Previously we reported on [en] the ‘Developing Latin America' competition (Desarrollando América Latina), or #DAL, a public hackathon that aims to create technological solutions to problems in education, security and public budget, in six countries in the region. Now it's time to report its results.

The Intelligent Citizen Foundation [en] (Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente), which organised the event, determined that there were local winners, in addition to the general and regional winners, so the competitiveness in each venue was an added ingredient to the challenge of managing to complete an interesting application based on existing open data, within the time limit.

CitiVox [en] and OpenDataMx talk about the event in Mexico:

Part of the Mexican team. Photo by Desarrollando América Latina.

participaron poco menos de 50 jóvenes, de varios estados de la república, desde Sonora hasta Oaxaca. Se formaron diez equipos que trabajaron en 30 horas en diversos temas, desde seguridad pública hasta la transparencia de la nómina estatal. Finalmente presentaron sus proyectos ante un jurado formado por Mónica Aspe (Coordinación de la Sociedad de la Información y el Conocimiento, SCT), Eric Gundersen (Seed Development) y Andrés Lajous (revista Nexos). Después de escuchar las presentaciones de los equipos y de deliberar se anunció que el segundo lugar sería para el proyecto Nuestra Info por su vanguardia y potencial para presentar datos públicos difíciles de accesar. El primer lugar fue para Xmatch por hacer accesible la información y la visualización comparativa de datos en mapas.

Fayerwayer did the same on the Chilean side:

En Chile, el evento […] se llevó a cabo en la Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, concluyendo con la presentación de nueve proyectos de Santiago y cuatro de Temuco. […] Los tres primeros lugares fueron:

• Proyecto “Escuela Popular”: desarrollado por los ucranianos residentes en Chile Oleh Burkhay y Nadiia Vasylchenko, se trata de un portal que permita tener información actualizada y profunda de los colegios y escuelas del país. […] permite a las personas entregar puntos según diferentes indicadores a cada colegio, y comentar respecto al mismo, entregando mejor información a los padres que estén buscando la mejor alternativa.
• Proyecto “Presupuéstate”: […] busca proyectar cuánto necesitan ahorrar a largo plazo los padres de un estudiante para pagar la universidad del hijo. La aplicación hace el cálculo según el sueldo de la persona, mostrando una proyección de los aranceles según carrera. También hace recomendaciones de qué colegios pueden servirle al alumno para entrar a la carrera que quiere, según los puntajes PSU [Prueba de Selección Universitaria] de corte de cada carrera.
• Proyecto “Punto Seguro”: es una plataforma donde las personas de un barrio pueden marcar en el mapa un lugar de conflicto (donde ocurren robos, violencia, etc) y generar una discusión con los vecinos donde dar ideas sobre cómo combatir esa situación (instalar luminarias, organizar sistemas de alarma entre vecinos, etc).

Part of the Peruvian teams. Photo by Maru Panta/Escuelab.

In Perú, Escuelab reports about the winners from the 12 participating groups (Disclaimer: I [Juan Arellano] was part of the DAL panel in Lima):

El jurado otorgó el primer lugar al grupo #OTA por el proyecto Quiero Ir! que mediante un punto de inicio indicado manualmente o usando el GPS muestra en un mapa las rutas (líneas de transporte público) que llevan al usuario hasta el destino seleccionado. La aplicación ofrece además información referente a la empresa de transporte (número de ruta, distrito inicial, distrito final, etc) así como una foto referencial de la unidad.

En segundo lugar se eligió al equipo SEUSS. Su aplicación presupuestando.pe, brinda información de manera dinámica acerca de los indicadores presupuestales de los gobiernos regionales y locales proporcionando un fácil acceso a la información incentivando la participación ciudadana. (Presupuesto a nivel nacional). El proyecto se puede ver aquí: http://bibliotecuss.iideasperu.org/presupuestando/

En tercer lugar se eligió a ¡Salvemos las Huacas!, una plataforma web de mapeo ciudadano orientada a la defensa, conservación y protección del patrimonio arqueológico ante la amenaza del desborde urbano en nuestra ciudad.

In Argentina the winning projects were: 1- Del boletin (The Bulletin), 2- Datos Universitarios (University Data) and 3- Qué Sabemos de? (What do we know about…). In Brazil the Onde Acontece? (Where does it happen) project is reported to have won; and in Uruguay the following projects won: 1- Gobierno transparente (Transparent Government), 2- Reporte de Mapas (Map Report), 3- Moña Azul (Blue Bow). Finally the #DAL organisers announced the regional level winners:

1. Brasil – Onde Acontece. Team: São Paulo Perl Mongers. Team Leader: Thaigo Rondon.

2. Chile – Escuela Popular. Team: Oleyna. Team leader: Oleh Burkay.

3. Uruguay – Moña Azul. Team: Moñita Azul. Team leader: Fernando Briano.

DAL also added that “The developers, designers, engineers, professionals from the most diverse areas, gave a lesson to the world. Boundaries do not exist when it comes to solving real problems for our towns, nationalities don't exist when it comes to trying to solve problems that bring all Latin Americans together.”

Visualization of traffic accidents in Montevideo. Photo by Desarrollando América Latina.

