OneWorld.net (U.S.)

Listen to the People

I want to thank GFEM steering committee, and especially David Haas, for inviting me here today. I am very honoured …

David has asked me to focus on 3 topics: · First, to introduce OneWorld’s governance model and our media portal · Second, to introduce OW-TV · Third, to introduce our latest and biggest baby, the Open Knowledge Network or OKN.

It’s very impressive what we have been hearing about from David Fanning. We know from first hand experience how much it takes to keep a serious series like this going, when the mainstream gatekeepers shut the gates more and more firmly against anything that isn’t infotainment. Peter especially knows this, because he was a media pioneer at the BBC for 20 years, initiating its first global justice strands like Everyman and Global Report in the 70s and 80s, and setting up the BBC’s first interactive unit – which the BBC threw away, in 1990, because they said this interactive multimedia nonsense would never take.

But then, thank goodness, the web arrived, as we all know – and we were completely knocked out by it. Here was an unbelievably flexible new medium, packed with the most exciting creative possibilities just waiting to be explored. Not creative just in an aesthetic sense but in terms of its democratising potential. A people’s medium: for the people, by the people.

So for the past 9 years, we have been experimenting with what this new medium can do, to help bring about a co-creative society. Not to think of Society as being over there - and Media over here, commenting (and reporting, which is also a form of commenting): but of media being an integral part of society – with its communication flows as the lifeblood and voice of a society that can express itself.

Someone last week described OW as a giant petrie dish! But when we launched OneWorld in January 1995, we expected it to be a very tiny petrie dish - just a half-time job for one person! But within six months, to our astonishment, OneWorld.net had become the biggest site on human rights and global justice on the Net – and it has grown exponentially ever since then.

And when OW started to expand all over the world, from a UK base, we became very worried: heaven forbid we should create a second British Empire! So we deconstructed OW - and reconstructed it as a global network, with power distributed all around the network.

Now there are 10 OW centres around the world, from Zambia to Finland, with the UK-based group there not to dominate it but to maximise the network synergies. It is emphatically not an HQ that issues orders to the rest of the world. The only people who have overarching power are the trustees – and they too are not proposed by myself as Director of OWI Foundation but by the network, with each centre nominating one trustee. So the governing power of OW comes from the outside in: just as it should in any good democracy.

What do the 10 centres do? Each one collaborates with partners in its own part of the world. OW-United States has 140 partners ranging from big NGOs like CARE and Amnesty, to UN organisations like NetAid, to small groups like Women’s Edge and Teachers without Borders.

The OneWorld network as a whole has some 1,500 partner organisations from all over the world. Many of these are networks in their own right – so there’s a giant chain reaction out there!

Between them the partners produce about 2 million web documents at any one time - which you can get fulltext, databased and searchable, on oneworld.net. A rather terrifying and skeptical woman once demanded, very aggressively, whether OW had anything on childhood post traumatic stress syndrome in Bosnia Herzegovina. I nervously typed this into the search box - hoping I had spelled it right! - and immediately up popped up three articles; much to my relief, and her great delight. Instant conversion.

But as not everyone come to a site knowing what they want to find out, these millions of documents are also organised into 17 different user-friendly editions – including three different Spanish language editions: in Central American Spanish, Catalan, and Spanish; an Italian edition, Dutch, Serbian, Macedonian, Albanian, Finnish, German, assorted different kinds of English editions, including from Asia and Africa, the US and Canada - and there’s a French-Canadian edition too. The point is not to be prolific but to be local – rooted in local culture, but not trapped there; but rather, leading readers out to a global awareness.

We also run a syndication service on Yahoo! Yahoo! News is the biggest online news service in the world – but till recently it took newsfeeds just from 4 news syndication services - Reuters, AP, NYT, ABC. The usual suspects, all with a very predictable Northern POV. But about a year ago, OneWorld.net joined the list – and so, for the first time, Yahoo readers got access to the POVs of civil society, including those from poor communities in the global South.

We are reaching beyond the converted to a general audience – proven by the fact that we have finally started getting hate mail! Interestingly, even the biggest NGOs like Oxfam or CARE could not get this exposure on Yahoo – precisely because they are strong individual brands. It is only because we are a plural platform for a wide range of voices that Yahoo accepts us.

Now more than ever of course we need this diversity.

That’s just our text outlets – or some of them. But OW is a multimedia portal. We collaborate with some 700 radio stations: they use the OW radio platform to help exchange, for free, programmes in 17 languages. Radio is key in the south. The Internet via computers only reaches less than 10% of the global population – but radio reaches over 90%.

