My name is Lorelai Kelly, I'm a research fellow with the Open Technology Institute here at the New America Foundation. What we do at OTI, well our mission really is to convene the nation's best thinking about internet freedom and open technology. We're working to build what you might call a connected global town square. And we also hope to act as a hub of impartial research, open discourse, innovative fieldwork and new technological development, so it's kind of a perfect fit for social media week. And we believe that in the 21st century, this is a universal human right, this ability to be connected and to communicate. And it has to extend to the internet and include access to open technologies and platforms. My project here is called Smart Congress, it's a pilot and I'm looking at ways to re-engineer and redistribute the expert knowledge function of the U.S. Congress and also to reinvent its process of public deliberation and citizen engagement, you know it's just a little task. So as we put out in the announcement, around the world there's just a profound shift that's underway where demands for self-determination are redistributing power from hierarchies to individuals and communities. Meanwhile, these old institutions that govern us are struggling to adapt to and they often resist these modern requirements of participatory government and inclusion. On the one hand, and this is very common in this country, big transparency movement, transparency is increasing, data is abundant, but systems of public accountability are lagging behind. I like to say that we've reached sort of a transparency plateau. So what do we do with all this transparency now that we have it? How do we actually create mechanisms for progress that our institutions recognize and can act on? And what are the role that individuals can play in building the tools of modern governing which are going to be redistributed? And right now we're in this big sort of beta test of what that's going to look like. And an important question for social media week is how is technology leveraging participation to build this new public space, along with sort of this transparency plateau? I think we've also reached sort of a realization that just volume and mass don't actually change policy content for the better. And that's something that social media has done is really accelerate and put benchmarks down for people's concerns and what they want represented. We haven't figured out really how do we get that into the policymaking process. And so this panel today is going to feature experts in case studies from around the world. And hopefully we'll open it up relatively quickly for an audience participation discourse. And what I'm hoping that the idea here today is to get you to think about how you as an individual have more agency and more power to generate positive social change and solve these big collective problems than ever before in human history, really. I also want to point out something that usually doesn't get talked about in the same room is that distributed power has both an upside and a downside as does what we like to call disruptive technology, social media access. Individuals working together accelerated by technology have catalyzed huge changes from 1989 in Berlin to 2011, Middle East, North Africa, it's ongoing today. On the one hand, on the other hand, access to lethal measures are more available now as well. It used to be just, you know, kamikaze pilots, suicide vests. Now we have everything from the AQCON network that's selling nuclear materials in a global market to the Syria's myriad insurrection cells who have basically crowdsourced their supply chain for weapons and advisory capacity. I'd like to define social capital because there's a lot of definitions of it out there. I'm considering it's relationships that exist in society that solve collective problems and they're usually based on a history of collaboration and trust. So trust is key here. The United States and the DIY power here and the reason I wanted to ask this about the United States is that I feel like this is a chance for us to see the United States in the scheme of things rather than as the scheme of things. And I'd like to take a different approach to this argument for or against American exceptionalism. So we're doubling down on distributed power in a couple of different ways. One is investing in disruptive technology like mobile technology for women. On the one hand, on the other hand, one of the biggest platforms we're investing in in the military is drones and drone strikes. So how do we think about this? Will phones build enough social capital to compensate for the animosity and blow that caused by increasing use of distributed violence? The fact that so much of Pakistan's public really intensely dislikes, not hates the United States, how do we compensate for that? Can we build a social capital accountability system to begin to better understand implications of distributed power? Is there something we could create that's an updated version of a policy tool like a reputation impact statement? How about dignity mapping? How about empathy coding? Shameless, I'm counting on you for that. And civil society really needs to catch up fast. We need a platform or a security strategy for civil society that's global. Because we need to nudge this critical mass of distributed power into a positive life-affirming direction. One of the focuses for us here at OTI and at New America is for the increasingly, is to how to mend or bridge this increasingly obvious gap between individual agency and centralized power. In other words, we've seen a lot of democracy activists, we've seen the narrative change, but they're really disconnected from the institutions of governing. I mean, just this week I got a note from someone in Egypt who said that they're considering a measure to now nationalize civil society. So bring it under control, re-consolidate it. And in a lot of ways, centralized systems, the ones that we rely on, even the privatized ones are failing to look out for the greater good. The government has ceded public obligations in some cases to corporations and sometimes they're also inadequate. This is the case with access to spectrum and broadband. Shameless is going to talk more about that. And the one thing I wanted to point out is what we hope to do and the reason I got these folks to come with us today is that they really have a lot of on-the-ground field experience. In fact, if there was a fluffy heart cloud machine, I would turn it on right now. Or John, maybe we could airbrush some of them in on the webcast because I really admire and love these people. I have the chance to work with over a number of years. And I feel like the example they're setting and the work they're actually doing out in the world is exactly what I'm talking about, bridging this gap, doing it in a positive, life-affirming way. We're going to start with Claire Lockhart.  She's the co-founder and director for the Institute for State Effectiveness. She wrote this wonderful book, Fixing Failed States, which you can come up and have a look at. She was one of the original people who worked on the bond process for Afghanistan now over 10 years ago and also lived on the ground. And Afghanistan has seen the unfolding. She was responsible for one of the biggest civil society funding and promotion programs that still exists in Afghanistan, the National Solidarity Program, is continually called on as an advisor around the world for prevention of the collapse of failing and fragile states. And I'm going to let her go into the details of that. Leila is the director of the Middle East Task Force here at the New America Foundation. She has a lot of experience on the ground in the Middle East, especially with Palestine and as an advisor at the United Nations and worked with civil society across the Middle East. She's going to focus today on Syria and what as being built by citizens within a war zone and how they're taking some of the functions of self-determination and governance on their own shoulders. Sheamus Tui is one of our, what I like to say, he's a speller and a counter. He's a humanities wonk who can code. And this is an especially valuable set of skills in the world we're facing today for Social Media Week where we're getting wonks in the room with young entrepreneurs. He is a digital communications expert here at the Open Technology Institute. We really connected when I came to OTI because he's also got a peace studies and conflict resolution background, understands process, understands systems. And he's now implementing the signature program of OTI which is called commotion. It's also known as internet and a suitcase which is building a mesh broadband network, a communication system for use here in the United States and around the world. So with that, I'm gonna just hand it over to Claire to start and then we'll move to Leila and then Sheamus and then open it up for questions. Thank you. Yeah, you can come up here or stay where you are is fine whatever is most comfortable. Thank you, Lorelai. It's very, very clear the world over that our institutions are buckling under the legacy of the industrial mindset and that the new waves of innovation are being driven by individual small groups and the social movements around the world are overturning power structures on a daily basis. In foreign policies, it's as much as we're confronting here in the US. As we look back, and the starting point for the book that I wrote with Dr. Ghani is that just six decades ago, the economies, the societies and policies were bounded by national boundaries and so many of the institutions and organizations that we rely on in our foreign policy were created with that way of working in mind. When at the UN there were just a handful of NGOs registered 50 years ago. Today there were thousands and thousands. So it needs no restating that the world has changed but diplomacy and foreign engagement are just beginning to. And much of diplomacy is still imprisoned by the frame of state-to-state relations. And what does this mean in practice? It means when US leaders, codels, delegations of congressional leaders visit countries, they visit the head of state, they visit the ministers. But they don't seem to have the tools to interact with the broad spectrum of civil society and change agents across the government. We talk of whole of government, we talk much less of whole of society. It's the same for the World Bank. The client of the World Bank is the government. The UN is composed as we know of member