Wikipedia goes dark in protest at SOPA and PIPA

A few years back, before all this internet/smartphone/ubiquitous stuff, I worked for a media development NGO, helping to strengthen public-interest media in the developing world, as a critical part of public debate and social change. One of the ways we used to articulate why it was important to support these independent, public and community media was “imagine a world without media”… Unthinkable.

Now, with the space for individual communication and agency expanding and affecting so many facets of our lives, a flotilla of sites “going dark” is a critical action that demonstrates where we might all end up if this kind of legislation, which seeks to protect archaic modes of production and value creation, at the behest of entrenched lobbies and interests, is not stopped in its tracks. SOPA and PIPA must be stopped.

[And, if laws such as these pass in the US, then these flawed and failed legal standards will then be exported to other nations, with drastic results for free speech, and the creation of value (cultural, economic, and network) worldwide.]

1. Redefining quality:

We are seeing a huge increase in the quantity of content, but old markers of quality need to be redefined in this new era. Journalists are having to deploy traditional skills in new configurations and at different speeds, as well as sharing parts of their role to their networks on Twitter and elsewhere. Curation, facilitation and amplification are becoming core skills, alongside new forensic techniques for evaluating the accuracy and reliability of information. This could mesh powerfully with long-standing approaches within media development, such as foregrounding the perspectives and demands of those on the front lines of poverty and marginalisation, or increasing the diversity of sources. It’s incumbent on the media development community to engage with these new modes of doing journalism, and to help to shape the new markers of quality and value.

2. A new ethics of information and communication

When billions can communicate in real-time through text, audio and images, and images formerly seen only within a country’s borders or by a select few are now available instantly around the world, media literacy and information ethics become ever more important. Ethical practices in journalism are part of the picture, but it’s bigger than that – it’s more fundamentally about how we communicate, how we film, photograph, document our and others’ lives, and how we share this information, for example on social media networks. [Update: A journalist wonders, for example, about the ethics of using material posted to social networks, and whether there might be a signal of intention missing between "public' and "private".] Services like Facebook are trying to make it as easy and “frictionless” to share content as possible, but might “friction” – for example, considering whether I really should post that picture – be a good thing? And as more and more citizens acquire the ability to stream live video, for example, how will technology providers, regulators, NGOs, media, and citizens respond? How will “local cultural sensitivities” change and adapt in a truly globalised communication environment? Several of our interviewees suggested that looking at these issues through the lens of human rights provides a robust new basis for a new information ethics. Alongside these ethics, we will need to rethink how and when we might extend, for example, some of the statutory protections afforded to journalists to others engaging in similar work, but not affiliated with publications, and not working in traditional media forms. How might this benefit governance, for example? [Update: Here's a case from December 2011 where a blogger invoked, but was judged not to have followed professional practices necessary to, statutory legal protections journalists might have access to.]

3. Privacy, identity and technology are inextricable

Our privacy, our identities and our technology are increasingly linked and bound up with each other. Participating in new networked technology – using a mobile phone, having a Facebook profile, using a free email service – and taking advantage of its social aspects means trading aspects of your privacy, and linking formerly separate parts of your identity. Doing this unwittingly, whether you are an activist, official or journalist, presents new types of risks. It is clear that neither policy-makers nor civil society organisations understand these technologies well enough, if at all, or how they work – and therefore their understanding of the vulnerabilities and risks inherent in them is cloudy at best. We all need to understand these technologies, the people that build them, and the impacts they have better – whether by learning the basics of computer code, or about how mobile phones work, or how data is collected on web users – rather than seeing them as somehow “magical” or dismissing them as insubstantial. [Here's one excellent analysis, from October 2011, of how journalists could do better, by OSI Fellow Christopher Soghoian.]

