Radio Tijera

I’ve been volunteering at the garment worker center for over a year and half now, helping with a workshop where garment workers learn how to use audio recorders, conduct interviews, record sounds, mix live, recorded, and musical elements, and other community radio skills. You can listen to some of this material here: http://garmentworkercenter.org/audio. I’ll write more about the project later but for the moment I’m just making this post because I need to upload a 10 minute segment of material produced by this project, so that folks at Nuestra Voz over at KPFK can download and burn it for tonight’s broadcast! If you’re in LA, tune in to 90.7 tonight at 9 to hear the show. Our segment will go on around 9:30. Thanks Freya!

Audio links:

• Radio Tijera (web qual, mp3, 10meg)
• Radio Tijera (hi qual - aiff, 110meg)
• Radio Tijera (hi qual - wav, 110meg)

Last year I spent some time with friends brainstorming an ‘advertising service’ that would be focused around providing simple tools to help people replace all those web ads with ‘ads’ or announcements / art / news / other content from socially and environmentally responsible small businesses, left printing collectives, worker-run cooperatives, or whatever you’d like to imagine. We even put in a draft proposal to the Knight News Challenge, and called it SOCRATES (SOCially Responsible AdverTisemEnt Service) as a code word. Made it past the first round, but then rejected. Anyway, the other day I came across this potentially interesting project to break open the online advertising model:

I signed up for a beta tester account, but haven’t received anything from them yet. Is it just vaporware? I hope not. It would be pretty amazing if this kind of thing blew up, and suddenly the whole model of monetizing user eyeballs collapsed in a whirl of participatory ad making, selling, and buying. Especially if the mindshare gets captured by someone who uses it to push green, labor friendly, sustainable production and consumption…

I can dream, can’t I?

Anyway what follows is our SOCRATES idea from last year. Enjoy.

Socially Responsible Advertising Service (SOCRATES) “Don’t Just Don’t be Evil. Be Good.”

WHAT IS IT?

SOCRATES is a web based advertising service designed to connect socially and environmentally responsible, local, and small to medium enterprises (SMEs) with web administrators and web audiences that care about supporting such firms. In the process, a portion of the advertising revenue is used to support monitoring those firms that want to be listed as socially or environmentally responsible.

In the long run, SOCRATES will help web users avoid ads they don’t want and receive information they do want, help web administrators monetize their content by supporting socially responsible and local firms, help socially responsible firms reach customers, and help support the monitoring of firms for compliance with labor standards, environmental impact, and other criteria of social responsibility.

In the initial demo stage, SOCRATES will focus on developing a working model that lets socially conscious web administrators easily monetize their content by placing ads for socially responsible, local SMEs. Next, SOCRATES will release a Firefox plugin that allows web users to participate directly via ad replacement, as well as through publishing shared whitelists and blacklists. In the future, SOCRATES can expand to place ads across media platforms. Of course, SOCRATES will be built on Free/Open Source Software, and all software development for the project will be released back into the FOSS community.

WHY WOULD I USE IT?

• Website manager: With SOCRATES, you no longer have to choose between running ads from any old climate destroyer, sweatshop manufacturer, or corrupt contractor, or running no ads at all. You can easily limit the ads on your site to those from socially responsible firms, or to local small and medium enterprises, and you get to select the criteria.

• Socially responsible firm or Small to Medium Enterprise: With SOCRATES, you gain trusted access to customers who care that you’re a socially responsible firm or a local business - and as awareness of the impacts that non socially responsible business models have had on our world grows, this group of people is rapidly growing.

• Web surfer: With SOCRATES Firefox plugin, you will only have to look at ads from socially responsible firms, or local, small to medium businesses. Plus, you get to choose your own criteria for social responsibility. Select between ‘whitelist’ or ‘blacklist’ mode, and choose from lists provided by Socially Responsible Investment firms, trusted monitoring organizations, or user-generated lists. Feel strongly about a particular issue? Participate in making and maintaining shared lists with others. Plus, if lots of people subscribe to your list, you get a share of the ad revenue.

• Socially responsible investment firm: The companies you invest in get more visibility and do better. You might become a partner or participate by actively contributing to the lists of firms that do/don’t meet your investment criteria.