Some of the developers that took part in the competition published their thoughts on their blogs. For example, Uruguayan developer Francisco Castro comments about the project he collaborated on:

Estuve participando en un grupo que busca acceder a la gente de “a pie” la información del parlamento. Datos interesantes, como las asistencias, los proyectos que presenta cada parlamentario; tanto los gastos suntuosos, como los pedidos de informes que estos parlamentarios realizan a las diversas dependencias del estado; … Transparencia. Darle al público también la posibilidad de opinar al respecto de cada asunto, de que la gente pueda indicar qué temas le interesan, y así informarse cada vez que se presenten proyectos, notas, etc… al respecto.

Sylvia, from the blog El mundo frente al mar, is another Uruguayan developer that took part in the competition. Out of all the things that the experience has given her, she mentions:

• Todas las pilas para aprender rápido y bien otros lenguajes como Java y Python. Yo sólo soy estudiante de UTU y mi intención al ir fue la de aprender y no la de ganar. Ahora, que voy a tener un premio entre manos, las ganas de superarme más allá del curso que hago son muy fuertes.
• Darse cuenta que con la informática también se puede ayudar en problemas diarios y en temas sociales. Sólo es cuestión de pensarlo y encontrarle la vuelta.

Also, Fernando Briano, another Uruguayan, in his blog Picando Código talks about his experience in #DAL and he concludes:

Me alegro de haber podido aportar mi granito de arena en algo mucho más grande que cada uno de los participantes, pero realizado con el trabajo colaborativo de todos.[…] Sabemos que estos proyectos, así como los proyectos de otros países, se segurián desarrollando. Próximamente habrán más hackatones de este estilo, donde espero ver más gente participando. Personalmente hoy estuve trabajando un poco en procesamiento de datos xls, ods y Google docs, y sé que Juan Manuel iba a mirar cosas de OCR para PDF y Fran estuvo mirando DJango (por influencia directa del evento). Sé que los demás equipos también piensan seguir el desarrollo, lo que marca el inicio de esta nueva etapa que comentaba. No hay que perder el impulso

Exhibition of one of the Mexican teams. Photo by Desarrollando América Latina.

This competition has, in equal measures, served to encourage the idea of hackathons [en] and public hackers in the region and to organise the community of people from diverse disciplines with experience in the use and exploitation of open data bases.

This might be a good starting point both to generate similar replicas or more ambitious activities from civil society organisations interested in these issues, as well as for the simple spread of the concept of open data, e-government and the social use of IT amongst the developers of the region and others who are interested. Hopefully these types of initiatives will become widespread throughout all Latin American countries.

Written by Juan Arellano · Translated by Kathryn Morgan · View original post [es] · comments (2)
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Following is an interview with Slovakian Michal Habala, who together with a colleague came up with the idea for Vorsr.sk in August 2008, using JUNG, an open-source Java project by a couple of students from the University of California.

Sample data visualisation from Vorsr.sk

Global Voices (GV): How much time did it take to launch Vorsr.sk before it went live? What were people's first reactions?

Michal Habala (MH): At the beginning we thought that it would be ready in a few weeks/months but when we saw the data quality in the business registry we decided to go deeper and implement data cleansing algorithms and other functionality. This and the fact that it is not a commercial project (it was always balanced between all our free time activities) meant that the beta version for public testing was released 18 months after we started. But I think it was worth it; the reactions are always very good, as we can present some results, which you would never be able to see in any other relevant project or tool.

GV: How did the idea change from day one? What are your users saying and how are you adapting to their needs?

MH: This tool is in never-ending development driven basically by our users. Every time we get an impulse from our users to add some functionality, we begin to analyze this request and try to make it happen.

GV: What are your plans for the near and distant future?

MH: The tool is evolving in time and now we are introducing a Czech version (beta version here) and probably in two months we are looking to introduce a Czechoslovak version (from both countries). This could be the first European project which provides information from joint business registries to the public (and it’s completely free).

GV: What is/was your main obstacle while developing and running the project?

MH: Probably poor data quality in the business registry. We tried to make this tool without downloading the data to our databases, so in Slovak it runs as an online wrapper of the business registry. This approach has its positives (like no problem with request limits and always up to date data) but recently we discovered that this approach has some limitations, which we want to overcome. This is mainly the data loading time and stability of the business registry, which is continuously getting worse. Even though we like the concept of using government services as data sources for our tool, we have to face the fact that these services have a long way to go before they can be used in such way.

GV: Was there anyone angry at you after you launched this project?

MH: I think that people still don’t get it what they can do with this tool. Most of our users just look at their own business and do not go deeper. Partly it’s our fault because we don’t pay much attention to the promotion of results yet. But we are going to change that and embed some introductory (tutorial) videos and results-showing videos in our home page. Then I can imagine that some business people would be annoyed that we used their case to present our tool. But in general I think there’s nothing to be worried about, it’s all public data already accessible through the public business registry.

GV: What will be new in the beta version?

MH: The beta version is completely new inside. There was some major object and internal structure redesign, which will improve stability, the speed of the applet and will allow us to easily integrate other countries and add other sources of information. Also some GUI [Graphical User Interface] redesign and new graph analyzing algorithms. So it will be quite new in the end, but we are talking about a wait of probably one year.

GV: I find this tool currently hard to use - there is lots of Java, it's quite slow in my browser. Don’t you lose some of your audience because of these issues?

