The first session of this year’s Socialcamp in Berlin kept me busy thinking for the whole weekend. Coming from the challenging experience of reaching sustainable change when working with organisations in Africa, Tobias Eigen from Kabissa was looking at questions of the drivers of change, and how to identify these “Change Agents”.
This let me to remember one of the principles of the power of internet, which is that everybody, from Kinshasa, to Berlin, to Port Moresby, can make a difference, can engage and has the opportunity to be an agent of change. While this was true before the internet as well, and limitations of connectivity still exist, the opportunity to scale this engagement has increased exponentially.
Go change the world. Now.
Now this obviously doesn’t mean that every idea will change the world, but what I find most interesting and exciting is that by simply doing something such as sending a text message, posting an idea or a comment, taking a picture and sharing it, he can be part of a changing world.
In short, this is citizen engagement. How this can be a key factor for influencing the fight against corruption in the future, I have described on this blog and also here.
The concept that was floated during the discussion is the one of a Change Network, in a way taking the concept that every one can be a change agent and planting this person into a societal context. I think the concept of one person driving change is, on a general level, somewhat of a myth. The person is always embedded in a network that reflects, adapts and catalyses the ideas and concepts of change. This does not limit itself to its immediate group, but also to the community or society surrounding.
And without this networks, the change will not happen.
While preparing this text, Patrick Meier from iRevolution did a great summary on the discussion on crowdsourcing and I would like to quote his words which fit quite well here:
We credit the crowd because no one person lives in a vacuum and comes up with innovative ideas that are completely independent from their interaction with the outside world.
This is also true when you think of how dependent change becomes if it is only focussed on one person, rather than a network. It is a challenge the fight against corruption has experienced much to often when having to rely on political will to change the status quo. Once a government changes, all advancements may stop, just because this change was based on only one person.
The question is whether a Change Network can be institutionalised.
I am split on this with my thoughts, but I believe that there needs to be the liberty to engage and create a culture of engagement and action without having to organise everything (and this coming from a German), and let allow that even from slactivism eventually comes true engagement and activism. I like the idea of a possibility for change at every movement. Providing space for the individual to do something and let the network surrounding it create the change. Not everything will be, or want to be NGOised.
Corruption in the access to basic service delivery, such as water, health and education is one of the key areas that need to be tackled to improve the lives of people and their livelihood. Especially access to water is possibly the service I feel most strongly about, as the corruption in this sector can be deadly. More than 1 billion people worldwide have no guaranteed access to water and more than 2 billion are without adequate sanitation.
Combining these two easy-to-use technologies, the process of delivering water to the people is made more transparent, and through circumventing potentially corrupt bureaucracies, it can become a cleaner – and corrupt-free process.
Additionally, these technologies allow to access highly useful and relevant information of when, where and how much water is being retrieved. This data should be made open and accessible. As publicly available information it can then be mapped and serve to highlight risks, deficiencies or failures in the process of providing water services to the population.
Of course, some related questions arise, such as how strongly privatised can and should the access to the basic service water be. Also issues of privacy and personal information gathered through these systems need to be handled in a responsible and open manner.
But for questions of improving transparency and reducing corruption, technology reducing intermediaries and enabling the tracking information can be very powerful.
I would like to share with you two interesting initiatives that highlight one point I wanted to make for a longer time now.
My point is about easy solutions. And basic concepts.
Sometimes the easy solutions are the best ones. Solutions where not much programming is needed to make it an effective online tool. A clear concept that can be put in practice easily can remove one of the biggest hurdles existing for some practitioners, and especially in NGOs with limited resources: Dealing with the internet and the complexity of not being able to programme and manage a website by yourself.
Blowing the whistle
This is why I like the following case. It’s the concept of simple transparency of information and explaining how things have to work put into practice. On a web page that basically displays a word document, listing the three key points, some PDF documents and the relevant phone numbers. And that explains what whistle blowing is, and how and where to do it.
Have a look at the new page on Blowing the Whistle on Waste & Fraud in Government, put in place by the State of Illinois.: www.whistleblower.illinois.gov
Accessing information
The other example I wanted to include here is a nice project called the Question Box, addressing one of the key concerns for using online tools: illiteracy (also nicely presented here, and discussed here). One box per village. The concept is a call center, to connect to the internet.
How it works
Maintaining the infrastructure might not be easy, but electricity can come from solar cells and the used technology is basic enough to be repaired easily. Again, easy concept. Easy solution. And many ideas coming into mind when thinking about accountability, access to information and citizen engagement in governance.
One of our colleagues here at TI has prepared an exciting project for the N2Y4 mobile challenge. In a nutshell, Mosomo-health is looking to make use of mobile phones to bring together information about health-related government spending and connect this data to local knowledge about whether or not funding reaches its intended destination and actually results in on-the-ground infrastructure and public health services.
