So It Goes

Victor Papanek from Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change

Writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. died Wednesday night, April 11th. His books were important to me and my generation. So I've been enjoying reading pieces that mark his passing. 3Quarks Daily links to a half dozen: here, here, here, here, here, and here.

On Tuesday I went to a visitation for a friend who died. Such a sad occasion, for she was a most beautiful and charming friend, still madly in love with her husband and their lovely children. It was nice to see so many long-time friends. We are all in a state of shock still imagining ourselves too young to die of disease. Many of us have known each other for over twenty five years, and my thoughts turned to our youth together in the early 1970's.

Eric Hersman has been running a series called African Digerati where he's been interviewing African technologists. It's a great series and his blog White African is always information rich. His most recent post in the series was with Ethan Zuckerman. Zuckerman says he doesn't "really qualify as a member of the African Digerati," but his contributions to the Afrosphere make him a significant contributor.

I was particularly interested in this exchange:

What do you see as the biggest advantage or opportunity for African technology development?

Something that’s very important in technology research is problem selection. If you choose a boring problem to solve, you get boring technologies. If you choose a fascinating problem and are able to solve it, you can start a revolution. Right now, there are much more interesting problems in African technology than there are in the developed world, in my opinion. I think that smart computer science students around the world should be looking at the developing world for challenges to address – power usage, wireless networking, non-verbal interfaces, computer-based systems for microentrepreneurship. It’s a huge advantage for African innovators to be surrounded by interesting, worthwhile problems.

Reading perhaps more into Zuckerman's answer than is proper, my sense of it was that creating solutions applicable to the developing world is smart because those solutions will be useful everywhere.

The jump from my friend's death to Zuckerman's point about "interesting problems" is a long one. What I'm thinking about is how, back when my cohort was younger, we were indeed engaged by interesting problems. Back in the day most of us would have liked the idea of ourselves as "counter-cultural." We hardly turned out that way.

When I was in college Papaneck's book Design for the Real World captured my attention.

There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them. And possibly on one profession is phonier. Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don't need, with money they don't have, in order to impress others who don't care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today. Industrial design, by concocting the tawdry idiocies hawked by advertisers, comes a close second.

None of us flinched reading lines like that; instead, many of us really did respond: "Right on!" Our ecological understanding sometimes wasn't very deep, but there was no mistaking a passion about it.

Looking around the room full of mourners I wondered, "What happened?" I drove down to the funeral home with a friend. On the way back home she remarked about what could have been. She was referring to the political follies of the years, but there's no escaping the fact most of us played along.

It's the construct of telesis that stuck out in Papanek's Function Complex diagram when I read the book almost thirty years ago. Telesis isn't a word I've run into much since. Merriam Webster defines:

progress that is intelligently planned and directed : the attainment of desired ends by the application of intelligent human effort to the means

Papanek relates telesis to design:

[C]ontent of a design must reflect the times and conditions that have given rise to it, and must fit in with the general human socioeconomic order in which it is to operate.

As a generation we wanted to run counter, but in our designs lacked the creativity to fashion a fit with the socioeconomic order in which we function that was anyway more ecological. In fact, we seem to have fallen for precisely the program--"It's the system, man"--we once so enthusiastically mocked.

Vonnegut's writing always seems so simple, but the ethical dilemmas he exposes are never so black and white, us and them; but nuanced. General humanness and the socioeconomic order are problems that won't go away and are the subject of much of Vonnegut's storytelling. We have to navigate through them, and Vonnegut showed that harsh judgments aren't a particularly useful way to do so.

Something about online social networks and all the content people put up on the Web is how blindingly stupid too much of it is. Geez! At least that's my reaction when reading some of what I've contributed. I'm not an African blogger, but I do want attend to the Afrosphere. The beauty of the Web is contained in the dialogs. It's worthwhile participating. But when we do, our local perspectives, our telesic baggage, influences us to such an extent we often can't see how wildly inappropriate our designs and solutions are in different contexts.

Eric Hersman responded to a comment I left at on his post with the Zuckerman interview:

I’m particularly in agreement with his belief that Africans are responsible for making Africa better. It’s up to those educated techies in the diaspora to apply their years of experience to solving Africa’s technological problems. Many of these technological problems, once solved, will likely solve a number of economic and social issues as well (my opinion).

Eric seems to be saying a number of things, not the least of which is coming from a perspective of a diasporian. I may be wrong, but I took it that he was also pointing to the problem of people in the West designing inapt solutions, ignoring the importance of place to functional design. I don't deny Eric Hersman's concerns, but I also think that Zuckerman's "worthwhile problems" is a critical and fascinating point.

