Wikigender asks: how can social networks foster gender equality?

From 3 until 10 February, Wikigender hosted its first online discussion on: “How can social networks foster gender equality?”

Numerous examples were given of web 2.0 platforms that help girls and women to feel more included in discussions that matter to them, giving them a sense of belonging to a specific community. The wealth of information offered by those online social networking platforms is not only easily accessible by those who have an Internet connection, but also easily spread. This opens many doors, from career counselling and career building to campaigns to advance gender equality, strategies to cope with poverty, best practices and more. All in all, comments reinforced the idea of online social networks acting like a “technological booster” that empowers women and girls in many ways.

Comments however also reflected the rhetoric of current global inequalities, with only 30% of the population digitally included. What about the 5 billion people that do not have access to the Internet? What about women in rural areas who are unable to view videos on YouTube in some countries due to insufficient bandwidth? Even if other technologies such as mobile phones are becoming increasingly cheap and therefore more available in developing countries, helping women to balance their family and work responsibilities, this does not mean that they have access to those social networks and therefore to the information. Therefore, within the digital divide and “access” issues, one needs to consider also the “gender divide”: women and girls need to build their capacity in using online social networks more efficiently, and they need to be involved in the early design and deployment stages of new technologies so that these technologies respond adequately to their needs. Sometimes, women and girls simply need to be informed of the existence of such social networks, as it is not always the case, and they should be trained in differentiating good information from bad information, as social media can also have adverse effects.

To access all the comments and read the full summary of the discussion, please visit this page. If this online discussion inspired you to create an article, click here!

To continue on the question of empowering women and fostering gender equality, the Wikigender Team invites you to participate in a new online discussion on: “Equal rights to resources: the key to empowering rural women. But what's stopping it?” – the outcomes of the discussion will be presented at a side event during the 56^th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women, which focuses on the empowerment of rural women and their role in poverty and hunger eradication, development and current challenges. Contribute until Wednesday 22 February and get your point across!

By Estelle Loiseau 

10 Best Places to See Sexy Data and more

"Every minute, 35 hours of footage is added to You Tube globally"
"Between the dawn of civilisation and 2003 we only created 5 exabytes of data. Now, we create that every 2 days. By 2020, it will increase 50 times" -Think Quarterly

Google has just come out with a new journal called "Think Quarterly". It is a publication meant for their stakeholders so it is not being written or marketed for the public.
The first edition is on data.

Included in the publication are interviews about the data deluge by Google's Director of Research, Hans Rosling, Google Chief Economist Hal Varian, Laurence Guy, CEO of Vodaphone among many more.

Ok, 10 best places to see sexy data according to Google:

http://data.london.gov.uk/
http://www.infochimps.com/datasets
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/
http://flowingdata.com/
http://www.patrickcain.ca/
http://www.owni.fr/
http://www.timetric.com/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/data
http://datamarket.com/
http://www.linkedin.com/

Angela

Thoughts on data, progress and a crisis

I, like most of you, have been watching the footage from Japan. While the New Zealand earthquake fades from memory I suddenly remember those horrific floods in Pakistan that are all but a distant memory to the western media. Then what about Ivory Coast and Libya as well? Sometimes I really wonder how the world can possibly progress if disaster after disaster keeps occurring. Ok, before you stop reading because I am being really depressing, there is a point to this. Data.

Yesterday, I attended an OECD Development Centre seminar on “Social Cohesion, Inequality and Economic Crises” with Sir Anthony Atkinson of Nuffield College, Oxford. He was talking about two crises that have come upon us in recent years: the banking crises and the consumption crises. He and Salvatore Morelli are working on a piece of research on how/whether different kinds of crises affect inequality in societies or vice versa. The camp which argues that growing inequality increases the risk of crises includes Chiefs Economist Stiglitz and Rajan. Whereas Krugman (2009) argues that rising inequality is does not increase the risk of a crisis.

