2007 April archive at saidia.org

Archive for April, 2007

Be kind anyway, so Mother Teresa

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April 27, 2007 in Africa, Create Peace, Poverty and HIV/AIDS. 0 Comments

Last night I had the pleasure of being invited to a fundraising event here in Seattle for an organization called RESULTS. More about that in a minute - but first let me type in the text of an inspirational quote that was on a scrap of paper at my plate, complete with the right justification and lots of semicolons:

People are often unreasonable,
illogical, and self-centered;
Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, People may accuse you of
selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some
false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank,
people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness,
they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.
The good you do today,
people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have,
and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.
You see, in the final analysis,
it is between you and God;
It was never between you and them anyway.

attributed to Mother Teresa

Reading this reminded me so much of my mother that I almost cried. She died five years ago this summer, and in many ways I always felt that she operated by her own rules and did all of these things - she was kind, honest and frank, serene and happy, did good in small deeds, and gave the world the best she had. Continue reading ‘Be kind anyway, so Mother Teresa’

Near a radio? Join talk about Nigeria election in BBC World Have Your Say

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Tobias Eigen

April 23, 2007 in Africa, Civil Society, nptech, Web 2.0, Blogging, Nigeria and Democracy. 4 Comments

I got an email this morning from BBC inviting me to join their talk on today’s Have Your Say program is the Nigerian election. It’s on at 6pm GMT today, Monday April 23. They appear to be interested in hearing about how technology is being used, and my post last month on Blueprint for a Nigerian Civil Society Election Blog.

Seems since then alot has happened in that department - but perhaps not enough. I’m still digesting it all, and trying to get my head around the tragedy that is the election results filtering through. The greenlightnigeria.org blog was set up by SDN, and NMEM, a to me unknown group, used the Frontline SMS tool by Ken Banks to do some election monitoring by SMS. I don’t know yet how the SMS experiment worked out, but the greenlightnigeria.org blog has been very inspiring to monitor, with audio and video testimony posted just about daily for the last two weeks.

Are you in Nigeria? Text your election observations to 0808-4032739

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Tobias Eigen

April 20, 2007 in Africa, Civil Society, nptech, Web 2.0, Blogging, Media, Free/Libre Open Source Software, Nigeria and Democracy. 3 Comments

According to this Texts monitor Nigerian elections article on the BBC News website,

Anyone trying to rig or tamper with Saturday’s presidential elections in Nigeria could be caught out by a team of volunteers armed with mobile phones.

The number to text to is 0808-4032739. Note that number and tell everyone you know! According to the Network of Mobile Election Monitors (NMEM) website, here is how it works:

The success of our endeavor rest solely on the effectiveness of our volunteers. To participate is simple. First of you have to register as a volunteer, simply text the following information to 0808-403-2739. We will send a reply sms indicating we have signed you up as volunteer.

As a volunteer, you are expected to go out on Election Day and vote. This is the only way you can participate and report correctly on the election.

Volunteers are required to send in two reports on the conduct of the polls in their location.

The first report should be sent in before 12noon and should cover the following aspects of the polls.

Poll opening times

Voter accreditation

Ballot box / materials delivery times

2nd report at the close poll should be sent in before 6pm

Vote counting / result

Turn out at polling station

General conduct of election

Exit polls

And some more details from the BBC article:

The Network of Mobile Election Monitors (NMEM) will use SMS to feedback their observations to a central computer hub.

The collected text messages will then be passed on to other monitoring groups and authorities including the EU.

NMEM hopes the system will stop fraud, especially in areas considered too dangerous for other groups to enter.

“We want to set a precedent,” said Emauwa Nelson of the Human Emancipation Lead Project, a Nigerian NGO that helped set up the project.

“We want people to know that if they are trying to rig the election, there could be someone behind them and that person may send a text message saying what happened.”

… and don’t forget about blogging the election!

Then, if you are able to get to a computer with a microphone, please share your voice so the world can hear about what you are seeing and experiencing. Record a voice message to be posted directly on the greenlightnigeria.org election blog website. Or, if you prefer, send in your submissions via the greenlightnigeria.org contact form.

This is terrific news and I am very pleased to see that election monitors are making use of Ken Banks’s Frontline SMS tool to make this possible. These examples of SMS use for defending democracy are extremely important and can be applied everywhere in Africa.

Congratulations, Ken and NMEM, and may you succeed in helping to keep Nigeria from erupting tomorrow. All eyes are on you.

(If you can, please share your observations about your experience using this technology in a comment to this post - I’m very interested to hear about it.)

Upside down tomato gardening

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Tobias Eigen

April 11, 2007 in Bainbridge Island and Gardening. 1 Comment

Originally uploaded by thomas pix.

I absolutely love this idea! Probably totally obvious to many but not to me! I’m gonna try this.

Thomas’s instructions for making it out of an old bucket, newspaper and some seeds are here, and he links to more instructions at seedsofknowledge.com.

