Here are some photos I took from the project

I’m just coming down from an exhausting weekend in Port Talbot producing the online element of The Passion of Port Talbot, an extraordinary production by Michael Sheen, National Theatre Wales, WildWorks and the people of Port Talbot in Wales – a three day retelling of the Passion story from the gospels, but set in modern day Port Talbot, and telling the story of the town and it’s people. There are plenty of places to read about the production itself, which Guardian Theatre Critic Lyn Gardner described as follows:

It raised not just the ghosts and future hopes of the town, but the spectre of how and where theatre happens – and how it might connect with a hyper-connected 21st-century audience, particularly those who seldom go anywhere near a theatre building…

there were many entry points, too: online, through posters and leaflets, via YouTube, through tweets and live streaming, as a novelisation, even through rumour, conjecture and whispers. What was interesting was the way that all these platforms came together. Although you could follow The Passion using just one way in, using several of them at once resulted in a richly layered and rewarding experience…

I was in charge of the online dimension of the project, and a small ARG element, aiming to enrich the experience of the production, build the world of the story in advance of the project and provide a way to experience some of what was happening in Port Talbot to those who were unable to be in the town over the weekend.

We had very little time to think it through… as with many online projects, it was commissioned very late in the day – two months before the actual show, which left very little time for planning and working with the writers and directors to think through how the story would be told on the web platform. The idea was to start the story online and then create, edit and publish video, photo and text from the show during the weekend.  We barely had any budget, and we were to work with a group of volunteers from Port Talbot to make it happen. We were bootstrapping from the start.

Matthew Lawton, the communications Director from National  Theatre Wales, was working with local graffiti artists, video and design teams to create real world resources such as fake news stories, graffiti, branding for “the company”, photos and videos of the missing man being spotted around the town and other assets which we were able to use in the run up to the main weekend, when the production would hit the streets.  By the time the weekend arrived, we had received 10,000 visits to the site.

We had also set up a very simple game… we had put some numbers onto defaced company posters – a simple series – 107, 2925, 3880 and 4790 – the first number indicated the sequence (1,2,3,4), and the remainder spelled out a phone number: 07925 880790 – this led you to an answerphone message recorded by the Resistance. The first person to crack the code was Richard Pellow from Port Talbot, and on the eve of the production, he was phoned by Jordan Bernarde, who played the lead Resistance character in the show, and instructed to infiltrate The Last Supper – the massively oversubscribed Saturday night highlight, which was to take place at the Seaside Social and Labour Club in Port Talbot, which was to feature the Manic Street Preachers being arrested by ICU goons. He was, to say the least, a bit excited by this prospect.

On Friday 22nd April in Port Talbot, we assembled a team to cover the show, with a basic understanding of how and where the show would unfold, a lot of goodwill from the wider production company and a space to create a production office for editing and uploading content as it came in. The plan was to get people onto the streets with video and stills cameras, capture the action, edit it as fast as possible, upload it to YouTube, place it on the site and tweet it out. We were armed with only the cameras that we had to hand – Flip cams, iPhones a couple of DV/HD camcorders and an SLR. We had two video editors – Marc and Joe (who appeared on the scene with one day to go), and one in reserve (nice one Shaun). And so from the moment the first scene – the arrival of ICU Industries on Aberavon beach – ended, we were working as hard as possible to edit and upload photos, create web friendly videos (2 – 5 mins in length) that we could get online and out into Twitter networks via the #ntw13 hashtag as soon as practically possible – on average, we had a photoset and a couple of videos online and being viewed within 2 hours of the action taking place.

It was an exhausting weekend, but a wonderful one. The production itself was phenomenal – people came from all over the world to experience it, but the kudos has to go to the people of Port Talbot, who not only turned up in their thousands, but provided the backbone of the professional cast and production crew and thousands of community performers, from Male Voice and youth Choirs, youth Gymnastics teams, rock and brass bands, artists, BMX crews and many, many others who made the streets explode with art and creativity. It was a transformative experience for the community, and it’s effects will unfold into the future over many years.

Many people, as Lyn Gardner above have talked about this show as being first ever genuinely multi-platform piece of large-scale theatre – as well as the graffiti on the streets and our website, livestreaming video during the production (as well as the usual lighting, sound, costume and prop design), local art and performance,  there are two BBC documentaries being made (they should be shown during late May 2011), a feature film being Directed by Dave McKean, and a short, three part novel, The Gospel of Us, by the show’s writer, Welsh poet and novelist Owen Shears. The cumulative experience of engaging with all these platforms created a truly immersive experience for those who were in Port Talbot on this amazing weekend, and a window into the story of the town for everyone who couldn’t be there.

As Michael said at the community wrap party, we made a bit of history. It was a phenomenal experience inspired by his vision, with the people of Port Talbot showing all their incredible energy and creativity in telling their own story, to themselves and to the world. It was a transformative experience, touching the lives of all those involved, including myself and the team of people who helped to make the website happen, to whom I am absolutely grateful: Fraser, James, Marc, Lee, Kym, Antony, Joe, Shaun, Cazz and Jenni.

