This blog post first appeared on the Media and Government site.
The Institute for Government is hosting a panel debate on ‘Policy by Twitter’ today with Tom Watson, Tim Montgomerie, Alberto Nardelli and David Babbs, chaired by Jill Rutter. It is part of the Media and Government series in collaboration with Fishburn Hedges.
Online engagement may have bigger implications for politics than many commentators, journalists and politicians have yet realized. The generic description ‘new media’ could lead to a false sense that little has changed by implying that facebook, twitter and blogs are just a faster, less professional version of the ‘old media’. But perhaps they are the early signs of a form of social engagement which is qualitatively different from old media, in ways with important implications for government and policymakers.
Consider the demise of the News of the World. The paper was not killed by competition from new media: it brought itself down by a failure of journalistic integrity, and by management which either did not know or did not care how journalists were getting their scoops. In the past this might have been a survivable incident: it would merely have joined a long litany of press misjudgments, alongside the Sun’s coverage of the Hillsborough Stadium disaster, Piers Morgan’s anti-German Mirror headline and the Daily Mail’s support for Hitler and Mussolini. But this time the error was terminal for the News of the World. What has changed?
The collapse of the News of the World is partly the result of a new understanding by British politicians that their political future no longer depends on the patronage of Rupert Murdoch. David Cameron and Ed Milliband realized that they not only could but should disown their relationships with him – an act which would have been considered political suicide only a few years before. And it was not just that the stranglehold of newspaper proprietors over politicians had been relaxed. The final nail in the coffin for the News of the World was a short campaign on twitter which persuaded companies to withhold their advertising from Britain’s biggest highest-circulation newspaper.
This suggests that new media is not just a faster and 24 hour news channel. The political economy of media is changing in three important ways.
First, the economics of media are changing in a way which could shift political power. The old media required expensive equipment for printing presses and broadcasting studios, and income from advertising revenues or governments to cover significant running costs. Wealthy individuals and business provided the capital for old media, and often subsidized loss-making newspapers. The wealthy owners acquired political influence through their ownership of limited means of mass communication. By contrast, new media requires no capital. From Mumsnet to the Huffington Post, everyone now has the tools of mass communication in their hands, irrespective of wealth. The decision of British politicians to ostracize News International appears to be an unconscious recognition of a new world in which wealth no longer buys control of mass communication, and so buys less political power too. If so, this will have significant implications for the way that policy is made in future.
Second, the new media is a conversation not a broadcast. This is more than a difference in form: it is a difference in attitude and meaning. For digital natives the impact of the internet on media is analogous to the impact of the enlightenment on science: the authority of a message is not derived from the position of the person from whom it comes, but from it being exposed to human interaction, review and scrutiny. Digital natives increasingly do not rely on a newspaper editor to curate news stories, but on their extended social network which guides them to interesting news and commentary. They expect articles to be followed by user comments, which draw attention to errors of fact and weaknesses in reasoning. This combination of social filtering and the wisdom of crowds draws good content to the surface in a way which is both more reliable and more democratic than the old media. The government is at risk of treating new media as if it were a new way to transmit information to the public, without being willing (or knowing how) to engage in the conversation which for digital natives is the essence of its legitimacy.
Third, digital citizens engage in a long tail of conversations. Chris Anderson explained in 2004 how online businesses such as Amazon and Netflix make money by selling a large number of distinct items in relatively small quantities to consumers with specific interests. For bricks-and-mortar stores the costs of distribution and inventory made it impossible to serve this ‘long tail’ of niche interests. Similarly old media, with high marginal costs, has only ever been able to serve a narrow range of topics which they deem to be of wide appeal. This has led to a conceit that they are the centre of the ‘national conversation’, as if popular interests were normally distributed along a bell curve and they were able to serve people within one or two standard deviations of the typical citizen. But the public’s appetite for engagement is not normally distributed: it follows a power law (or ‘long tail’) distribution. With zero distributional costs, new media can serve small groups of people with deep interests in niche topics in a way that old media never could.