3. All our eggs in one privately-owned basket

Technology, and video increasingly, is a critical part of civil society’s infrastructure. We need to invest continually in making sure civil society has the capacity to use it effectively, as it can magnify the impact of resources, mitigate isolation, act as a protection and so on. But as I have noted, it’s also a risk generator… Much civil society content is stored on private commercial web services, some of whom have less than stellar records on protecting freedom of expression. This content is also vulnerable when commercial web services are shut down – in these circumstances these services rarely consider donating their content to a public domain site like Archive.org [non-profits also fail to do this, but they host far less of other people's content]. Content is also vulnerable to takedown on the grounds of copyright – parodies, an honourable tradition in internet video, for example, are especially vulnerable to poltically-motivated copyright takedown. But copyright policy debates are dominated by the film, music and publishing industries and by polarised rhetoric, and policy-makers rarely have access to a balanced set of research and resources to help guide digital-era policy. We’re in the early days of addressing this public/private conundrum – and media development practitioners and donors might have helpful lessons to share from their experiences of more inclusive definitions of the public interest, bridging public and private media.

4. Agility

Programming cycles in civil society are too long and inflexible, and unsuited to the nature of more fluid and iterative project development (some might say, to the nature of reality.) Whether this is a result of donor requests for deeper and more robust evidence of impact, or some other root-cause, it is leading in some cases to risk aversion, and to a fear and masking of failure. Venture capitalists and technologists thrive on acknowledging and understanding failure – civil society and donors need to own up to, understand and use failures much more clearly, especially in the iterative ICT domain, which rarely responds well to rigid long-term logframes… Similarly, legislative cycles are too long and unwieldy to be able to cope adequately with new developments in technology and new uses for technologies. It means that policy coherence is fractured across and between different domains of government and intergovernmental policy, and that legal and regulatory mechanisms are increasingly out of step with the reality of practice. And legal communities and judiciaries around the world (here in the UK too) need to understand these developments better too, not least in helping to develop evidentiary standards for social media.

5. Civil Society

I’ve already said a lot about civil society, but here’s something specific that came out of a lot of the interviews: civil society needs to collaborate more and to compete less when it comes to the internet and the media. Civil society’s collective knowledge, understanding, networks and influence are enormous – CSOs are among the most trusted organisations and institutions in the world. But lack of coordination, lack of collectiveness, and lack of forward-planning are hampering this potential influence. We need to infuse spaces (and the companies that own them) such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook with the human rights ethics and values we espouse, but at the same time, we need to learn from other sectors in becoming more fluid, more porous and more collaborative – and if we are to exercise more credible influence, we need to understand the technologies and spaces we are talking about better, in the same way we understand trade negotiations, or HIV/AIDS, or the environment – or indeed, governance.

6. Donors

Finally, a word about donors. Donors – whether governments, foundations, individual philanthropists or crowd-funding sites – need to be more mindful and less risk averse in how they approach and evaluate funding for human rights and ICTs. They need to help rethink the programmatic model for a more complex, instant age, bring together groups of grantees more systematically, and function more clearly as brokers of ideas and as field-builders and -strengtheners. They also need to use their long and evolving understanding of M&E to help build less burdensome, more shared systems for documenting and measuring the effects of what they fund. Interviewees also called on donors to fund the development of a more systematic evidence base in this field. Finally, they need to use their long experience to help peers and grantees to avoid repeating mistakes of the past, particularly in instrumentalising, or “harnessing” the internet. [Here's a presentation I gave a few months later with recommendations from the final report on what donors can do specifically.]

Knowledge management, fact-checking in news organisations

Three Newsfoo discussions in particular prompted this post (alongside Baratunde‘s reminder to us all that The Onion has fact-checkers):
- Jonathan Stray asked first how news organisations could implement better knowledge management as they gather and process information – in a sense, a “context layer” for the web. As one person put it in another discussion, “the process of journalism is very lossy”, in that a lot of labour-intensive, useful information gathered in the process of doing journalism never gets used, or stored and made available to others to search or build on.
- Dan Schultz and Sasha Costanza-Chock talked about how to provide a “truth and credibility layer” for news consumers when they interact with journalism: how do you know if a statement reported online is true or not?
- a range of participants came together for a session specifically on fact-checking, looking in part of how Politifact works, and other initiatives (like this) enabling quite granular analysis of political and business discourse and reporting.

