Everywhere you go in Tanzania, there are nets. Mosquito nets. And not just here at the comfortable Zanzibar Beach Resort, where we stayed one night, but every little accommodation place we saw throughout the country. They’re serious about nets.

To be honest, at first I thought it was a just a bit of Africana for the tourists — hey, a four-poster bed certainly makes you feel like you’re somewhere different, right? But not so.

One morning in Dodoma, the ActionAid Australia campaigner travelling with me, Lena Aahlby, asked whether I’d bothered using the mosquito net. “No,” I said. “It’s dry, there weren’t any mosquitoes around, so I didn’t bother.”

Despite the scary warnings in my little travel medicine book, I hadn’t bothered with insect repellent either.

But our Tanzanian colleague Albert Jimwaga leapt in. “Oh, you’ve got to use the mosquito nets,” he said, a genuinely worried tone in his voice. “It doesn’t matter if you can’t see any mosquitoes, because they only come out late at night. You have to use the nets!”

It turns out this wasn’t just polite concern for his overseas visitors.

In Tanzania and other African nations, the threat from malaria is real.

As Abdul Kajumulo points out, malaria kills more than 100,000 infants annually, and attacks between 16 and 18 million people countrywide each year. That’s around 45% of the population. And that’s despite Tanzania having a decent anti-malaria strategy, apparently.

For my brief stay in country, spending AUD 30 for a month on gut-churning Doxycycline is a viable prevention strategy. But poor rural peasants only earn AUD 120 a year, so many malaria cases go untreated — with an obvious toll on individuals, families and the economy.

And then there’s dengue fever, for which there’s no vaccination and no cure.

I now have real respect for the humble mosquito net. I can see why, when there’s flooding or other cause for human displacement, a truckload of mosquito nets is high on the agenda.

[Disclaimer: Stilgherrian was in Tanzania as a guest of ActionAid Australia. His opinions do not necessarily represent the views of that organisation or its international affiliates.]

Saturday 27 June 2009. This isn’t exactly the world’s newest Boeing 767-300ER, and there’s slightly too much pubic hair in the toilets. Breakfast is being served, and my stupidly-expensive Moleskine notebook is filling up with notes about the Parable of the Quartered Donkey.

That’s quartered as in hanged, drawn and quartered.

I’m the donkey.

The smiling Kenya Airways staff go about their business of bread rolls and bitter coffee en route from Bangkok to Nairobi, where I’ll change for my flight to Dar es Salaam. I wake from a brief period of something vaguely approximating sleep to the realisation that Project TOTO has one significant flaw: multiple goals, with conflicting requirements.

Something deep in my gut says this is going to be a problem.

Flash forward to today. It’s only two weeks since I arrived in Tanzania and a week since I left again, but the world is eager to analyse the project’s “success” or “failure”. We already have Laurel Papworth’s Stilgherrian: Wherefor art thou, bloggers? (which has triggered some excellent discussion) and Fi Bendall’s Sharing the knowledge: How NGOs can benefit from online consumer awareness.

Both articles are well worth reading. Both highlight what I think is a serious problem: short-term thinking.

But first, those multiple goals.

• “Give poverty a voice.” This was the “public” goal. Training Tanzanians in blogging and getting their blog online, as promoted in the original #secretmission briefing note and media release. This requires uninterrupted time at a computer with a decent Internet connection — although there’s also the paper blogs training exercise. But that’s just the orientation and technical set-up. Actually establishing a corporate blog requires discussion within an organisation, and then slowly, steadily building an audience. That takes months, unless you’re Stephen Fry.
• Tell the story of poverty. Expose me to the reality of African poverty, so I can write about it. This requires both plenty of contact time in the field, and plenty of quiet reflect-and-write time in solitude. As I wrote a fortnight before I left Sydney, an insightful essay can take half a day, and I was already worried then that it was going to be tough.
• Expose a hidden problem. The report Breaking the Curse, commissioned by development charities including ActionAid, reckons African states have been deprived of royalties and taxes by mining firms, thanks to a lack of legislative oversight and overly-generous tax concessions. They want to expose Australian mining companies if they’ve been behaving badly. This is investigative journalism. It’s all about establishing trusted contacts and research over an extended period.
• Raise ActionAid’s profile. This whole project came about because Austcare, a “trusted brand” in charities here in Australia, was becoming ActionAid Australia, and needed to promote it new identity. If people were reading about the project, then they’d learn the new name.
• Raise money. In amongst all that is the need for ActionAid to cover the costs of the project — as well as fund its continuing operations, of course. Fundraising targets were amongst the KPIs Fi Bendall write about in her piece, though they’re not spelled out.

