CONTACTS
--- Community Based Drama - Tanzania
--- Soul City's 4th Series

ONLINE RESOURCES
--- Site designed to help college students improve their grades
--- July issue of Educational Technology & Society
--- Items from the INDEV e-mail digest no. 19 (7 Aug 1999)

ARTICLES
--- Find Your Voice: Writing for a Webzine - Phil Agre
--- Public Electronic Correspondence Service Systems - PECSS

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NEWS

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Taken from the Media Beat - July 30 1999 (edited by Warren Feek)

Communication Technology Continues To Lag - Zambia

The Post - July 28, 1999 - By Lubasi Katundu Communication technology will

continue to lag behind in developing countries because of the lop-sidedness

of basic infrastructure, said University of Zambia (UNZA) electrical

----------------------------------------

Taken from the Drum Beat - 25 (edited by Warren Feek)

Latin America will experience a 175% growth rate in spending related to

Internet commerce in 1999, although that figure could have been higher had

the region been experiencing healthier economic conditions, says a

Massachusetts research firm. The firm, International Data Corporation (IDC),

says Internet-related spending reached nearly $167 million in 1998, an

increase of 361% over 1997 levels. IDC said that throughout 1998, regional

web commerce was increasing at a "rapid pace..." The firm said, however,

that "economic difficulties being experienced by the major market - Brazil -

are expected to dampen this robust growth. Honduras This Week - 12 July

CONTACTS

-----------

Taken from the Drum Beat - 25 (edited by Warren Feek)

Community Based Drama - Tanzania - The Friedrich Ebert Foundation and the

University of Dar es Salaam, the Department of Fine and Performing Arts have

just ended a workshop with the Hanang Women Counseling and Development

Association. It focused on community based plays designed to sensitise the

Barbaig community on the negative impact of female circumcision, domestic

violence and the importance of sending girls to school. 2 short plays were

produced: one on domestic violence and the problems of forced marriages, the

other on problems resulting from female circumcision. Question from Barbaig

community after performance: what positive alternative can be suggested to

this cultural activity (FGM), rather than simply telling them it is bad and

should be stopped? Contact Dr. Augustin Hatar hata@twiga.com

----------------------------------------

Taken from the Drum Beat - 25 (edited by Warren Feek)

Soul City's 4th Series - South Africa - the recently launched 4th series of

this highly popular multi-media initiative (radio, TV, & related

communication activities) has a major focus on violence against women. It

also addresses AIDS, youth sexuality, small business development, savings

and high blood pressure. Contact Dr Shereen Usdin shereenu@soulcity.org.za.

ONLINE RESOURCES

-----------

I thought I'd send you a quick message to let you know about a site designed

to help college students improve their grades and get more out of the

college experience.

You can find out how to learn more efficiently, improve study skills, have

more free time, conquer test anxiety, win scholarships and much, much more.

----------------------------------------

The July issue of Educational Technology & Society, peer-reviewed online

journal, is now available in HTML and PDF format. It is freely accessible

This issue contains several papers on the theme "Learning by Doing State of

Distance Education"
----------------------------------------

[the following three items are from the INDEV e-mail digest no. 19 (7 Aug

--- Asia Recovery Information Center

The Asian Development Bank has approved a US$ 1 million technical assistance

grant to help establish an Asia Recovery Information Center (ARIC). This

Internet-based facility will support the collaborative exchange and analysis

of information on the social and economic impacts of the Asian financial

crisis, and the pace and sustainability of the economic recovery process. It

will also publish an Asia Economic Recovery Report on a biannual basis.

--- Empowering villagers

The information age, so far confined to the urban population, is making an

entry in rural India. The Chennai based M. S. Swaminathan Research

Foundation has set up an "Information Village," with an aim to provide

location specific information to five villages near Pondicherry.

--- Enabling E-Commerce in India

A survey of companies in India revealed that although e-commerce was

regarded as key to the business strategy of private companies in India, only

20% of the 318 chief information officers (CIO's) surveyed had implemented

e-commerce in their operations. Of the households surveyed, only 26 percent

of PC-owners were aware of e-commerce, with the majority of them indicating

that they would prefer to not make purchases on-line until quality and

delivery could be guaranteed.

ARTICLES

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Find Your Voice: Writing for a Webzine

You are welcome to forward this to others.

