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More than Friends: Social and Mobile Media for Activist Organizations Tad Hirsch
Introduction
Political activists around the world have been quick to adopt social and mobile media for use in protests and mass mobilizations. In recent years, demonstrators in Moldova and Iran employed social networking sites like Facebook and the micro blogging service Twitter to share their stories with international audiences [11, 10]; the use of mobile phone text messaging by protesters in Spain, the Philippines, and the United States has also been extensively reported and analyzed [for example 2]. Scholarship has tended to focus on examples of activists appropriating commercial products and services to mobilize large groups of sympathizers, often in rapid response to egregious betrayals of the public trust. As these studies illustrate, broad mobile phone adoption coupled with the easy social networking capabilities offered by so-‐called “Web 2.0” technologies enable loosely-‐coordinated groups of individuals to spontaneously mobilize and share information to confront injustice. Several years ago, Howard Rheingold dubbed these collectives “smart mobs” [14], a formulation that continues to hold sway. Activists from to Argentina to Zimbabwe have exploited the ease with which sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter enable spontaneous information sharing and collective action by large numbers of people. However, analysis that emphasizes street protest and mass mobilization risks overstating the importance of tactics that, in reality, constitute a relatively small component of activist practice. Street protest, for example, is most effective for easily understood issues with clear heroes and villains, where consensus already exists among a sufficient number of potential actors. As Shirky observes, successful demonstrations are predicated on large numbers of people already agreeing – at least tacitly – with the protest objectives [15]. Without this consensus, demonstrations are sparsely attended, attract little media attention, and generally fail to inspire future action. However, activist campaigns are often built around issues for which there isn’t widespread consensus or sympathy. Most activists aren’t able to mobilize large numbers of ordinary people in extraordinary acts of civic engagement or public dissent. Rather, campaigns are carried forward in increments through the persistent efforts of small groups whose members are deeply engaged with their cause and committed to each other. Accordingly, activism tends to be less concerned with particular mobilizations than with creating and nurturing movements. Central to this effort is the creation of activist organizations that marshal and direct resources, coordinate and amplify individual action, and provide mechanisms for collective
decision-‐making. Organizations provide members with a collective identity while simultaneously providing a focal point for outsiders including journalists, opponents, and new recruits. They are also of central importance in enabling social movements to endure over time [9]. When we look across the broader range of activities that make up activist practice, it becomes clear that technologies and services designed for explicitly commercial purposes are often not ideally suited for activist use. For example, they may not provide adequate security for activists working in particularly contentious climes, and they often impose conditions on the ownership and dissemination of data that are at odds with activists’ need to repurpose and rebroadcast content across a variety of media and contexts. More broadly, the model of social relations that undergirds commercial services, which tends to emphasize relationships between autonomous individuals, may not mesh well with activists’ emphasis on organizations and movements. Simply put, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the like are not activist technologies (despite their appropriation by activists), and often don’t mesh well with the complexities of real world activism. Accordingly, activists around the world have come to rely on a growing number of social and mobile media technologies that have been developed by and for activists. Although less well known, less widely used, and often less fully developed than their commercial counterparts, they provide features and address concerns that are of particular interest to activist communities. In do doing, they challenge assumptions that underpin the design of commercial services and broaden our understanding of what social and mobile media can be. In this essay, I argue that activist technology projects are distinct from commercial services in several ways. Activist social media projects proceed from a fundamentally different orientation towards social relations that privileges organizations and collective action over individuals and personal behavior. Accordingly, they have unique instrumental goals – i.e. they are designed to meet needs and address problems that are different in both form and substance than those that motivate commercial design. Activist technology projects also embody a distinct set of values, meaning that they are shaped by a different set of concerns (or at least, a different weighting among competing concerns) than their commercial counterparts. I will present three recent activist social media projects: Ushahidi, an incident-‐ reporting system developed during Kenya’s 2007 post-‐election violence; Crabgrass, a social networking software platform developed by an American radical technology collective; and The Hub, a video sharing site developed by an international human rights advocacy organization. I have selected these examples because they demonstrate a range of activist activities and modes of social organization. Ushahidi, for example, began its life as an informal collaboration by a network of Kenyan bloggers; Crabgrass is a project by an engineering collective associated with radical leftist movements; the Hub is an offering by an established non-‐governmental organization (NGO). These examples are also noteworthy for their similarities to
well-‐known commercial services. Crabgrass and The Hub are roughly analogous to Facebook and YouTube, while Ushahidi combines elements of Twitter and GoogleMaps. I describe the conditions surrounding each project’s conception, detail the goals and values that influenced each design process, and highlight commonalities and differences between them. Finally, I consider how these examples relate to existing commercial social and mobile media services. This essay proceeds from the assertion that, because most of the current literature on activist use of social and mobile media focuses on what activists can do with commercial services, it tends to overlook what they cannot do. That is to say, analysts who study activist appropriation of services like Facebook and Twitter often miss the ways in which activist needs outstrip the capabilities that these services offer. I suggest that examining activist alternatives to commercial social and mobile media services provides valuable insights both into the technology design and into the nature of contemporary advocacy movements.