And what happened to Richard Pellow? While attending the Last Supper, he was handed a small package, on which The Teacher had written “Get this to my daughter”. He handed it over to his ‘resistance contact at port-talbot.com‘ (me!) and it contained a memory stick, within which was a series of video clips which the Teacher had made during his 40 days disappearance. We put together the clips and created the video “The Teacher’s Story”. My original brief to Michael Sheen was that he should use it to build the Teacher character and use him to express some of his own real feelings about the town from which he comes. He did an incredible job, and the result is an extraordinary insight into his acting talent – he shot it himself, on his own, improvising everything… creating, I hope, a unique insight into the process of exploring a character by a master of the art, and a wonderful gift to the people of Port Talbot.

Reflections

In many ways, the online dimension to the project was very experimental – we were brought in just two months before the show began (two weeks before it began with the disappearance of a local teacher) and we had few resources – what we did achieve, we did through the tireless efforts, commitment and passion of the team we pulled together and the co-operation and goodwill of the production team. It is a testament to the experimental spirit of National Theatre Wales’ John McGgrath, Lucy Davies and Matthew Lawton that we were given the opportunity to make this happen.

The site attracted over 35,000 visits by over 20,000 individuals from 102 countries, delivering 77,421 pages in total, and it continues to receive visits as people look to look at the story from the beginning. The site and it’s posts received 2440 Facebook likes, 742 Tweets and 335 comments, while the show itself was the subject of thousands of tweets (I’ve not got the full numbers yet, but will update when I get them). Looking through the comments on the site gives an indication of the value of the online coverage for those who were both in Port Talbot and those who couldn’t make it:

Thank you guys for sharing all this videos, photos and comments at this site about The Passion. With out your efforts it would be impossible for me and other people abroad to get moved by this gorgeous project. Thank you for sharing your PASSION with us. Hugs and kisses from Mexico City.

The build up, news reports of the missing man, the graffiti, the posters and the intrigue of the codes on them. Who masterminded the hype ? Hats off to you !! Then the play, not my type of thing I thought. Boy was my head turned around ! And then I found this website, and it is Fantastic too !! (The photographs are truly outstanding – trust me I found ‘Wally’ a few times in the shopping center ones, but I was there for quite a while). The Passion of Port Talbot is something that I will never forget.

Obviously, there are many lessons to be learnt and to reflect on after this project, and I will try to set out some of what I think are the most important things for us to consider in working with online platforms and live performance….

• Where does online work ‘sit’ in the organisation of theatre productions? Often, it is seen as being on the marketing side of the ‘production/marketing’ divide, and undoubtably it performs an important marketing function. But it is also, importantly, a storytelling platform – certainly not with the same properties and potential as a live performance, but if it is to perform this storytelling function well, it needs to be close to the people driving the main storytelling effort – the writers, directors and cast (we could really have done with some of their input for the videos we were creating in the buildup of the show, for example).  To fully realise the potential of this kind of work, it has to be seen for what it is… fully part of the storytelling, and as such it needs time and space for digital producers to work with the writers, directors, cast, design, costume and any other part of the production crew that are required to plan and create the elements of the story that we are telling online.
• What is the role of an online platform in creating the world of the story? The best Transmedia productions give the impression that ‘this is not a story’, invite people into it not by inviting them into a storytelling space, but encountering them in their living room, on the web, and in doing so, connect to people’s real life social media profiles and networks. We often have to draw people into the show with less impressive resources to lead people into the story than a full scale live performance (whereas you KNOW you’re watching a story in theatre, online, the lines are more blurred). I can’t tell you the number of comments to our missing man story that just “yeah… it’s Michael Sheen… I saw him down Aberavon shopping centre this afternoon”, and the like! I suspect that we are discovering a different type of relationship between ‘the story world’ and ‘the real world’ than is achievable with other storytelling platforms such as TV, Film and Performance Theatre… and as a result, a different type of relationship between the audience and the story. We need to start exploring this.
• The resources required for this kind of work are considerable. We were very lucky with this show, in that we had the voluntary services of some great people from Port Talbot, and that was exactly as it should have been. At it’s heart, The Passion was a show rooted in the participation of the community in Port Talbot , and it felt very right that the online project should reflect this. Without these voluntary resources, we would have needed to assemble a considerable operation – A Digital Producer, a Director (part of the main production team?), cameras (both video and stills), a writer, and good, fast video editors, not to mention someone to organise the team, drive and source food! This is not a piece of work to be taken lightly, and as I said, we bootstrapped this work, and the team performed little miracles all weekend (which seemed fitting!).

An amazing experience, and for all it’s rough edges, I really hope that it brought the incredible events of Easter Weekend in Port Talbot into the homes of people both in Port Talbot and around the world. It’s something that I will always be proud of, just as The Passion of Port Talbot will, I’m sure, be something that everyone who played their part in creating will always be proud of.