states. Now I get the sense and part of our research work is going back to interview people who've worked at periods in the past and what I just keep meeting 90-year-olds who've worked at different eras in US diplomacy and they talk of a very different type of diplomacy when it was about the science-to-science community and the education-to-education community. So I do think there's a lot that we can look back to in our own past. But I'm gonna turn to the field perspective. When we work with civil society groups in different countries, what are the kind of questions that we find that people are most excited about, most energized by? And the first is the question of citizenship. For so many people in countries around the world, they've just experienced life as being a subject. And so even the concept of citizenship is somewhat new, but the kind of conversation they want to engage in was what does citizenship mean? What are the rights and responsibilities? And what does that look like? What are the laws and then what are the practices that balances those rights and responsibilities? So citizenship is the first theme. The second theme that we find strikes a chord whether we're in villages in Indonesia or in Nepal or South Sudan or in Greece and states within the US, the second one is accountability. And what are the accountability mechanism and what are the type of accountabilities that they can hold both governments but also companies to account? And in each of these areas, both the definition of citizenship and the practice, the framing and practice of accountability, it goes again without saying that the role of technology has an enormous, enormous implications. And I think we're just at the beginning of the innovation curve in each of those. Beyond these broad themes of citizenship and accountability, what is it that empowered individuals and communities, how can they play a role within the broader question of the direction of their societies and states? And I think it's in three areas. The first is to determine what is it that their governments can do? And as we all know, it was John Dewey who said, the state is just a mechanism that does what people want it to do. But how do you produce that conversation between citizens as to what is it? How to shape the way that their government is shaped, the way that those services are performed? And in our book, Dr. Ghani and I, this was based on interviews with citizens across the world. What we found from those conversations from a reading of history, from readings of philosophy that the state in the contemporary era performs 10 functions. It could be nine, it could be 11. It'll depend on the context. But broadly, what are they? Weber talked about the monopoly on the use of force and the maintenance of law and order. But today, citizens expect their governments or their societies to provide a number of other functions. It's managing public finance, so revenue and taxation. It's managing the assets of the state and that could be minerals, it could be water, forestry, and so on. Provision of services, health and education, managing infrastructure, the governance of the market, international relations, citizenship rights, and then administration. And that's everything from passports to citizen identity cards to land records. And what we're finding in each of these areas, there's an enormous, enormous role for citizens and that's always been the case, but there's enormous potential for citizens to get engaged in how those platforms for service delivery can be organized. And this enormous revolutions taking place because of technology, because of citizenship participation. So take education with the advent of massive open online courseware. Enormous implications for how education is delivered. Same with health. Even law and order with crowd sourcing of security, neighborhood watch schemes. Again, each of these services can be re-engineered. So it's the question of the conversation as to what the government does, the question of how those services are performed. And then the third area, how can citizens hold power accountable, hold their governments accountable in how the money is spent, where the money flows and how those services are performed. So I think in my mind, as citizens think within their own contexts, the potential for tools that can help in each of these areas is enormous. And a question as so much individual takes place at the individual level and the community level, how does that mesh with these bureaucracies in the top down? So simply put, how does the bottom up meet the top down? And this is something I see being worked out again in the field in Indonesia and South Sudan and Afghanistan. And when it's right, then citizen energy creativity, the participatory way of delivering these services can mesh with the way that funding is allocated. When it goes wrong, it can cause terrible conflict. I'm gonna touch on a couple of examples and then close on some implications for policymakers. Starting with Nepal, my team and I had the opportunity to work with groups in Nepal just after the king had stepped down and the Maoists had ceased their conflict and it agreed to form a government with seven other political parties. And what was extraordinary was that throughout the years of conflict, networks of citizens had clubbed together to keep the essential services going. So even in the parts of the country where the government hadn't been able to govern, there were groups of citizens organizing education, organizing water resources, organizing healthcare across the country. So when the government came together, the question was how do these services that are being managing, rather like Belgium that kept its services going for more than 300 days without a government. The people in Nepal that kept their services going without a government. When the government came back to power, this question really became the operative one. How do these services, how does the bottom up mesh with the top down? And so I think a lot of the conversation was about how was the constitution going to operate? How are the rules going to be written? How is federalism going to work? That in a sense was a debate on paper and what really mattered was how did the organization of daily life take place? And in some of our discussions with citizens in the rural areas, when we asked them what does this new Nepal mean to you, they said citizenship. But what does citizenship? It was actually the physical card of citizenship because unless they were recognized as citizens and were given their card, they wouldn't enable them to have access to a whole range of benefits, services, schools and so on. In Afghanistan, I'll talk about the National Solidarity Program, the traditional approach to aid and delivery of aid, I think as many of us know, involves giving contracts to either big, big companies, to UN agencies, to NGOs. And what tends to happen is then there's a sort of trickle down and the big companies, subcontractor slightly smaller ones and smaller ones and smaller ones, the big NGOs, subcontractor little NGOs and by the time the money is trickled to the actual, the places where the people live in the neighborhoods and districts, a tiny proportion of that funding is available. And then it often tends not to be programmed. A decision was made in a capital city, thousands of miles away that this money would be spent on X, the villagers need Y, it's too bad, they get X. But hundreds of millions of dollars is sometimes wasted in the process. The question was how from a design perspective do you turn that on its head? And so what was created was a system that gave a block grant and the decision rights right to the village. The village had three very simple rules. The village has to have a village council, they choose how to have it. 99 times out of 100, they choose to have a secret ballot election. A quorum comes together to decide on the project, they post accounts in a public place. This is now operated in 28,000 villages and it's not alone. There's a similar program in Pakistan, there's a similar program in Indonesia and there are other programs like that in different places. What this did was create a framework for citizen action and decision making. The state was involved, it set the very basic rules and it allocated the funding, but beyond that it got out of the way. Now in a sense that's an offline framework for community action. I think one of the really interesting problems and there are people working on it is what kind of technology, what kind of tools, what kind of apps now people have mobile phones can exist to empower and mobilize this program further. I'm gonna close with a couple of almost questions and reflections for how the US interacts overseas. I think first it's to move beyond whole of government, to whole of society and open up. It's already happening, but open up increasing challenges for the scientific communities, for the tech communities, for the education communities to interact with each other and to move beyond a paradigm of state to state relations. The second is the aid complex. I think the US taxpayer is being shortchanged. Enormous sums and comparatively amongst the budget, they're much smaller than people think and I think every penny, every cent is worth it, but the US taxpayer and the beneficiary communities are both being shortchanged because there are far, far more efficient ways of delivery of partnering with communities that avoid this multiple chain of contractors with so much waste in the way and I think that an alliance between the tech communities and the design communities and thinking not just on a village basis because scale really matters, solutions have to be scalable, but there exists huge, huge potential for bringing innovation design and technology together for a new model of foreign assistance. I'll stop there. Thank you, Claire.  