Having begun this course in Global Governance, one has to explain what that actually means. From now on, I’m going to carry this funky looking issue map from WEF:
The map’s from WEF’s Global Risks report from Jan 2011.
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Waterloo, Ontario
So this is where I live. All the houses are the same.
And this is how we get to school.
The manor.
Columbia Lake
The playing fields
The flags.
The university’s graphic design dept is pretty good. They’ve got some nice brand values (others are connected, unconventional, risk-taking).
But this is the best one:
I could do that. I choose not to.
The library / sugarcube. Perfect for naps.
It’s really squarey.
The nano building (not nano-sized, yet).
And the computer centre.
Oh, and for COI people, I think these guys made Livelink. I’ll pay them a visit.
Photos of the new CIGI campus (including a former whisky distillery, mmm) to follow once they’ve more nearly finished it. That’s where I’ll be living working.
In terms of information useful for global governance, security information is often still perceived as closed and secret from the public (until Wikileaks comes along). Although nations and global institutions are opening up data and becoming more transparent, when it comes to security, one assumes the public just don’t have the same access to detailed imagery and intelligence information as to global events.
But wouldn’t it be great if citizens had the same access to the same kind of fancy satellite imagery that you assume the US military has (i.e. you saw it on the West Wing a few times). Imagine if we could actually see what was going on in Sudan, Zimbabwe, Libya…
Introducing..www.satsentinel.org
“The world is watching because you’re watching”
Presumably this compares very poorly to what national governments have, but in terms of tech tools changing global governance, Satellite Sentinel is pretty interesting.
They’ve used before-and-after satellite images to create compelling stories of what’s happened in Sudan, which could become useful evidence for action against the perpetrators. More immediately, it’s useful information to prove their case that violence is continuing.
This seems exciting, but have a read of this critical view from Tim Brown (of globalsecurity.org) for Imaging Notes. In it he argues that imagery has often be used and abused in the past, and there’s a danger of information overload. And of course, ultimately information itself doesn’t lead to better outcomes – ‘boots on the ground’ etc. But that’s not really the point of the Sentinel programme.
The one benefit he points out is that the “goal of documenting violence, war crimes and genocide to prosecute is more attainable.”
Perhaps the point is simply that its harder to hide war crimes now. Wherever you are in the world, more and more actors are capable of seeing what you’re doing – not just those wealthy nations with high tech equipment. You already know that it’s wrong, and now you know that people will be able to see what you’re doing. It’s becoming possible for globally concerned movements and activists to observe and document any large scale atrocities that happen anywhere in the world, from anywhere in the world.
Environmental satellite imaging
Similar things are going on in global environmental governance. Google Earth Outreach “gives non-profits and public benefit organizations the knowledge and resources they need to visualize their cause and tell their story in Google Earth & Maps to hundreds of millions of people.”
So it’s a bit more of a campaign tool – but if the satellite imagery of deforestation can be provided at regular intervals, who is to say that some bright techie type won’t design some crowdsourced rainforest ‘watch, report’ thing, using hundreds of environmentalists around the world to monitor areas of rainforest and report illegal logging to locals who can confirm and act on it.
Bright techie type? Anyone?
– why are the roads such bad quality, eh?
– you don’t notice the accent until any word involving the letters ‘ou’ is pronounced. Pronounced, for example.
– a transfer ticket on the Toronto metro/bus/tram system cost $3. Bargain.
– bus drivers actually say ‘good morning’ and ‘thank you’ – BIZARRE.
– it’s really hot.
More to follow. Maybe some photos.
I live not far from Gold Command, which as Sky News excitedly informed me on Monday night, is where the planning for the policing of riots or civil disobedience. And I thought it was a car park.
As of this morning, there are still a load of hire vans parked along the streets nearby – presumably used to bus in all those extra bobbies for London. They’ve had a busy week.
I wanted to record some of the bits of writing I’ve found useful in understanding the events of the last week, as well as some of my scattered thoughts. Helpfully, these thematically arranged themselves into the following groups.
The story of what happened
Paul Lewis runs through this well. He writes with a breathlessness which well reflects the way the stories were reported. His technique involved donning a hoodie and biking from incident to incident, but there were so many different reporters (and citizens who picked up camera phones and started tweeting) around London that the news came constantly, including this pretty brave stuff from a Sky reporter in Clapham on Monday night.
At the time, the more you read or watched, the scarier events often seemed. Particularly by Monday night, endless loops of burning buildings on the rolling news channels, rumour as well as trustworthy updates on Twitter and Facebook, live blogs from most of the newspaper websites, as well as texts from friends around London, all added up into a hyped news bubble. By around 10pm on Monday, #prayforlondon was the third highest-used phrase on Twitter, worldwide.
Some of the examples from Storify (timelines of tweets) show how the narrative of the riots developed through both offline and online media, each feeding the other.
The Wikipedia riots page is a good effort at trying to gather all of the events from this strange last week.