Self-published magazines, or 'zines, have proliferated since the 1980's. The

zine movement opposes itself to a wider culture that has been swamped by a

tidal wave of fakeness. In a world where any meaningful shared symbol will

turn up in a sneaker ad next month, it becomes important to fly beneath the

radar of the surveillance machine of commercial culture. Several strategies

can be distinguished: resisting being labeled by the machinery, embracing

the machinery and tried to use it, appropriating elements of mass culture

for their own uses (Jenkins 1992), and trying to stay a step ahead of it.

The zine movement represents another strategy: creating a community of

cultural producers who talk to one another through their creative work and

personal letters without aiming for broad commercial appeal. Heartening

though it is in its goals, however, in practice this community has been

defined much more by what it is against, commercial culture, than by the

positive alternatives it is for (Duncombe 1997).

Paper-based zines have been limited by the limitations of the medium. The

Internet, however, promises a new world of popular cultural production --

webzines. It is now less necessary to focus on negating mass culture.

Instead, it is time to reclaim the public sphere by creating a public space

outside the machines of advertising and the media. That project has many

facets: teaching and learning technical skills, plugging in the

infrastructure, building Web sites, and so on. But I want to discuss one

element of the larger project of reclaiming the public sphere: having a

public voice.

What is a public voice? A public voice is the synthesis that lies halfway

between two extremes: a private voice and a commercial voice. A private

voice makes no concession to others: the only priority is honest expression,

regardless of whether anyone will comprehend or identify with your words. A

commercial voice wants only to produce a predetermined effect in the

audience: study the audience and then tell them what they want to hear.

Private voices and commercial voices both have their place, but they serve

no useful purpose in the public sphere. To have a public voice, you must

learn to combine two seemingly contradictory goals: being true to your own

experience and values while also serving as a consciously designed

intervention in an ongoing public debate. In other words, having a public

voice means saying what you want to say while being confident that your

audience will understand it.

The role of the audience is central in another context: MP3. MP3's explosive

growth is fueled by the appeal of free stuff, of course, but at a more basic

level it is fueled by musicians' fervent desire to circumvent record

companies and their onerous contracts. Record companies do roughly three

things: production, distribution, and promotion. Production can already be

bought by the yard, and MP3 promises a new distribution system. That leaves

the most complicated of a record company's functions, promoting records.

Recording contracts are onerous because promotion cannot be bought by the

yard: promoting a band requires all kinds of intangible and subjective

strategies that cannot be easily specified ahead of time. The standard

recording contract is one-sided precisely to give the record company an

incentive to promote the band. When negotiating a contract with a record

company, therefore, a band's only real negotiating leverage is an

established audience. Whereas a band that has already built an audience is

effectively contracting for production and distribution, which are

commodities, a band with no existing audience can only sign the form

contract and hope that the label will invest its promotion dollars in them

and not someone else. In order to circumvent record companies completely, it

follows that bands must learn to use the Internet to promote themselves --

that is, to build an audience.

I want to put these pieces together, and suggest that building a voice and

building an audience are parts of the same process. I will focus on the area

in which I have the most experience, political writing, but I believe that

my comments will also apply to other kinds of writing, and to online

expression in sound and images as well.

What is a voice? I will start with an important idea: that we know ourselves

by internalizing others' perceptions of us. This starts with the earliest

formation of the self, and it continues throughout one's life. (See, for

example, Kaye 1982; Vygotsky 1978; Wertsch 1985, 1991.) That is why you are

best advised to associate with sane and perceptive people. In particular,

when you speak, you do not know what you have said. You may know what you

*intended* to say, but you cannot know how much of your intention was

actually conveyed by your words. As a result, you only know what you have

actually said by listening to your interlocutor's responses. Once you

internalize those responses, be they understandings or misunderstandings,

you can anticipate them, and as your voice integrates the various

anticipated responses it will become more complex. Faced with the rhetorical

challenge that those potential responses pose, you will automatically grab

hold of useful fragments of voice from your environment -- others' words and

phrases, turns of speech, and so on. You appropriate these fragments and

make them your own, to serve your own purposes. This is the complex

relationship between individuals and their cultural surroundings: it is hard

to escape the discourses around you, but you can use the elements in ways

that nobody expects.

That, at least, is the situation with face-to-face conversation. The voice

you develop through conversation is specific to the kinds of people you

converse with, and those associations will be shaped in part by the social

structure: poor kids don't internalize the responses of bankers. But at

least your conversational voice develops more or less automatically. With a

public voice, on the other hand, the situation is much harder. When speaking

in public, you do not have the same immediate feedback from your audience.