It strikes me that all of these things take time.

Indeed, as Laurel writes:

Social media can be slow — everything happens in the long tail of rippled content, rather than the short head of traditional campaign activity.

And as Ash Nallawalla commented:

I didn’t know about Stil’s trip until the day of his send-off party, and only because Neerav mentioned it.

It’s all too easy to forget that just because we might be hyper-focussed on some issue and hanging on every tweet, for others it’s just part of the background chatter in their lives.

I felt like I’d been talking about Project TOTO for weeks, to the point of boring everybody. However I was still getting messages on Twitter a week after I’d arrived in Tanzania from people wondering why I wasn’t in Sydney. People asked me today whether I was still in Tanzania, when I left a week ago.

We shouldn’t be surprised by this. People retweet things said days ago because they’ve only just logged in and scrolled back. People add comments to blog posts from months or years ago, because they’ve just stumbled across them while searching for something on their agenda today.

Despite knowing this, Laurel is disappointed by the lack of instant reaction:

I expected Australian bloggers to get more behind Stil, and I’m a little disappointed they didn’t. A few blog posts on the going away party — we bloggers love boozy tweetups — but no real analysis of the changes that citizen journalism can wrought to this new hybrid of Social News and Social Action.

But one commenter, Just some guy, absolutely nailed it, I reckon: Authenticity. Or rather, the lack thereof. His comment is worth reading in full.

As an outsider — I don’t know any of you people — I have to say that the apparent lack of interest in this project has to do with the failure of Stilgherrian to communicate in an authentic voice.

For someone who, according to the voice he chooses to use in social media, can barely lift the telephone or make it up Enmore Road without a “FFS” about some perceived injustice against his delicate sensibilities, to suddenly become the Mother Theresa of African blogging read as forced, fake, self-censoring and pandering to the politics of his sponsors.

It’s absurd to be harangued for not getting behind the project when, from an objective point of view, all we saw was an endless series of tweets about getting there only to be followed by more tweets about getting out of there and worrying about getting a decent hotel room in Bangkok.

It was ridiculous to find one of Australia’s most cantankerous voices on the internet replaced, suddenly, with an apparently calm acceptance of things we know, from experience, he would never put up with in his day-to-day life in suburban Sydney.

Regardless of how socially significant the project may be — which was never really explained or expressed outside of months of chatter about “sekrit” meetings — its expression read as two-dimensional and insular.

If you genuinely believe that Australian bloggers outside your network should support and promote this kind of international action, you need to back off from the provocative language and engage a real-world audience with something a little more useful. As it stands, it looks like all that happened was a piss-up and a couple of long drives in the African countryside as narrated by Evelyn Waugh on Valium. Got anything better to offer?

Whoever he is, he’s right. I did self-censor. And I did worse. I committed the unforgivable sin of being boring.

From the time of The Gnome Incident, I was stressed about saying something else that might cause problems. Though I had a document in which my editorial independence was agreed there was, as vealmince pointed out weeks ago, inevitably an invisible pressure to conform to The Message simply because ActionAid was paying for my ticket.

This is, of course, precisely the criticism aimed at embedded journalism. And rightly so.

As I said in my previous post, for most of the time in Tanzania I was completely exhausted. And exhausted, I didn’t have the focus to say what I was really thinking and feeling. While I didn’t have time or, often, an Internet link to blog, I did tweet to sustain the presence — but my tweets became banal.

