This report is the culmination of four months of research examining the objectives, challenges, successes, and effects of online technology projects that aim to promote transparency, political accountability, and civic engagement in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, China, and Central & Eastern Europe. A team of eight regional researchers documented a total of 37 case studies of relevant technology projects. Though this report contains only executive summaries of each case study, full interviews including audio podcasts and related documents, are available on our website. In addition to the in-depth case studies, we have also documented over 30 project listings, which provide basic descriptive information and context about related projects.

This report is structured in three sections. The introduction examines the differing aspects between traditional watchdog journalism and online media that rely on raw data sources, often directly from government websites. The introduction also aims to contextualize the benefits of transparency, accountability, and civic engagement from a grassroots, networked perspective. The second section of the report consists of regional overviews authored by each of our eight researchers. These overviews document the history of the good governance movement in each region, the role of technology in promoting transparency and accountability, and summaries of the case studies they documented. The concluding section groups case studies thematically in order draw out trends, conclusions, and recommendations that apply across a number of projects.

Here's a teaser:

The birth of the World Wide Web as we know it today dates back to March 1989 when Tim Berners Lee, then a research fellow at European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, wrote a proposal for an Internet framework that would allow online documents to link to one another. Eight months later in neighboring Germany protesters brought down the Berlin Wall, and with it fell more than half a century of Communist rule in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. The next decade would also see an end to the repressive era of military dictatorships in Latin America, the birth of multiparty democracy in much of Sub- Saharan Africa, and a financial crisis in Southeast Asia that led to calls for greater governance and improved accountability. The World Wide Web and the movement for transparency and accountability in government have grown up together over the past two decades, though often in parallel, and with little research evaluating the role and potential of online technologies to bring about greater transparency, accountability, and civic engagement.

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Those five categories encompass the vast majority of projects that we documented throughout our research. However, there are five other categories of technology for transparency projects that are also worth reviewing from a thematic perspective.

Crime Mapping

A number of websites have cropped up over the past few years in the United States and United Kingdom to add transparency and accessibility to crime reports from municipal police departments. CrimeMapping.com, Oakland Crimespotting, CrimeMapper, LAPD Crime Maps, CrimeReports, SpotCrime, Crimedar, and EveryBlock (which began in 2005 as ChicagoCrime.org) are just a few such examples. Outside of the United States and United Kingdom the majority of crime mapping projects seem to be based in Latin America, which claims 8% of the world's population, 40% of world's homicides, and 66% of kidnappings.

WikiCrimes.org is a collaborative, global, multilingual mapping of crimes around the world that is built with WikiMapps software. It was conceived by Vasco Furtado, Professor at the University of Fortaleza, Brazil where he coordinates a research group in “Knowledge Engineering.” All data can both be imported and exported in the open standard KML format. WikiCrimes currently has 13,117 reports of crime, almost all of which are based in Brazil. Reports can be filtered by category, time, and credibility. Users can sign up for notifications of crime reports based on their customized filters, and there is a beta mobile application available in Portuguese. All crime reports are ranked by their number of views, comments, and confirmations, and are re-distributed via Twitter. Users can confirm crime reports by linking to relevant news items or video and photographic evidence of the actual crime. So far the most commented crime is a homicide that took place on March 29, 2008 at 11 in the evening in Sao Paulo. It has received 22 positive confirmations, one negative confirmation, and four comments.

Delitos Ecuador is a project of Fundapi which uses Ushahidi to collect and aggregate crime reports in Ecuador. Reports can also be submitted via Twitter using the hashtag #delitosEC. The Illegal Drug Trade Map in Argentina combines a blog with a Google map. It was created by the Argentinian Association Against Drugs and enables citizens to learn more about the illegal drug trade in Argentina, and to submit locations where they have seen drug dealing take place. Panamá Transparente uses Ushahidi to aggregate and map reports about crime in Panama. Iluminemos Mexico is a citizen network against violence in Mexico that maps crimes and invites users to discuss and implement solutions to internal security problems. Outside of Latin America, Sithi is a Cambodian human rights portal that aims to crowdsource and curate reports of human rights violations across multiple human rights organizations.

Recommendations:

While most crime mapping websites in the United States visualize official crime data from municipal police departments, which can then be confirmed and commented on by users, all of the crime mapping projects we documented depend on individual citizens to provide the information. This is likely due to the fact that police departments in most of the world still do not publish their crime reports, much less in a structured format that can be automatically mapped and re-purposed. We recommend to crime mapping project coordinators that they work in collaboration with local police departments in order to automate the publishing of official crime data. If a project has successfully convinced a police department to publish its crime reports, we suggest that they publish their experience to help provide like-minded projects with an advocacy strategy.

While mapping crime helps us better understand both where it occurs and how crime spreads over time, it does not necessarily lead toward pro-active solutions. In fact, it can even lead to paranoia and social exclusion if residents react by merely investing in higher walls and more expensive alarm systems. Crime mapping platforms should focus on prevention as much as after-the-fact reporting. We recommend that they integrate their content with social groups that are working in neighborhoods where crime is prevalent and youth are at risk.

We believe that crime mapping platforms should collaborate with local bloggers, journalists, and activists to host monthly discussions about how to deal with a crime problem that has been particularly troublesome over the past four weeks. We suggest that it is useful to think of crime through the lens of epidemiology, with a focus on curing the disease.

Extractive Industries

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill illustrates and justifies the public's interest in the activities of extractive industries. The Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative aims to bring about greater disclosure of payments from companies to governments, contracts and information on how revenues are spent by the oil, mining, and gas sectors. We believe that the movement for greater extractive industry transparency would benefit from the use of technology to bring about greater awareness of the activities of the extractive industries, but so far we have been able to find few examples of existing projects.

Publish What You Pay is a global civil society coalition that helps citizens of resource-rich developing countries hold their governments accountable for the management of revenues from the oil, gas and mining industries. It has supported a number of capacity building workshops worldwide. Landman Report Card is a project of the ExtrAct group at MIT which aims to provide information and tools to residents whose land is coveted by oil and gas companies. While its focus is almost entirely on the United States, the platform and resources can also be used by residents worldwide.

Nomad Green is a multilingual platform for Mongolian environmental citizen journalists to document environmental threats and climate change in their country. Much of their reporting and documentation has focused on the environmental and social impact of open-pit mining. They use SeeClickFix to map examples of harmful and illegal mining, and to encourage direct action. The Observatory of Mining Conflicts in Latin America has a rudimentary map which links to information about mining-related community conflicts that have taken place throughout Latin America. So far it links to information about 136 different conflicts.

Recommendations:

We recommend that Publish What You Pay, Revenue Watch Institute, and the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative all attend and host barcamps that invite technologists and bloggers to strategically discuss how online tools can be used to bring about more transparency in the extractive industries - both in terms of environmental/social impact and also financial corruption. The World Wildlife Federation's Amazon Map and the Louisiana Bucket Brigade Oil Spill Crisis Map are two models for mapping impact, whereas Sourcemap illustrates a potential platform to map the flow of money related to extractive industries.

Local Government

In our podcast interview, Fabiano Angelico observed that while most technology for transparency projects focus on federal government transparency, their potential for impact is in fact much stronger at the local level where users are likely to be more invested in policy decisions that directly affect their daily lives. Compared to national level projects we were able to find relatively few technology for transparency projects at the local level, however it is also likely that there is less awareness and available information about those projects.

Local Accountability Portals in Atitlan provides easy-to-use and cheap tools to help local municipalities of four different villages in the department of Sololá to publish all the information required by law on their local government websites. Concejo Visible Bucaramanga is an initiative coordinated by Universidad Industrial de Santander in Colombia to make more transparent the activities of the Bucaramanga Municipal Council Administration. It also opened a collaborative space to share ideas and discuss policies that matter to them. Concejo Visible Bucaramanga is, in fact, one of a number of similar citizen-led transparency initiatives that make up the Colombian Network of Citizen Observers.

