Is the U.N. ready for Web 2.0?

Is the UN ready for the digital revolution, with its fundamental impact on e-democracy and open government? To judge from a one-day conference organized by the DiploFoundation and the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP) on 19 June 2013, the answer is: not for a long-time yet. Peter Hulm reports.

Don't just count the numbers of people in the room. One Geneva break-out session at the World Meteorological Organization had four or five participants, but thanks to the magic of e-participation, another 49 people were following the discussion on the Internet.

Just as important, you have to get the right people with you in the room, and they may not be numerous at all.

Monika Gehner of the World Health Organization revealed that her social media communications department has only two people. The United Nations Development Programme was perhaps the most pioneering U.N. organization present, physically or digitally, with regard to social media. But Silke von Brockhausen of UNDP was alone in her department until recently.

So the participants may have been few, but they were probably some of the most active and influential social media specialists you could have found in Geneva.

At the same time, it was an indicator of how little the U.N. bodies are investing in the effort to go beyond traditional media relations.

Experts, not targets

Giulio Quaggiotto from UNDP Bratislava, taking part in the DiPLO/GCSP conference remotely, put his finger on another key problem facing UN organizations who want to adapt to Web 2.0, as the interactive Internet has been dubbed

Citizen engagement in the digital revolution is a matter of design, he argues. "Oftentimes technology is not the major issue."

Instead, he said, the UN needs to start looking at the people it is seeking to engage with not as targets of programmes implemented from remote offices.

We need to treat them as experts on the issues the organization is trying to tackle, he told the conference on "a more open UN".

Local people often are the "smart sensors" who can tell you what is wrong and what needs to be done. Often, too, they have developed their own solutions.

One participant in a recent UNDP Hackathon programming fest was a 75-year-old pensioner who developed his own open-data portal of local government information out of frustration at trying to prise the details from authorities online.

Discover local problem solvers

The international aid community needs to discover what local people have invented to solve their local problems, said the UNDP official.

Perhaps they don't need international experts to fly in and analyse their problems for them.

Quaggiotto, a former private sector and World Bank employee, praised Global Giving for its efforts to match up donors with people who are developing local solutions on the ground, and Maker Faire Africa for giving the spotlight to people who have carried out their own R&D.

The Council of Europe, with UNDP support, created EdgeRyders as a project gathering together citizen experts to contribute to development solutions, he added.

Quaggiotto is Practice Leader, Knowledge and Information for UNDP's Regional Centre for Eastern Europe and CIS. He describes his job as leading a team who research the latest trends in technology and citizen engagement and explore ways to turn them into development results "on a cheap budget".
"We need to rethink our whole approach," he urges.

Difficulties

Just how difficult this can be for UN organizations participants learned, if they did not already know, from WHO and the International Telecommunication Union.

WHO, with its two-person team for 7000 staff, now flags its Disease Outbreak news on Twitter before posting to the Web, hoping to reach journalists more quickly that way.

 But the need to speak as a neutral secretariat, rather than as opinionated policymakers (its member states), makes the job of disseminating the news more cumbersome.

One journalist participant, who followed the SARS virus story through WHO's media as well as via the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, reported that he regularly found CDC providing information more quickly than WHO.

Anders Norsker of ITU, working at the coalface of the UN's promise to make multilingual services a feature of remote participation in meetings, pointed to the importance of physical encounters and networking at conferences: "We need coffee breaks."

What is difficult to organize is a mixed remote and face-to-face session. The DiPLO/GCSP conference got round some of the difficulties by bundling together questions before giving the microphone to panellists for their answers, and remote participants via Twitter or the Web received precedence over the in-your-face audience.

It worked better than it sounds, though sometimes the moderators were not up to handling all the technology. And it wouldn't fit diplomatic protocols in more official meetings, noted Jovan Kurbalija of DiploFoundation.