The story of how social media affected the riots
Live news reporters were quick to suggest that social networks were somehow involved in organising the riots. ‘The twitter’ was often mentioned by studio hacks who knew not of what they spoke. How else would so many people know to assemble in the same area at the same time, often swiftly changing locations? But urban youth don’t use Twitter, they use Blackberry Messenger, as Mike Butcher showed in this article for TechCrunch.
And so began the fairly tortured narrative around social media and riots.
One of the suggestions has been that the government should gain new controls on social media. This has been met with predictable disdain from democracy campaigns and technologists.
It seems odd that the vast majority of politicians apparently still don’t grasp social media. Especially since, when MPs were dramatically recalled to debate the riots on Thursday, they then launched into discussions that had already taken place in a more nuanced, advanced fashion online. Twitter itself is a form of parliament. A giant town hall meeting. We sit under the tree of Twitter and debate. MPs should be engaging with their constituents through it. There’s just no need for them all to rush to the same location. And still be late on the uptake.
It’s the people that matter, not the platforms. It allows information, true or false, to spread faster and wider. Except that it also leaves a data trail, in a way that speaking on the phone or in person wouldn’t.
And without social media, communities might have struggled to organise some of the more humane elements in the riots: #riotwombles cleaning up Clapham, financial assistance for the Malaysian student mugged while seriously injured and to the 89-yr old barber whose shop was trashed, and, as my colleague put it, the ‘digital stocks’ of photoshoplooter.tumblr.com. Whether or not the riot wombles actually did much clearing up (mostly they seemed to wait around for police forensics teams to finish) they helped show that there were two sides to the community – and showed the rioters that there was a large body of people affected by their actions.
More importantly perhaps, social media allowed trusted local bloggers/tweeters to be extremely useful in identifying what was happening in immediate areas – down to individual postcodes – providing much more geographically relevant information than national news could.
How it stopped
This has become another disputed story of the riots – a bit of a spat between police and government over who was responsible for the orders of extra police on to the streets. Top police officers claimed that they would have done so without politician involvement.
But by flying back and giving dramatic speeches, including mention of ‘more robust policing’, politicians created expectations and impressions of gravity, which may have helped changed the mood in the rioters’ communities and networks. Even if it seems unlikely that many youths watched Cameron’s speech, their parents may have done, or at least sensed that repercussions would get more severe, so hauling their children back home on Tuesday night (in London at least).
The story of who was involved
Pictures tell a thousand words. The first images of looters shown on TV seemed to only feature teenagers. It quickly became accepted truth that the looters were urban youth, acting in anarchic fashion. News reporters talked of ‘a child of only [any age between 7-14]’, but when you looked at more of the pictures coming off CCTV, it’s obvious that wasn’t only the case. It was also reported, especially in Manchester, that kids were being organised by older members of the community.
Ideally, the data from the magistrates courts across the country would be pooled and analysed, as the BBC showed with Camberwell Green (but only 55 cases from the 2,000+ arrests). The Guardian datablog post is being updated as I write. It shows a large majority of those charged being between 11-24.
The story of why it happened
And this is the biggie. In positive psychology, you’re sometimes asked to ignore the ‘why’ question – it often doesn’t help the immediate situation. By dwelling on the why, you simply get stuck in the same negative cognitive cycle. For example, ask a young rioter why they did it. They’re not going to have any good answers.
But this has been where some of the most thoughtful writing has come from. One of the best being this article from Peter Oborne. He writes with fury and a passion with which great journalism does. One suspects he will not be invited back to any Kensington dinner parties any time soon. The article has received over 4,000 comments online.
“…the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society”
The BBC have another ’10 explanations for the riots’ which includes a fairly broad spectrum of theories. Their list includes the ‘check out the price of failing to care’ argument of Camilla Batmanghelidjh, CEO of Kids Company, a London charity for children, as well as arguments ranging from ‘weak’ policing, to American rap music (rioters referred to the police as ‘Feds’).
The other debate this week has been about cuts to policing, youth clubs etc, as opposition politicians try to carefully, or not so carefully (Ken Livingstone), gain political capital. Their cause may have been helped by this prophetic Guardian video, warning of riots due to youth club cuts, which swiftly went viral after events in Tottenham.
And the story of what happens next
The attention span of journalists, editors and ultimately news consumers is notoriously short. While a story as dramatic and visceral as riots is likely to hang around, over time another story will come along, elements of what happened may be forgotten.
News moves on, society must not.
If you want to help prevent this happening again, get involved. Volunteer. Get to know your community by working for it. Mentor a child. This is hugely rewarding and is incredibly valuable to the children involved. Charities that do this include Chance UK, who work in Tower Hamlets, Lambeth and other poor areas around the UK and whose programme I can recommend. The Mayor of London is also promoting a mentoring scheme, and Kids Co, mentioned above, also run mentoring projects. This stuff is proven to work.