Adote um Vereador encourages Brazilian citizens to blog about the work of their local elected officials in order to hold them accountable. Fabiano Angelico, our research reviewer who is also based in Sao Paulo, suggests that participating bloggers should pick a monthly topic and try to raise awareness and advocate for more government data related to that one topic. It is worth noting that a similar “adopt a politician” campaign began in Peru in 2008 when the well known journalist Rosa María Palacios asked citizens to mount pressure in order to get information about the operational expenses of national congressmen. Juan Arellano wrote an in-depth review of the project, which is no longer active following the overwhelming resistance by most congressmen.

Recommendations:

We recommend to all developers and coordinators of local technology for transparency projects that they read Georg Neumann's post “Developing Hyper-Local Integrity Systems to fight and prevent corruption“, which encourages such projects to use the National Integrity System Assessment as a holistic framework to analyze both the extent and causes of corruption in a given country.

We also support and encourage the replication of “adopt a politician” projects in all municipalities worldwide to create more awareness and accountability at the local level.

Private Sector:

We specifically set out to document projects that aim to increase government transparency and political accountability, but throughout the course of our research it became clear that several private sector transparency projects are explicitly in the public's interest, including those related to consumer rights and the environmental/social impact of corporate behavior.

Quien Paga Manda (”Who Pays is in Charge”) is a Costa Rican blog by former journalist (and Technology for Transparency Network advisor) Hazel Feigenblatt. It serves as an information resource about the responsiveness of businesses to customers who have received poor service. It is also meant to amplify the voices of citizens who otherwise have no recourse to hold private businesses accountable. Issues are categorized by electronics, banks, restaurants, public services, and vehicles. Reclamos.cl is a similar consumers' rights platform based in Chile, which has a strong focus on working with broadcast media to distribute and amplify stories about companies that are unresponsive to consumer complaints. So far they have managed to facilitate 1,869 mainstream media stories, which are broken down by media outlet on their front page. In addition to filing complaints, users can also list recommendations for positive service experiences. A business directory lists complaints by business, and select complaints are featured on the “emphasized complaints” page. Every complaint lists the number of comments it has received and the number of times it has been read.

Sourcemap is an open source, global platform for researching, optimizing and sharing the supply chains behind a number of everyday products. “We believe that people have the right to know where things come from and what they are made of,” declares the website. Sample sourcemaps include a Giant TCR ‘04 Bicycle, iPod, Tesla Roadster, and IKEA Sultan Alsarp bed. Sourcemaps are organized by user-submitted tags, and also by “most favorited”, “most commented”, and “most complex”.

CorpWatch is a San Francisco-based aggregator and platform of articles, blog posts, investigative reports, statistics, and multimedia related to the corporate accountability worldwide. It categorizes its content by industry and issue.

Recommendations:

In most developing countries the past two decades have seen the privatization of many industries that were once run by the government. As privatization continues, citizens must develop new tools to hold those new private corporations accountable. Archon Fung rightly points out that the transparency movement should focus on private companies at least as much as government agencies. We recommend to all technology for transparency activists that they invest more of their time on projects that hold corporations accountable.

All of the above-mentioned projects publish content related to multinational corporations. Most of them categorize that content per corporation to create site-wide business directories. But we do not yet have an aggregator of all of this related content across multiple platforms to provide a more comprehensive look at the responsiveness, behavior, and social/environmental impact of major corporations. We recommend that private sector transparency projects convene a conference to agree on semantic standards that can easily be aggregated and re-purposed across their platforms.

As one of the ultimate goals of such projects is to improve the behavior and responsiveness of corporations, we recommend that private sector transparency projects partner with business schools to systematically study what advocacy strategies are most effective in convincing corporations to voluntarily become more accountable. For example, is it possible to organize a competition on Sourcemap where major clothing companies voluntarily submit the supply chains of their products to compete for the lowest carbon footprint?

Advocacy:

Admittedly, the most nebulous category of projects on the Technology for Transparency Network is “advocacy.” At worst it can be seen as something of a miscellaneous dumping ground of all projects that don't belong elsewhere. On the other hand, advocacy projects can also be seen as the glue which holds together all of the above-mentioned categories, and tries to fill the gaps in the transparency and accountability ecosystem. Unless awareness is spread in government, the media, and civil society about the need for such projects, they will never scale up to a level where their impact can be measured over time.

More information more Rights [Más Información Más Derechos] promotes public debate on access to public information in Colombia. In addition to its blog, it also promotes discussion and distributes information via Twitter, Facebook, Slideshare, and Scribd. Képmutatás, which means “hypocrisy” in Hungarian, advocates for more transparency in campaign financing in Hungary by estimating the unreleased expenses made by political parties during election campaigns and distributing their findings through traditional and social media. Kubatana.net has built a network of over 200 civil society organizations in Zimbabwe, an archive of over 15,800 documents, and an SMS subscriber list of over 9,000 individuals. It promotes collective action, such as a campaign to determine how toll booth revenue is being used by the government. Saatsaam, which means ‘clean’ in Khmer, aims to encourage public participation in promoting transparency by raising awareness about the impact of corruption, and making related documents freely available. ProAcceso, founded by Mercedes de Freitas of the Venezuelan chapter of Transparency International, is a coalition of organizations in Venezuela that advocate for timely, relevant government data related to public health, education, politics, law enforcement, the use of public resources, and salaries of public officials.

Recommendations:

Most advocacy projects we documented target either governments or the general public in their efforts to increase awareness about the importance of transparency and accountability, and the role that open data plays in bringing about both. We recognize that each audience is distinct and requires different strategies.

For groups advocating to governments, we recommend that they frame their advocacy in terms of cooperation rather than hostility. Transparency and accountability should be framed as pathways toward political credibility. We specifically recommend that advocacy groups seek out like-minded supporters who work in high government positions and depend on them to help promote and amplify the importance of transparent governance and open data from within.

For groups advocating to the general public, we recommend that they work closely with both mainstream and social media. The World Bank and Transparency International have published a number of guides and white papers on how to design effective anti-corruption campaigns. People, Spaces, Deliberation, a blog of the World Bank's CommGAP initiative, also frequently publishes recommendations and case studies related to advocacy campaigns for transparency and accountability.

As much as possible, avoid acronyms and unnecessarily technical language. Creativity always helps draw attention to your cause. For example, Fifth Pillar, an NGO headquartered in Chennai, India, printed “Zero Ruppees” bills with the image of Ghandi to be given to any official asking for a bribe. The initiative was covered by CNN, the Economist, the Telegraph, Boing Boing, and many other international media outlets. Fifth Pillar received calls from interested groups in Nepal, Argentina, Mexico, France and Germany who wanted to implement their own zero currency projects.

The Zero Rupees initiative was a creative response to spread awareness about the problem of bribery in India. Similar creativity should be applied to initiatives and campaigns that advocate for open government data.

Conclusion:

With this post we conclude the first phase of our research into the role of technology in the transparency and accountability movement. Our platform, however, remains open to new submissions of relevant, innovative projects, and we anticipate a second phase of research with a greater focus on evaluation for impact.

One of the most difficult challenges throughout our research was simply developing a taxonomy to categorize and describe the projects we documented. We recognize that technology for transparency projects might choose to describe themselves and their objectives in language that differs from traditional anti-corruption organizations and the donors that fund them. We believe that categories on the website will always be dynamic and will shift as new projects come online and maturing projects evolve their objectives and strategies.