One of the recommendations from Thursday’s debriefing with ActionAid Australia was that the next outreach blogger will need time to recover from jet lag and a less-packed schedule if they’re to write while in the field.

Barry Saunders also nailed it in Social media and social justice:

I’m quite keen to blog about [Project TOTO], but frankly, I’m more interested in hearing the voices of the Tanzanian bloggers. The last thing the blogosphere needs is more middle-class white westerners drowning out other people’s voices.

Hear hear!

Quite frankly, I’m uncomfortable with the slogan “Give poverty a voice”. Poverty already has a voice. Everybody does. What poverty needs is for us to shut the fuck up and listen for a change.

While my longer blog posts are only just starting to appear, we’ve established some valuable human links between Sydney and Dar es Salaam — both through actual voices from Africa in the blog Jambo Tanzania and whatever other stories emerge . It’ll be interesting to see how that evolves.

Update: The following point occurred to me as I was responding to comments. I think it deserves to be pulled up into the body of the post.

Which of these two aims was the real aim of the project?

1. Give poverty a voice.
2. Look at me and tell your friends! I’m giving poverty a voice!

Humans are highly-evolved social animals. I think we have a special part of the brain designed to detect insincere attention-seeking behaviour.

I’m back in Sydney. I’m almost caught up on sleep. Almost. It’s time to start writing about my Project TOTO journey to Tanzania for ActionAid Australia.

I’ll split my posts into two streams:

1. Brief essays like my old Unreliable Bangkok series, which I’ll call Unreliable Tanzania. They’ll be personal reflections about my experiences in Tanzania, observing not just ActionAid’s work but also the people, society and country generally — as well as recording my own state of mind. They’ll be presented in rough chronological order, but will weave together thoughts from throughout the journey — much as I did in The Poverty Web.
2. There’ll also be posts reflecting on Project TOTO itself. What worked? What didn’t? And, given that ActionAid is already looking for the next outreach blogger, how can we improve things for the next participant and generate more value for ActionAid?

In between, I’ll post my photos on the Project TOTO (ActionAid) Flickr group — but don’t rush there just yet, because currently there’s only photos from the farewell party, and that gives totally the wrong impression.

Now, having explained that framework, this very first Unreliable Tanzania will break the pattern by giving you a quick rundown of my itinerary — because things changed somewhat from the initial plan.

What actually happened was a schedule involving a lot of travel and not much sleep:

• Saturday 27 June: Arrived at Julius Nyerere International Airport, Dar es Salaam, after a 25-hour three-flight journey from Sydney via Bangkok and Nairobi. I was met by ActionAid driver Reza Uronu and then my contact Albert Jimwaga and taken to the domestic terminal for a fourth flight in a ZanAir Cessna 404 Titan to Zanzibar. I was met there by ActionAid’s Zanzibar team and given a presentation about their work. I also discovered that we were being joined by a photographer and also a team from ActionAid Italy.
• Sunday 28 June: Up at 6am for a telephone interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, which was never published. Visited three ActionAid projects in Zanzibar: a soap-making project for HIV-positive people in Zanzibar Town; a clove-based craft project in Mahonda, funded by a women’s micro-finance collective; and a new village school in Kilimani [see update below]. As it happened, this ended up being the only direct contact with ActionAid’s field work during the entire time in-country. Thanks to confusion over boarding passes, we ended up staying in Zanzibar for dinner — fresh seafood from street stalls in Stone Town — before a late-night flight back to Dar es Salaam.
• Monday 29 June: A day in ActionAid’s office in Dar es Salaam. This was originally devoted to training in blogging and other social media, but we lost half the day to catching up on email and other communications, and to organising the rest of the week. We’d been invited to visit the Australian-owned gold mine Golden Pride near Nzega, an opportunity too good to miss given ActionAid’s concerns about mining revenues. I worked until after 1am processing photos and preparing website graphics.
• Tuesday 30 June: Drove nearly 500km to Dodoma, the capital city, a suitable half-way point to the mine. With 5 people in a Toyota Hilux and the need to cover long distances, there was little comfort and few stops. I could watch the world, but not experience it.
• Wednesday 1 July: We left Dodoma at 6am for the 9.5-hour drive through Nzega all the way to Mwanza, Tanzania’s second-largest city on Lake Victoria. Mwanza wasn’t on our original itinerary, but ActionAid’s UK office had arranged for a photographer to fly in there, and we needed to collect him. This drive included a 70km stretch of “temporary” road which was little more than a dirt track — and badly maintained at that. Scary.
• Thursday 2 July: A 6am start so we could do the 3.5-hour drive back to Nzega, the tour of Golden Pride, and the rest of the drive back to Dodoma in one day. We ended up traversing that dirt track after dark. It’s a credit to our driver Thomas that we escaped with only one warped wheel on the 4WD.
• Friday 3 July: Finally, an easier morning in Dodoma, where I managed to write The Poverty Web while the wheel was being repaired. We arrived back in Dar es Salaam that night.
• Saturday 4 July: A very full day in the Dar es Salaam office, where I discussed politics with ActionAid’s Country Director Rose Mushi, and the new blog Jambo Tanzania went live.
• Sunday 5 July: Rest! And the start of the long journey home.