In the interest of brevity and to encourage you to head over to the netsquared site this is an extremely abbreviated description of the idea. If you like it thus far, please register (it’s non-profit and there won’t be any spam), go straight here to look at the detailed description of Mosomo-health, give it a star rating and perhaps an additional positive comment in the comments field. If we can create enough of a buzz, then maybe, just maybe, we’ll have a chance to reach the finals of the competition and mobilise some funding to pilot the project.
To get a sense of just how worthwhile this may be, check out the last challenge-winning project Ushahidi and on the contest site.
Thanks in advance for your help in spreading the word!
And while we’re at it, TI’s new twitter has just been named Nonprofit of the Week by Nonprofitorgs. Good reason to follow both.
Not in the grand scheme of things, we don’t think. But consider this piece from the NY Times webpage:
And on Monday, defense lawyers in the federal corruption trial of a former Pennsylvania state senator, Vincent J. Fumo, demanded that the judge declare a mistrial after a juror posted updates on the case on Twitter and Facebook. The juror even told his readers that a “big announcement” was coming Monday. But the judge decided to let the trial continue, and the jury found Mr. Fumo guilty. His lawyers plan to use the Internet postings as grounds for appeal.
So much for Twitter and possible unintended consequences in the fight against corruption. Not a good reason to ignore the potential of this technology to create transparency though, is it?
This week has been a pretty busy one for global anti-corruption activists. On Tuesday, Transparency International honoured two investigative journalists, David Leigh of the Guardian(UK) and Roman Shleynov of Novaya Gazeta (Russia). David and Roman are the recipients of the 2008 Integrity Awards. The winners of the Integrity Awards are extremely brave individuals who often accept great personal risk to expose corruption, as Georg sadly had to highlight a short while ago. This is what TI says:
Transparency International’s (TI) Integrity Awards honour the work of these courageous individuals and organisations that make a real difference in the fight against corruption. From accountants and public prosecutors to government officials and pharmacologists, their backgrounds may be diverse, but the message is the same: corruption can be beaten.
TI’s 2008 Integrity Awards pay tribute to two remarkable investigative journalists, David Leigh and Roman Shleynov, whose untiring determination to expose corrupt dealings in the face of formidable odds serve as inspiration to the anti-corruption movement.
Huguette Labelle, Chair of TI with Integrity Awards 2008 winners David Leigh and Roman Shleynov (left to right)
A slideshow with photos from this year’s ceremony can be viewed here.
World Economic Forum opening a window for discussion? Copyright by World Economic Forum
Especially, as one of the impressions I got from this year’s meeting was the feeling of helplessness in the discussions on how to tackle the economic crisis. I think that this challenge the world is facing needs to come with the recognition for two dominating aspects of the solution, and that might scare some to take the next step: one being the need for letting go of conventional approaches; and the other being the request for a new openness and transparency.
At least, questions of ethics and accountability have been included in the agenda this year. But, the promise of this new era of responsibility has to be monitored by everyone. Where, in the era of social media, are the masses on the streets, holding the people responsible accountable?
Sometimes I might sound too optimistic, but I think there has been some interesting input through social media. And while these channels still seem very much a side event, have a look at:
Nearly 80,000 viewers have watched the video of the Forum’s youtube-contest by Colombian Pablo Camacho, 24, discussing the need for a n International Code of Ethics for CEO’s. His suggestions may not be taken up right away, but can serve as a perfect motto for 2009: “Make money, but do not harm others”.
And also have a look at the impact of social media at Davos, and especially of Twitter, via this nice sum-up by James Conell on the New York Times.
Here’s an interesting question for everyone working on transparency, accountability and corruption: How can election monitoring contribute to promoting democracy, human rights and good governance?
Elections are an ideal opportunity for looking into how social media concepts can be used to support a fair and democratic process of choosing a country’s government. Lack of transparency goes hand in hand with opportunities for fraud and undue influence, from the very practical measure of excluding electoral observers, to the more complex uncertainty about the amounts of monies spent in the campaign. Already, a range of tools are used to monitor elections and election day irregularities.
Let me just give you two examples:
A very nice one, is the iChoose Election Observer, a complaint database developed by Transparency Maldives, fulfilling two objectives: to facilitate the reporting of election-related complaints to the proper authorities on the one hand; and to monitor how these complaints are being processed on the other.
It shows a very practical way of on election day monitoring, engaging citizens, combining text messaging, social media (a facebook group ), and a very effective way of making fraudulent action transparent.
The second example is a project called Base de Datos de Publicidad Oficial (Data base of Official Publicity) by Transparency International’s national chapter in Argentina, Poder Ciudadano, that lists the money spent by the government to the media on advertising. The main part of the project is a searchable data base including the allocation of official advertising since 2000 for all channels, such as radio, TV, cinema, newspapers etc.
