Social Ch@nge

Are you a hacker who’s socially minded? A few weeks ago we wrote about how Estonian hackers were assisting Georgia with online defenses against ‘cyber attacks’ by the Russians.

The latest twist is that Wired (who cracked this story in the first place) has put a link to an open-source defense project on their blog ‘Danger Room’. This project is looking for volunteer hackers who will help crack the Russian codes and map out more patterns from earlier attacks. Apart from being posted on Wired, the authors take great pains to make the whole thing very cloak and dagger (you have to Twitter ‘Gray Goose’!) and it works - I’m certainly spooked out by the prospect. Civilians volunteering for a defense operation? Is it remotely possible to keep this from getting out of hand? What would Jane McGonigal say? But maybe I should relax - after all, they’re only drawing a map together, right?

We keep talking about social networks as the next big thing in fund raising, but of course social networks were raising funds long before Facebook put - well- a face to them. Just look at this - it’s a drawing by artist Mark Lombardi of the network of relationships between laundered money and social relationships that he’s organized as ‘BNL, Reagan, Bush, & Thatcher and the Arming of Iraq, ca. 1983-91′ This is a map of a different kind of social network that also promotes social change - albeit the scary kind. Mark Lombardi made a lot of these maps before he committed suicide in 2000 and though he mapped these networks as art, the FBI has reportedly used his pictures for actual investigations. One of the comments on the Wired blog pointed out that the good citizens of Cleveland recently started making their own corruption map in protest against their local government.

Maps as a form of social protest are an interesting route for non-profits to take if they’re looking to help donors connect the dots on social issues. But the prospect of sanctioning volunteer vigilante hacking against another country - well, that’s not just drawing a map now, is it?

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Update Sept 18: Check out Marcia Stepanek’s post on Cause Global about Ushahidi - a web platform that creates maps of danger areas (where violence is occurring) through information sent in by eye-witnesses via text message and email. It was first used during the violence following the Kenyan presidential election - it mapped danger areas and testified to the reality of what was happening during a time when a government ban prevented everyone from sharing information.