I did make the upside down thingy on my own. Took a standard 5-gallon bucket and drilled a 2.5 inch (55 mm?) hole in the center of the bottom of the bucket. Lined the bottom of the bucket with newspaper (you can use a coffee filter, too) and cut an X in the bottom where it aligned with the hole in the bucket.

Suspended the bucket between two chairs so as to be able to get the plant in there, then fed the tomato seedling through the bottom so the roots were in the interior of the bucket. Packed some peat moss around the roots and then topped it off with potting soil within an inch of the top of the bucket.

Water liberally and away it grows! You can’t see it in the pic, but I’ve planted parsley in the top of the bucket (you can plant basil, too) to complement the tomato. They grow well together.

Casting a ballot for Africa at netsquared.org

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Tobias Eigen

April 10, 2007 in Africa, Civil Society, nptech, Kabissa, Web 2.0, Social Networking, Blogging, Free/Libre Open Source Software, Web Development and ICT4D. 1 Comment

I was psyched to see my Casting a ballot for Africa blog post on the frontpage of the Netsquared.org website, and various blog postings about the Kabissa 2.0 proposal at WhiteAfrican.com, globalvoicesonline.org, and Meandering Passage - wow, thanks everyone for helping to get the word out. It would be stunning if plenty of projects oriented towards Africa and the global south were to be among the finalists for the Netsquared Innovation Award, which is being decided between now and Saturday, April 14th at noon. And I certainly hope Kabissa 2.0 is among them!

Netsquared.org is an initiative of Compumentor (the same folks who created Techsoup.org) and is creatively challenging advocacy groups and nonprofits to make good on the promises of the Internet for revolutionary change. According to http://www.netsquared.org/about:

Our mission is to spur responsible adoption of social web tools by social benefit organizations.There’s a whole new generation of online tools available – tools that make it easier than ever before to collaborate, share information and mobilize support. These tools include blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, podcasting, and more. Some people describe them as “Web 2.0″; we call them the social web, because their power comes from the relationships they enable.

Last year I attended their first conference, which was a rather loosely organized event exploring the power of Web 2.0 for social change. I was interviewed then, in fact, about Kabissa 2.0. This year promises to be more “action oriented” - especially given the grandiose competition going on at netssquared.org right now. Last month they issued a call for proposals for innovative Web 2.0 for social change projects, and this week the Netsquared community is voting on the amazing 150 proposals submitted. The top 20 will be represented at the conference - all expenses paid - and duke it out for the top prize for the Netsquared Innovation Award. Of those even the losers are no doubt going to get plenty of attention.

Message from activist @ democrats.com: On April 28, Spell I-M-P-E-A-C-H for Congress

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Tobias Eigen

April 9, 2007 in Blogging, Politics, Middle East, Create Peace and Democracy. 0 Comments

I got the message below from activist @ democrats.com today - and I for one think it’s a terrific idea to put the word IMPEACH! everywhere on April 28. The sooner the better. I’ll start with this IMPEACH! Banner for the saidia.org blog - you can get the html snippet for your own blog here.

George Bush and Dick Cheney lied the nation into a war of aggression, are spying in open violation of the law, and have sanctioned the use of torture. These are high crimes and misdemeanors that demand accountability through the Constitutional mechanism of impeachment. Since Congress doesn’t seem to get it, we’re calling on all Americans who stand for truth, freedom, and justice to join us on April 28 and spell it out for them: IMPEACH!

Let’s put the word IMPEACH! everywhere on April 28. If you’re in Miami you’ll be able to voice your opinion directly to George Bush himself. If you’re in San Francisco, you can join 2,000 people who will use their bodies to spell impeachment on the beach in San Francisco and then march to Speaker Pelosi’s house. If you’re in San Diego, you can join activists at the California Democratic Party Convention who will tell Nancy Pelosi to put impeachment back on the table. And if you’re in Cleveland you can give your support to Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who is considering starting the impeachment process.

In New York’s Central Park, a crowd will spell out the word IMPEACH on the grass. Another thousand people will do the same at Coney Island, and then spell it out with pizza pies on the boardwalk. Both events are being organized by military mothers with sons who have served in Iraq. A pilot will fly a banner saying “IMPEACH!” around NYC and take aerial photographs of the human murals.

There’s an impeachment rally in front of Faneuil Hall in Boston. In Minneapolis, citizens will spell out “IMPEACH!” with canoes on a lake. That evening they’ll form the letters with bed sheets lit from below so that people will be able to read it from planes passing overhead. In Washington DC, 1,000 people will form a human mural to spell out IMPEACH! at the base of the Washington monument.

Events are planned for April 28th all over the country and outside of it, and you can find one or create one here:
http://www.a28.org

Continue reading ‘Message from activist @ democrats.com: On April 28, Spell I-M-P-E-A-C-H for Congress’

greenlightnigeria.org - it begins!