Ushahidi: Channeling Citizen Journalism for Crisis Reporting
The aftermath of Kenya’s disputed 2007 presidential election saw an eruption of violence across the country, resulting in over 1000 deaths and hundreds of thousands displaced. Concerned that official reports underestimated the extent of the unrest, several bloggers living both in Kenya and abroad created a website1 called Ushahidi – Swahili for “testimony” -‐-‐ to collect and visualize incident reports from Kenyan citizens. Their goal was to provide an accurate and unbiased account of the post-‐election unrest.
1 http://www.ushahidi.com/
Figure 1: Ushahidi.com Ushahidi allowed citizens to report incidents of post-‐election violence by sending text messages from their mobile phones, which were displayed on an interactive map (Figure 1). Ultimately, Ushahidi recorded nearly 140 incidents including riots, murders, and rapes. A number of events and incidents were also reported that promoted peace and reconciliation. While Ushahidi did not claim to provide a full accounting of all that happened across Kenya, the site documented many incidents that escaped coverage by the mainstream media. Subsequent analysis of media coverage found little geographic overlap between Ushahidi’s coverage and the mainstream media [8]. Since the elections, the Ushahidi team has made its software available to other NGOs under open source licenses. It has been deployed to monitor elections in Mexico and India, medical supply shortages in Kenya, Uganda, Malawi and Zambia, and attacks
on immigrants in South Africa. Al Jazeera used it in its coverage of the January 2009 conflict in Gaza, and it was combined with FrontlineSMS – another open source activist technology project – to monitor Afghan elections later that year. In December 2009, Ushahidi received a $1.4M grant from the Omidyar Network that will enable the organization to continue software development and evangelism, as well as to establish a board of directors and offices in Kenya. Ushahidi was not the first site to combine citizen journalism with map visualization; it is preceded a several noteworthy examples including Jonathon Mendez and Greg Stoll’s Katrina Information Map, which visualized eyewitness accounts of post-‐storm New Orleans [16], and the New York Times’ map visualization of readers’ reports during a New York City transit workers’ strike in 2005. However, Ushahidi was unique in several respects. The use of text messaging for incident reporting provided an immediacy that was lacking from earlier efforts. While the Katrina Information Map, for example, relied on reports submitted via laptop and desktop computers often hours or days after events occurred, Ushahidi featured reports direct from the field. Ushahidi’s creators were also committed to data verification. Not content to rely solely on eyewitness accounts, they used government sources, NGO reports, and journalist accounts to verify the incident reports it received; each incident that appears on the Ushahidi site is marked with an icon indicating whether or not is has been confirmed by external sources. This commitment to verifying the accuracy of crowdsourced data sets Ushahidi apart from other social media and citizen journalism platforms. Most commercial providers take the stance that their role is to provide a platform for their users; responsibility for the truth or falsehood of a particular piece of content lies with its author. While providers might exercise editorial control from time to time, as in cases of libel or defamation, such intervention is usually undertaken in response to a complaint or threatened legal action and is limited to editing or removing questionable content. It is rare for a commercial service provider to directly endorse particular bits of user-‐generated content as accurate, reliable, or valuable. Ushahidi, in contrast, took an active role in monitoring and where possible, verifying the accuracy of its users’ posts. This reflects the context in which the site was developed, where much of the post-‐election violence was fueled by rumor and innuendo and there was the very real possibility that accounts appearing on the site could further inflame passions rather than help to calm them. Ushahidi’s commitment to accuracy and verifiability reflects a communications strategy that one finds in many activist campaigns. Because they promote marginalized interests in the face powerful state and corporate opposition, activists often assume a heightened standard of credibility. Public statements that activists make are closely scrutinized; errors may be used to undermine their credibility. Some activists argue that the bar is higher for activist communications than it is for, say, mainstream media outlets or public relations professionals. An
environmentalist that I interviewed in the course of this research put it succinctly: “as an activist, I don’t have the luxury of lying.” For example, if the New York Times makes a false claim in its reporting, it prints a correction the next day with little or no lasting damage to its credibility as an institution. If an environmental activist, on the other hand, overstates the health impacts of emissions from a local paper mill, the mills’ owners may use the error to undermine the validity of the both the activists’ project and of the activists themselves, who may be branded as “radicals” or “crazies.”