Over the next few days all of our research will be bundled into a single PDF document for the sake of cohesiveness and distribution. However, we emphasize that the distribution of reports is not as significant as the distribution of new ideas that turn into concrete projects and partnerships. As such, the objective of the Technology for Transparency Network will always be to facilitate the sharing and learning of skills and strategies across projects, sectors, and communities. We aim to translate our findings into as many languages as possible. (Already our findings have been translated into Portuguese, French, Chinese, Spanish, and Bahasa.) In the future we hope to host live chats with developers, bloggers, and activists focused on similar works of engagement in order to spread the best ideas and come up with new ones.

We will especially re-distribute our findings, conclusions, and recommendations to all groups and projects that have been mentioned throughout our research. And we will work with like-minded research and mapping projects including ParticipateDB, Participedia, the International Association for Public Participation, the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation, ePractice, MobileActive's mDirectory, and LocalLabs to ensure that our work is cross-linked and cross-verified.

We encourage interaction, new ideas, and challenges to everything we have published. Please do get involved to help push the discourse and the movement forward.

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But then, Classical Athens in the 5th Century BC was made up of only around 30,000 eligible voters. (The vast majority of Athenian society was comprised of slaves without civil rights; women also could not vote or own property.) With just 30,000 participants, Athens could be governed by direct democracy. Adult Athenian men did not elect representatives to vote on their behalf, but voted on legislation and executive bills in their own right. Today's average national democracy, in comparison, attempts to govern over 30 million individuals. The federal government of India, the world's most populous democracy, governs over one billion citizens. It is simply neither practical nor possible for each of those billion voters to take part in every legislative decision.

Blue - Nations with bicameral legislatures.
Orange - Nations with unicameral legislatures.
Gray - No legislature.

As a result, we almost all live in representative democracies where we elect public officials to create and vote on legislation on our behalf. This layer of representation, while necessary, takes citizens away from the decision making process. For decades broadcast media provided just about the only link between citizens and their elected representatives, but coverage tended to focus more on the lives of the politicians and less on the issues they vote on. Over the past five years a new generation of websites have sprouted up which combine information from parliamentary websites with social media tools in order to give citizens more information and clarity about the profile and activities of their representatives, and to become more active in the legislative process.

You can see all of the parliamentary informatics projects we reviewed at the Technology for Transparency Network by clicking on the “parliament” filter underneath the map interface.

Parliamentary Informatics

The first such website we reviewed is Vota Inteligente, a project of the Smart Citizen Foundation in Santiago, Chile. Like most of the parliamentary informatics websites we documented, Vota Inteligente “scrapes data” from the websites of Chile's Senate and House of Deputies in order to more effectively gather and present information about representatives, political parties, and legislative bills. Using the information gathered by the Vota Inteligente team, you are able to compare congressional terms by party, gender, age, and incumbency. There is also a section called “Informed Citizen” which provides contextualization and analysis of the large flow of information that is added to the website every week. The website's archive presents access to all collected data and documents. It includes a glossary, source list, document library, multimedia library, and collection of legal and legislative documents.

Vota Inteligente depends on Facebook and Twitter to sustain interaction with its users. The team has also started a “webinar” series where invited guests use streaming video to present a particular topic to anyone who shows interest. All of this information and interaction comes at the cost of a serious time investment. I had the opportunity to visit the Vota Inteligente headquarters, a comfortable two-story house in residential Santiago, which was buzzing with eager volunteers who were adding information to the database and discussing how to improve the functionality of the website. While their enthusiasm and hard work was infectious, one must wonder if it is sustainable.

Unlike the dozens of volunteers that Vota Inteligente has managed to attract, KohoVolit.eu relies on the dedicated work of just two individuals who have managed to create a directory of profiles about every representative in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It even includes fairly extensive information about the activities of representatives (MEP's) of the European Union. In our interview, project founder Michal Skop emphasized that the sustainability of parliamentary informatics websites depends on their level of automation. Any such website that depends heavily on human labor to input and organize information, Skop says, is likely to run out of steam. By taking government data and automating its presentation and distribution in new ways, the participants of such projects can spend more time on adding much-needed contextualization and analysis to the stream of information.

Automation, however, depends on the availability of properly structured, open government data that programmers can easily import and manipulate. Brazilian political scientist and co-founder of Congresso Aberto, César Zucco, says that the current transaction costs of seeking out congressional data across multiple websites in Brazil is so high that he and his colleague Eduardo Leoni have not been able to analyze any of the data they have collected. They are now waiting for the Brazilian government to implement the proposed Government Information Law, which should mandate government agencies to make official data available in structured formats that can be put to use by platforms like Congresso Aberto. Congresso Aberto was modeled on two other, similar websites: Open Congress (United States) and Vote Watch (European Union). It contains: 1) data and analysis about Brazilian Congress such as voting records and attendance; 2) profiles and information about representatives; 3) information about Brazilian political parties; and 4) proposed bills and legislation. The information comes from the official websites of Brazil's Congress, but it is not yet as timely and granular as Zucco and Leoni would like.

In fact, in terms of sustaining the movement of open parliamentary data, a strong argument could be made that activists should first work on implementing satisfactory government information laws - along the lines of the Open Government Directive in the United States - before working on information management systems to help bring that information to more citizens. Of course, it doesn't have to be one or the other, but analyzing and communicating the information does depend on having access to it.

In Kenya, Mzalendo is another platform which came into existence precisely because of the lack of official data from parliament. Ory Okolloh and her colleague Marc launched the project at the end of 2005 after the website for Kenya's Parliament was shut down following protests by some MPs who were embarrassed about having heir CVs published online. Kenya's parliament website is now back online - and much improved since its former 2005 incarnation - but Ory and Mark feel that they still have an important role to play in using online tools to hold Kenyan MPs more accountable. According to Mzalendo, the MP profile pages of the official Parliament website “are not working and the Hansards are still in pdf and not xml format, which makes them hard to repurpose.” The new (though not yet launched) version of Mzalendo, on the other hand, promises much more information and interaction. The Mzalendo blog has launched a new section called “Mzalendo Vox Pop” where guest contributors “discuss issues affecting their constituency in more detail.” Okolloh hopes that by the 2012 general election Mzalendo will have enough content to produce voter cheat sheets which rank incumbents by their participation and performance in parliament. The idea is to hand them out to voters without internet access who otherwise wouldn't be able to take advantage of the content from Mzalendo to make a more informed vote. “It’s one thing to tell people to make informed decisions, but that’s difficult when there is no information.” Still, like most of these sites, there are concerns about Mzalendo's sustainability. “We thought we could be sustained by volunteers, but that clearly is not working,” says Okolloh. “We think we are onto something good and potentially powerful, but how to build on it without becoming an NGO is a challenge.”

A hybrid model, which depends on volunteer students, but is able to count on the institutional support of the University of the Andes, is Congreso Visible in Colombia. As the websites of both Colombia's Senate and House of Representatives are hopelessly out of date, Congreso Visible depends entirely on students of the political science department of the University of the Andes to manually input the data about representatives, political parties, and legislative activity. There is also a useful section called the “Agora” that provides context, investigative reporting, and opinion pieces. Each quarter they publish a printed review of activity that took place on the website in order to distribute it to offline readers. As of today the website includes 1858 profiles of members of the Congress and aspiring candidates, 5614 legislative documents and almost 1144 voting records. Of all the parliamentary informatics websites we reviewed, Congreso Visible has the cleanest presentation, and might also have the most thorough inventory of information. It takes advantage of Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter to encourage interaction with the content published on the site. Colombia's Congress has contacted the Congreso Visible team to learn how to develop a similar website for the official Senate and House of Representatives domains. While the Colombian Congress should be applauded for seeking out expertise on how to modernize its information systems, this does beg the question, what will be the use of Congreso Visible if the Congress itself uses the exact same platform?