If there’s one word I can apply to this itinerary, it’s “fatigue”.

I was tired even before I left Sydney. The first ActionAid blog went live only hours before departure, and I’d pulled some late nights to get there. Some other tasks ended up being pretty time-consuming too — tasks which, in hindsight, were time-wasters. I’ll come back to them.

Even though the little travel medicine book I was given says “start the journey in as relaxed a state as possible”, I didn’t. Even though it says “avoid making important commitments for the first 24 hours after arrival at your destination”, I didn’t. Well, not me, actually. I didn’t have control of the itinerary.

Still, there’s some fascinating experiences to report, and I hope you’ll follow the journey as I retrace my steps.

[Disclaimer: Stilgherrian was in Tanzania as a guest of ActionAid Australia. His opinions do not necessarily represent the views of that organisation or its international affiliates.]

[Update 13 June 2010: I have just discovered that this village is not called Kilimani at all. Kilimani is the location of the Zanzibar Beach Resort, just south of Zanzibar Town. That's the hotel where we stayed overnight in Zanzibar — and be warned, their web is a dreadful slow-to-load Flash job with looping music that can't be turned off. It's quite possible this village is called Kisimani, located here on Google Maps and not marked at all on Bing Maps. I will investigate.]

It’s been a long journey. On Monday we started with that most basic of questions: “What is a blog?” Then, when we spoke about people adding comments and the comment-moderation process, that inevitably led to further discussions about how the organisation should handle the inevitable problems of abusive commenters, or people who posted material which put the organisation at risk.

We were on the road Tuesday through Friday — and I’ll have plenty to tell you about that in due course — but when we returned to the task on Saturday there were further discussions before the first posts could appear.

How did the fact that two staff members were blogging reconcile with a communications policy that says only the Country Director can speak for the organisation? A disclaimer! What would our first bloggers write about? Introduce themselves! Should we have a formal welcome from the Country Director, given that Tanzania is a more formal country than Australia? Yes!

And there were many questions which regular users of online forums in the West would take for granted. What are “tags”? What’s the difference between “tag” used to describe a folksonomy and a “tag” in HTML? What is HTML anyway? Should I even mention the word “avatar”?

We never did get time to set up RSS readers. I’ll handle that via email. Small steps, and focus on what’s needed immediately.

Explaining social media from the very beginning to intelligent and well-educated people who had not yet encountered it was a brilliant learning experience for me too. I will have more to say.

Meanwhile, please enjoy the introductions from Country Director Rose Mushi, Abdul Kajumulo and Albert Jimwaga. I know they’d appreciate your comments and questions.

This is Juma Hassan lila Kalibu, secretary of Kilimani [see update below] village in Zanzibar, showing off the village school’s new computer room. As you can see, it has no computers. Or electricity. Or desks. Or chairs. Or anything, really.

