How to liberate African publishing?

The graphic element of the BarcampAfrica UK logo

BarcampAfrica UK is a gathering of technologically inspired Africans and their friends, to be held in London on 7th November. Barcamps are a form of ‘unconference’, events in which the overall focus is declared, but a detailed agenda is only worked out on the day, and people are encouraged to come along prepared to take part in running a workshop. I’m lending my support to the organising team (thus far my main contribution was the logo design), and I plan to facilitate a workshop on the day.

The first Barcamp Africa was held last year in northern California, the brainchild of Ellen Petry Leanse and Kaushal Jhalla. There have been several since, one recently in Cameroon. Much of the impetus for the UK barcamp has come from young Africans in the BCS. The overall focus of the event will be on what technology (especially computing and communications technologies) can contribute to positive human, economic and environmental development in the African continent.

My Barcamp focus will be on information sharing/publishing. Information design, information sharing and electronic publishing are my personal areas of interest and knowledge. The workshop I intend to run at BarcampAfrica UK will focus on how to make it easier for African institutions to publish and disseminate useful information.

The high cost of publishing software

Ghanaian high school students in the National Museum, Accra. Photo Conrad Taylor

A few years ago, I spent a couple of weeks in Ghana. I went over with Ghanaian friends, but spent time wandering around Accra on my own. One of my visits was to Ghana’s National Museum, a small circular building that is not well known even to Ghanaians. If you want to get there by taxi, ask to be taken to ‘Edvy’s restaurant’: located within the museum grounds, it is better known than the museum itself!.

While browsing the exhibitions, I got talking to the museum’s curator, Joseph Gazari Seini, about methods for captioning exhibits; most of theirs were either typed, or hand-written. I explained the kind of work I do, and he invited me to his office.

Pulling out a folder, he showed me the text for a book, a report of some important archaeological work. It had been written on a computer, and the print-out was inkjetted. The folder also contained a collection of colour photographic prints showing aspects of the excavation and the objects found. Joe Gazari explained to me that they would love to get materials like this published, but they didn’t know how to go about it, and they hadn’t the means.

I wondered if there was some way I could help, and later that week I had a meeting with Joe’s boss. I’m afraid it ended up with misunderstanding; in retrospect I think they thought I was some rich oburoni offering to finance the whole venture. But what I did do when I got back to England was contact Adobe Systems Inc. Their software — FrameMaker or InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator — would be excellent tools for book-publishing.

I understood that Adobe had some history of charitable giving; would they donate software to this cause? No. They do support projects, but only in their back yard, for example in San Jose, California. And the amount of money it would cost the museum in Accra to buy legitimate copies of professional publishing software would be way beyond their budgets.

Is free, open-source software the answer?

So this is one of the barriers: the cost of decent software. What about free, open source software? That is certainly a route worth exploring. There is OpenOffice Writer of course, but a word-processing program doesn’t have all the features you would expect of proper publishing software, such as flexible layouts, extensive support of graphics types, and CMYK colour for commercial printing.

There is also the Scribus desktop publishing program. Last time I tried it it was awful, but that was two years ago and maybe version 1.3.3.x is OK. I have to say that the page about installing on Mac OSX doesn’t inspire much confidence…

Another possibility would be to use the venerable typesetting language TeX, invented by Donald Knuth in the 1980s — free implementations are available for a variety of computer operating systems. On the down side, typesetting in TeX is not a WYSIWYG experience: you prepare a file using a text editor, embedding formatting codes, and feed the result to the TeX engine, which does a batch process on the file. The results can be of very good quality and the method has great promise for textbooks, but is difficult if not impossible to lay out publications in which there is an intimate relationship between text layout and graphics.

Fonts for African languages

Another issue that is a barrier for publishing in some of the African vernacular languages is that they require characters that cannot be found in the standard fonts. In early 2000, I conducted a personal investigation of this issue, writing a 55-page illustrated report called Typesetting African Languages, which I have now parked at The Internet Archive as a PDF. (Warning – it is now out of date, and may contain errors.)

In my report, I divided the languages into five grades of difficulty in respect of typesetting them:

1. Languages which use the same characters as English, without any diacritics — examples include Swahili, Somali, Zulu, Xhosa. These langauges can even be processed using 7-bit ASCII or sent as telex without orthographic compromise!
2. Languages which use accents but in a way that is similar to Western European languages like French or Portuguese, so can be typeset using standard computer fonts. Examples include Kikuyu and Tswana.
3. Languages which use ‘ordinary’ letterforms but in unusual combinations, such as a dot under a vowel, or an accent over a consonant. These could be typeset with systems like TeX that build accented characters from components. Examples include the Nigerian languages Igbo, Edo and Yorùbá, the Zambian language Nyanja, and Wolof (Senegal).
4. Languages which have additional letterforms that are not found in standard fonts — for example Fulfulde, Krio, Twi and Hausa.
5. Languages which are written with non-latin script systems. Apart from the Arabic script, there is also the Tifinagh script of the Berber people, and the Ge’ez script of Ethiopia and Eritrea.

A passage from a text in Yorùbá, typeset using MacTeX and Computer Modern fonts. Click to enlarge.

At the time that I wrote my study, the options for Level Three and Level Four languages looked quite problematic. I did have a go at typesetting a passage of Yorùbá using the MacTeX system and the Computer Modern type family. In this system, the accents and letters are composed by TeX macros, rather than stored as precomposed letterforms, so with a bit of hacking I was able to produce the result illustrated here

But a lot has happened since. For a start, more publishing software now encodes text in the Unicode system, which allocates a unique character identification number to each letter in all of the world’s languages. There are now fonts available in the extended TrueType and OpenType formats – fonts like Arial Unicode, Lucida Sans Unicode and Adobe’s ‘Pro’ font families – which contain hundreds or even thousands of characters, though usually not the ones which are needed for the African languages I have mentioned.

The growth in the number of ‘large glyph set’ fonts has in turn led to the development of mechanisms which make it easier to insert characters for which there is no keyboard keystroke. A good example is the Glyph Palette in Adobe InDesign, and the Character Palette system utility for Mac OSX.

A Twi (Akan) proverb typeset in two free-of-charge fonts, Gentium and SIL Charis

What Africa really needs is fonts which contain the glyphs for African languages – and which are free of charge! Fortunately this is now beginning to happen. Gentium, a beautiful font, was designed by Victor Gaultney, originally I believe as part of a research project at The University of Reading. Victor started the drawings for Gentium (the name means of the nations in Latin) in the same year I was conducting my informal research. It now encompasses full extended latin, greek and cyrillic alphabets, is hosted by SIL International, and is available at no charge under the SIL Open Font License, which allows modification and redistribution.

SIL International is a Christian organisation with a 75-year history of documenting and supporting the world’s less well known languages. Originally a summer school (Summer Institute of Linguistics’), SIL has grown into an organisation with knowledge of 2,550 languages. It publishes The Ethnologue and has also created a number of fonts that supprt African languages well. Charis is a family of four fonts – roman, italic, bold and bold italic. It is based on Bitstream Charter, originally designed by Matthew Carter, which in 1992 was donated by the Bitstream foundry to the X Consortium.

It’s a good start, and there are other initiatives along these lines of which I am aware. A friend of mine, Dave Crossland, recently obtained his Masters at the University of Reading, in the course of which he created a font which he intends to release using an Open Font license. The other day, Dave showed me the font running on his Google Android ’phone, and very crisp and legible it looked too. Although Dave’s font doesn’t have the character support for, say, Twi and Yorùbá, the licensing provisions he has chosen make it possible for other type-wranglers to take the baton and run the next mile.

Even TeX doesn’t stand still. In the course of preparing this blog post I found a reference to a brand new version of TeX – XeTeX – which supports Unicode, OpenType and Apple Advanced Typography. It’s also being looked after by SIL, see here!

 

The BCS: enabling the information society

THIS WEEK, the British Computer Society launched its new identity, as part of what it calls the ‘transformation’ programme. In fact it now wants to be called only ‘the BCS’, along the lines of BAA and HSBC. But I predict that those of us who have been BCS members for some time will find it hard to drop the habitual mention of British, or Computer, or for that matter Society (BCS now wants to be called a ‘Chartered Institute’ instead).

On Wednesday, 23 September, the BCS held a Member Groups Convention at the Royal Society’s building in Carlton Terrace. The BCS is home to scores of local branches, some International Sections, plus more than fifty Specialist Groups. The ‘SGs’ are volunteer-run societies, embedded within the BCS, which cater to special interests such as Fortran, computer history and conservation, project management, health informatics, security, interaction design, information retrieval, articicial intelligence… the list is a long one. In addition, there is a very active Young Professionals Group.