I had the pleasure of collaborating with Erin on a photoshoot in the gallery space above Milgi, in Roath, Cardiff. Erin is a Welsh actor, appearing soon in “Being Human“, so she’s confident in front of a camera and very aware of the look she is creating. Finished with minimal post-production – just a few bits of tidying up to keep a natural look. Thanks for a fun evening Erin – I’m very pleased with the results.

Nick Clegg’s confirmed that from April, fathers will be able to take any remaining maternity leave if mothers return to work early, up to a maximum of six months. If the notion of fathers taking maternity leave sounds like an odd idea that won’t work, you’re right – the UK will be the only country in the world with a system like this and we already know hardly any parents will use it.

The policy has three major aims. Firstly, to let mums and dads make their own decisions about who looks after the kids and who works. Secondly, to reduce discrimination against women created by the current maternity system (or more simply, to make men as unpopular with employers as women already are). The new system also aims to make it possible for fathers to become more involved in the lives of their children.

The Labour government, which created it, ran a study into how effective the new system would be, and found that only 6% of fathers would use it and that it would affect 0.7% of small businesses. The coalition already know it won’t really work, so within weeks, they’ll launch a consultation on a completely new system of parental leave, to be introduced by 2015.

Until now, the law has basically been saying, if you’re a mum, you look after the kids, if you’re a dad, we expect you to work. It doesn’t matter if your family is different – we expect you all to fit into this industrial society model of family life where mums do kids and dads do work. We currently have the most gender-unequal system of leave in the world, so if you’re a couple who’d like to do things differently, tough. The UK and its couples have moved on – in one-third of families, the woman earns the same as, or more than, her partner, so the system badly needs to adapt and offer more choice.

This huge leave gap between men and women hurts women’s prospects and fuels the gender pay gap. In 2003, the Labour government introduced two weeks of paternity leave and extended maternity leave to twelve months. I was lobbying for what is now The Fatherhood Institute and I warned them that it was a terrible deal for women that would worsen employer discrimination against them. Within five years, the head of the UK’s equality body reported that employers were, indeed discriminating against women because of a maternity system that indicated responsibility for babies is women’s alone.

Recently there has been a wealth of new research evidence showing what most people know instinctively – good relationships with their fathers (or male role models) help children prosper. Their performance at school improves, they have a better relationships in adulthood, boys are less likely to get involved in gangs or criminal behaviour and girls are less likely to get pregnant young and unintentionally. Mums are crying out for their men to be more involved in their children’s lives, as are many men themselves. But the leave system has been one among many obstacles to this happening.

For all these reasons, the UK needs a new parental leave system that allows couples to decide for themselves who takes time out of the workplace to care for their babies, beyond an initial period for women to cope with the late stages of pregnancy, birth and recovery from that.

But families will not take this new system up in serious numbers. Most will not risk the father’s career prospects – on average, men earn two thirds of the family income, so if there’s any sniff of disapproval in the workplace or hint that he might lose out in the long term career stakes, they won’t touch it. There’s plenty of evidence that employers are more hostile to requests for family friendly working from men than from women. And that’s not to mention the short term loss of his income.

Furthermore, because the government is tinkering with the existing leave entitlements instead of rewriting the whole system, this is maternity leave we’re asking men to take, and to take it away from women, who remain effectively responsible for babies while men remain positioned as ‘helpers’ in the world of parenting. This is not a system that will create the necessary cultural change to enable men to engage more equally in the care of their infants – that requires a little more investment.

In Sweden, they moved from a maternity/paternity system to a parental leave system back in 1975, with clearly stated aims of looking after the welfare of children and promoting gender equality. Over the years, they’ve developed a system of ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy’ months, which are paid at a decent rate, only available to one of the parents and lost if not used. There are currently three mummy and daddy months each, and a further 12 months of parental leave which can be divided up as the parents see fit. It has taken a generation, but nowadays, most fathers take months of time off work to look after their children (on their own) and the result has been that children are closer to their fathers, and it is now culturally unacceptable for a dad not to take a serious amount of time off to look after their babies.

Just as promoting women’s equal participation in public life and the economy took pro-active steps to overcome legal and institutional barriers, so getting men equally involved in domestic life and parenting takes conscious effort. In a highly gendered sphere such as parenting, even gender neutral policies tend to reinforce inequalities – you need to be proactively combating gender imbalances. This new system is not even gender neutral – it actively reinforces the inequalities. So we’re still going backwards.

The new measures may look radical on paper, but they won’t change much. Tinkering at the edges of the leave system is just creating a bigger mess, which employers will have to cope with. The UK leave system needs a complete rethink from the ground up starting with a few basic questions: What do babies need from their parents? How do we protect women through the vulnerable period of childbirth and how do we enable choice and equality while encouraging men to be more involved with their children? And how do we keep things simple for employers? As soon as this new system is in place, the government will be ripping it up and starting again. Why bother?