MH: I know that Java is source consuming and therefore the whole tool is slower in browsers with large amounts of data loaded, but this tool was never meant to be used this way. It was designed to be a small applet for visualizing small graphs online loaded from the business registry. When we saw that big business cases are really big and you have to load very large graphs to see the context, we decided to make a real tool from it. The first step to overcome the speed issue was enabling the install of it as a desktop application, which runs faster. Another step is to release a new version with optimized algorithms (i.e. the beta version mentioned earlier). But at the end, it will never be a click-and-see component for everyone, it’s a tool and when a user wants to use it he/she has to accept its demands.

GV: What are the promotional plans? Do media and journalists use it?

MH: We don’t have information as to whether any media use it. I think that there are some media people among our users but that’s all. I have to say that we underestimated the value of promotion. We are mainly programmers but we have to face the fact that every project needs a promotion plan.

GV: Is there any business person who wants to sponsor you?

MH: This goes hand in hand with the question before I think. No promotion means no sponsor. On the other hand we are getting promo support from the Fair-play Alliance in Slovak Republic and now also from people of the Kohovolit.eu portal in the Czech Republic for which we are very thankful.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to do this interview.

Written by Jakub Górnicki · comments (1)
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Inspiration for the initiative came from a Slovak press watch blog (spw.blog.sme.sk) [sk] on which there were occasional posts about the country's Sunday debates and the factually inaccurate numbers/arguments that people had used in them. Projects such as PolitiFact and FactCheck in the United States fulfil the same function, where people analyse political claims and rate them as true/untrue/misleading/ etc.

Here, I spoke with Matej Hruska, the student founder of Demagog.sk.

Demagog.sk

Global Voices (GV): How much time did it take to launch the project before it went live? What were people's first reactions?

Matej Hruska (MH): We had a three months period of testing of what we would be capable of in terms of how much time is needed to analyse one television debate etc. We used the WordPress platform for the site, so to set it up was not very time consuming. First reactions were (and still are, when someone new comes to the site) that it is great to have someone who watches those political ramblings every Sunday. We launched the site couple of months before the elections so the attention was kind of logical.

GV: Has the idea changed since the start? What are your users saying and how are you adapting to their needs?

(MH): The idea is still the same, we use the same methodology, but we have upgraded the website and now we use a CMS made specifically for our needs (with statistics for every politician, etc).

Usually our users dont say much, or at least they don't say anything to us. The basic feedback we get is when someone is not satisfied with our analysis or conclusion.

GV: What are your plans for near and further future?

(MH): The plan is to cover debates on public radio as well, and to monitor politicians' claims continually during the week, e.g. at major press conferences, events etc. Another goal is to spread the concept to other countries.

GV: What is/was your main obstacle while developing and running your project?

(MH): As with any similar project, the main obstacle is lack of time and money. In the beginning we ran the whole thing as a voluntary project in our free time; since September [2011] we have been getting some funding and other volunteers from a Slovak NGO, SGI. But we still have to find a way how to make the whole thing sustainable.

GV: How do you attract more people to interact?

(MH): The basic idea is that we want people to dispute our conclusion (sort of “crowdsourcing” the fact checking) - we do not think we are absolutely right in every case. However, people often react in an angry way, which rules out any rational discussion. Given that our main field is to fact check statements, we dont have any other special feature which would give people more space to get engaged.

GV: Have politicians ever contacted you to “straighten something out”? Or do you contact them?

(MH): Sometimes we try to contact them - in cases when they are talking about some report or governmental analysis which is not (yet) online - but they usually do not react.

In a few cases, some of them have contacted us, by commenting under the articles or by email, to add something to their claims, or to prove their opponent had been wrong. We analyse such additional information and if it makes some sense, we add them to the original conclusion, with the byline that they are from such and such person.

GV: How do you collect materials? Do you work as a media monitoring service or do you cooperate with one?

(MH): We have transcripts of debates from Newton Media (a media analysis firm); any other material we look up on Google. That is our main source and tool.

GV: How do you promote your analysis? Do you paste links to some comments below articles on mainstream media?

(MH): We have several opportunities to publish our findings (in fact, too many at the current time, and we don't have time to use them all) in the national media or online. The thing is that we are the first one who are doing something like this here [in Slovakia], so we have been able to attract some media attention.

We also do a kind of “realtime fact check”- we analyse some of the claims during the debates on Sunday using the coveritlive platform. Two slovak news server use the embed code of the coveritlive on their websites.

Thanks for taking the time to answer above questions. Good luck.

Written by Jakub Górnicki · comments (2)
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On 21-22 of October the capital of Poland hosted the biggest Open Government Data (OGD) event in the world this year. It was organized by the Open Knowledge Foundation with the cooperation of Centrum Cyfrowe Projekt Polska (link Polish only). There were more than 250 people from 41 countries. You could talk to techies, members of transparency-oriented NGOs, journalists, social activists, government officials, EU Commission representatives and so on. During two days of the main conference and almost a week of satellite events, there was a lot of time to review different approaches to open government data, especially in terms of new trends and the future of the movement. […]

Open Government Data Camp venue: 'Panorama of the former M25 underground electronica club in Warsaw industrial area, during the OGD Camp. Funky cyberpunk feeling.' (Photo by Flickr user RealIvanSanchez; CC BY-SA 2.0).