The New Tactics in Human Rights Project promotes tactical innovation and strategic thinking within the international human rights community, by promoting the use and sharing of as wide a range of tactics as possible. One of its tools are debates held online, open for everyone for discussion.
“Election observation should (…) not be a one-off event. Institutions and organisations should make a firm commitment to stay involved, not only by observing consecutive elections, but also by staying engaged in between elections.”
And I would maybe add, every citizen needs to stay engaged in between elections, holding their leaders accountable.
How to promote anti-corruption activities and transparency in countries with challenging political environments for civil society organisations and journalists such as the Middle East?
The organisation has developed an interesting website called Nazaha meaning “Transparency and Integrity” aiming at raising public awareness about corruption. The website, available only in Arabic,
provides downloadable tools for journalists, members of elected Local Councils, and NGO’s leaders, enabling them to investigate, uncover, and fight corruption. Moreover, the website monitors and documents corruption cases circulated by 23 (party, state-run, and independent) newspapers. The documentation is divided into seven categories: (1) corruption in health sector; (2) corruption in housing; (3) corruption in primary education; (4) corruption in higher education; (5) corruption in transportation; (6) corruption in supplies; and (7) corruption in local administrative units. The documentation is necessary for analysis of the data and interpretation of the causes and effects of corruption on the life of the people, particularly the poor and the marginalized.
A similar concept is followed by a project undertaken by Transparency International’s Moroccan chapter under the name Observatoire National de la Corruption.
These examples show that sometimes very easy concepts such as gathering and documenting relevant information already available in the public sphere, such as newspapers and news magazines, in one place, preferably available online, as well as providing key advocates with materials may they need to make their case, can be incredibly powerful.
Documenting and categorizing corruption cases is important. But making them public by matching and mapping them in an easy and accessible fashion should be the next important step to identify hotspots of corruption in a given country. Public monitoring, including by the affected citizen, will be the most effective process to effect change on public institutions.
The assassination of Sri Lankan journalist Lasantha Wickramatunga comes as a shock to the anti-corruption community. Wickramatunga was editor of the Sunday Leader and winner of Transparency International’s 2000 Integrity Award, awarded to honor his fearless efforts in exposing corruption in Sri Lankan politics.
Sanjana Hattotuwa from Vikalpa, a citizen journalism initiative located in Sri Lanka, posts an interesting comment on ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace) stating that:
It’s really horrible that it takes an event of such a tragic nature to propel our work higher in this list [top 100 list on YouTube amongst Reporter’s Channel worldwide], but it does also demonstrate once again that short videos on YouTube in particular, and online video in general, can be a powerful platform for activism and advocacy. (…)
Vikalpa’s YouTube Channel channel reaches and generates far more people and interest respectively than its website, which gets around 350 readers on average a day. This is significant in a country that does not enjoy good bandwidth (most of the viewers and readers are from Sri Lanka). It suggests that online video – especially short videos – can be and are re-distributed, cross-featured, emailed the links to, embedded, downloaded and copied and if their license allows it, re-worked and re-edited to create viral campaigns, including those on social networks such as Facebook and Myspace, that can meaningfully strengthen real world activism and advocacy against violence.
These observations are very relevant when looking at supporting, recognising and advocating for the work anti-corruption activists all around the globe, but also, when looking at covering corruption by activists such as the series of YouTube-videos on police corruption in Morocco show (see example).
Sunday Leader Editor in Chief Lasantha Wickremetunge murdered – English, documentary by Vikalpa.
A video on the 2000 Integrity Awards ceremony will be available on YouTube shortly and integrated in this post [Unfortunately we couldn't make this available as digitalizing the VCR was not possible for an affordable amount].
thrown by our colleague alan, this link points to the Bank’s interest in projects linking ICT and governance. could be a good opportunity for anti-corruption csos in francophone africa to partner in going mobile. it’s posted on frontline sms’ webpage, an interesting tool that has already been applied promisingly by a number of ngos in the broader governance field for election monitoring, e.g. in Nigeria and Zimbabwe. some general background on mobile election monitoring is available here. it will be very interesting to see what the potential of this technology is with regard to mobilisation against corruption, and – dare we hope – its prevention.
The people behind the social media and anti-corruption workshop at this year’s International Anti-corruption conference (IACC) are: Georg Neumann, Dieter Zinnbauer, Editor of the Global Corruption Report and Conrad Zellmann. We are all strongly committed to our various professional responsibilities working for Transparency International Secretariat in Berlin, but this blog features exclusively our personal thoughts about matters of anti-corruption and beyond, not those of TI. This blog will accompany the workshop and we hope that it will help us gather additional ideas, interesting social-media based project examples and challenging questions for the actual workshop discussions on 1 November in Athens, Greece. In one of the next posts, we will start explaining in some more detail what our original thinking was behind the workshop proposal and who we’ve invited to enlighten and inspire the anti-corruption community about the potential of social media for the fight against corruption.
