Sabtu, 19 Januari 2013

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

C.W. Anderson: The public is still a problem, and other lessons from “Rebuilding the News”

Posted: 18 Jan 2013 09:00 AM PST

Finally seeing a book you’ve written make it into print is an odd experience. This is probably a widely felt sentiment amongst first-time authors, but the feeling is exacerbated when the research for the book — and indeed, in many ways, the writing of it — began more than six years ago. Six years is a long time, both for the Internet and for a PhD student in his late 20s; in six years, both you and the subject you are writing about are likely to have changed a great deal. And, in our online era, much of that change is public in ways it might not have been 20 or even 10 years ago.

I’m calling this post a “post-mortem” because the weird thing about books is that they are dead. Thought and scholarship are living, breathing experiences; articles, and especially books, are congealed thought. In our digital age, this might not be true forever — perhaps in 20 years, every book will be updated all the time. But I doubt it: The human need to fix things solidly is too strong. I don’t think there’s actually anything wrong with books being dead — indeed, they help freeze things that are changing too fast for us to get a handle on them. But this moment of “freeze-frame” still makes you think hard about the relevance of what you wrote. In this post, I want to revisit some of the things about Rebuilding the News that I still think are true today.

Rebuilding the News is part of what might be called the ethnographic tradition in newsroom research. Extending from the work of Herb Gans, Gaye Tuchman, and Mark Fishman in the 1970s, to Nina Eliasoph in the 1990s, to Pablo Boczkowski and Nikki Usher today, newsroom ethnographers treat journalists as a tribe and seek to understand the rituals, work processes, and items of symbolic value to that tribe. Writing this book in the digital age made me think hard about some of the basic tenets of ethnographic research, actually, and I’m going to get to that rethinking in a future post. But for now, this is what ethnographic research basically is: We go and pitch our tents in the newsroom, or the lab, or the hacker conference, or wherever, and the people and objects we analyze there are our tribe.

I originally conceived of Rebuilding the News as one half of a two-part project: I was interested in understanding how journalistic theory (what journalists did in school) and journalistic practice (what journalists did in their jobs) hung together to create journalistic authority: the cultural belief that journalists were a professional group whose truth claims were worth taking seriously. But once I had finally cajoled, bribed, and sweet-talked my way into Philadelphia newsrooms (don’t laugh! these are honest-to-god ethnographic skills), I pretty quickly realized that my intellectual scaffolding was going to have to change. There was way too much going on in journalism in 2007-2009 to stick with the original education/practice dichotomy. And so my book became an ethnography of the Philadelphia news ecosystem, and how it was adjusting to the tsunami of change that had just crashed in on the news business.

So what do I think is still relevant in Rebuilding the News, all these years after I started my research? After all, a lot has changed (and continues to change) in Philadelphia since I did a lot of the fieldwork for the book. I want to mention two things in the book about journalism that still hold true today. In a later post, I also want to mention two things about the book that might make it valuable for scholars who are just starting out their research. Journalists will probably find the first post more interesting; graduate students and other academics might be equally interested in the second.

The public is still a problem in journalism.

There is a long tradition of research in journalism — arguably going back as far as the writings of John Dewey and Walter Lippmann, but really taking off in the 1990s — which saw the crucial dynamic driving journalism as its relationship with — and misunderstanding of — what political theorists called “the public.” The public was journalism’s totemic reference point, its reason for being, but journalism in the 1980s and ’90s was accused of “forgetting” the public, or else substituting the views of savvy Washington insiders for the real public.

I argue that, in a digital age, the journalism-public relationship is still paramount, but in a different way than the civic journalists of the 1990s assumed. Rather than the public being eclipsed or forgotten, there are instead too many publics. Or rather: For journalists in the digital age, the public is everywhere, but it is different than journalists originally thought when they knew less about it. This public-journalist relationship, examined ethnographically, is one of the driving dynamics of Rebuilding the News.

Reporting is a bizarre way of building knowledge (and we actually know very little about it).

One of my research traditions is known as science and technology studies (STS), which is concerned with, among other things, how cultures construct and certify knowledge. This isn’t philosophy (“What counts as ‘true’?”) but anthropology (“How does truth get built?”). In my academic days, I was highly impressed by the STS work being done in scientific laboratories, technology firms, and other places where modern truth regimes are being built. So when I went into the newsroom, the STS perspective was always in the back of my mind. “How are journalists different than scientists?” I’d ask myself. “What are the ways that journalists build knowledge?” In other words, a pretty basic question: What is this thing we call reporting anyway?