These three characteristics of new media – low capital needs, a culture of engagement and the long tail distribution – could have profound implications for policy making and especially the way that the government interacts with citizens. The public will increasingly expect to have a conversation with government, not a one-way transmission of information. They will be less inclined to accept the authority of pronouncements from the government, unless they are confident that it can be the subject of detailed scrutiny. They will expect engagement on a wide range of topics previously regarded as of interest only to a limited few, not a focus on a single issue of the day.
This could bring about considerable changes in the way policy is made and communicated. For example:
a. The government will have to become accustomed to publishing all the data it holds, and the analysis which underlies its policy choices, to enable calculations to be reproduced and judgments scrutinized. The public will be less and less inclined to take the government’s word for it. (Examples: OBR, ICAI)
b. Social media strategies will have to mean more than employing someone in the press office to post press releases online and link to them on twitter; government departments will have to become part of the online conversation. (FCO Ambassador blogging is moving in this direction).
c. The long tail of public interests means that most public communication can no longer be channeled through ministers and press offices. Guidelines requiring officials to refer all enquiries to the press office will need to give way to new rules which allow technical experts across the range of subjects to engage directly with citizens, in the way they have in the past through meetings with lobby groups.
d. The erosion of the political power of media proprietors may democratize policy-making to a broader cross section of society. It will be harder to sew up a consensus among the political classes.
None of this means, of course, that government will make policy or have conversations with the public in 140 character tweets. Twitter is merely the dial tone of new media. It is the background hum which confirms you that you are online. It is increasingly the gateway to interesting content and conversations. Policy by new media – including Twitter – could look very different from today’s world.
A View from the Cave has a survey on the best blogs on aid and development.
Surprisingly many people prefer to receive this blog by email than to visit the website or use the RSS feed. (You can sign up for the email on the blog page or here.)
For the last two bog posts there has been a glitch with my website software which sent up to ten copies of the same blog post to some unlucky subscribers. (One of them emailed me to say: “the content is great, but once is enough”. Quite so.)
I spent some hours last night reading through pages of code, and I think the spamming problem is now fixed. I certainly hope so. (The problem, if you are interested, was a hyperactive WordPress Cron function.)
Please let me know if you have any problems with the email list. If you want to stop getting the emails, there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email.
Walking home today after having lunch in a nearby cafe, I was asked for money by a middle aged man suffering from podoconiosis, sometimes called Mossy Foot.
The foot of a person suffering from podoconiosis
I bet you are thinking: podo-what?
Podoconiosis is a disease of people who work barefoot, particularly on red clay soil in the neighborhood of volcanoes, especially at altitude. Tiny micro particles of silica from the volcanic soil penetrate the skin and inflame the lymphatic system. (As a layperson, I think of podoconiosis being to feet what asbestosis is to lungs.)
This disease affects millions of people around the world, including in Ethiopia, Rwanda, Burundi, Cameroon, Tanzania, Equatorial Guinea, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, northwest India, and Sri Lanka.
It is a disease of poverty: it can be completely prevented by wearing shoes, and by providing basic information to the people who are at risk from it.
We could eradicate this disease altogether. It would not be very expensive, and it doesn’t require new medical technologies. So why don’t we? The problem seems to be that the people who suffer from this disease are poor and marginalised. There are powerful AIDS lobbies in industrialised countries ensuring that we spend billions of dollars on antiretroviral therapy for people with HIV. But almost nobody is working to highlight the plight of people suffering from podoconiosis and ensuring that we put in the modest resources needed to bring it to an end.
A British academic, Gail Davey, now working in Brighton but formerly living here in Ethiopia, is an exception to this. She is working to get the disease recognised, as step towards getting the disease tackled and eventually eradicated. You can read more about podoconiosis, and the work that Gail does, in a recent article on Humanosphere. Humanosphere is an interesting new blog by Tom Paulson, a journalist based in Seattle, about global health and poverty, and it is well worth including in your regular reading.
Social media
I can think of a couple of organisations which have embraced social media exactly like this:
New aidinfo website
In work-related geek news, my team has a brilliant new website: http://www.aidinfo.org. (I can call it brilliant without immodesty because I had almost no part in it.)