Most of the parliamentary informatics websites we reviewed seek to provide readers with more information about their representatives and how they vote. Others are more pro-active in encouraging citizens to think about issues rather than individuals. Vote na Web (”Vote on the Web”) is a tool developed by WebCitizen, which was launched in November 2009 at TEDx São Paulo. Using a clear interface, congressional bills are translated into simple language with clearly defined context and consequences. Beyond just explaining legislative bills in everyday language that most citizens can understand, the interface also encourages users to vote on the bills themselves, and then compare their votes with other users and with the politicians. So far most bills have only attracted between 10 - 500 votes, but if the number of users scales up, Vote na Web will provide an excellent visualization of just how representative Brazilian politicians are in their voting histories. KohoVolit.eu has also developed a number of online and offline applications to compare citizens' votes with those of elected officials.

500 sobre 500 (”500 for 500″) also encourages more pro-active interaction by creating profiles of all 500 representatives of Mexico's House of Deputies, and then asking users to adopt each candidate and follow a list of updated “challenges”. The project ends at the end of the month.

Recommendations:

What stood out as most surprising throughout our documentation of all of these projects is that each one wrote an extensive amount of code to develop distinct platforms even though nearly all of the platforms follow the same basic structure: 1) profiles of representatives with voting records, 2) legislative bills, 3) profiles of political parties, 4) a section for context and analysis. We recommend that donors convene a meeting of technologists working on parliamentary informatics websites to agree on a single platform that can be used in all representative democracies. They should collectively develop and release the Ushahidi-equivalent for parliamentary informatics. So far OpenCongress, which is written with Ruby on Rails, backed by a PostgreSQL database and Solr full-text indexing, seems like the best bet. However, MySociety's TheyWorkForYou platform, written mostly in PHP, is another strong contender, especially for Commonwealth parliamentary systems that use a Hansard. The Congreso Visible platform, which was developed by Monoku and written in Django and jQuery is also worth further exploration, as is the Vota Inteligente platform, which is written in PHP.

[Update: We have since been informed by the Participatory Politics Foundation (developers of OpenCongress.org) that they are currently developing OpenGovernment.org, a new project that will make the open-source OpenCongress code base more modular and will be used to reveal state-, city-, and local-level government data. Its current code its hosted on GitHub.]

There is a lack of research comparing the practices and effects of parliamentary informatics websites. Arthur Edwards’ 2006 paper “Facilitating the monitorial voter: retrospective voter information websites in the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands” is one of the few such studies, but it is by now outdated and limited in scope. Of specific value would be a quantified, comparative study of web analytics from each website. Where do visitors come from? What type of information are they seeking? Where do they spend most of their time? What parts of the website are frequently ignored? All of these questions can be answered with closer research into the web analytics of each website.

The majority of the projects we reviewed took advantage of social media services and relationships with their national blogospheres to distribute information and analysis from the website. We saw less evidence of collaboration, however, with civil society organizations and mainstream media institutions. A notable exception is Vota Inteligente, which has established an impressive network of like-minded national, regional, and international civil society organizations. They have also collaborated closely with mainstream media, such as CNN en Español to spread awareness and put pressure on politicians.

We recommend to project leaders that they thoroughly study search engine optimization and apply its strategies to their website development. Most users will likely arrive to their websites by searching Google for information related to a particular politician or keywords related to a legislative bill. It is crucial that the relevant page is among the first ten search results.

We recommend to project leaders that they work with local newspapers, radio stations, TV stations, and mobile phone service providers to distribute information and analysis from their websites to offline readers. Other strategies for offline distribution include Congreso Visible's model of quarterly reports and Mzalendo's plans for non-partisan voter pamphlets to be distributed before elections. We recommend that project leaders work in partnership with high school teachers to develop lesson plans that integrate these platforms into school curricula so that students understand the workings of their government from an information perspective. We also recommend to project leaders that in addition to scraping data from official parliamentary websites, they also take advantage of the wealth of contextual information found on sites like Open CRS, Parlio, and the National Congress Library of Chile in order to give a more thorough overview of how congress works.

We recommend to the Global Centre for ICT in Parliament that they reach out to technologists and administrators of parliamentary informatics websites to involve them in discussions and agreements related to XML and open standards in parliament. The 14-17 September 2010 Internet Governance Forum in Vilnius, Lithuania could be one potential venue to convene such a discussion.

We recommend to project leaders that they follow the strategy of Congreso Visible and partner with local universities to take advantage of eager students who can help input data into the system, and then analyze and distribute that information. We recommend to donors and universities that they facilitate more conversation between researchers of open government data and technologists working on parliamentary informatics websites.

We recommend to governments that they seek out the opinion of open government activists and technologists when deciding how to publish information online, and what information should be made available.

Thanks to Renata Avila for her contributions to this piece.

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Civic Complaints

Throughout our interviews with project leaders a sentiment we heard over and over again is that they are trying to transform a culture of complaining into a culture of solutions, actions, and accountability. Ory Okolloh, a longtime Kenyan blogger and the co-founder of Mzalendo, remarked in our interview:

I spent a lot of my early blogging career sort of highlighting all the ills of the government in Kenya and all the corruption and problems. One day I asked myself, well you’re sitting here with this voice and this platform and all your complaining is not really doing anything to make a difference then how can you - within this space - try to have a little bit of an impact? And I think that’s what drives me. ‘Look, it’s time to stop complaining and start acting.'

In order to act on complaints, however, it is first necessary to organize and make sense of them. Several projects set out to do exactly that.

In September 2008 four Jordanian technologists developed Ishki to collect and organize complaints from local citizens about the public and private sector. Their goal is to eventually expand the mission of the project so that the complaints lead to conversations, solutions, and, finally, to better policies and responsiveness by companies and government officials. Though dormant for most of last year, the site has since relaunched with new features and remains active today. So far, however, we are not aware of any examples in which a complaints listed on Ishki has been resolved, or even responded to by public officials.

Similar to Ishki, Kiirti serves as a single platform to collect complaints from residents of major cities around India. Unlike Ishki, which is built on Drupal, Kiirti uses Ushahidi to accept complaints via SMS and then visualizes them on a map interface. Project founder Selvam Velmurugan of eMoksha says that the platform has led to the repair of a streetlight in Chennai and also the paving of a dirt road. In an earlier review of the project I pointed out the seeming inefficiency of submitting a complaint to a platform which then forwards it to a government agency, but, in her review of the case study, Aparna Ray suggests that “citizens may actually welcome this buffer which facilitates engagement and gives visibility and weight to their complaints and issues.” Still, she encourages Kiirti to become more transparent about its process in verifying, forwarding, and resolving complaints.

Penang Watch goes one step further than Ishki and Kiirti. In addition to collecting and categorizing complaints from citizens, the volunteers behind the site harass city council officials until the complaints are at least answered, if not resolved. Their persistence has, for example, led to the shutting down of illegal shops in Georgetown's UNESCO world heritage neighborhood. Complaints submitted to PenangWatch.net are first verified by a team of volunteers, and then forwarded to the relevant authority and/or individual to answer or resolve the complaint. If there is no response within a week or two then a reminder is sent out. If the complaint is still not dealt with after two more weeks then a profile of the complaint is featured on the website and the negligent agency/individual is “named and shamed” via emails to all council departments and media organizations. Project coordinator Ong Boon Keong says that “roughly 300 complaints are submitted through Penang Watch per year” and that so far they have “been able to settle 50 percent of submitted complaints.”

Unlike Penang Watch, which serves as a bridge between citizen complaints and city officials, Cidade Democratica aims to motivate citizens to come up with their own solutions to civic problems. It's important to note that online, social platforms don't only offer new ways for citizens to interact with elected and appointed officials; they can also create new frameworks to think about how citizens govern their own communities without relying on traditional government structures. Cidade Democratica is a Brazilian platform - with most activity taking place in São Paulo - where users can submit both problems and solutions to those problems. There have been some policy decisions - such as the creation of bicycle paths in Jundiaí - which resulted from discussions and proposals originating on Cidade Democratica. So far successful solutions have depended on government involvement, but in the future one can envision that communal gardens, walking paths, and even recycling programs can all be coordinated by citizens without government involvement.