Zuckerman wrote a provocative piece, The moving circus, the post-national, the Global Soul and the xenophile which inspired Joshua Goldstein on In An African Minute to respond. I'd like to put myself in a line with these two, but feel obliged to point out that I'm goof and neither of them are. Still, we're three white Americans who follow and participate in the Afrosphere. I'm a product of the Baby Boomer Generation, Zuckerman, I presume, a Gen X Generation guy, and Goldstein Gen Y.

Zuckerman wrote:

Xenophilia believes that the world is made of diverse, culturally and socially different, yet interconnected spaces, and that the ability to encounter these different spaces without getting on an airplane is one of the most exciting aspects of the 21st century.

Goldstein makes the case for the "Local Soul," but observes:

Local Soul is no longer enough. We know that our (local) way is not the only way, and for personal and creative reasons it is necessary to reach beyond the bounds of the Local Soul.

And he asks: How can we balance the tension between the necessity for a deep understanding of our place with a growing need to expand our boundaries toward a Global Soul?

The question is such a good one in that Goldstein focuses on "a balance" and not reduced to an either/or bifurcation. Balance seems the core of Hersman's emphasis on African responsibility for solving challenges in Africa, tilting the weight towards the Local Soul. And Zuckerman's point about the importance of interesting problems, and how smart computer science students around the world should pay attention to solving African challenges concerns balancing this tension, perhaps by tilting the weight towards the Global Soul.

So Kurt Vonnegut has died, one of the Greatest Generation. As much as those of us Baby Boomers rail against the notion, we're getting old and our influence waning. That realization is a small part of the shock we all felt with my friend's passing. Being among my friends, so many of them have created some very good things. As the sad sack among them, my yelling: "Sell outs!" would be ridiculous. I wouldn't say that, in any case, but I'm enough of a Boomer to know that the accusation still carries a sting. That seems a very good thing. My generation holds within a deep critique of the socioeconomic order and a vision for a more just and ecological way of living. Vonnegut was very influential in helping to shape that vision.

Rene Dubos is often credited with the maxim: Think Globally, Act Locally. Dubos, was part of a generation before Vonnegut's but coined his famous maxim while an adviser to the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. Sociologist Lester Frank Ward, a couple of generations older than Dubos coined the word "telesis." There's not an imaginary straight-line that connects the generations, rather threads which extend to and beyond. Dubos's meaning in "Think Globally, Act Locally," isn't far from Zuckerman's view of the world which is "diverse, culturally and socially different, yet interconnected spaces." And the mission of World Changing where Zuckerman is a board member and contributor bears a thread that extends to Lester Frank Ward's vision of telesis.

Vonnegut's last book of is entitled, A Man Without a Country. Vonnegut's meaning isn't precisely what Zuckerman is referring to in his The moving circus post, but a a thread of humanism connects them. Many of the essays in the book are available online at the In These Times Web site. Cold Turkey is worth reading. Something that's reassuring is that even while wisdom comes from experience, a wise man like Vonnegut doesn't claim to have the meaning of it all figured out.

Verlyn Kinkenborg in The New York Times suggests that for those of us who read Vonnegut's work twenty or thirty years ago, our sense of those works now is a bit disquieting. She writes:

So you get older, and it’s been 20 or 30 years since you last read “Player Piano” or “Cat’s Cradle” or “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Vonnegut is not, now, somehow serious enough. You’ve entered that time of life when every hard truth has to be qualified by the sense of what you stand to lose. “It’s not that simple,” you find yourself saying a lot, and the train of thought that unfolds in your mind as you speak those words reeks of desperation.

But then she concludes:

And yet, somehow, the world seems more and more to have been written by Vonnegut and your life is now the footnote. Perhaps it is time to go back and revisit that earlier self, the one who seemed, for a while, so interwoven in the pages of those old paperbacks.

When I gathered with my friends earlier this week to grieve for our friend's passing, I remembered us when, and those memories were comforting.

I'm probably just lost in the weeds alluding to comparison between the tension between a generations and a Global Soul and a Local Soul. But I realize as I write that using a metaphor of a balance beam and weights to compare Zuckerman and Goldstein's positions is exactly the wrong sort of metaphor for the balance involved. Quantitative measures are nonsense when the issues are the quality of connections.