Crabgrass: Social Networking for Collectives
Crabgrass2 is a social networking and collaboration platform for social movements and non-‐profit organizations. It was initiated by Riseup Labs, a Seattle-‐based radical technology collective that since 1999 has provided email accounts, web hosting, and software development to activist organizations around the world. The project developed out of the collective’s experience working with social movements, and its deep understanding of opportunities and limits that social networking and collaboration software offers for activists. While Riseup acknowledges that Facebook and Twitter are effective outreach tools because of their broad user base, the collective believes that these services are ill suited for internal communications and collaboration. Crabgrass includes a number of features common to social networking and collaboration software including the ability to make links and send messages between users. However, its orientation towards social movements has lead to a number of design departures, including more nuanced group management, greater emphasis on privacy and security, and enhanced collaboration and decision making tools. Of these, the group management features are the most significant, and arise from a fundamental rethinking of the model of social relations that undergirds social media design. Commercial services like Facebook and Twitter are oriented towards what we might call “personal social networking” (Figure 2). These sites are designed to support lightweight connections between individuals. They are based on a relatively flat model of social relations in which connections between people are more or less equivalent; for example, Facebook users are “friends,” not “best friends” or “casual acquaintances;” LinkedIn users are “connections, not “employees” or “mentors.”
2 http://crabgrass.riseup.net/
Figure 2: Personal social networking Personal social networking is a simplistic model of social organization that trades complexity for ease-‐of-‐use. Connections are easily established, and are maintained with little effort. (The are also relatively ephemeral, as evidenced by Burger King’s 2009 promotion in which 233,906 Facebook users were de-‐friended in exchange for free hamburgers [12].) While the model’s simplicity has no doubt contributed to social networking’s rapid-‐fire growth, Crabgrass’ founders’ argue that it is insufficient to capture the “complexity of relationships that activist organizations face in the real world.” Instead, Crabgrass is takes what we might call a “collective social networking” approach in which the primary goal is communication and collaboration within and between groups. The central concept for Crabgrass is the “group,” which represents a collection of people who are involved with each other on an ongoing basis. Starting from the premise that activist networks are centered on collectives rather than individuals, the designers have developed a nested model of social organization that recognizes hierarchy and supports several kinds of relationships between individuals and groups (Figure 3). The software makes distinctions between “friends” and “peers,” and also supports “committees” (subgroups), “councils” (subgroups with enhanced privileges), and “networks” (collections of groups that are collaborating together on a project). Each of these configurations comes with its own membership and privacy settings that allow individuals and groups to exert fine-‐grained control over the information they choose to share and with whom. In addition to messaging, groups share media assets including audio and video files, and collaborate to create and edit documents, events, and task lists.
Figure 3: Collective social networking Crabgrass’ orientation towards social movements has also lead to a reordering of other design priorities. Like many other activist communications systems, Crabgrass privileges privacy and security concerns. Crabgrass users and groups set their own policies governing information sharing, data is stored in an encrypted format, and the default configuration only accepts secure connections between servers and clients. Crabgrass’ voting features are also more supple than the simple “majority wins” tools found on many social media sites. Crabgrass users can create straw polls that allow users to individually rate various options under consideration; the platform also supports instant runoff elections that allow participants to rank options rather than simply choose a single preference. Advocates for such “alternative voting” mechanisms argue that they are more democratic than simple majority voting because of the protections for minority viewpoints and the ability of users to express more nuanced opinions [17]. That they are included in the Crabgrass platform reflects deep and abiding commitments on the part of the system’s designers to democratic decision-‐making and egalitarian processes. Finally, it is important to note that Crabgrass is offered as both a service and a software platform. Activists and organizations can create accounts on Riseup’s servers to utilize Crabgrass’ features, but are also encouraged to download the software and host their own services. Doing so enables an organization to maintain stricter control over its data, integrate Crabgrass into existing communications systems, and customize features as needed.