The activities of the member groups form a vital part of the life of the BCS, and the Convention was held so that the elected and employed officers of the Society, I mean the Institute, could tell a collection of the organisers and activists from those member groups about the BCS’s new orientation and aspirations for the future. It also gave an opportunity for those of us who work as volunteers within the BCS member groups to think about how we can contribute to these goals.

Adrian Walmsley, BCS vice-president for member services, stands beside one of the two London cabs sporting BCS marketing messages.

The new visual identity of the BCS is a strong green colour, suffused with yellow glowing bits, and a half-shield logo device — as illustrated on one of two taxis currently carrying the BCS’s advertising messages on the streets of London. (Appropriately, the taxi shown has WiFi inside and a satellite data uplink!). There is also a new slogan to accompany the logo — Enabling the information society — and it is this new mission statement that I want to comment on here.

Of information and computers

As Alan Turing predicted, the conversion of data and information into numbers allowed glorified electronic adding machines to evolve into general-purpose information appliances. The Lyons catering company took a revolutionary step when it commissioned the creators of the EDSAC machine at Cambridge University to design a general-purpose business computer, which made its début in 1951 as the Lyons Electronic Office, or LEO computer. This was pressed into service collating the requirements of Lyons’ nationwide chain of tea-rooms, managing the inventory, and controlling the production and dispatch of baked products to the tea-shops.

Today, only the smallest enterprises are run without computers, and the management of data and information using computers is central to the operations of government and public services too. But computing is also essential to scientific research and technology development — and has itself become the object of scientific research and technology development.

I have no idea just when the term ‘Information Technology’ or ‘IT’ started to be used as a synonym for computing, but I suspect the reason was to ‘big up’ the image of computing and its practitioners to business bosses and politicians. Personally I do not like the term. Firstly, because there are many other uses for computers apart from in managing information, and calling all computing ‘IT’ ignores that. Secondly, many non-computing technologies have been employed through the centuries in connection with information, for example in the writing and printing of books.

Hence my reservations about the BCS’s move to suppress pronuncation of the C-word, while describing itself as the Chartered Institute for IT.

The information society

On the other hand, I feel very positive about the adoption by the BCS of ‘Enabling the information society’ as a statement of its mission; which I find both humble and ambitious at the same time.

Why humble? Because the slogan does not claim that computer people are the only heroes of the information society. There are, after all, other people who know a thing or two about how to deal with information: researchers, teachers, writers and editors, publishers, library and information science people.

Consider my craft practice as a writer, information designer, illustrator, photographer, typographer and media producer. I used to practice all these crafts without a computer, but without a doubt the Apple Macintosh, the PostScript language, digital cameras, all that lovely software, and of course the Internet, have been very enabling indeed.

The computer and communications industries, now thoroughly converged, are providing the world with the infrastructure and tools which information and media workers like me rely on to create, manage and disseminate information products, and various cultural creations too. And it’s not only about production: in the last two decades, what I prefer to call CCTs — computing and communications technologies — have also become the means by which ordinary people access information, enjoy cultural media creations like films and music, and communicate with each other. Thus CCTs, and the people who know how to create them and make them work, are essential enablers to all these practices.

It’s true, ‘information society’ is more of a sloganeering term than a clear definition. There is some reasonably authoritative precedent for it, however. In 2003 in Geneva and 2005 in Tunis, the United Nations held a two-part conference called WSIS, the World Summit for the Information Society. It was managed by UNESCO and the ITU, and I’m afraid the British Government didn’t take it very seriously, but at least I can say that the BCS Specialist Group community did.

Led by John Lindsay, then chair of the Developing Countries Specialist Group, a group of us held a workshop in January 2003 to consider the WSIS challenge and themes, and what might be the response of professional societies working within the information sphere. (Full account of the meeting as PDF, available at the Internet Archive.)

Certainly on the UNESCO side of the WSIS organisation, the concept of the Information Society carried with it a commitment to promoting wider access to the technical means of accessing and sharing information. In preparatory papers for WSIS, UNESCO also identified the need to promote what they called ‘information literacy’, the skills people need to be able to find the information they need, evaluate its worth and make critical use of it. And information literacy was the topic we focussed on in the January 2003 BCS-DCSG workshop.

The BCS as enabler

In explaining the importance of the new mission statement, BCS President Elisabeth Sparrow spoke to the Member Groups Convention of several ways in which the BCS can work towards enabling the information society.

For a start, society needs information-oriented computer systems that are fit for purpose, and one of the BCS’s principal aims is to promote professionalism among computing practitioners. The BCS has also committed itself to bridging the gap between education, practice and research. I would expect the member groups to contribute a lot to this bridging process, because they already provide a focus for collaboration between academics and practitioners.

The BCS is a charity and has a Royal Charter which commits it to working for the public good. One of the commitments described in the transformation launch document (also entitled Enabling the information society) is to ‘Informing public policy on how IT can contribute to society’ and another is to ‘Ensuring everyone benefits from IT’.

To be honest, in recent years the BCS and its member groups have had a difficult relationship; the groups have felt under-appreciated and over-controlled, and there is suspicion that there are some BCS staff who wish the groups would just go away and let the staff get on with running the whole show. But the mood at this week’s Member Groups Convention was much more positive, and with this new expression of the BCS’s role as helping to enable the information society, we have an agenda with which the member groups can engage with enthusiasm, and to which we have a lot to contribute.

This I think is particularly true for the Specialist Groups, many of which are engaged with external ‘communities of use’ for computer and communications technologies and information-handling systems (health informatics is a good example, and so is electronic publishing). In a way we act as a natural interface between the BCS and wider communities of information users.

One informal project that I have been involved in running is the discussion community KIDMM (on Knowledge, Information, Data and Metadata Management), which started as a collaboration between members of a dozen or so BCS SGs, held a founding workshop in March 2006 and now, three and a half years on, has held three other events and has eighty members of its discussion list. Most are BCS members, but many have joined us from other communities equally committed to enabling the information society.

 

Twaxonomy?

Is there a way to manage your subscriptions to Twitter so you don’t become overwhelmed by the volume? And is there a role for genre metadata in separating the tweet from the chaff?

I’M ABOUT ONE MONTH INTO my experience of using Twitter, and I can see both advantages and disadvantages, when viewed as a tool for being pointed in the direction of interesting news, events and opinions. That of course is only one perspective to have on Twitter, the Internet service which asks you ‘What are you doing’ and lets you post a note to that effect in 140 characters.

That short-message limit misleads some people into a comparison with SMS text messaging, but the dynamics are very different. If you ‘follow’ another Twitterer, you will receive all of the ‘tweets’ they send. And unless you put up specific privacy blocks in place, anyone can become your ‘follower’. Likewise, you can follow as many other people as you like to. It’s common among friends who Twitter for the following to be mutual, symmetric — but there’s no necessity for the deal to be symmetrical (and there’s a difference with Facebook friendship).

The technology and the offer is essentially quite simple; the complexity comes from the people who engage with Twitter, and their different expectations and modes of action. A popular view of Twitter is that people use it to say things like ‘Waiting for the 188 bus’ or ‘An extra shot of expresso in my coffee this morning’. And some people do. Used like this, and in a symmetric link-up between friends, Twitter is a way of keeping the people you care about on your radar screen.

Another use of Twitter — and this is the one that attracted me more — is to follow people who can point you to interesting observations, news, articles and events: a form of knowledge-sharing. I am fortunate to have friends working around online social networking, media and community-building who devote a large proportion of their posts to such a function: typically their tweets include a shortened URL, clicking on which will take me to some very interesting information. If you are interested in following this sort of person, I heartily commend (by way of example) @Nico_Macdonald, @davebriggs, @DavidGurteen, @stephendale and @davidwilcox.

There are also some people who are such specialists in this use of Twitter that they have accumulated many followers, such as the journalist @glynmoody who specialises in writing about computer issues and ‘openness’ — Open Source, open content, open access to information etc. Glyn’s tweets are legion, but always well structured (and never about what he’s having for tea).

But can the Twitter experience scale up?