My answer may be unsatisfying: We don’t know, and while we’re trying to figure it, the answer is changing radically. Oh, journalists know what reporting is — but we as scholars need to do a better job of getting reporters to articulate their tacit understandings of this topic, preferably in a manner that explicitly contrasts reporting with other knowledge-construction professions like science, law, and indeed, sociology itself. All the while we do this, though, there are new nuances to reporting and new “objects of evidence” that impinge upon journalists’ reporting practices, changing what reporting is and will be in the future.

And so, despite everything that has changed for journalism, in Philadelphia and elsewhere, I think these two things remain: The public is still a problem, and we still don’t understand reporting. I’m hoping to continue exploring these topics in future academic work. I’m also hoping that other researchers will take them up as challenges to be met, or hypotheses to be debunked/argued with, or whatever.

To do this, though, I also think we need to think about how we practice scholarship differently — and that’s a second thing I learned while working on Rebuilding the News. I’ll discuss two ways in which our scholarship might change in a future post.

RootIO wants to take radio back to the local level in Uganda

Posted: 18 Jan 2013 08:00 AM PST

Is it possible to create community radio without a studio or a tower? With his Knight News Challenge project, RootIO, Chris Csikszentmihalyi wants to enable neighborhoods and other small communities to develop a network of radio stations using mobile phones, simple transmitters, and other low-cost tools.

Csikszentmihalyi plans to run a pilot project for RootIO in Uganda, partnering with Uganda Radio Network, UNICEF Uganda, and the UNICEF Innovation Unit to research information needs in the country. RootIO was awarded $200,000 from Knight, which Csikszentmihalyi says will help in the prototyping phase of the project.

“In the back of my mind, I’ve been trying to think of how radio could benefit from things like telephony and networks,” Csikszentmihalyi said.

As proposed, RootIO would be a combination of open-source software and other tools, like portable transmitters and a power source, that would allow people to use their phones to host shows and broadcast information on low-power radio stations. As Csikszentmihalyi describes it, hosting a radio show would be similar to holding a conference call, with the host and guests on different phones, broadcasting out to the greater community.

But the project is far away from that point. Csikszentmihalyi said they’re in discovery mode, where they’ll assess the available technology in communities and see how RootIO can take advantage of existing networks.

As a medium, radio has shown remarkable resilience, enduring both technological shifts and natural disasters. It’s that durability, which becomes apparent in emergencies like the earthquake in Haiti, that makes it a useful platform for delivering vital information to people. But community stations in particular, Csikszentmihalyi said, can play a different role than most radio outlets, through offering intensely local information and offering a tangible connection to place. Local radio, he said, “supports the ability of the community to inform itself and help decisions.”

Radio has a strong presence in Uganda, Csikszentmihalyi said, but as stations grow and become successful, they can shed their community focus as they try to appeal to broader audiences. Local stations would be able to focus on reports for farmers, as well programming for minority language communities, he argued. Using phones as a delivery and production point becomes important because it ties people to a place, but using mobile is also crucial because of its ability to deliver an audience. The network effects that come from mobile devices create a potentially large audience of radio producers and listeners. “There’s something really interesting going on in Africa right now,” Csikszentmihalyi said. Phones potentially make it easier for listeners to participate in shows, using SMS to take part in polls, alert producers to guests, or to send basic advertising to stations, he said.

By some estimates Uganda has 60 percent mobile penetration, which would make phones an ideal device for producing and listening to radio around the country. Phones end up serving multiple purposes, as an access point for banking, or a source for emergency alerts in a community. RootIO could potentially make mobile-based radio a familiar feature to phone users as well.

Aside from figuring out the technology aspects of the project, the other goal will be defining stations and networks. By partnering with the Uganda Radio Network they’ll be able to figure out what resources small stations could use, and whether additional services, like cloud-based production tools, would be needed. Building out or strengthening networks would let producers share content among each other, which would help propagate stations.

Csikszentmihalyi said the network piece is important because it could allow community stations to tap into news programming from elsewhere around the country — or maybe global players like the BBC or Al Jazeera in the future. “For this to work, right away, we have to work with the existing stations to make sure this is useful to them as well,” he said.