Witness Video Hub: Situating Human Rights Video in an Activist Milieu
WITNESS is a US-‐based nonprofit organization that promotes the use of video in human rights advocacy. Since its founding in 1988, the organization has provided video cameras to human rights groups, worked with advocacy organizations around the world to produce documentary videos, and have distributed videos to journalists and politicians. In the fall of 2007 WITNESS unveiled “The Hub,”3 a website where individuals and organizations can upload and view human rights-‐related videos (figure 4). The Hub offers similar functionality to other video-‐sharing sites, like You Tube or Daily Motion. Users can upload, view, and rate videos, and engage in discussion with other users by entering comments. WITNESS lists a number of additional features that are currently under development including support for uploading and viewing videos from mobile phones.
3 http://hub.witness.org/
Figure 4: The Hub homepage. While WITNESS continues to post its videos to a variety of video-‐sharing sites, the organization argues that the Hub provides an alternative communications channel that is better suited to activists needs than its commercial counterparts. For example, the Hub places a premium on protecting the identities of users who post content to the site and of activists who may appear in videos. This is a primary concern in human rights video work, where activists can face imprisonment or worse at the hands of the authorities their works expose. The Hub’s commitment to security extends to the site’s policies of not requiring users to provide personal information to the site and their commitment to “never share, sell or trade your
personal information. Ever.” The Hub also features online identity-‐protection tutorials and promotes the use of TOR, an open-‐source software tool that masks IP addresses, making it difficult to associate Internet traffic with specific computers or physical locations. The Hub also differs from commercial sites in that it doesn’t claim ownership of the videos that it hosts. Instead, videos are published under Creative Commons licenses that allow activists to repost, repurpose, and reuse videos in advocacy campaigns. Although not currently supported, the Hub intends to allow users to download videos so they can be shown in offline venues or reused in new advocacy video productions. The Hub contrasts this with YouTube and other commercial services that own the content on their websites regardless of its provenance, which WITNESS says both limits activist ability to repurpose videos for advocacy and potentially leads to the distasteful spectacle of private enterprise profiting from human rights abuse footage. Thirdly, the Hub’s sole focus on human rights enables advocacy videos to be highlighted in ways that are impossible on commercial services. The site’s founders describe the experience of looking for human rights videos on YouTube as akin to “finding a needle in a haystack” [7]. The sheer volume of videos on commercial sites coupled with the tendency of those sites to feature videos based on popularity or aggregate ranking often has the effect of burying human rights videos under a mountain of pratfalls, music videos, and dancing babies. While YouTube has introduced a “nonprofits and activism” channel, it has quickly become a dumping ground for all manner of fringe movements and conspiracy theories. Perhaps most importantly, from WITNESS’ perspective, the Hub situates human rights videos in an activist milieu. Videos are categorized by issue (for example “war crimes” or “child labor”) and by country. The site contains blog entries and feature articles that highlight particular issues or campaigns, such as “the role of archives in human rights” or “Bhopal: 25 Years of Injustice.” The Hub encourages users to join groups organized around various issues and suggests ways for viewers to become directly involved with human rights campaigns by, say, attending real-‐world events or donating to advocacy organizations. The Hub also offers online training to would-‐ be video activists through a series of “Video Advocacy Guide” videos that instruct viewers on filming, editing, and distributing advocacy videos. These features represent an attempt to go beyond simply distributing human rights video via the web; they are aimed at providing activists with all the tools they need to use those videos in a variety of on-‐ and off-‐line advocacy campaigns.