What was most interesting to me was the issue of “the data challenge”. In order to actually argue this out, there has to be reliable data of which there are not. In order to analyse this Atkinson notes that you need a long run of years as crises (the kind he was talking about) are rare events, up to date distributional data which is lacking, the ability to download annual series on a number of countries (currently very difficult technically to do), consistent data (currently data on inequality have to be patched together from a variety of sources or just left out if missing) just to name a few. Also, in the choice of countries for study, any country that had had a major war was just left out. Would it not be interesting to look at a conflict country to see whether inequality was an issue? Data on violence in Liberia for example can be found here on the UNFPA’s website on shelter, jobs, loss of life and violence against women. But, Liberia and many other post conflict countries are left out of many studies because there was a war there. Unless, it is a particular study on “post conflict society”, you will not see very much from this crowd. It is really difficult to get data for sure. UNFPA talks about the challenges of collecting data on the ground. I have lived in Liberia and been to Lofa country on several occasions. I can tell you that they are not kidding.

So, if the data is so hard to collect and more subjective measures or non official data are not really trusted as much as those of national accounts systems (though that is also under fire as of recently see the Stiglitz report and the Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies), what is to be done about it? I am really thinking in terms of crisis data here. With information communication technologies today, there should be a way to be able to continue to collect data on a society uninterrupted. Sure, Ushahidi and others are working on this but this kind of data hasn’t made it to the peer review journal set (wikileaks?). I think we are in another crisis…a data one. Data on populations in wars and natural disasters is important and these countries should not be left out because of an IT or management problem while in crisis. Fast Company has a good article on this here which asks “so is that what Pakistan needs? An external service specializing in the collection and coordination of data, rather than relying on its own internal government resources?” Whatever the case, there has to be regular ease of communication between data collected on the ground, have it recorded “on the record”, disseminated and used in studies like Atkinson and Morrelli’s and beyond. Perhaps then we will really be able to say with some certainty where we are in terms of social cohesion or inequality or any other dimension of progress by applying better evidence for conflict countries, countries in a crisis like Japan and Pakistan and all others.

These are just some of my thoughts while watching Japan gets through this. I would be interested to hear yours.

Angela Hariche

Mobile Twitter apps won't put food on the table

The potential for Facebook and Twitter to help social activists organize and share information is well known. How important these social media tools actually are for collective action remains less clear. In 2009, many of us first heard of an uprising in Moldova thanks to Twitter. Subsequently, tweets from post-election protests in Iran were "live-blogged" on sites like the Huffington Post. Time magazine quickly labelled Twitter the "medium of the moment" after the U.S. State Department asked the micro-blogging service to postpone scheduled maintenance downtime during the Iranian protests. Social media quickly became the darling of those who supported the protests, particularly those sitting in front of their laptops in the developed world.

Watching recent events in Tunisia and Egypt, my colleague Angela asked whether these "revolutions will be Facebooked?" Social media moved directly to the fore in Egypt when the authorities detained and then eventually released Google's head of marketing for the Middle East and North Africa, Wael Ghonim. Ghonim had administered a Facebook group that helped organize protesters and for a while at the height of the protests, he communicated solely through social media. Surely his detention hints to the seriousness with which regimes at risk view the threat of social media.

On the other hand, folks like Malcolm Gladwell and Evgeny Morozov call those who overemphasize social media's role in civil activism "cyber-" or "digital-utopians." Gladwell argues that the revolution won't be twittered because social media build weak ties, rather than the strong ties needed to galvanize "high risk" social activism. Morozov's recent book The Net Delusion deflates cyber-utopianism differently: in every way social media empowers protesters, he says, it can equally empower the powers that be. As @nancyscola pointed out on Twitter yesterday: "Egyptian revolutionaries seemed to have been blessed with a regime extraordinarily bad at the Internet." Iran's government, in contrast, may be more internet savvy, as their post-protest crackdowns in 2009 seem to show.

Across the Twitterverse at present the debate is now coming full circle. Jay Rosen, a well-known professor at NYU, lambasts what he calls the "Twitter can't topple dictators" genre. Rosen says the nay-sayers are simplifying the cyber-utopian position. They aren't bothering to address the interesting question of how social media tools have changed the balance of power between citizens and their governments, he says. Jeff Jarvis from CUNY also criticizes Gladwell and Morozov for their "curmudgeonry." Facebook and Twitter didn't topple Mubarak, he acknowledges, but some of the Egyptians who did organized themselves with these social media tools. Much as Gutenberg's printing press empowered Martin Luther to disseminate his 95 theses back in the 16th century.