Where it gets problematic is when your receiving several hundred tweets a day — and you can reach that level pretty quickly, as I have found following only about 50 people so far (mind you, that includes two Guardian newspaper channels, @guardiantech and @guardianeco. And as I was realising this, my attention was drawn to a Twine posting by Nova Spivack, entitled Can Twitter Survive What is About to Happen to It?. It’s worth reading, as are the many comments it has been attracting.

Spivak points out that Twitter still has a fairly small user community, compared let’s say to Facebook, but millions are now starting to join the early adopters; and ‘many won’t have a clue how to use Twitter’, he moans. Also, robotic notifications will increasingly join the human content. The answer, he suggests, may be in adding some sort of metadata to tweets, on the basis of which users can filter the rush of Twitter messages.

Twitter does have a primitive kind of metadata labelling scheme: it’s called the hashtag. Thus, for example, I have suggested that all tweets about the upcoming British Computer Society’s Member Groups Convention should include the hashtag #bcsmgc. But as far as I can tell, hashtagging is only useful for content discovery, and not for filtering.

People are reacting in various ways. Some people retort, ‘Well, don’t follow people whose tweets are inane!’ (there is a new verb around now, to unfollow). This however is a rather drastic measure, and banishes someone from your screen for good.

One possible mechanism is to group the list of those you follow into Twitter groups; the Tweetdeck application which I use does that, and I have created a ‘NewsFeeds’ group and sorted the Guardian stuff and Glyn Moody into that. But the problem comes when you have Twitterers who broadcast tweets of several kinds of genre, some of which you are interested in, some of which annoy.

Let me illustrate the dilemma as it affects me thus: I value my Twitter link with my recently rediscovered friend Dave Snowden (@snowded). His tweets sometimes point to interesting stuff, and he’s been able to broadcast appeals for suggestions to those who follow him, to a few of which I’ve responded, hopefully helpfully. However, Dave also does tend to twitter excitedly and in great volume when there’s a rugby game on TV, especially if Wales is playing. Not having the slightest interest in games played by men with funny-shaped balls, I’d be happy to filter all those posts out!

I wonder, perhaps what we could do with is something not overly complex, but a simple two-dimensional faceted classification scheme for Twitter tweets. For subject classification, it may be that the hashtag system works well enough (though I have seen interesting cases of contention when Twitterers at a conference disagree over what tag to use for it!) Could we perhaps have a simple genre classification that would allow Twitterers to designate a tweet as ‘trivia’ or ‘broadcast query’ or ‘recommended URL’, and so on? One could encode the classification in a mere one or two hidden ASCII characters (so the data format wouldn’t need modifying), but add the genre-settings choice pop-up menu and the viewing filters to the various Twitter clients.

I can’t claim to have thought long and hard about the problem, but problem I have little doubt it will become. I’d be interested to hear the views and ideas of others.

 

Dave Snowden on managing complexity

Dave Snowden at the Gurteen Knowledge Cafe at the BT Tower in London: 17 February 2009. Photo Conrad Taylor.

33 YEARS AGO, I lived in a commune at Wick Court, a Jacobean manor house situated between Bath and Bristol, which was then the head office and conference centre of the Student Christian Movement. Another of the 17 or so communards was the SCM’s Chairman, Dave Snowden, a spare, bearded Welsh Marxist Catholic philosophy and physics graduate. Taking no prisoners in argument, and delighting in winding people up, Dave gave the impression of having slipped from another historical epoch, though whether it was from some future time, 1920s Russia or perhaps the Counter-Reformation was less easy to judge.

Our paths separated after Wick Court. Last summer I was again in the Bristol region, staying with my friend Bob Bater, who works in the area of knowledge management — a field I have strayed into from my lifelong interest in information design and communication. Bob told me about the work of a company called Cognitive Edge and its founder Dave Snowden, a description of whom sounded remarkably familiar. So when I had the opportunity to hear a lecture by Dave Snowden at a Gurteen Knowledge Cafe event at the BT Tower in London, I made an effort to go along.

Quite apart from the joy of re-union (and some grand views of London from the revolving restaurant at the top of the tower), it was also fascinating to discover how Dave’s thinking and mine have been oscillating around some of the same attractors over the years. Mind you, he has made a great deal more use of them than I have, through his many consultancies with major enterprises, and even state security organisations.

The topic for the day’s Cafe session was How can we best keep employees engaged in their work, in the current economic climate? But Dave’s talk addressed a much wider set of issues around what organisations should do to adapt to a complex and crisis-ridden world — one in which the ‘lessons’ of the past are no longer a guide for future action, and ‘management by objectives’ doesn’t equip us with the agility and intelligence to respond to emergent threats and opportunities.

Paradigm shifts in management thinking

The word paradigm has many sloppy uses, but Dave deploys it strictly to mean a theoretical framework: very close to the use established by Thomas Kuhn in his book on the sociology of scientific knowledge, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. For a period of time, a paradigm dominates because it seems best to organise our thinking about the world; but then, a new approach that flies in the face of received wisdom and which is initially ridiculed gets taken up; and at a certain point, a ‘paradigm shift’ occurs and the former heresy becomes the dominant idea. The revolutions associated with Copernicus and Darwin are two such instances.

In the last 120 years, said Dave, two paradigms in succession have dominated management thinking. The first of these, dubbed Scientific Management (or ‘Taylorism’ after Frederick Winslow Taylor, its progenitor), focuses on the function of the business organisation and takes a command and control approach to the organisation of work. In this period, the emphases are on mass production, time and motion, automation and efficiency. The Machine is the model, and people are viewed as components of the system.

The second paradigm identified by Dave Snowden is Business Process Re-engineering, which took off in the 1990s. The belief in BPR is that one should look anew at the company’s objectives and define the outcomes or goals you want to achieve, the values or behaviours which you want your staff to adopt. Dave notes that this makes several assumptions, among them that you can pre-define your goals, and that one can rely on a form of causality in which results are repeatable, that the past is a guide to the future. The approach also relies on scalable and reliable technology (particularly information and communication technology) through which metrics can be gathered and control can be driven.

And now, said Dave, we are entering a third paradigm, which it was his job to explain. Rather than projecting an idealised future, this approach seeks to understand and manage the evolutionary potential of the present. It is people-focused, exploits mass collaboration and pervasive social computing, and relies on distributed rather than centralised cognition.

Dave also displayed for us a quote from Seneca:

The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.

Catastrophes, niches and predators

Dave argues that times of economic crisis also tend to coincide with paradigm shifts, the times when the previously dominant set of ideas appear weak and the opportunity arises for the new model to take hold. Focusing on evolutionary potential and emergent trends in the present is particularly beneficial in opening our attention to novel possibilities for ways of doing business.

An idea he borrows from evolutionary biology is ‘Dominant Predator Theory’. This holds that after a major disturbance of the ecology, there will be one predator species that will first make the move into the new niche, occupy it and dominate it. The speed with which the predator can move into this niche is key to its dominance; and agile companies will be the ones that emerge from the current crisis in best shape.

Systems and agents: three configurations

To understand how an organisation might exploit the third paradigm, Dave presented three system models: ordered, chaotic and complex. By ‘system’ he means networks that have coherence, though that need not imply sharp boundaries. ‘Agents’ are defined as anything which acts within a system. An agent could be an individual person, or a grouping; an idea can also be an agent, for example the myth-structures which largely determine how we make decisions within the communities and societies within which we live.

• Ordered systems are ones in which the actions of agents are constrained by the system, making the behaviour of the agents predictable. Most management theory is predicated on this view of the organisation.

• Chaotic systems are ones in which the agents are unconstrained and independent of each other. This is the domain of statistical analysis and probability. We have tended to assume that markets are chaotic; but this has been a simplistic view.

• Complex systems are ones in which the agents are lightly constrained by the system, and through their mutual interactions with each other and with the system environment, the agents also modify the system. As a result, the system and its agents ‘co-evolve’. This, in fact, is a better model for understanding markets, and organisations.

Most people understand how to think about order and chaos, but understanding complexity requires a new mind-set. One property of complex dynamic systems is that patterns may take shape within them that can rapidly escalate if they find reinforcement. Many people know of the phrase ‘the butterfly effect’ to express how interactions between agents can sometime build rapidly into something that would have been hard to predict. The key to managing complex systems is therefore to attune to spotting emerging trends as early as you can, sometimes referred to as weak signal detection. If you have the means of detecting signals early, you can move to boost those that you view as positive, and dampen down those which are negative.

The childrens’ party metaphor

I don’t remember the younger Dave as a raconteur, but he’s certainly an accomplished one now. To explain the difference between the above three systems and how to manage them, he told a story about the rules around a birthday party for his 12-year-old son, and his 16-year-old daughter.