The previous Open Government Data Camp event was held in London last year, and, as Ramine Tinati pointed out:

The beginning of the day started with a certain level of surrealism. The location and setting of the conference building was different, very different. It was once a factory, but now transformed into a nightclub. Dark and cold was the order of the morning, with a kick off time of 9:45 (ish). Rufus Pollock opened Open Government Data Camp 2011 with a great keynote, giving a quick introduction into the progress of Open Data, then delivered a few key points which seemed to trend throughout the day:

• Data is useless without communities and tools
• Tools need to be open source
• The Open Data communities need to grow

David Eaves, in his blog post “The State of Open Data 2011,” named the successes of the past year:

[…] One of the things that has been amazing to witness in 2011 is the veritable explosion of Open Data portals around the world. Today there are well over 50 government data catalogs with more and more being added. The most notable of these was probably the Kenyan Open Data catalog which shows how far, and wide, the open data movement has grown. […]

He also wrote about the current state and challenges of the open data movement:

[…] I'm impressed by the hundreds and hundreds of people here at the Open Data Camp in Warsaw. It is fun to be able to recognize so many of the faces here, the problem is that I can recognize too many of them. We need to grow this movement. There is a risk that we will become complacent, that we'll enjoy the movement we've created and, more importantly, our roles within it. If that happens we are in trouble. Despite our successes we are far from reaching critical mass. […]

Open Knowledge Foundation published a series of videos from the event on Vimeo.com.

More coverage can be found here and on Twitter.

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Last April, an Egyptian court ordered the dissolution of the political organization that had ruled the nation for decades, the National Democratic Party (NDP). At the time, the verdict was considered by many, including the Egyptian blogger, Zeinobia, as one of the achievements of the revolution, and a punishment for those who contaminated the political life in Egypt during Mubarak's era.

She wrote:

This long waited verdict is the best slap on the arrogance of the NDP members “former members to be accurate” who do not want to give up and admit the crimes they have committed against this great nation.

Since then the word “Felool” [ar], which translates to the “remnants of the former regime”, has become the newest addition to the daily vocabulary of Egyptians. Mohammad Salah described the meaning of the word in more detail:

Between seriousness and comedy, the word “remnants” has become the most frequently used word within Egyptian circles after the Revolution. The remnants are the defeated, or the leftovers of the former regime: whether those who worked within the executive apparatus and assumed high-ranking government positions; prominent figures of the dissolved National Democratic Party (NDP); MPs in the People’s Assembly and Shura Council who would gain their seats through fraud; or people affiliated with the Mubarak regime even if they did not work in the government or engaged in politics directly – such as businessmen, celebrities, artists, football players and people the regime would use to promote itself or to justify certain behavior, allow certain decisions to pass and promote the issue of Mubarak’s son inheriting the presidency!

And while the Egyptians are getting themselves ready for the parliamentary elections in November, the remnants of Mubarak regime became a serious issue to many of them. Some former members of the NDP launched new political parties, and some others will run independently. Even when it comes to other established parties, some of them decided to rely on the popularity of some ex-NDP members to gain more seats in parliament.

Azza Sedky wrote how Al-Wafd - one of the oldest Egyptian parties - is accused of integrating ex-members of the National Democratic Party into its lists.

She explained:

However, even the Wafd seems to be having issues with its lists, as certain members insist on running in the parliamentary polls, while the party's high commission thinks otherwise. Mostafa El-Gendy, who recently resigned from the party, was among those who censured the Wafd for allegedly integrating ex-members of ousted president Hosni Mubarak's National Democratic Party (NDP) into its lists.

Also Ramy Mahrous tweeted:

@RamyMahrous: Ayman @ayman_shweky claims some Parliament candidates belong to “Alwast” Party are ex-NDP #Matrouh #Egypt #Parliament #Elections

Issues like this resulted in many arguments either within the parties or between different parties within political blocs, and Bassem Sabry reported one of those example in his blog:

Reasons for the split include ex-NDP members running with the Egyptian Bloc, and also (of course) the allocation of seats within the Bloc.

One of the proposed solutions was a law that bans members of the former Egyptian ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) from running in the upcoming parliamentary elections. However, this caused much controversy as some political forces view it as necessary for a real democracy in Egypt, while others have criticized it for setting a precedent of political isolation.

Such a law is still being studied by the Higher Council for the Armed Forces (SCAF), and it is hard to wait for it with the elections around the corner, so some revolutionary youth came out with another solution. They created a new platform under the name Emsek-flol (Catch the former regime remnants) to list all those former NDP members and the electoral districts they are going to run in. Zeinobia blogged about the website here:

Just like Catch a thief Egyptian political groups and activists including April 6th Youth , Revolution Youth coalition and The Egyptian National Council “Mamdouh Hamza” have launched a great website that called : Emseklflol.com
This fantastic website includes all the names of ex-NDP leaders and important members as well former NDP members of the parliament , local councils and NDP’s headquarters in all our governorates. It is huge fantastic work. You can find names based on governorates with brief details about their positions in the NDP.
The most interesting section is the cadres of the NDP , its leaders. That list includes very powerful businessmen who are untouched up till now. The website includes the names of the parties made by the NDP remnants, of course they are more than 8 now.

This post is part of our special coverage of Egypt Protests 2011.