The public audience is diverse, you only hear from a few of them, the ones

you hear from are not representative, and you don't get their responses in

real time. As a result, where the internalized interlocutor in your head

should be, instead you have a vacuum. The natural mechanisms for

internalizing an audience don't work, and the results can be painful. You

may sit down to write an op-ed column for the newspaper, and find that

nothing comes out, or what comes out sounds nothing like an op-ed column.

You aim, but you shoot wide, and the result doesn't even sound like you. You

*feel* that vacuum, and it sucks all kinds of paranoid fantasies into it.

That is where stage fright comes from, or freezing up at the idea of

contributing to an online forum.

What to do? The solution starts with understanding the problem. Don't blame

yourself. Ride out the paranoia. Don't retreat into silence, or into a

private or commercial voice, if that is not what you want. Instead, get a

strategy. Don't wait for your public voice to grow automatically, because it

won't. Build it. Consciously choose to start out easy, get comfortable, and

ramp up. (See generally Vico (1990 [1709]).) Some of the possible strategies

should be obvious by now:

* Forage for fragments of voices -- phrases and ideas that seem useful.

* Choose someone you identify with and copy their voice -- not their exact

words but their style -- until you get comfortable.

* Start with safer groups, or groups that you aren't afraid of.

* Contribute to public discussions by responding to others, rather than by

initiating your own topics. Responding is easier.

* Let yourself make mistakes. Laugh at paranoia.

* When someone misunderstands what you wrote, tell yourself that it doesn't

matter who was right. Just come up with another way to say it.

Those few strategies are easy enough. To consider the matter more deeply,

however, we need to back up and consider why you would want a public voice.

What the Internet mostly does is connect people who have something in

common. Take the case of people with cancer. In the old days, if you had

cancer then you were all alone. It was you and the medical establishment.

Today, however, if you get cancer then you get an account on an ISP and join

a community of people who have experience with the situation. And the same

thing applies to law librarians, stamp collectors, and gay kids in small

towns: each can get online and find a community of others like them. Call

each of these groups a community of practice (Agre 1988, Lave and Wenger

1991, Wenger 1998). Every community of practice has its collective identity

and its ways of thinking together: rumors, associations, griots,

newsletters, and so on. And the Internet is here to amplify this effect.

Some communities have strong mechanisms for this kind of collective

thinking, and others have weak ones. Our job is to strengthen them.

In order to have a public voice, you have to care about something. So figure

out what you care about. A provisional guess will do, since your interests

and identity can only be discovered as your voice starts to grow. Caring

about something is a big deal, and it's hard for some people. It's not just

being against something, and it's not just wanting to have a community. It

means having values that make the world make sense. Once you know what you

care about, then you can hunt for a community. Maybe that community already

exists, or maybe you have to build it. The point is that your voice is not

just your own voice -- it is also the voice of a community.

That is the key: you are not alone. You may feel alone, but that just means

that you haven't found your community yet. Although you are surely unique in

many ways, you are also human, and you are a product of places and times.

Whatever you care about, no matter how personal it feels, lots of other

people care about it too. Your job is to imagine that community of practice

out there, its members all thinking together, however quietly, about the

topic that most concerns you. Your community needs a language, it needs an

association, it needs a clubhouse, and it needs a voice. Your voice. That's

how it works. Your zine is your hook in the ocean, your magnet attracting

all of the other people who share your values. As you hear from them, you

will have the interlocutors you need to develop your voice. You'll never

hear from most of them, but you can imagine them. Imagining your community

also prevents burnout: your community's members are all out there doing

great things, and so the whole weight of the world is not on your shoulders.

Burnout helps no one.

Having set out to build your community by circulating your zine, what should

you say? Here are some rules of thumb:

(1) Say something interesting right away. You can't noodle around with ten

paragraphs of prefatory throat-clearing. If your readers don't know who you

are, you'll have one paragraph to say something. Otherwise they will move

along to the next page, or the next message. Interesting to who? To you.

(2) Say something new. Meaning, new to you. If you've heard it before, so

has your audience. It should be real and spontaneous, so that it's your

voice and not someone else's. Notice the tension between this rule and the

strategy of copying someone else's voice for a while.

(3) Have a point. Know what it is.

(4) Talk about current events. If attention in your community is focused on

a breaking news story or an ongoing controversy, use that issue as the point

of departure for your reflections. That's what pundits do.