Food, shelter, clothing are essentials, and we imagine these things as something we have. Perhaps the very closeness of these essentials make it easy to neglect the basic needs for clean water and the atmosphere we breathe. Water and air we all share and so it's harder to expand our attention to the kinds of cooperation necessary for them. Vonnegut in Cold Turkey says we're addicted to oil. He's right about that of course, but like addicts we steep ourselves in denial about it. That's why it's so hard for us to get our heads around Global Climate Change, and to move our butts.

One of the reasons that Ethan Zuckerman's suggestion that smart computer science student look to the developing world for problems to address seems so interesting is because it's a way to think outside the limitations of oil addiction. No doubt Eric Hersman is correct that Africans are the ones best equipped to tackle African problems. But the problems people face today include existential challenges of a global scale. What could be more global than the composition of the Earth's thin layer of atmosphere. The interesting part is the solutions to the global problem depend upon the behavior of billions of people in hundreds of thousands locales.

World Changing's Manifesto works from a premise:

that the tools, models and ideas for building a better future lie all around us. That plenty of people are working on tools for change, but the fields in which they work remain unconnected. That the motive, means and opportunity for profound positive change are already present. That another world is not just possible, it's here. We only need to put the pieces together.

Vonnegut's literary legacy presents that putting the pieces together is no simple matter, because all sort of truly lunatic combinations are probable.

Cynics in Grecian antiquity believed that virtue is the highest good. I don't really know much about history, so I wonder how the present meanings of cynic has come to be. I've seen Vonnengut called a cynic, I've seen him called a misanthrope. And I find it strange for someone who so strongly believed in kindness and loving one another to be so cast. It's the quality of the connections that matters most. I'm grateful to have been connected to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. through his paperback books. I'm delighted that others can connect to, even while he's flown the cage.

Framing

Reading the newspaper on Friday, an article, Judge gets tough with convict who spit at officer produced a perverse chuckle. It seems that a man of whom the court-ordered medical opinion stated is "narcissistic beyond the point of rehabilitation" set out to represent himself in court over a matter of spitting on his probation officer. The judge exceeded sentencing guidelines and sentenced him to four to 10 years.

A friend sent me that photograph of me and I wanted to share it. I'm not an awfully good judge of character, especially my own. The picture captures a certain je ne sais quoi; no wait, it's pretty easy to say: I'm a goof. Partly wanting to run a picture has to do with having signed up this blog to Afrigator on the Ugandan channel. The problem is, you see, I'm not Ugandan. I've never been to Uganda, much less been to Africa. Oh and there's the unfortunate choice of "Kaunda" as a handle, and the even more ridiculous decision to post for a while a photo of me in an afro wig in my profile. Geez! What was I thinking?

The name was chosen because I was sure I'd make a fool of myself blogging and thought that some anonymity might be in order. All the good handles I'd dreamt up were already taken. Kenneth Kaunda came to mind. At the time I was hoping against hope that President Musevini would step down as Kaunda eventually did. Not surprisingly, because of Kaunda's authoritarian presidency, no other blogger had snapped up the name Kaunda. I bet I can change the name, but have figured out how to. In any case, I soon discovered doing searches from my blog quickly yielded results displaying my real name and other aliases. I was quite naive about online anonymity, or at least how to go about creating it.

Part of my mirth about the case of the irredeemable narcissist in the courtroom stems from my, decidedly unqualified, perceptions of the judge in question gleaned over time. You know, he strikes me as a wee bit egotistical; well, and maybe a tad on the narcissistic side of the scale. The Assistant District Attorney on the case said during the sentencing hearing:

Anyone who cannot control himself with the judge on the bench deserves the maximum sentence.

Note to self: Should you ever be compelled to defend yourself in court; get representation!

I'm not at all sure how clinicians make their diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. One clue that I might not raise to the level is that while the report of about the defendant did raise a chuckle, I'm well aware of my own ability to make a fool of myself publicly, so felt embarrassed for the defendant. Schadenfreund was offset by: "There but by the grace of God go I."

Living in this world seems a little crazy most of the time. And as a very ordinary American the notion of being of service to African people is something to deserving of some skepticism and inward reflection.

I was delighted to discover that Keguro has been blogging at new quarters. The man never ceases to amaze me with his capacity to peal back the layers revealing what's inside and under. In the post I read today he looked at a recent New York Times poll which asked readers: "whether 'rich countries' should help 'poor countries' with problems stemming from climate change."

Keguro notes that most people in "rich" countries are hardly rich, but then directs his attention to the rhetorical framing of the question:

Responsibility, what I would term culpability, is re-translated, through a very clever sleigh of hand, into altruism. Rich countries help Poor countries.