This Week in Review: Aaron Swartz’s quest for open data, and Facebook dives into search

Posted: 18 Jan 2013 07:00 AM PST

An activist’s death and the open information cause: The death of a young digital innovator and activist, Aaron Swartz, quickly led to a fruitful discussion about the main cause he stood for — free information. Swartz, who was 26, committed suicide last Friday. His New York Times obituary has a good summary of his substantial accomplishments: He helped develop RSS, was in on the ground floor of Reddit, and co-founded the social justice advocacy group Demand Progress, among other things. He also took more radical steps to make information free, including downloading millions of pages from the U.S. government’s (paid-access) PACER document system and then downloading millions of academic articles from the subscription-based service JSTOR.

Swartz’s death prompted scores of remembrances, and GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram collected many of them on blogs and Twitter. Several of the most poignant personally oriented tributes — from writer Quinn Norton, from Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow, from The Nation’s Rick Perlstein, and from Mashable’s Christina Warren — described him as a brilliant, passionate, and empathetic young man. Swartz’s friend Matt Stoller also paid tribute to his political beliefs, and NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen (who didn’t know Swartz) reflected on his devotion to the public good.

Web philosopher David Weinberger also expounded on Swartz’s tremendous work to help create an open Internet, and contended that Swartz was not a hacker (as he was described by some), but a builder. That work was what turned him into a “hero of the free culture movement,” as The New York Times put it, and inspired academics this week to post thousands of copyright-protected research articles online, and a California legislator to introduce a bill amending hacking law.

The central issue that swirled around Swartz’s death, though, was the legal case stemming from his JSTOR hack of academic articles, which threatened to send him to prison. The Wall Street Journal reported that Swartz’s attempts at a plea deal to avoid prison time had stalled last week, and many fingers were quickly pointed at both the federal prosecutor who went after him and MIT, whose network he used to access the articles and who was reportedly a significant part of the reason plea deals had fallen through.

Free-culture legal activist Lawrence Lessig expressed the outrage against Swartz’s prosecution well: “Somehow, we need to get beyond the ‘I'm right so I'm right to nuke you’ ethics that dominates our time. That begins with one word: Shame.” Social media researcher danah boyd also voiced that anger, but also cautioned the geek activist community to channel its efforts to create change into means that don’t create easily targeted martyrs. Similarly, Gawker’s Adrian Chen chronicled the recent “example-setting” crackdown on hackers.

Others, such as The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald and open Internet advocate Lauren Weinstein, described Swartz as a hero who boldly challenged (and was ultimately steamrolled by) the government’s overreaching and power-mongering control of information. A few discussed in detail the merits (or lack thereof) of the case against Swartz: Alex Stamos, Swartz’s expert witness in the case, argued that Swartz’s charges were groundless, but Orin Kerr of The Volokh Conspiracy found much more merit to them. Greenwald called for judicial abuse like this to be investigated, and at Inside Higher Ed, history professor Timothy Burke contended that the blame for this case runs much deeper to systemic levels, including academia itself.

Facebook dives into search: Facebook took an important step in its evolution as a social network, unveiling its Graph Search, which allows you to search for people, places, and things among the social data built up in its network. The New York Times has a good, quick overview, and Wired’s Steven Levy has the exclusive deep dive into how it was developed and What It Means. “Most strikingly, it expands Facebook's core mission,” he wrote, “not just obsessively connecting users with people they already know, but becoming a vehicle of discovery.” Search expert John Battelle also wrote a good post explaining why this is a big deal for Facebook — “Facebook needed a service that layered a fresh blanket of value over its core topography. Graph Search is it.”

Some of the initial reviews were quite positive. Slate’s Farhad Manjoo said Graph Search could finally make Facebook useful (and not just a fun time-waster), and Molly McHugh of Digital Trends saw it as a way to finally put all that data Facebook’s been collecting to the user’s benefit by creating a truly personalized search engine. Facebook’s Vadim Lavrusik also explained its potential usefulness to journalists.

The biggest questions in the wake of the announcement were what Graph Search would do for Facebook as a company, and for its partners and competitors as well. The Guardian’s Josh Halliday reported that Graph Search is intended to keep Facebook’s social network from growing static, while The Verge’s Tim Carmody noted that it’s targeting not just Google (the obvious search rival), but LinkedIn and Yelp, too, intending for Graph Search to become “sufficiently powerful in enough situations to displace web search as the query of first resort.” As Quartz’s Christopher Mims put it, Facebook is trying to turn all those other networks into mere features of its own network.