Written by Tarek Amr · comments (0)
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Our tribute for Ada Lovelace Day goes to women who are constantly working to make our world a more transparent and fair place; brave social leaders denouncing corruption while providing tools and directing campaigns who are increasing our awareness and uniting us to act for change.

'One Laptop Per Child' project. Image by Flickr user venkylinux (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

As we have done in the past, this year we are including smart women in the intersection between technology and social change who are a central presence in projects promoting a more accountable and transparent society.

Our tributes

Fernanda Viegas (@viegasf) is on the list of the top 100 more influential Brazilians. She is a computational designer whose work focuses on the social, collaborative, and artistic aspects of information visualization.

Viegas is a co-leader, with Martin Wattenberg, of Google's ‘Big Picture' data visualization group in Cambridge, MA. She is also one of the great minds behind public visualization platform Many Eyes, an experiment in open, public data visualization and analysis. In this video you can see her talk in TedX Sao Paulo:

Hok Kakada from Cambodia is creating a software program that will help Cambodian hospitals store data more accurately, allowing for better treatment. All her work is based on Open Source software. She challenged the difficulties girls face in her country and obtained a master degree in Japan.

Linda Kamau (@lkamau) is one of the coders behind the well known Ushahidi initiative. She is a software developer based in Kenya with a degree in Business Information Technology. Kamau develops both web and mobile applications and is contributing to change across continents, from election monitoring to corruption mapping.

Brenda Burell is the technical mind behind the Freedom Fone Project, a voice database where users can access news and public-interest information via land, mobile or Internet phones. Previously she directed the Kubatana initiative in Zimbabwe.

Camila Bustamante (@cabude), from Peru, is working on the design front, on design strategies for participatory processes mainly related to urban mobility, public space and new media. In 2010 Camila iniciated Todos somos dateros (”We are all data providers”), a participatory mechanism for sustainable urban mobility in Lima.

Working from the UK-based Open Knowledge Foundation, Kat Braybrooke @kat_braybrooke is a front-end web developer and Lucy Chambers (@lucyfedia) is in the process of learning how to code. They are involved in the organization of the world's biggest open government event, the Open Government Data Camp in Warsaw.

Kristin Antin (@kjantin) from the United States is participating in the design and organization of New Tactics in Human Rights, a technical on-line platform providing resources to human rights advocates that offer innovative tactical solutions for confronting specific local challenges, using technology.

Stephanie Hankey is the co-founder of Tactical Technology Collective, a small non-governmental organization dedicated to advance the skills, tools and techniques of rights advocates, empowering them to use information and communications as a critical asset in helping marginalised communities understand and effect progressive social, environmental and political change.

Daniela Silva (@danielabsilva) from Brazil is the founder of Sfera Brazil and Transparencia Hacker a community of over 800 designers, developers, coders and even government officers developing huge projects together to promote transparency and accountability.

These are some examples of brilliant women who are not afraid of the mouse, the screen, or the complexities of coding. They are inspiring others by doing amazing projects, all of them contributing to social change.

If you have an example in mind today, we invite you to write about them, to describe the amazing women working in technology you know; women who are an example and inspiration for girls in the generations to come as Ada Lovelace, more than hundred years ago, was for many others. Share your stories and inspire others!

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There has been an expanding and increasingly global movement of technology and digital media projects aimed at promoting government transparency, accountability, and public participation in political processes. After documenting dozens of cases around the world, the Technology for Transparency Network, a project of Rising Voices, documented these transparency projects to gain a better understanding of their current impact, obstacles, and future potential. Now it is time to start the conversation, with the help of the wonderful platform ‘New Tactics for Human Rights'.

Image by whiteafrican on Flickr (under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license).

This week we are inviting 11 experts from all over the world, from different projects promoting openness, collaboration and transparency, to answer your questions, comment on interesting topics and discuss the future of technology in promoting transparency.

Join Elizabeth Wolf from Ciudadano Inteligente (Smart Citizen), Chile; Susannah Vila and Jorge Soto from Citivox, Mexico; Mike Linksvayer from Creative Commons; Jonathan Gray from Open Knowledge Foundation, UK; Diego Casaes from Eleitor 2010, Brazil; Camila Bustamante from Dateros, Peru; Ulrich Muller from Germany; Maya Indira Ganesh from Tactical Technology Collective; John (Kipp) Kipchumbah of InfoNet, Kenya; Amr Gharbeia, Technology and Freedoms Programme Officer for the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights; and Mendi Njonjo, Fund Manager for the Africa Technology and Transparency Initiative in Kenya.

The dialogue is an opportunity to share these case studies and tools with the New Tactics online community, learn from the experiences of practitioners implementing these projects, and discuss new ideas, challenges, risks and opportunities. Join us online from September 21-27 to share your stories, ideas and resources.

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The report is being published by the Transparency and Accountability Initiative (@TAInitiative) along with a over a dozen other reports on the global transparency movement. The reports focus on three key research areas: Impact and Learning, New Technologies, and Policy Innovations.

Many thanks go to the Transparency and Accountability Initiative for supporting our work, to our amazing team of researchers, and to David Sasaki, who launched and directed the initial phase of the Technology for Transparency Network, which laid the groundwork for this report.

