Pupil Barrister
A few weeks ago I suggested that a project be launched to publish the thoughts and policies of the Tahrir Square think-tank. The nearest realisation of this I have come across so far is the #18daysinEgypt project, which seeks to retroactively collate and tag all the content produced during the uprising that culminated in the resignation of Hosni Mubarak.
2nd February 2011, in Bab El Luk, Cairo. Photo by gcawflickr on Flickr.
Overlay my last two posts (on digital tools for Boris Bikes; and how to wage cyber-resistance) and I think an interesting question arises: How much code should a Citizen know?*
Its clear that literacy and numeracy are essentials for active citizenship as they are for Life and Work. For millenia, the ability to communicate your thoughts in a clear and pithy manner has been a prerequisite for campaigners, dissidents and indeed anyone who wanted to be part of the civic discourse. In recent decades, I would certainly add ‘A working knowledge of Microsoft Office’ to that list, along with an ease at using the Internet. They teach all this at school now.
But is that enough? My feeling is that, at the very least, basic HTML skills should be included too. you need to know the difference between your <em> and your <img> and your <a href> tags if you want to communicate efficiently. For the professional political campaigner, these are certainly essential. I cannot shake the feeling that they should be equally indespensible for the average citizen, too. Do they learn this stuff in school yet?
And when HTML and CSS are taught in schools, what more should political campaigners be learning? If I want to start a mass movement but have no scripting skills, am I missing a trick? If I want to start a new local campaign, but have no clue as to how to pull and push data from an API, am I doomed to failure?
I am reminded of The New Liberal Arts prospectus:
A generation of digital natives is careening towards college. The economy is rebooting itself weekly. We have new responsibilities now—as employees, citizens, and friends—and we have new capabilities, too. The new liberal arts equip us for a world like this. But… what are they?
‘Coding and Decoding’ and ‘Translation’ are two of the skills listed briefly, but the authors don’t go into specifics. It would be interesting to put some flesh on the bone.
* I deliberately capitalised ‘Citizen’ to distinguish between the literal sense of the word (i.e. someone of a particular country with the rights afforded to all citizens; and a person who participates in that democracy.
I am sure readers will be aware of the long-running global discussion about the role social media can play in revolutions. Clearly, Facebook and Twitter can catalyse opposition to authoritarian regimes, and spread news of protests and government oppression between citizens, and to the world at large.
In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak’s heavy handed response to online opposition may actually have quickened his fall. He and his cronies felt they had no option but to ‘switch off’ the Internet, depriving the entire country of proper connectivity. This was an obvious ploy which only signalled the regime’s desperation. The protesters in Tahrir Square were emboldened.
In the future, however, oppressive governments may become more subtle and savvy in their approach to censorship. In Episodes #81 and #82 of the Rebooting the News podcast, Dave Winer and Jay Rosen discuss this problem at length. Winer explained out that Twitter and Facebook could be nixed by regimes. An Internet ‘kill switch’ is bad for governments, because it signals to the people that the protests are working. Instead, oppressive governments will try to develop tools which simply filter out content which undermines their agenda, yet maintains the appearance of normalcy. The Chinese regime does this very well, and managed to selectively filter out references to Egypt for Internet users inside China. Having witnessed the sobering examples of Mubarak and Ben Ali, other dictators will begin to commission tools to achieve this. Corporations (which, we must remind ourselves, include Twitter and Facebook) will be happy to do this, in exchange for access to the emerging markets these countries represent.
Winer expands on this idea on his blog, Scripting.com:
They can do the same with Facebook that they do with Assange. There’s all kinds of crazy stuff you can do at a firewall to make one site appear to be having technical problems. Real technical problems (but fake ones nonetheless). There are consultants calling on generals all over the world, right now, selling them wonderful Internet dashboards that selectively and randomly make sites appear to have problems of their own, not caused by the government.
Anticipating this, we have to create communication networks on the Internet that require that the whole Internet be cut off in order for them to be cut off. The reason is simple. The people who are being manipulated will know they’re being manipulated. In a centralized social space, there could easily be doubt. I know this is a complicated idea, but the intellects are at work, I promise you. They are smart, we have to be smart too.
