On passing through the immigration control at the airport in Tehran, she was asked by the officers if she has a Facebook account. When she said “no”, the officers pulled up a laptop and searched for her name on Facebook. They found her account and noted down the names of her Facebook friends.

This is very disturbing. For once, it means that the Iranian authorities are paying very close attention to what’s going on Facebook and Twitter (which, in my opinion, also explains why they decided not to take those web-sites down entirely — they are useful tools of intelligence gathering).

… we have to be fully prepared to be quizzed about any online trace that we have left

… this reveals that some of the spontaneous online activism we witnessed in the last few weeks — with Americans re-tweeting the posts published by those in Tehran — may eventually have very dire consequences, as Iranians would need to explain how exactly they are connected to foreigners that follow them on Twitter

We’ll hear more of this. Karl, chalk one up for opacity.

Via Carl Nordlund and the fabulous SOCNET list. I love you guys.

If you’d like to contribute to the preservation of the garden as a wild space Emily posts community updates on her blog. And imagine (le) mile-end has been doing lots of great organizing. Here’s their report from the last meeting.

From the introduction:

Lot #2334609 is a terrain vague — owned by the Canadian Pacific Railway, owned by the City of Montreal as of June 2009, used and cherished by the community, the only green space in the Mile End. People feel free in this space. They don’t ask for permission to picnic, grow things, create art, or gather around a campfire. It’s open and wild, unlike most city parks.

To outsiders, it may look like an abandoned field. But, as you will read here, the community has appropriated this space and wants a say in how it will be developed. Development is scheduled for 2009-2010, as part of the city’s $9-million revitalization of the neighborhood.

Emily Rose Michaud, through the Sprout Out Loud! gardener’s collective, created the Roerich Garden project in November 2007. Using this project as a starting point, this book provides a history of the meadow and documents the many ways the community uses and relates to this space. It then connects what’s happening in the Mile End to similar local, national, and international initiatives. It documents what the community wants for this space, as captured through a series of participatory consultations. And it asks questions about how we engage as citizens to imagine and create more open cities.

If you’d like to get (infrequent) updates about this project and the book you can sign up.

Listen to him on EarIdeas or read the text of the talk on the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (RSA) website.

He’s writing theory. And like all good theory, it’s simple. Thompson lays out five “fundamental modes of societal life” —  hierarchical (government, public goods), individualistic (markets, private goods), egalitarian (equality with fettered competition, common-pool goods), fatalistic (inequality with unfettered competition, club goods), and autonomous. He does not talk much about the autonomous mode, I assume because it means opting out — not engaging.

The problem, he says, is that we’ve been stuck swinging back and forth between the hierarchical and individualistic, the old public versus private debate. He calls this “the pendulum model” and explains that it is inadequate and misleading. Instead, he suggests we imagine the four modes as four different colours of algae competing over the surface of a ping-pong ball. When one gets bigger the others shrink. The edges are constantly changing. It’s possible for one to take over the whole ball. This is a dynamic model — a “transactional sphere” — that allows for deeper debate and the development of a broader range of solutions to social issues.

Take, for example, the Brent Spar oil storage structure, the deep ocean disposal of which was proposed by the market actor – Shell – and approved by the hierarchical actor – the British government’s regulatory agency. Had there been only markets and hierarchies, the Brent Spar would now be mouldering in its watery grave. But of course it isn’t. Another actor – Greenpeace – from a third way of organising (egalitarianism), forced its way in by audaciously, and very publicly, landing a helicopter on the structure as it was being towed out into the Atlantic. The disposal plans were abruptly abandoned by Shell (motorists, particularly in Germany, having stopped buying its petrol) and the British government was left with egg all over its face (John Major, the prime minister at the time, called Shell’s senior managers “wimps”). Shell then entered into lengthy discussions with Greenpeace and the Brent Spar has been cut up into cylindrical sections to form a ferry terminal in Norway. Those British citizens who managed to remain ignorant of the whole affair (and there were many) or who found themselves convinced by whomever they happened to have last seen arguing their case on television, were evidently bound into none of these ‘active’ ways of organising – individualism, hierarchy or egalitarianism – and constituted a fourth and rather inactive way – fatalism – assuring one another either that ignorance is bliss or that “nothing we could do would make any difference anyway”.