This is a slightly expanded version of an article I wrote for the Western Mail newspaper / Wales Online

In the light of debates online about the recent Tunisian revolution and the role of social media, I thought I’d take a look at a really interesting report on the role of social media in the Iranian protests against the results of the election in June 2009.

While a surface reading of social media as a democratic media form suggests that it could circumvent government control of the media and enable rapid grassroots organising through it’s capacity to enable many-to-many conversations – it’s an argument made by Clay Shirky in “Here comes everybody”.

One of the core points that the report makes is that it is very difficult to gauge the real significance of new media formats in facilitating the protests against the Iranian government because of the lack of hard data. Views formed in the West are often formed on the basis of a skewed sample of isolated case studies, although recently, new tools for aggregation and analysis of large amounts of data have become available.

The report appeals not only for a look at hard data, but for analysis on five levels on which new media tools could be said to have an impact on the political dynamics within the Iranian situation;

1. Individual transformation (how citizens think and act)
2. Intergroup relations (impact on group conflict and coherence)
3. Facilitating collective action (enabling co-ordination and collaboration)
4. Regime policies (for example, using social media to track and repress activist)
5. External attention (the extent to which the international community takes notice)

In each level of analysis, the report attempts to look at the available evidence for the utility of social media in aiding either the Iranian resistance or the Regime in promoting or resisting the protest movement.

In many respects, the report finds claims of a “Twitter Revolution” to be overstated – Twitter was not widely available to the population as a whole, and more important to informing the protests were two satellite TV stations – VOA Persian and BBC Persian (who actually turned to social media themselves to source content).

Sysomos reports that there were approximately 8,500 Twitter users who selfreported as Iranian in May 2009, and Gaurav Mishra claims that less than 100 of those were active during the election period. Such numbers pale compared to the hundreds of thousands of Iranians who participated in the protest movement at some point.

That’s not to say that Twitter didn’t prove a useful organising tool for the activists in the protest movement,  or help to inform cable TV stations, blogs and Facebook pages of key information like the location of key protests.

There was circulation of information in a mediascape that included new media channels as both sources and relays. All of these lay to some extent outside of the control of the regime, which was able to control the content of state owned TV, Radio and newspaper outlets.

The regime was also active on the internet during the protests. SMS services were shut down,  Internet access was “throttled”, blocking websites where “regime opponents were seen as having an advantage”. They also developed their own new media strategy, by encouraging supporters to blog and use Facebook and Twitter to promote their position. In addition, the regime saught to discredit the protest movement by positioning their use of new media as revealing their domination by Western interests.

Most disturbingly, the public nature of social media channels like Twitter enabled the Regime to crack down on the movement. The ‘leveling’ of the media playing field created by social media may well have given the protesters a public voice beyond the control of the regime, but the regime has just as much access to those platforms, and considerably greater resources.

Of course, the “level playing field” of access to media channels such as Twitter and Facebook didn’t eliminate the massive pre-existing power and resource imbalances between the regime and the protesters. A worrying thought here is that the experience gained by the Iranian regime in combating a resistance movement using social media will be shared into other governments who want to clamp down on this type of communication and organising.

Where Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere clearly did matter was in the international attention that was gained for the unfolding events in Iran. Traditional media in the west couldn’t get access for their journalists, so information from new media dominated coverage in this part of the world… of which there was a lot (until the death of Michael Jackson).

International activist networks sprang up quickly around the Iranian protests on Twitter and Facebook, enabling forms of international solidarity to emerge, including potentially the action of other states. The Obama regime indicated its sympathy (nt least by asking Twitter to delay it’s scheduled maintenance) but it was reluctant to act as this could damage the credibility of the protest movement within Iran by aligning it too closely to the West.

Thus while there was a huge amount of support expressed internationally through social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook, it was largely incapable of offering any practical support to the protests in the country. As one cynical, but ultimately accurate tweet put it,

Note to would-be revolutionaries: you can remove the green tint from your pictures now; it didn’t work

The report strikes a cautious note about over-optimistic claims made about the democratising power of new media channels, noting that it has both good and bad effects, and that there are considerable dangers associated with the backlash against activists who use public digital media channels for highly risky anti-government activism.

It may be that networked platforms such as Twitter and Facebook that enable multiway conversations could be used to facilitate radical movements in countries with repressive regimes as bandwidth penetration grows and use of these tools for radical social and political discourse expands beyond the capacity of governments to control it. Maybe. But we’re not there yet, and this is not what happened in Iran. The rest of the world was far more aware of what was happening, but remained relatively powerless to help.

The report is available for download from The United States Institute for Peace: Blogs and Bullets: Evaluating the Impact of New Media on Conflict.