Recoded as altruism, culpability becomes yet another way to bolster one’s ego. Pushed to a certain illogic, the potential for recoding injury or criminality or responsibility as a form of altruism guarantees ongoing inequality and oppression.

Reading the whole post is very much recommended as is reading his blog Gukira frequently. The precision of the word, culpability, over responsibility is worthwhile. The connotation of trustworthiness in "responsible" tends to paper over the "blameworhiness" implicit in the word culpable.

Acting responsibly is of course no mean feat. How should one, privileged as I am, respond in a mad and unjust world? The strategy of narrowing ones boundaries contains a logic and even an inevitability. Broadening ones boundaries to include in sight people in the world far away is fraught with pitfalls, but also exposes one to a richness of life unavailable from a closed, provincial perspective. Without much wealth the advantages to the broader perspective would seem to easily outweigh the pitfalls. Nevertheless negotiating the unfamiliar terrain requires tact and self-awareness. Neither quality, it appears, have I in abundance.

Keguro's illuminating the rhetoric of "rich" countries and "poor" countries reminds that the problem isn't just me, but a pervasive framing, even propaganda, that shapes our worldviews, especially as Americans. Narcissism isn't only a personal disorder, but a persistent cultural expression; surely it's annoying.

Hash points to new developments at Kabissa and online social network for civil society organizations working in or for Africa. In the member spotlight at the Web site is Thembathi an organization dedicated to the support of orphans and other vulnerable children in the KwaZulu-Natal region of South Africa. Thembathi means hope with us in Zulu.

I bear culpability for injustices of many sorts, just by being born who and where I was. It doesn't seem fair, but there you go, injustice is a funny that way. So I have an obligation to try to help repair the world. But I'm a shirker and feeling guilty seems to motivate me towards inaction. Whereas, the invitation to hope with others moves me. My Ugandan friends inspire me to imagine Uganda's potential. Hoping with them enriches my life. Like so many of my ideas--have you seen Hats For Health?--Bazungu Bucks is a bit half-baked. Still the intention is to invite others to hope with us. I'm sure together we can create something good.

Afrigator

Last night My friend Nathan in Iganga Uganda sent me an IM: "What are you doing?" I told him I was looking over a list of Nobel Prize winners in Economics and asked what he was doing: "Chatting with a friend in Thailand," was his response. As it happens I was thinking about economics because an American friend teaching in Thailand is beginning some new research and sharing the process online.

A friend and neighbor is a well-regarded horseman. She's a horseman? I don't know what the less-sexists way to say it; horse trainer doesn't seem to fit her approach. I know not much about horses, and I met a friend of hers a while back who knows my friend primarily from the horses. After interrogating me to discover, I know nothing about horses, she said, "You don't have a clue who she is." My horsey friend is a polymath. Over time her friend has discovered some of the areas our interests overlap, or at least has got a sense that we actually do share some history. The friend got comfortable enough to tell me that when she first ran into me at the corner store and then at my friend's farm, she thought: "What a hick! What a hayseed."

Her first impressions of me weren't half wrong. That's why Internet conversations spanning the continents still seem so remarkable and enjoyable to me.

I met Nathan online probably over five years ago. The story of how that came about involves my horsey friend. She got me online. When I discovered all the news sources online, even ones which gave spare coverage to African issues, my cocoon of denial about the suffering of other people in the world began to unravel. I discussed issues of food security in the Eastern Horn of Africa with my friend and she said, "I've got just the book for you." The next time I visited she gave me a book by Robert Rodale, Save Three Lives: A Guide to Famine Prevention. Soon enough I searched "African pen pal" and made my first connection with Nathan.

Nathan's life is full of challenges I can only imagine. He was only seventeen when both of his parents had died, leaving him the oldest of five children. Something that's always impressed me about Nathan is how he's understood that his fortunes are closely tied to those of his community. So we've talked over the years and collaborated together on ways to do good stuff in his community.

Me, Mister Hick, Mister Hayseed, had quite a lot of learning to do about Africa and Uganda; I still do. But I wasn't so sure where to look for information in the beginning. In the last year or so the number of sources and opportunities for learning seem to have increased many-fold. Partly perhaps this has to do with just knowing better where to look, but quite importantly a number of new sites have sprung up. I'm particularly excited about a new site, Afrigator.

If you scroll to the bottom of my sidebar you'll see several buttons to various Web sites. I just noticed that the Taking IT Global Button doesn't work: I better fix that. There's a new button: Afrigator'd. I listed this blog on their Ugandan Channel. Maybe I really shouldn't have, but I suspect the ratings will allow this blog to fly under the radar.