BROADRIDGE Financial Solutions Inc. (NYSE: BR), the giant investor communications and brokerage outsourcing firm, plans to connect every US company and every shareholder in a massive social network that could rival Facebook in terms of members. […]
The move by Broadridge comes after the SEC adopted changes to its rules in February designed to encourage the use of electronic shareholder forums by public companies and their shareholders. The SEC sees online forums as a way to improve communication between shareholders and companies and cut the number of shareholder proposals submitted for inclusion in annual meeting proxy statements.
iMiners conclude the following from that:
The SEC’s encouragement of companies using new technologies to facilitate communications is finally starting to take off, and we think that in the not too distant future shareholder forums will become standard on many company IR websites (at least for those companies not afraid to embrace new technologies, and not afraid to have a dialogue with shareholders).
UPDATE 23/09: ..As I continued browsing to look for more information on investor relations 2.0 I found another great post that puts all this nicely into a broader context.
This illustrates a number of issues we’ve discussed upon developing the workshop programme and sparks a few further thoughts (and I would expect us to debate those fervently).
Today, Transparency International released its 2008 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). In its visual appearance it is as all indices a simple table. Asking myself how the score relates to each country’s rather complex national reality, and therefore how the CPI, measuring only public sector corruption, could be complemented with additional information, I came up with a couple of ideas related to how the information is presented.
As a first step, improving the visualisation of the data can make it more accessible. So here’s the CPI as a world map. The Tactical Technology Collective has developed a nice guide on how to visualise information for advocacy. But better, make it an interactive google map. And the final step should be to use the crowd to enhance the information that is available in the map contributing real-time information – national news stories, bribing experiences and the like.
Secondly, you can explain the data with a press release. But you can also explain it with a youtube-video. Automatically the video relates to others on similar issues. Additionally viewers can comment on it, add their own videos, and engage into a conversation.
No research stands alone and needs to be seen in context with other data. The World Freedom Atlas, developed by Zachary Johnson at the University of Wisconsin, provides an interactive visualisation tool for world statistics on issues of freedom, democracy, human rights and good governance. Other examples of great presentation of information in world maps can be found developed by Maplecroft and, “as you’ve never seen it before”, on the Worldmapper website. In a future post I’ll share more interactive and social mapping projects.
But on the other hand it has not much to do with what happens on the streets, in hospitals or in public institutions. An index meaningful to people needs to be connected to their lives and realities. More tools that combine facts and personal experience, as well as engage people in a conversation need to be developed. This will allow us to gain a more comprehensive picture of what is it exactly we are dealing with when we want to fight corruption.
One of the key questions of the workshop will be how social media can change the way we fight corruption. We’ll have some interesting answers and examples, but as a general note a couple of directions can be distilled already.
Fighting corruption becomes:
1) Collaborative and crowd-based. It is much easier to link up with people and groups working on the same issue, and gather them in a bigger anti-corruption movement. But this is only one aspect to it, as it also has an effect on joining up with individual activists, a task usually difficult for bigger organisations, as well as for people to organise themselves. The dream is the old metaphor of the many little fish that eat the big fish. Also crowdsourcing as a tactic can be one of the options, especially when looking at datasets made available under the umbrella of transparency or interpreting data collectively (as an example see how mysociety.org asks their users to match up each speech with video footage), or in investigative journalism or for community-based reporting, as reflected by the NY Times and the People, Spaces, Deliberations-Blog.
One of the consequences, overseen sometimes, is that organisations will loose control over how people organise themselves and communicate externally, but also internally.
2) De-centralised. De-centralised action and organisation forms will be developed where necessary. One example is how global protests where organised on 4 February under the moto “A Million Voices Against FARC” via Facebook. Manifestations were organised all over the world. Especially under restrictive regimes, where civil society is challenged when organising itself, social media can be used to organise, meet virtually and work together without being together. Google maps can be used as a great tool to track and plan actions.
3) Empowering. Social media can empower people that want to change things. It becomes bottom-up by giving voice to the people affected most. By contributing their experience, easily done via blogs, twitter, or a wiki, they can become part of the movement and give faces to the issues. I have referred to this in my previous post.
Some of the traditional limitations of the fight against corruption that lie within the political environment of a country, such as a restricted civil society, can be overcome using social media. While knowing that new limitations such as lack and cost of access to the internet and mobile devices remain.