Get the report

• Full report via the Transparency and Accountability Initiative
• Executive summary: English

Executive Summary

This report contains the key findings from having reviewed more than 100 projects and having interviewed dozens of practitioners in Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the former Soviet Union, and Sub-Saharan Africa who use new technologies as a means to increase transparency and accountability. This summary helps to ‘take the pulse‘ of the Technology for Transparency and Accountability movement and suggests both exciting possibilities for scaling impact as well as important caveats and challenges.

For practitioners in the transparency and accountability space, it is useful to frame the potential for leveraging technology towards transparency and accountability initiatives in at least four ways:

• Bringing projects and interventions to scale.
• Bringing citizens closer to the policymaking process through new and improved channels of participation as well as citizen monitoring of government.
• Identifying policy priorities and service delivery challenges through ‘data mashing‘ and other visualisation and data manipulation techniques of both government and private datasets.
• Improving the efficiency of civil society organisations working in the transparency and accountability space through adoption of best practice technology platforms.

Additional Findings

The majority of projects we studied focus on the executive or legislative branches of government.  A smaller number of projects focus on the judicial branch, the media, the private sector, and donors.

Nearly half of the projects focus on monitoring elections.  While many of these use Ushahidi, some have developed their own approaches, including aggregating elections news from multiple sources on a single site and tracking official election monitors’ reports on Google Maps.

Projects in multiple regions focus on transparency in the legislature, often tracking legislative bills and posting profiles for each representative that include biographies and voting records. Some also include profiles of political parties or records of legislative spending.

Data visualization and navigation tools are a key feature in more than half of the projects we documented, as are diverse forms of data collection from citizens. Approximately one third of the projects use mobile phones in some way, most commonly by allowing citizens to submit or receive information via text messages.

What's next?

The Technology for Transparency Network website will remain open as a place where we can share projects, tools, and ideas, as a meeting point for successful initiatives and those who want to learn from the work others have done. You can subscribe to our mailing list, read or contribute with specialized articles on Global Voices Online, and follow us on Twitter (@techtransparent) and Facebook. This field is just beginning to emerge, and we look forward to helping nurture global efforts through collaboration and communication across borders.

Written by Renata Avila · comments (1)
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Manuel Aristarian

When Manuel Aristaran (@manuelaristaran) heard the news about controversial contracts by the local government in the Argentinian city of Bahía Blanca, he explored its website and noticed that expenses by the municipality were simply not accessible: they were published in a long list and without tools to explore the data, and the format did not offer an efficient and effective way to watch the expenses. He decided to solve that problem and take transparency in Bahía Blanca to the next level, a more participatory one.

RA: Why did you start your project?

MA: I've always been interested in public policies and the real impact of data on how they're designed. After the news of some controversial purchases made by the government of Bahía Blanca broke out, I learned that its website contains information about some of the public contracts and purchases. Those documents were published as a long list, and the municipality's site doesn't provide any additional tools to explore that information. I thought that scraping, structuring and building a simple site to display that information (that is, transforming data into knowledge) might be a nice weekend project. After few weekends, I released Gasto Público Bahiense.

RA: Why did you get involved? What is your inspiration to dedicate your weekends to Gasto Público Bahiense?

MA: I think that involvement in public affairs is impossible if we don't understand how the government works. In other words, you can't commit to something you don't understand. Making government data available in a simple, concise and clear way is a step in the direction of “educating” people about their actions of their government.

RA: How are things changing after the release of your idea? Any success stories?

MA: There's been some reaction from inside the government: the city's legislative body declared the site of ‘municipal interest'. The project also succeeded in educating some government officials on the importance of publishing  information in open and standard formats.

RA: Can you describe the obstacles and barriers you overcome to create your project?

MA: The lack of good government data and the lack of a solid legal framework that guarantees that they won't stop publishing the information just because. In Argentina, the OpenData grassroots movement is just starting. Together with other transparency NGOs, we're trying to think of ways of raising awareness about the importance of making governments more transparent and accountable. That, I hope, will lead to better policies of transparency and information.

RA: As a concerned citizen, do you want other local governments to do the same? Are you sharing your knowledge and expertise with others? Tell me more about “the power of shared code”.

MA: During an Open Data Hackathon, the code that powers Gasto Público Bahiense was used to display purchase data from other local governments in Argentina.  Anyone can grab the code and adapt it. It just had to write the code that extracts the data from those cities' websites.

RA: Your idea has inspired others to explore the potential of open data, right? How are people using your tool?

MA: Yes, different actors have used my project in many ways, for example hyperlocal news outlets used the website as source, businesses that sell to the local government use the site to check on their competitors, and when government purchases are available, consumers can access a good reference to compare prices.

It is well known that corruption in Argentina is widespread and hinders the political system and the economic growth, in spite of its highly educated citizens. However, “social entrepreneurs” like Manuel use their skills to foster change and invite others to copy the idea and do the same, everywhere.

Written by Renata Avila · comments (1)
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Although the video documents [RUS] many other offenses committed by the policeman, it is this particular comment that has drawn public attention. In Ukraine, the official state language is Ukrainian, native to 67.5% of the population, according to the 2001 census. The second most used language is Russian, with 29.6% of the population considering it their mother tongue. Although the primary language spoken in Odesa is Russian, according to the country’s Constitution, Ukrainian must be used in the public sphere, in particular, when state officials exercise their immediate duties [UKR].