Afrigator is an aggregator of African blog posts. I've had the feeds from Blog Africa sent to my Bloglines reader. I wonder why I've never championed that site? Probably because I subscribe to several African bloggers already and enjoy scanning through the many feeds through Blog Africa daily, but recognize that not everyone has the interest or time to do that. But my heart sank when I at read Ethan Zuckerman's excellent post on Afrigator:

Afrigator is very, very pretty and strongly suspect that it will make BlogAfrica obsolete at some point in the near future.

Zuckerman urges anyone whose blog is listed on Blog Africa to list it at Afrigator as well. I hope Blog Africa stays up for a long time because I do like the unfiltered stream of posts, because information and topics not on my radar often prove to be interesting and useful. But I especially hope that African bloggers do register at Afrigator in droves because the site is clean and provides many different ways to find posts of interest.

Blogs are such a great way to discover places because the posts are real people's perspectives. My friends now suspect I'm particularly informed about Africa. That's hardly the case, but they ask me all sorts of questions anyway. Very often the questions are about African politics. I'm a news junkie and follow American politics pretty closely. Oh man! The ins and outs of American politics are really hard to make sense of. Yes, I do pay attention to politics in Africa, but I'm a long way from really having much of a clue. I always tell my friends that there are over fifty African countries and that the continent is huge. Of course African politics is important for Americans to pay attention to, but that lens alone distorts our imagination of Africa. Reuters Africa is a great news portal for the news of the continent, and if I have the presence of mind do mention it. But blogs provide windows into business, art, architecture, technology, the African Diaspora and so much more. Blogs connect people. The people connections provide some context to begin to understand complicated issues like politics.

Afrigator's site is so clean and easy to use. One of the features I like very much is the Channels are based on countries and by the headers for each post is a little country flag. Symbols like that help me so much. First of all I have to practice a bit to recognize all the country flags. Then I make a mental note placing the country on the map of Africa in my mind. I love the tag clouds on Afrigator too.

Yesterday I noticed Microformats in the tag cloud. I'm so slow when it comes to computer stuff; for example, I seem to freeze when it comes to picking tags. But I do at least get the idea that tags and people tagging stuff is very useful. Microformats are something I have only a dim awareness about, so I clicked on the tag and scrolled through the posts. South African blogger Stii had a post directing to a great Firefox tool called Operator. I downloaded it and really love it. Among the features is that Operator will find the tags on a Web page and with a click direct you to photos at Flickr, bookmarks at de.licio.us or blogs at Technorati. I have a sense this is going to help me use tags more effectively than I would have otherwise.

The African blogosphere is already a very rich space and it's growing rapidly too. Afrigator is great addition to the Web universe. Kudos to Justin Harman and Mike Stopforth for bringing Afrigator online!

Stop Cyberbullying Day

Andy Carvin pronounced today as Stop Cyberbullying Day, as a result of a very public and serious online harassment of a widely read tech blogger, Katha Sierra.

One of the nice things about being such a casual blogger is not having enough visibility to be the object of online feuding and blog wars. One of the sad aspects of Kathy Sierra going public with her ordeal is, that as a result, she's gotten even more vitriolic and hateful messages directed at her. So I'm loathe to blog about that incident, as if I would even have something worthwhile to say. But it's not correct to think I'm unaffected by such awfulness, directed at Sierra and many others. One of the most direct impacts I can feel, if not measure, is the voices I don't hear online because bloggers are tired of the BS.

Of all the bad things someone might say about me, to be labeled a misogynist would cut me to the quick. That's not how I want to be identified, and the idea of hating women boggles. From my position as man, not very manly sort, but a man none the less, I don't have to endure the cruel assaults which too many women face all the time. Vile verbal attacks against women are a particular problem; a subset of the larger problem of hateful speech. All of us have some experience with the ways words wound, but it's useful for guys like me not to imagine I can truly understand the impact of sexual objectification and threats of sexual violence against women. To get a sense of how clueless men can be about this, consider the justification sworn in some cases where a man is accused of murdering a gay man: "He was coming on to me." And then to consider how often such testimony results in acquittal. Men know the power inherent in such assaults, but not a clue what it feels like to be on the receiving end.

So this disturbing aspect of misogyny is an important part of the discussions going on all over the blogosphere about cyberbullying, but there is so much more. Andy Carvin has set up a Ning site Stop Cyberbullying. Ning is Web site that allows people to create their own social network with profile pages and forums. so the turn around from Sierra's post on Tuesday to a site that up and running in response now is just remarkable. Go there look around, the discussions are thoughtful, there are numerous resources about cyberbullying; and it's a great example of "create something good" when confronted by evil.