• Corporate monitoring organization: The work you do gets put to use in a new way, and if you are interested, a mass base of SOCRATES users can help be your eyes and ears. You participate by contributing to lists of firms that do/don’t meet your criteria, and if you become a partner you will get a cut of the ad revenue to help you do the valuable monitoring work that you do.

• Advertising agency: If you work with a client that wants to reach people who care about social responsibility, or with a small to medium, local enterprise, then you want their ads placed by SOCRATES. Your ad, and your client, will gain trusted access to customers who care. What’s more, this customer base has shown that they are willing to pay a premium for goods and services that are produced and distributed in local and/or socially responsible ways.

HOW DOES IT WORK? Basically, there are two approaches that the users can select between:

• Whitelist approach (”Do Good”): A whitelist is used to to serve ads only from firms that meet user-specified criteria. There is a default SOCRATES whitelist, or users can select whitelists maintained by trusted organizations in different fields (environment, labor, militarism, gender equality, etc). Users can also select user-generated lists, or create their own list. User interaction is via a SOCRATES browser plugin. The whitelist is used to replace all the ads that the user sees. For web admins, the interface is via a website where they set up an account, choose ad criteria, and receive code to place on their site. Example: “I only want ads from firms that meet the environmental and labor standards that allow them to be included in Parnassus [a socially responsible investment firm] holdings,” or, “I only want ads from Fair Trade firms, as verified by [some monitoring organization]“, or, “I only want ads from worker-owned cooperatives.”

• Blacklist approach (”Do No Evil”): A blacklist is used to block/replace ads from specific firms. There is a default SOCRATES blacklist, or users can select blacklists maintained by trusted organizations in different fields (environment, labor, militarism, gender equality, etc). Users can also select user-generated lists, or create their own list. Example: Web admin: “I don’t want any ads from Blackwater on my site.” User: “I don’t want to see ads from Blackwater when I’m browsing.” Admin/User selects a blacklist maintained by a monitoring organization that they trust, and/or develop their own or shared blacklist. Ideally, user-generated blacklists are produced simply by turning on a SOCRATES browser plugin, then simply clicking on ads that should be removed (with an option to enter tags to add metadata to the ad). Depending on user preferences, ads can either be blocked, or (more interesting), replaced with ads for an organization or firm that works counter to the blocked firm. Example: replace military contractor banners with avaaz.org banners. Or replace Exploitative Shoe Company A ads with ads for a sweat-free shoe label.

Can this be done? I don’t believe it’s possible!

It’s not rocket science, technically. The easy part is setting up the banner ad service for socially responsible firms to place ads on sites with socially conscious admins. It’s more difficult to do context-sensitive
placement a la AdSense, but in the long run this will be possible by using some of the ad revenues to support an open-source contextual algorithm. As for the ad replacement part, there are already working, open source models, for example check out http://www.addart.eyebeam.org and greasemonkey: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748. For an existing experiment in matching advertisers with bloggers who choose to run their ads, check out Ad Butterfly: http://www.adbutterfly.com.

HOW TO MAKE IT HAPPEN

This is a very ambitious project, but it can be done by breaking its development down into simpler steps.

The first stage is to develop a workplan, assemble the team, and do demo design that focuses on web administrators and socially responsible SMEs. In this first stage, we will develop a system that allows web admins to easily sign up, and paste code into their site that will place ads from an initial group of ‘whitelist’ firms. We should be able to develop a working demo within the first year, and this is the stage that we are asking Knight to fund.

In the second stage, once we have a working system, we begin to roll out SOCRATES, reaching out to likely firms and web administrators, and adding functionality that lets admins select between whitelists maintained by different organizations.

In the third stage, we will release the Firefox plugin that will allow web audiences to use the ad replacement function, and if they desire, to participate in whitelist or blacklist maintenance.

This December I was fortunate to be invited to Seoul for a conference organized by the public media center MediAct about community media in the digital age. I’d been there once before, in 2004, to attend a similar workshop and also to screen the Miami Model (an Indymedia documentary about the mobilization against the Free Trade Area of the Americas that I participated in making) at the Seoul Human Rights Film Festival (SHURIFF). At the time, I went with Dorothy Kidd, and after the conference we got an amazing tour of the social movement media organizations around Seoul.