(5) Give voice to the community's values. Give people words to explain what

they care about. These words should communicate clearly to members of the

community, and they should also communicate to others. You can provide a

public service by learning how to explain your values to people who don't

yet share them, thereby developing a public voice, and then sharing your

voice with others.

(6) Speak to the healthy part of the person. Maybe your audience has bought

some propaganda, or maybe they are wounded and acting out a trauma. Don't

talk to those parts. Don't fight with them, don't sympathize with them,

don't persuade them. Talk to the parts that share your values. Find ways of

talking to the healthy parts of the person without pushing the buttons of

the other parts. If your audience has developed antibodies against a certain

word or phrase, find some other word or phrase.

(7) Don't flame. Ranting is okay, but not flaming. The difference is that

ranting communicates a coherent and original argument, whereas flaming is

pure redundant negativity. If you do rant, be sensible most of the time.

(8) Try things. Find a voice that you're comfortable with, but keep pushing

it in different directions. See what it feels like. Keep doing the things

that feel good.

(9) Let it become part of your life. You'll find yourself spontaneously

rehearsing things to say. Say the good ones. It gets much easier with

practice. The vacuum and paranoia will dissipate.

(10) Let it take time. Keep sending your voice out there. As time goes by,

one by one your audience will drop you simple notes to say how much they

like your work. One by one your audience will drop you simple notes to say

that you've changed their life.

References

Philip E. Agre, Designing genres for new media, in Steven G. Jones, ed,

CyberSociety 2.0: Revisiting CMC and Community, Sage, 1998.

Stephen Duncombe, Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of

Alternative Culture, Verso, 1997.

Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture,

Routledge, 1992.

Kenneth Kaye, The Mental and Social Life of Babies: How Parents Create

Persons, University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral

Participation, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Giambattista Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time, translated by Elio

Gianturco, Cornell University Press, 1990. Originally published in 1709.

Lev Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological

Processes, edited by Michael Cole, Vera John-Steiner, Sylvia Scribner, and

Ellen Souberman, Harvard University Press, 1978.

Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity,

Cambridge University Press, 1998.

James W. Wertsch, Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind, Harvard

University Press, 1985.

James V. Wertsch, Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated

Action, Harvard University Press, 1991.

NOTE: The article below is a USA-based concept, but may be of interest to

those planning similar interventions in African contexts.

------

Public Electronic Correspondence Service Systems - PECSS

Draft 1.0, Wednesday, August 11, 1999

E-mail is an essential Internet tool used by citizens. It is the most

frequently used and personally controlled online experience by the most

people "on" the Internet. The effective use of e-mail for public

correspondence to and from elected officials and government is running into

significant barriers, particularly at higher levels of government. These

barriers are primarily technical due to the lack of integration with

existing constituent service systems and therefore manual requirements for

sorting and responding to e-mail are administratively overwhelming. E-mail

is becoming the least effective way for the average online citizen to

interact with elected officials (expect perhaps at the local level), while

becoming the most effective way for active citizens to communicate

informally with the elected official staff. E-mail should not become a tool

just for insiders and those who already know workings of the democratic

system.

The technical options for electronic correspondence, including e-mail, web

forms, and other forms of real-time communication over the Internet need to

be explored. There is a significant opportunity for the technical developers

within government to connect with the broader Internet community to develop

software and share advice in order to build solutions that can be shared

widely around the world. With scores of parliaments, legislatures,

Presidents, Prime Ministers, and Governors addressing this concern, the

problem is being solved somewhere - let's share our experiences and ensure

an effective future for online communication between and among citizens and

their government.

Below is a technical scenario that attempts to describe the challenge and

possible solutions.

An e-mail list is being established for those interested in technical

solutions to this problem. This is a "can do" not an "ought to" information

exchange space. If you would like to join the charter group to develop this

e-mail list, please fill out the following form:

Name:

E-mail:

Personal home page:

Title:

Organization:

Organization URL:

Duties:

Related Experience:

Role you'd like to play:

Cut and paste the form above and send it to: do-email-owner@egroups.com

I'll collect the names to start the list, but it will be up to those more

closely involved with the issue to lead the effort.

Public Electronic Correspondence Service Systems Technical Options Outline

Public Electronic Correspondence Service Systems (PECSS) should be designed

for the following purposes:

1. To encourage citizens to interact *effectively* with elected officials

and their government.

2. To reduce the administrative load of online citizen communication to

government while ensuring its role as a useful and improved input system

into the political process and government as a whole.