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Tobias Eigen

April 8, 2007 in Civil Society, nptech, Social Networking, WordPress, Blogging, Politics, Create Peace, Nigeria and Democracy. 0 Comments

In a comment to my Blueprint for a Nigerian Civil Society Election Blog, Tim Concannon announced greenlightnigeria.org - I’m glad to see this development and hope it catches on. Congratulations SDN and IDASA! Please help spread the word and make this - and the Nigerian election - a success!

greenlightnigeria.org

… it begins

Thanks for inspiring us to get this started, Mr Eigen, and for the support. We owe you and Kabissa yet another one.

Apart from some of the technology issues that people are raising here - and which you and I have talked back and forth offblog - I think Imnakoya and Sokari are highlighting the main challenges we have to overcome:

Nigeria and Africa isn’t up to speed with “blog” technology.

(I.e.: How to get Flickr, Technorati, Twitter, Wordpress, Joomla, Tagging, YouTube and everything to work together so you can do something useful with them.)

To be fair… I think some European human rights activists, who think they know a thing or two about websites, are also lagging somewhere behind in understanding how it all works together… I’ve learned a lot this week

The other main challenge for us, which Imnakoya and Sokari are correctly identifying is that the Nigerian “blogverse” is fragmented at the moment.

I think that is a reflection of Nigerian politics… things are not falling apart, so much as very slowly crumbling. (I have written about this here. I also write a little there about my experiences in Port Harcourt at Easter in 2003. On which note, by a coincidence I’m writing this on Easter Sunday 2007 so Happy Easter everyone :))

Greenlightnigeria.org is going to be an interesting experiment, to see if we can get a wave of enthusiasm for blogging going across the whole country.

In fact, why stop there? If this becomes a useful tool during Nigeria’s elections - with the biggest electorate in Africa - it must be possible to use the same technologies and approaches throughout the continent.

But we are very much aware of the fact that this is an experiment. April is the start of the process… the real crunch time is in February, when local government elections are scheduled.

For now, the main advantages greenlightnigeria.org has are for election monitors, activists and indepedent witnesses to the elections; all of whom want to be able to get information, experiences and opinions out, but want to minimise the risks to themselves of going public.

I am going to have to do a bit of editing and managing as we will have multiple bloggers, plenty of opportunity for people to interact through comments and in other ways.

We will have to manage the garbage-in / garbage-out problem with having multiple contributors… there’s no getting around our legal obligations as publishers in the UK, so a certain amount of fact checking is unavoidable.

For this reason we would love people to approach us to become bloggers - as well as to be “commenters” etc - but we will probably have to pick people up slowly, do basic ID checks, etc…

However, despite these limitations I am really excited by the huge opportunities for people to interact and use this as a tool to create debate.

More to come… -t

Corporate Corruption: NBC’s Silvia Wadhwa talks to Peter Eigen, Transparency International, about recent corporate corruption cases.

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Tobias Eigen

April 5, 2007 in Civil Society. 0 Comments

Once again, I’m the proud son today. My father was interviewed on CNBC about corporate corruption and the critical role of civil society in global governance. Businessses and governments won’t behave by themselves - and shareholders, driven mostly by profits, won’t keep them in line either.

New PhoneBlogz Post

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Tobias Eigen

April 5, 2007 in Blogging. 0 Comments

A new audio message has been left: CLICK HERE

Audioblogging by Mobile Phone? Round 2: Nigerian Election Blog Blueprint

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Tobias Eigen

April 4, 2007 in Africa, nptech, Web 2.0, WordPress, Blogging, Media, Politics, ICT4D, Loband and Nigeria. 6 Comments

When considering a Civil Society Election Blog for Nigeria, we realized fairly quickly that it has to be possible for people to contribute to it via their mobile phones. Post via the web and e-mail, yes, but also somehow via phone.

The obvious first destination is blogging via SMS, for which various tools are available. However, the constraints of SMS are immediately apparent - the limited number of letters you can send in a message, and that (apparently) SMS service is spotty in Nigeria. SMS messages simply do not always arrive at their destination. There are also not many carriers, and it seems risky to develop a strategy that depends too much on one carrier even if it seems likely that service will not be interrupted (after all, the police rely on their mobile phones as much as anybody else).

The next destination, audioblogging by telephone, is compelling. In fact, it’s so compelling that I’m surprised it has not caught on already.. especially in Africa. Why should it not be possible for activists and election monitors - and indeed citizens - to call a number and leave a message about problems they are experiencing or issues dear to them, and be able to expect their message to be immediately made available for listening on a blog?

We brainstormed on the topic, and it is remarkable how many affordable options are available. Read on to join me in looking into three of them - PhoneBlogz, Skype-In with Voicemail, and Evoca. Maybe you know others? None so far seem to make it particularly easy to provide a local Nigerian number to dial into, however it may be possible for some Mobile Activista to figure this out - so stay tuned for that.

Continue reading ‘Audioblogging by Mobile Phone? Round 2: Nigerian Election Blog Blueprint’