I haven’t been a very prolific contributor to this blog over the past few weeks, which was at least partly due to the fact that I was travelling. This post will require a bit of background, as it comes round to an idea for the application of social media advocacy very much on the basis of a more traditional look at - in this case – the part of the equation sometimes called the supply side of corruption: corporate bribery.
Among other meetings in the Netherlands, I attended Ethical Corporation’s 2nd European Anti-corruption summit. What struck me there was how seriously many corporations take corruption as a legal compliance issue without necessarily taking into full view the broader societal implications of corruption and what business can do to help address these. In other words, following the string of latest corporate cases and at least some efforts by government to prosecute these more vigorously – with prominent exceptions – (see TI’s latest progress report on enforcement of the OECD Anti-bribery convention here for details) there is a heightened sense of awareness among big business that the legal risks incurred by corruption are considerable and that at least individually, businesses need to act.
Very few companies however seem to regard anti-corruption as a fundamental corporate responsibility issue yet (though there were a few notable presentations and conversations highlighting the importance of doing just that during the conference). Approaching anti-corruption as a responsibility issue not limited to compliance with the law (while that of course is fundamental) has the potential to not only protect one business from legal harm (a damaged reputation and lost business, jail time for senior management, etc. included) but to benefit society at large by helping to create the environment for sustainable development. Real opportunities exist for example for business to become engaged with collective action approaches against corruption (a good resource on these has been compiled here) that can help move the debate in the compliance and quite a lot more direction.
We also have had the chance to invite some members of Transparency International’s national chapters around the world to the workshop to explore together possibilities on how to apply social media tools and concepts to the fight against corruption.
I am welcoming Florencia Bianco who is Director of Communications at TI’s Argentinean chapter Poder Ciudadano, responsible for institutional communications, press work, as well as the news agency Infocívica that distributes news from NGOs and social issues to the media. She is the first to start sharing her thoughts in the run-up to the conference.
Yesterday, at the We Media meeting here in Buenos Aires, a friend told me that all of us gathered there were enthusiasts who believed that technology could help us transform the oh-so-horrible world we live in. “Otherwise, we wouldn´t be here”, he said matter-of-factly.
And, of course, I agreed. (That tends to happen when the person speaking to you is your friend and does it so matter of factly).
But on my way home I couldn´t stop thinking about all the causes I have joined since Facebook came out. I am a supporter of CHINAR (a really neat NGO that works with orphan children in conflict areas, such as Kashmir), “Ni un joven con su identidad cambiada” (a group that works to find the true identity of children unlawfully taken from their parents and given to adoption during the Argentina´s dictatorship), and Sierras Protegidas YA, an ecologist movement that protects mountains).
In most cases, I have joined because I have friends who promote these causes (or friends of friends, or friends of family members, and so on). On top of that, supporting is effortless, and penny-less. And it looks good on my public profile, and it makes me feel good about myself.
Where is my commitment? Does my support end with a (dollar-less) click? Or is this symbolic support really contributing to raise awareness of these issues? I don´t have any answers yet, and would love to hear ideas from you! I have a feeling that if social media is to contribute to change the world, I am going to have to do more than click…click…click…
The main challenge for using social media concepts, and the internet in general, is that many people, especially in the developing world, still don’t have access to it (see this statistics overview, wikipedia, as well as this nice map).
However, usage rates are growing tremendously, especially in Africa and the Middle East, and initiatives such as the bloggers conference give hope that the internet, as a genuine grassroots media, can reach not only the few. Through the internet and information sources such as blogs, the entrance barrier to join a political dialogue and the public sphere are much easier than through traditional media and TV.
A while ago, this article looked at South Africa and the influence bloggers and “citizen journalism” have on the political dialogue in the country, arguing that, while not yet in a scale as in the US, bloggers are are joining the discourse and start receiving attention by the media.
Of course, radio on the other hand still advantages providing a platform for discussions. Community radio projects keep to be successful around the world. A great initiative addressing how to tie in both media is the Radio 2.0 for development blog. See also a related post presenting the publication: Fighting Poverty: Utilizing Community Media in a Digital Age.
Merging text messaging and social media tools such as twitter provide another opportunity that will be discussed in a following post.
People are starting to make noise. With corruption being one of the main obstacles for development, there is the potential and the need to start engaging into social media tools and not write off the continent, just because of the technical challenges that still need to be overcome.
If good governance is largely about strengthening citizens’ voices on the demand side, which in turn will also help enhance accountability and transparency on the supply side, it is clear that the traditional conception of communication – transmitting messages through given channels to “target audiences” – is not enough to achieve the intended results. What is needed to strengthen citizens’ voices and enable their active participation is a space where individuals feel safe and stimulated to be part of the processes leading to change.
As I highlighted in an earlier post, social media is about empowering people. Using the tools and concepts of web2.0 means that we have to change the way we traditionally interact with each other.