What would happen if you were prepared to model a 12-year-old’s party as a chaotic system? Anything could happen, including the house being reduced to ashes. What would an ‘ordered system’, ‘management by objectives’ approach look like? Dave span out a fantasy process starting with declaring the objectives for the party, pinning up motivational posters, writing a project plan with clear milestones at which progress would be measured against declared outcomes, starting the party with motivational video and Powerpoint, and after the party, reviewing the outcomes and updating the best-practice database. (That raised a laugh and ripple of applause.)

Far better to model the kids’ party as a complex system. You set boundaries (‘cross that and you’re dead!’) — but you keep them flexible, you see if you can stimulate the formation of ‘attractor mechanisms’ that will set up some good patterns, and you keep a weather-eye open for bad patterns that you will want to disrupt. Your aim is: to manage the emergence of beneficial coherence. And the benefits in business of adopting this process, Dave asserted, are that you get as dramatic an improvement as business process re-engineering ever got you, and at a low cost if you spot the patterns early and move appropriately.

Dave’s 16-year-old daughter’s party raised the stakes to a new level, as a previous incident involving a couple of friends and a bottle of vodka had given them cause to know. Here, the rules were more carefully set: who could be invited, what kind of alcohol etc. Shortly before the impending event, Dave was working with a well known client organisation in Langley, Va. USA, and sympathetic friends there loaned him an extensive array of surveillance equipment. With the house fully bugged, Dave and his wife stayed in their bedroom, tuned in, and only twice had to make forays so as to be on hand to disrupt possibly negative emergent patterns. ‘In a complex system, what counts is your weak signal detection,’ Dave explained.

Distributed cognition

Swindon’s Magic Roundabout

Distributed Cognition is a key concept in Dave Snowden’ vision of the new way to manage radically networked organisations, and he explained it with reference to the so-called ‘Magic Roundabout’ in Swindon. I’ve been trying to get my head round it (according to Dave American visitors can’t get cars round it!), and my best way of conceptualising the roundabout is as a very compact ring road, with traffic in both directions, linked to five radial roads by a mini-roundabout at each junction.

The Magic Roundabout offloads onto drivers the decisions about how to interpret the traffic flows, when to go and to stop, which way to turn and so on. The roundabout has no traffic lights. That’s what distributed cognition is about: you rely on the intelligence of the agents in the system. Since it was introduced it has never jammed up.

When the Magic Roundabout was set up, the partitions within the roadways were set up on a temporary basis, movable on the basis of observations by policemen and road traffic engineers about how people reacted to them. And the moral that Dave drew from that was: ‘Move away from attempting failsafe design towards setting up safe-fail experimentation’. Because you cannot analyse the problem space fully in advance, and you have to be prepared to adjust systems interactively until you find that they work.

Putting distributed cognition to work

Within complex systems, for the organisation to become alerted to early weak signals of pattern formation, Dave argues that it is necessary to work with objects of fine granularity — be these objects organisational ones or informational ones.

As for the granularity of levels of human organisation at which distributed cognition works, we should also be aware of certain numerical thresholds: ‘Organisations work differently as 5 or less individuals, 15 or less, and 150 of less’. 150 is Dunbar’s number [Wikipedia ref], the limit on the number of ‘acquaints’ a normal person can maintain; it is also a typical kind of size for a military fighting unit such as a company, and W.L. Gore & Associates divide business units when they exceed this size. Dave described fifteen as a ’limit of trust’ and related to the size of the typical extended family; and five as Miller’ Number [Wikipedia ref], the limit of short-term memory. (Note: George Miller actually defined this limit as ‘the magical number seven, plus or minus two.’)

Spotting the ball, missing the beast

Dave then got us to take part in an experiment which demonstrated both the strengths of distributed cognition, and one of the failings of all human cognition about which we should be on our guard. He prepared us for this by getting us to think about the fairground competition that invites us to guess how many jelly beans are in a large jar. If the first guess is visibly posted up, subsequent guesses tend to bracket this; whereas if each person remains unaware of the other guesses, cognition remains distributed and the average of the guesses is more accurate.

Our task was to watch a video in which three students dressed in white T-shirts walked within a circle passing a basketball between them, while another three dressed in black T-shirts also circled between them, likewise passing a ball. How many times was the ball passed between the students in the white shirts?

This visual attention test wasn’t new to me, as I had read about Daniel Simons’ experiment in Scientific American a couple of years ago. Most people concentrating on this task fail completely to notice that half way through the clip (see it here), someone in a gorilla suit shambles in from the right, grins at the camera and beats his chest, then leaves. Many in this audience likewise missed the gorilla — but as a thumbs-up to distributed cognition, the reported number of passes neatly bracket the correct answer, which is 14. (I anticipated the gorilla, but failed to count three of the passes as a result!)

Given how we were prepped for the task, the gorilla was a typical ‘weak signal’ that slipped off most people’s radar. There is a moral to this: we don’t tend to notice what we are not looking for. According to Dave, people on the mild side of the autistic spectrum do tend to notice the gorilla despite concentrating on the task.

Stories and filters

With both positive and negative effects, human beings and societies are closely attuned to stories. Indeed a book by John D Niles characterises our species as Homo narrans. Families, workgroups, companies and whole cultures have stories, and dominant narratives act as primary filters through which we see (or fail to see) data. (Indeed, I see this as related to the idea of a ‘paradigm’ anyway.)

But what if we were able to capture stories and make use of them to build business intelligence? Dave’s clients are coming to value the freeform comment over conventional forms of survey, and also in preference to the output of focus groups (in which the danger of bias from the facilitator is high). At Cognitive Edge they have been developing methods and software tools which harness the illuminating power of stories beside distributed cognition, and make the raw data available directly to decision makers together with useful quantitative summaries and visualisations — what Dave calls disintermediation.

Dave gave several examples of this in practice, but one will suffice for here. In the My Visit project, National Museums Liverpool wanted to collect and analyse feedback from the hundreds of thousands of school children who visit and interact with its staff. The children leave small text comments, and are asked to ‘self-signify’ the comment fragments by placing them on a sliding scale between two negative polar opposites. Examples of scales:

• From staff patronise the children

  to staff are too childlike and pathetic

• From too much to see and it’s overwhelming

  to not enough to keep me interested

• From rushed from place to place; missed things

  to too much time in one place

The software provided by Cognitive Edge (SenseMaker) presents the spectra of results as a histogram. Obviously, what the museum management would like to see would be positive stories that sit comfortably in the middle of these negative extremes. But to detect problems and fix them early, what they keep their eye on is the histogram columns at the negative edges. The long-term pattern displays as blue bars, the last 48 hours’ results show in red. Behind the simple display is a database of all the comment fragments, and the management can drill down quickly to read the individual, unmediated complaints.

The SenseMaker display lets museum staff monitor the emergence of trends and drill down to read comments left by children. Image by permission of Dave Snowden.

Feedback from the system has helped the museum to refine and develop over twenty learning activities for children, and has quadrupled the figures for learning visits.

Dave showed other examples covering e.g. attitudes of employees to their leadership, scenario elicitation within a Canadian forestry service, and so on. One of the latest uses of SenseMaker sounds fascinating and I look forward to learning more: the Children of the World project aims to create a cultural map of the world, getting children to gather stories from their families that are reflections about past and present life, future hopes and aspirations. Starting in Liverpool, the project will branch out soon to Australia and Canada, Bangladesh and Africa.

Shifting paradigms

Summing up, Dave argued that while there is nothing wrong with the BPO paradigm for the things it’s good at, it doesn’t deal well with complexity. So what are the practical implications for organisations prepared to make the switch?

• The demands of weak signal detection imply setting aside periodical analyses based on surveys and focus groups, in favour of narrative-based research that continuously captures and displays a disintermediated evidence base, as described above.

• Rather than determining outcomes and measuring performance against targets (what’s ruining UK health and education), shift to measuring the impacts of activities and allow for emergence and adjustment.

• Rather than using centralised scenario planning, set up systems which allow for scenarios to be generated by employees.

• Break people out of their boxes. If you can assemble ‘crews’ with a membership that spans functional job boundaries and put the crews ‘on watch’, you will have at your service a team whose skills exceed those of any one of its members.

• Best practice databases are all very well, but they lead you to rely on what you ‘learned’ in the past. Dave recommends knowledge management practices that collect narrative fragments.