Also, a week before Newsfoo, Craig Newmark had posted on how he’s extremely dissatisfied with the state of fact-checking [UPDATE: and a new post from Craig Newmark at Nieman Lab continues to argue that fact-checking and -challenging is a critical part of how news organisations earn, retain and grow trust]. And a week ago, Ethan Zuckerman wrote helpfully about Morningside Analytics’ work on the US online fact-checking ecosystem, and Lucas Graves’ work on the landscape of fact-checking in the US. There’s a lot of discussion about the state of fact-checking generally at the moment, so I won’t retread the discussions had in these sessions at Newsfoo (not least since there was a fair amount of FrieNDA.)

So read on for a list of resources mentioned in these Newsfoo sessions, along with some others I’ve added to round things out a bit – I hope it’s of use. Most of these are US/UK only – who’s doing this in other parts of the world, in other languages? Thoughts? Additions? Let me know through the comments box!

–> making information gathered during the news/research process more useful
- SoundNote helps journalists, researchers and others link their text notes to raw audio. It’s a little like a LiveScribe pen, but as an iPad app. This all reminds me of Matt Thompson’s Speakularity - what happens when all audio and video content is automatically transcribed and collaboratively corrected and annotated?
- Palantir and their video explainers - Jonathan called Palantir’s knowledge management technology “state of the art”, and wondered whether this (or something like it) could be adapted for use by journalists, in addition to the existing government/intelligence and finance products, if it’s as secure as Palantir claim. Would this allay Christopher Soghoian’s fears about journalists and information security? In a similar vein, I’d also ask whether this could be used for human rights organisations, especially resource- and technology-poor ones worldwide.
- Jonathan also recommended reading Tim Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web - rather than an automated, algorithmic system that analyses the world for us, he conceives it as a better way for us of annotating the world.
- DocumentCloud came up at the previous Newsfoo as a key tool for journalists to share and annotate source material they have used in their journalism. Lots of people are talking about how to establish reputation for individuals online – commenters, journalists, and so on – but what about the source material itself? Do we need a score a bit like PageRank or some kind of citation analysis embedded in a piece of journalism to help readers to see how influential a piece of source material has been?
- And from the Mozilla Festival a few weeks before Newsfoo, a handbook for data-driven journalism is underway (version 0.1 here)
- a suggestion was also discussed to combine elements of knowledge management with fact-checking, by creating a simple checklist for journalists submitting articles to fill out as part of the workflow: have you put your source documents on DocumentCloud? Have you provided links to your online sources? Is this based on a press release? And so on… News organisations could choose to make any or all of this public for users to help them decide what to read.