Amidst all the history lessons, sociology lectures, and name-calling (and the associated tweets, links, and status updates) a lot of web traffic has been driven to all sides of the debate... without the discussion advancing very far. Indeed, some see the glass half-empty, while others see it half-full.

Nonetheless, a few common threads are emerging from the polemic. All sides agree that social media have altered the way that both social activists and governments organize themselves and communicate. But whether optimistic or pessimistic about the democratizing potential of social media tools, everyone can also agree that a mobile phone with a Twitter app won't provide jobs to the unemployed overnight, or put food on the table of the hungry.

As Google's Wael Ghonim tweeted a few hours ago: "Just a clarification to all Egyptians: I don't belong to any political alliance. I don't support anyone for presidency. That's not my role." While the web 2.0 tools may have helped keep a crowd of unhappy citizens from becoming an angry mob, it is up to traditional political processes and local institutions to pick up the pieces after the crowd disperses. It is citizens, not Twitter, nor Facebook, nor Google, who will need to build a responsive and well-functioning government that can provide adequate services to the people. A month after the fall of Ben Ali in Tunisia, the thousands of young Tunisians fleeing by sea to Europe remind us that picking up the pieces after the crowd disperses is often easier said than done.

Chris Garroway

Photo credit: http://www.tednguyenusa.com/the-next-egypt-in-social-media-revolution-2-0/

Can the internet help the poor?

A 50 year old father from Harare, Zimbabwe sent us an email, brimming with enthusiasm. Distressed by seeing women in his community suffer as they peel tough, sun-dried peanuts with their hands, teeth and stones, he turned to the internet, and found the Universal Nut Sheller, documented on the Appropedia wiki.

A Kenyan potato farmer turned to Google to find help when his crop was dying. He found the answer, harvested a bumper crop, connected with the Kenya Potato Growers' Association, and found a customer.

The maker of a home biogas system in the Philippines. He got help putting his design online, on the Appropedia wiki, and as a result got much more exposure, and received emails from around the world, with thank yous and suggestions for improvements (some of which he incorporated in his updated design). This is one of my favorite stories, because it shows that people in less developed countries are not only consumers of knowledge, but creators and sharers.

Appropedia is an open wiki project, focused on technologies and practices for overcoming poverty and creating a just and sustainable world. I've been involved since early days in 2006, working on it, telling people and helping to build partnerships. But when we tell people, a reaction we sometimes get is:

What use is an internet site to help the poor, when the poor have no internet access?

But... why the assumption that they're completely disconnected? Travel in less developed countries and you'll see internet cafes in cities and villages. A home internet connection may be too expensive for local incomes, but saving up money to connect from an internet cafe is within reach of many.

Mobile phones are widespread. Text messages and phone calls are surprisingly cheap in some countries - on one occasion a 10 minute off-peak call from my mobile phone in Jakarta cost me less than 3 cents. This matters because of the many applications for mobile phones that support development, and because there are many more phones than computers. A story was told at BarCampAfrica in 2008, by a Google employee who had been in Africa and asked a local "Have you heard of Google?" the local replied "Yes, of course." But when asked "Have you searched with Google from a mobile phone?" the local was confused. "Of course - how else can you search with Google?" In Africa especially, users are skipping land connections, and cell phones are getting smart quickly.

You only need one phone in the village with this capability to significantly increase people's ability to find information, and to allow new ideas to arrive and spread. A farmer with a dying crop now has an alternative to just watching the crop die. The compassionate Zimbabwean can find an answer to the suffering of women in the local community. The local inventor or designer can spread the word about their latest idea. And a teacher can find answers and teaching resources for their class. This is real progress.

Still not sure how this affects those who don't log on themselves? Consider our potato farmer, above. Understandably enthusiastic about how technology has helped him, he is now connecting the global with the local, enabling knowledge from the net to be shared in his community:

In my rural community, it is about making use of simple wooden notice boards, with print outs of text messages, e-mails, photos illustrations and articles, all talking of local issues.

This is clearly a world where tech helps the poor. The question is no longer whether the poor can benefit from wikis, but how good the information will be when they find it?

These issues face all wiki communities, especially those concerned with human progress at a global level. There is more we can do to make wikis more accessible, through improving the interface and making offline versions available. More on that in a later post.

Relevant wiki pages:

• Can the poor access Appropedia?