Still, Facebook’s main target is Google, and The Wall Street Journal wrote a definitive explanation of Graph Search’s role in the battle between the two, and The Guardian’s Charles Arthur focused on Google’s foray into social — Google+ — in relation to Facebook’s foray into search. Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan broke down what’s unique about Graph Search as compared with Google, and Business Insider’s Alyson Shontell noted that unlike Bing, Facebook’s powering its search with data Google can’t touch. Speaking of Bing, it will get every Graph Search query that Facebook can’t handle, though Mark Hachman of ReadWrite was skeptical about how much Bing would benefit in the long term.

Others said Graph Search needs more in order to fulfill its potential value: John Battelle wanted to see sharing search results, Mike Isaac of All Things D said Facebook now needs engagement beyond the “Like,” and PandoDaily’s Richard Nieva and The Verge’s Tim Carmody said what’s missing is mobile. And, of course, with every Facebook innovation come privacy concerns: Salon’s Andrew Leonard laid those out,  and John Herrman of BuzzFeed explained how Facebook is continuing to ignore distinctions between the private (or semi-private) and public through Social Graph.

Manti Te’o and willful blind spots: The sports journalism world was left with some serious soul-searching this week after the sports blog Deadspin broke the news that one of college football’s most compelling stories this year — the death of the girlfriend of star Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o — turned out to be a hoax: The girlfriend never existed. (It’s not clear yet whether Te’o was a victim or perpetrator.) Co-author Timothy Burke talked about how he uncovered the lie, which he described as a false story that “became true through the media.”

And that was the most alarming part about this story: Dozens of media outlets, including some of the U.S.’ biggest, ran with the lie and helped sell it to the public. Deadspin outlined exactly what the media got wrong, and singled out Sports Illustrated and ESPN for scrutiny. As Gawker’s Mobutu Sese Soko noted, reporters were refreshingly forthcoming with their mea culpas. But the question remained: Why did no bother to check this too-good-to-be-true story?

The answer for many was that it was simply too good to check. Several people — including The Big Lead’s Ty Duffy, Slate’s Josh Levin, Ohio Ph.D. student Molly Yanity, and The Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone — argued that it played too perfectly into the cliched, archetypal story of the noble, inspirational hero that sports journalism is far too reliant on. As Sports On Earth’s Will Leitch (Deadspin’s founder) put it, “this story exists because sports media wanted it to exist.” Deadspin editor-in-chief Tommy Craggs called those stories “dumb, infantilizing stories” that were “executed poorly and sloppily,” though Jack Shafer of Reuters said there’s no need to do away with simpering stories entirely.

Syracuse Ph.D. student Brian Moritz said that in addition to reporters falling in love with a story, it was a failure of process, particularly editing — a point The Baltimore Sun’s John E. McIntyre also emphasized. Digital First’s Mandy Jenkins tied the problem to sports journalists’ deference to power and unwillingness to jeopardize their access. Her Digital First colleague Steve Buttry argued that linking was a key missing element from what should have been their verification process, while Poynter’s David Griner advocated more transparency and some renewed self-reflection.

A few people emphasized that they could understand how reporters could have missed something like this. Former Newsday editor Diane Werts played the “hamster wheel” card, Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum said it’d be bizarre to think of digging into something like this, and the Columbia Journalism Review’s Robert Weintraub said that while the media was gullible, the alternative would have been telling a young man he was lying about someone he said he loved (though Moritz noted that verification need not be confrontational). The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple described the mistakes as “at once understandable and inexcusable.”

The Atlantic and advertorial ethics: The Atlantic fell on its face this week with an article-like piece of “sponsored content” from the Church of Scientology, which proved to be an illuminating case to examine that murky region between news and advertising known as advertorial. The Scientology article, which looked like an Atlantic article but for a small “sponsor content” tag on top, also had its critical comments removed by Atlantic ad staff before it was taken down (though you can see a screenshot here).

The Atlantic apologized, though The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple noted that it didn’t say what it was apologizing for. Wemple also laid out what little we know about how the whole thing happened and predicted that The Atlantic would be done moderating comments on advertorials. As controversial as the Church of Scientology is — and as odious as its treatment of journalists has been — Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici said the problem wasn’t necessarily with running advertorial from the group, but in how The Atlantic went about it.