So I've been asked to speak about Syria and it's a privilege to be able to do so because I'm going to tell a story of Syria that is not commonly heard in the media these days. We see a lot of violence emanating from the country, but there is another part of events in Syria that tell a more hopeful story. At the same time, given the conditions in the country, we can say that any effort by citizens to claim power for themselves and to self-government, govern is really an experiment and a work in progress. And for me, when I look at the situation in Syria and examine it in detail in terms of how Syrians are responding to the contraction of their government and a situation of widespread violence, we see that there are many lessons that can be learned and issues that arise that are very common to transitioning states, but perhaps slightly more complicated in the Syrian context because it is a country very much deeply in conflict. So before I tell you about what is going on in Syria in terms of efforts at self-governance, I just wanna paint a little bit of contextual background. Syria, unlike many other countries in the Middle East and North Africa that went through an uprising like Tunisia and Egypt, was an extremely centralized state. It was an absolute autocracy and power was concentrated in the hands of a single party and the president. And there was no independent institutions in Syria. There was no judiciary that was functioning. It was essentially a corrupted agency producing decisions either by per-corruption or per the decision of the state. The parliament was essentially a non-parliament, an endorser of state decision-making. And there were municipalities because Syria paradoxically had very strong and still has very strong regionalized identities and socioeconomic disparities between the different provinces, between the capitals and the urban centers and the outlying rural areas. And so there were municipalities and there was a pretense of decentralization but that was really a perfunctory existence of these municipal councils. So citizens really had no individual power and the repression in Syria that the state used repression like many other states in the region but in an extreme fashion, there was no civil society. In Egypt, in Jordan, in Palestine, in all of these countries of the region, we accept the Gulf. We see remnants of civil society at different strengths and levels but in Syria, there were individual dissidents but no NGO movements and there was very little international presence in the country. There were maybe three or four international NGOs operating and they did so under the control of the government which had a say over their budget actually, a power over their budget. And any attempt on the part of the Syrians to create a movement that were to be inclusive of more than just individual dissidents was met with repression and died either dramatically and suddenly or over time because of arrests and detentions and inability to really build a movement. And finally, Syria is a very diverse place with many different minority groups as Syrians and Kurds who had their own language and their own historical experiences but who were denied the right to speak their language and exist in public as Kurds and Assyrians. Yet in their homes, they had that identity. So, and then the state was controlled by a minority faction, the Alawi, which drew on their history of oppression in Syria to justify their exclusive form of power and they aligned themselves with the majority population through merchantile corrupt networks. So, the system in Syria was one of tight control, really a very diverse society but one in which people didn't understand the diversity and they didn't have any identity outside of the state but yet they didn't see themselves represented by the state. And there was a high level of disaffection but an inability to organize and claim citizen activism. The internet was tightly controlled. There really were no avenues or outlets for activism. That's why when we saw people rise up two years ago it was a bit of a shock for many people who thought that essentially it took a lot of bravery on the part of Syrians to face down the brutality that continues until today. So, what have Syrians done in terms of organizing themselves and in a context of not having any institutional experience at engaging as civil society without clarity on what is to come of their country and in a context of increasing conflict and factional fighting. Initially, Syrians rose up and were demonstrating in the streets. They organized local activist committees that were essentially about recording demonstrations to show the world that Syrians were actually speaking out against the regime and seeking a revolution of their state and also recording the crimes of the regime. And that was a very linear process and one in which social media was drawn on and this was an effective tool and we've seen Syria as being one of the newest examples of where social media has really driven has been a driver of a revolutionary process. The Syrians also organized themselves into revolutionary councils and of course this is a limited aspect of society but the revolutionary councils consisted of former and new elites that were intending to provide strategic directions to the revolution but which I think effectively served as intermediaries between people on the outside who wanted to provide equipment and money to activists and this process of revolt so essentially serving as an intermediary between the activist committees and the outside funders. And then as the state responded with brutality and violence, people gradually organized themselves into relief and medical committees. So we see that this initial stage of organization and community-based effort in Syria was driven largely as a method to activate the revolution to get messages out, to conduct advocacy and to ensure sustainability and to meet the needs of the people via the relief and medical efforts. Now over the past year when Syrians adopted a strategy of insurgency against the state, the state has begun to contract and so there are certain parts of Syria that are considered liberated territory areas where the rebels are controlling and these areas are not huge swaths of territory and it's not an entire province that is liberated and no part of Syria is there connected villages and towns under one province that is liberated. These are pockets of liberated territory where rebels control the inside of the town but which they are surrounded by the regime and they continue to be shelled. Because the regime has contracted and the government is not functioning, people have had to respond to the needs of citizens by doing self-governance. So the latest incarnation in Syria of organization is what we refer to now as local councils where people are trying to organize their relief and other efforts under a rationalized, let's say executive body or power structure that has an identity that can receive funds and that can create budgets and distribute money to people and respond to needs. Now this is raising issues in the Syrian context which I think is relevant to questions of do-it-yourself power throughout the world. First is the issue of legitimacy and authority because what you have in Syria is a deconstruction of the state through this revolutionary process. We have a normative vacuum in Syria. People don't, the social contract has been dissolved essentially and power is now very diffused. So the question is when you have a situation of people rising up to take money from outside sources and to respond to the needs and provide services to citizens, who should perform that function? You don't want to rely on illegitimate agents of the past and you have to choose essentially who is going to fulfill that function. And you see debates within these local councils and contestations, I mean people are asking are they, is it traditional authorities, religious authorities or business elites who will perform this role? The younger generation is contesting this but people feel that there's a necessity to have traditional authorities on board in order to get things done and to build consensus. Yet there's a sense, there's a general awareness and hesitancy to see things fall back into centralized concentrated power. There's also revolutionary credentials which are now a factor in deciding who should have legitimacy and authority in leading self-governance. And there is to a large extent the question of resources and particularly external resources, international aid and private money that's being funneled into the country. If people have access to resources, does that automatically give them legitimacy and authority? And this is a big question in the context of Syria. And there's a threat that by pouring in money to different sources you could preempt a process of Syrians figuring out for themselves who will be their legitimate leaders going forward. There's a question of the longer term role. Are these going to be NGOs? Are they the foundation of civil society? Are they local governments? Are they service providers? Are they political representatives? And I think that this question is very much related to what Claire was talking about. How does the top down meet the bottom up? So we have people in Syria at the very local level trying to respond to needs and fulfill the needs of citizens but they know that there are more powerful sources that are trying to constitute a representative authority that can serve as a transitional government. And the question will be how will we merge these two these two levels of government and authority going forward? Another question is timing. When are societies ripe for self-government and community-based initiatives? In Syria, the security conditions are making it very hard for people to sustain organizational efforts and with massive funding coming in, that means that we could potentially see a distortion of power and authority when people trying to latch on to elements of centralized elements or entities, people that are known to outside forces in the context of chaos. And I wanna say a little bit about social media because I realize that there's a technical interest in the audience and then I'm gonna be quiet. But social media very much played an important part in the mobilizing of Syrians and mobilizing of citizens in the Arab Spring but it's also playing a very, it's also being manipulated by different forces. You see people utilizing Facebook and in order to establish themselves and to announce their existence and to gain resources and donations from outside forces by putting up a Facebook page, posting a YouTube video, it's a way of saying I'm here but then that creates a competition, a competition that's being played out on social media and in some cases unauthentic Facebook pages or YouTube videos are causing confusion about what's really happening on the ground. And so this has put information and data at a high premium and I think raises questions about how we understand what's happening in places where we can't reach directly and raises some questions about the use of social media. So I know I've been talking for a while. Do you wanna say anything about US power or do you