Surely most of us have noticed how tempers can flare as the result of Internet correspondence. I have unintentionally pushed those buttons and pulled the leavers to make others livid with me. When that's happened I've wondered: What the heck did I do? That's different, of course form cyberbullying, but those instances provide a window to view how powerfully emotions can be engaged, and how difficult it can be to repair online relationships.

Any regular readers of blogs or Newsgroups are familiar with Internet trolls too. Considering my own instances of infuriating people and my own annoyance at trolls, I've poured over various list like Giveen's Guide to Internet Trolls. I've wondered: What kind of Internet troll am I? I'm not a troll! Clueless and insensitive at times, maybe, but I don't intentionally strive to sow discord. So the issue of trolls is a bit different from cyberbullying too, but it's subject that's hard to avoid when considering the broad issue.

Among my online African friends I've heard their experiences with Westerners, in particular Americans, hurling racist language in their direction. As a white guy, muzungu, and an American who's never been to Africa, how to talk about racism here in America is a subject I've never figured out the words to tell the story. It's not like it's easy to talk about with other Americans. Certainly one of the first things I discovered going online was how terribly much racist talk floats around on the Internet. One particularly frustrating situations that comes up is over advance fee frauds and being tarred with the broad brush: "You people!"

Come to think of it when the sentence begins, "You people.." it's pretty easy to predict nothing good is coming after it. Except, who isn't prone to generalities and stereotypes? We all are, it seems it's part of the way people in general create a map to navigate around in the world that's compact enough to actually be usable. It's a good thing to be aware of this tendency. In any case we can be fairly sure that "You people..." is the beginning of an expression of anger.

There are many things we can be reasonably angry about too. Nigerian Letters in my email box don't make me angry, but it's easy to see why they make some so angry; their intent is fraud after all. It seems helpful to recognize there's another perspective from just the consumer of such fraud, and in some cases the intent of the fraud isn't so very different from that of the cyberbully. The various ways of scamming people on the Internet again isn't exactly cyberbullying, but something to consider in the whole ball of wax. On the Internet scams are truly International affairs.

Dave Winer has made some very important contributions to the current discussion. He wrote:

So if we have a code of conduct, it can't just talk about how trolls behave, because truly we have no control over that. It should talk about responsible people whose names we know with reputations they care about -- what should they do when abuse happens? That is something we can do something about. There should be 18 steps before something like Kathy Sierra's post appears in the midst of the blogosphere, and it shouldn't come from teh person who has been victimized, someone else should stand up for them and explain what happened. For so many reasons this is a much better way to go, and I'm sure the victim would like it better too (I speak from experience).

This blog is hardly a piffle, but in my best imagination it belongs to the so called "bridge blogs." Like other bridge bloggers I encourage people to blog, to tell their stories. We have a special responsibility as bridge bloggers to respond to abuse in our connected communities. It's not always obvious what to do, but at least we can stand by and support our friends when they are subjected to cyberbullying. At a minimum we can take care and be mindful.

Networks

In many ways my mother had pretty elegant tastes; that is, she liked things well-made and that announced their use and purpose forthrightly. But she was also fond of tacky little plaques with aphorisms on them. I suppose it was her way of suggesting that it would be unwise to toss out folk wisdom too quickly.

The other day I was reminded of something on a plaque that outlined "The Rules of the House:" If it cries; love it. I went to the spot where the plaque is supposed to be to check to see if there were other good rules on it. I was surprised to find the screw it once hung from, but no plaque. I fiddled with the screw a bit and realized it didn't have enough purchase to be stable and tightening it to make it so didn't allow enough of a head to hang a picture. A longer screw is in order. Apparently the darn plaque must have fallen down once too often and I'd stashed it away. And that must have been some time ago because I don't remember anything about it.

The trouble with the sort of folk sayings my mother hung about the house all through my growing up is they seem so obviously right, it hardly seems worth the trouble of reminding about them. Clearly, my taking down that plaque and not registering a blip on my memory shows how little I've paid attention.

I haven't written a blog post in over a month, I kept thinking to myself: I'll get a round to it. Oh yes, and as you can see from the picture, a part of my inheritance is a Round Tuit. A fine Round Tuit it is, no doubt purchased with care at one of America's finest souvenir shoppes.