Let me give a practical example of using a wiki for producing a report on an issue. Traditionally, a person, or a group of persons will draft the report and send it for feedback to the people selected to ask. The feedback comes back to the group and gets incorporated in the document on the basis of what the drafting persons find relevant. Although the process might be very open and transparent with regards to what has been included and what not, in the end the decision will always be taken on the side of the drafting person.
Using a wiki, this process will be opened by inviting the same group of people, but potentially more, to edit the document. With everyone being able to make changes and reverse changes in a “safe space” the discussions become more transparent, but also less controlled. This de-centralising of control and empowering of each participant in the discussion can be frightening to the ones that are used to lead a discussion. It also does not necessarily mean that the process will be more productive. But it will increase the engagement and the committement of all participants and may question established perceptions and points of views of issues.
Now think how long it takes to change a process such as this one in your organisation. It becomes clear that adapting these processes to an even broader audience such as the citizens of a country will need time. But with the tools developed and looking at the videos on youtube, the images on flickr.com and the groups and causes on facebook.com, people starting to make us of them, it may not take as long as we may think.
Sorry for not having been able to contribute to this blog till now, but we are about to meet in Athens and I am looking forward to it!
I am sure we will be discussing interesting topics at the panel and that all our experiences from different countries will help us to develop more and better work back home.
I wanted to present one blog I’ve been managing lately: Latinoamérica por la Transparencia (only Spanish!). It was built as a “making of” for TILAC’s Regional Programme on Anti-Corruption Conventions. This time we used the traditional way of “journey diary” to tell the readers what was going with the project in the countries we were visiting. I´ll be talking about it a little bit on our panel.
And… here is a personal note… on Wednesday my colleague and I won an award for Plaza Públicathe Blog we manage at Clarínnewspaper. It is a two-year old blog on citizen participation. Although now a days it is not very active, we are very proud of the prize because this means that citizen activism is gaining a place in the cyber space!
I’m delighted to participate in this group blog and even more pleased to have an opportunity to talk about Accountability 2.0 with such a distinguished group of colleagues at the conference this week. I thought that before making the journey to Athens that I would give the readers of this blog a short overview of Sunlight’s work here in the U.S.
Sunlight was founded in January 2006 with the nonpartisan goal of using the Internet — the new information technologies and social networks — to enable citizens to learn more about the work of our government and to create a more positive and interactive relationship with their elected officials. Initially we focused exclusively on the U.S. Congress, but we already extending our work to focus on the U.S. government at large.
From the beginning, our work has focused on shedding “sunlight” as a way to help reduce corruption, to ensure greater accountability by government and to foster a public trust in the vital institutions of our democracy. Sunlight is unique in the U.S. in that technology and the power of the Internet is at the core of all of our efforts.
All of our work — websites, databases, visualizations, lobbying — is based on the premise that the collective power of citizens to demand greater accountability is the clearest route to a real democracy and that transparency can make a huge difference in building public trust in the institutions of governance. Transparency can stop bad things from happening, for starters. It can allow citizens to become their own watchdogs, and it can give NGOs the fuel they need to create more effective advocacy campaigns.
Sunlight’s work serves as a catalyst to enable citizens to better understand, monitor and hold elected officials accountable; help investigative reporters, bloggers and citizen journalists do the research necessary to better inform the public; help citizens interested in following and hsaping politics to more easily inform themselves (and their readers and social networks) and get engaged; and push and pull our government into a much more expansive relationships with the public. We’ve launched numerous innovative websites, databases, and tools to that end.
I’m very much looking forward to sharing more details with our fellow panelists on Saturday afternoon an to learn more about how others are using the social web in their work.
The 13th IACC conference started with a panel on corruption, peace and security. Let me reflect on a couple of issues mentioned during the session.
13th IACC
One of the panellists that got me thinking was Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International. She highlighted that a Transparency International list of countries with high levels of corruption would look very similar to an Amnesty International list of countries with high levels of human rights violations. Human Rights can be important tools fighting corruption, especially the right for freedom of expression and freedom of assembly and are an underutilized legal framework to fight corruption.
Already in this opening plenary it becomes clear that it there is an essential need for the right of citizens to be involved, the right of victims for a voice.
Khan said, and here I see a link to this blog: “The best tool to fight corruption is an empowered citizen.” As I had argued earlier, social media is about empowering people.
This “social transparency”, being accountable towards the citizens, demanding leaders, politicians, to account to what they do, can be supported by the use of social media.
Another issue raised was on stolen money that, as Mark Pieth, Chairman of the OECD working Group on Bribery in International Business Transactions stated, must be hidden somewhere. More transparency, especially within global financial flows is urgently needed, as also Transparency International pointed out in its resolution of this year’s Annual Membership Meeting ahead of the 13th IACC.