Nevertheless, today we have all the technology needed to organize remote meetings, Norsker pointed out. After all, we trust airlines to get us to our destinations using technology and we happily pay bills via the Internet.

Four principles for e-conferencing

That said, the diplomatic system brought into being by the treaty of Westphalia 400 years ago has advantages the technologists have not yet managed to improve on: how do we deal with accreditation, verification of identities, security and authentication of documents?

Similarly, how can a digital meeting handle points of order, voting and the question of a quorum of participants?

For multilingual conferences, the quality of sound has to be acceptable to translators.
So long as e-meetings are described as being in a pilot phrase, he observed, organizers were given an easy ride. Remote participation can only be a new service, not a substitute for face-to-face talks, Norsker underlined. As a result, he suggested four principles for integrating e-conferencing into organizations:

• Don't try to force it through (be tolerant).
• Train everyone, get experience in managing discussions.
• Be patient (particularly with technical glitches).
• Protect the integrity of the physical meeting.

Broad aims vs narrow focus

UNDP is trying to decentralize its efforts, von Brockhausen told the meeting. It has staff in 130 countries using social media networks, with a community of 850,000 people, and communications in several national languages. But Twitter analytics show that most of the followers are male, and UNDP still has to roll out a fully developed blog platform.

The Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria takes the opposite approach. Claudia Gonzalez, Head of Marketing at the Global Fund and a star in the social media firmament for her appearances on TED talks and for YouTube videos of bigwig supporters, said her organization emphasizes blogs (through an agreement with the Huffington Post website) and high profile videos. It has put together 400 clips of leading politicians and business executives giving short statements in support of the Global Fund.

The Fund identified 5000 prominent people to target in its campaign to persuade governments and organizations to give money to reach its $15 billion replenishment target this year.

As a result, its campaign known as The Big Push, launched in September 2012, is probably unknown to the general public.

The Fund's strategy is to create a "bubble" for ministers and international leaders to rally support for the fund's activities and goals. She described it as "opinion leaders reaching out to decision leaders. The number is not as important as the chain of influence."

Asked how the Fund managed to get celebrities to openly support its goals, Gonzalez saw no mystery. Everyone, even important people, like to be associated with a good cause.

But how to get blogging decision-makers to pass on your message? "Through your vision", she responded. The Fund's approach is "Let me talk to your heart as distinct from your head."

Under attack

No matter how effective and efficient as a means of directing your energies to the places most likely to produce results, it is not a strategy that United Nations bodies can comfortably adopt, since it is easily open to allegations of elitism. That is, as Guy Girardet, DiPLO's Head of E-diplomacy, reported, e-participation:

• is limited to the connected
• skews results in favour of the online educated
• polarizes, giving undue influence to special interest groups, and
• encourages "clicktivism": clicking the Like button is all you need to do to feel you have done your civic duty.

Quaggiotto also made this last point. Hackathons are all very well in producing prototype answers to problems. But "the person who is missing is a policymaker," he said. "If someone does not take action […] your great prototype is not going to have an effect."

But are all these objections just ways for the UN to avoid tackling the problems?

All these questions have a technological answer or benefits that can outweigh any drawbacks. Think of the private initiative that put together read-write online data for tackling Haiti's problems during its latest environmental disaster, noted Tim Davies of the University of Southampton.

In Kenya, a World Bank backed initiative has created an app for finding local schools with details of their performance. The principles of the G8's Open Data Charter announced the day before are becoming mainstream already in countries like the UK and US. "People aren't talking. They are doing it now."

The chances are, it seems to me, that some day people will decide the problems are no longer important and simply get on with implementing e-participation. I've known a number of international organizations where insuperable obstacles have suddenly vanished with the arrival of a new director and the decision to press ahead with a favourite project. Within a couple of days everyone forgets the previous objections.

In international organizations, as British Prime Minister Harold Wilson might well have told us, a week is a long time. Unless the decision is so disastrous or egregious people cannot help but remember its failings.