Before Christmas last I joined Omidyar.net. Omidyar.net is a social networking site. What makes it unique among the many social network sites is its simple purpose to help people discover that every individual has the power to make a difference. There are so many remarkable people there, many whom I'd discovered elsewhere on the Web. Omidyar.net isn't the easiest network to be involved in; it's a "roll up your sleeves and get to work" sort of affair.

Among the many discussion threads at ONet are discussions about open space technology and social networks. The discussions are of a very high caliber; the sort of high level discussions that give even ordinarily chatty types like me pause before jumping right in. Daniel Bassill is one of the most erudite participants in these threads. I've had his blog Tutor/Mentor Connection on my Bloglines blogroll since well before joining the ONet community. Tutor/Mentor Connection is primarily concerned with matching young people in the Chicago area with adult tutors and mentors. Their approach to this and their use of the Web so impressed me I subscribed to the blog.

Recently at ONet Daniel Bassill contacted me about a blog exchange Tutor/Mentor connection is hosting in May and June. I was flattered to be contacted, but that also set off a minor crisis of confidence about this blog. I've never figured out what purpose this blog serves, except perhaps as an outlet for my babbling-on, and thus sparing some unsuspecting victim their ear and patience with me.

But truth be told, I've harbored ambitions for the blog. I've wanted more Americans in general, and more people around Pittsburgh specifically, to consider what they can do in service to people in Africa.

My sense is that people struggle everyday to provide the requisites of our survival. As hard as it seems for all of us, those of us living in the USA and other rich areas of the world have enormous advantages. One of the consequences of this state of affairs is a complacency about the enormous challenges people face. We lull ourselves into thinking that the problems aren't ours. But all people are part of the human family, whose lines, we now know, thanks to advances in science, are much closer than we ever imagined before.

My complacency astounds me. For example, yesterday I read: "World Food Programme Forced to Cut Food Rations to Northern Uganda by Half" (also here). This is quite significant news, at least one would think so for someone like me who claims an interest in Uganda. But I didn't save the links to that story in my running notes or to del.icio.us and I couldn't remember off hand where I'd read about it. Did I ignore the news simply thinking there's nothing I can do about it? I'm not sure really, but I am sure that I will hear news of the consequences of it through Pittsburgh's Africa Project.

Like everyone, I'm part of many implicit and explicit networks, although I hardly feel very connected, like the connected-to-many people that kept the number of hands a letter addressed to a person in Stanley Milgram's Small World experiments to about six degrees of separation. Try your own letter chain here. The point is that the suffering from hunger in Northern Uganda is something, even as unconnected as I am, I will hear about in personal terms.

Daniel Bassill does great work and has thought and experimented with social networking for many years. With all that accumulated knowledge, the idea for the blog exchange is deceptively simple: The idea is for people to tell their stories and to share ideas about how we can build better connections. We need to build better connections, our lives and the lives of many depend upon it.

What stories do you have? Will you get around to sharing them? I'm hoping you will.

Bazungu Bucks Aren't Heavy

In the comments Prettyobvious asks: And exactly how many Bazungu Bucks can I get for 363 tons of $100 bills?

One hour of your time is equal to one Bazungu Buck. Since the 363 tons of $100 bills represents about four billion dollars, one dollar exchange per Bazungu Buck would make for an honest days work of five hundred million people. A more generous $8 per hour wage would mean that 363 tons of $100 bills could be exchanged for five hundred million hours of work.

Bazungu Bucks, however are not convertible to real money, they are a form of Time Dollar. Time dollars are not the only kind of alternative currency. There are a wide array of alternative currencies. One model is LETS or Local Exchange Trading Systems. Phil at Blahsploitation linked to a recent BBC article about a local currency, the Urstomtaler used in Magdeburg Germany. I was surprised to learn in the article that there are 16 regional currencies in Germany. The surprise comes because such currencies are officially illegal. Time dollars in the USA have legal precedents which suggest their legality, but perhaps the best known alternative currency in the USA, Ithaca Hours bear more resemblance to the local currency of the Urstomtaler than Time Dollars. The BBC article explains the Bundesbank view the regional currencies as in a "grey area" and a form of social money. Ithaca Hours also fall into a gray area, but the scheme has been left alone so far as I can tell.

I printed about 100 Bazungu Bucks, and I've tried giving them away and still have plenty left. I think the difficulty in spreading them around isn't just people can't imagine what a Bazungu Buck is good for, I think it's because they understand the idea of an hour in service to African people. It's not that they don't want to serve so much as not knowing what to do. So the currency has built into it an unintended "guilty feeling" factor, a very serious problem. I think I'd have much better luck saying: "Do this that and the other and I'll give you X number of Bazungu Bucks." Alas, I'm not organized enough, so Bazungu Bucks are stalled.