It would be great to use crowdsourcing concepts to identify flows and assets of CEOs or politicians. To match the money with the people. As Pieth said, if dictators find it more difficult to hide their bounty in financial centre, this contributes to corruption. Maybe if they find their mansions and Maibachs posted on the web, people will become aware. A map on google un-hiding the villas by political leaders.
A question to the panelist asked them, what each one of them could do to fight corruption. So here are just some initial thoughts, if you have any ideas, I’d be interested in hearing and reading them here!
It was quite a diverse group that looked from very different viewpoints at the issue of using social media in the fight against corruption.
Ellen Miller gave an overview of the great work the Sunlight Foundation has been doing over the years looking at accountability and transparency via the innovative use of technology and internet (see also her post on this blog).
Julian Assange presented the concept of the website wikileaks.org, an anonymous platform for whistleblowers to expose sensitive documents, and a research tool for journalists.
Inés Selvood looked from a journalist’s perspective at the question of how blogs can and are used for the objectives of civil society organisations, challenging the role of traditional journalism and presenting concepts of alternative and citizen journalism.
With a view at using the interactive concepts of social media such as chat and networking functionalities via facebook Nicolas Hernández presented how OCASA uses them for their youth education programme.
Finally, how user-orientated tools of social media can be used to empower citizen and support civic action was illustrated by Shaazka Beyerle on the example of Egypt’s facebook revolution (see here and here)
Let me just highlight one intriguing question that came from the audience. How does social media not only change the way corruption can be tackled, but also, how do civil society organisations need to change to use these tools and concepts adequately? And indeed it seems that traditionally grown organisations will need to adapt their advocacy approaches to make these concepts work and be able to engage more effectively with the citizens who are able and willing to be join the efforts and do their part.
All in all, it was a great expert panel. Only downside was that there was not enough time for questions and feedback from the audience. But you can do that now right here on the blog. So, with the interest in the workshop and the apparent need to analyse today’s opportunities arising with the social web, I am happy to continue this blog and provide a space for discussion and ideas.
Having had a look at the powerful example of the Egyptian revolution using facebook to organise themselves mentioned on the panel and in the previous blog post, I remembered this nice map that gives an idea of the most popular social networks around the world. It also shows very well that Africa still lacks behind in many ways regarding the usage of internet and the social web, as a large number of countries could not even be included.
Map of most popular social networks - October 2008
Until end of December, I’ll be working in Rabat, Morocco for Transparency International’s national chapter Transparency Maroc. The chapter also runs the Observatoire de la Corruption, a project that, in short, monitors national news stories on corruption to identify key areas where the national integrity system fails, and makes recommendations on how corruption in different sectors can be tackled.
It would be interesting to look at how this work can be improved by using social media concepts and during my stay here, I’ll be trying to come up with some ideas.
But let me first give you a couple of initial observations on the environment civil society groups are working in Morocco, especially as we haven’t talked so much about the practical challenges yet.
Generally, of the Kingdom’s about 34 million inhabitants, more than 7.3 million, about 20 percent, have access to internet, a number that has been growing quite strongly over the last couple of years. Morocco is therefore the country with 3rd most internet users on African soil. Surprisingly, penetration with fast DSL connection is quite well, especially in cities. The maybe even more important number however, is the amount of internet cafés, with about 10,000 licenses. Internet cafés constitute places where especially the younger people meet, personally or over the internet to skype and talk via messenger. Facebook is the main social network used. A great place to initiate discussions, even on social or political issues!
Internet café in Rabat, city centre
Digital activity is growing. Numbers of Moroccan blogs are estimated to be between 10,000 and 30,000. The non-profit organisation Tanmia.ma has developed a website for Moroccans to share their podcasts and support the use of new technologies by the Moroccan civil society.
But here’s the other side, while internet access is generally considered to be fairly open and unrestricted (see the country analysis by the OpenNet Initiative), there have been a couple of incidents over the last year, such as the two-year prison sentence against Moroccan blogger Mohamed Erraji, accused of having insulted the king, that was eventually overturned by the court of appeals in September (read the background in French and English). Another one was a fake facebook profile of the King’s younger brother developed and published by Fouad Mourtada.
Interestingly, the prior incident made an US internet marketing company, SEO 1 Services, suspend its decision to open an office in Tangers, North-Morocco, showing that there might even be an economic impact of restricting freedom of opinion and expression, as well as freedom of press.
By the way, an interesting overview of digital activism in Morocco (and other countries) can be found at: http://www.digiactive.org/topic/morocco/ gathered by DigiActive, a volunteer organisation dedicated to helping grassroots activists around the world use the Internet and mobile phones to increase their impact. Talking about mobile phones and interesting numbers, 50% of the population have one in Morocco. I’m about to get mine tomorrow.