• ‘Practice-Informed Theory’ similarly assumes stability and doesn’t deal well with emergent behaviours and situations. Indeed Dave felt that more ‘Theory-Informed Practice’ is desirable. For example if there were more professional ethical principle applied in banking and accounting, would we be in the mess we’re in now?

 

A seasonal message: from epidermis to epidemic via IT

IT’S INFECTIOUS. My humour, that is, in this early winter season. At least, I hope so. But something else about me might be infectious too. At least, I fear so.

I’ve been beset with some kind of virus for a couple of weeks now. It’s adenovirus, probably. I’ve had a nasty chest infection, wheezy lungs, and a disturbed gastro-intestinal tract. You really don’t want to know the details.

I have neighbours, mostly young ones but not exclusively, who come round to see me frequently, so they can get my support with their coursework or Stuff they want to do online. In these last two weeks I’ve been telling them, ‘I’m in quarantine — I’ve got the Dreaded Lurgy!’. Or some translation of the above, since none of them know The Goon Show. Yet they insist they must come, and want to brave my menagerie of bacteria and viruses and use the computers.

Viruses delivered by computer

I wonder if you realise what a horrible device the computer is for passing on viruses. And I don’t mean malicious bits of software. If you have a cold or the ’flu, you may be sitting there sneezing and coughing all over your keyboard. Plus, our hands are fantastic organs for getting contaminated with germs and viruses — and the next pair of hands that touches that keyboard (or that drives the mouse) will — with an appalling degree of certitude — carry our microbial payload to their mouths.

So, when these friends have insisted on coming round to use my computers, I have asked for a little time in which I can wipe down the keyboard and the mouse with disinfectant and isopropyl alcohol first. Though I have subsequently learned that a solution of hydrogen peroxide might be a better weapon.

Compared with a toilet seat…

According to a Web article at Applelinks, microbiologist Charles Gerba at the University of Arizona conducted a study of which objects in a typical office work environment are the most germ-ridden. Telephones came top, followed by the surfaces of desks, water fountain handles, computer keyboards and mice. The stats read allegedly thus:

• Phone: 25,127 germs per square inch
• Desktop surface: 20,961 germs per square inch
• Keyboard: 3,295 germs per square inch
• Mouse: 1,676 germs per square inch
• Toilet seat: 49 germs per square inch

If that’s true, I realise now that I should not only be sterilising my keyboard and mouse, but even more importantly those places on the desk my hands and wrists constantly caress, and which furthermore get nourished daily with spilled coffee and crumbs and soy sauce.

As for your phone, into which you breathe so intimately — well, lending yours to a friend when you are ill is about as direct a transmission vector as snogging them full-on!

Prevention is better than curse

Are you involved in administering a workspace in which people share computers, or do hot-desking? Places such as Internet cafés, University computer labs? Perhaps it’s time to look at how we manage those environments, to minimise their potential for spreading epidemics via the epidermis, and viral aerosols broadcast via coughing and sneezing onto receptive keyboard and desk surfaces.

The article referenced above not only has some good suggestions about how to disinfect IT and comms equipment, but it also links to descriptions of computer peripherals that have been specifically designed to make it easier to manage this health risk. There are…

• keyboards and mice made with organic antimicrobial compounds such as Microban embedded — or even better, colloidal silver;
• keyboards and mice that are so totally sealed that they can be washed in a dishwasher;
• keyboard membranes that offer a condom-like surface protection and at least make the touched surface easier to clean, with fewer cracks and hidey-holes where viruses and microbes can breed.

Of course, one could always retreat to a remote cottage in the Outer Hebrides and avoid epidemics that way. Except, I suppose, those social/behavioural epidemics of ideas and behaviours which shower down into our lives like clusters of meteors each time you connect to the Internet.

But that would be taking me on to a future subject of Gladwell’s ‘Turning Point’ thesis, which is my current reading…

 

UK to support GMES; benefits to British space science

MY EARLIER POST hoping that Britain would come up with support for the important European GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) initiative appears to have been an answered prayer. In previous funding rounds, the UK had committed to only 5% of the costs of GMES, which seemed way out of line with Britain’s economic clout and engagement with climate prediction.

BBC News science reporter Jonathan Amos has posted a report that Lord Drayson committed 102m euros (£86m) to GMES, at this week’s meeting of space ministers convened by Esa, the European Space Agency. This amount appears to have been cannily calculated to ensure that British space firms will still be considered in the bidding to build the next generation of European meteorological and earth-monitoring satellites, the ‘Sentinel’ series.

Britain is also to benefit from an Esa plan to open a space science research centre in Britain, based at the Harwell innovation campus in Oxfordshire. The focus of research at the new Harwell centre is still uncertain, but is likely to include a robotics component in line with British involvement in the Exomars next-generation Mars exploration programme.

 

Desert power?

‘ONE PLANET’ — the environmental documentary radio programme of BBC World Service — last month broadcast (and podcast) a documentary which explored whether a future solution to Europe’s electricity supply problems might come from giant solar-thermal generating stations in the Sahara Desert, feeding hundreds of megawatts into the European grid through undersea cables while also bringing ‘an industrial revolution to the Southern Mediterranean,’ to quote one of the scheme’s supporters, Prince Hassan of Jordan.

What the programme didn’t mention is that the idea is at least five years old and is championed by TREC, the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Co-operation project, an initiative of the German association for the Club of Rome, together with the Hamburg Climate Protection Foundation. But what Miriam O’Reilly’s inverview with Professor Galal Osman revealed is that there are people in Egypt who see the construction of the pioneering solar-thermal power plant at El Kureimat on the Nile as possibly the first step towards realising that dream.

El Kureimat, a few kilometres south of Minya, is the site of a power generation centre that already has two gas-powered generators installed. Now under construction is a ‘Concentrated Solar Power’ (CSP) solar-thermal plant which will generate 20 megawatts of power, rising to 50 MW. Similar in principle to solar-thermal plants operating in the deserts of south west USA, the plant will feature an array of mirrored fifty-metre parabolic reflectors covering 100,000m². These will focus the sun’s rays onto a vacuum-insulated heat collector tube running down the centre of each reflector, through which water pumped under pressure will carry the heat to a central facility where steam is generated and electrical power is produced using turbines.

Sun, water and salt

Photovoltaics, using for example silicon cells, is a completely ‘dry’ process, witness its efficacy in outer space and the surface of Mars. But CSP solar-thermal plants are the affordable technology when scaling production up to tens and hundreds of megawatts. One factor that might be seen as a hitch to implementing ‘desert power’, then, could be shortage of water; but there are plenty of zones around the desert edge where water is to hand, though it may be sea-water.

One vision for an integrated system to harvest the desert and make it blossom involves using CSP plants not only to make electricity, but also to desalinate marine and brackish water, for human consumpion and for agriculture. It has also been pointed out that if the solar arrays are constructed so that the ground beneath them is accessible, those shaded spaces could be ideal for agricultural and horticultural use.

Apart from cost, solar-thermal has another advantage over photovoltaics, in situations where a reliable constant energy supply is desired. Electricity is expensive to store — but harvested heat can be stored cheaply for use in overnight power generation. The 50 MW solar-thermal plant which Spain commissioned at Solucar near Seville a couple of years ago uses underground vats of molten salt to store up to seven hours’ worth of power-generating heat.

High tension

In the programme, Professor Osman, fancifully invoking a memory of Ancient Egyptian worship of the sun, also imaginatively sketched a vision of ten thousand square kilometres of desert covered with CSP mirrors, generating potentially much of Europe’s electricity needs. How would this be brought across the Mediterranean? The TREC plan calls for three High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) cables under the sea: one from Libya to Sicily, a second from Tunisia to Sardinia, and a third across the Straits of Gibraltar from Morocco to Spain.

In the early 20th century, in the competition between rival electricity transmission techniques, it was Alternating Current that won out. AC, which reverses polarity fifty or sixty times a second depending on the design of the system, can be stepped up to very high voltages with cheap transformer technology — and high voltage is important, as this vastly reduces the amount of power lost to electrical resistance in the transmission cables.

However, developments in semiconductor technology never stand still. In recent decades the advent of high-energy solid state static inverter circuits has made it simple to ramp voltages up and down for direct current, too. And this has real advantages: less electrical power is lost per thousand kilometres in DC cables, and the cables are cheapoer to make and lay. The problem is that DC static inverter stations are still much more expensive to build than AC transformer stations; but where energy must be moved long distances, especially underwater, HVDC is the sensible choice. (The longest current HVDC power circuit is overland, however — it’s the 1,700-km line that runs from Congo’s Inga Dam hydropower scheme to the copper mines at Shaba.)

