Notes from USIP

This morning I sat in for a while on a USIP session entitled, "Can You Help Me Now? Mobile Phones and Peacebuilding in Afghanistan." The InternetBar.Org proposal for using mobile phones for land deed registration was on the table for discussion, along with a number of other projects. I wrote down a couple of observations based on the discussion.

First, any time one sets up an online system that increases communication, there is an automatic increase in the opportunity for communication and agreement, but there is a corresponding increase in the opportunity for disagreement. In the case of the land deeds, not everyone on the ground will be happy to see a central registry - if I took over someone's land, creating a way to prove it doesn't belong to me would not be welcome, and if I'm a local war lord, an unwelcome development might provoke a violent response. So, it seems that all ODR systems need to be cognizant not only of the direct conflict which it is designed to resolve (e.g., who owns the land) but also of the indirect conflict it can generate (e.g., displeasure from the war lord or the government bureaucrat who might lose the ability to skim income from the rightful owner). ODR within ODR, culturally sensitive - quite a challenge, particularly in Afghanistan these days with the discovery of a trillion dollars worth of lithium, the mining of which will be tied to land ownership and access.

Second, it is clear that crowdsourcing is not always a good idea. I heard from two projects that promote "bounded crowdsourcing," which is the use of a large number of identified experts or trained participants instead of opening up to the crowd at large.

Third, it is worth pondering what liability, legally or morally, one assumes when a project puts into the hands of people technology that may cause conflict that did not exist before, like I mentioned above, or which basically changes the nature of social relationships. An example of the latter is found in the process by which expat Afghans send money back to the folks at home. Traditionally it came by letter, which probably could not be read by the recipient (the literacy rate for males above 25 is 30 percent - for females it's 11 percent). So, the letter would be read collectively and everyone would know how much money the individual received. That put pressure on the individual to disperse the money based on the complex web of social and class relationships at work in the society. Now, the money can come in via cell phone, so that no one knows who is getting what - suddenly there is an individual empowerment that never existed before. From the comfortable perspective of my office in an individualist society that sounds good. From the ground in Afghanistan, I suspect it cuts both ways pretty deeply.