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Events in Egypt





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Conclusions from Tahrir Square




Digital Reverse Development

The idea of Digital Reverse Development is an observation and a call to action. It describes the way digitally-enabled social innovations from Brazil, Africa and elsewhere will start to tackle problems in the West. The part that's most visible is the digital: @Ushahidi is moving mainstream, and there's mobile tools from @FrontlineSMS and Android apps from @AppsForGoodCDI. But behind the tech are, as  @giantpandinha says, the social operating systems, the cultural behaviours that drive these innovations from the ground.

Digital Reverse Development is the mutant offspring of reverse innovation and liberation learning. Reverse innovation is a business concept which “...uses developing markets as seedbeds for product innovations to challenge incumbents in world markets” and is a hot topic places like the Harvard Business Review. Liberation learning (a.k.a. critical pedagogy) is exemplified by Paulo Freire, a radical Brazilian educator from the 1960’s who said "There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."

Digital Reverse Development is what you get if you combine new technology with methodologies of participatory development, as in CDI's Apps for Good. What leaks back to the West is innovation from cultures that haven’t lost the idea of community and collective action as much as we have. Innovation from elsewhere allows us to see ourselves differently.

The developing world also has more experience of crisis. Argentina's financial meltdown in 2001 prefigures some of the social consequences hitting Europe following the failures of the banks, and Brazilian favelas are in a permanent state of social crisis. What we know from the developing world is that, in a crisis, people fall back on their informal networks. What do you do in a society which has lost it’s informal networks - can we use digital reverse development to rebuild them? Can we, for example, combine the praxis of Argentina’s neighbourhood assemblies with the UK's emerging hyperlocal sites?

This, then, becomes digitally-enabled community development.  Community development seeks to empower people by providing them with the skills to make changes in their own communities. It involves changing the relationships between ordinary people and people in positions of power. The role of the tech in this is both practical and imaginary. It enables us to organize stuff in the real world, but also to re-imagine how we organize ourselves. The critical edge of Digital Reverse Development moves it beyond the voluntarism of the Big Society to an explicit call for social justice.

Here's a 5-point starter plan to increase Digital Reverse Development  -

  1. seed digital social innovation in so-called developing countries via initiatives like Social Innovation Camp and Map Kibera
  2. set up structures to encourage reverse digital development, similar to The Ghana Think Tank ("Since 2006, The Ghana Think Tank has been "Developing the First World." Problems collected in the UK and US are sent to a growing network of think tanks in Ghana, Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico, Serbia and Iran. These "Third" World think tanks propose solutions, which are enacted back in the problem-communities, whether the solutions strike us as brilliant or improbable.")
  3. build reverse digital development on top of successful South-to-North social innovations such as BRAC
  4. encourage the digital imaginary elsewhere through ideas like Afrocyberpunk, and carry out a cultural infection of the Western digerati with proto-movements like #londontropicalismo
  5. focus on women, who drive the informal social networks in developing countries and should be central to reverse digital development

Your comments  welcome.

Photo credit: CDI Europe (some rights reserved)

Mental Health Camp UK

The moment I spotted MentalHealthCamp Toronto I wanted to help make it happen here. Years ago I was a volunteer MIND mental health advocate in the old Hackney Psychiatric Hospital (a former workhouse) which was a schooling in one side of mental health services. Now that I'm an accidental digital innovator I can see the huge potential in a mashup of mental health and digital, which I can’t really put better than the MentalHealthCamp Toronto mission statement :

“We live in a society with access to the newest technologies, open access to information and the possibility to connect through social media and online communities. Our goal for MentalHealthCamp is to ignite conversations around how can we use these technologies to promote better mental health and help improve the lives of people with mental health problems.
Mental health concerns everyone. So if you’re a mental health professional, someone with lived experience of mental health problems, a family member or friend of a person with mental health problems, or have a passion or an interest in the topic, then MentalHealthCamp is for you! MHCTO also welcomes technophiles, change architects and all sorts of social media types.”