HVDC has another benefit where international sales of electricity are contemplated. AC grids can exchange power only if synchronised in frequency and in phase. When AC circuits go out of step, they can bring the system crashing down, with wide-area power outages. DC power flows constantly in one direction and can easily be distributed to AC local circuits through an inverter regardless of local phase and frequency. Indeed, sometimes HVDC links are incorporated into power grids just for the stability they bring.

Energy and security

In the BBC programme, Prince Hassan spoke about the benefits which widespread adoption of solar-thermal power could bring to the Middle East and North Africa, especially in terms of prosperity and development, industry and agriculture — and flowing from this, greater social and political stability.

However, a gloomy note was stuck by Open University֦s Professor Dave Elliot, co-Director of the Energy and Environment Research Unit. He pointed out that almost insurmountable obstacles have arisen in negotiations between European nations about cross-border sharing of power; how much more difficult would it be to negotiate prices and access for power from another continent?

European policymakers are also understandably nervous about energy security; the way Russia plays politics with its gas pipelines illustrate the dangers of dependence. It is said that one of former Congolese president Mobutu Sese Seko’s motivations for supplying the Shaba copper mines with electricity from 1,700 km away, rather than develop allegedly cheaper local hydropower sources, was the advantage to him of having his hand on a big switch to render Katanga province powerless should it rebel. How stable is North Africa?

‘We’ve got to get the balance right in the future,’ concluded UK Energy Minister Malcolm Wickes, ‘between the energy we’ll have to import — mainly oil and gas and coal at the moment, maybe one day solar — and the energy we can produce here in Britain and just offshore. Energy security will become an increasingly important component of a nation’s security, given the huge global demand, the global grab for energy in the 21st century, and all the difficult geopolitics around that.’

 

Support GMES, Mr Brown – not space-walks

THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION is, I hear on today’s news, ten years old. To be more precise, it is ten years to the day since a Russian Proton rocket hauled the Zarya module into orbit, followed some weeks later by the Unity module aboard the American shuttle flight STS-88. Two years later, humans moved in and have been there ever since, and the last couple of years have seen the station expand to accommodate a permanent crew of six, and a number of laboratories are beginning to do some useful work.

This is very expensive science, something in the region of $150 billion to date. And the respondents to interviews on today’s BBC World Service news were very vague about what useful science the ISS actually delivers, other than the opportunity to learn about the health effects of long periods living in near-zero gravity. Which kind of begs the question (‘manned space flight helps us to learn about manned space flight’).

I’ll admit it’s glamorous. For me, the Shuttle is particularly glamorous, the kind of thing I expect a real spacecraft to be like, rather than being shot into space in a can and coming back down under a parachute.

But Earth Observation is what we urgently need

In recent writing and public speaking, I have been drawing attention to how important computation is, coupled to environmental monitoring, for predicting the direction and scope of climate change and other environmental developments. A key role here is played by earth observation satellites such as the Jason-2 with its Ocean Surface Topography Mission, the ICESat LIDAR-based ice sheet mass observation system, the SeaWiFS instrument that measures ocean-surface chlorophyll, the twin GRACE gravity-mapping satellites ‘Tom’ and ‘Jerry’, and so on.

Other earth monitoring projects rely on distributed probes to collect data, whether they are tags on migrating whale sharks, instruments that measure water depth and quality in rivers and reservoirs, or buoys floating in the ocean, like the remarkable Argo System of 3,000 free-floating buoys that measure subsurface temperature and salinity and current flows in the depths of the world’s oceans. These too rely on satellites, in this case (a) to get a fix on their position and (b) to upload their data via the multifunction Argos satellite network which has been providing environmental data retrieval from surface monitoring platforms for 30 years.

GEOSS and GMES for efficient utilisation of data

Given the uncertainty and enormous risks which we now associate with environmental change, we need evidence-based policymaking. Therefore we need more and better quality earth observation data. But it has also become evident that making effective use of this data means bringing it into standard, shareable formats, and making it available ‘downstream’ to the research bodies, universities etc. who can perform analysis on it.

Recognition of this need led to the setting up of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), a collaboration between 74 member countries and 51 participating international organisations, currently three years into an ambitious ten-year programme.

The European Union contribution to GEOSS is GMES, ‘Global Monitoring for Environment and Security’, a joint initiative of the European Union and the European Space Agency, and formerly known as Kopernikus. The aim of GMES is to pull together information obtained from environmental observation satellites, aerial platforms and ground-based station so as get a comprehensice picture of the state of the Earth’s health. This has four components:

• The space-based platforms and their supporting ground stations
• Measurement platforms in situ (ground stations and aircraft)
• Data harmonisation and standardisation
• Systems for providing information services to users downstream.

GMES is currently working on three ‘Fast Track Services’ to utilise existing monitoring platforms: the Land FTS, the Ocean FTS, and a third that is dedicated to supporting emergency response to disasters. Atmosphere and Security will be the focus of future Fast Track Service developments.

However, GMES is also planning three space-based observation missions of its own, collectively known as the Sentinels. The first of these will provide microwave altimetry data, while Sentinels 2 and 3 will be platforms for multispectral optical surveillance.

Will Britain support GMES next week?

JONATHAN AMOS, writing on 19 November for BBC News, notes that UK support for GMES has been lukewarm. Three leading scientists have written to the Prime Minister urging that the British government pledge financial support for GMES at a meeting in Den Haag next week of the European Space Agency. The scientists are Professor Alan O’Neill of the National Centre for Earth Observation, Prof. Paul Monks (Leicester University Atmospheric Chemistry Research Group) and Prof. Shaun Quegan (Director of Sheffield University Centre for Earth Observation Science and the Centre for Terrestrial Carbon Dynamics).

Professor O’Neill, of the University of Reading, explained to the BBC that not only is support for GMES important in delivering on Britain’s commitment to being serious about climate change — a failure to deliver at least 100 million euros to the two billion required may also have an impact on Britain’s ability to participate in space commercially.

‘ If we are a downstream recipient of data, a third-party user, we will not be involved in influencing the agenda and the prioritisation for the instruments. Our industry will not be competing to build those instruments. And by not having close proximity to the actual data, we will lose first-mover advantage, not just in science but in downstream applications. So we’re either in the vanguard and mixing it, or gradually over time we will become third division.’

Unlike its major European partners in ESA, Britain does not have a dedicated Space Agency. The person who will deliver the UK government’s verdict on GMES next week will be Lord Drayson, the science minister, who recently stated that he hoped Britain would one day fund an astronaut in space. Get your priorities right, lad.

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ESA Ministerial Council Agenda, 25–26 2008: Read this news release from the European Space Agency to understand the full range of European space initiatives that will be considered by the meeting of ‘space ministers’ from the 18 ESA Member States plus Canada. These include earth monitoring, the Galileo navigation system, data transport satellites, the Enhanced ExoMars project, further development of the Ariane 5 and Vega launchers and the Kourou launch site, participation in the International Space Station programme, and manned space flight projects.

 

Rare elements, electronics and politics – again

MY LAST POST on the relationship between metals and militias in Eastern DRC included references to coltan, used in producing small-volume tantalum capacitors for mobile devices, and cassiterite, an ore of tin, which the electronics industry is using more and more of in lead-free solders. This prompted a senior colleague in the British Computer Society to ask what other ‘troublesome’ elements might cause problems further down the line.

Indium

ONE CANDIDATE IS INDIUM, the current principal use of which (70%) is to make the transparent indium tin oxide electrodes used in liquid crystal displays. Indium is found in nature only as a tiny proportion of other metal ores, and is extracted from tailings, usually from zinc mining operations. About 470 tonnes of indium are extracted this way each year, worldwide.

Canada is a leading producer, and the largest single source is the Teck Cominco refinery in British Columbia. Some other sources are in Portugal, Peru, southern China and Khazakhstan — a diverse and widespread range. The main worry with indium is nothing to do with dodgy politics, but simply whether there will be enough to meet demand in the future.

LCD technology is not only pervasive on laptops, desktops and just about every mobile technology you can imagine, but also now for televisions. But there is another growing source of demand for indium in the form of a promising thin-film solar cell technology called ‘CIGS’ (copper indium gallium selenide).

