Microsoft are getting in on the act

2008-10-01T15:33:00.005+02:00

Since my post in August about collaboration tools and my post last month about the development of consumer technology vs 'professional' technology I found some interesting stuff from IBM, a major developer of knowledge management technology.

On IBM's site Luis Suarez, a well known knowledge management expert (and IBM consultant), makes some very useful comparisons between old approaches to knowledge management and the social networking and collaboration tools I was discussing.

1. KM was about explicit knowledge. Little attention was paid to tacit knowledge.

2. KM was imposed from the top. It became an extra task for employees. What he calls 'social computing' arises as a core activity of daily work

3. KM was highly structured and inflexible. Social computing is flexible and personal

An interesting observation about these comments is that they are on IBM's website! That's because IBM now sells its own collaboration product, Lotus Connections. Its something like facebook (profiles) combined with blogger (staff blogs) combined with digg/delicious (shared bookmarking) and bascamp (messaging and diaries). And unlike these other apps, it sits on an organisation's own server. I have no idea how much it costs. Probably quite a lot.

Which makes me think of what I wrote about consumer vs professional technology development (see September posting). And makes me think that Lotus Connections is unlikely to succeed over time. It would be interesting to know what the ongoing research and development budget for Lotus Connections is. My bet is that it is a fraction of the development budget for facebook or any of the other free tools it emulates. And so I suspect that in the end it will struggle to compete just as the makers of specialist tools in music production and television production have failed to compete with consumer orientated manufacturers. And the same applies to microsoft which is now trying to convince us that its office tools can be built on to make them the basis for social computing.

But back to collaboration. Ive been working on some slides I will post soon, but my thinking is this....

1. social communication ('collaboration software' in my language, 'social computing' in microsofts and 'social software' in IBM's) models work better than traditional knowledge management and project management tools because they incentivise users to use them (rather than instruct them to use them)

2. they work better because they allow spontaneous connections between sources of information (ie PEOPLE!).

3. we no longer need to try to impose such structured means of controlling or organising information because we have SEARCH! (cf Google - which can now be incorporated into any web site or intranet or even desktop)

4. email is how people in organisations have got around clumsy knowledge management systems. but as a work-around its got severe limitations.

5. The shift required is from control and reporting as the dominant purpose of organisational software to tools that make keeping, organising, sharing and finding knowledge easy (in our everyday work).

6. The key tools required are:

messaging that keeps a secure searchable trail of our conversations (unlike email)
document sharing that is easy to file and flexible in structure (unlike database solutions) and that doesnt duplicate and is secure (unlike email)
networking that allows us to search what we need by people as easily or more easily than searching by subject (if you have a serious medical problem you dont search wikipedia you go to a doctor).
ability to control the level of sharing of information and knowledge we have (and that enables us to share on a continuum from private to public).

consumer tools show the future of business tools

2008-09-12T12:53:00.005+02:00

over thirty years ago I worked as a session musician (yes I am that old). The professional synthesisers, sequencers and sound processors that the major studios were packed with, cost many million of pounds.

Over the next decade, consumer electronics companies started making consumer products that were able to do more and more of the things that previously only professional equipment could do. And then, these same companies (mostly Japanese) started producing 'semi-professional' equipment. This equipment generally cost between 20% and 50% of professional products and could do up to 80 or 90% of what specialist professional equipment could do. Each year the difference between the price points widened while the difference in functionality narrowed. How? The consumer manufacturers invested many times the research budgets of purely professional suppliers since they could amortise this investment across a far greater market. This pattern mirrored what was taking place in the computer industry where personal PCs ate away at the price points of the corporate server market (these days servers are really sup'ed up PCs).

A decade or two later, the same thing started to happen in the industry I now was working in - the television and audio visual industry. Here, 'semi-professional' camera, sound and editing equipment devastated the professional video equipment market. Now the computers that edit feature films, news bulletins and television drama series are essentially the same as the ones you buy in any computer shop.

Today, I believe we are reaching the same point with software. If I was betting between Oracle, SAP and the other corporate software solutions and the new generation of personal software tools in knowledge management, collaboration software and online applications, I would bet on the later. They will change faster, build customer bases more quickly and invest in product development more effectively.

Some thoughts on Collaboration, Sharing, Managing knowledge and project management

2008-08-11T18:02:00.014+02:00

Over the last six months, I've been experimenting with some of the many tools available on the web that enable groups to share knowledge, collate stories, learn and problem solve. I think we are on the verge of a revolution in how the web can be applied to changing how we work, how we learn and especially how we work and learn together.