In the tradition of our times, MentalHealthCamp UK started with a hashtag (#mhcuk), exchanged in tweets with the organizers of the Toronto camp, and is now working its way into reality.  I hope that #mhcuk will be about positive mental health as much as it’s about mental health problems, which it surely will be as one of the other organizers is Andy Gibson of Mindapples. I also hope that it’ll get gritty and apply digital innovation to some of the more intractable issues around mental health, whether that’s the limitations of statutory care or the stigma of being labelled as ‘mad’. For an idea of topics covered in Toronoto check out their Take Action Videos.

And for me #mhcuk is just a start – an idea generator and constituency builder for the idea of a mental health Social Innovation Camp. There's already been a #sicamp pilot for a specific sector -  the team ran the Jailbrake weekend to find and support great ideas that could break the cycle of youth offending using simple web and mobile tools (see here for the film of the weekend).

There are already pioneering projects exploring the potential of digital for mental health, like Buddy, the social media radio from Sidekick Studios which they're developing with South London and Maudsley Trust. Some studies show that online social support is an effective means of mediating stress and Social Innovation Camp Central & Eastern Europe generated the Betterfly project for psychology first aid. On the other hand, this Psychology of Twitter article asks whether it's supporting self-actualisation or leading to increased narcissism.

Holding a mental health sicamp and extending some prototypes in to really useful working services also fits with my new role at Media for Development and my aspirations for the ways digital innovation at Media for Development can use the untapped potential of media to empower marginalised communities.

But first, #mhcuk. The silos of the mental health scene can only benefit from the peer to peer conversations that’ll  take place at Mental Health Camp UK, and the follow-up could inject a post-digital kind of co-production into the mental health scene. As the folk of MentalHealthCamp Toronto said


At this stage we’re looking for potential venues, potential sponsors, and (of course!) passionate participants. If you are any of the above then please leave a comment, head over to our wiki or join the google group.

photo credit: Lada Brunova

open data doesn't empower communities

Open data doesn't empower communities. I'm not saying open data is a bad thing, but we need to highlight the gap between the semantic web and social impact. Otherwise we'll continue to get swept along on a tide of technocratic enthusiasm where hope lies in 'a flood of data to create a data-literate citizenry'.

I'm inspired by the idea that nuggets of opened data could seed guerilla public services, plugging gaps left by government, but i don't see any of that in the apps list. The reasons aren't technical but psychosocial - the people and communities who could use this data to help tackle their own disadvantage and marginalisation don't have the self-confident sense of entitlement that makes for successful civic hacktivism.

So why the big push behind open data and the lack of interest in enabling communities? i think the crude answer is 'bread and circuses'. And anyway, opening up data is a technocrat friendly activity whereas empowering communities is messy and difficult. So we'll continue to be told that we can improve public services and create future economic growth by linking data rather than tackling power.

There are many missing steps between open data & an empowered citizenry that can fulfill David Cameron's claim that “People will be the masters. Politicians the servants. And that’s the way it should be”. It might be useful to contrast the histories of libraries and of Chartism - libraries are a necessary platform for an informed citizenry, but it takes the channeled anger of a social movement to focus that in to historic change.

Hackney Peace Mural

So which path leads beyond the sterility of SPARQL queries? Part of me says forget the whole thing. In a past life i helped collect data for the NHS, so i know that most government data is fake anyway (massaged beyond recognition as it passes upwards through the layered sphincters of bureaucracy). I'll keep an open mind to the results of the Open Data Impacts survey but i think we should sound the alarm that open data risks becoming (as Becky Hogge says) a kind of cargo cult.

The real struggle, as ever, is on the terrain of meanings. Who will write the narrative that we inhabit? And how much does data actually help here?

Adam Greenfield captures the issue in microcosm when comparing two local crime apps, Asborometer  and SpotCrime NYC:
"In my talks and writing, I frequently argue that 'data' in and of itself is seductive, its dynamic visualization more so, and that we need to be very careful that we don’t get drawn into real-world decisions based on such visualizations without due reflection.... The distinction is between an abstract fear on the one hand, given apparent substance by its inscription in seemingly authoritative numbers, charts and graphs — and the actual texture of street crime on the other, in all its tawdry, banal and occasionally appalling isness. You’re likely to have much more of a sense of agency when confronted with particulars than you would against inchoate percentages. And agency, as far as I’m concerned, is the name of the game".