Sources

Full information on the conference, with additional articles, is available at http://www.diplomacy.edu/calendar/e-participation-day-towards-more-open-un. Here you can read Quaggiotto's mantra: "Today it is safer for most bureaucracies to assume that most smart people work outside of their walls, and most importantly they will never want to work for [you]. You are a) too boring, b) too callous, c) too unrewarding, or d) too irrelevant (or a combination of all of the above)."

As of 20 June, several of the presentations are available at http://www.slideshare.net/DiploFoundation, and more are promised later.

Why can't other international meetings give you as good a backgrounding?

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20 June 2013 at www.crosslines.ch

FIFDH: Simon Cowell syndrome

Simon Cowell syndrome

One problem with film festivals is that they make you want to escape the films. I can understand the reporters who chase after starlets, photo ops, side shows, receptions and behind-the-scenes stories at Cannes and the like. Anything to escape the barrage of images and sounds chosen for you. After a few sessions in the darkened cinema, none of it seems real. A film festival on human rights can feel like being trapped in the Guardian editorial pages — all very worthy but more sermonising than your average Joe can stand outside Holy Days.

In my case, the escape from the 8th Geneva International Festival of Film and Human Rights was to school debates and university panels on the themes of FIFDH (its French acronym). It still wasn't enough. In front of standard documentaries such as Main basse sur le riz/Dirty hands on the rice trade and La Bataille des droits humains/The Battle for Human Rights, my attention was diverted from the content to the style. Where the film was an exemplary piece of film-making (Sale Paradis/Dirty Paradise), the story was so affecting it was hard not to put that at the front of the report to the detriment of an appreciation of its aesthetic qualities. And that would be a mistake (see below).

The closest analogy I can find is with church art. A trashy sculpture or painting can serve its religious purpose very well, as any cathedral in Italy demonstrates. The horrendous jostles with the sublime. After a while (depending on your powers of resistance) it requires a effort of will to push into the gloomy interiors and take the tour. Or you become impossibly demanding (I do, anyway), thrusting your way past the slow crowds towards the masterpieces and then immediately out the door. You become a culture-vulture version of the tourist who misses all the sights in order to photograph the scenery. If you force yourself to see it all, you become like Simon Cowell at American Idol: doggedly fixed on speaking the truth, no matter how hurtful to the audience. In contrast to him, though, you don't take home the big bucks for doing it.

Being forced to consider the "aesthetic" qualities of a masterpiece, however, doesn't do it justice, either. A Caravaggio is not just about chiaroscuro. It challenges conventional ideas about Bible stories by making them contemporary, not just enlivening them but also questioning the credibility of the religious ideas imported into the scenes.

The same applies to documentaries, which are a similar form of fictionalizing. The standard documentary is made in a form digestible to inattentive or somnolent audiences, in a pattern that is easy to digest so that viewers can concentrate on the content and not be distracted by fancy footwork and breathtaking spins (Chris Marker is unbeatable at these kinds of pyrotechnics). But, of course, "investigative" documentaries perform their own sleight of hand, as my reports on Main basse and Bataille document, and I am sure the film-makers themselves realize.

At least it has been obvious to me in all the videos I have produced, and the reasons have been equally obvious: shortage of time, need to keep up the cutting pace, obscurities I wasn't able to clear up, keeping the message simple, etc.

Sometimes I have been helped by my camera operators, whose interest in the subject being filmed led them to put on video the full story rather than the few scenes I was after. On other occasions, I have argued with the editors about keeping the text in sync with the images so that no-one could be misled.

But this still takes you away from appreciating the film as a whole. Dirty Paradise found a good audience of high school students to debate its "content" with the subjects of the film, the Wayana people who came to Geneva to see the UN. Main basse sur le riz did not have an audience, and Bataille's first student showing staged no debate because the director was delayed (she appeared for the second showing that was too late for me to attend). A pity, because this might have restored a sense of the subject and its content going together in the eyes of non-specialists (in either filming, the UN or human rights).