When I visited this village last Sunday as part of ActionAid Australia‘s Project TOTO — this school is one of their projects — it was a striking example of what we’d been discussing the previous day with ActionAid’s Zanzibar team: the poverty web. You can’t just dump one single piece of modernity into the poor rural environment and expect everything to work. As James Burke’s classic TV series Connections showed, modern Western civilisation is a built on a web of interlocking technologies, processes, structures and institutions, and you need all of them to make things work.

Kilimani has none of them.

Kilimani is literally a series of mud-brick huts. I’ll post more photos later — but this school, with its concrete floor and rendered walls, is as far ahead of the villagers’ homes as a medieval cathedral was ahead of the peasant hovels that clustered nearby. It’s appropriate, I think, that everywhere I’ve travelled in Tanzania, education is seen as the key to future prosperity. Well, not prosperity exactly, but whatever’s one notch up on the scale from abject poverty.

Consider this. Computers need electricity, amongst other things. Even if you string in the wires to connect this village to the power grid, someone might decide that the scrap metal value of the copper wires is more important to them than the electricity right now. A family in poor parts of the Tanzanian mainland might have a total annual cash income of TZS 150,000. That’s about AUD 120. When you only have $10 a month, a couple dollars of copper represents significant wealth — and at the mine we visited in Nzega in northern Tanzania yesterday they have to post guards to stop people stealing the water pipes and fences.

OK, assuming the wires and transformers aren’t stolen, what happens when something breaks? Who’s paying for the spare parts? Who’s trained to do the work? What use is a technical college when there are no teachers? Who’d come to work as a teacher when the homes have no electricity or running water? A basic education is a pathway out of here! So you need electricity to attract the teachers to… um, but that’s where we started!

How do you unravel this poverty web? Buggered if I know! But that’s the challenge facing countries like Tanzania. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of things we take for granted in the West simply aren’t there, and all the things you need to build those things are not there. They could be bought, sure, but there isn’t the money.

Money. There you have it.

Juma Hassan lila Kalibu, dressed in his Sunday best to greet his honoured guests, is certainly proud of his school, the most magnificent building in the village. And he would like our help. Some paper would be nice. And some pens.

[Update 13 June 2010: I have just discovered that this village is not called Kilimani at all. Kilimani is the location of the Zanzibar Beach Resort, just south of Zanzibar Town. That's the hotel where we stayed overnight in Zanzibar — and be warned, their web is a dreadful slow-to-load Flash job with looping music that can't be turned off. It's quite possible this village is called Kisimani, located here on Google Maps and not marked at all on Bing Maps. I will investigate.]

Today (D5) we’ve drove north from the capital Dodoma, headed for Mwanza on Lake Victoria. I reckon I’ll only get to post meaningful — or at least lengthy — material once I get a few hours to myself. And I’ve no idea when that’s likely to happen.

It’s half-way through my time in Tanzania and we’ve travelled half the country it seems. I can’t post much while on the move — have you ever tried to type on a netbook while your 4WD is doing 60km/h down a dodgy temporary road dodging b-double petrol trucks which suddenly emerge from the dust right in front of you? So I’ve decided instead to take copious notes — mental, pictorial and on paper — and let the writing emerge once I return to Sydney.

Meanwhile, check out the photos Lena Aahlby took, posted over at Archie Law’s blog.

Before Project TOTO takes me to Tanzania — in just 20 hours — I had to get ActionAid Australia‘s blogs online. Done! With, oh, hours to spare!

Stressed much? Oh yes!

Archie@ActionAid is the new personal blog of CEO Archie Law. His first post, From Melbourne to New York, Phnom Penh, Johannesburg and back, reveals his not-very-secret musical background and why he’s dedicated a good chunk of his life to the international humanitarian and development sector.

It’s Archie’s first entrance into the blogosphere so, please, have a read and let him know what you’d like to hear about. You can also follow Archie on Twitter.

