I've just completed my second turn on the front page rota, handing over to Kanishk tomorrow, who hands over in turn to David, who hands over to Tom, then Rosemary then Susan. The system is getting a little less hectic, both in terms of my own preparing for the weekbut also with all the sections on the site getting used to highlighting material that should be considered for the front page. The goal is to make a distributed publication with components all sharing a "family resemblance" that amounts to the openDemocracyy core brand and values. It requires a trade-off between control and freedom that proving exciting to experiment with.

The week had some excellent reflections on the Iranian revolution (I particularly liked this). We carried a lot of material on civil liberties---a current focus given our sponsorship of the Convention on Modern Liberty---for example these posts on the disturbing question of the UK as a torturing state, and a long, three part piece that I have been working on for a while about the relationship between technology and liberty (here, here and here). The Russia section is producing a lot of excellent material, for example distressing piece on the economy of the regions.

We had just under 110,000 page views this week on the main site - that excludes forums and the wiki (about 15,000 pageviews on top) but includes the sections. The most popular articles are shown in the picture here:

I hand over front page duties to Kanishk next week, then David, then Susan, then Rosemary then back to me. Anthony will join in when the Convention is over.

Why the rota? The idea is that we all work on various parts of the site, commissioning, writing and editing. But bringing the front page together everyday requires thinking about all sorts of trade-offs and about the contribution of each part to the whole. There is no better way of making each part aware of the constraints of the whole by having many people take the reins for a period.

When I explained to a mathematician friend the basic constraints ofpublishing on oD - what capacity we have for articles on the front page; how many readers per day we have; how the various parts of the site develop their own readership, and I further explained that I thought everyone should have responsibility for a part of the whole - heclaimed that sharing in space and sharing in time should come to exactly the same thing. It would be as good to divide the front page into some number of zones, with each person with responsibility over "theirs" as to divide up the year into slots where each person would have responsibility. Clearly, he had taken the level to a level of abstraction too high - splitting in time still imposes the task of creating a unified whole, from quote to lead to which block goes where to pacing ... which a split in space of the front page would never have offered. Anyway, we're experimenting with the sharing through time rather than space.

I'm working hard with Julian to make the publishing process -- everything from picture research to sub-editing to creating shortened versions for syndication and preparing the emails for dispatch -- so standardised that we can start to expand the distributed network of helpers and volunteers. 

Between the rota and the volunteer-based publishing network, we're moving towards the goal of having a mechanism that will wikify the production of agenda-driven analysis.... 

 

Today was pretty Gaza-dominated on the site again. Over in the forums, Gaza-related threads are getting very long and heated. Just asn an example, Iron Mike posted this one on Hamas being the blame for the war, and it now has 110 replies. I think that Avi Shlaim's devastating history of Israel's post-1947 treatment of Palestinians should be read by all those in that thread. It is very powerful to hear this story told by "someone who served loyally in the
Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of
the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders."

We published on the economy too. Godfrey Hodgson celebrates the return of the economically powerful state, while Simon Zadek sees the hope for real accountability in capital allocation mechanisms. Simon links the solution of the financial crisis and the environmental crisis: both are failures to hold the powerful to account for all the consequences of their actions. I hope Simon is right. I feel that the solutions may be less technocratic than he seems to suggest---redesigning incentive systems is unlikely without a firm purpose, and that needs a strong, positive vision to take hold. On that, we could do better.

 There is a very moving story of vision in Jane Gabriel's interview of legend film-maker Theo Angelopoulos. He is interesting on the riots ... but also on the optimism of his own generation: 

"
I belong to an older generation, a generation that believed that
change was possible, that it was possible to change the world, that it
was possible to open up a new path. My generation believed that it was
possible not only to dream of a new world, but also to turn dreams into
realities. It didn't happen. I think we are all carrying the shadow of
disappointment and failure. "

 But read to the end. It is brimming with hope.

We have a huge amount of good material coming in. That's one thing crises do -- send thinking people to write. We don't have the capacity to transform all of it into publishable material. Hat tip to the volunteers in the publishing network without whom output would slow to a trickle!

Oh ... and yesterday's intruder on the Gaza box. He's now written suggesting some writers we might like to commission. That's an improvement in method :)

Back on the Front Page rota. During the long Christmas break, we had the "Best of" taking up the right hand side and occasional pieces on the left hand side. The crisis in Gaza started before we had planned to start active, disciplined publishing again. Paul Rogers wrote an analytical, clear and devastating assessment of the security aspects. The piece has attracted a great deal of commentary - polarised but serious.