Designing for Activist Organizations Ushahidi, Crabgrass, and the Hub were all developed with activist organizations in mind. The use cases envisioned by their designers centered on collective action rather than individual behavior, and assumed explicitly political objectives. This unique perspective yielded a distinct set of requirements and features. For instance,
Crabgrass offers more sophisticated group management and decision-‐making capabilities than other social networking platforms, the Hub links video content to activist campaigns and organizations, and Ushahidi allows editors to vouch for the accuracy of users’ submissions. These projects also embody a set of values that reflect the activist communities from which they emerged. For instance, Crabgrass and the Hub privilege user privacy and data security, perennial concerns for activist technology design made more urgent by such well-‐publicized incidents as Yahoo! providing information to the Chinese government that lead to the arrest of a leading dissident in 2005, and an unsuccessful attempt in 2007 by the State of New York to compel the author of this essay to reveal information about users of an activist text-‐messaging service called TXTmob. Activist designers are often explicit about the ways that ethical values shape their decisions. For example, both WITNESS and the Riseup collective raise concerns about commercialization of activist media. While some of this discussion is framed in instrumental terms (for example, activists’ need to distribute and reuse videos and software), both organizations include a moral dimension in their consideration. Riseup is openly anti-‐corporate, and lists a non-‐profit orientation among the desirable features in choices it makes about software platforms. While perhaps less radical, WITNESS’ discussion of commercial ownership isn’t limited to concerns about licensing and distribution; the organization also raises the distasteful possibility of commercial sites appearing to profit from human rights video. In explicitly acknowledging the ways that they deliberately encode ethical concerns into technology projects, these designers offer a template for what Friedman, Nussbaum and others call “value-‐sensitive design” [3, 4]. These projects’ shared orientation and values do not imply a uniform or consistent set of features or requirements. Indeed, we can identify instances where decisions made by one project are at odds with those made by another. For example, one might suggest that the anonymity that the Hub offers its users might allow for the sort of uncorroborated content that Ushahidi’s creators were concerned about instigating violent backlash in post-‐election Kenya. Recognizing these contradictions points to the importance that specificity plays as a value undergirding these projects. Each project presented here set out to address a narrowly defined need, for a narrowly defined audience. Ushahidi was developed to catalog incidences of post-‐ election violence in Kenya; Crabgrass to facilitate collaboration across activist networks; the Hub to disseminate human rights videos. The specificity of purpose exhibited by these projects is contrasted with commercial services, which are generally designed to support a range of usages by as broad an audience as possible. YouTube, for example, facilitates virtually any type of video sharing; Facebook hosts an ever-‐expanding portfolio of applications. This difference in scope is intimately tied to the institutional goals of the organization responsible for each project. YouTube’s and Facebook’s approaches are aligned with the fact that they are commercial services whose businesses depend on
attracting large numbers of users. While the revenue streams for sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter continue to be works-‐in-‐progress, evolving business models appear to be based on delivering advertisements to large numbers of users organized into such easily-‐digestible market segments as geography and interests, and on enabling viral marketing campaigns that exploit insights about social network structure that are gained by conducting data analyses on users. In contrast, activist organizations generally operate without profit-‐making considerations and do not necessarily depend on maintaining large constituencies. They can, in a sense, afford to be more specialized than commercial services. This is not to say that activist technology projects are immune from financial considerations; as I have shown elsewhere, they are absolutely influenced by the economic conditions under which they occur [5]. However, the logics that drive funding decisions affecting activists and NGOs are different than in the commercial sector and are often more closely tied to notions of social impact than by aggregated numbers of users. In the cases described here, social impact is understood in terms of global networks of activist organizations. Each project described in this essay was undertaken by an organization that hoped to support other activists, often without direct financial compensation. Each required an activist organization to take on the development and day-‐to-‐day management of the project. In all three of the examples presented in this paper, the design of an activist technology was accompanied by the simultaneous design of an activist organization to manage it. In the case of Ushahidi, a loosely connected network of bloggers coalesced into an NGO initially to take on the roles of developing software and vetting incident reports, and ultimately to evangelize the software to the global activist community, solicit funds, and direct further technical development. With the Hub, the development of a video sharing site facilitated new relationships between an established organization and other advocacy groups, and required a new set of policies and additional staff responsibilities. Similarly, Crabgrass provides both a new hosting opportunity for the Riseup collective and a set of new organizing capabilities for the organizations that adopt it. Designing technologies and services for adoption by organizations adds its own set of requirements to software development projects. In addition to thinking through end users’ needs and experience, designers also have to contend with the adopting organization’s institutional goals, including the organization’s ability to project its identity through the technology (what we might think of as “branding”), and the ability to act collectively in directing projects, coordinating action and mobilizing resources. Solutions intended for uptake by organizations also often have to be customized and integrated with existing technical systems and organizational practices. This is a matter of both technology design and technology licensing. For example, Crabgrass offers flexible group management tools that better reflect the complexities of activist social arrangements than popular social networking software. Because Crabgrass is available under open source licenses that allow the software to be altered with little cost or restriction, an organization can choose