Recommendations:

Of all the civic complaint websites we documented, Penang Watch has been the most successful in terms of bringing about government action and response. We recommend to all projects that they implement and document well-defined processes for how to deal with submitted complaints. This includes verification, categorization, prioritization, effective communication with relevant government agencies, ensuring response, working toward resolution, and publicly recognizing the work of responsive public officials. These processes can be seen as chronological stages and platforms can identify the stage of each complaint, similar to software issue tracking systems.

We recommend that, as much as possible, civic complaints websites work with and not against government. Penang Watch coordinator Ong Boon Keong is eager to point out that the website aims to improve the local government's performance by “providing it with both positive and negative feedback.” Some observers, such as Archon Fung, worry that that the adversarial nature of many transparency and accountability websites erodes trust in governments and institutions, and presents the government as more inefficient and wasteful than it really is. Indeed, we have found many websites that strive to highlight the worst actions of corrupt officials, but few if any that reward effective performance and clean track records. In the future it is recommended that transparency and accountability websites strike a balance between criticizing poor government performance and celebrating that which is worth duplicating.

We recommend that civic complaint websites investigate whether an anti-corruption hotline service exists in their country. A working paper by Transparency International offers several suggestions as to how civil society can work more closely with such anti-corruption hotlines. Elaine Byrne, Anne-Katrin Arnold and Fumiko Nagano of the World Bank's CommGAP initiative have published an excellent paper advocating for improved communication between government anti-corruption agencies and traditional media. Their findings, case studies, and suggestions are equally applicable to anyone developing or managing a civic complaints website.

It seems likely that the future of civic complaint websites will be increasingly mobile as internet-capable mobile phones become more common in developing countries. We believe that citizens are more likely to file a complaint if they are able to do so immediately from their mobile phone, rather than waiting to return to their computer. Platforms like FixMyStreet in the UK and SeeClickFix in the United States reveal the potential of marrying mobile applications with web-based map interfaces. The SeeClickFix complaint platform has even been adopted by some politicians, such as Bronx city councilmember Fernando Cabrera, who has put SeeClickFix right on the front page of his website. Other municipal governments including Boston in the United States and Eindhoven in the Netherlands have developed their own mobile applications to collect and act on citizen complaints.

However, the creation of so many disparate platforms to collect civic complaints also presents a problem. The most basic objective of civic complaint websites is to provide the most efficient line of communication possible between the citizen who has observed a problem and the public official who is responsible for resolving that problem. If there are multiple platforms, or multiple channels, through which citizens can make their complaints then public officials will have to spend more time searching, reviewing, and prioritizing complaints on each platform and less time responding to and resolving the complaints. We recommend to developers, activists, and governments that whenever possible they avoid the proliferation of multiple platforms so as to decrease the transaction costs of resolving complaints. If this is not possible, it may be necessary to develop aggregators of complaints filed across multiple platforms.

The city of San Francisco has shown one possible model toward open, distributed complaint tracking by partnering with CoTweet to track citizen complaints via Twitter. The San Francisco city government should be lauded for taking advantage of a channel of information where citizens are already leaving complaints about dirty streets, graffiti, and potholes, but the use of Twitter as a platform for complaint tracking reveals a tension between openness and organized prioritization. It is important to communicate to citizens that while a broken streetlight may be their own personal priority, it is likely not the first priority of an entire municipal government. Twitter is not currently well-equipped to organize messages by their priority and status toward resolution, but there is reason to believe that San Francisco's Twitter-based complaint tracker will improve its organization and prioritization of messages over time.

While San Francisco's residents may be eager to send their local government a photograph of a pothole via Twitter, the same program might not be as effective in other communities where expectations of political representation and responsiveness are lower. Stuti Khemani notes that in very poor countries, people may not link events in their personal lives with wider policies. He gives the example of a child dying - something outsiders may blame on a lack of immunization or poor health policies, perhaps due to government corruption that prevents funding from reaching target areas. He argues that local community members may see this death as a fact of daily life rather than as something that could possibly have been prevented by better governance.

This likely helps explain why a SMS-based civic complaint service launched by the municipal government of Pimpri-Chinchwad in India has so far attracted only three to four complaints per day, some of which, officials say, are personal issues rather than civic problems:

Though [Municipal Commissioner] Sharma claims that three-four complaints in a day are not bad, the harsh truth is that every gulli, chawl, building or society in Pimpri-Chinchwad has dime a dozen complaints. Every day, you will bump into groups of citizens discussing a bad road or a cooperative society residents grieving about piling garbage. Stinking public toilets is another major problem. And residents, especially those, living in chawls, have a strong grouse against the state of public toilets where either doors are missing or broken, commodes have been smashed, water is not available or the toilet blocks have not been cleaned for days.

Journalist Manoj More writes that he spoke to a “cross-section of citizens” from Pimpri-Chinchwad and found that “hardly anybody knows that such a system does exist.” Simply building a platform to collect complaints is clearly not enough; such initiatives must organize workshops to educate citizens that they are able to make demands of their elected officials, and that there are concrete processes in place to do so. At the same time, it is crucial that coordinators of civic complaint websites partner with government agencies so that citizens feel they are heard when they participate. We recommend to project managers that they partner with teachers at local high schools and universities to take their classes on “civic complaint finding field trips” so that young people are able to see their community from the perspective of an engaged citizen and prioritize which issues must be dealt with first.

Before donors support the development and outreach of civic complaint platforms, we recommend that they first support more research of how such initiatives can most effectively attract, organize, communicate, and resolve citizens' complaints by working in partnership with government agencies. We do see evidence that there is utility and rationale for a middle layer of civil society to serve as the broker between citizens demanding better government service and government agencies prioritizing their time and budgets, but there is so far a lack of evidence and inquiry as to how that middle layer can most effectively operate. What incentivizes citizens to participate? How to various government agencies organize and prioritize incoming streams of complaints? How much overlap is there between the priorities of citizens and government agencies? Are complaint services run by civil society organizations more effective than those run by local governments? What are the most effective strategies to inspire response and resolution of civic complaints? What types of complaints must be resolved by government agencies, and what are examples of complaints that have been resolved by citizens themselves? These are just a few of the questions that require more research, ideally from longterm studies that focus on a single municipality over a year.

Finally, while we recognize that software platforms must be adapted and appropriated to function effectively in each distinct environment, we recommend to all activists who are considering the implementation of a civic complaint website in their community to closely examine existing, open source platforms such as FixMyStreet and its sister version written in GeoDjango, which is used by FixMyStreet Canada. Both projects have invested heavily in writing the code to the platforms, which can be used freely by other projects so that they can focus their time and efforts on partnering with relevant government agencies and organizing educational workshops to ensure that the platform is used.

Thanks to Rebekah Heacock for her contributions to this piece.

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On the Technology for Transparency Network platform we have organized case studies and project listings into ten different categories: budget monitoring, civic complaints, election monitoring, parliament informatics, extractive industries, private sector transparency, advocacy, crime, local government, and aid transparency. You can sort through each of the ten categories by clicking on the filters beneath our map interface. If you have suggestions for other categories that we should be tracking, please leave a comment below.

Today's post will focus on two of the largest categories we reviewed - budget and election monitoring.

Budget Monitoring

Monitoring the budgets of local and national governments is a key instrument in the toolkit of any accountability activist. Active budget monitoring can both prevent and expose corruption. As an example, despite protests from privacy activists, the Mexican government decided to publish the salaries of elected officials. (At the time, Mexican governors were among the highest paid in the world.) The reasoning is that any elected official who is clearly spending more than his/her salary permits should be scrutinized closely to determine where that money is coming from, and whether it is linked to political misbehavior.