What’s interesting about this? Five things. First, the dynamic push and pull: each approach attempts to disorganize the other, each needs the other to organize against.  (Reminds me of the Amity-Enmity Complex). Second, it allows for difference to be creative and constructive. Third, it provides a framework for thinking, arguing, and coming up with the best solution (or re-solution). We need more deep, intelligent debate. To explore all options. No more ad hominem arguments — against individuals or groups. Fourth, it shows that we can make a difference — Greenpeace succeeded in changing the course of events. Fifth, the concept of “clumsy institutions”:

So, are there any practical guidelines that we can draw, once we’ve detached ourselves from the inadequate and misleading pendulum model and embraced this indeterminate and disequilibrating table tennis ball? Yes there are, and I’ll mention just two of them. First, Ashby’s law of requisite variety tells us that a control system must always contain a variety equal to that which exists within that which it aspires to control. In other words, if one or more of our coloured patches are being reduced to points (as they likely will be if the control system we are applying lacks the requisite variety), watch out! And this principle, slightly more elaborated and tied-in with the classic theory of pluralist democracy, leads us towards the somewhat counterintuitive notion of ‘clumsiness’. Clumsiness is where each voice (each of the policy stories that are generated by the four ways of organising) is (a) able to make itself heard and (b) is then responsive to the others (see Figure 2).

Here’s Figure 2:

See? Isn’t that a nice way to imagine making decisions and developing policy? Clumsily fighting and finding a good solution. Together whether we like it or not.

Finally, there’s Thompson himself. Read his bio or see him on video: soldier, himalayan mountaineer, anthropologist, researcher, environmentalist, thinker. Amazing cool guy. Would I ever like to find a man like this ;)

Of course social reporters can use add the #PCamp09 tag to their tweets, which are aggregated on front page of their website.

Great use of social media and attention to virtual participants: livestreaming video, twitter, skype. And of course great topic:

Democracy is a game in which we all make the rules. How do we make this serious game more inclusive, more fair, and more fun? Participation Camp will provide the spark for an explosion of sharing, experimentation, and collaboration around this question. Participants may attend a wide range of physical and virtual presentations (or deliver one themselves), compete in a conference-wide participation game, or roll up their sleeves in a hands-on workshop.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Iran has one of the world’s most advanced surveillance networks. Using a system installed last year (and built, in part, by Nokia and Siemens), the government routes all digital traffic in the country through a single choke point. Through “deep packet inspection,” the regime achieves omniscience — it has the technical capability to monitor every e-mail, tweet, blog post, and possibly even every phone call placed in Iran. Compare that with East Germany, in which the Stasi managed to tap, at most, about 100,000 phone lines — a gargantuan task that required 2,000 full-time technicians to monitor the calls. The Stasi’s work force comprised 100,000 officers, and estimates put its network of citizen informants at half a million. In the digital age, Iran can monitor its citizens with a far smaller security apparatus. They can listen in on everything anyone says — and shut down anything inconvenient — with the flip of a switch.

…

Other than trying to shut down many parts of the Web, we don’t know what, precisely, Iranian security forces have done in response to the online protest movement. It’s unclear whether they’ve actually planted disinformation online or tried to trace images and videos back to their original posters. But the uncertainty itself breeds fear. Several times over the last couple weeks, rumors have flooded the Web that the government had already gotten wise to Twitter and was actively seeding the movement with fake news. It was a stark example of how the psychological repression characteristic of authoritarian regimes — the constant fear, the inability to trust anyone — finds particularly fertile ground online.

…

On Wednesday, a reader alerted the Lede to an Iranian government Web site called Gerdab.ir, where authorities had posted pictures of protesters and were asking citizens for help in identifying the activists. That’s right — the regime is now using crowd-sourcing, one of the most-hyped aspects of Web 2.0 organizing, against its opponents. If you think about it, that’s no surprise. Who said that only the good guys get to use the power of the Web to their advantage?