wanna save that? Well, I mean, yeah, I can save it if you want to. Okay, we'll save that for Q and A. Okay, Seamus, take it away. I feel really fortunate actually to be on this panel because usually I talk to technologists and so it's very much so a focused conversation about a tool and its abilities and its capabilities and its drawbacks and you miss the way that people use the tool and especially talking about power. I'm gonna tell the story of commotion which is the project I work on that Laurel I was talking about more from the human perspective today and so excuse me if it seems a little bit rambly but the building of a tool when you talk about its development and its growth and commotion is very much so a growing project really does rely on the way that people use it, the way that people come up with innovative uses for it and commotion specifically kind of lives in this seat of distribution of power. Commotion is a tool that comes out of social, well, essentially infrastructure, the internet. In many areas and the first developers on commotion were working community wireless networks. The idea being when the internet can only reach the outskirts of your town or the center of your town and you wanna spread that use out you can put up a wireless router the same one you have in your house which is a little bit more powerful and beam that signal, share that signal and others can then take that signal and rebroadcast it. It gets a little slower every time but you can branch out what would be one pipe of internet to a town all over a countryside let's say. The very far outskirts will get minimal internet but they'd still get access and as we know all over the world and in America the disparity between those who have access to the internet and access to the resources on the internet can mean a whole world. The education perspectives, the ability to apply for grants and a lot of places if you wanna get apply for welfare or get on social services you have to go on the internet and apply. So just that bare access is very important. So Commotion started out as a tool kit for these community wireless access. It became very clear though in areas where there is repression and oppression when the internet can get shut off at any moment when there is that internet kill switch it becomes even more important to be able to use those tools you develop the social networking platforms you develop to talk to your neighbor. I mean I text people in this building from three cubicles away constantly. You realize that these tools are powerful even here, even without access to someone all the way across the world. And so the project was envisioned to create a secure way when everything goes dark when the internet goes out to be able to communicate across a city or within a township or even just us in this room I see multiple cell phones out right now and Commotion is built to help us so we could text each other right now without a cell phone network or the internet or wireless. And as it evolved we saw some really interesting things. One we built testbeds here in the US. Now Commotion runs on wireless routers it runs on Android cell phones it runs on Linux, Mac, PC a series of different platforms. So I can get out my laptop and it'll jump and talk to a router which will then send the message of someone's phone and that phone will then send it on to the next computer bouncing that signal bouncing the message that I'm sending either to the nearest access point to the internet to then be used through the existing infrastructure or to the next person whom I'm trying to reach. As we put up these testbeds we realized that people had amazing ideas for the use cases of Commotion no longer was it just this tool that could help you get that last mile access. It was also a tool to provide your own services. I could run my own Facebook here in town and not have to worry that they're gonna advertise to me and sell my data and collect it and give it to the advertising companies or maybe I say oh well my leg hurts a lot today and my insurance skyrockets. This is a carousal future tense obviously but it is something that we worry about when we deal with privacy and security and individuals ability to communicate using these new innovative ways to communicate. And so there was actually a community in Red Hooks which is over in Brooklyn and they came to us and they said you have this great technology and we'd really like to use it but we had test networks and we were still very much so in development and we pointed them to a grad student who was doing some really interesting work on these kind of local applications and Jonathan who actually now works for us because he did such an amazing job working with this community, the Red Hooks initiative. He worked with the community, he talked to them, he put up a router on one of their buildings and he built a local mapping application. A lot of people describe it as the Sims meets, oh gosh what is that called? Is it a HIMSA? No, it's essentially a mapping application where you can pinpoint on an event or an item onto this map and say I'm gonna have a party here or the street sign is broken so that the actual city can find out what's broken, what's working. Over time he added in a bus scheduler because the Red Hooks area only has one bus and it's never on time. So if you follow the actual schedule you're not gonna get your bus on time but now you can go up on this local router, it's all hosted at a school locally and say well when's the bus gonna run and it'll show a little image of this bus plotting along 30 minutes behind schedule as it moves through. All again, working with the community to find their needs. Another one of the first apps they put into place was a spotter for illegal search and frisks and Red Hooks is a big problem, a lot of people being stopped and frisked and there's no way to collect that data, it's all word of mouth. Well I can't believe this happened again, I was walking down the street and just randomly got stopped and so out of community need grew a local application, something that doesn't need to be broadcast all over the world. Transparency is less important for well I'm having a barbecue at my house or they really need to fix this street sign, my mail never arrives anymore. And over time they put together a really innovative set of applications and then Hurricane Sandy hit and almost all of Red Hooks went out. In fact they were some of the last to receive services, it was three weeks I believe until they got power back and even longer until they got internet access. I see Preston sitting in the back, tell me if I'm wrong with these dates by the way. He's one of our field members and knows far better the implications on the ground than I. And luckily the building that had this router on it was one of the few buildings that was still with power and with connectivity and all of a sudden it was a beacon of resources. You could actually use this to find out where the food trucks were coming, where services were coming, where you could get access to your needs in this time of emergency. And so very quickly people in the community said, well okay well let's get some more of these up, let's kind of build this out. We had people who before weren't really sure about putting a router on their roof, putting infrastructure on your roof to share access to something. You know it's almost as if you said, well can you put a solar panel on the roof and share it with everyone? Well that's my roof. And the emergency opened up something that was really beautiful which is that people realized that well, doesn't, the router is about clocks radio worth of power every day. So sharing internet connectivity for the charge of pennies a week is almost nothing. And all of a sudden red hooks got one too, I believe they have something like six to seven routers now spanning out all over red hooks. It was the primary infrastructure. And there was no centralized control unit. And talking about that bottom up meeting the top down, luckily the internet is an open architecture. We know how it's built. It's very easy to interoperate with the internet. That's why it's such a boon and there's so many wonderful tools on it today. So building a local community infrastructure, you essentially plug it in and now it has internet as well. It's internet as a service as opposed to the internet as the infrastructure. And so I don't wanna go on too long because again going deep into a technical project I'd rather have the discussion open up. But it does say something when you see something like commotion which is an ad hoc, I put up a router and you put up a router and they immediately start talking and interoperating. I open up my phone and turn on commotion and it starts talking and sending messages for others. It allows for a distributed infrastructure of information and communication. Which when if any of you have ever been in an emergency or been to the Super Bowl, not a single cell phone works anytime anything interesting happens. Cause everyone gets on their cell phone and goes, did you see that? And everyone's called drops because it's only profitable to build infrastructure for the median. That group of times when one or two people are on but they're all in their individual cells and we come together as a community in times of emergency, in times of need, in times of joy, those systems fail. But when we come together in times of emergency and joy all of our devices act as infrastructure. It allows us to come together as a system itself. And there's only again one example of this distribution of power. But even though we were building this tool for international use, we're building it for these situations when there are malicious acts of destruction of communication infrastructure. When people are actually turning off our ability to communicate because they want to manipulate the way that we see the world. The uses outside of even our own here in the US have been phenomenal. They've taught us a lot about what it means to take control over your infrastructure and kind of take power in that sense. I want to say where there's some commotion signals in Washington DC. Oh yeah, we actually have two community-led networks here in DC, actually. We have Columbia Heights has a network as well as Mount Pleasant also has a network, two separate networks. And I believe the hack space here in DC also has a lone node waiting for someone to connect them. So if you live between the hack DC space and Columbia Heights or Mount Pleasant, please let us know and we'll help you put our node on your roof and we can finally get these communities connected. It would be kind of fun. Thank you. I'm gonna go ahead and open up for Q&A because I see people in this audience, some from NGOs and some from institutions that I think will really be a lively conversation. We've got a microphone coming, so Will's gonna hand it to you. Go ahead. Thank you. This is Steve Luke from FHI 360. And I just had a question. How does the internet service providers think about this sort of solution? Are they cooperative or do they even know about it? Well, they do know about it. Or at least I assume they know about it. Community wireless networks are a pretty standard thing all across Europe. We have GweefyNet or we don't have GweefyNet. But there exists GweefyNet, which is in Spain, Nine Necks, which is in Italy, Athens Wireless Mesh Network, which is actually created out of a need for connectivity to the internet. When there was such spotty connectivity, obviously over a series of islands they were getting internet for days at a time. And so they started building up, there was actually no offense to them, a bunch of geeks in that region who said, well, I can build an antenna that can go from this island to that island and this island to this island. And it built up, again, internet as a service where they download Wikipedia every day when they finally get connectivity.  