So either we dump data for narrative, or we 'queer' the data in the full knowledge of its limitations. I'm inspired in that by the counter-cartographies collective (3Cs) who say in their report from a Chicago community mapping workshop:
"One big point of discussion was how to deal with the embedded biopolitics behind data sources like US Census data that we use in our maps — as 3Cs, we often talk about how we ‘queer’ data or statistics by pulling map stories out of them that they weren’t intended for. But data sources often come so tightly bound up with state politics, white supremacist racial policies, definitions of family structure, etc., that queering them might require more conscious work than we always put in".

Open data is not a magic recipe for righting wrongs. What will move things on is the stories that communities tell about their situations and their possible futures. If open data has a part to play in this it will be through the bootstrap empowerment of projects like savvy chavvysocial startup labs and transition towns.

my Media for Development manifesto





 daniel of the Nudge Me project

Daniel from the Nudge Me project at Jailbrake (Photo credit:




"There ain't no justice, just us" - war crimes impunity in the digital age

One of the darkest things about war crimes is that most of the perpetrators get away with it. From Pinochet to Serb paramilitaries, the men (& it's mostly men) involved in acts of vile horror carry on with their lives untouched by justice. Will the digital age have any impact on impunity? If you need convincing about impunity, the Guardian's Datastore has taken the data provided by the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague and compiled a spreadsheet of the cases that have been concluded. Set against the scale and duration of the horror, this is an essay in ineffectiveness. And listen to the women from the Omarska concentration camp recount their experiences on BBC radio. Their job was to clean the torture rooms of skin, teeth, hair; at night they were raped. Having bravely returned her home town of Prijedor, one the muslim women regularly comes face-to-face with her tormentors while the war memorial in the town glorifies the Serb 'war heroes'. I know from personal accounts that the spectacle of the ICTY is wholly failing to bring closure to those who experienced ethnic cleansing. But behind the horror there's the determination of some women to fight for justice. Having set up an association for women victims of war in Sarajevo, they have also become a detective agency, taking witness statements and tracking down & photographing perpetrators based on 'crowdsourced' identification of the men in the statements - a process that starts to sound a lot like the citizen journalism ushered in by digital tech. What impact could citizen journalism & social reporting have in unblocking the politically-motivated inertia of official war crimes investigations?
(Photo from Calling the Ghosts, A Story about Rape, War and Women by Women Make Movies) Another challenge is highlighted by the Kenyan election violence of 2007. On the one hand, this was the stimulus for Ushahidi, open source software which uses the lessons learned from Kenya to create a platform that allows anyone around the world to set up their own way to gather reports by mobile phone, email and the web - and map them. Ushahidi has now been used in many critical situations around the world including the first European application at our Social Innovation Camp Central and Eastern Europe by the Map Your Nazi project. Ushahidi is an exemplar of bottom-up digital innovation, but more than 2 years later no-one in Kenya has been prosecuted for the crimes against humanity that it helped to map. It turns out that neither a mashup nor the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court can have much impact on the political forces that trade power for impunity. My contention is that the real impact of digital comes from it's catalysis of horizontal process, social action that routes around institutional complicity. Could Ushahidi or something like it be used to convene activities of transitional justice - people-powered initiatives that take on the need to confront legacies of mass abuse? I'm not talking about the real-world equivalent of a Twitter lynch mob but holistic additions to criminal prosecutions that promote accountability and create just and peaceful societies. These would need to be more active than digital memorials. Perhaps we should apply the radical transparency of wikileaks to the archive of the war crimes court for the former Yugoslavia and pipe the results through citizen-up initiatives like we20? Whatever the challenges of transparency 2.0, the alternative is to freeze societies in a state of denial. Despite the efforts of Michael Portillo most Brit holidaymakers are still unaware that the beaches of Malaga contain mass graves of Republican sympathisers shot by Franco. Even though I count myself knowledgable about the Spanish Civil War, I visited Granada without knowing that the hills we strolled over still conceal 10,000 bodies. The psychic damage to Spanish culture is still in full effect thanks to the 'Pact of Forgetting' and the 1977 amnesty law. The transparency of the digital age is not just about open data but the surfacing of suppressed histories as starting points for transformation.
(Photo credit Mike Elkin &