Important stuff to think about. Read Darin Barney — this connects to what he writes about in The Network Society:

In the network society, power and powerlessness are a function of access to networks and control over flows. Access to significant networks is an important threshold of inclusion and exclusion, a condition of power and powerlessness…. Control over access to these networks becomes a crucial mechanism of power and domination.

Anonymous blogging is important. But we need more because it won’t help if the whole network is down. Which brings me to Foulab and other hardware hacker spaces, which I got interested in because of Beth‘s involvement with a similar group in Seattle. Then I watched her talk at Berkman: User, Hacker, Builder, Thief: Creativity and Consumerism in a Digital Age. Beyond being fun to hang out at (Liam and I did a Pico Cricket workshop, and I did an intro to basic electronics and Arduino) I think they’re part of Plan B. Could you build an alternate network? Or do we go back to radio? Forgive my ignorance here — just trying to figure this stuff out.

And policy. And just a plain old basic understanding how things work. How do our networks operate? Who controls them? How? Knowing this is essential.

Ushahidi (“testimony” in Swahili) is an experimental web platform that crowdsources crisis information. People can submit reports via text messaging using a mobile phone, email, or the web. Looks like it can be deployed (sorry, geek speak) for a specific crisis. It was most recently use to track events in Gaza and was also used in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Users can submit or track by category: riot, looting, sexual assault… (reads like humanity’s list of shame). The results are aggregated onto a map. They can also upload photos and post links to videos and news stories.

The project is free and open source, with developers from Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, Malawi, Netherlands, and the United States. If you’re a developer and would like to participate you can join here.

And on top of everything, the design of their site rocks ;)

Related: Blogging for Good Governance

Station C is a space that fosters community, collaboration, innovation. People come here to work and connect. We are a hub for creators and innovators: entrepreneurs, geeks, artists, social activists.

Station C is part of an international coworking movement, which brings together the best elements of the office, cafe, and salon. This movement is built on a set of common values:

• Community — We are a community that thrives on connections and mutual support. Everyone participates, contributes, and benefits. Station C members take the initiative to care for our collective space, welcome visitors, orient new members, start conversations, and host events. We also reach out and contribute to our local community.
• Collaboration — We work together, intentionally as part of project teams or in an ad-hoc way when  someone needs a hand. We help each other out by sharing ideas, learning, solutions, resources.
• Openness — It is beneficial to share and build on each others’ ideas and knowledge. We encourage this in a concrete way by working at shared tables in an open space. We’re a modern agora, providing a public space for informal community gatherings and encouraging folks to drop in and work with us for the day.
• Diversity — We want people with different ideas, perspectives, and ways of working. People from different backgrounds. People at different stages in their life and career. Diversity means occasional misunderstandings, annoyance, and arguments — all of which are a small price to pay for sparking creativity and avoiding groupthink.
• Sustainability — Financially, Station C was designed to sustain itself and the community, not to make a profit. Each of us is responsible for finding our own work. Environmentally, like everyone, we are still learning and finding ways to lower our impact and promote sustainable products and behaviors. We need to do more and welcome help with this.

Please post comments here. See comment, below.

Omar in front of IRIS, November 2005. I think at this point I was trying to get him to smile.

There are certain people I don’t maintain relationships with. Haven’t seen them in years; don’t keep in touch. But I like them. Fiercely. I respect what they do. And I know that we’re all working toward the same goal: repairing the world. My friend Karim Kasim, in his lovely poetic and Egyptian way, says that these people form our “circle of love” — they somehow sustain you by the simple fact that they understand you, share some of your values, and are in the world doing their thing.

Omar Azfar was part of my circle. He died yesterday — January 21, 2009 — of bone cancer. I’m shocked and saddened. I didn’t even know he was sick.