The internet in Ethiopia
If you live in Ethiopia, you’ll have noticed that the internet got a lot faster from the second week of July this year. I wondered at first if this was for the same reason that the Addis roads are relatively clear of white 4x4s at this time of year: all the ferenjis go on an extended holiday to avoid the rainy season. But I now know that there is a better, and more long-lasting reason: there is now a fibre-optic cable to Djibouti, connecting Ethiopia to the Seacom submarine fibre optic cable for the internet. This has completely transformed internet speeds in Ethiopia (I can now stream BBC Radio 4 on our home broadband connection).
Shared items
If you read things on the internet via an RSS feed reader (if you don’t, see here for an explanation of what you are missing) then you may be interested to know about shared items feeds. These are RSS feeds containing items that someone has tagged as interesting (that is, not articles that the person has written, but articles that they are recommending).
My shared items feed is here. Chris Blattman’s shared items feed is here.
Guardian Development Pages
Let me be the thousand and first person to point you towards the new development section of the Guardian online. I admire the Guardian for putting so much effort into this, and giving it so much prominence. But so far it feels a lot like white middle class people, mainly men, talking about development. I’d like to hear more from the citizens of developing countries.
Here is a really nice animated talk by Dan Pink on what really motivates us.
For those who can’t play the video, he says that monetary incentives work for simple, straightforward tasks, but they don’t work at all well for tasks that require conceptual and creative thinking. According to him, what motivates people is autonomy, mastery and purpose.
One conclusion I draw from this is that there are probably a lot more people than you might think who would be willing to spend a lot of time and effort helping to make the world a better place by reducing poverty, if we did a better job of enabling them to give their time and abilities. According to Pink, what will motivate them is the challenge, the opportunity to develop mastery, and the knowledge that they are making a contribution to a purpose they believe in. Those of us who work in development need to do some more thinking about how we can provide more platforms on which those contributions can be made, rather than just asking people to pay money in taxes or in donations.
In a more satirical vein, if you work in the aid business I think you’ll enjoy the “Hand Relief International” blog. Here’s the latest post, on innovation in development:
Speaking about thinking – I have been thinking about “innovation” a lot lately, as I noticed the word is all the rage these days. The challenge in our sector is how to “integrate innovation” in our language without changing much about the way things work. … Passing innovation in a world dominated by career professionals with many years in the business and certain ways of doing things is a pretty tall order but then donor’s don’t really want to see much rocking of the boat happening either – that would force them to change their ways, which always makes them uncomfortable – they want to see the word used a lot, and they want to hear the occasional 300-words story about it, that can be put in a neat textbox in a report.
(Thanks to @AIDSPolicyProj for the link to the Dan Pink video)
… is here. Simon’s stuff is always well worth reading – he has an enviable ability to synthesize ideas from across disciplines, and explain them with a coherent narrative.
Every time I add a new blog post, several hundred people now receive it automatically by email. (If you would like email updates in future, just type your email address into the box at the top right of the page. You can also remove yourself from the list at any time in exactly the same way.)
It isn’t surprising that people prefer to have blog posts come to them, rather than to have to make the effort to visit every blog they want to read. This is especially true if you have low bandwidth or if internet access is expensive, as is often the case in developing countries. I guess that’s why some people like the email option. But most blogs do not offer email subscriptions; and if you follow several blogs you might find it a bit of a pain to have your email clogged up with this stuff.
So you don’t to want to visit each blog individually, and you can’t or don’t want to get them all by email. Not everyone knows that there are some good solutions to this problem, especially if they are not all that interested in technology. So here’s a quick guide to how to read blogs and other websites easily.
I read over 250 blogs regularly, because I find them informative, entertaining and interesting. I get more diversity of opinion and ideas from those 250 blogs than from reading one or two newspapers; and often you get the chance to learn from real experts in their fields, without the casual mistakes, prejudices and dumbing down that you get when those views are intermediated by lazy journalists.
But I don’t want to visit 250 websites each morning. Nor do I want all that stuff arriving in my email each day. I don’t want to read everything that they all write: I want to skip through the headlines, or a brief summary of each article, so that I can see which ones I want to read properly.
Fortunately there is a wonderful behind-the-scenes feature of almost every blog – and many other websites – called RSS. I’ll spare you the technical details, but this stands for “Real Simple Syndication” and it means that you can pull the contents of a blog or website to another place. And that in turn means you can get all the blogs you want to read in one place.