This is certainly what the film-makers were aiming for. Even Daniel Schweizer, the prize-winning director of Sale Paradis, did not seem particularly interested in hearing praise for his film-making skills. But it was hard not to get deflected off-target by seeing one film after another. In the end, I had to give up in order to step back from the occasion and concentrate on the films themselves.

The best idea I heard on how to solve this dilemma came from a journalist friend and film-maker himself. He suggested that every other film festival should agree to show one (presumably relevant) film on human rights at their big do's. Now that's an idea for FIFDH to pursue.

Sale paradis/Dirty Paradise

It might seem pretty buzzword-fixated to link up the blockbuster extravaganza with a film about an indigenous tribe suffering from outside exploitation of the natural resources in the paradisical territory where the group has made their home, but the contrast highlights the differences between Hollywood's approach to "original peoples" and the people themselves. In Hollywoodland they are nearly all versions of commercial Native Americans, noble creatures who "just don't get it".

Even when directors try for something more, like Clint Eastwood in Flags of Our Fathers, the story conventions overwhelm the reality of the individual experience in a way a written narrative usually does not (just compare any Hollywood version of events with those recorded).

Sale Paradis tries the difficult task of showing us the Wayana people as they want us to understand them. There's no effort to convince us of their nobility. We do get the chance to hear something of their wry sense of humor. And we feel their frustration in dealing with an indifferent bureaucracy.

But their description of their plight and the scenes of their daily life could have come from U.S. suburbia rather than Pandora. The kids run home from school. The father goes out shooting with his son (but all he gets in the denuded and off-limits forest – barred to them by armed goldpanners – is a scrawny bird). The pirogues with outboard motors clatter past the village on the poisoned river,. A mother explains why she feeds her babies mercury-loaded fish: it's food they can digest without teeth.

These people are well aware of the challenges they face and the ways in which to deal with them through official channels  –  except that the channels lead nowhere. Which is pretty much the history of the real Native Americans, i.e. those who didn't make it onto the screen. And as with real Native Americans, there is no plea for pity or charity, just a sad acknowledgement that the attempts to claim what they need to survive fell on the President's deaf ears as well as incapable authorities, civilian and military.

You couldn't have a more sympathetic figure than the soldier who came to ask them about the illegal gold panners and their guns before leading a raiding party upriver. The Wayana knew the raid would find only an empty camp because somehow the gold seekers were always warned. One Wayana described the raids as "a joke. There's no follow-up."

I am not trying to rehash their story here. You can find it in the reports on the film festival. What interests me here is the process of film-making.

It took Daniel Schweizer six years to complete filming of the Wayana, even after being given the framework of the film by his childhood memories of the best-selling picture book Parana the Little Indian, and learning of their plight from the photographer Dominique Darbois, whose photo portrait of the village inspired thousands of children in the 1950s. In fact, the Wayana did not want another sob-story. They asked him to show people how they live.

Schweizer, a Geneva film-maker now 51, played fair by showing to the Wayana in the evenings any film he had shot (the wonders of digital tape). Their input became crucial to the feeling of the film. These are not Flaherty primitives leading a doomed religion-bound existence (and we know now that Flaherty's natives were restaging at his request a life that had already vanished). What we see is a society in continual flux facing changes that threaten to destroy them and the environment that sustains them.

At the same time, we hear a variety of other voices about the Wayana: Schweizer himself on what he remembers and what he found, a health worker, outsiders like the military and the bureaucrat whose attitudes to the Wayana tell us something about them, and the gold panners themselves.

Schweizer has made something of a reputation for taking on difficult, even potentially dangerous, assignments if you don't get the people you are filming to trust you: neo-Nazis in Sweden, skinheads. With the Wayana and the gold panners, he managed to put on film beautifully photographed scenes and interviews with astonishing sound quality.