Over the week-end I set up a Diigo group to collect must-reads on the crisis. I emailed the openDemocracy staff suggesting they add material to it. I added a few other people to the distribution list whom I thought would be doing some interesting reading on the crisis. I told everyone that whatever they tagged in the group would be reproduced in the "Gaza" box on the top right of the page.

Fine ... it all seemed to be working v.well. Until this afternoon, when I received a shocked email from a loyal reader: "I am writing to share my surprise (and disgust) at the fact that opening open democracy.net today to access a (fantastic) article about climate change I discovered a “gaza” tab on the right listing no less than 5 posts that are 100% pro Israel. Open Democracy had shown better balance than this in the past and I am deeply disappointed."

When I went to the tab, I indeed recognised none of the articles there. A bit of digging and I discovered that a certain Michael Bremmer had joined the diigo group and was posting this very unbalanced material. I have no idea who Michael Bremmer is. I tried a little sleuthing to see if I could figure who had let him into the group -- there was no simple way to tell. I presume that at some degree of remove, my email inviting a small number of trusted readers had somehow made its way to Michael Bremmer who immediately spammed the Gaza box. I think I fixed the leak and the box is now back to being something I am happy with.

Thank you to our concerned reader. Many eyes make light work, as Wikipedians know. The episode also made me realise how rapidly I could come to a sense of violation --- someone unwelcome had sneaked in and  left an illegitimate trace on the site. My heart goes out to all those who have had treasured domains hacked or otherwise taken away from them. 

 

Denis Dutton at Arts & Letters Daily featured Theo Hobson's very interesting Milton piece and we got the spike in readership that comes from Denis' selection. I have written about the ALDaily effect, over here in relation to the unbundling of editorial roles that is happening all over publishing. If you go to the comments on the Milton piece, the 15 from Sunday are, I assume, from amongst the followers of Denis' recommendations. They are articulate, intelligent, opinionated---just the sorts of readers we love to have. Thanks, Denis!

Our own unbundling had a slight hic-up today. First, I spent a good part of last night restoring 2 new computers replacing the stolen ones. (Digression: my laptop had a Time Machine on an external hard-drive in the house. I got a total clone of the computer that was stolen in hours. Selina's had key files backed up on Mac's iDisk which was much less smooth restoring. Of course, iDisk is somewhat safer in that it is off-site. The lesson is that we should always be backing up both on and off-site, both complete mirrors and critical files).

Then there was a big ModernLiberty planning meeting -- exciting things happening there, more news soon. And finally our twice weekly physical group get-together... So it was great that the publishing team got  Sophie Roberts'  piece on the disappearances of civil society and opposition figures in Zimbabwe. She tells the history of Zimababwe's first post-colonial "dirty war" againstZapu-supporters and analyses disappearance as a tactic of putting people in a place that is beyond law. People disappear, and, this way, so too does accountability.

Tomorrow -- the traditionalism of the French Socialist party, three scenarios for Somalia ...

I added the Polymeme feed to the front page the other day. Polymeme was created by openDemocracy author Evgeny Morozov. It is Evgeny's own semi-automated news aggregator, and I had found myself selecting so many of Evgeny's stories in my "The World" entries that I eventually saw the web logic of this -- why not  spread the energy and just give Polymeme its own slot.

Evgeny has built a database of a huge number of sites and blogs which he has categorised into broad subject areas. Every day, his machine discovers which stories are being referred to by several of these sites. He then does a manual cull for the most interesting ones. The result is a very interesting and distinctively personal selection of news stories.

 

Yesterday's fron page plans did not all come together in time. There was the very nice surprise of having John Palmer's piece on the Irish referendum and the sureal spectacle of having Europe's leaders promise that they will not do any number of things that they never had the intention or the right under the treaty of doing. Palmer wonders whose victory it will be if the Lisbon Treaty does not get through before the UK Tories are in power with the ability to veto it.... Time is surprisingly short, and the Irish in a rather good negotiating position.

We did not have all the Stalin/Memorial pieces ready to go last night, and anyway it seemed as if the SWISH report and its extraordinary daglo picture --- this is described on flickr as a picture of a soldier concealing himself  with a smoke bomb after his vehicle is hit by an IED --- could spend a few more hours in the top slot. A strange notion of concealment ... maybe there is a metaphor there.