Nonetheless, social money is a sticky idea, and I'm sure we'll see various systems and instruments tried in the future. One quite handy Web site is BillMonk. I'll admit to not using it and that has to do with my lack of friends. It's a great idea, and the developers are right, I think, in their expectation that social money will become rather large business.

I don't recall where I first saw the link to a YouTube video made by Michael Wesch but I do know that Christian Long posted it in a post, A Delightful Re-Think and encourage you to follow the link to his blog, think:lab to watch it and then look around Christian's blog. Education is something we all care about and think:lab never ceases to delight and inform. One of the great points in Wesch's video is: The Web is linking people. Traditional money links people well in some ways but fails to connect in other important ways and these failings are made more obvious by the social Web.

Perhaps money is exactly the wrong sort of metaphor needed for peer production. But one reason alternative money schemes emerge is we're used to doing things with money. It's the intersection of peer-production and traditional money that's so interesting. It's a subset of social entrepreneurship and business that's changing our ideas about money and business. These surely are "interesting times" and the need for inventiveness has never been greater. A bedrock observation of conventional economics is: "People respond to incentives." Social money fits neatly with my ideas about incentives, so the various experiments along this vein seem worth paying attention to.

One Hour of Time

This post is cross-posted at my other blog, Hats For Health. Longtime readers here may recall that I seem to have a strange fascination with paper hats. This post won't explain all of that, I at a loss to imagine whence this fascination stems, but for what it's worth it explains it a little.

My ideas always seem half-baked. I've got another blog called Bazungu Bucks. The idea behind Bazungu Bucks is to assign a credit for time spent in service to African people, where one hour of time equals one Bazungu Buck. You can read a little more about the idea in this post. I guess it's a very Western metaphor to think; time is money. But then again, Bazungu Bucks aren't real money but an alternative currency.

Now this idea hasn't gone anywhere because nobody can figure out how to spend Bazungu Bucks, so what's the use? Since you really can't spend Bazungu Bucks like money, what I had in mind is that sort of a reputation system. If a person spends enough time in service to African people and accrues some Bazungu Bucks they could go to another person with some Bazungu Bucks and make a deal--after all who else would do something for Bazungu Bucks than someone who already had some? Perhaps first there is a question: What did you do to earn those bucks? Chances are good that the ways different people earned their bucks represent individual interests and skills. So the next question might be: Would you be willing to trade some of your time using your skills to earn some of my Bazungu Bucks? The bucks sort of grease the wheels of collaboration among partners.

The devil is always in the details. In this case I've not worked out too many of the details for anyone to take the idea seriously. Nevertheless I think there is a kernel of a good idea in Bazungu Bucks and that's simply: Our time is valuable. One dollar won't get anyone very far, and a single Bazungu Buck may not get you anywhere. But dollars added up can make a difference and so too the small efforts of many. The reputation systems at various Web sites like eBay function a little like how I imagine Bazungu Bucks might. In any case such reputation systems prove there is value to what we do which is not so easily measured by real money.

It takes about an hour to make a hat. As a fund raising endeavor it's probably not very efficient. I think most people would be willing to pay a dollar for a handmade paper party hat. And I think most would agree that a dollar an hour is slave wages. So maybe the idea of Hats For Health isn't just half-baked but downright wacky too.

I think that Hats For Health hold value beyond fund raising. First of all parties are very important to people because they are a way to share our connections to others. An hour making a Hat For Health is an hour spent in service to others. In that hour a person makes all sorts of decisions to make a nice hat. So the hat contains a story about the person who makes the hat. When people make hats together in groups stories are shared. Now fund raising is a good reason to make hats, so the best way to sell the hat is to tell someone the story about the hat. When a person wears a Hat For Health they tell a story about it to. Making Hats For Health is a way of expanding connections. The stories of paper party hats for health have real value beyond the money raised.

Three million people die a year as a result of diarrhea, a disproportionate number of them are children. Nearly two-thirds of the people on the globe do not have dependable access to safe water. So at a very rudimentary level the story of a hat begins: Too many people in the world lack for the basic essentials of life, and too many are dying. I made this hat to do something about that. Won't you do something too?

The best part about the hats is they are colorful and fun. They are meant to be worn at a parties. The stories in the hats are joyful. The invitation to do something, to spend a little of your time to devise solutions to the pressing problems today is joined by: Come on, it will be fun!