There are two ways in which an indium supply crisis may be averted, however. One is through developing extraction processes that improve on the current 20% yield, and extend the process to other metal ores such as copper — increased prices for indium would make that a viable proposition. The other is through recycling, which in fact accounts for 650 tonnes of indium per year, more than from mining, according to a report from the Indium Corporation to a photovoltaics conference in Milan in late 2007.

However, it seems likely that this ‘recycling’ term principally means the in-factory recovery of the 70% of indium tin oxide (ITO) which ‘misses the target’ when LCD transistor arrays are being deposited. I would feel rather happier if I knew that LCD displays at the end of their lives were being scavenged for their rare elements rather than ending up in landfill — true ‘post-consumer’ indium recycling.

And maybe, in any case, we will see ITO replaced entirely in LCD production before long. An exciting alternative way of making transparent electrodes would be to use graphene — engineered one-atom-thick sheets of linked carbon atons which a Wikipedia article charmingly describes as ‘atomic-scale chicken wire’! And a scarcity of carbon is simply unthinkable.

Lithium: the Li-ion roars but for how long?

A SHORTAGE OF LITHIUM, on the other hand, could be a real bugbear. It is scarcely 17 years since Sony produced the first commercially available lithium-ion (Li-ion) rechargeable batteries, and they have become the battery of choice for portable devices such as laptops, camcorders, digital cameras and mobile phones. They have an excellent energy-to-weight ratio, they lose their charge very slowly when not in use, and they do not have that hated ‘memory effect’ which nickel-cadmium cells suffer from.

Lithium-ion technology has had its problems. While in use, the anode generates heat, and the cathode is a potential source of oxygen; and given the reactivity of lithium, batteries have been known to explode. Apple Computer is just one of several computer companies that had to embark on expensive battery recall and replacement programmes due to exploding Li-ion batteries. The problem is solved by building monitoring and control circuitry into the batteries, and there are ongoing programmes of research to improve reliability, overcome the ‘aging’ problem (Li-ion batteries slowly deteriorate in capacity from the day they are born, and faster if they become hot), and still further improve their energy density.

The problem with lithium is, although it is relatively common, it is dispersed at low levels of concentration throughout the earth’s rocks and oceans, making it uneconomic to retrieve except for a few locations where is is concentrated, such as in the granitic rock spodumene. Some 80,000 tons of lithium is extracted from such rocks in Western Australia, China and Chile. Another source is from ancient alkaline brine lakes in China and Argentina.

Is this enough? It depends of the world’s appetite for lithium, and that may be set to increase enormously due to the suitability of Li-ion batteries for automotive applications: either fully electric vehicles, or petrol-electric hybrids such as the Toyota Prius. These vehicles use serious amounts of lithium in their batteries. Mitsubishi, which plans to introduce its own electric car soon, estimates that unless new sources of lithium are found, demand will outstrip supply in ten years, and prices will soar.

There is one truly enormous reserve of lithium in the world. More than half of the world’s reserves of lithium are in one place: the Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest (10,582 km²) and highest (3,650 m) salt flat, in the south eastern corner of Bolivia. The Salar de Uyuni contains an estimated 10 billion tons of salt, but less than 25,000 tons is extracted each year, and by miners belonging to a co-operative. And as for lithium extraction, there is none.

BBC news on 9 November published an article by Damian Kahya — ‘Bolivia holds key to electric car future’ — about how industry regards the Salar as the answer to lithium shortages in the future. But Bolivia’s socialist president, Evo Morales, is not about to let any foreign company in to loot the lithium. After centuries in which foreigners extracted Bolivia’s gold, silver, tin, oil and gas and yet left it one of the poorest countries in Latin America, Morales is determined that in the case of lithium the benefit will accrue to Bolivia.

The Bolivian government has plans to set up a pilot plant, initially producing 1,200 tons a year, in the Salar. Without foreign involvement, the project may take time to scale up to meet the predicted demands of the market for lithium. All of which makes the politics of lithium very interesting indeed.

 

The curse of Congo’s mineral wealth

TANTALUM is probably not one of the elements on the Periodic Table that you’ll remember from school chemistry. Dull grey and chemically inert, its principal use is for making electronic components, specifically tantalum capacitors which are capable of achieving high capacitance in a very small volume. Therefore tantalum, despite its scarcity, is in demand for use in mobile phones, PDAs and laptop computers.

Map of militias and minerals in eastern DRC: click to enlarge

Tragically, the value of coltan is linked to the current round of bloody wars in the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The columbite-tantalite ore from which both tantalum and niobium are extracted, colloquially known as coltan, is found in relatively easy-to-work surface deposits in the provinces of South Kivu (at Mwenga, Kamituga, Shabunda, Kalehe and Kabare) and North Kivu (at Masisi, Walikale and Lubera). There it is mined by ‘artisanal’ methods, by forced and extorted labour under the control of the various militias who are terrorizing the area, and exported to the world market to fund their acquisition of weapons.

Coltan is not the only one of Congo’s rich resources that are being pillaged in this way. An estimated US $70m worth of cassiterite (tin ore) is also reaching the world market from war-torn Kivu. Indeed, from late 2002 the price of coltan took a tumble after the US Defense Logistics Agency unloaded its tantalum stockpile onto the open market, but the price of tin went up after Japan and Europe enacted safety legislation to have lead-based solder replaced with tin solder for electronics fabrication.

In this morning’s (11 Nov) edition of Business Daily on the BBC World Service radio, the focus was on cassiterite. Global Witness, through its researcher Carina Tertsakian, has been keeping an eye on the exploitation of Congo’s resources for several years. In February 2007, Global Witness called on the UK Government to call to account a Wembley-based business, Afrimex, run by Ketan Kotecha, who has been buying coltan and cassiterite in the region of Goma since 1996, to the profit of the Goma faction of the RCD, the Rally for Congolese Democracy. The cassiterite is taken out through Uganda and Rwanda, and so to the Indian Ocean coast, from which it is transported to smelters in India and China, Thailand and Malaysia. There is also reportedly a cassiterite and tantalum smelting plant in the Rwandan town of Gisenji, just across the border from Goma, operated by a South African firm (MPA) whose founders have links to the Rwandan Patriotic Front party (see 2007 article by David Barouski).

Congo has many other minerals such as uranium, cobalt, diamonds and gold. The rival militias of the FNI and the UPC in the Ituri region across the border from Uganda are involved in organising the artisanal mining and smuggling of gold, and there have been documented dealings between the FNI and the multinational company AngloGold Ashanti around the operation of a mine at Mongbwalu.

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THE MURDEROUS FACTIONALISM of eastern Congo, and the motivations of Congo’s neighbours in meddling in her misery, are difficult to understand: these are convoluted ethnic tensions with their roots in the colonial past, combined with opportunistic looting. Let me attempt an explanation, as I understand it.

How ethnic tensions crossed borders

The current fighting, in which the rebel general Laurent Nkunda is currently threatening to topple the Congolese government of Joseph Kabila, is just the latest round in a chain of Congo wars from 1996 that have cost the lives of millions. However, the roots of the Kivu and Ituri conflicts can be traced back even further, and over the border into Rwanda and Uganda.

After the First World War, the Belgians who controlled the Congo also took over the territories of Rwanda and Burundi from Germany under a League of Nations mandate. The Belgian policy was to strengthen aristocratic Tutsi dominance over the Hutu, strengthening the ethnic distinction between them, just as they similarly promoted the ethnic Hema over the Lembu in the Ituri region of North Congo.

(Note: the Tutsi and Hema do seem to share some genetic traits that suggest a different and perhaps more northerly origin, compared to the Hutu and Lembu — notably a lack of sickle-cell trait and high lactose tolerance. But with intermarriage and social mixing, the Tutsi commoners and Hutu seem to have been on a converging trend that Belgian policy artificially discouraged.)

In response to Tutsi dominance, the Hutu in Rwanda organised for their ‘emancipation’ around Gregoire Kayibanda and his PARMEHUTU party. Fighting broke out in November 1959, in which thousands of Tutsis were killed and many more fled into southern Uganda and into the South Kivu province of the Congo, where they became known as the Bunyamalengi.

The Ugandan governments of Idi Amin, and then Milton Obote, refused to allow the Tutsi refugee community to integrate in Ugandan society. However, when Yoweri Museveni launched his civil war against Obote from the south west of Uganda, the so-called ‘war in the bush’ (1981–86), he recruited a large number of Tutsi refugees into his National Resistance Army. Thus when Museveni came to power, and the NRA was rebadged as the Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF), it contained a large contingent of battle-trained Tutsi soldiers and officers, among them the current Rwanda president, Paul Kagame, who at that time was a head of military intelligence in Museveni’s army.

