Isabel Vincent at Canada’s National Post has gone to Kosovo four years after the war and finds it a mess, with ethnic cleansing continuing (of Serbs by Muslim extremists) and drug and people smuggling:

“More than 80% of Western Europe’s heroin comes through Kosovo, where several drug laboratories have been set up, Interpol officials say.”

The sources are more than a little one-sided – anonymous Interpol officials and a lot of data provided by a Serb diplomat (as well as an ex-Canadian ambassador) but it’s certainly not encouraging.

Let’s not forget about the former Yugoslavia while we try to take care of things in Iraq and Afghanistan (and numerous other countries around the world…)

A report in the Guardian says little new support was offered by the developing world to close the digital divide and suggests governments and NGOs didn’t really interact. Tellingly:

While the government leaders made their speeches in main auditorium, other people and organizations showcased their projects in a separate hall on the floor below… There was relatively little interaction, with government officials using their own entrances, restaurants, lounges and even toilets.

I read once before about this and could hardly believe it but apparently it is true – c. $100m found by the US military in Saddam’s palaces has been looted and redistributed to a ‘Commanders’ Emergency Response Program’ which amounted to a slush fund for US military commanders to use effectively “at their discretion”:http://usembassy.state.gov/mumbai/wwwhwashnews999.html. Fred Kaplan at “Slate”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2091857/ suggests this was an excellent idea.

Call me old-fashioned but doesn’t that money belong to the Iraqi people and shouldn’t the money have gone into some kind of fund that they could draw upon once an independent Iraqi government is once again established? Kaplan suggests now that that source of funds has been spent the US government should put some of its own money into a similar fund.

“Might such discretion create the potential for corruption? Yes. But no reports of abuse surfaced during the first round. And if some miscreant officer does skim a few bucks off the top, the loss would be trivial compared with the price-gouging that Pentagon-approved contractors have routinely practiced in the course of rebuilding Iraq.”

If you want to do an end run around administrative bureaucracy in approving rebuilding projects why not give the money directly to NGOs and protect them as they do their work? But then the Iraqi people would not be forced into a cosy relationship with the occupying forces…

According to Dexter Filkins at the “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/07/international/middleeast/07TACT.html?ex=1386133200&en=b502ae4c549da2f4&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND :

As the guerrilla war against Iraqi insurgents intensifies, American soldiers have begun wrapping entire villages in barbed wire.

In selective cases, American soldiers are demolishing buildings thought to be used by Iraqi attackers. They have begun imprisoning the relatives of suspected guerrillas, in hopes of pressing the insurgents to turn themselves in.

All of these tactics have apparently been used in Israel, and, ‘writing in the July issue of Army magazine, an American brigadier general said American officers had recently traveled to Israel to hear about lessons learned from recent fighting there.’ Colonel Sassaman (the man who surrounded a village with wire) is quoted in the article saying, ‘with a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them.’

This is frightening stuff. Fred Kaplan at “Slate”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2092178/ (who pointed to the NYT piece) suggests – correctly in my view – that this kind of approach only breeds more terrorists, whether in Iraq, Israel or (historically) Vietnam and the Philippines.

It appears that the Marines “don’t intend”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/12/international/middleeast/12MARI.html?ei=5007&en=1a1a29c3bded603f&ex=1386565200&partner=USERLAND&pagewanted=print&position= to behave the same way, but it will be interesting to see if those good intentions remain once they start getting fired on.

The New York Times Link Generator – A solution to the problem that links to the New York Times normally disappear after a week or so into their “pay to see” archive. Links generated using the service above will always be freely accessible. This has been done with the permission of the New York Times on the (likely correct) assumption that commercial researchers will still want to use the NYT’s own complete search and pay for articles from the archives because webloggers won’t be linking in to (and therefore making freely available) every last article the NYT produces on a given day.

In the “discussion”:http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/2003/06/06#a440 that surrounded this move I also came across “Bug Me Not”:http://bugmenot.com/ which is a somewhat more controversial tool – it gives users a way to share usernames and passwords for sites like the NYT that require registration.