If you’re interested in the technical details, read on…

It’s built in WordPress MU, the multi-user version of WordPress, which means it’s easy for us to add further blogs coming off the top-level ActionAid blogs site. I used the excellent Tarski theme — the same one I use for my own site — with a custom stylesheet to shift it towards the look’n'feel of their main website.

Click through for the full-sized image.

Yes, I still have thousands of things to do. But it’s Friday night and I’m exhausted, so I’ll tell you all about it in the morning. Probably.

Meanwhile, I’d live to know what you’re thinking about Project TOTO, so have a look at the previous posts and say stuff and ask questions and things.

And if you’re wondering who the people quoted are, try @mpesce, @snarkyplatypus, @kcarruthers and @apostrophepong. And also click through to ActionAid Australia for The Good Cause.

It’s D-9 for Project TOTO. My international itinerary has been set and, thanks to some clueful bookings, we’ve squeezed in an extra day for preparation. I leave Sydney next Friday afternoon 26 June.

It seems today I’ll also finally finish the stressful non-TOTO tasks that have interfered with pretty much everything in my life. Provided no-one tosses any more hand grenades in my direction, I’ll therefore have more writing and a clearer plan later today — both for the preparation and for my time in Tanzania.

OK, the timetable and the plan as it stands…

There’s three main ways to fly from Sydney to Dar es Salaam. One goes through Perth and Johannesburg. Another goes via Dubai and Nairobi. But the plan which best suits our needs goes via Bangkok in three flights.

1. Depart Sydney on Friday 26 June at 1530 via Thai Airways, arriving in Bangkok at 2155 local time. My last trip to Bangkok was the same flight, TG996, but the old Boeing 747 has been replaced by a Boeing 777. If we get phonecasting working I’ll try posting a podcast while flying across outback Australia using the aircraft’s satellite link.
2. Depart Bangkok at 0035 via Kenya Airways, arriving in Nairobi on Saturday 27 June at 0605. I’ll sleep across the Indian Ocean, and wake up to the sight of dawn over Kenya from 10km up.
3. Depart Nairobi at 0805 via Kenya Airways to touch down in Dar es Salaam at 0920 local time. What a great time to arrive!

From there, the schedule is still as in the project briefing: Saturday to orient myself; Sunday to Zanzibar; Monday and Tuesday in Dar es Salaam working with the ActionAid Tanzania guys; and then Wednesday through Saturday looking at the field projects. I’ve got Sunday 5 July to myself in Dar es Salaam before flying home the way I came.

But I’ve still got lots to do before that…

In the remaining 9 days I’ve got to:

• Set up WordPress MU for multiple blogs on the ActionAid Australia website, including implementing a design to match that done by Suede for the main site.
• Change my own website so it highlights Project TOTO material a bit better.
• Make sure all the equipment which is being sourced makes its way to my place, then figure out how it’ll all fit together into two coherent production systems — hardware, software and online services — one for me to use while travelling, and one for the Tanzanians to use after I’m gone.
• Document all of that.
• Transfer my day-to-day workflows from my MacBook Pro to the IdeaPad S10e that Lenovo has provided.
• Coordinate with various people who’ve offered to create some extras, such as a map plotting my journey and the phonecasting thing.
• Survive my Farewell Party this Saturday 20 June.
• Seek out some quiet solitude for the Winter Solstice this Sunday 21 June.
• Design a training program for the Tanzanian staff, or at the very least sketch it out.
• Make sure my other clients’ needs are covered while I’m gone.
• Generate some content every single day.

Whew! All that in 9 days. Wonder why I’m stressed?

[Photo: Kenya Airways Boeing 737-300 by Melanie Kotsopoulos.]

A few people were talking on Twitter about ActionAid Australia‘s newly-painted office on Parramatta Road, Camperdown in Sydney. So here’s a picture.

My plan to blog daily hasn’t gone so well, but yesterday’s briefing session at ActionAid Australia went just fine. My head is exploding with information and possibilities. Here’s the brain dump.