–> fact-checking statements made by politicians and the media
- TruthSquad is a community-powered fact-checking system, aimed at fact-checking statements from all parties in the 2012 US Elections. It builds on previous experiments by NewsTrust: “Our first pilot took place the week of August 2nd, 2010, with the help of our partners at the Poynter Institute and our advisors at FactCheck.org [...]. Check our findings from this pilot on the NewsTrust blog — and the article from Read Write Web on NYTimes.com. At the end of 2010, we conducted a second pilot with MediaBugs.org and RegretTheError.com, focusing on statements from reporters or commentators (not politicians). In September 2011, we started a third pilot, to test our new fact-checking form and experiment with new types of claims.”
- NewsTransparency is a similarly community-driven site that focuses on individual journalists rather than facts. Both Poynter and a commenter (rather more forcefully) on the Knight Center at UT blog have expressed concerns about how easy it might be to misuse this kind of reputational system.
- Politifact aims to provide citizens with a rapid idea of whether a statement made by a politician is true, partly true or false. Here’s more about the service and how it works, and here’s their team. It’s part of the St Petersburg Times in Florida – which exercised Gawker this week, after the site announced its Lie of the Year, stoking a lot of controversy among liberal commentators in the US.
- Truth Goggles is a browser plugin being developed by Dan Schultz at MIT Media Lab, and uses sites like NewsTrust and Politifact to tell a reader whether statements made in an article are true or not – this is a deliberate limitation, he says, as he’s focusing on the user side, rather than the data source side. Dan talked about the need for a “truth and credibility layer” when reading or watching news online – here’s Dan’s introduction to the project, and here’s The Register’s take. Dan’s also working on a project called ATTNSPAN.
- Hypothes.is is a new non-profit initiative looking to bring sentence-level collaborative annotation of information and writing on the web – it’s based on an emerging open standard for annotations.  They’re looking for Fellows who can help them develop a robust reputation-modelling system (application deadline is Wednesday, 4th January 2012).
- The Washington Post and the UK’s Channel 4 News both have fact-checking blogs, and Ben Goldacre has written a science fact-checking column in The Guardian for years now. I’m sure there are plenty of examples of this kind of watchdogging (as Ethan’s post on Lucas Graves mentions).
- DisputeFinder (part of Intel’s wonderfully named Confrontational Computing team, which researched how people argue on the web) – a now-defunct Firefox extension that helped readers identify disputed claims online (via Dan Schultz).
- SpinSpotter, also defunct, was cited as an example of how not to do this…
- and no list would be complete without Snopes - an old stalwart of online myth-busting, with some journalistic moments. Very useful for cross-checking email scams, hoaxes (and for telling your mother that the email she just forwarded to 300 people is in fact a hoax.)
UPDATE (22 Dec) – Here’s a tool proposed by NewsMotion.org for rating contributions to journalism on the web: ReticulatorUPDATE (9 Jan 2012) – Global campaigning community Avaaz is soon to launch a news service, and is advertising for a fact-checker.

–> tracking, mapping and visualising hidden things
- Muckety maps and let you explore “relationships of the rich and powerful”. Here’s more about the team behind it, and here are some of their sources. If you want to use it, you need to license it.
- Little Sis is broadly similar (more about them, their team and their list of source data) but takes an open-source, partly wiki approach, has a few training videos for would-be contributors, and provides an API. They provide highlights from their data via their blog.
- Poligraft allows you to plug in the text or URL of a news article, blog post or press release, and it will show you “an enhanced view of the interconnections between the people, organisations and relationships mentioned in the piece.” It’s got a bookmarklet you can use too. This reminds me a little of the Media Standards Trust’s Churnalism tool, which allows you to put in the URL or text of a news article, and tells you (in theory) what percentage of it is recycled from press releases.
- Truthy is a meme tracker for Twitter – it’s based at Indiana University, and “helps you understand how memes spread online. We collect tweets from Twitter and analyze them. With our statistics, images, movies, and interactive data, you can explore these dynamic networks.” (The Guardian used a similar idea in a journalistic context, but built it a different way.) Here’s more about Truthy.
- I tweeted a link to Sentinel Visualizer Software, which is being used by human rights organisation Videre to analyse patterns of incidents and abuses – I’d be interested to see journalistic instances of this or similar tools.
- and it’s easy to forget that someone owns the way we search for information – CommonCrawl, by contrast, is a truly open crawl of the web – here’s where they are headed next.

Today/tomorrow in London it’s the UK Foreign Office’s London Conference on Cyberspace (programme) – which seems heavy on cybersecurity, anti-hacking, and cybercrime, but opened this morning with a long panel on internet freedom featuring, among others, one of my wife’s Article19 colleagues, Barbora Bukovska. I’ll be there on Wednesday, with a particular interest in the session on Safe and Reliable Access.

In Mexico City on Wednesday and Thursday, the Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners are meeting to discuss Privacy: the Global Age (programme PDF). I’m intrigued to see where this goes after following its previous iterations in Madrid and Jerusalem. Visual privacy still seems a little off the agenda, in particular – and with the rise in consumer-driven face-recognition, this seems like a massive missed opportunity. And interested to see also how Stephen Deadman of Vodafone approaches moderating his panel on Mobile Privacy in the light of widespread criticism of Vodafone earlier this year during the Egyptian revolution. Sadly I won’t be in Mexico City alongside another of my wife’s Article 19 colleagues, Dave Banisar (see his global RTI law map) sampling the chapulines… The Public Voice held a related civil society meeting yesterday, and the OECD is holding one on privacy frameworks today.