In addition to seeing the production and training facilities that the social movements had secured in the form of MediAct and visiting another community media center in another part of the city, we learned about the history of workers’ video collectives during the time of the dictatorship from folks at Labor News Production; we heard from Sarangbang about how during the first years of the Human Rights Film Festival the government tried to shut down the screenings with police and the social movements successfully fought for their right to screen films; we went to the offices of JinboNet, who provide IT infrastructure and support for Korean social movements as well as policy proposals against Net censorship and for access to knowledge and information; we met with IT staff from the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU); we attended a migrant workers’ video training that was part of the epic migrant workers’ Sit-In Struggle at Myoung Dong Cathedral; and we met with a group that was trying to start up a Korea Indymedia. We learned about the richness, depth, and history of South Korean media activism, and heard from local activists about the near total disconnect between OhMyNews and Korean social movements, even while the English blogosphere was holding OhMyNews up as a shining example of media democracy.

So what changed between 2004 and 2008? A hell of a lot, of course, and I can’t even try here to do justice to the small amount that I do understand, but I can mention a couple of elements I found interesting.

First of all, in 2004 the centrist Roh Moo-Hyun administration had recently come to power on promises to seek reconciliation with North Korea, deepen democracy in South Korea, open government and corporate contracts to public scrutiny, and renegotiate S. Korea’s relationship with the US Military. Roh came to office with support from the left, labor, and students, riding the wave of mass mobilization against the US Military that came after they killed two middle school students in a vehicle accident. Once in power, Roh pedalled steadily to the right, pushing the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement and sending Korean troops to Iraq, and he completely lost the confidence of Korean people across the political spectrum. Despite all that, his administration provided some openings for Korean media activists to push for more democratic media policy. Media activists managed to secure funds to create a number of new community media centers around the country. They also were able to build up RTV, Korea’s first public access TV channel; for example, over the last few years the Migrant Worker video workshop that we saw in 2004 grew into a regular show on RTV that produced around 200 episodes of multilingual migrant worker news: Migrant Worker TV.

In 2007, conservative candidate Lee Myung Bak came to power with a large margin of the vote, but the lowest voter turnout ever. LMB was CEO of Hyundai, then Mayor of Seoul, and came in promising to run the country like a successful multinational company. He’s a neoliberal ideologue who is intent on pushing forward the USKORFTA, wants to “get rid of” militant trade unions, has been rolling back free speech and freedom of assembly, repeatedly deployed police force against peaceful protesters, and has just eliminated funding for RTV. His administration is also taking additional steps to monitor and control the Net. So media activists are now on the defensive, trying to protect the gains they’ve won over the last couple of decades.

However, in a long conversation over rice wine with Sejin, who used to work providing IT services for KCTU, during this visit to Seoul we heard a really interesting analysis of the current shift in the Korean social movement media situation that could be summed up like this: participatory media is taking center stage.

The trigger was the recent round of mass mobilizations and candlelight vigils that began as a “No Mad Cow Disease” protest by a handful of middle school girls against US Beef imports, but grew over the next two months into a nightly vigil of hundreds of thousands of people opposed to LMB’s neoliberal privatisation plans. George Katsiafacis’ summary of the mobilization wave is a good read and makes a similar point to Sejin: despite the claims of the government and police, the mobilizations weren’t organized by the labor unions or the existing social movement organizations. It was organized mostly online and via mobile phones, and as it grew and grew, the State was increasingly bewildered and frustrated by its inability to ‘decapitate’ the movement by arresting the people they thought were the ‘leaders.’ For example, they thought that KCTU was behind the protests, so they tried to arrest KCTU leadership, but KCTU was just as surprised as police at the growing turnout. Violent repression by police ended up radicalizing people and swelling the ranks of the protesters. People converted popular commercial sites like Agora at Daum.net into forums for debate and mobilization, and documented their own participation in the protests using the tools they use everyday anyway. For a longer blow-by-blow check out this article on Newscham.net.