The Russian pieces should be ready to go tonight. The two together tell a very disturbing story. I hope that we see the Zimababwe article too.There has been very good discussion on Archibugi's Human RIghts piece - what exactly is the role of NGO's in improving governance?The immigration pieces we featured from OurKingdom last week continue to elicit important debate.

I had the nasty experience of having our house broken into last night. My laptop was stolen, as was Selina's (my wife's) ... So today has been a scramble of glaziers, police visits and all the while making sure that we do have backups of everything (and especially Selina's manuscript). I think we're going to be OK, but it is a long process getting the personal computing cloud back up and running.

I'm doing front page duty this week -- essentially, I look at what articles we have either coming up or published in different areas on the site and chair the process by which we decide some get highlighted on the front page.

I loved the solar thermal power station that we featured as an example of the kind of green infrastructure that will make for a good Keynesian stimulus and good green policy in Ralf Martin's very sensible squaring of the budgetary / environmental circle. Talking of which, William Sigmund and David Mackay are working hard to get "Energy Without Hot Air"ready for a group read. The goal is to have Chapter 1 up before the holiday break so that we can get started on some reading/annotating. One thing I thought about the book is that all the examples and numbers relate to the UK - the point is to make it very comprehensible in everyday terms. I wonder what it would take to localise the book to other places ... Might be a project to think about as we read.

I think we will put the Paul Rogers SWISH report into the front page slot today. We had a discussion in the office yesterday over whether it was in any way in bad taste to frame these SWISH reports as coming from security consultants to Al Qaida ... The worry is that this paints a view of the world as run by amoral, besuited consultants, each working as desk-bound mercenaries, and suggests a amoral, or at least morally totally relativistic world. Kanishk argued persuasively that Paul's pieces are of such sober sense and sound judgement that there was no possible interpretation of this kind. Reading this one, I have to agree. 

We have an excellent piece about memories of Stalinism in the Russia section which we will feature on the front page. The piece makes it very clear the ways in which history lives in the present, and how the present will become history that will continue to reverberate in society. This, of course, is a theme that is clear in the SWISH reports too, with their reminder of the time scale and relationship to history that radical eschatological movements adopt.

There is a really good Zimbabwe unsollicited submission in the pipeline. I hope we can get that ready for publication soon.

 

While the American campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have changed the public views about how and when America goes to war, a serious and underreported debate is being waged within the halls of the Pentagon and the wider military establishment.

Open Democracy contributor Mary Kaldor captures the tensions between the traditional high-tech, big war philosophy often favored by the US Air Force and Navy and the low-intensity, 'small wars' approach supported by the Army and Marine Corps.

The nature of the current conflicts reveals the limits of the traditional security approach, with its focus on technology, speed and firepower. Kaldor, whose work on “new wars” is now studied at US military schools, rightly identifies that the success of the “surge” was in large part more about a “profound change in strategy and tactics” emphasizing the protection of civilians rather than the direct result of increases in troop levels. What remains to be seen is whether this dramatic shift in US military thinking will be embraced politically by a new Administration and the Congress.

John Casey’s article Rediscovering Tradition is good at highlighting how in religion, as in education, the apologetic attempt to make the old and traditional ‘relevant’ has signally failed.

When the Second Vatican Council ordained that the Mass be said in the vernacular, it wasn’t that the Latin Mass was simply translated into English, Swahili, or whatever, but that a new rite was introduced, which had more Sciptural readings, more ‘active participation’ by the congregation, and encouraged a rearrangement of the church (often involving iconoclasm) so that the priest faced the congregation. The idea was to make the Mass more relevant, catering more to the subjective convictions of the individual, and making a ‘place for creativity or the expression of personality’. But as with similar moves in schooling, these reforms have failed. Trying to make the venerable in religion or culture ‘relevant’ usually results in demoting it, taking away the onus on the customers (as they have now become) to become relevant to it, and precisely denuding it of the sacredness that made it revered. And as with the endless use of handouts, and pre-digested, oversimplified information in schools, wooing the congregation has actually obviated the need for the individual’s own involvement -- the close following in prayer and reading the missal that the old rite demanded. Anyway, the main ‘expression of personality’ is that of the priest’s, who, rather than being almost an impersonal, objective vessel for the Mass, is now a sort of entertainer to be judged on his delivery and charisma.