And then, on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, it’s London’s turn again for the Mozilla Festival. This promises a totally different tone and approach to the previous two – focused more on the possibilities of openness, collaboration, innovation – and should be fascinating. (No time to go to this either, however…) Lots of very interesting people there (more here), and here’s what they’re talking about.

[ADDED] Also NewsXchange is happening in Portugal right now. Always worth following along to get a sense of what is happening across news industries around the world.

(I’ll post up relevant summaries, video etc if and when these appear.)

You can watch the video live here, or follow the tireless Katherine Maher’s liveblog here. And we’ll try to take questions via Twitter for about 20 minutes after the panel ends at the hashtag #rightscon.

(After the panel, I’ll add any videos or resources we bring up or show into this page.)

Visual content and human rights - Content has changed our world, how do we manage its impact on society, governance, and privacy?

Panelists:
Sam Gregory, Program Director, WITNESS
Thor Halvorssen, Founder, Oslo Freedom Forum
Victoria Grand, Director, Global Communications and Policy, YouTube
Hans Eriksson, CEO, Bambuser

I’ll be drawing in part on Cameras Everywhere, but what topics and issues would you like me to raise with these panelists? Let me know either via a comment below, or tweet me.

When the Egyptian government shut down the internet during the protests in Tahrir Square, it was seen as a form of repression.

Should access to technology now be seen in the same way as access to, say, clean water? And does this mean that the companies behind those technologies have a particular moral obligation to their users?

The authors of Cameras Everywhere, a report published earlier this month by Witness, a non-governmental organisation focused on using video to expose human rights abuse, argue that they do. (Full disclosure: Sameer Padania is the report’s co-author and a friend.) They looked at the role of mobile telephones and social media, as well as technology providers including Google, Twitter and Dailymotion, in documenting human rights abuses.

Thanks, Rav!

But then a few months ago came the mammoth and fascinating SSRC report on Media Piracy in Emerging Economies. And now comes the extremely impressive Washington Declaration on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest, which takes a wide view across the range of the impacts of this IP creep, and still manages to present a compelling and specific case for a more progressive IP regime. I urge you to read it…

A few brief thoughts on the text from a non-specialist…

I was particularly heartened to see the centrality of human rights in the declaration and in the legal framework that should govern IP:

Use human rights, including civil and political and social and economic rights, to scrutinize expansions of intellectual property rights that threaten access to essential knowledge goods and services.

And likewise the importance of archives in the digital age (although it would have been interesting to see inclusion of human rights and justice-focused archives too):

Promote limitations and exceptions that enable libraries, museums, archives and other “institutions of memory” to fulfill their public interest missions, while assuring that cultural and educational institutions take advantage of existing flexibilities.

As well as the inclusion of a specific section advocating for “development agendas to infuse all levels of international and national intellectual property policy making” is critically important and long overdue.

I did note, however, the continued absence of something I’ve discussed with a few specialists working in this domain, and which comes up in the recent report I worked on with WITNESS, Cameras Everywhere, namely whether material that is directly related to human rights in particular might be given a special status within the definition of “public interest”. This section comes close, with its “socially valuable”:

Recognize the continued role of public funding for types of production deemed socially valuable and systematically under-provisioned by the market, such as small-market audiovisual, musical and artistic culture.

Notwithstanding that debate, the Washington Declaration stands as a hugely important step forward in building critical mass in civil society for more progressive IP regimes worldwide, and I’m fascinated to see what impact it has on policy-making and advocacy alike.

[Addition: here's a post from the professor at AU who hosted the meeting at which the Declaration was formed. He urges you to sign it - I'm #657...]

The report, which is based on over 40 interviews with experts in technology, media, human rights, policy and social media, just launched over on WITNESS’ website here (and here is a direct download link for the PDF file). We’re looking forward to your feedback and responses – let us know if you blog or write about it.