It looks like we may be able to launch the "Digital Green Ribbon Campaign for Darfur, Sudan" this week at the Harvard Internet and Society Conference.
Update:
The military has long talked of the "projection of power" into particular regions. The Digital Green Ribbon Campaign is about learning to project the power of witness and the power of communications-enabled social organization into situations of conflict and repression.
This is an opportunity for civil society to learn to use the techniques of modern communications to develop rapid response communications systems that can penetrate national borders, can evade censors, and that can help people connect with each other to liberate themselves.
This is "Radio Free Europe" for the 21st century. As Nicco said of the situation in Ghana, whatever the intentions of the government of Ghana, Ghana is so much "on the grid" that repression can scarcely happen. Sudan and Darfur, by contrast, are off the communications grid..
Thomas Barnett speaks eloquently of the "gap states" that are off the grid of global society. The projection of digital access into such states could be a very low-cost, fast-response way to start to connect the citizens of these areas into the most interesting people across the rest of the world.
By the way, what is the status of WorldSpace radio? Barnett in his blog speaks of it here. Could WorldSpace help in Sudan? Perhaps by providing updates and logistics of use to the citizen resistance to the government? Not sure. WorldSpace is cool, but one-way.
Update:
I just spoke with Nicco, formerly Webmaster of the Dean campaign who now works on a variety of web-based initiatives.
In regard to the Digital Green Ribbon Campaign, Nicco called our attention to the use of ham radio to carry email in Haiti, as well as the use of motorcycle-based email pickup and delivery services in Nigeria--both could be implemented in Darfur and other parts of Sudan.
The ham radio idea is particularly powerful, it seems to me. As Nicco said, "Ham radio folks were the first bloggers."
I wonder if anyone out there knows folks in the ham radio scene the might have relationships in Sudan, or could work with us to develop them? The content of ham radio communications could be immeiately blogged, and might develop into "ham moblogging" and "ham podcasting." By the way, for the middle east and Africa we might want to rename "ham" to "lamb."
Nicco was recently in Italy and was invited by a
friend to tour the World Food Program situation room --which Nicco
describes as "very intense." The bottom line is that people are starving in Sudan, and the UN Food Program is crippled by lack of security. The tragedy is tracked day-by-day in the WFP situation room in Rome. Nicco is going to write up his impressions,
and we will post them here.
Comments