The dominant practice in the field of knowledge management over the last decade or two has been the building of databases - libraries of information - which are then made available to staff online in closed networks or intranets. What we know about libraries is that they need librarians (ie dedicated 'knowledge' resources), very detailed and fixed systems (eg index systems), and codified entry, with each item having a fixed form - most books fit on standard library shelving, they have titles, authors and ISBN numbers, not to mention indices. But few organisations have the resources or appetite to create and maintain such systems and resources. Even where they have, encouraged by the major consultancies and the major hardware and software houses (ORACLE, IBM, SAP for example), they have often reported that the expected improvements in productivity have not materialised.
Now lets look at project management. Over the last decade, project management has become a powerful discourse in large organisations and small as they look for tools to manage processes that cross functional management structures. As Tom Peters says, everything now is (and should be) a project. As with knowledge management, the literature is littered with tales of disappointment in trying to get people in an organisation to follow the protocols of project management disciplines, completing scoping documents, using planning tools such as microsoft project, and especially, following project closure processes which include documenting learnings so that the knowledge gained is available to others in the organisation, today and in times to come. I know whereof I speak! As a leader in an organisation of some sixty people, I introduced project management processes into our organisation and tried to encourage managers and professionals to adopt them with mixed results.

So what is the problem? Initially, training was included when new systems were implemented. But that didn't deal with the issue. Over the years, some have argued that the source of the problem is people's resistance to change. So if we can change individuals' and groups attitudes to the changes required to use these tools, then they will work. But is this the wrong way around? Is it rather the tools themselves?

Its interesting to consider the history of the platforms on which these tools have been developed. The first generation of office computers were terminals - they gave access to a central computer, so all information was shared and the tools used were central tools (as still is the case with tools like SAP and Oracle). PCs changed the situation radically. They were individual machines, and not very good at connecting to each other. (Newsrooms in many countries in the world used Macs rather than DOS PCs mainly because they were relatively easy to connect together). In many offices still, the vast majority of data in the organisation actually sits on the drives of the individual PCs. In our organisation I remember how hard it

was to convince people to use the 'common' drive for filing their documents. The tools that most of us use are also individual - we have our own copies of word, excel, etc sitting on our own machines. The PC represents our own space. Like our own desk. And as with attempts to get people to share space (think hot desking and open plan offices), its proved difficult to get people to share digital space well in the workplace. In fact, the dominant means of moving data between users in most offices is email, which as a protocol is fundementally a private one to one system, rather than a platform for sharing. Incidentally, one of the major challenges in many organisations now is that, for so many users, email has become their main filing system. A use for which email was never conceived and for which it is poorly suited.

But meanwhile, there's three things going on in cyberspace that are interesting and relevant to solving the problems of knowledge and project management.

The first is the web as a whole...

As a knowledge management model, you could say its knowledge without the management. There is no structure, no index, no fixed relationships between one piece of knowledge and the next. Of course the other, often raised, point is that much of it (most of it?) may not be knowledge at all. But it has succeeded in one respect where so many knowledge management systems have failed... millions of people contribute trillions of pieces of knowledge, for free and of their own free will - without having had the benefit of any change management programmes to make them do it.

The second is the

phenomenon of social networks. Social networks are in fact structured knowledge management systems. They are run from central servers. In that sense all information is centralised. But they allow a lot of control from the point of view of the individual user. She can determine exactly how much of her information she shares and with whom ('friends', 'groups' etc etc). She can add information to other people's sites on the network. She can choose synchronous and asynchronous means of communicating (this distinction, with tools like twitter, has become more a continuum.) She also has access to tools that mine data across the network.

The third is the growth of internet applications and especially collaboration software...

igoogle, del.icio.us, digg, basecamp, backpackit, wickis, and more. Much of it, though not all, is open source. Much of it, though not all, is free.

My favourite collaboration tool of the moment is 'basecamp' - a tool produced by a US company, 37 signals. Its a flexible online project collaboration tool that enables workgroups to share information, communicate, and track work with minimal training.

It's not free but you can achieve much of its functionality by using free tools... see roll your own office for some useful tips.

My University school uses basecamp as the main platform for us to communicate with each other and with our students. I also use it for community projects I am involved in. Having used (much more expensive) corporate project management tools, most of which require a lot of training and a lot of change management to actually get people to use them, I've realised that offering people simple collaboration tools is much more important than trying to force them to obey complex project management (or knowledge management) processes.