This is not to say that the existing media activism infrastructure didn’t play a role - of course it did. In a similar way, the labor unions soon entered the mobilizations, and young students and middle class people who had never protested before learned some tactics from them - for example, how to confront riot police. But these organizations were not the initiators or drivers of the mobilization wave, nor of the popular communication that blossomed inside of it. Sejin, who also happens to be translating leftist scifi into Korean as part of a larger project that looks at ideological battles inside science fiction narratives, has been thinking about writing something on the meaning of the Multitude in the South Korean context. I hope he writes it soon

In any case, as I write this post, the public broadcaster KBS is also under attack, but this time from the left and below, most recently for censoring their New Years’ coverage to eliminate images of candlelight protesters. To follow the ongoing situation in S. Korea, check out the various links above as well as some others like Newscham, Global Voices South Korea, Anarclan, Two Koreas, and Seoulidarity.net. Oh yeah, and it looks like there’s going to be another (3rd? 4th?) attempt to start up an Indymedia Korea. Good luck!

While many of us across the country and around the world have been celebrating the Obama victory, despite the fact that he seems to be scuttling towards the center as fast as his lanky legs can carry him, here in California we’ve also been getting angry and mobilized in the wake of the voters’ approval of Proposition 8. Prop 8 (or Prop H8, as many a sign will tell you) is the bigoted ballot initiative to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry. It passed by a small margin (52%); you can check out the breakdown county by county using one of many interactive maps, for example this one from the LA Times. Without going into a long and detailed discussion of why the No on 8 campaign failed, let’s just say this: white middle class leadership ran a weak and disorganized campaign based almost entirely around TV ad buys, tried to take a ‘moderate’ stance which meant no calling out the bigotry and hatred behind the support for 8, and managed to put almost no resources into street level organizing in working class communities and communities of color. Meanwhile, the Mormon Church and other religious fanatics poured millions into vicious attack ads that played on fears of queers taking over the schools and teaching their evil ways. Then the out of touch No on 8 campaign was surprised when they lost.

In the wake of this mess, tens of thousands of angry LGBTQ folks and their friends, parents, and supporters started seizing the streets in what has turned into the largest queer mobilization wave in decades. Lots of this mobilization has been organized online via facebook and blogs, as well as with mobile phones via SMS between friends and on Twitter. While the ‘official’ No on 8 website was still displaying a lame-ass written message about how we lost but someday we’ll be back, literally overnight people were organizing mass protests, street actions, breakaway marches, and other forms of protest that spread up and down the state of California. Within a week and a half there was a national day of action with tens of thousands of people marching in front of city halls across the country.

I went out to several of these actions with friends here in LA. I think it was on Saturday night a week after the election that I went to a protest at Sunset Junction with Anna from Engage Media who was in town for a few days. ANSWER had somehow opportunistically positioned themselves as the organizers of the protest so we had to stand around with 10,000 other people and listen to an hour of speakers talking through a sound system that was too small to really hear (yawn), then the march began and we were stuck with the ‘approved’ chants over megaphones (the deadly “hey hey, ho ho, prop 8 has got to go,” and the only slightly more creative “black, latino, asian and white, marriage is a civil right!”) We tried out some of our own chants with mild success:

“Prop 8! That’s Hate! Separation of Church and State!”

“Prop 8! That’s wack! Stand up! Fight Back!”

“Latter Day Saints, Kiss Our Taints!”

Things got a lot more interesting once we made it over to around Vermont and Sunset, when about a thousand of us tried to break away from the ANSWER route to head west on Sunset. In fact, everyone was chanting “West on Sunset! West on Sunset!” and pushing up against a line of riot cops. They didn’t budge, so eventually we dispersed… but a scraggly haired young guy came running by telling everyone “Hollywood and Highland, 10pm! Text everyone you know! We’ve done this before, and we know it’ll work, just text everyone in your contacts!” Sure enough, by 10pm there were at least a few hundred people assembled at Hollywood and Highland, even though LAPD had shut down the metro and stopped traffic for blocks. In fact, there were more police assembled along Hollywood Boulevard than I’d seen since the RNC in St. Paul. There were dozens of riot cops in lines, mounted riot cops on horseback, and two long rows of squad cars, side by side, stretching a couple of blocks west from Hollywood and Highland, plus a block long line of motorbikes, assorted vans, and other vehicles. Oddly, all those cops did was hold down the intersection, ignoring three breakaway unpermitted marches of a couple hundred people each that tied up traffic in the area for the next several hours.