It’s important that people learn to manage their own infrastructure. It’s going to happen, we can do it. We can make servers much easier to set up and maintain, and do more stuff that’s meaningful to people like the people in Egypt fighting for freedom. By spreading out we’re harder to stop.
This strikes me as being one of the most important ideas for freedom of expression right now, and a crucial lesson from the Egyptian uprising.
Right then: I’ve made a tentative foray into the world of webtools for urban living: The Farringdon Lane Docking Station on Twitter. Now I need help making it better.
There’s a long established trend of inanimate objects being on Twitter, including Tower Bridge and The River Thames. In both cases, they update people on crucial aspects of their current status: for example, is the tide in or out? I felt it was time this particular bike rack joined the service – as a keen user of Boris Bikes (an ironic moniker given they were commissioned by Ken Livingstone) I often need to check the status of the rack outside the Free Word Centre (where I work).
The Farringdon Lane Docking Station is a popular rack, one that is usually either (a) completely full with no space to park a bike, or (b) completely empty with no cycles available to use. For that reason, I often find myself trying to check the status of the racks online or on the move. Unfortunately, the workflow required is relatively difficult, involving several steps through the website or iPhone apps like Fliplab’s London Cycle. This actually takes a fair few frustrating minutes via a 3G connection, which is no good when I am in a hurry and keen to make a quick decision about whether to take a tube train or a bike.
I thought I could solve this by creating a twitter account that automatically updates itself, whenever the status of the dock changes. That way, whenever I think I may need a bike, I can simply fire-up my twitter application of choice and look at the latest status of the docking station. I don’t have to load unnecessary information about the status of every other docking station.
Unfortunately, my coding skills are minimal and limited to simple PHP. I don’t have the wherewithal to pull data from the London Cycle Hire site using their API. I solved this by making a customised RSS feed using the Feed43 (Feed for free) service. This scrapes the cycle hire map page (which has the status of all the bike racks embedded into it). Then I used Twitterfeed to post the results into a customised twitter account. The results are below:
The problem with my system should be obvious! If the chain of data was linked together properly, then we should be able to see every single change in status, not a huge jump from 16|0 to 8|8. This is clearly happening because both Feed43 and Twitterfeed pull data a long but regular intervals, not on a second-by-second or minute-by-minute basis. This is useless for my purposes. How can I improve it?
One protester made a helpful explainer for President Mubarak. It says “Mubarak leaves. Yes: Parliament dissolves. No: Protests, disobedience. strikes.” Photo: Al-Jazeera English on Flickr, creative commons.
@robertsharp59 so, er, we’re publishing blogposts by people within the square…after the event is over?
Well, that was not quite the intention. The blogposts I have read from people ‘on the ground’ in Cairo and elsewhere seem to focus on the movements of the security forces and pro-Mubarak counter-protests, or other ‘in-the-moment’ stories. The use of the word ‘think tank’ to describe the discussions taking place within the square caught my eye, because it implies discussions of policy and new political structures: More forward looking, and less reactive.
It may be that such discussions and ideas have already found their way online, but I’ve not seen many, and in any case they are scattered around the web. Such ideas that are coming out are filtered, either through journalists or by experts who are not part of the protests. These reports and analyses are valuable, of course, but I think primary accounts would have a certain value at this precise political moment. As The Bee said
@robertsharp59 @sunny_hundal Would be really good to get the view from the inside & not “retold” by someone else
(More thoughts in response to my idea on The Bee’s website, which awesomely is in English and German.)
On Facebook, Sophie Mayer was enthusiastic, and reminds me of the We Are Iran project.
I see something on the model of We Are Iran crossed with a conference proceedings… Would be an amazing record of a moment and an opportunity to organise ideas and information. Oh for a mimeograph!
A couple of PEN members may be putting this together with their contacts in Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon and Libya! Get in touch via the comments if you would like to help.
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