And essentially mesh networking, which is what we do, it was the standard for the internet, for wireless connectivity, at least. It was ad hoc networking. It was abandoned because not nearly as quick as when I just go directly and have central authority, leading to central authority so we can funnel all the traffic. But it really is an unanswered question. When we see people getting either sued or losing contracts over things like sharing their wireless network connectivity, the issue of what people do on my wireless network is becoming a big issue in America. I know Germany is also dealing with it pretty heavily right now. And so these are really pressing issues for this kind of world of technology. And I believe that they will lead, hopefully, to the better because when we realize that we have to control everyone on my wireless access point and my friend comes into my house with his cell phone or him here at New America, we offer wireless internet for anyone who's in the audience and wants to surf on the internet. If we have to monitor everything you do, if we have to block the evil and slowly refine and more and more and more, it becomes a really dangerous situation. So there's a lot of, and I mean we saw with Sopa and Pippa, people love their connectivity and they're willing to fight for it. So it is, again, kind of a coin flip right now. We don't know where it's gonna land, hopefully for the better or else. My last couple of years have been for naught. One thing that I wanted to actually ask Claire to clarify a little just because we have a diverse audience is the evolution of this notion in the U.S. government of whole of government approaches to intervention and engagement and how that needs to be sort of recalibrated and rethought because I remember 10 years ago I was on the whole of government bandwagon which is you can't just go in with the military, you need to bring in the diplomats, we need to sort of coordinate this at the same time. White paper after white paper came out of presidential directives on interagency coordination and it hasn't worked that great for the most part. So could you just clarify what that means for our audience because it's a really important stage in the evolution of the U.S. government. Certainly, and I speak to this as an outsider and observer but from what I've witnessed and sort of picking out where Lauren and I left off, I think the impetus to create whole of government solutions rather than sort of unilateral solutions was entirely understandable and presumably only a good thing instead of it's probably started with the military probably is the first to understand they can't act alone and from my experience of talking with members and leaders of the military they're saying we're not good at economics, we're not good at agriculture, we need people alongside us or instead of us, we don't want to be doing this and so the need where the U.S. is engaging in another country to have the State Department at least alongside was imperative and then I think even the State Department realized well, we diplomats, we're not good at agriculture so we want the Department of Agriculture there, we're not good at understanding how to build a judicial system, we need the Department of Justice there. So very quickly the whole of government grew and what I've witnessed is it's proliferated and then they had you coordinate amongst these different actors again an entirely understandable process but I think and it has a lot of good to it, it brings a diversity of perspective of capabilities but I think what it's done is created a very bureaucratized process and a very government led perhaps sort of top heavy process and I've seen this in practice in some cases let's take the dialogue between the U.S. government and the government of Pakistan. So the Pakistan government will bring all of its ministers, the U.S. government will have it, all of its departments they'll have probably a very productive discussion about how Pakistan is going to generate electricity to invest in its agriculture to upgrade its education systems and so on which in some senses was a very productive discussion but I think what it did is to elevate the state to state part of it at the expense of having a broader dialogue between different segments of society and so we are hearing different people now calling for much more of a whole of society approach which recognizes that while there are many, many talented people and incredible capabilities that the federal government has that America is much more than that and so much of American capability and ingenuity and talent and wealth resides in its citizens, in its NGOs, in its universities, at the state level and building these ties of, I've heard some people in so many countries saying, you know, we don't want your government, we want Apple, we want Microsoft, we want Google. It's bringing those different elements of American society, American power to the table in the right way. Now, that itself could become very unwieldy so what are the channels and what are the right ways to do that and I think that's where some of the examples from the past I've seen, for example when South Korea was establishing itself after its war many decades ago, one of the most productive programs seemed to be actually organized by the National Academy of Sciences which brought actually technologists, people who understood science and technology to work with the scientific community within South Korea to ask them what kind of technology, technological capability do you want to train your next generation for? What kind of industries do you want to develop and we all know what happened in South Korea. It was incredible but I think a lot of that came from something called the Career Institute for Science and Technology which came about from the scientific partnerships so that would be in my mind one example of those broader partnerships that lie a little bit, I mean it was a presidential initiative here so it certainly had the government was involved but it brought different skill sets and different communities to the table. Jerry? I'm Jerry Epstein, I'm from the government, I'm not even as far along as Lorelei, I'm 10 years behind her in terms of my thinking on this. Claire, your remarks in terms of social capital and whole society and whole government are really triggering a problem I'm wrestling with and I'm trying to see whether the non-governmental aspects of this problem are gonna be dragged down by it or the part of the solution and that gets that tangible versus intangible, social capital versus financial capital in terms of, the US government say in Afghanistan or Pakistan is making hundreds of millions of dollars of real investment, schools, hospitals, roads. It seems to me that can be completely negated by one burned Quran or one publication in Danish newspapers and so I don't understand how a country, at least a government, can operate in the world where a billion dollars of real money evaporates due to something completely intangible and when you bring the rest of society in, is that a solution? We're now dealing with the US the state not the US the government and maybe there's some insulation there or is the US perceptions gonna drag down, is the perception of the government gonna drag down the rest of US efforts as well? I'm still trying to think my way through this. Claire, do you wanna take that first? You just wanna jump on it too. I think exactly this question of perception and citizen perception of actions, it was always there and so I think it always did inform how a society and how communities react to foreign assistance, whether it's the US or any other actor. But I think you put your hands on it, the finger on it, the question of social capital that gets formed and how we measure that and how we understand that is incredibly important. It's not just the financial capital that matters, it's many other forms of capital that matter. So when one looks at a community or when one looks at the benefits and in fact, villages have said this to me when I went around the country to speak with citizens who are engaged in national solidarity program. I remember being in a village far west of Harat near the Iranian border and one of the women in the village has said to me, you know, it's not about the money. She's, and somebody said to her, don't tell her that they might take away the money. And I said, look, I don't actually have that power to take it away because it's a system that has its own rules. But she said, it's not about the money, it's the fact that before this program, she said we were all sort of in a heat, we'd just come back from exile and they were, they were living under intense, under animal skins with their animals all together. They said it was, it was, it's not the money. What this program did was bring us together and we began to solve our problems together.  She was literate and she could teach our kids. And what it did was generate this sort of new sharing economy or sharing society. So what it built was that social capital in which the money was really what it was was a catalyst but it was the social capital that was being built.  