What Casey’s article suggests above all is the mistakenness of assuming that it is possible to grasp the essence of a religious belief or a religious ritual, and then to transmit it clothed in modern garb. But is there such a separable essence? Is it a special content underlying forms that are somehow optional. Is tradition the sort of entity that can be lifted out of its clothes and regarbed so as to be more palatable to consumers? Is form and ritual ever just an external husk that can be cracked and discarded, leaving an easily-separable kernel?

I had not read Murat Belge's remarkable October 4th 2001 essay on Fundamentalism and reactions to it. Murat is a Turkish public intellectual and long-time friend of openDemocracy - he regularly comes in to visit us when he is passing through London. In this essay, Murat disects the spectacle of 9/11 not only from the point of view of Islam's colonial, inferiorist grievances, not only from the resultant ability to form a cold, universalising ideology that legitimates violence, but also importantly from our reaction to it. Hawks obviously play into the hands of fundamentalists by "increasing the distance" to the other; but so do liberal democrats whose tolerant multiculturalism too easily slips into moral relativism. The essay, written less than a month after the World Trade Centre attack, is a masterful account of the bind that violence puts us into.

Can the study of supposedly peripheral regions provide insights that are not visible from the centre?

Arthur Aughey finds a fresh perspective on Britain's past in Christopher Harvey's  A Floating Commonwealth: Politics, Culture and Technology on Britain's Atlantic Coast, 1860-1930.  Writing 'British history with London left out', has enabled Harvie to uncover the wider significance of great Atlantic cities like Glasgow, Belfast, Liverpool and Bristol.

Aughey sees in the diversity highlighted by Harvie an underlying unity which illuminates a key question for the future. What is to be the fate of the political union which once dominated this Atlantic world, and does change mean disntegration or simply transformation?

 

Rein Müllerson, a professor of International Law, strips the Russian-Goergian war of obfuscating legalities. This is not a conflict about ``aggression, occupation, genocide, racial discrimination, territorial integrity, peace enforcement, humanitarian mission, sanctity of treaties'' or any such term of art used with "such self-righteous indignation, with such self-confidence by all sides". This is a war about the interests of global powers. The next steps to be taken by the US and Russia will be important in defining a future either of a great (nasty) conflictual game between US, Russia and China or of a concord of nations recognising mutual dependence in the face of global threats. The latter, better path requires all sides now to tone down rhetric, to u-turn without saying so.

openDemocracy/Russia was created last year. Two new articles on Abkazia demonstrate why it is a brilliant initiative.
The idea was that English readers around the world should be able to learn at first hand the vitality and intelligence of Russia’s free voices and that Russians should be able to participate directly in the growing (we hope) democratic discussion that is global in its interests and concerns.
Alas, it has taken the crisis in the Caucasus to confirm how much this initiative is needed. openDemocracy has always resisted the clichés of received ideas and the imposition of worn out worldviews while seeing itself as a platform where minority voices and opinions (even if they too have their clichés and evasions) can be well published and debated when the current is against them.
oD’s exceptional coverage of the Caucasus predates the present interest and will continue after it. Others have drawn attention to the analysis and the seeking for human based conceptual frameworks in new essays by Ivan Krastev and Mary Kaldor, I’m just going to draw your attention to Zygmunt Dzieciolowski's encounter with Sergei Bagapsh the President of Abkhazia and then an article by Inal Khashig,
editor of the Abkhaz newspaper Chegemskaya Pravda, who states that the West's endorsement of Georgia's claims has merely ensured that Abkhazian independence is a fact.
Zygmunt writes in the tradition of his late Polish compatriot the celebrated Ryszard Kapuscinski. It’s a journalism of the main facts and the telling details, threaded with an awareness of history and place so that the reporting is rooted in time without being fatalistic or sensational. He brings to life the “soft voice” of President Bagapash, his willingness to delay catching his flight to Moscow to talk with co-editor of openDemocracy Russia, his wariness of and desire for independence from the Russia that has just saved his statelet but was only recently also imposing sanctions on it.
One detail I didn’t know that comes across strongly in both Zygmunt’s report and Kashig’s insistent article. The West’s participated in preventing medicines including antibiotics from being imported by Abkhazia after it broke away from Georgia in the early 1990s. This abuse of humanitarian principles turned everyone who remained into a potential martyr. When Russia let in antibiotics it made a moral gain (whatever the cynical calculations behind it) that western media coverage seems completely oblivious of. This is the kind of significant detail that openDemocracy Russia brings to our understanding of the Caucuses.