[DigDemo] We are the world

Joi Ito: Today was US-centric. In some S.E. Asian countries, "fairness" comes before "democracy." And there were a lot of white Americans talking about blogs today. Blogs mis elements such as community. And blogs are a lot about text.

Ethan Zuckerman: The Net is doing three things: 1. It's changing where we get info. 2. It's changing how we debate. 3. It's changing how we interact. How does this change when we get out of the US?

Blogs give great perspective on already-reported stories, but not as much in generating stories ("citizen blogging journalism"). As bloggers, we're very dependent on mainstream media. GIGO. Take a look at AllAfrica.com.

Joi: Mainstream journalists were asked: Why don't you cover Africa more? Answer: No resources and we don't care. How do I get myself to care? How to get others to care? It's not just about information.

Ethan: Many of us have the incredible luxury of having free time to blog. Many of the countries I'm in don't have that sort of free time. Is there a way to open ourselves to these other voices. Is there a way to use blogs as an amplifier for voices we're not hearing? Some examples:

IranFilter
Rebecca McKinnon's NKZone on N. Korea
BlogAfrica from Joi and Ethan, finding and encouraging blogs in Africa
Blogalization translation project
GhanaCrisis

Joi: Anyone who goes with Ethan to Africa is forever changed.

Ethan: We tend to think emergent democracy will come out of the highest tech medium. In much of the world, you want to be looking at talk radio. It's had an utterly revolutionary effecti n West Africa. In Ghana, public officials get grilled on the radio by their constituents. What's amazing is when you combine the power of talk radio with cell phones. Can we use tech developed for Dean or whatever so that we can set up an anti-corruption system: Whenever anyone asks you for a bribe, you can register it on a central server.

Joi: Americans mean by setting up democracies: Make it look like a democracy but have America in chharge. Why not just set up a monarchy? Maybe we shoujld talk about digital transparency instead of "democracy" since it comes with a lot of baggage.

Ethan: Voices04.org: letters from the world to America. Not many from Africa, but boy are the Canadians pissed. How could we set this up so that we would actually get letters from, say, Africa?

Ethan: We're trying to put together a trip to Africa, probably in September. Who wants to go?

Q: [Jeff Jarvis] What has to happen to expand the citizen initiative?

A: 1. Better hosting. People don't have credit cards to pay. We need free, high-quality tools. 2. Useful instructions in local languages. 3. It's all about leaders.

Q: Are you integrating machine translation into these blogging projects? And to what extent are you allowing indigenous languages from Africa to be online? And to what extent are you working with the already existing radio infrastructure?

A: In Mali we're doing a big project on local radio. Machine translation doesn't work well enough. But there's a great opportunity for people willing to translate blogs in order to build bridges. The Open Knowledge Network gets people in a community to put their knowledge online.

Joi: What can we do with spectrum in Africa? We should send some of the smartest radio spectrum guys to Africa...

Q: Why do you only talk about Web interfaceds? Computers are expensive in Africa. Why not cell phones?

A: In Ghana it's gone from 150,00 to 2,000,000 phone lines in the past 2.5 years, mainly in mobile phones. There are some really cool tools available. What we really really really need is a voice XML server that we can deploy for free that we can hook into the cell phone network. Not SMS. Voice.