• Assuming everything goes to plan, I’ll arrive in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Saturday 27 June. Two weeks from today. So I leave Sydney in about 12 days, flying (probably) via Perth and South Africa.
• I’ll have most of Saturday to myself to relax and get used to the idea of, you know, being in goddam motherfucking Africa. I’ll also catch up with ActionAid Australia researcher Lena Aahlby, who’s heading over a week before me.
• Sunday 28 June is orientation day with ActionAid Tanzania. “Great, meetings on a Sunday,” I thought. But no. We’re catching the ferry to Zanzibar, like where there’s fabulous tropical beaches, to see for myself that right next to those 5-star resorts there’s the most abject poverty.
• ActionAid Tanzania has chosen two people to be their first official bloggers. They’re based in Dar es Salaam, but travel regularly to all the field projects. One specialises in policy and governance, the other in communications. They can show us the real situation in poor rural areas, sure, but also explain why poverty continues.
• I’ll spend Monday 29 and Tuesday 30 June working with these guys to set up their blogs and introduce them to “social media culture”, for want of a word. We’ll do that in the Dar es Salaam office, where we’ll still have the 1Mb link and access to shops if we’re missing anything.



• For the rest of the week, we’ll travel Tanzania by 4WD and small aircraft, visiting as many field projects as we can fit in. The exact itinerary is still being worked out, but one priority is heading up to the north-west border to Lake Victoria and, oh, Rwanda. I’ve heard of that.
• My plan is that we’ll all post something at least once a day, words and at least one picture. Maybe we can post some video. I’ll be sending a bazillion tweets via my Twitter stream. But we’re also working on something special in the podcasting department, which I’ll tell you about later today.
• Since I’m only in the country a short time, I’ll be trying to connect the bloggers to as many people as possible. We’ve already discovered that ActionAid Denmark (Mellemfolkeligt Samvirke) has one of their people blogging from Dar es Salaam, Pernille Baerndtsen — though of course she brings a European perspective.

So there you have it. Over the next 12 days I’ll be telling you what we’re doing and how you can help and so on. I will try to stick to my planned regime of daily posts.

There will be a going-away party announced soon too because, as Kate Carruthers so delightfully put it, “Let’s face it, you might get killed.” Cheers, Kate.

Oh, and ActionAid Australia also gave me a cultural briefing on Tanzania.

[Photos: Lutheran church in Dar es Salaam by Greenery; Lake Victoria, Tanzania, by Marc Veraart. Both used under a Creative Commons license.]

• The Poll Cruncher | Pollytics: How trustworthy is the result of an opinion poll? This handy little tool allows you to enter the sample size and the result, and it gives you the margin of error. Assuming, of course, that the poll was conducted randomly and ethically in the first place.
• What’s Your Professional Reputation? | Pollytics: Possum interprets the latest results from the Roy Morgan poll of public perceptions of ethics and honesty for various professions. As usual, newspaper journalists and car salesmen are down the bottom. Possum creates a nice little interactive graph showing how the result have changed each year since 1979.
• Nineteen Eighty-Four turns sixty | Inside Story: Brian McFarlane’s take on the 60th anniversary of the publication of Orwell’s classic. Somehow, while talking about film adaptations and connections to Phillip K Dick, he completely fails to mention Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.
• Dear Global Service Direct, where is my Snuggie? | Crikey: Crikey‘s coverage of their interactions with the Snuggie has the potential to become quite obsessive. In a good way. However this silly exchange of emails with Snuggie’s sellers contain one of the best customer service responses ever: “I wish I could do more but I am just a pawn.” Also, a graph.
• From little things… | RN Future Tense: This episode of ABC Radio National’s Future Tense included an interview with ActionAid Australia’s Archie Law about Project TOTO, as well as some great stuff about innovative uses of telecommunications technology in Kenya and India. Internet via bus, anyone?
• William Langewiesche on Somali pirates | vanityfair.com: Feature article on the incident where French luxury cruise ship Le Ponant was targeted by Somali pirates.
• louder than swahili: The blog of Pernille, a 37yo Scandinavian woman who’s been living in Tanzania since 2007, and most recently before that spent 26 months among Sudanese refugees along and across the Ugandan border to Southern Sudan.
• A Never Ending Race | absolutelybangkok.com: Bangkok in 2015 is a paranoid short yarn from Yan Monchatre, a French cartoonist and illustrator who’s resident in Bangkok.
• The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection | Moserware: A deep, deep explanation of what happens when your web browser creates an encrypted connection to a website.
• mHITs: An Australian company providing the technology to pay by mobile phone. Currently seems to be limited to food and drink, and to a handful of venues in Canberra and Sydney.
• The United Republic Consulate of Tanzania Consulate: This is, I hope, the official website of the Consulate for Tanzania in Melbourne. It’s not particularly reassuring when the home page’s title bar reads: “::Welcom to Company Name::”.
• Rise of online mercenaries | Australian IT: Steven Bellovin, professor of computing science at Columbia University, predicts the rise of online mercenaries using techniques going back 200 years to letters of marque and reprisal, where governments commission somebody to attack another government’s assets with perfect immunity under law. The story’s a couple weeks old but still relevant.