Budget monitoring can also lead to improved public services and infrastructure. For example, in the United States the government recently passed the largest economic stimulus program in the country's history. To track how that money was spent the government created Recovery.gov while ProPublica created Eye on the Stimulus, which also tracks how the money is spent. Kenya had its own stimulus program, called the Constituency Development Fund, which started in 2003 as a way to fund local governments to improve their infrastructure and services. Budget Tracking Tool is a way to see how that money is being spent and to leave comments to report on the progress of those projects. However, so far few people seem to use the tool, and even fewer comment on the progress of the development projects in their constituency.

In order to effectively monitor and evaluate any budget, the data must be available in a format which allows for analysis in a spreadsheet or database program. The information should be both granular, in order to evaluate as many variables as possible, and timely, in order to expose corruption and inefficiencies before it is too late. Unfortunately, most governments that do publicly release their budget information do so using Adobe's PDF format, which doesn't allow for data analysis. As Noam Hoffstater and Alon Padan of Our Budget pointed out in our interview, the accounting offices of governments obviously have their budget information in spreadsheet format, but they purposely publish it as a PDF document in order to discourage closer scrutiny.

Our Budget uses OCR technology to create an Excel spreadsheet version of the Tel Aviv municipal budget. Volunteers go over and check every entry, and then they make visualizations and graphs of how the municipality is spending taxpayers' money. Importantly, while they have done this for two years running, in the end they decided that litigation (demanding that the municipality release the budget in spreadsheet format) was a better strategy than time-consuming, technological solutions.

Dinero y Politica uses a similar strategy to create more information about campaign financing in Argentinian elections so that voters can make fully informed choices. In Argentina, political parties must disclose all of the campaign contributions they received at least ten days before the election. But, once again, they only have to disclose those numbers in a PDF report, which, doesn't allow citizens analyze the data to see relationships between political interests and politicians. So the Dinery y Politica team has created an interactive database which maps donations and creates visualizations of which parties receive donations from which groups, unions, and companies.

Recommendations:

Both Our Budget and Dinero y Política use Many Eyes to visualize the data they collect. We recommend that other budget monitoring activists learn how to use Many Eyes and Many Eyes Wikified in order to dynamically visualize budget information. Google's Fusion Tables is another powerful online tool to both store and visualize complex information related to public budgets.

The information collected and analyzed from all three projects does not seem to be exploited well by civil society organizations, journalists, or bloggers in the countries where they are based. We recommend to project leaders that they do more outreach to train journalists, activists, and bloggers how to use the tools they have developed. A sample gallery of effective ways their information has been used could help inspire others to build on that work.

A number of traditional civil society organizations have been working in the realm of budget monitoring and open budgets for quite some time. The International Budget Partnership has a very useful world map which links to country profiles with related information and organizations working on budget monitoring. We recommend to donors that they support an international event that brings together technologists and budget monitoring activists to share best practices and strategies regarding the use of modern technology and information management systems to improve the efficiency of budget monitoring. This event should be followed by a three-day intense “book sprint” which leads to a open licensed, freely accessible book that explains the technical steps in order to: 1) extract financial information from PDF documents using OCR technology, 2) store budget information in structured, public databases, 3) verify and cross-reference information, 4) analyze and evaluate data using Many Eyes and Google Fusion Tables, and 5) use resulting findings and conclusions to partner with media, bloggers, civil society and government to seek greater accountability.

Following the publication of such a book - and its translation into relevant languages - we recommend that donors support barcamp-style events at the national level that bring together technologists, civil society organizations, government officials, investigative journalists, and bloggers to focus specifically on budget monitoring.

Finally, we recommend that budget monitoring platforms partner with accounting, statistics, and computer science professors at local universities so that the students of their classes can help improve the governance of their country while learning new skills and techniques.

Election Monitoring

Like budget monitoring, election observation is an activity of government accountability and transparency with a long history. According to Wikipedia, it dates back to at least to the 1866 plebiscite of Moldavia and Wallachia, which led to modern Romania. In more recent times, election monitoring has tended to focus on countries with weak democracies or democracies in transition, and has been organized by international organizations such as the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the European Union, the Commonwealth Secretariat, the Council of Europe and the African Union. Major international NGOs like the Carter Center, the International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa, the National Democratic Institute, and the European Network for Election Monitoring have also become increasingly active, and often partner with local NGO's to take advantage of established national networks.

As if all of those many players weren't enough, a new generation of election monitoring websites now ask ordinary citizens to also become election observers by using their cell phones to report any voting irregularities they may encounter. If all goes to plan, such reports are then verified, categorized, and placed on a publicly accessible map.

One such project that we did not document because we felt that it has been discussed sufficiently in both mainstream and citizen media is Vote Report India. In fact, co-founder Gaurav Mishra has joked that perhaps there were more articles about the project than reports submitted to the platform. Mishra has also written an excellent and candid evaluation of the project, which lists successes, failures, and - most importantly - lessons learned for the next incarnation of the platform for the 2014 Indian elections.

Last month saw the first multiparty election to take place in Sudan in over 20 years. Sudan Vote Monitor is one of many Ushahidi-based websites we reviewed that allow voters to report irregularities by submitting text messages which are then verified by a partner NGO and placed on a map. To understand the context behind Sudan Vote Monitor and the difficulty in implementing a technology project in Sudan, I highly recommend Rebekah Heacock's post, “Sudan: Is ICT all it's cracked up to be?” Most of the attention given to the initiative during the election itself focused on the fact that the site was temporarily blocked by the government. Less reported was the website's impact on ensuring credible elections. According to the website itself, 257 reports of voting irregularities were received. In a followup interview with Heacock, project coordinator Fareed Zein says that number is probably somewhere between 300 - 500 if you count all SMS reports, which have yet to be added to the system. But few, if any, of these reports have been verified, and there has been no official response to any of the reports. Still, Zein suggests that the objective of this first implementation was simply to create more information, rather than necessarily holding anyone accountable:

In previous elections it was all a closed door affair — nobody knew exactly what went on on the ground. The intention of this was to be able to get the information out to the public, internally and externally, about what's going on. Just being able to get the word out was enough for us. We didn't set out to try to urge anybody to take any specific action. Our mission was to get the information out and then let people judge and act for themselves.

Zein says it is likely that Sudan Vote Monitor will be used again during the January 2011 Southern Sudanese independence referendum.

Like Vote Report India and Sudan Vote Monitor, Cuidemos el Voto is another national election monitoring platform that uses Ushahidi. Co-founder Oscar Salazar notes that, while Mexico transitioned to multiparty democracy in 2000 with the election of Vicente Fox, vote buying and conditional cash transfer programs are still corrupting the democratic process. Cuidemos el Voto managed to achieve something important that other, similar projects lacked: support and endorsement from an official government body, in this case, Mexico's Special Prosecutor's Office. Still, that endorsement did not apparently lead to any sort of accountability. For example, on July 5, 2009 someone reported that in Puebla they were offering 500 pesos to vote for the PAN party. But this report wasn't verified and we don't see any kind of followup. For such election monitoring projects to make an impact in terms of accountability, they need the staff and resources to verify all reports and ensure that the proper government body responds. Or, perhaps more appropriately, they must partner with other organizations who can invest in the long haul of followup work. It could even be the perfect semester-length project for a political science graduate-level class.

The African Elections Project differs slightly from other election monitoring projects we reviewed in that 1) it doesn't use Ushahidi and 2) it focuses on multiple countries throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. The project, funded by the Open Society Initiative for West Africa, uses new media tools to produce and disseminate more information about elections in ten African countries including Malawi, Namibia, Botswana, Niger, Guinea, Mozambique, Mauritania and Togo. Their hope is that more watchful eyes reporting on the electoral process will help prevent and expose vote fraud, and encourage clean elections. However, most of the countries where they work have broadband penetration levels between five and ten percent. Until there is greater connectivity, the impact of an online project like African Elections Project is inherently circumscribed, despite its relatively large budget.