Digital media has played a role in shaping the way in which events have unfolded in Tunisia recently, and an interesting debate is underway about the exact nature of that role. Talk of a “Twitter Revolution” or “Wikileaks Revolution” may sound far fetched, but it’s clear that these new digitally enabled technologies have helped determine how events have unfolded, through enabling communication and co0ordination between activists.

A Guardian article by a young Tunisian sets out some of the real, long term social reasons behind the discontent in Tunisia… the abuse of power by the ruling family, the fear of informants, the corruption, unemployment. Then, it seems, events catalysed the protests that have exploded in recent days, one of which was the revealing of what the US knew about the regime, that it was definitely corrupt, but also, crucially, becoming weaker…

And then, WikiLeaks reveals what everyone was whispering. And then, a young man immolates himself. And then, 20 Tunisians are killed in one day.

Information about the regime generated by US diplomats was subsequently made public by Wikileaks, giving further details of the ruling family’s corruption, their unpopularity and the fragillity of their grip on power. In total, 9 US cables relating to Tunisia have been released by Wikileaks.

Tunisian authorities responded by blocking access to the website of a Leabanese newspaper which published the US cables revealed by Wikileaks which described the corruption and hatred of the regime. This, in turn, prompted pro-Wikileaks hackers to attack Tunisian government websites and raise the profile of the whole story, in a classic replaying of the Streisand Effect.

While there was already widespread contempt for the regime in Tunisia, and there were undoubtedly other important events in the lead up to the protests,  the Wikileaks revelations acted as one catalyst to action by making this truth a public fact and revealing the US government’s view of the regime as sclerotic and, ultimately vulnerable. This may well have shifted the consciousness of the Tunisian population to believe that they could actually do something about the situation.

During the protests, Facebook (which has 18% penetration in Tunisia), Al Jazeera Cable TV, DailyMotion and YouTube provided alternative media voices to the state run media, but it was Twitter that apparently excelled itself as a platform which enabled rapid communication and co-ordination between protesters.

While some like Ethan Zuckerman have asked whether this constitutes the first “Twitter Revolution”, suggesting that it played a crucial, but not necessarily deterministic role, others such as Luke Allnutt, taking a lead from Evgeny Morozov have countered by suggesting that by reducing our analysis to the technology we are merely focussing on our own debates in the west and ignoring the really important changes that were already underway in Tunisia.

While the events in Tunisia are clearly the result of a wide range of historic and social pressures, current difficulties and events, it does seem that new digital channels and tools have certainly played a part in enabling the protests and ‘revolution’ that has resulted (although ‘revolution’ seems quite a strong word to use at this stage, as power has merely been seized by other parts of the established power elite within the country, and no major structural changes have happened as yet).

The debates in the west about the role of digital media technology in undermining existing power structures seem to focus on the extent to which the technology can be seen to be deterministic, which feels like a stale debate. As Clay Shirky put it,

The way that these issues are being discussed in the west may make sense in the wider context of the debate around the argument that Malcolm Gladwell made in his article for the New Yorker, “The Revolution will not be Tweeted”. Gladwell argued that the ties created by social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook are not strong enough to sustain the kind of pressures that relationships endure in revolutionary circumstances.

It has to be argued back to Gladwell that when activists who are already engaged in political struggle harness the enabling power of socialised digital media channels, that their activity can be massively amplified. Social media has the power to change the scale of the existing work of political activists. And very often they are able to act at a massively quicker rate than government and other traditional institutions, who rely on much slower forms of management communications and structures.

Charlie Beckett has argued that those loose ties may be sufficient to being people into a sense of belonging to a social movement, and that once social and media changes create sufficient pressure to tip into action, that might just be enough to create revolutionary changeTunisia suggests that once there is a tipping point of momentum in social movements, those ‘weak ties’ make well be just enough to engage people sufficiently to bring them out onto the streets.

Whether or not social media causes revolutions seems a matter for debate. What does seem clear is that it creates a revolutionary new context in which social and political revolutions occur, changing the way that people are able to communicate, co-ordinate and collaborate. When there are sufficient, real causes for revolutionary consciousness and activity, such as mass poverty, corruption and state violence , these media make a hell of a difference. Corrupt, authoritarian regimes which have relied on police violence and state control of the media are on notice.

It’s now a year since the 2010 Haiti earthquake, in which over 230,000 people died and two million people became homeless. The devastation to the country’s social, health and physical infrastructures continue to cause enormous problems for the country’s population in its attempt to recover.

But this disaster happened in 2010, a year in which rapid developments in digital media technologies are transforming every aspect of life. How has digital media changed the shape of a disaster event in the case of the Haiti earthquake?

Donor response

News of the earthquake spread instantly and incredibly soon after the earthquake, dozens of NGOs were raising funds (and some continue) for the relief effort using digital tools on the web. Co-ordination between UK NGOs via the DEC has raised £101 million, and web and text message based fundraising was at the heart of the fundraising efforts for Haiti. This didn’t feel spectacularly new, which says a lot – rewind just 6 years to the Asian Tsunami and the DEC was heavily dependent on telephone lines (3000 of them) and human beings to process funds.