Beyond Transparency: from Lessig to True Levellers

Lawrence Lessig's New Republic article 'Against Transparency' really rattled the cages of transparency fans and led to a spirited defence from Ellen Miller and Michael Klein, the co-founders of the Sunlight Foundation.

Lessig's opening diatribe is long-winded and sets up some straw men that Miller and Klein dispose of - like saying that transparency will increase cynicism because the public don't have the attention span to make proper judgements. I suspect the need for a complete throwdown comes from his lawyer-genes :)

But IMHO he wins out by addressing the core issue; that the only way to capitalise on transparency to increase trust is to actually change structures. So if we can never be sure whether a certain political donation did or did not influence a vote, we should take donations out of the process altogether. As Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El Fattah tweeted during the debate: "amazing how people r missing the point of @LESSIG article. disclosure useless without changing uderlying dynamics".

Despite the Sunlight folks efforts to 'annually directly train more than a thousand reporters and bloggers on how to use these datasets, tools, and sites to better inform their investigations' their aspirations stop at cleaning up the existing system. In this they follow the democracy geeks at MySociety, believing that current mechanisms would deliver fairness if only they were cleansed of unethical gunk.

For sure, we need transparency around finances, but cash is just a proxy for power. And power is a far trickier thing to map than money; it ranges from the psychological to the physical and involves us all in complex and contradictory networks. Our current institutions accrete power in ways that amplify its abuse while simultaneously producing narratives of denial.

Us liberal Twitterati have flexed our Streisand effect in the last few days to challenge the old trappings of power, in the specific shape of UK libel laws and #Trafigura. One rightful rallying cry for this was the 1688 Bill of Rights. But it's ironic that so many other flaws of our system are still glossed over, despite the fact that in the Putney Debates of 1647 the Levellers were predicting the need for a better system than the one we have.

While Sunlight say "the very idea of exposing government data feeds for outside developers is, at its core, about spurring innovation in the way we all perceive and contextualize data" I'm still troubled by The Unbearable Lightness of Mashups and the increasing tendency of information mashup initiatives to align themselves with the status quo rather than with movements for social change.

Last word goes again to @alaa: "activism that limits its ambition to exposing and reporting is useless if not harmful. work on redefining reality behind what is measured."

Observ. LIII. Of a Flea., from Micrographia by Robert Hooke

Will Politics 1.0 Swallow Government 2.0? a response.

Gartner analyst Andrea Di Maio has penned a couple of sparky posts this week about the more trenchant realities of government 2.0. In 'Will Politics 1.0 Swallow Government 2.0?' he characterised Tom Steinberg's decision to advise the Tories as heralding the way that gov 2.0 leaders will inevitably align with politics 1.0:

"What interests me, though, is how people like Steinberg in the UK or like Beppe Grillo in Italy feel the urge to join or take sides with a party, although they have been making independence and grass-root approach their mantra."

The reason being that bloggy tweety aggregation is all well and good but if you want to get stuff to stick in the real world you need established structures. "Perhaps going back into existing silos is the price to be paid for moving from vision to execution". That's the bit that makes me smile - the idea the the government, or any large incumbent institution, represent the best hope for executing anything flies in the face of experience, especially when it comes to anything that involves tech.

My sense is that it's easier for mySociety types to cleave to The Man because their agenda is to make current modes work more smoothly, rather than to question the distribution of power at a basic level. Shame, because the interesting thing about Stuff 2.0 is its potential to leak a bit of power back to a peer-to-peer model. That's not to deny the challenge of sustaining bright ideas in a hard economic reality, which is why I wrote about Lightweight Structures for Social Innovation Startups after the first SICamp. But politics 1.0 has the gravitational pull of a black hole and the only way to break the paradigm is to connect digital innovation with social movements that are the soil for its participatory roots. So, for example, if you really want to see government 2.0 you'd be better off doing digi with Transition Towns than with the Green Party.