I met Omar in October 2004. We worked at the IRIS Center, a small consulting firm/think tank founded by Mancur Olson in the Department of Economics at the University of Maryland.  We were both there until somewhere around the spring of 2006, when I left to work freelance with the aim of moving back to Montreal and he went on to a professorship at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, part of the City University of New York.

Omar was an economist and an expert on corruption, decentralization, and governance. He did his undergrad at Oxford in philosophy, politics, and economics, and his PhD at Columbia.  How bad-ass is that? He was a slender, good-looking guy with a slightly English accent. Smart and friendly; sometimes arrogant and vain. (I had to take his photo once for the IRIS website and he gave me such a hard time, but as you see from the photo above I luckily captured his beauty and intelligence.) He would wear a ripped t-shirt and jeans to work and then clean up real nice when it was time to give a presentation.

We worked together on a few projects: a corruption assessment toolkit, a summary of a technique to figure out which survey respondents are lying, explaining how corruption undermines healthcare. I looked through these today to remember him. (You can type his name into the IRIS search tool to see more of his writing.)

His passing is a loss to all of us.

You can download photos I took of Omar in front of IRIS in November 2005 (Photo 1, Photo 2, Photo 3). I’m dedicating them to the public domain. Take them and use them well.

I noticed two things:

Andrew Graham, the NDP candidate from New Brunswick Southwest, does not support reforms allowing free access to scientific and survey data gathered by government institutions. First, kudos to Mr Graham for signing the pledge — that’s the kind of leader we want. Now onto his comment, which explains his reasoning: “My main worry is those who would take tax-funded research and use it for private corporate profit.” Although it does not entirely address Mr Graham’s concern, my understanding is that if you licensed the data under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license then anything that was built on the dataset would have to be shared in the same way, thereby allowing anyone — government, civil society groups, or nonprofits — to benefit from the value added by the private company. But I’m no copyright lawyer, so let me know if I have this wrong. Then, of course, the argument can be made that companies pay taxes too. So why shouldn’t they have access to the data? But that’s a whole other discussion.

The other thing I noticed is that none of the MP candidates from Outremont have signed the pledge. They are: Marcela Valdivia (Bloc), François Pilon (Green), Thomas Mulcair (NDP), Lulzim Laloshi (Conservative), and Sébastien Dhavernas (Liberal). C’mon folks! Let us know where you stand. Sign the pledge, or at least tell us why you disagree.

We’ve just launched our first project — ibelieveinopen.ca — a site that collects pledges from Member of Parliament (MP) candidates to commit to making five improvements to government transparency. The site also collects signups from voters to show that we care about transparency and that we’re paying attention.

Check out the results to see if your MP has made the pledge. If they’re not, you may want to ask them why, because the commitments are basic to good governance:

1. Support reforms that increase government transparency and accountability.
2. Make campaign promises specific and measurable, and report progress on promises and their metrics at least semi-annually.
3. Publish the content of his or her daily schedule, including meetings with lobbyists and special interest groups.
4. Support reforms allowing free access to scientific and survey data gathered by government institutions.
5. Support reforms that make it easier for Canadians to obtain government information they have a right to know.

Once you sign the pledge, you’ll be sent an email that you can forward to others to promote this great project. Easy way to get involved!

The article gives a great overview, but it does not provide any practical links. So here they are:

• Anonymous Blogging Guide: A step-by-step way to protecting your privacy and your safety
• Blog for a Cause: How to use blogs as advocacy tools for political and social change (in English, Spanish, Arabic)

Beyond using blogs, people are also using cell phones (see FrontlineSMS and Mobile Active) and Twitter for similar types of work (see Andy Carvin’s Can Twitter Save Lives?, Ethan Zuckerman’s Never thought of using it that way…, and the KM4Dev’s community’s Twitter knowledgebase).

Let me know if you come across any other ideas or resources. These technologies can also be used in other sectors. Environmental activists, for example, can use them to alert authorities and mobilize people to combat illegal logging or poaching.

PS. You can also use Twitter to take care of your plants while you’re away saving the world. Check out Botanicalls.com.