And web-enabled information delivered by solar powered radio is now used even in remote areas like the Zambian countryside, where there are Mothers’ Listening Clubs. At first these mothers just listened passively, e.g. to health care information: now they have started to respond to what they have heard - and have even made their own tapes which they have sent out to the government, telling the politicians what their local health priorities are. So in this way, the mothers are changing society – co-creating it.

And this time last year we launched OW-TV. We are very delighted that Alyce Myatt has just agreed to join our this team. I have a feeling that, with Alyce around, by this time next year, everyone will know about OWTV.

So, all in all, there’s quite a lot going on at OW. If the BBC is a British broadcasting service, in the British public interest, I guess we stumbled into starting up a global broadcasting service, in the global public interest. It shocks me sometimes to think that that’s what we are doing, but I guess we are.

But those of you who have tried watching full-length documentaries online, sitting peering at a small square on a computer screen, may be thinking: ‘Is this really the way forward?’ Your fears are justified. For years we put out some of the best independent documentaries online at OW - but nobody much came to watch. So we went back to the drawing board. At a media lab in the UK two years ago we set ourselves the challenge of reinventing TV for the web.

First we addressed the problem of attention span, by deconstructing the documentaries into short 2 minute scenes. As each scene came to its cliff-hanger at the end, we gave the viewer a choice. They might want to know what happened next, or they might want more background on the issue or whatever – and they could choose to sidetrack…so viewing became a webby, interactive experience.

But this was just the beginning. It led us to two much more important breakthroughs. First, it meant that we were giving people around the world – anyone with a camcorder or a mobile phone that can transmit video – the chance to contribute their own clips to the ongoing storyline. So OW-TV becomes an open space for the community of independent filmmakers worldwide to work collaboratively, building a new form of interactive doc TOGETHER in real time.

Now over 2,000 filmmakers are using the software provided by OW to upload their films into this video quilt, created by many hands and still growing organically.

But the second breakthrough is the one I find most thrilling. If an independent filmmaker finds it hard to get a documentary placed, how could a non-literate woman from a village or slum ever get her images screened? But now you could be, say, a non-literate Guatemalan woman walking along the road with your small, unobtrusive camcorder, just about the size of your palm, and you see a street child being beaten up and robbed by a policeman. You can quietly film what is going on – and then send it via your local NGO office to OWTV, where it immediately becomes evidence blasted out all over the world.

I told Jonathan Peizer about this a few months ago and he went into shock. He called out: ‘This is HUGE. This is revolutionary! This is Rodney King for everyone!’

And it is. Who needs CNN’s interpretation of the news when you can have the world’s citizens telling you in their own words and with their own gestures what their lives are really like?

Here’s a clip showing a woman in Zimbabwe – a strong woman – with AIDS. But maybe being strong under these circumstances is not that simple – either for her or for her daughter. Take a look.

[clip]

This is real reality-TV. I’d like to thank Marty Collier and Jonathan Peizer for seed funding for developing this idea. Because this is just the beginning. We’d like to use it in the North for marginalised communities – like native Americans – to tell their stories. And to show how young people in poor communities in the south are solving local environmental or social problems. Maybe there are schools in the US where the students have local solutions of their own that they could swap?

It’s funny. People in the North often assume that video is inappropriate for poor people because it is too high-tech. They think we should give poor communities email rather than camcorders. But email is useless for someone who is non-literate – while pictures are fine. What makes technology ‘appropriate’ is not whether we regard its features as high tech or low tech: it depends on the benefits it gives to the user. We have to stop making assumptions based on our insulated experience and listen to the people at the grassroots.

One very strong Northern assumption is that the prospect of getting grassroots voices online is a ridiculous pipedream. But in Pondicherry, I met a young Dalit woman, aged 24, called Pakkialouchme. Not the sort of person Northerners assume would be running a telecentre: a young woman, and a Dalit! (And I believe here education came courtesy of a Ford Foundation programme.)

Every morning she collects data picked up by a US Navy space satellite on local wave heights, because these wave heights can foretell storms approaching the coast while they are still far out at sea. Then she translates this data into Tamil, the local language, and reads it into an audio file – which is picked up in the nearby fishing village – and blasted out through a series of loudspeakers planted along the shore.

Every afternoon, when the fishermen are sitting along the beach checking and mending their nets, they listen to Pakkialouchme’s voice to help them decide whether it is safe to go out next morning or not.

These fishermen can’t read or write, even in their own language. They couldn’t afford a computer in a hundred years. But nonetheless they are getting the benefit of the world’s most expensive state of the art space satellite technology, in their own language, and at a time and place and in a manner suited to them. This is appropriate technology, isn’t it?

I asked one of the NGO managers whether Pakkialouchme’s efforts had made any measurable difference to the lives of the villagers. ‘Well,’ he said, mildly, ‘in the past there were five to ten deaths each year from drowning. Since she has been doing this work, there have been no more deaths.’