PC Magazine in the US recently did a “short article describing Wikis”:http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1402872,00.asp (web pages that anyone can edit just by typing simplified text into a form) and rated six options for making your own Wikis. One Wiki-related technology with some interesting unique features that is free to use and doesn’t get a mention is “Bloki”:http://www.bloki.com/ and probably the largest bit of Wiki content is the “Wikipedia”:http://www.wikipedia.org/ – a 300,000 entry user-generated encyclopedia.

Thanks to Many-to-Many for the link

A local paper claims the Independent Media Centre that started it all in Seattle closed partly because of its decision to have a downtown location costing $3000 a month so that it could be at the heart of the Seattle WTO protest (which was four years ago) and so it could offer its multimedia services to other left-leaning groups.

More controversially the paper’s ‘obit’ suggests classic problems of left splintering were also partly to blame – “the core group running the IMC was cliquish and inaccessible; at one point, nonwhite media activists discussed starting their own competing local IMC” and it also pointed out one of the drawbacks of the open publishing model – readers had “to sort out for themselves the solid, well-researched, well-presented stories from the jargon-laden, factually incorrect anarco-leftist rants”.

Of course Seattle Weekly is part of the alternative press themselves so it may be they had an axe to grind – and the Seattle Indymedia website is still running, with a front-page explanation of their status that is “dismayingly revealing”:http://seattle.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=36723&group=webcast …

“John Weeks”:http://www.insead.edu/facultyresearch/ob/weeks/ at Insead did an interesting bit of ethographic research entitled “Unpopular Culture: The Ritual of Complaint in a British Bank”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0226878120/qid=1070905181/ and was interviewed about this in the ever-interesting “Thinking Allowed”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/thinkingallowed_20031126.shtml programme on the BBC. One of the first things he said was that he became interested as a grad student when he heard about the MIT project Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century and contacted one of its sponsors. Well a little Googling later wouldn’t you know – there was only one British bank who sponsored that particular project – NatWest.

He said (paraphrasing) he would come back from a hard day’s ethnographic observation and talk to colleagues about his study of organizational learning and have something like this exchange:
“What do you see?”
“I don’t think I’m seeing anything!”
“Well what are they doing then?”
So I’d describe what they were doing (complaining mostly) and they’d say
“Well that’s what they’re doing – that’s what you need to write about!”

A succinct description of the purpose of good ethnographic research!

A new neighborhood aimed at young middle class folk in Orange County seem to have benefited from a neighborhood intranet [article in LA Times – requires registration]. It brought people together by giving them an easy way to find common interests and solve common problems (like babysitting) without having to go knock on people’s doors. What is not clear is how beneficial such an intranet would be to existing neighborhoods and to neighborhoods with a mix of rich and poor in the same area.

Thanks to “Keith Hampton”:http://www.mysocialnetwork.net/index2.php?p=37&c=1 for the link (he did an influential academic study of the building of social capital in an earlier experiment outside of Toronto).

The iGeneration includes some guest opinion pieces about the “World Summit on the Information Society”:http://www.itu.int/wsis/ , some basic facts and figures and some (generally rather upbeat, uncritical) case studies of ICT use in the developing world.

To take one example of their treatment of the significance of ICT use in the developing world, the BBC profiles a “Brazilian telecentre using Linux”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3250876.stm in a poor area of Sao Paulo with the stated aim of improving employability. Well:
1) users only get an hour a day – not much time to learn
2) I wonder how many of the users are using the connections to learn skills and how many are simply recreationally surfing or emailing
3) I wonder whether programming or software-using skills based on Linux are transferable to the commercial market in Brazil (possibly more so than elsewhere since the Brazilian government appears increasingly interested in promoting Linux use, but still a concern)
4) As “Steve Buckley”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3251024.stm hints at, I wonder whether the money spent on the telecentre might have better been spent on, say, a conventional literacy programme or some other intervention.

More money to close the digital divide would of course be welcome but not if it comes at the expense of other programmes…