After the video appeared on YouTube, the Ukrainian Ministry of the Interior instructed [UKR] the Traffic Police Department to conduct an internal investigation into the incident, which uncovered that, while fulfilling his duties, the policeman - Sergeant Shvets - has violated at least three laws, including the Constitution. For the police officer in question these findings resulted in an immediate job loss.

This incident, although widely publicized, is not the first case of unlawful actions committed by traffic police exposed through the Internet. In August 2010, for example, a video of a traffic inspector from the town of Haisyn insulting a driver was uploaded to YouTube, after which the officer was fired [RUS]. Another policeman from the Crimean city of Dzhankoy was investigated and then fired [RUS] after a video of him harassing a driver appeared online.

Amidst such cases, the Ukrainian public has learned about a civic initiative called “Road Control.” According to the project’s website [RUS], its central advice to drivers is to know their rights and to openly film their encounters with police officers. For instance, “Road Control” claims [RUS] that it was one of their activists who filmed Sergeant Shvets mentioned above.

After the recent events, the Ukrainian Ministry of the Interior has ordered [UKR] additional legal training for its traffic inspectors, while stressing unacceptability of offensive language or signs of discrimination of any kind towards citizens by its employees. Moreover, in a December 2010 interview to the TV channel “1+1″ a spokesperson for the Kyiv Traffic Police Department admitted that the use of cameras was helping both drivers and police officers to “avoid ambiguous situations” [UKR].

While the number of corrupt traffic cops being exposed online continues to grow, more and more Ukrainian drivers install cameras in their vehicles [UKR].

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As Geert Lovink and Patrice Riemens point out in their article “Ten Theses about Wikileaks,” the organization's release of sensitive government information used technology to capture the attention of millions:

Wikileaks manages to capture that attention by way of spectacular information hacks where other parties, especially civil society groups and human rights organizations, are desperately struggling to get their message across. Wikileaks genially puts to use the ‘escape velocity’ of IT — using IT to leave IT behind and irrupt into the realm of real-world politics.

But which tools are they using to capture and keep the attention of people and media, and ultimately change the government opaqueness they fight? More importantly, how can citizens collaborate in this innovative, real-time, diplomacy-focused call for accountability?

Traditional media partners

Wikileaks gave five major media outlets — the The Guardian, Le Monde [fr], El País, Der Spiegel, and New York Times — preliminary access to the cables. By combining a digital release with publication by traditional media, Wikileaks — and other online transparency organizations — are able to reach a broader audience and spread information in different formats and vehicles. Wikileaks' constant updates on Twitter even made it to the U.S. Department of State press conference and several international media organizations who made references to them.

Visualization tools

The majority of Wikileaks' media partners and the Cablegate site are using easy-to-understand graphics to communicate the data in a more comprehensive way. Information Aesthetics has a roundup of the different visualization techniques. Fast Company has taken a slightly different approach, constructing a Wordle based on the cables.

Cablegate Wordle, via Fast Company

Crowdsourcing

Cablegate created a way where any user anywhere around the world can easily browse and locate any cable of interest for them and draw their own conclusions. Wikileaks is inviting users to search for events that happened in their own countries. They can, for example, check key dates of relevant events to see if they can find any references in any cable, then share their analyses and findings using Web 2.0 tools. This is essentially crowdsourced accountability by anyone, anywhere in the world. Other organizations are taking advantage of this, encouraging citizens to “get their hands dirty” and dig through the cables for relevant information: the National Security Archive blog “Unredacted” published a guide on how to read Department of State documents and a list of commonly used acronyms in the cables.

Wikileaks is encouraging citizens to share their findings:

Pick out interesting events and tell others about them. Use twitter, reddit, mail whatever suits your audience best. For twitter or other social networking services please use the #cablegate or unique reference ID (e.g. #66BUENOSAIRES2481) as hash tags.

Perhaps we are witnessing a change of era, where the voices of citizens will replace the whispering of secrets behind close doors and foreign relations will switch to a more open diplomacy. Perhaps not. Regardless, after this release the world will have a new model to follow.

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Networked citizens around the world have today a unique opportunity to create a global front against corruption by embracing and adopting free culture freedoms. Applying free culture principles in the fight against corruption, increases its effectiveness and enables better informed policies and a coordinated effort across national boundaries and areas of interests.

As the recent 14th International Conference Against Corruption in Thailand stated, to foster the transparency agenda it is necessary to restore people’s trust and rebuild the credibility of institutions. Those who fight against corruption should go beyond expressions of political will to concrete action. Also, it is crucial to engage youth, as pointed out by Bunga Manggiasih, one of the international young journalists who collaborated to cover the event. One of the best bridges to connect and engage youth in the use — and the invention — of technology to fight corruption is to organize efforts to connect different communities and take action. Several of these events are taking place this week:

Open Gov Data Camp in London

Open Gov Data Catalogues available to any UK citizen offer an unprecedented opportunity to achieve more open, accountable, responsive and efficient approach against corruption and the culture of secrecy that prevailed in the past. OpenGov Data Camp will take place November 18-19, 2010, with representatives from different countries attending and holding discussions around around key legal, technical, and policy issues related to opening up government information. The camp will also offer a space for for developers and hackers to make things, learning from each other and from their mistakes.  You will be able to follow on Twitter (#ogdcamp) and via live notes/discussions on the OKF Etherpad site.