The simplest and most widely-used solution is Google Reader. This is a website which lets you read blogs, rather like Hotmail or GMail lets you read your mail. You tell Google Reader the addresses of all the blogs you want to read, and it pulls all the posts to one place. It looks a bit like an email programme: you can easily see what’s new, and skip through the headings until you find something that looks interesting. When a blog post is new and unread it shows up in bold.
As well as blogs, you can subscribe to the feeds of other websites, such as the BBC Africa News or DFID Press Releases. You can even set up a Google Alert for a specialist subject – such as your own name! – and have that appear among your feeds. You can have all your friends’ Facebook statuses in a feed. This means that you can decide what you are interested in, all over the net, and bring it all together in one place.
You can put the blogs in folders – mine are grouped into “Africa”, “Development”, “Technology” and so on. Some people put their “must read” feeds into one folder, which they look at each day, and their occasional reading in another folder for when they want to do some browsing.
However, Google Reader is an online website, and that may not be ideal for you if your internet connection is slow, or if you are on a plane. One solution to this is Google Gears, which is a way to access Google services like Google Mail and Google Reader if you are not online. I have found Gears a bit unreliable in the past, so it is not my preferred solution.
There are many other ways to have your computer fetch the information from these feeds when you are online. (These programmes are technically called aggregators or feed readers.) Some of them can be set to download the content to your computer so that you can read it later offline, like you can with your email.
If you have Outlook 2007, then you have a feed reader right in front of you. You can tell Outlook which RSS feeds you want to read and they will appear in a separate folder underneath your Inbox. To use this, you can go to the Tools menu, choose Account settings, then RSS feeds. Paste in the address from the blog or website you want to subscribe to. (Use Ctrl+V to paste into the box). Apparently you can also add feeds to Outlook automatically from Internet Explorer.
I prefer not to use Outlook for reading blogs, however. I use FeedDemon instead, which is a free download. This is very easy to use, and it has the neat feature that it synchronises with Google Reader. So if I add a new subscription to Google Reader, it is automatically added to FeedDemon. If I have read something in FeedDemon, it is marked as read in Google Reader.
There are other feed readers, such as SharpReader. (I use FeedDemon because of its synchronisation with Google Reader.)
If your office does not let you install new software, you may be stuck with Outlook (if you have Outlook 2007) or an online service like Google Reader.
Which blogs should you be reading? If you are in to development you may be interested in my list of the best development blogs – look at the suggestions in the comments, which include some important omissions from my original post. There is a longer list of what I am reading down the right hand side of my blog page.
How do you get started? Adding subscriptions manually is a bit of a bore at first. Fortunately there is a way to share subscription lists. To get you started, here are twenty two key development-related blogs in the form of an OPML file. Right click the link and download this file to your computer, and save it to your desktop. Then in Google Reader or Feed Demon you can import this file and it will automatically add these blogs to your subscriptions. (You can always unsubscribe if you don’t like them or if you find this too much). I can’t see a way to import an OPML file into Outlook, unfortunately. ** UPDATE: See the comments for how do to this in Outlook. **
The key point of all this is that there is a way to subscribe to blogs and websites, so that all the information you are interested in comes to you in one place, whether from blogs, newspapers, website, facebook or even search. This makes it really easy for you to see what is happening all over the world as you drink your morning coffee.
And if all that sounds terribly complicated, don’t forget you can get this blog by email by putting your address into the box on the top right of the page – or, if you must, send me an email and I’ll add you manually.
Happy reading …
It would be invidious to recommend particular blogs, and what’s the point of having a blog if you can’t be invidious? So, if you only read a few development blogs, here is my list of who I think you should be reading. I expect I have embarrassed myself by leaving out somebody crucial – if so, please tell me in the comments and I’ll fix it. I’ve also updated the blogroll on the right of the page.
Development blogs you should be reading
To make this pleasingly controversial, I’ve also put them roughly in order, from “must read” at the top to “probably should read”. I’m not going in for that “in no particular order” fence-sitting stuff.