Overall what’s been great is that this protest wave is showing a new generation of young GLBTQ and ally activists that they really don’t need the top-down, out of touch mass media messaging of the big gay rights organizations. In fact, that approach has now been exposed as a losing  strategy. Also, the new tools of social networking sites and mobile phones do really make a difference in rapid coordination of street mobilizations - as Larry Gross said to me during another protest in downtown LA, pulling together a statewide or nationwide action in the days before widespread use of the Net and mobile phones would have taken several months to a year. We should add the Prop 8 protests to the ever-growing list of mobile-enabled mass actions that includes txtpower in the Phillipines, the rise of the Left to power in the Spanish elections following the subway bombing that the right wing government tried to delink from Spanish military participation in the Iraq invasion, and so many others (check out Mobile Active for more).

So the mobilization result is that lots more people have gained organizing and protest skills and capacities, and hopefully we’ll see fruit from this in a resurgent LGBTQ movement over the next decade. The immediate political outcome? Great pressure on the State and the courts to overturn Prop 8, and the California Supreme Court has in fact agreed to take it on.

Oh yeah, one last note: I Still Think Marriage is the Wrong Goal

So I fell behind during the last few days on a couple posts I meant to write. First off, a little about participating in video the vote during the election. VTV is a great project, developed by some of the folks from Guerilla News Network for the 2004 election and run again in 2006 (and now 2008). It’s great because the premise is clear and simple: coordinate a nationwide network of video volunteers to document any irregularities at the polls, thereby strengthening the evidence of any election fraud so that it will be more difficult to pull off Grand Theft Country as in 2000. This year they managed to line up some heavy hitting partners, including YouTube and PBS. I decided to sign up and the process was easy, just registered using their online form and filled out some info (name, location, availability times on election day, do i have a camera, do i have video shooting skills, and so on). Then I received an email with info about upcoming training conference calls. I didn’t get around to a call right away, and a volunteer even called me to double check that I’d gotten the info. So far so good.

On Sunday, I joined a conference call that had about 20 people from around the country, and a video the vote staff (volunteer?) ran us through how things would work. To make a long story short, volunteer dispatchers at call centers work with election monitors and when they receive a report of an irregularity, they use the VTV database to look up the nearest videographer and send them to shoot interviews. It’s a great project, and with 3,500 people signed up across the country to participate, there’s a decent chance that someone will be available to go shoot, at least anywhere near major urban areas. The interface for dispatch could really be improved with some simple GIS tools, easily accomplished via, say, google maps API. For example it would be nice if the dispatcher could look up the location of the problem and immediately see the nearest shooters (videographers), rather than search around via ZIP codes.

The system is cool, but there was a serious lack of security consciousness. On the dispatch call with 20 anonymous callers from around the country, the VtV trainer gave out login info for the database that gave us all access not only to look up videographers by ZIP, but with a few clicks allowed us to see name, address, phone number, and even download all 3500 people’s info into an xcel spreadsheet. Not good. What if I was Karl Rove? What if I was an annoying telemarketer? What if I were using this system in, say, Tunisia? It should be obvious by now that lots of states are taking action against activists by tracking them online. VtV needs to figure out a better process for giving permissions out; maybe reading through something like the RSF Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents would help.

Anyway, on election day I ended up receiving several calls from dispatch volunteers, and with camera in hand and my partner Chris at the wheel we headed out to document. The first situation was a blank, with no problem and no disgruntled people to interview by the time we got there, but the next call panned out. At a polling place around the 400 block of Union, a number of mostly Latino voters were being given provisional ballots, even when they were fully registered. Also, there was an aggro poll worker who physically pushed a guy out of the polling place for waiting around for his girlfriend to vote, and then physically pushed and verbally abused election observers who tried to stop him. His supervisor wasn’t helpful, either - she ended up calling the police, not on the aggressive poll worker, but on the election observers. Anyway I shot interviews with the election observers and with some neighbors across the street who saw it all, including one family where the father had inappropriately received a pink provisional ballot. Now I have to go upload the interview…