which features meet its needs and can combine Crabgrass with other open source software products. As a result, organizations can use Crabgrass to integrate group management and other social network features into customized platforms that present constituents with a seamless communications experience. Ushahidi’s modular design and its open source licensing similarly facilitate adoption by other organizations. Having described activist projects as a distinct form of social media, let us now consider how activist social media relates to commercial services. As Pinch and Bijker observe, there is often significant interplay between artifacts produced for different purposes; innovation is often a process of appropriating features developed by one social group for use by another [13]. There is certainly a great deal of back-‐and-‐forth between activist and commercial media. For example, much of today’s “citizen journalism” is an evolution of the Indymedia movement; and Twitter’s creators have credited the activist TXTmob service as an important precursor [6]. New services like TwitterMap4 and TwitterVision5 produce map visualizations of Twitter feds, extending Ushahidi’s core functionality. Facebook and other social media services’ group management capabilities continue to evolve in ways that echo Crabgrass’ design. Activist media projects similarly borrow from commercial services. Crabgrass is a case in point – it was designed from the get-‐go as an activist response to the widespread adoption of popular social networking sites. However, we should also recognize that activist technology projects proceed from an orientation and set of values that is at least partially incompatible with business requirements. For example, it would be difficult to imagine Facebook introducing privacy controls that prohibited the company from conducting social network analysis on its users. Indeed, incommensurability with business objectives is largely the point of activist technology design. Activist projects allow organizations to create communications channels that function independently of commercial offerings. While the need for such channels is often couched in terms of privacy and information security, it also reflects deeper issues in activist communications strategy. As activist groups engage social media to promote their causes, they often find themselves to be “small fish in a vast sea “ [1]. Activist media tends to garner far less interest than other kinds of content on sites that are primarily used for entertainment. Even when activist messages do garner significant attention, organizations may be frustrated by the tenor of discussion and the difficulties in translating viewership into committed action. As WITNESS’ Sam Gregory puts it, activists’ goals of “transforming a transitory audience into an engaged public” is at odds with the structure of commercial sites like YouTube [18]. Gregory sees a greater value in disseminating human rights media among committed activists than in using social media sites to reach largely disengaged audiences despite their numbers. By enabling activist organizations to create separate discursive spaces for 4 http://twittermap.tv/ 5 http://beta.twittervision.com/
activist concerns, activist technology projects facilitate the creation of what Gregory calls “communities oriented towards action”: groups of people who share commitments to one or another cause, and who are oriented towards translating those commitments into concrete action. In short, activist technology projects provide a material substrate that enables movements and organizations to create, nurture, and mobilize constituencies; collectives whose orientation towards collective action distinguish them from the “users” that frequent commercial social media sites.
Conclusion
While commercial services like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have become important components of advocacy campaigns around the world, activist technology projects like Ushahidi, Crabgrass, and the Witness Video Hub help us see the limits of corporate media services for political activism. As we have seen, activist technology projects often proceed from different models of social organization than their commercial counterparts. Placing activism at the center of technology design highlights new requirements and leads to new features that are absent from tools designed to serve a more general audience. Activist media’s unique context leads to innovative solutions that, in some instances, anticipate broader technical trends. Examining emerging practices in activist communities can thus provide a glimpse into one possible future for social and mobile media more generally. Activist design projects also tend to operate according to a different set of values than their commercial counterparts. While these values may at times be incommensurate with business objectives, looking closely activist design projects can help us think critically about the assumptions and biases that underpin social media projects more generally. In particular, they help us understand the key role that institutional goals play in shaping social and mobile media technologies and environments, and the policies that govern their use.
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