In its current fundraising effort (for the Pakistan Floods), the DEC provides the following options (in order):

• Donate online
• Text to give
• Post
• CAF card

(I suspect the first two are the ones that really matter in terms of scale – it would be interesting to hear from DEC the relative proportions of the four different methods used to process donations).

The campaign for donation used social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter (where people passed the donation link and text message number around their networks) and YouTube (where videos could be quickly and easily distributed around social networks and blogs).

The emergence of social media in recent years has enabled ordinary members of the public to spread awareness of the issues and fundraising efforts around their networks in an unprecedented way, allowing them to become part of the media effort in donor countries.

Digital tools in rich countries certainly have helped to accelerate the fundraising response through providing easy-to-scale methods for processing payments, and the socialisation of media which enabled people to participate in the spreading of awareness of the disaster, and the information about how to contribute to the response.

With websites and media channels such as YouTube, donor organisations like DEC are able to feed back to their donors directly on the impact of their donations. This is a vast improvement on traditional broadcast “news” media, which often becomes disinterested in events on the other side of the world once they’ve stopped becoming ‘new’.

Here’s a video on the DEC site from Oxfam, showing how money raised is being used for the new challenge, moving from temporary response to rebuilding communities:

In many ways, the examples above are merely the perfecting of the structure of responses to international emergency disasters that began long before web technologies… the DEC was founded in 1963 and fundraising for the relief effort has a long and distinguished history in the UK. What the perfecting of these Web 1.0 technologies have done is to make the efforts of these institutions far more effective – reducing the costs associated with raising funds, and we’ve begun to see new interactive Web 2.0 services starting to enable ordinary people to join the communication effort to spread awareness.

Texts, maps, crowdsourcing and communicating the response on the ground

A new report, “Media, Information System and Communities: Lessons from HAITI” from InterNews, Communications with Disaster Affected Communities and the Knight Foundation has looked at the use of digital media technologies in the response to the disaster. Of course, within the disaster setting on the ground, communications are vital for shaping an effective on the ground response.

As the introduction to the report says,

…the Haiti earthquake also marked the beginning of
a new culture in disaster relief. Occurring several years
into a revolution in communications technology, the event
attracted legions of media specialists bearing new digital
tools to help.

Haiti became a learning opportunity for the use of SMS (texting) services, radio-cell phones and collaborative mapping. Partnerships were hastily put together,  new approaches tried and experiences and learning gained.

The reports highlights three observations:

1. Traditional humanitarian organizations were often open to the new technologies, but remain nervous about the implications of information and powersharing through crowdsourcing and other new
media platforms.

2. Joint humanitarian communities demonstrated that there were many beneficial ways to use digital media in the crisis setting, particularly texting functions.

3. Although much of the attention has been paid to new media technologies, radio was the most effective tool for serving the needs of the public. The first media priority in Haiti was to restore radio service (as it was in the tsunami and other recent crises).

The first observation is typical of the challenges that new media brings to the people trying to take advantage of them – new media forms don’t just mean new ways of communicating… they mean new and often unfamiliar ways of working. As the report quotes “new media activists”,

Technology is easy. Community is hard.

One of the newest uses of technology was crowdsourcing maps using a system called Ushahidi (Swahili for Witness) – a digital platform developed in Kenya after election violence in 2008.  It enables the rapid aggregation of information onto a map from news sources, on the ground text and multimedia messages and directly uploaded reports.

Here is the Haiti Ushahidi based map. And here is the initial Haiti Ushahidi installation.

This platform enabled people on the ground, who knew more about their own situation than anyone else, to drive the information set that those involved in the rescue effort were using.

One of the difficult tensions was between the approach taken to information by the open source information culture epitomised by Ushahidi and official beuriocraccies who are more used to operating in an information culture governed by principles of secrecy, privacy and accountability. The report makes clear that one of the tensions introduced by these technologies was around the communications between organisations operating in these two cultures.

The good news is that the Ushahidi platform saved lives by making information useful and relevant and accessible on the ground. Here’s a video showing something of the use and impact of collaborative mapping in a disaster scenario through Ushahidi.

In the end, the effectiveness of the Ushahidi platform for organising information overcame any reluctance from official agencies to using it, with the US Marine Corps and FEMA using the system to find and rescue survivors.

Media changing the way things are done, not just the way things are communicated.

The evolving technologies used to mediate the international and on the ground responses when the Haiti earthquake occurred represent a landmark in the evolution of how these technologies are being applied to different situations. The high level of innovation and experimentation in Haiti shows how rapidly media platforms are capable of evolving these days, and have helped to improve the effectiveness of those responding to major humanitarian disasters. Lessons are still being learnt from Haiti and will they’ll be sure to inform how the international community responds to the next major emergency which will, sadly, inevitably happen one day.