They say, no, the CDC, the Community Development Council, that's ours, but through it we talk to government. And this is the first time that we've experienced government as something other than repressive. We now, this is the first time that government has done something for us. So it, one, it changed what was valuable to them was that social capital. And what it changed was that perception. So I think sort of turning your question on its head. You know, it's one, it's, you know, yes, enormous amounts of financial capital can be undone or at least the sort of gratitude or the relationship can be damaged by an event, especially in an age of easy access to information. But also it's not really the money that counts. It's the way that the relationships get built and the way that the partnership is constructed that matters. And when it's right, I think a little bit of money can go so much further. Do you want to answer that? I would just probably say that, you know, the question is also where is the money going to and to whom and for what purpose and within what framework. And these are decisions I guess that you have to, you have to let communities define for themselves, right? And so there is, there is government in the US in particular, I think needs to consider more a posture of humility in terms of what it can, what its use is in the world in terms of these questions of empowerment and agency. Because the US does have a lot of foreign, is obviously a wealthy actor and can distribute lots of money, but, and that's useful for communities, but how it delivers that assistance I think has been very conditional and specifically conditioned on US strategic interests, which are very specific to the US and very much driven by United States domestic interest. And so one question I have is whether or not those, the interests of the US and of other societies can match up well enough that the ways in which the US intervenes cannot be damaging but actually helpful. And I don't see the US actually historically, traditionally adopting a posture of humility and allowing communities to decide for themselves.  So I think that that presents a complicating factor and I wonder if other donors haven't been more effective in circumventing the binding nature of strategic interest and domestic interest and how they deliver assistance. Dana, did I see your hand? If I can kind of caricature the three things, the three comments in the panel which was great a little bit to get to my question. Claire's got this kind of wonderful bottom-up organic process that she's describing. Over time, we can kind of use these tools to grow connections and to grow social capital across networks, but it takes time to do that and you gotta iterate the process and everything. Leila, your description a little bit is of kind of entrepreneurial manipulation of the game in the interest of my faction right now in this turmoil and everything like that. In between is Seamus with the mesh. So my question is where we wanna be is clearly kind of in Claire's growing of social capital but the challenge is the one that Leila, that you showed, right? I mean, everybody's going out and using these tools. They're using them like marketers use it to get their interest pushed. How do we use these tools in fast-moving, contentious, disputed problems to build the social capital and the network and the bridges and everything that Claire describes and that we all understand at some point we need in these challenges? Goodness, I thought I asked hard questions. Thanks, Dana. Do you wanna go? For Seamus. I'll give from the just the middle ground, the tools perspective.  I think that a large part of this is making sure that the institutions, the tools themselves and the use of the tools in the way that we understand the tools, whether they be digital tools or social tools, exists before that fast-moving situation. When there is crisis, it's no time to build a committee. It needs to exist beforehand. And I think a large part of that is the distribution of knowledge and training because when there is a crisis, those five people, the elite, the best people who you wanna have on the ground to do this aren't gonna be there. There are two of them are gonna be on vacation, one's gonna be injured. Like it's never gonna be that wonderful situation where the five guys who are prepping for 20 years are there. It's the people who they've told, oh yeah, well if you wanna restart the pump over here, you just do this and do this and do this, that's the guy who's gonna get to the pump. If you want, it's a lot like the, so when I was a youth, when I was in school, they always took the top kids in the class and they give them extracurricular and teaching them how to be a part of local governance and the like, yet, and I've been hearing a lot more and more recently, those are the people who leave town.  Those are the people who you wanna get into all those extracurricular programs because they'll be there. And when you need community adhesion, when you need support, when you need a good, strong local government, you want those kids because they're gonna come into your town, they're gonna join the local community, they're gonna find their way locally and build you a strong infrastructure. So as a tool maker, I say that when those fast, horrible crises hit or wonderful opportunities come, you need to have that infrastructure prebuilt. You need to have people, you wouldn't have had Twitter revolutions and Facebook revolutions if no one was using Twitter and Facebook to talk to each other. And they were just really lucky that we had this broad, wide-sweeping communication channel upon which they could get information out. If the tools are built, and now I speak of digital tools, if the tools are built to provide that security and that ability to get information out when it needs to get out, delay tolerance, mesh networking, for instance, these ability to make it so when there is, for instance, a communications crisis, everyone knows how to use those tools because when I wanna call my best friend or call my roommate and be like, hey, I'm going shopping, what do you need? I use the same tool as that tool when I say in the first 72 hours, okay, I see this building and there's someone who's injured in it and how do I get them out or how do I get to help? If those are the same tools, it becomes a lot easier for institutions to move forward in times of crisis. I'd have a couple of observations. I think the starting point is the clarity and transparency of the rules of the game and having as many of the relevant stakeholders as possible agree to those rules. And so in a very different context, really the same point that you just made, if there was agreement on the rules in place before the crisis hit, when someplace you can get agreement on the rules because a crisis hit and I'll explain, then when there's the flood of money in the chaos, because people have agreed to these rules, it actually then prevents this kind of very destructive kind of competition. So in the case of Indonesia, the reason that the program, which is now across 80,000 villages was able to be put in place was actually because of the Asian financial crisis, enormous imperative to get relief to the villages. But they realized that you couldn't use the government social safety nets because you'd have the same problem of money disappearing at the regional level, nor could you rely on NGOs because NGOs just would net, we just too prohibitive to pay people to cover 14,000 villages. So you needed this very simple system because the crisis had already hit, there was enough sort of sense of urgency that the rules could be agreed to. In Afghanistan, it was the tragedy of 9-11 had happened, the Taliban had collapsed and fallen from power and there was a vacuum. The UN agencies projects sort of all $2.7 billion worth of them, 10,000 different projects were on their way. But some people who'd been working for years in the country and have built a community forest system which had really functioned as a survival network during the 90s, understood the importance of putting this in place so they moved very, very quickly. So actually rather, I think it didn't take a long time. It was actually, this network was in place before the so-called emergency relief arrived. It takes time to mature over time, but it was in place and because it's such a simple system, it achieved national coverage very quickly. Now I do think the challenge is because right now in certainly in the case of Afghanistan, it's predominantly an offline national civic network. The challenge is going to be what kind of tools as that comes online and what effect will that have? Final point I think is where the most damaging kind of competition comes is actually competition between the different donors because they're often competing for the loyalties of the same villagers. And where we've seen the program really collapse is when somebody, a new NGO arrives on the scene with their new donor and even though the villagers now agreed on how they're going to create a community treasury and what kind of projects they're going to do and how they're going to allocate labor, then somebody will come and say, oh, we'll pay you all big subsidies for $20 a day and you get this sort of outbidding which actually breaks down that social capital. So again, how do we, how can we be much more cognizant in some cases? Your absolutely strategic engagement for an assistance is needed, but if badly designed, it can cause so much damage and particularly in terms of breaking down the social capital in the neighborhoods and in the villages. Leila, did you want to comment on, on in Syria, is there an approximation of a set of rules or anybody who could enforce anything? Right now, maybe that's the whole aspect of what is the United States doing or not doing that it maybe could? Does it have any power? I think as I try to allude to, there is this process of questioning ongoing which I think is healthy and surprising given the circumstances under which Syrians live. I mean, people in the country are raising questions about who has the right to take money from outside donors and what projects that money will go to when they don't have enough bread to eat, they don't have food, they're hungry, their homes are at risk of shelling. So I think that it's admirable that people are raising these questions and I think that we as outsiders have to allow them the time and the space to actually engage in those questions and in terms of the rules that they are sort of shifting through. As I mentioned, they're