Most of us would be glad to be able to say we had done that much in the whole of our lives.

OneWorld is now building on the work done by these local NGO-run telecentres through a new collaborative project called the Open Knowledge Network. That’s the third thing that David wante4d me to tell you about. Its purpose is to create a network of local networks like this, so that more and more people at the grassroots can share their experience and information with one another.

One way is by helping them to produce a community newssheet – I guess you all have newssheets like this in your neighbourhoods too. Here is the monthly Chinnor Parish Pump, the newssheet produced in the village in England where I live. And here is a local newssheet produced in Pakkialouchme’s knowledge hub – containing today’s fish prices in Tamil. It can be read online or printed out and stuck outside for people to read as they walk by.

But you should know that this newssheet is not as innocent as it seems. Unlike the Chinnor Pump, it’s not produced by hand, laboriously, once a month, this is produced, with OneWorld’s help, via a state-of-the-art database.

Why bother? Well, let me run off five reasons for a start.

i) It helps the information become transmittable by other media – by mobile phone, for instance. Here is my phone where I can pick up the latest coffee prices. And if I can’t read, I will use the text-to-speech mechanisms now being developed.

The online phone is becoming a huge asset to poor people. Because, even if you can’t afford to buy a phone, you can afford to buy the occasional call. And there are 900,000 phone kiosks where you can buy an individual call in India alone.

ii) Second, it’s a great organiser. Pakkialouchme doesn’t just collect a few dozen pieces of information a month: she may get s many as 1,000 pieces each day coming from all the villages around. The database sorts all these out mechanically – e.g. to separate the perishable material, like today’s weather or fish prices from long term health care information. The Chinnor Pump’s monthly turnaround makes it pretty useless for buying fish.

iii) Third, it allows P to exchange information with other hubs elsewhere in Tamil Nadu state - or even in other Indian states, or even in other continents. I was once shown a very cheap and effective new idea for a water pump in a village near Mysore - based on an idea from a village in Africa, that had got it from a group in China.

iv) Fourth, it stores non-perishable information for years - so that P also becomes the villagers’ librarian and public records officer. Which can allow villagers to plot trends and see patterns: · Have childhood illnesses been showing a pattern that suggests a common source of pollution? · Have the government welfare offices been visiting regularly?

Benefits story. In one village, there were 34 extension workers assigned to dispense government benefits – like pensions, and maternity benefits. But…

v) the newssheet is thus a critical tool for good governance and participatory democracy.

So what we are talking about – with both OW-TV and OKN - is not just using information tools for disseminating a few more facts. We are talking about a fundamental change of culture – where poor people start to have access to all the social, political, civil rights and economic benefits of an information society that we take for granted. It’s about poor people being able to appropriate the media so that society can be transformed.

My father used to say, ‘Information that’s not for transformation - is just gossip.’ And poor people are well aware they need these tools.

Jockin Arthampur founded the National Slum Dwellers Association in Bombay, which has 50,000 members who live on sidewalks or shanty towns. He himself was born in a slum – and still lives there. He said flatly that the three top needs of poor people were: i) information ii) communication iii) money.

A World Bank survey of some 60,000 poor people from all three southern continents prioritised their needs – and information was in the top three.

But the point was most stunningly expressed for me by a little boy - a street child - who had travelled scores of miles across Brazil on foot to attend the first Children’s Parliament, back in 1988. I have never been able to get this child out of my mind. He was asked by an adult what his biggest need was. Was it education? Was it shelter? Was it food?

His answer was: ‘Respect.’

And how do you know you are respected, except by knowing that you are really heard? When you know that what you have to say really matters to someone else – then you know that you really matter to someone else.

Being unheard, again and again, is a sure-fire way to make you feel diminished in your very humanity - and that diminishment is the essential human rights abuse. Respectful dialogue is, on the contrary, a way of saying namaste - `the divinity in me respects the divinity in you’.

I’d like to end with another short clip. It’s a series of very thin slivers, each about 30 seconds long, sliced from a long documentary.

It is about a family who lives by the Narmada river, whose village is about to be drowned by dam builders diverting the course of the river. The justification for this diversion is that there are people dying of thirst in a drought area to the North, so these villagers should make a small sacrifice for their brethren. But this is a lie. The truth is that it will not be a small sacrifice, but the wipeout of their whole community – and worse, that the river will not be diverted to slake the thirst of the suffering but will be diverted to rich industrialists.

Here’s the clip.

[clip]

Big dams like this have destroyed the lives of at least 16 million people - in India alone. And the dam walls keep rising. These are just a few million of the billions of human beings living on the razor’s edge of unnecessary suffering. And until we listen to these people, speaking up for themselves, nothing will change.

(C) Anuradha Vittachi 2003