"I treated them like stars," he told me. "They got the full crew: cameras and equipment."

As a result, everything comes across without a hint of condescension, in a rhythm that reflects the progress of their days rather than a conventional narrative: nothing begins, except for Schweizer when he picks up Pirana the Little Indian and decides to start film, and nothing ends just because the tape stops rolling.

Schweizer has kept to this open-ended commitment, helping organize the trip by the Wayana to Geneva to see officials at the International Labour Organization. Having made a film with these principles, we were hardly surprized. But it remains an exception in the film world. Once the lights come up, most directors would see that as the end of their responsibility.

Schweizer shares top prize

The CHF10,000 top prize at FIFDH was shared by Burma VJ – Reporting from a closed country by Anders Høgsbro Østergaard (also a favourite with the young festival goers) and Dirty Paradise by Daniel Schweizer. The jury said it wanted to denounce the ecological crime that is striking hard against a peaceful and poor people living in harmony with nature.

Other award winners were Children of War by Bryan Single, Nino’s Place by Aude Léa Rapin et Adrien Selbert.

In its closing news release, FIFDH said it recorded 18,000 entries, with 80 speakers on 14 themes and 22 films in competition.

Main basse sur le riz: Dirty Rice

I have posted a review of Main basse sur le riz at http://www.crosslines.ch/. Now working on piece about The Battle for Human Rights.

Wayana articles posted

have just posted several articles about the Wayana and the film Dirty Paradise at http://bit.ly/dxQjoY. I'll discuss the film here later. I will also put in some notes about Main Basse sur le riz (Dirty Tricks in the Rice Trade) here.

I'll also offer some thoughts here about the World Court of Human Rights session and Battle for Human Rights at the UN.

Geneva's 8th International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights

The 8th International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights (FIFDH) in Geneva (5-14 March 2010) offered the Nobel Literature Prizewinner J.-M. G. Le Clézio and a reading from his work, the UN Rapporteur on torture Manfred Nowak, French star Juliette Binoche and diva Barbara Hendricks for a day of solidarity with Africa, several debates with leading human rights campaigners, and 10 days of films from the afternoon and evenings.

Special topics, where the audience could take part in discussion, included the situation in Iran, the Roms (Gypsies), the Litvinenko case and freedom of expression in Russia, trafficking of women, Burma, Iraq after the elections, rights in China, war crimes trials, Cambodia, Islam in Europe and homosexuality.

I'd have been glad to take part in all of this, but because of shortage of time (how many people can take every afternoon and evening off for 10 days?), I focused on two particular questions:

First, what kind of film is it possible to make about human rights? Given that most subjects will be stories of abuses or, in view of the last two decades of atrocious history spanning Yugoslavia and Rwanda, Burma and West Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, trying to make poetry out of the situation would be barbaric (to misquote Theodore Adorno on Auschwitz), is there any human rights film you would want to watch? And a festival of angry films about atrocity might seem like masochism, of strictly limited appeal (I've only been able to watch Schindler's List once and two years after it appeared -- and this is my academic specialty). At one viewing, when the lights came up, the only people still in their seats were me and a reporter from a Geneva freesheet. Where can such films find common ground with an audience?

Second, what can an audience, and the subjects of such films, make of such an environment of normally passive reception? And how can journalists break out of this framework? Sorry for the jargon, but in fact my concerns can be stated simply: in a world of new media where interactivity (however limited and illusory) is the way most young people use media (Swansea professor William Merrin speaks of me-dia for this new phenomenon of facebook, phone texting, blogs, twitter and multitasking), what are filmmakers doing to respond to the new challenges? And what is the position of the human beings who form the films' subjects? Or that of the audiences?

So I focused on film shows at FIFDH that were part of the Geneva educational programme, bringing in high school students and allowing them to interact with (listen to, question and speak to) the film makers and their subjects.