Several others went into greater detail about what exactly The Atlantic did wrong. Jack Shafer of Reuters said The Atlantic turned off its upmarket advertisers by running “loopy Scientology content,” and eConsultancy’s Patricio Robles said The Atlantic has an obligation not to throw its advertisers under the bus. At paidContent, Mathew Ingram maintained that sponsored content should be a crucial part of many media sites’ strategies, provided they’re done well.

Others said the problem is more of a fundamental issue with advertorial content. The Columbia Journalism Review’s Dean Starkman and content strategist Erin Kissane argued that if the advertising’s success depends on its deceiving its readers into thinking it’s journalism, that’s a fatal flaw. Said Kissane: “If you wouldn't knowingly lie to your readers in an editorial or an investigative feature, you shouldn't deceive them with interface design choices that obscure the line between ads and ‘content.’” Josh Stearns of Free Press argued that news orgs can’t sacrifice readers’ trust with such content, and Poynter’s Julie Moos listed some ethical questions for news orgs to ask about sponsored content. At The Guardian, Dan Gillmor said it needs to start with disclosure.

CBS twists some arms at CNET: At last weekend’s Consumer Electronics Show, the tech website CNET was forced by its parent company, CBS, to remove Dish Network’s Hopper (a DVR that automatically skips commercials) from its “Best of CES” awards because CBS is suing Dish over it. The initial report was that the Hopper had simply been removed from consideration, but as it turned out, CNET had voted it “Best in Show” before CBS stepped in and forced it to re-vote.

One of CNET’s star reporters, Greg Sandoval, quit in protest, saying in the process that CNET wasn’t honest about what had happened. CNET editor-in-chief Lindsey Turrentine then explained her side of the story, pointing out that she wrestled with CBS executives about letting the vote stand, or, failing that, being transparent about what had happened. (She was overruled.) She insisted that CNET’s writers remain uncompromised, and CBS insisted to The Verge’s Tim Carmody that it won’t interfere in news, only reviews (and then only in exceptional cases).

PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy said Turrentine made the wrong decision by not demanding an independent vote or quitting over it: “She is picking a corporate overlord over her readers.” If you do that, she said, “you don't get to keep your self respect or the respect of your peers.” Ars Technica founder and editor-in-chief Ken Fisher argued that disclosures simply aren’t enough to combat conflicts of interest, while TechCrunch’s John Biggs said that as bad as this episode might seem, gadget journalism isn’t fundamentally corrupt.

Reading roundup: There was lots of more media news going on during a busy, busy week:

— More commentary on the Journal News’ map of local gun owners: The New York Times’ David Carr was skeptical that the map had sufficient rationale for publication, as was the Times’ Bill Keller. On the other hand, both Jeff Jarvis and Politico’s Dylan Byers defended the paper for publishing the data. Amid reports that a burglary was linked to a house’s inclusion on the map, the local police commissioner said there was “no pattern” of crime linked to the data.

— There’s rumored to be a top-level editorial shakeup coming soon at The New York Times, and this week, the paper closed its environmental desk and reassigned its reporters. Climate Progress’ Joe Romm and the Scientific American’s Bora Zivkovic both voiced their concern, with Zivkovic saying that the Times’ Green Blog becomes even more crucial. Andrew Revkin, who blogs about the environment from the opinion section, predicted the Times’ environmental coverage would remain strong, and the paper’s public editor, Margaret Sullivan, said it’ll take real work to keep quality up without a dedicated desk.

— The Chicago Tribune published a four-part postmortem on the disastrous Sam Zell era at its parent company, the Tribune Co., and its ensuing bankruptcy. It’s the definitive account (so far) of what went wrong.

— Mike Fourcher, who runs the Chicago hyperlocal news site Center Square Journal, wrote a post full of lessons for running a hyperlocal news site. It’s a great resource not only for people doing hyperlocal news, but most anyone doing entrepreneurial journalism anywhere.

— And finally, a fantastic post by The Awl’s Choire Sicha on the bizarre art of writing pageview-grabbing headlines for the web.

Photos of Aaron Swartz by Sage Ross, Mark Zuckerberg by ofnetsandthings, and Manti Te’o by Shotgun Spratling/Neon Tommy used under a Creative Commons license.