And that's why I was rocked to see the title of Andrea's follow up post 'Why Government 2.0 Has Little To Do With Government'. Critiqueing the idea that gov 2.0 is about the ways "organizations and institutions can leverage technology to improve effectiveness and efficiency and to better engage constituents" he reframes the issue: "The problem is that government 2.0 is not about organizations and institutions. It is about the way in which constituents aggregate and socialize knowledge in ways that change their expectations and how they relate to government institutions." It's nicely articulated but stays on the safe ground of information and knowledge. I'd contend that the bolder win is for people to aggregate and socialize solutions i.e. actual functioning answers to social needs, whether stand-alone, grant funded or direct hacks of gov operations. That's what Social Innovation Camp has been trying for, and it'll be interesting to see which side of the wavy grey line that folk at the myPublicServices unconference will plump for.

Image courtesy of edmittance: part of his work with Transition Towns.

The Berlin Wall between civil society and social change

It's the weekend before Social Innovation Camp Central & Eastern Europe (SICamp CEE); one of the most intense experiments in digitally-enabled social innovation to have targeted that region. We've assembled seventy amazing people to build six great ideas in a manic 48 hours. Time to reflect on why it matters.

SICamp CEE is the guerilla sideshow to a Civil Society Forum (CSF) convened by the CEE Trust. In a bold move, this major funder of NGOs is questioning whether those dollars are having much social impact. The commissioned opinion pieces on the state of CEE civil societies reveal the depth of disillusionment and loss of direction.

The truth is that we didn't get rid of the Berlin Wall. Sure, there was a festive destruction of that hated bit of concrete, but the Berlin Wall and all walls like it are the physical parallels of a certain approach to the world; a way of dealing with life that works best with division and control. Read the insightful CSF essay Redefining NGOs by Primož Šporar: NGOs are "autocratic", "top-down" and "donor-driven", have an increasing "political dependence on the government in power" to maintain an "existence more closely related to the salaries of employees than the potential benefits for the target group". Bluntly, they are afraid that truly active citizens could undermine their "monopoly on problems".

This is the description of social change with a wall around it. Of barriers between people and the supposed agents of that change. Of hierarchical control that stifles innovation and the kind of "informal, ad-hoc and problem-oriented" local initiatives that Primož sees springing up outside of the NGOs. And I can say for sure that his description fits the so-called Third Sector in the UK as much as it does NGOs in Central & Eastern Europe.

Enter Social Innovation Camp! Of course we're not the answer to all that. But SICamp is like one of those early crowbars, digging at weak points in the wall, looking for leverage. And our leverage is digital because that enables people to connect and collaborate without the overhead of old institutions. It enables crowdsourcing, wikifying and the emergence of new possibilities by mashing stuff up.

And that's why we say SICamp is about "individuals using the web to change things" and not about making the third sector more efficient or effective. In my experience, people working in an NGO automatically filter out ideas that they know don't fit with the organisation's expectations, even if they're innovative ideas. An organisation bringing an idea to SICamp would want control and this would kill the magic. At SICamp the development of the idea is totally in the hands of the team who've formed around it. They can change it and play with it. They can be spontaneous and creative. But this is serious play - they want to win, and to win they need to create something that will have real social impact.

SICamp works. At least, our past events have generated enough real projects and ideas with legs that the momentum is growing. But SICamp CEE is a uniquely internationalist experiment, with campers from Romania, Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Poland, Slovenia, UK, USA, Germany, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. One of the criteria for selected ideas is that they can be applied in more than one country, and multinational teams will build them. SICamp CEE is truly internationalist.

SICamp and all similar hacktivist initiatives are using digital tech to break through the walls of resources and respectability, tapping straight in to people power by creating a space for free imagination. The liberatory potential of digital is that it allows us to do this without asking for permission. The tools are to hand - down with all Berlin Walls!

Digital Kung Fu for Civil Society


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