asking questions about the role of traditional authorities, religious authorities, business elites, they're raising questions about technocrats. There is this sense amongst Syrians that apolitical technocrats are the ones that can actually deliver and meet needs of transparency and accountability, but then there is a lack of capacity and there is also a sense that technocrats don't have the political pull or the weight, the social capital to move decisions forward. And people are very suspicious of people that had power in the past. So I think that there's a debate that has to go on and having that debate where your prior social construct in this whole state has been evaporated, I think, is a very hard process, but one that cannot be rushed. And so I think timing is a big issue and I think also in all of these questions that we're looking at, we're thinking of systems and tools, but individual agency also really matters as sort of basic as it may sound. I think policies are the aggregate of individual decisions. One decision can move in one direction or be implemented in a certain way depending on how individuals interpret their mandates and conduct themselves. And I think community cohesion and even the whole of government works best when people are conscious of their individual agency and that works to the betterment of a realistic, non-ideological ideal. Hi, thank you. My name's Catherine Harrington. I work with Women's Learning Partnership. We do a lot of civil society and citizenship capacity building in the global south and primarily Muslim majority countries. And one of the challenges that we face in trying to do this, particularly when using social media tools is we find that in many of these countries you have kind of an elite group or a young urban educated group that are leveraging these tools and they're speaking with the international community and that's incredibly powerful and important. But in looking at how to make that bridge between the activists on the ground that have access to these tools and to the international community and then the grassroots populations particularly when you have a kind of post revolt period where these tools were leveraged incredibly well for mobilization but now we need to get to the real thorny tough work of democracy building. So I don't know if you guys have any examples from your work that kind of speaks to that, making that connection or just your thoughts on that challenge and particularly with women too that tend to have less access to these tools, thanks. I can give you some examples from the research I've been doing just in the US Congress. I mean, the transparency rules that have passed in the US Congress over the last two years have been transformative. The extent to which we're gonna act on them for policy making purposes is still unknown. Just, I think what you're talking about is evident and I can only really give you the perspective here on the ground is what I call sort of mass and volume is this tactic of making a lot of noise, getting something on the radar screen, shutting down legislation. Same thing happened in Egypt. Get rid of the dictator. Then what happens after that? What happens the next day? Last year, this time of year, we're gonna shut down the internet. Wikipedia goes dark until you get rid of this awful piece of legislation. I think the more important question or lesson from that is why weren't there technologists in the room when that piece of legislation was being written? And the truth is now that we can so improve the supply chain of knowledge into policy making to our lawmakers. And that, it can only happen when you have the willingness to be transparent and Congress, the House is ahead of the Senate. The executive branch is doing, it's uneven but it's really done a lot in the last four years. But in Congress, I'll just give you some examples. Right now the way you can, with the webcast hearings and almost all the hearings are now webcasts, how you can do fact checking or expert knowledge support in the room by sitting in Minneapolis or Tennessee or California. The biggest problem in Congress right now, and this sounds cynical and I'm not a cynic, is that expertise doesn't have a political constituency that counts. We haven't leveraged distributed knowledge in a way that matters to members of Congress and their districts. And the only way it's gonna be able to compete against sort of noise and money right now. And noise and money are decision rules for access. I've never seen, well there is some quid pro quo but it's not that bad. A lot of it is, this is the path of least resistance. Another example is that Kony 2012 video. Everybody, millions and millions of views around the world. Do we have helicopters for peacekeepers in South Sudan? Do we have them? It's just basic, basic stuff because what happens with these loud movements is that they don't get sophisticated fast enough into the policy making process. Other things that you could do right now is crowdsource or I don't actually think it's really important to make a distinction between crowdsourcing and curation. Crowdsourcing is good for some inclusive purposes. It's good to accelerate ideas. But policy requires expertise and not all information is created equal. Curation is like what a museum curator does is this careful shepherding and custodianship of expertise. And that we haven't figured out how to do very well. So first of all, I mean the Iceland did this with their constitution but I talked to the guy who organized this crowdsource constitution. He said, stop saying that, stop calling it crowdsource. It ended up being 150 people. And the Facebook social media aspect of it was great for public input. A lot of people don't want to be in the room at the last mile making these decisions. And we've got to figure out a way to sort and filter that. So it's not just noise and money who are making the decisions for us. You could right now create surge teams of retired Foreign Service Officers to just create better situational awareness for members of Congress. I'm from Northern New Mexico. There's probably a hundred retired Foreign Service Officers in Santa Fe. My cousin's one. He sat in Mogadishu for 20 years. He now lives on the border of Colorado and New Mexico and gets really mad all the time about how lousy our policymaking is. But he hasn't ever sort of been put in a system given an on-ramp to be part of an advisory team with no financial conflict of interest for Ben Ray Lujan, who's the member of Congress from that area. There's, I think so much of what we're talking about here is just a change of mindset. We have the social capital. This country's really good at innovation and at risk-taking. How that will fit into foreign policy now and reinventing institutions is the big question. Another example would be reinventing public deliberation. There's no reason hearings have to happen in D.C. Just takes an official venue and a repertoire. It takes a couple members of Congress who have the authority to do this. But what a lot of people I talk to in civil society don't realize that members in the House at least are in their districts 10 to 12 weeks a year more now than they were two years ago. Have we followed them there? Have civil society created opportunities for them to take risks? Are we supporting them in the way that we want them to take risks, giving them the expertise, following up, creating a standing support system, crowdsourcing or curating witness questions on the spot research? Every function of Congress, I'm a congress geek and I work there for 10 years, but you could do things like the special order process. One minute's in the morning. Those things aren't exclusive to the club on Capitol Hill. And I think the more transparency comes up and the more people are able to map influence of purchased access, the more sort of cartel-like our system has become as a private market for influence, the more people who have not been participating fully in the process need to get involved. And I see this in academia all the time, that just not, they're not in the room when they need to be and that's not a problem anymore. We solve the timing problem. And I think the corollary of the countries I work on is very parallel to what Lorelai's described in the US and what you've pointed to that there is often a bias towards the capital city and there's a super empowered beat and especially the division has become particularly marked given the access to internet and phones, the divide between urban and rural, between rich and poor. And I think one of the questions is then exactly what are the means to compensate for this and to get out to a much broader range of voices from across the country geographically to different constituencies within the women's community. And I think that requires good old fashioned social science of mapping the stakeholders and understanding what the different categories are and which are the excluded communities and who are the people excluded from voice because they're not online or because they live in remote areas or for other barriers that mean that their voice isn't heard, their voice doesn't count. And I think for a while until, the mobile phone is changing things rapidly and we've seen a number of countries acquire incredible mobile access, but as I understand it, not all the devices are capable of running apps and so on. So for a while, some of this dialogue is gonna be offline and I think we have to, especially as more and more of the dialogues move online, how do we ensure that we compensate for that? So we're not replicating some or exacerbating some of these bias. And I think that means, so take Yemen for example, which is moving into its national dialogue. Superbly impressive group of women, but many of them are in the capital city. So how does one get out to other towns, villages, ensure the voice of women is heard through that national dialogue in the writing of the new constitution? And I think here there have been a number of really great examples from peace processes that have worked, the town halls that were held around the country in Columbia. The way that South Africa managed its process after the end of apartheid, which really took the dialogue out to rural areas and showed that it was really inclusive. So what we're seeing now is a number of processes, both in the Middle East and other countries, the importance of civic dialogue, number of national dialogues about to start, but looking at these models, ensuring that there is inclusive as possible becomes terribly important. Is