The native Ugandan officers may have resented the Rwandan Tutsi role in their army; in any case, the Tutsis’ aspirations lay elsewhere. They formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front in 1986, trained their army, and in 1990 launched an attack on Rwanda with Ugandan support. (Note: the French provided support for the Hutu régime during this fighting.) After 3 years of warfare, the Rwandan military dictatorship under the Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana signed a cease-fire agreement with the RPF, the Arusha Accords, and the United Nations sent a security force, UNAMIR.

Assassination, genocide and aftermath

What happened next is a matter of much conjecture. Did Habyarimana intend to abide by the Accords, which would have ceded much power to the Tutsis? In any case, six months later, his jet plane was shot down by missile fire as it approached Kigali airport, killing all aboard. Controversity is still rife as to whether the assassination was the work of the RPF, the Ugandans, or an extreme faction among the Hutu leadership seeking to wreck the Accords.

Almost immediately, the Hutu-led army and the Interahamwe militia groups embarked on a well-organised campaign of genocide within Rwanda against the Tutsi and moderate Hutu: some 800,000 deaths in about one hundred days between April and July 1994. It is notable that the UN forces did not intervene to stop the massacre of Tutsis.

The RPF responded with an attack which occupied the north, east and south of Rwanda by June, and by July they had reached Kigali. Now France obtained UN Security Council support for a 3000-man military intervention, Opération Turquoise, which set up a protection zone in the west of the country through which two million Hutus, including the military and the Interahamwe killers, fled into the Congo (then known as Zaïre), principally to North Kivu.

Remnants of those Hutus who escaped to the Congo are now organised under the control of ex-army and ex-Interahamwe militia, as the ‘Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda’ or FDLR. Thus Rwanda, Uganda and Congo had fallen into a pattern of cross-border strife.

Rwanda and Uganda intervene in Congo

From 1994 to 1996, Paul Kagame’s new Tutsi-dominated Rwanda government took vengeance against the Hutus in Rwanda: for example, refugee camps were shelled with heavy artillery. In 1996, Kagame’s RPF forces invaded Zaïre, in part to seek out and destroy the Hutu forces there, but also to join an alliance with the Congolese rebel leader Laurent Kabila. Yoweri Museveni also threw the Ugandan UPDF forces into the civil war (the First Congo War) on the side of Kabila and Kagame.

The Rwandan army, the RPF, also armed and organised their Tutsi brothers who had been resident in Kivu since the ’sixties: the Banyamulenge. Acting together as the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaïre (ADFL), these forces first destroyed a series of Hutu refugee camps, then turned towards the capital, Kinshasa. Lacking popular support, the old and corrupt régime of Mobutu Sese Seko collapsed — and on 17 May 1997, Kabila declared himself president of the ‘Democratic Republic of Congo’.

‘Africa’s World War’

THE SECOND CONGO WAR broke out in August 1998. In the following five years, eight African nations and 25 or so armed groups would engage in a bloody struggle that claimed 5.4 million lives – mostly to disease and starvation. The conflict was triggered when Kabila, seeking to be rid of his erstwhile allies, ordered all Rwandan and Ugandan forces out of the country.

The Tutsi Banyamulenge in the town of Goma, feeling threatened, revolted; Rwanda responded with immediate military assistance, and a well-armed Tutsi rebel group was set up: the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD). Rwandan and Burundian forces entered the war, as did the Ugandan UPDF. Within a couple of weeks, these anti-Kabila forces had control of the diamond centre of Kisangani and the Inga hydropower station, and Kabila’s régime seemed doomed.

But Kabila was rescued because Namibia, Zimbabwe and Angola entered the war on the government’s side. (Both Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and to a lesser extent Namibia’s San Njoma had significant mineral exploitation ventures in Congo.) Chad, Libya and Sudan also joined in on Kabila’s side, and financial support was forthcoming from US, Canadian, Australian and Japanese mining and diamond companies in exchange for concessions. Thus the Ugandan and Rwandan forces were held off.

One of the consequences for Kivu was that Joseph Kabila, who succeeded his assassinated father as DR Congo President, encouraged the unification of the ex-Interahamwe and other Hutu movements into the ‘Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda’, and set them to attack the RCD and the Rwandan Army (RPA) — a dangerous game. The FDLR continued its war against Rwanda and the Tutsis of the RCD after the ceasefire, and has done so up to the present day; though its strength is much reduced, this provides the pretext for Laurent Nkunda’s refusal to stand down — he claims to be protecting Kivu’s Tutsis — and for Rwanda’s intransigence too. There are many people who wish that the perpetrators of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide could simply be magicked away somewhere.

How Uganda, Rwanda & Zimbabwe looted the Congo

In 2005, Human Rights Watch published a report entitled The Curse of Gold. It documents how the Ugandan People’s Defence Force, having taken over the north of the Congo in 1998, immediately took direct control of gold-rich areas in Haut Uélé and coerced local people into mining gold (estimate: one ton, at $9 million) for their benefit. Ugandan Lt. Okumu initiated artisanal mining in the Durba and Gorumbwa mines, but accelerated it dangerously with explosives, resulting in the deaths of a hundred miners when the Gorumbwa mine collapsed.

The Ugandans were not alone in taking what they could from Congolese territory they occupied. In April 2001 a UN panel of experts investigated the illegal exploitation of diamonds, cobalt, coltan, gold and other resources by Rwandan, Ugandan and Zimbabwean forces and recommended that the Security Council impose sanctions. Their final report (Final report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo) contains many detailed allegations.

Proxies, militias & those who trade with them

Although the Rwandan and Ugandan armed forces withdrew from Congolese territory in 2002, they left behind their proxies. As a result of this, but also because of other disagreements and clashes, including open conflict that broke out in 2002 between Uganda and Rwanda, the situation became much more complicated.

• In Ituri, Uganda backed an ethnic Lemba force, the Nationalist and Integrationist Front (FNI), which waged war with a Rwanda-backed ethnic Hema force, the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC). In 2002–3, they were openly at war for control of the Mongbwalu goldfields. The UPC were assisted with air-drops of weapons from Rwanda; in 2003, some FNI attacks were directly assisted by Ugandan troops.
• In Kivu, the RCD had split into a Kisangani-based faction (RCD-K, later RCD-ML) backed by Uganda, and a Goma-based faction backed by Rwanda (RCD-Goma). The latter appears to have control of part of the coltan and cassiterite production.
• Though much of the RCD-Goma faction joined the newly integrated national army in 2003, Laurent Nkunda pulled his followers out and moved to the forests of North Kivu, forming the CNDP, which is now at war with the DRC and United Nations troops.
• As already noted, the extremist Hutu forces of the FDLR are also still in play. For a while they were aligned to the DRC forces, but now act independently. They appear to control the bulk of the cassiterite mining around Walikale and Bisie in North Kivu.

A brutal symbiosis

All these militia armies maintain their power and re-stock their arsenals by exploiting the population and the environment. In the context of Congo’s mineral wealth, one of their best means is by organising forced artisanal mining, or controlling and exploiting it, usually through an informal tax. However, this makes economic sense only because the people who organise the trade locally have links to and protection from powerful people in Rwanda’s and Uganda’ military and political élites — people who are in a position to provide the means to transport and trade the ores out to the world market.

However, there is another tier of responsibility: the unscrupulous dealers, and the multinational companies who are prepared to buy gold and diamonds, casseritite and coltan without asking too many questions. And what responsibility are we then to ascribe, say, to the mobile phone manufacturers whose handsets may be built using ‘blood tantalum’?

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Closing thoughts on commodity prices

Coltan prices on the world market have ratcheted up and down over time. One oft-quoted suggestion is that Sony’s desperation to acquire enough tantalum capacitors for the Sony Playstation 2 launch in 2000, and a spike in demand for mobile phones and DVD players, drove the price of coltan from $49 to $275 a pound in 2000. Professor Rev. Ferdinand Muhigirwa SJ of CEPAS, the Centre of Studies for Social Acstion in Kinshasa, cites prices per kilo of coltan as $400 in 1999, $320 in 2005. Thus high prices were the norm when Rwandan forces and their proxies were extracting coltan from the Congo. But now? Muhigirwa quotes a mere $32 per kilo of coltan for 2008. However, he believes that artisanal production in Congo will be continued ‘as a matter of survival’.