The tragic eventsin Mumbai last week highlighted again how susbtantially the media landscape has changed in the recent past. Literally within minutes after the beginning of the terrorist siege, twitter users, bloggers and flickr users began reporting the events as they unfolded. Established national and international news media quickly began featuring the content provided by private individuals in their own reporting. This Wired blog post has some of the most interesting examples of social media tools used to provide first-hand accounts of the events, including the already prominent flickr collection by Vinu. Gaurav Mishra has written an extremely informative and balanced account on the use and impact of social media tools during the days of the siege. He suggests that while Twitter was used heavily to send first-hand news, there was somewhat less original citizen reporting through blogs than could have been expected.
The horrific violence perpetrated against the people of Mumbai and their visitors in the attacks brought out the best in people as well: empathy and the desire to help others in the wake of terror. As pointed out by Asfaq Tapia, volunteer spirit and social media complemented each other in this situation to deliver critical information faster and more comprehensively than traditional news and rescue services could:
While we maybe shouldn’t be talking so much about web2.0 and social media, I wanted to share with you a couple of interesting posts that came up in a couple of fora I am visiting regularly.
And here’s another interesting interactive one on the number of public corruption convictions in the USA. While one needs to be carefull in using the map as an indicator for the level of corruption in the different states, it is a good way of presenting information related to the fight against corruption, showing that corrupt behaviour actually is being punished.
Social software has the potential to enhance political activism from a local to a worldwide scale as exemplified in the anti-FARC-rallies, although the usage of social software applications still has to be considered as a privilege. In countries with huge social inequalities social software is still used and formed by an elite, additionally created within and emerged from a Western US-American context and its inherent cultural, social, economic and political structures.
Global resistance and grassroots activities have to emerge from a collective. Social software has the potential to be used for collective knowledge processes.
Food for thought. It is crucial to find opportunities to integrate national cultural contexts and ways of using social media into succesful campaigns, as well as build on existing communities that are driven by the people themselves. The “facebook-revolution” in Egypt gives a good idea for a nationally owned movement. In Morocco, for example, the use of video platforms such as youtube.com and dailymotion.com is extremely high, and probably presents a better opportunity for targeted actions.
And of course, we were not only writing but have also been working on a couple of projects that we’ll hopefully be able to present here soon.
Last Friday, I attended a colloquium on the state of access to information in four countries of the Maghreb, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania. The two-day event organised by Transparency Maroc and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation on 12-13 December, brought together experts, journalists and heads of the main human rights organisations in the region. The issue of access to information is fundamental in fighting corruption, as Transparency International states on the website:
The right to demand information is fundamental to building trust among citizens and the state. It is a right that acts as an instrument to allow citizens access to fulfill other cultural, economic and social rights such as the right to education, to food, to work, to self determination.
When citizens are denied their right to know, corrupt officials can act with impunity. When the media cannot report the facts due to government control or censorship, this right is further harmed and opacity strengthened.
Interestingly, technical solutions addressing and using information that is already publicly available strategically, as rare as it might yet be in the region, have barely been mentioned. It became visible in the responses to a comment on the value of technical solutions to facilitate access to information made by Jaco Du Toit, in charge of Communications and Information for the Maghreb region at the UNESCO in Morocco. There still exists a fear that technical solutions will not facilitate, but hinder access to information by producing too much text and information, and exclude the non-literate and poor, being especially challenging when looking at countries with a high numbers of analphabetism, for example in Morocco.
However, besides giving citizen the possibility to access information from the next internet café 24/7 rather than travelling to the next municipality, the contrary would be true regarding the non-literate in the population, as technology would allow and facilitate people who can not read, to access information or undertake administrative procedures via icons and visual elements.
The web also reduces arbitrariness in administrative process, as can be seen in an example from the regional capital Fez, where all costs and requirements regarding services such as birth certificates can be reviewed via the web. The project ACK Journal by Transpareny International in Russia aims at gathering all information on administrative processes, and user experience to increase transparency and knowledge about any requirement and current law, and therefore reduce corruption.
As discussed and mentioned by various attendees, citizen can be empowered through the right to information and by giving access to information. Trust is a crucial factor in politics. Let the citizen use the tools making information easier accessible, some of them that may still need to be developed. Let them decide how they want to hold their authorities accountable. Have a look at the work of the Sunlight Foundation (also presented on this blog) to see some concrete examples.
Of course, the Tunisian example discussed during the workshop shows another critical issue: access to information is of no value, especially for the media, if there is no freedom of expression.
One the key questions is however, what to do when information is not available, and where legislation has not yet passed the necessary laws? Some ideas could follow the concept to show the lack of information and highlight where it either should be available by law and is not, or building up pressure on the type of data that is most urgently needed.