VoteReport PH is the last Ushahidi-based election monitoring initiative we reviewed. Most of these projects were only attract the participation of very few users because there was not broad awareness that the websites exist at all. VoteReport PH is different in that its team spent six months prior to the election going around the country and giving voter education classes about how to use automated voting machines (which were used for the first time), and simultaneously, how to submit reports to VoteReporter PH by sending text messages. Such on-the-ground outreach work is necessary in order to create more awareness about citizen election monitoring platforms. In all, 654 reports of voting irregularities were submitted. For example, at 1 p.m. on May 10 “massive vote buying” was reported by an anonymous contributor via text message. We are told that the report was verified, but there is no further detail on what constitutes verification, or if anything was done to follow up on the report. One very useful strategy by the VoteReportPH team was to write a separate blog post highlighting the most urgent reports of vote fraud. They also published a helpful blog post summarizing some of their early experiences and conclusions. I recommend Mong Palatino's overview, “Monitoring Philippine Elections through Social Media“, to get a better idea of how Twitter and blogging played a distributed role in monitoring the Philippine elections.

Though Ushahidi was created to map reports of violence that occurred after Kenya's 2007 election, it was quickly adapted to monitor elections themselves. In addition to the above-mentioned case studies, Ushahidi was also used to map voting irregularities in Afghanistan and Lebanon.

Ushahidi implementations have already been set up for Colombia's presidential election later this month, the Puebla municipal elections in July, and Brazil's general election in October.

Recommendations:

We recommend to project implementers that they plan at least one year ahead of the elections they will monitor. In addition to the technical challenges of implementing and localizing the Ushahidi platform, they must also concentrate on outreach efforts to 1) establish an SMS shortcode, 2) hold on-the-ground training workshops, 3) partner with relevant civil society organizations, and 4) partner with media organizations to spread awareness. Such projects should also seek funding to cover the expenses of marketing the project via billboards, radio commercials, posters, and leaflets. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, election monitoring platforms should establish strong relationships with the governing electoral commission in order to agree upon a protocol for verifying and acting on reports of vote fraud. Without a signed agreement in place, the project is unlikely to make a concrete impact toward greater accountability and credibility of elections.

We recommend that online election monitoring projects partner with students at universities to verify and follow up on all submitted reports, similar to how Tufts University students worked to verify reports submitted to the Ushahidi implementation for the Haiti earthquake.

We recommend to funders that they fund specific election-related plugins that make Ushahidi a more functional platform for election monitoring. Oscar Salazar of Cuidemos el Voto has noted that Ushahidi lacks certain features for election monitoring:

Ushahidi's main design was to provide a common pool of reports. So if I started giving administrative access to everyone, everyone will see the same pools . What happen's if two NGOs that are associated with two different political parties get access to the same pool and start approving or disapproving the reports? I don't want everyone to have access to the same pool. i want to give special accounts to different NGOs, where they see only their own reports plus the citizen reports. Ushahidi wasnt designed for a lot of NGOs working together. So we are tweaking it for these local elections to make it work in this way.

The tweaks by the Cuidemos el Voto team should be packaged into a plugin that can be shared with other election monitoring initiatives.

We recommend to the Ushahidi team and to their funders, that increased emphasis be placed on documentation, especially in regard to best practices regarding election monitoring. Patrick Meier has written an introductory primer and Erik Hersman has made a forum posting to compare common election-related categories, but there is still a lack of needed documentation for any activist wanting to use Ushahidi to monitor elections. We suggest that Ushahidi aspire to a documentation resource as thorough and easily accessible as WordPress' Codex.

We recommend that researchers do both more longitudinal and comparative research in order to better understand the impact and methodology of online, citizen election monitoring websites. How does verification compare across projects? What strategies bring about accountability? How do you increase the signal to noise ratio for submitted reports? How do you best visualize reports to inspire action? What are obstacles to collaboration with traditional election monitoring organizations? What are the pros and cons of anonymity in citizen election reporting? These are just a few open-ended questions that require more research.

Finally, we recommend that multilateral and civil society organizations focused on election monitoring organize an international event to bring together the coordinators and technologists behind the various online election monitoring websites we have listed above to share experiences and prepare improved documentation for future implementations. This has already happened at the regional level in East Africa, which led to calls for a “Tech Election Monitoring Toolbox”, but it should also happen at the international level to share skills, techniques, resources, and future plans across distinct tech communities.

In the next post we will summarize and offer our recommendations related to more categories of case studies from the Technology for Transparency Network.

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As the incoming president you are aware of the issues facing your country. The agricultural sector needs to be industrialized to boost productivity. Greater security must be put into place for infrastructural projects to continue unimpeded. Technical and scientific education must improve to raise a generation of engineers who can exploit the country's offshore oil reserves. The country's health system must improve to raise life expectancy above 50 years, and to contribute to a more productive work force. What you are not aware of - what, in fact, there is no way for you to track - is exactly how much money is pouring into your country from donors, where it goes, and how effective its impact has been. This information is unavailable because donors are notoriously opaque about their funding even while they push for greater transparency in the countries where they work.

In an excellent three-page policy briefing titled “Greater aid transparency: crucial for aid effectiveness,” Sam Moon and Tim Williamson show how a lack of aid transparency can reduce the ability of taxpayers to hold their governments accountable because it is unclear which projects are government-funded and which are donor-funded. A lack of aid transparency also leads to a lack of government budget transparency, the authors argue. “Without transparency, discrepancies between aid received and aid spent is hard to measure, and corruption is harder to track and eliminate.” It was this basic fact that led Peter Eigen to leave his position as the director of the World Bank Office for East Africa and found Transparency International:

A lack of aid transparency also impedes collaboration among grantee projects. In our mapping of “technology for transparency” case studies we came across several projects that were funded by the same donor, but were unaware of the existence of each other until we made the introduction. A simple list of grantee projects by region and topic would go a long way toward encouraging collaboration and preventing duplication.

Lastly, there is a moral argument behind the idea that funders aiming to promote more accountability through transparency should also encourage greater accountability of their own work by publishing more information about their spending and activities.

Lack of Information Leads to Misinformation

The inability of national governments to take stock of the incoming flow of aid money into their countries is just one of the negative consequences that arise from the lack of aid transparency; it also leads to misinformation about the amount and effectiveness of philanthropy and aid development. According to a survey by the Borgen Project, Americans guess, on average, that 24% of our federal budget goes to development assistance. In fact, it is less than one percent. That is about 25 cents per day for each American. Furthermore, less than half of aid from the United States goes to the poorest countries; the largest recipients are strategic allies such as Egypt, Israel, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Such misinformation about how - and how much - development assistance is used has contributed to a popular backlash, led in the mainstream media by Dambisa Moyo and Bill Easterly. At the first - and regrettably only - TED Africa conference in 2007, the “Cheetah Generation” of young African leaders called for “trade not aid” to increase Africa's development. Popular rhetoric says that billions of dollars in development assistance have not accomplished a thing, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. But such hyperbole depends on the fact that we simply don't know where aid money goes, how it is spent, and what the results are. Such information tends to stay in the filing cabinets of each individual funder. We simply can't measure aid effectiveness without aid transparency.

Working Toward Aid Transparency

The good news: we have reached the point where there is clear agreement that we need to work toward greater aid transparency. The challenge and disagreement now lie in how. For example, what is the ideal level of granularity for financial information regarding grants? Does publishing the salaries of individual employees violate their privacy? How timely should information be made available? What format should it be published in? How is information across various funders easily accessed, aggregated, and understood? What are the most efficient processes to integrate the publication of information with accounting from the funder's side and budgeting from the recipient country's side? Should future budget information be made available in addition to past investments and current spending?