In the most ludicrous pantomime of democracy last night, two hours were spent debating and passing the Digital Economy Bill - legislation aimed at tackling the hugely complicated issue of filesharing and copyright. Putting aside the fact that copyright laws are now utterly incapable of coping with the new digital age, the law allows for internet connections to be closed down is someone is suspected of downloading/uploading copyright material from that location.

Businesses… let’s hope none of your staff are downloading music. Are you a cafe with free wifi? You are now responsible for for everything that any of your customers download. Libraries… likewise. If you have wifi at home, you’d better get it encrypted. But even that won’t work – savvy downloaders can easily anonymise their IPs and crack your encryption.

There are so many problems with this bill that really can be summed up with one thought: The people who have created this legislation DO NOT KNOW HOW THE INTERNET WORKS. That’s why it’s being opposed by everyone who does. It is a law that doesn’t protect artists (who have lots of new opportunities to get their work some attention via the net), it protects the recording industry (NB – not music industry), who have refused to adapt their business models to the new reality and are simply trying to use legislation to prop up their old (failing) models.

As someone on the Now Show said, It’s akin to trying to prop up the blacksmiths industry by forcing all car owners to put a few horses feet on their car. Wake up people – the world is changing! The internet is changing everything about media – this is a revolution, so won’t be stopped by laws… the revolution will just become set against the authorities and a greater conflict created.

Laurence Lessing is a good voice to listen to in this debate – he’s a law professor who specialises in copyright and the digital economy… and the good news for the US is that he is advising the White House. Here’s what he has to say about how the law is actually killing creativity, not protecting it:

For us in the UK, we have just woken up in a new reality – when the bill becomes law – in about a year and half’s time, large corporations will have the power to disconnect you from the internet if they THINK you have been breaching copyright. Important parts of the new information economy like Wikileaks can be blocked by the UK government because they are sharing information that is copyrighted… even if it is revealing corruption and abuse at the highest levels of power.

Believe – this is not the end… the internet and it’s users are way, way way better informed and resourced than the government and large businesses could ever be – our tools for collaboration and communication are so much more advanced than institutions that were created when letter writing was the most efficient form of communmication. The government has just picked a fight that it cannot win, and will spend vast sums of money and amounts of time in Canute-like behaviour that subsequent generations will hold up as a case study of idiotic posturing against the inevitable forces of history. For “luddites”, read Digital Economy Bill.

If you’d like to do something about this – then join the Open Rights Group

Find out if your MP voted for or against the bill… or just didn’t bother

Join the conversation on Twitter

UPDATED 9th April

The Tory party will offer a new Tax Break for Married couples and civil partnerships in a bid to support stable relationships.  The tax reform will be modest, so if one parent stays at home, they’ll be able to transfer some of their tax allowance to their working spouse. The trouble is – this doesn’t support marriage, it supports a certain type of marriage – one that is out of touch with modern relationships and makes for unhappy couples. If it actually succeeds in changing behaviour, it could increase separation and divorce.

In the 1950′s, 60′s and to some extent the 70′s, the ideal of fixed gender roles had a social approval that made it the basis of an accepted standard contract for couples – mum would stay at home, look after the children, cook the food and clean the house. In exchange, the dad would go out to work and earn the money. That’s what was expected and accepted, despite the unhappiness it often created.

Women have roundly rejected this ideal in modern times where 70% of mothers work at least some of the time and we all agree that girls should have a broad vista open to them in their life – the idea they should be restricted to the home is anathema to modern women and the men who love them – women can, want to and should be able to participate in any aspect of public life and not be restricted to the private realm of home and children. Men are changing too – more and more now yearn for a life beyond the workplace – a real relationship with their children. There’s been a huge increase in the amount of time and effort – and aspiration – of men in being involved in raising their children. No one ever said on their deathbed “I wish I spent more time at the office”.

The trouble with the Tory proposals is that they only benefit couples who have taken the decision to hold to the traditional old school division of labour – one parent works, the other stays at home – and they seem to think that this is what defines MARRIAGE. Wrong. Marriage is a publicly committed relationship, not a 1950′s conception of the domestic gender division of labour. To benefit from the Tory’s tax proposal, if you’re a woman, you’ll be a housewife, if you’re a man, a wage slave.

The Tories are interested in the stability of marriages – for the benefit of children – and fair play to this – it’s a laudable aim – children thrive within stable relationships. But the stability of a marriage has become more and more dependent on the satisfaction of the partners in the relationship. When society held to a strict gender division of labour and divorce was frowned upon, marriage stability didn’t depend on how satisfied each partner was – couples would stay together, often even if they were incredibly unhappy.

Not any more – without enduring satisfaction in marriage, there is a strong likelihood of the marriage falling apart – people don’t really put up with abusive, unhappy, dysfunctional, loveless relationships any more. So any policy that is going to increase the stability of marriage had better have a positive effect on marital satisfaction, non?