Personal Democracy Forum Latin America in Chile

As you can see in on the Technology for Transparency Network map, Latin America is one of the most vibrant regions in the World, where initiatives to engage citizens, promote transparency and fight corruption are flourishing and connecting their numerous digital natives, creating a bridge for them to better understand how their governments work, why transparent elections and the funding behind political parties matter, and why they should care about their parliaments, among other issues. On November 18 -19, 2010, @PDFLatAm will take place in Santiago, Chile. Latin American leaders and activists will share the new developments in the region and will learn from peers at projects based in the US, Africa and Europe, including Rising Voices former Director  David Sasaki and Ushahidi co-founder Patrick Meier. A group of Global Voices authors and translators will be there and will share their event insights with you. The Technology for Transparency Network will also be live-tweeting in Spanish during the event at @transparentech.

Polska Transparency Camp in Poland

Citizens who “do instead of talk” are at the core of any efficient and sustainable initiative involving technology and actions against corruption. Following such principles and engaging leaders from different countries to share their experiences, 150 people with different backgrounds will attend Polska Transparency Camp in Warsaw, Poland. Citizens together with a variety of speakers from different countries and backgrounds, connected by the Internet, will work together to connect different sectors, brainstorm ideas, and define the path to a more transparent and accountable society in Poland. You can watch the live event online and follow Technology for Transparency researcher Sylwia Presley on Twitter at @presleysylwia for updates.

Open Data Day Hackathon

The global Open Data Day Hackathon offers a unique opportunity to gather people around the world to act for transparency by developing applications using the open public data available in their country. The idea is to invite developers, designers, librarians, statisticians, and citizens of all kinds to spend one day working together. The event will take place on December 4, 2010, and it's not to late to join the global effort in your community.

All of these events offer ways for citizens to get involved in technology-based efforts to promote transparency and accountability, encouraging more active, engaged, effective digital activism against corruption. If you're able to get involved, we encourage you to do so — even though the Technology for Transparency Network operates mostly online, face to face contact with communities interested in a more open and transparent world is often crucial to making these efforts successful.

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We're also excited to announce a new feature on the Technology for Transparency site: over the summer, we've revised the way we categorize our case studies to make exploring the site and browsing the interviews more engaging. The projects we interviewed are complex and multifacted: for example, Dinero y Política (Money and Politics) in Argentina focuses on campaign finance; however, because of the type of technological tools it uses and its approach to financial data, it could also be considered an example of budget monitoring.

Our new categorization system lets visitors to the site explore the case studies through four different lenses:

1. The actor(s) whose actions the projects target (for example, the legislative branch of government).
   • Donors
   • Executive Branch
   • Judicial Branch
   • Legislative Branch
   • Media
   • Political Parties
   • Private Sector
2. The function(s) said actors perform (for example, elections, budgets, or government service delivery).
   • Budgets
   • Elections
   • Extractive Industries/Natural Resource Governance
   • Government Services
3. The type of technology tools they use (for example, mobile tools or data collection tools).
   • Data collection
   • Data visualization
   • Connect and engage (social media)
   • Mobile
   • Traditional (print and broadcast)
4. The project's scale (national, municipal, etc.).
   • Neighborhood
   • Municipal
   • Sub-national
   • National
   • International

The “Quick Look” section at the top of each case study lists the categories for that case — have fun clicking around to see what other projects fall into those categories!

The Quick Look feature at the top of each case study lets you browse our case studies by multiple categories.

We welcome your feedback on these cases, and the cases we'll be publishing throughout the month. Please feel free to leave comments on individual interviews, to message us on Twitter (in @techtransparent in English; @transparentech in Spanish/Portuguese), or to drop us a line on our Facebook page. We look forward to hearing from you!

Next week: new cases from India, Russia, the Philippines, and East Africa!

Written by Rebekah Heacock · comments (0)
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As the Technology for Transparency Network has mapped different transparency projects around the world, we have been excited to discover how enthusiasm for a more ethical and transparent society is flourishing everywhere, both with the increase use of technologies and with a growing awareness that corruption should not be tolerated by citizens.

A protagonist of these changes is India, the largest, most diverse democracy in the world. India is a pioneer in open government and open access strategies with an exponentially increasing innovation in technologies. It is not a coincidence that the country that is producing the cheapest laptop in the world is also partnering with other countries such as the United States to foster open government initiatives:

India is at the vanguard of figuring out how to exploit technology and innovation on behalf of democratic accountability. U.S.-based groups, as well as those throughout the developed and developing world, could learn an enormous amount from these efforts. And India may well become a kind of “city on the hill” that other countries look to for lessons on not only how to pull millions of people out of poverty, but also on how to strengthen democratic accountability.
— US Open Government Blog

Important to mention is that India is a federated state with a diversity of languages and realities. That is why many of the initiatives are focused on local transparency and how to hold local authorities accountable, such as the Accountability Initiative, the first case of our second round of global case studies. Project Director Yamini Aiyar shares the project's mission to improve public service delivery:

Our big vision is to promote an informed and accountable public delivery system. We do this in two ways. For such a system to exist, the government system has to exist in a form that is transparent and responsive to citizens’ needs, and citizens must be empowered with information so they can place their demands and push for greater accountability. All our work is to pull these two threads together. PAISA and Expenditure Track are examples of that. The second aspect of our work is to generate debate on the accountability issue.

Visit the Technology for Transparency website to explore other technology for transparency projects from India.

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