- Chris Blattman
- Duncan Green
- Bill Easterly (and colleagues)
- Aid Thoughts
- Karen Grepin
- Blood and Milk and everything else by Alana Shaikh
- Texas in Africa
- Global Dashboard
- Wronging Rights
- Tales from the Hood
- Transitionland
- White African
- Good Intentions Are Not Enough
- Hand Relief International (spoof)
- Wandering Thoughts
- Rethinking Development Economics
- Aid on the Edge of Chaos
- last and least, me: Owen Abroad
If you want an email whenever this blog is updated, please put your email address in the box top right.
Development organisations and think-tanks
Here are some blogs from development organisations and think tanks – some of them can err on the wrong side of the blog/flog boundary from time to time. Again, best ones are first.
- Center for Global Development(disclosure: I work here)
- Shanta Devarajan at the World Bank
- Global Economic Governance group at Oxford
- Aidinfo (disclosure: I work here)
- Development Initiatives (disclosure: I work here)
- Publish What You Fund
- Danny Kaufmann at Brookings
- UK Department for International Development bloggers
- Ideas 4 development
- Overseas Development Institute (ODI) Blog
Development podcasts
Here are some development-related podcasts. (I’m about to start a new series of Development Drums, by the way).
- Development Drums (self publicity alert!)
- The Center for Global Development Prosperity Wonkcast
- Think Before You Give
- BBC Africa Today
- Peterson Perspectives
- PRI: Global Health and Development
- The World Bank Podcasts
- Philanthropy This Week
- PRI: The Changing World
Bubbling up: newer development blogs
Here are some more you might want check out – they are too new (to me, at least) or slightly off-topic to be included in my “must read” list, but they look promising:
- Access to Action
- Do No Harm – by folks at the London School of Economics
- Waylaid Dialectic
- Lindsay Morgan’s Despatches
- Wait … What?
And of course there are more also-rans and off-topic blogs on the right of the screen.
On Twitter
If you are a Twitter user, you might be interested to add these to your list of people you follow:
- A list of Center for Global Development Fellows on Twitter
- Jim Cashel’s list of global development types on Twitter
- Mike Gechter’s list
Who are we missing?
I’m looking forward to being introduced to new blogs, and being reminded of blogs I’ve forgotten, in the comments.
I generally assume that people who read blogs use an RSS reader, like Google Reader or FeedDemon (which is what I use), rather than hopping from one website to another in your web browser. You can even use Outlook 2007 or 2010 to gather blog updates automatically. But talking to friends and acquaintances leads me to suspect that not many people are using feed readers.
So in response to a few requests, I’ve added a “subscribe by email” box on the top right of the my blog. If you want an automatic email every time a new blog post appears here, please put your email address into the box and press the subscribe button. You’ll get an email asking you to click a link to confirm that you really do want to receive updates. Once you’ve pressed OK on that, you’ll get every new article by email.
Please let me know if you experience any problems making this work.
You can also follow me on twitter (@owenbarder).
(For the technically minded, I’m using the Subscribe2 WordPress plugin.)
Good news: the Center for Global Development has started a new podcast series, the Global Prosperity Wonkcast.
In this first episode, host Lawrence Macdonald talks to Todd Moss about his new paper, Saving Ghana from Its Oil: The Case for Direct Cash Distribution. Todd proposes ways for the citizens to have more oversight of Ghana’s oil revenue, and to contain oil-induced patronage, by distributing the benefits of oil directly to the citizens.
The podcast lasts about 20 minutes, and you cou listen directly on line or subscribe on iTunes.
As you would expect from CGD, this first episode sugests that the wonkcasts will be essential listening. CGD has a knack of addressing important developing issues in interesting and innovative ways, and basing its ideas on thorough research and evidence.
And if CGD’s wonkcast doesn’t satisfy your entire appetite for podcasts on development, there is always Development Drums.
Chris Blattman has a thoughtful post about his decision to continue blogging.
He gives a bunch of reasons – to paraphrase, they are: (a) it is way to have influence; (b) it is probably a good career more; (c) it forces the author to think more carefully about the issues and to think about the big picture; (d) it acts as a an academic memory or diary; and (e) it subjects the author’s thinking and arguments to the wisdom of crowds.