So what happens if couples organise their lives to take advantage of the Tory’s tax proposals? One parent (usually the chap) has to take responsibility for all the earning, so inevitably plunges himself ever deeper into his career and has to carry the weight of responsibility for providing financially for the family. The other (usually the lady) will become a professional child carer / houseworker / cook – staff to the home and kitchen.

In other words, their lives will diverge almost completely – the man will have very little experience or understanding of what his partner’s life is like, and vice versa. They will experience very little of each others’ stresses, joys, frustrations etc. They will begin to lead almost completely separate lives.

It’s going to be very hard to develop sustain empathy in the relationship – which might be pretty high on the list of factors that are going to fuel marital satisfaction. Dad won’t be able to relate to mum’s experience of being at home with the children all day, and she won’t be able to understand the pressures on him at work. Isolated mums and workaholic dads. Great. Not.

If a ‘marriage’ policy is going to be successful, it has to be focussed on making relationships better – and that includes the opportunity to share the tasks and responsibilities of family life around. Just as men and women share the workplace, so they are increasingly sharing the parenting – and all the signs are that this is what young marrying couples aspire to. Children benefit in all sorts of ways from having strong relationships with both parents instead of just one. It’s good for children and adults – and good for their relationships.

So it’s important to acknowledge that the Tory’s proposals don’t actually support marriage, they just support a certain vision of marriage – one that’s been rejected as unfeasible and undesirable and probably leads to unhappy couples. If the policy actually works in changing people’s behaviour, I think it’ll lead to less empathy in relationship, more isolated partners, and I reckon, ultimately higher levels of separation.

A common criticism of Tory policy focus is that a financial incentive is unlikely to lead to people into forming or staying in marriages and that it just won’t change behaviour (good point). Let’s hope so – if it does result in couples making the choices the Tories want to see, it could lead to a rise in separation and divorce.

Law of unintended consequences, and all that.

Ellie Goulding recently did a gig at the Cardiff Arts Institute for Xboxeverb. It was an interesting gig, and an even more interesting process before, during and after the event. I thought I’d offer up some of my thoughts on the process for pubic chewing.  

Xbox Reverb set up a vote on Facebook and Twitter for which venue should host the event. After a frantic week of mass participation, the votes were counted and Cardiff Arts Institute had won. So had Xbox Reverb’s Facebook page, which had attracted over 2000 new fans through the process, growing from around 1500 fans to over 3500.

Top marks for Xbox Reverb’s attempt to engage with the Cardiff music community before the gig… it certainly did that, but the law of unintended consequences came into play somewhat here. Venue was set against venue, so the effort to gather votes became a blizzard of spam hitting everyone’s inbox… and we had enough real blizzards to deal with that week. While exciting to be involved in the scramble (client interest disclaimer… I was advising CAI)… I couldn’t help but feeling that the people of Cardiff were bloody relieved when it was all over.

Another unintended consequence of the process was that it put the music promoters of the Diff in a very difficult position. As the engines of Cardiff’s music scene, they work with all the venues by necessity, so were put in a position of having to support one venue (and alienate the others) or show their support to none. Bit of a lose-lose situation for them, I think.

The gig itself was fascinating – lots of xbox toys… particular interest in the DJ hero setup, great stage screen backdrop – and decent music. I was particularly interested in how the Xbox crew were experimenting to generate interaction on Twitter, but can’t help but feel they failed.

First off, they asked me for my username AND PASSWORD. Your’e joking right? The old system of linking an application to Twitter is out of date – you need to look into OAuth for Twitter – the username/password system that Xbox Reverb are using will be switched off in June 2010 (see the previous link), so they’d better upgrade their systems by then.

You’re given a lanyard with a pendant that you can swipe across hot boxes placed in different areas of the venue, which then automatically tweeted through your account. The kind of tweets generated can be viewed here. Now, forgive me, but I see my Twitter account as my public channel for communication, and this kind thing feels like a takeover… I’m perfectly capable of tweeting from a gig if I want… I’ve got a phone. Maybe just me, but I felt that they’d not got their Twitter thinking right. I wonder what others think.

After the gig, there’s been ongoing communication from Xbox Reverb (who need to know that if you add “http://” to the start of a web address on Facebook or Twitter, it turns into a link that we can click, rather than having to copy and paste). All good… I like communicative brands, and the video’s that they’ve produced, which have now been released on Xbox Reverb’s website are pretty cool – but you can’t do anything with them. You can’t embed them on other sites, you can’t automatically share them on Facebook or Twitter and you can’t comment on them. All of which is a shame, and will radically reduce the amount of coverage they get.

So… as an exercise in connecting live music events to social media, I really like the experimental spirit behind what Xbox reverb is doing… but there were quite a lot of fail’s in this event. As an experiment, the key is to take a really good look at what worked and what didn’t, so you can evolve and change in the future. I hope they do.

*update. I’m wrong about lack of sharing/embedding for video. I found it. Tis a bit hidden, that’s all.