You hope that events like these wake everybody out of ignorance or moral stupor. To change things. As the Archbishop of Canterbury said on Thursday:
I believe that this is a moment which we must seize, a moment where there is sufficient anger at the breakdown of civic solidarity, sufficient awareness of the resources people have in helping and supporting one another, sufficient hope (in spite of everything) of what can be achieved by the governing institutions of this country, including in Your Lordship’s House, to engage creatively with the possibilities that this moment gives us. And I trust, My Lords, that we shall respond with energy to that moment which could be crucial for the long-term future of our country and our society.
We’ll see.
Much of what this blog’s going to be about is not actually technology.
The technology isn’t the important bit – it’s what the tech allows us to do. And right now, that’s about social networks. And connections. And everything Anne Marie Slaughter talks about in her Personal Democracy Forum 2011 talk below.
I liked it so much it’s this blog’s first post. Here’s a very quick precis of Anne’s talk:
- until now it’s essentially been a small clicque of men who drive foreign policy, each representing one nation and fighting for its own separate interests
- today we don’t start from separation, we can start from connection. Now you define who you are in relation to others.
- the world of nation states still exists, but there are growing number of charities, social action groups, civil society groups, religious groups, private corporations, trying to get involved at the global level. At the big institutions, these are called non-state actors. As Clay Shirky says: ‘calling these things non-state actors is like calling an automobile a horseless carriage.’
- women get this better than men. Women have often been defined by their relationships, or define themselves that way, see feminist Carol Gilligan – today there is also a generational gap in this way we perceive ourselves.
- so now we have governments and a growing set of social actors, connected in ever-changing ways and ever changing identities.
- Christakis and Fowler showed that you can join up individuals in different ways: connect in a linear fashion = bucket chain, telephone tree = efficient dissemination of information, etc
- the Mr Y article (full pdf) written by two senior members of the US military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, essentially says the world has moved from a closed system to an open system, and in an open system, having power means having credible influence. We can no longer control by force. The US has to (again) be the most connected and influential nation.
So here’s what we do to address global problems
- with any global issue the goal is to map the space and connect enough people to mobilise to create the solutions to address those problems.
- this happens in these case studies [Ed: not sure these are the big global problems] AirBnB (expensive couchsurfing), Zinch (all US scholarships in one place), Interaction (network of 190 US NGOs), Global Alliance for Clean Cook Stoves [that’s a global issue], Partners for a New Beginning (US State Dept attempt to encourage public/private partnerships that deepen links between US and ‘local communities abroad’). [Ed: I’d look at things like Ushahidi, Avaaz, maybe charity:water – but more blog posts to follow on these, esp. Avaaz)
“Here’s the bottom line:”
we imagined that we lived in a world of closed opaque orbs – states that pursued national interest – now we live in a world of ‘open system’ foreign policy with infinite possibilities of connecting. Global problems are open problems – we as a world have to grapple with these. By mapping, linking and creating we can create the coalitions to address them.
So:
build local, go global, and change the world
Check against delivery:
More specifically, it’s going to be about technology and global governance. Or how the former affects the latter.
What’s global governance? It’s about massive global problems like climate change. And the current absence of solutions. These ‘problems without passports’ don’t know boundaries. They’re not controlled by national governments. And they affect everyone on the planet, but some more than others. And the ‘some’ aren’t necessarily those who can do anything about it.
The post-1945 state of global governance allowed a small group of nation states to design and sometimes enact global policy. It is inappropriate today. It may have been inappropriate in 1945.
Today there is deadlock on climate change, as nation states are designed to maximise their national interest. This is true with other global problems. There are inefficient and insufficient efforts made towards global security and global health. Global financial and trade regulation is captured by large private sector actors. Democracy does not exist at the global level.
This blog is about what joins all these problems together – global governance, and how technology may influence it.
It’s about the ideal of a global digital participative democracy, formed quite differently from the top-down multilateral or transnational approaches. It borrows from the web concept of ‘2.0’, where things are organised socially through sharing and collaboration. This concept has been applied to government (‘gov2.0’), which suggests that as familiarity with web 2.0 grows, connected citizens can achieve many of the roles of governance themselves. This could include monitoring, research, policy debate, prioritisation, budgeting and decision making – all taking place in an online community, unbounded by location. It is a movement towards participatory democracy, in which government becomes a platform for citizen-led initiatives.
It’s global governance 2.0.
In a global context, cooperative and collaborative solutions could be built from the ground up, sidestepping international deadlock and democratising the governance process. The power of new networks organising themselves with open data and new communication, budgeting and management tools would generate real legitimacy, where every member of a global society has a voice.
Whereas multilateral institutions struggle to accommodate growing numbers of actors, 2.0 institutions that use co-creative and collaborative processes are strengthened.
There are over 6bn people on earth. Technology allows for a global conversation to happen about the issues that affect everyone on the planet. Then it enables people to get together to do something about these issues.
This blog is an attempt to document and analyse some of this change.
Joe blogs. 