These are all good reasons.
I started to blog because I wanted to stand up and be counted on the things I think are important. Because I work at home on my own most of the time, blogging lets me get things off my chest without bothering my long-suffering partner about every issue.
I am very glad that Chris has decided to continue to blog. I learn a lot from what he writes, and I can hear his voice in every post.
Ryan Briggs has a good round up of development-related podcasts
Fall classes have started again so my time on the DC metro has increased greatly. The commuting has meant that I’ve been blowing through podcasts at an alarming rate, and I’ve come across a few that are worth sharing. These links are to the webpages of the podcasts, but all of them can be found in iTunes as well.
Here is a job I might have applied for if I were in London: Director of Digital Engagement:
Develop a strategy and implementation plan for extending digital engagement across Government
But I’m quite glad not to be eligible. Here are some phrases from the job description that should give pause for thought to anyone with experience of Government:
… You will manage a small team, directly, but will have to manage relationships with a wide group of senior officials across Government. This will require developing working arrangements in which departmental officials feel they are accountable to the Head of Digital Engagement without the benefit of a formal line management arrangement…..
… you will have to develop these relationships from scratch in a pressured environment in which Ministerial expectations of delivery are high.
… You will have a small budget
… Within two years the use of world class digital engagement techniques should be embedded in the normal work of Government
Or, in plain English, the post will have no staff, no budget, no power, and yet Ministers expect you to see to it that within two years the UK Government will make world class use of digital engagement.
Good luck to whoever gets this job!
- Ngaire Woods on what Africa needs from the G20
- Bill Easterly’s new AidWatch blog
- The Global Crisis Debate in the run up to the G20 (moderated by Dani Rodrik)
- Simon Maxwell’s reflections on Davos
Jeremy Gould, one of the few civil servants who “gets” the internet, is leaving to spend more time with his family.
I’ve been scouting around for a new challenge in Whitehall for a long time now but the truth is that beyond building and managing corporate websites, those roles don’t exist. There’s been a lot of talk over the last four years of how more senior strategic web roles are inevitable, but in that time its been just talk. So there was no next move for me.
It isn’t a good sign that people leave the civil service partly because it is so frustrating to be an advocate of change. On the positive side, things are starting to change – mainly in local government rather than central government – but the UK Government is miles behind where we could be. Jeremy also describes the way that he was discouraged from blogging, which is worrying.
Dave and Simon both highlight the significance of Jeremy’s departure.
The Cabinet Office has now published guidance for civil servants for blogging and participation in online sites.
How the Civil Service Code applies to online participation
The Civil Service Code applies to your participation online as a civil servant or when discussing government business. You should participate in the same way as you would with other media or public forums such as speaking at conferences.
Disclose your position as a representative of your department or agency unless there are exceptional circumstances, such as a potential threat to personal security. Never give out personal details like home address and phone numbers.
Always remember that participation online results in your comments being permanently available and open to being republished in other media. Stay within the legal framework and be aware that libel, defamation, copyright and data protection laws apply. This means that you should not disclose information, make commitments or engage in activities on behalf of Government unless you are authorised to do so. This authority may already be delegated or may be explicitly granted depending on your organisation.
Also be aware that this may attract media interest in you as an individual, so proceed with care whether you are participating in an official or a personal capacity. If you have any doubts, take advice from your line manager.
Good luck to civil servants as they try to implement this. I had rather a torrid time when the Mail on Sunday chose to attack me for my previous blog.
Simon Dickson has more.
The Economist highlights the importance of improving the way aid is given:
Because the aid they receive is such a capricious, volatile commodity, governments dare not make full use of it. They could hire legions of extra teachers, clinicians and civil servants, but only if they are prepared to fire them when the aid spigot is closed. They could put AIDS-sufferers on anti-retroviral therapies, but only if they are willing to discontinue treatment once the money stops.
The article explains why the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness is such an important step towards reducing the costs of aid to beneficiaries and donors alike, and so greatly improving the effectiveness with which aid is used.
It is a rare pleasure to read this well-informed comment about the need for donors to align their aid with the systems they are trying to support, to make aid more predictable, less likely to undermined domestic accountability and to duplicate each other less.
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