The guy in the photo is Jerry Watkins, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Design at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne — and I want to slap him.

This morning he was a guest on ABC Radio National’s FutureTense, where he talked about some fantastic third-world technology projects, like India’s DakNet.

A Wi-Fi transmitter and receiver is fitted to the local bus. So the bus drives along its normal route, goes through a number of villages, and what it’s doing while it’s stopping at the bus stop in each village, is simply picking up and delivering information via Wi-Fi from publicly-accessible computers in each village… Once it gets back into town, it simply uploads all its stored data onto the Internet… So in this way, the rural community is getting access to a very affordable internet connection, it’s just simply not always on…

It’s services like e-shopping which are proving increasingly popular with these users. So e-shopping is using the bus internet system, and it allows villagers to order essential items and luxury items, which just aren’t available at the village market. And what’s more, the items are often delivered to the village on the very same bus with the Wi-Fi transmitter.

Awesome. But that’s not why I want to slap him.

I want to slap Jerry Watkins because he said daft things about Australia’s proposed National Broadband Network.

It seems that Mr Watkins is rather skeptical about the point of the NBN.

We’re going to have a super-fast broadband network put into 98% of the country. That’s absolutely great for me; I’m looking forward to it. I use the internet a lot and a faster connection in my front room would be fabulous. However, a lot of the things I do, do I need super-fast broadband? Well email doesn’t, banking and bill-paying doesn’t, e-government doesn’t, searching for stuff on Google doesn’t, selling stuff on eBay doesn’t, iTunes doesn’t, Facebook doesn’t, Amazon doesn’t. These are some of the main applications that have been talked about as like the hero apps of internet. They don’t really need fibre to the node or super fast broadband connections.

The kind of things that do, with current technology, might be sharing video on YouTube, or online gaming, or internet protocol TV, like Bit Torrent, even bidding on eBay where you want fast internet connection so your bid gets in quickly at the last minute. But do I actually need a national broadband network to deliver online TV? Hmm.

Jerry, there’s a reason that “searching for stuff on Google”, “selling stuff on eBay”, “Facebook” and “Amazon” don’t “need” 100Mb fibre. That’s because they exist now, but the network doesn’t.

The applications that need near-universal 100Mb broadband don’t exist yet. They can’t exist and won’t exist until the network itself is built.

Only once the network is built will people be able to use it to develop those applications. Some article I linked to once — and I couldn’t be arsed looking for it now — pointed out that those clever Swedish folk could develop Skype only because they had the network and could tinker.

Also, it’s a bit rich to snidely imply that high-speed broadband is only useful for indulgences like gaming and “sharing videos on YouTube” — although videos can also be used for education and commerce, not just passive entertainment.

Also, BitTorrent is not IP TV.

Mr Watkins, I don’t know you. Your work maybe good. But on this occasion you’re suffering from a failure of the imagination, I reckon.

Oh, there’s other good stuff in the program, including the fact that Kenya has more advanced mobile phone-based services than the US, and an interview with ActionAid‘s CEO Archie Law about Project TOTO.