it just a matter of increasing access, providing more computers, more cell phones to people that don't have access, providing these tools to women? I mean, it's just provision of media tools enough. I wonder if you have a question, answer to that. I don't know if I have, or at least I know I don't have the answer, but I do have an answer, or at least a begging of the question. I love books. I love to read on paper because it's, I hate reading about my family and the events that are happening on Twitter and Facebook and all these other tools. And I've seen some amazing things done and I've heard about some amazing things done in a translation from the digital to paper. And I am a complete social media geek and techno geek, obviously. I love the tools, I tweet, I use Facebook, I use alternate social media that is open and private and free and the like, but someone once said something that really hit me quite hard, which is open source really closed because I build open source software. It's the code is open to anyone. I bet I could count on one hand people in this room who would care to actually read that code or would have the ability to read that code. And we find that with open source projects, we have a bunch of geeks who get in a room and they build this beautiful application that you run from the command line. And you have to type in, you know, dash, flag, four, type, and it's beautiful and it's open and it can free everyone from controlled data, but it's impossible to use if you're not one of the techno elites. And trying to teach my grandmother how to use Facebook, I realized that even the simplest and most beautifully designed interfaces are still, you know, just a mess to someone who doesn't understand how computers work. The woman could type almost 90 words a minute, she was a secretary for almost her entire life, but put it on her computer and she was confused.  And so I think that translation from the digital to whether it be paper. And there are projects that do that with people can use mapping applications to say when they've, I think it's called bad date and it's for sex workers who've been abused. And they actually produce reports to hand out on the street paper reports from what people have sent in with their phones because not everyone has access. And also, and a lot of times, people don't know about the tool unless they're on the right forums or in the right place. And I'm on 50,000 social forums and I check news feeds and have RSSs and email listservs. But I get one email from my mother that has a video of a cat. And I always watch that cat video because I care about my mother. That's the only way she's gonna send it to me. But if my mother decided to send me a letter, it's gonna have far more impact than even that email because I know to filter it out because it's gonna be a cat and I'm absolutely sure of that. But if she sends me a letter, I'll open that immediately because I trust her. Even if, even the same person, it's my mother. The medium counts. And something physical tangible that sits there and takes up space on my desk, I will get to, I will address. And so I think, to a certain extent, access is, yes, getting more devices, but devices are really expensive and paper is honestly a lot cheaper. And so finding ways to translate between the digital to the non-digital in a way, and also send back, whether it be, you can write into the local newspaper and we'll tweet it for you. Or however that process happens of the interconnection between the paper and the digital and getting that feedback loop built, I think is very important because digital literacy is hard. Access is very difficult. I mean, disparity, digital disparity is a giant, not just because computers are hard to use and because they're expensive because a lot of times there's no need or no no need. And if people get access to the information through means that are secure and safe. And by secure and safe, I mean in the comfy teddy bear way, not necessarily secure and safe in the digital way, it'll be far more easy for them to see the use of these tools and to want to interact in these spaces, in my opinion. Again, an answer, not necessarily. And you mentioned digital illiteracy and I think we shouldn't forget illiteracy is still a major challenge. And I think we're very close to meeting the millennium development goal of every kid in primary school globally. I think there are just 80 million kids left to go, but there's an enormous legacy of lost generations around the world in some countries and Afghanistan, Pakistan cases in point where the illiteracy level is very high. So at the risk of sounding very old fashioned, I think in some cases it's going to be in person consultations and dialogue and the old fashioned medium of radio which isn't going away and remains very important. So looking at, yes, exactly, communications across multiple channels remains important. It sounds like a lot of bridge building and real conscious bridge building and convening and catching up to reduce the disparities is a consistent theme here. I don't know what time it is actually. This thing says three a.m. Oh, okay, so we ran over our time. By three minutes, perfect. Well, thank you everybody for coming. I hope you enjoy the rest of Social Media Week and this was a sort of an ice breaking conversation. This whole idea of distributed power and doing it ourselves. And if you have ideas about this idea of how do we create a security strategy for civil society, I would love to engage in that. I'm sure my colleagues and friends here would as well. So thanks so much for coming and hopefully it's cleared up outside. Thank you.


A group known as Ukum Elid Assembly in Benway State has called on the people of the state to rule out blackmail, propaganda and blame games on the security situation in Benway. The group in a press conference in Makodi reacting to the series of headsmen attacking Ukum and other local government areas of Zone A set the people of Ukum extraction a relief with the motion moved by their Senator Emmanuel Udende to draw the attention of the National Assembly and the presidency to the genocide visited on them stressing that a motion was for the interest of the people of Ukum. The group through their secretary, Tia Soaka, however called on the governor to marshal out plans in solving the security situation in the state in line with the oath he took to protect the lives and properties of the people. The security situation in the state is beyond grandstanding postures. It is not a matter we should treat with key gloves. We must take cautious efforts at addressing and admitting the realities and not some blame games we call on the governor to sit up and marshal out plans to resolve the security situations in the state.


Less than one year ago our alliance said that we were going to transition from assurance to deterrence. Deterrence means you have to have capability, the capability to compel or defeat a potential adversary. You have to demonstrate that capability and you have to demonstrate the will to use that capability. So the exercises are a part of that demonstration of capability. The potential adversary has to believe that you would actually do that for them to be deterred. To communicate to a potential adversary, do not make a mistake, do not make a miscalculation, we are prepared. The United States is here and we're going to continue to participate in exercises and we're excited about doing that for as far as I can see.


In my book, I have talked about Bengal in South Asia. Bengal is a geographical unity, a geographical entity surrounded by mountains on the three side and just on the north of to the north of Bay of Bengal. So, in my book, when I use Bengal, I mean both Bangladesh and West Bengal. Chores are little river islands, little pieces of land floating or inhabiting the space within the two banks of a river. So, in a way, they are land because they are with the pieces of land made of sand and silt, but at the same time they are known land because they are within the river. So, Bengal was like an environmental laboratory, big laboratory where they were trialing all these high modernist ideas of controlling nature, controlling rivers, water engineering, river engineering. Water planners looked at the rivers and thought that these rivers are bringing down water, but actually these rivers are bringing as much sediment as they are bringing down water and they started to build these embankments which led to postcolonial dams and led to the formation of these chores. A chore can disappear overnight when the flood water rises.  The people who live in on chores are absolutely poor, you know, wretched of the earth.  Chores will come appear and you want to stabilize it, it will go away on its own next, you know, tomorrow. They do not believe in controlling nature and that is the essence of my book, Dancing with the River. They dance with the river. As the river rises and falls, they step up and step down and they dance with the river, matching with the river's tune. Chores and chore people are examples that people can live with nature. Even when the nature is not necessarily a benign nature, it is making people vulnerable, making people very poor. But it also makes people very resilient to these changes, sudden changes. While my study is located on 11 chores, so it is a very microscopic study. Microscopic study looking into how even how people spend their monies. So, what we did is we kept financial diaries, people looking at how people spend their monies over a period of, you know, different season, over a period of one year in different seasons, because there are, you know, peak seasons and lean season. And surprisingly, the lean season is the monsoon season. When rest of Bengal, for rest of Bengal, that is the peak season. And for chore people, the peak season is during winter. When rest of Bengal is not farming and for them, it is the lean season. In the chores, there are two communities. One community was more Bihari community, who were fishermen. And they gradually, their livelihoods become defunct and irrelevant as the water in the river went down, decreased, the river flow decreased due to dam construction. So, they left and in their place, Hindu migrants from Bangladesh came and settled. So, in my book, there is a little bit of on that migration story and the partition of India and how Bangladeshi Hindus are migrating and coming into the chores. It was a lot of fun doing the research, actually. So, new way of looking at the world, new way of thinking about environment.