News Challenge winner WeFarm wants to connect the world’s small farmers to share information

Posted: 18 Jan 2013 06:00 AM PST

Farmers in developing countries all over the world ask a lot of the same questions. They’re the kind of questions that would quickly turn you or I to Google, Wikipedia or maybe even Yahoo! Answers: What’s the cheapest way to get rid of this infestation? What’s the best fertilizer for this plant? Which kinds of crops will grow best on my land?

But according to new Knight News Challenge winner WeFarm, a project of the Cafédirect Producers’ Foundation, only about 25 percent of the world’s population has access to the Internet (it may be a little higher now). For them, trying to get answers to simple questions about their livelihood is, as program manager Kenny Ewan put it, “kind of like 10 years ago if your PC broke and you had to spend two hours on the phone with the manufacturer, who tells you to switch it off and switch it on again.”

Now, thanks to the WeFarm team, those farmers are able to help each other answer those questions, regardless of barriers of language and distance.

Founders Ewan and Claire Rhodes originally envisioned WeFarm as a purely web-based project. But as they connected with more smallholder farmers, they discovered that while only about 5-6 percent of their target population had reliable internet access, over 90 percent were familiar users of texting and mobile phones. They decided that what farmers in the developing world need is a database of useful information that’s accessible whether you use a desktop PC at an Internet cafe, a brand new 4G-enabled Samsung Galaxy, or a basic flip phone.

On its face, WeFarm is not a news project; its parent organization is an NGO that specifically works with tea, coffee and cocoa farmers across 14 countries. (It’s also the charity arm of the U.K. hot-beverage vendor, Cafédirect.) But what makes WeFarm relevant to the Knight News Challenge is the speed with which it’s making international communication possible.

“For people that never talk to anyone outside of their own community,” Ewan said, “to receive a text from someone on the other side of the world is kind of magic.”

Behind that WeFarm “magic” is web-to-text technology that facilitates the gathering and disseminating of information via mass SMS. Someone sends a text, which is then entered into a computer database, translated, and shot back out to users across the world. Ewan says, once WeFarm is running at full speed, that could mean receiving thousands of texts a day. So the site is developing a voting mechanism that will allow users to rank the usefulness of answers. In addition, volunteer translators will be able to tag questions with key words in multiple languages. “So if a farmer in Mexico is consistently answering questions about a certain type of tree and getting high ranks for those answers, it will recognize those questions as ones that should be targeted to him,” Ewan said.

WeFarm uses a commercial Android app called Telerivet, which allows them to operate their system countrywide using a single Android phone. But Ewan also spoke admiringly of FrontlineSMS, an open source software project (and fellow News Challenge winner) that allows users with a laptop and a modem to send out mass texts from a computer. It’s been used to facilitate mass communications among refugees and by hospitals to remind HIV/AIDS patients to take their medication. It’s also a major component of the much-lauded Kenyan violence mapping project Ushahidi.

“We take that text-to-web thing lightly, for granted, in the Western context because we all have smartphones, and so the interaction between the phone and the computer seems a pretty straightforward thing,” said CFP general manager Claire Rhodes. “But actually, on an old-school, non-smart mobile phone handset, that’s actually a system that isn’t used.”

But as WeFarm discovered via a 2011 survey, even the existing technologies can’t entirely eradicate the barriers between the developing world and the web: “Mobile phone tariffs and internet charges are too expensive for many small-scale farmers and high illiteracy levels limit written communications, including SMS and email. Frequent power cuts make re-charging mobile phones a challenge.”

Ewan says it’s important to remember how much innovation there is going on around mobile, especially in the developing world. Phone companies, for example, who have a stake in making sure their customers use their devices frequently, supply them with free solar chargers. And down the road, Ewan says WeFarm hopes to make wider use of voice recognition technologies so that community members unable to write out a text can still get their questions answered.

But the immediate goal for WeFarm is to build a permanent user platform and execute a business plan that will actually generate revenue. “Something we’ve talked about a lot is whether or not people should pay for messages,” Ewan said, “I think it is important that people spend at least a minimum to send a message, because…people need to value the service and value the information that they’re getting from it.”

Ideally, especially helpful responders could one day see dividends from WeFarm — another important step in the journey toward monetizing accurate and accessible information. “If a farmer in Kenya shares a tip, and people around the world take advantage of that tip, then there’s a reward, value on that knowledge,” said Ewan, “and it’s generated through the WeFarm business model.”
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