3. Promote competition among traditional constituent service systems to

integrate e-mail services into those existing systems.

If used right, online public input into the government will improve the

decision-making process and actually reduce the total administrative load of

constituent contact as a whole. However, with the current single in-box

implementation and simple auto-respond services, most electronic mail at the

higher levels of government is not viewed by human eyes or responded to

directly. It could be argued that the interest group based protest-style

correspondence in all forms is slowing down the representative process and

all input is become simply a numbers game. Then again, the increasing levels

of direct citizen contact organized by interest groups or based on

individual interest may represent a new era in participation that sorely

needs advanced technical solutions to ensure that direct participation

becomes a positive and integrated part of the democratic process. Regardless

of your view we have a problem that needs to be solved.

One possible scenario calls for an integrated e-mail and web form system

that can be administered in a distributed fashion via a web interface by

multiple offices in a legislature or parliament or by specific sections of a

government executive office. With government agencies around the world

involved, this may become the best opportunity for an open source software

development project led within government yet infused with the knowledge and

technical expertise of the Internet community.

Step-by-step

1. Citizen sends e-mail to politician@their.gov

2. System analyzes incoming e-mail for basic e-mail only system. A. Postal

code search or other evidence of full address determined. B. Filter those

with district postal codes to special incoming e-mail folder. C.

Auto-respond to those with addresses, thank them for message and disclose

response policy. D. Auto-respond to those without address information and

include simple text form and original message asking for their full address

and disclose response policies.- OR -

3. System analyzes incoming e-mail for extended e-mail only system . A. All

messages receive auto-respond message with text of original message, a text

form for basic address information and their e-mail response policy. B.

Auto-respond includes details on specific in-boxes established for specific

topics (i.e. education@governor.state.mn.us) as well as self-help URL to web

advice government service issues for specific agencies. C. Special

auto-respond messages are established with the topic address providing a FAQ

on related policy areas and discloses further response advice (i.e. write a

letter, call, or if this message does not answer your question, send further

e-mail queries to XYZ address.- OR -

4. System analyzes incoming e-mail for use with integrated web response

system option . A. All messages receive an auto-respond message with the

text of the original message and an URL link to where incoming electronic

correspondence should be submitted. B. Those without web access are given

further e-mail options and advice. C. The web form allows the citizen to

type in specific address information for easy database integration, to

choose the appropriate topic box, to check other Q and A boxes to help

determine the appropriate response, and a box to cut and paste or type a new

message. D. Citizens are provided access to government answer FAQs

(frequently asked questions) to promote self-service E. Web confirmation

assures a citizen that their message has been received, describes what will

happen to it, and provides an opportunity to request a formal written

response or indicate that they are satisfied that their input has been

received and does not require further response.

Note: In all these scenarios, intranet web access by the office of each

elected official would greatly assist composition and display of

auto-responses and other options. This system also points to a situation

where the day-to-day e-mail address of an elected official is separate from

the incoming e-mail box. In state legislatures and smaller nations these

addresses are combined for the most part.

5. Auto-response systems should include URLs or additional information on

places where citizens can discuss issues online with each other. Most of the

ongoing discussion places will be non-governmental, but topic and

time-limited online town halls sponsored by elective bodies is a developing

trend. In the end citizens want to heard and perhaps the most important

response is a tip on where to go for interaction that is not on the

shoulders of the elected official. For more information see

6. System automatically ports required e-mail and web form messages into the

traditional constituent response system with address details for tailored

official response from the elected official as required. In many cases

traditional correspondence is routed by government executive offices (i.e.

Governors) to specific agencies for a response and request to by copied a

reply with a specific case number. A web-based system would allow agencies

to assist executive offices with responses by establishing an integrated

interface to assist a similar digital routing process.

7. Additional opt-in e-mail list services are established based on policy

topics or types of communication such as press releases, public schedule,

etc. for ongoing communication with interested citizens.

8. With the use of opt-in e-mail list services to garner awareness about

decisions on a particular issue additional use of web response (informal

polling, comment forms, idea boxes, etc.) and e-mail input may be used to

gauge public response from active citizens.

If you have comments or suggestions on how to improve this scenario document

please send them to clift@publicus.net.

Telematics for African Development Consortium

P.O. Box 31822

Braamfontein

2017

Johannesburg

South Africa

Tel: +27 +11 403-2813

Fax: +27 +11 403-2814

neilshel@icon.co.za

www.saide.org.za

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