I don’t think I’m going to be able to do this topic justice right now, at some point I’d like to write something longer about what might be called SMASPs. This is the (fairly recent) group of ’software as a service’ firms that specialize in online tools for social movement organizations and nonprofits. The best known is probably Democracy in Action, but there are lots of them out there. This would include radical tech collectives like Riseup.net, who are best known as an email provider and mailing list host for thousands of movement organizations but are also experimenting with interesting things like a Free Open Source Software (FOSS) Social Network Site software called crabgrass. Another example is the open source Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) platform CiviCRM. Academics who write about social movements and the Net don’t seem to have really paid much attention to SMASPs yet, and for that matter neither has the press, really.

Many social movement organizations are using SMASPs, and there are a lot of advantages to doing so - primarily, the org gets access to sophisticated web tools, dynamic content, relationship management, tracking response to action alerts, and so on. If there’s a downside, it’s a kind of re-centralization of the communication function of movements. To take a simple hypothetical example: if, say, thousands of antiwar activists are all using Democracy in Action to coordinate a mobilization, then by taking DIA down the pentagon could significantly impact movement communications.

In any case, the reason I’m writing about this now is something different. The fast for our future is using DIA but their webmaster has been woefully unresponsive during the last two weeks of the hunger strike. Lots of content is being regularly posted by the Vozmob team to vozmob.virishi.net, images of support are being sent to the risemovement flickr photostream, and hunger strikers are blogging at fastforourfuture.wordpress.com, but none of it was appearing or getting linked at the main site for the action, fastforourfuture.com. Finally last night I was able to poke around a little bit in the admin interface for the site, DIA’s web admin tool. It *sucks.* It’s insanely difficult to navigate around, deeply annoying to update content, the graphic design is appalling, user experience is crap. Yet for some reason I have in the back of my mind that DIA is one of the most widely used CMS/CRMs by nonprofits and social movement organizations. Now I’m wondering: first off, is that true? What is the ‘market share’ of DIA vs. other alternatives? Second, assuming that many groups are using it, why? It can’t really be the best interface for the functionality it provides, can it? So is it just historical lock-in, nothing else was around a couple of years ago when groups started shifting from static pages to dynamic CMS with email action alert management? No one knows about the alternatives? I’ll stop rambling here, gonna have to go research this some more.

One of the first times that I became interested in the possibilities of the Net for social movements was at some point in 1999 (?) when I stumbled across protest.net. It’s basically just a shared calendar for announcing protests and mobilizations, anywhere in the world. You can search it by keywords or drill down by region and location. It was created by Evan Henshaw-Plath, who I later met through the Indymedia network. The basic idea is still great and now, nearly ten years later, there are all kinds of possibilities for rethinking the interface. The most obvious is to use geodata and a map interface; for example, check out this map of protests in Myanmar/Burma, made by the Alternative Asean Network on Burma:

burma protest map

Also see this map of the DNC protests on Platial. These are mash-up maps that rely on commercial application service providers like Google and Platial, and while on the one hand it’s cool that these services make it easy for anyone to set up a shared map, as commercial services they raise various problems for activists. The biggest problems are privacy (will the commercial service provider hand over all the user data to the Department of Homeland Security?), accountability (will the commercial service provider just delete the maps if they get a takedown request?), and exploitation (are they making money off of free content and social networking labor produced by social movements?) It would be great to see a redesign of the protest.net tool around a map based interface that used free, open source geographic information systems like Open Street Map.

Starting next week, the rise movement is going to launch a 21 day hunger strike for immigrants’ rights leading up to the election. There will be an encampment in placita olvera, the historic heart of downtown Los Angeles, and immigrant rights movement leaders will be participating. I’m helping out with some of the popular communication strategy. For example, we’re setting up a flickr account where people can post solidarity images; we’ll take these, print them out, and hang them up around la placita. Here’s the flickr photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/risemovement

Here’s an html version of the flickr badge from that photostream:

finally got mysql, php, and wp to play together on mac os x 10.5. phew.