These are difficult questions and their difficulty probably lies more in how each institution manages their record keeping than ideological differences related to privacy and power. Fortunately, a number of new initiatives are underway to help develop standards around aid transparency. Foremost among them is the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), a “temporary coalition of donor governments, governments of developing countries and NGOs” that was formed at the 2008 Accra Agenda for Action, which grew out of the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness. According to its website, “IATI’s role is to develop consistent and coherent international standards for the way donors report information about aid spending.” They publish a bi-monthly newsletter, which unfortunately is only available in the proprietary Microsoft Word format. Hopefully this does not reflect their thinking on how aid-related information should be published.

In November 2008 the steering committee of the International Aid Transparency Initiative began what was meant to be an 18-month process to define:

• A common, standard format and set of definitions for the publication of aid information
• A code of conduct for signatories of the initiative

According to their latest newsletter, they now aim to reach an agreement on what data should be published by July, with implementation and the agreed-upon code of conduct beginning in December.

Publish What You Fund aims to spread awareness about the importance of aid transparency, and to put pressure on the United States, the European Union, and the World Bank to meet specific transparency targets.

If all goes well the internet should be flooded with information from donors about their spending and activities by early next year. But how to manage the torrent of information? How to make sense of it? How to create mechanisms so that greater aid transparency actually leads to more accountability of grantee projects, government recipients, and the funders themselves?

The Role of Technology in Aid Transparency

Some innovative projects have already been developed to help visualize development assistance. The Ujima Project takes data from USAspending.gov, the United States Department of Justice, the US Department of State, the Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, and UK's Department for International Development to visualize aid flows, weapon sales, and lobbying expenses at the country level throughout Africa. It is managed by the Great Lakes Media Institute in Rwanda and the website was developed by Appfrica, a Uganda-based web development firm.

New York Times journalist Ron Nixon describing the birth and objectives of the Ujima Project at TEDx Kampala.

Aidinfo.org is a project of Development Initiatives to research the current supply of and demand for information related to aid. A recent blog post admits that several of the team's assumptions at the outset of the project have been challenged during their subsequent research, “most notably the idea that if more aid information is made available, people will use it.” They have also found that “donors publish a lot more information than some of us thought, it’s just not in a format that’s useful for most users. In particular it’s often not timely or comparable.” Most importantly, they stress that information related to “aid and other resources flowing from donor countries” needs to be linked to “the wider accountability movement in recipient countries where most stakeholders are interested in transparency of the whole budget.” In other words, from the perspective of an accountability activist in Kenya, the aid-related statistics from the Ujima Project are just one piece of a much larger puzzle. Other pieces include oversight of the Constituency Development Fund, extractive industries , and an audit of the Ministry of Finance.

Programmers working together at the Aid Information Challenge in London

That doesn't make aid transparency any less important, only more complicated. Fortunately, a burgeoning community of researchers, programmers, and activists are working together online - and offline at informal barcamps - to develop tools and techniques to overcome the many obstacles standing in the way of effective aid transparency. March and April were especially busy months for the aid transparency community. It all began on March 8 when students from the College of William & Mary, Georgetown University and George Washington University were given a preview of the AidData Portal, which launched publicly later that month. A week later the first Aid Information Challenge brought programmers and aid agencies together to think strategically about how to use open data to make aid more effective. They have linked to related projects that are already in development, and listed a set of recommendations. On March 22nd the Aid Transparency and Development Finance conference got started in Oxford, bringing together academics, think tanks, and development agencies to discuss aid transparency with a focus on data. The final day included the public launch of the AidData.org portal, the most comprehensive of its kind, and a hands-on workshop on how to use it. Two weeks later and the first UK-based Aid Information Challenge took place at the Guardian newspaper offices in London. They have listed a number of project ideas and prototypes. The Aid Information Challenge website promises future events in other countries. Last month the United Arab Emirates' Office for the Coordination of Foreign Aid held its own training workshop on aid transparency and accountability. Around the same time the World Bank announced that it had made publicly available all of its global development and finance indicators. Other initiatives aiming to bring transparency to philanthropy and development assistance include the Latin America Donor Index, Glasspockets, and Grantsfire.

The momentum of the aid transparency movement is palpable, but without greater coordination and aggregation, so much transparency will lead to more confusion than clarity. Raw data must be presented in ways that are easy to understand, and that tie directly to accountability initiatives at the local and national level in each country. Before we overwhelm the internet with information we need to facilitate the lines of communication to make use of it.

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We will be live video streaming as much of the discussion as possible, so long as the internet gods are on our side. In addition to the live video streaming, Jorge Gobbi and Felipe Cordero will be liveblogging all discussions, witty remarks, and inevitable gossip in both English and Spanish throughout the two days of the summit.

You can stay tuned on Twitter, and you can participate yourself by using the hashtag “#gv2010“. (Twitter has a guide to using hashtags.) Even without access to the internet, summit participants are reporting on Twitter that they have crashed the wi-fi at the hotel. There is also a Flickr group for photos from the summit.

Stay tuned to the Summit Blog for updates throughout the two days. A number of fascinating observations have already been posted about the development of online participation in Uganda, Morocco, Egypt, Madagascar, Macedonia, Argentina, India, Gaza, China, Colombia, and Bolivia.

We look forward to your participation, here in Chile and around the world!

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Over at the Technology for Transparency Network we have already documented 30 technology projects that promote transparency, accountability, and civic engagement, but we still have yet to clearly define each of those concepts and explain in detail why they are valued in bringing about good governance and a healthy society.

Why Transparency?

When we discuss transparency, we are generally referring to published information about government processes, budgets, and elected officials. There are also other projects, such as CorpWatch, Publish What You Pay, and Sourcemap that aim to publish more private sector information that is also in the public's interest.

Sometimes this information is made available by governments themselves. For example, in June, 2002 then-President of Mexico, Vicente Fox, signed his country's first freedom of information law which requires government agencies to publish in a routine and accessible manner all information concerning their daily functions, budgets, operations, staff, salaries, internal reports, and the awarding of contracts and concessions. (A clear analysis of the law was published by Kate Doyle the day it was passed. John Ackerman has published a three-year evaluation of Mexico's implementation of the law in comparison to similar freedom of information initiatives around the world.)

Many times, however, governments don't want to publish information about their activities and budgets because it invites criticism and could expose corrupt behavior. In some of these countries citizens have begun publishing that information for themselves. Ory Okolloh, the co-founder of Mzalendo, tells us that the project began in 2006 when Kenyan MP's demanded that the Parliament website be shut down to prevent public access to their CV's. Concerned Kenyan citizens then began attending Parliament sessions in order to publish their observations and help build an online database of legislative information. Similarly, Mumbai Votes collects and publishes information about the criminal records of public officials and election candidates.

Often times we find that governments do in fact publish information about their activities and spending, but they do so in ways that are not easily accessible or comprehensible. For example, the municipal government of Tel Aviv publishes their budget each year as a long, detailed PDF document. All of the information is there, but it is published in a way so that citizens cannot easily understand, visualize, and analyze their government's spending decisions. The team behind “Our Budget“, therefore, used a combination of optical character recognition (OCR) technology and human verification to convert the data to spreadsheet format and use online tools to visualize and analyze the city's spending. In Argentina all political parties are required to publicly disclose the campaign contributions they received at least ten days prior to voting day. However, once again these parties publish the information in long PDF reports that obscure the relationships between money and politics in electoral campaigns. Dinero y Política is an attempt to present that same information using interactive visualizations that clearly compare and contrast campaign contributions by district, political party, and industry. In Kenya, Budget Tracking Tool takes the budgets of federally funded, local development projects, which are buried deep down in government web pages, and presents them in a single database where users can leave comments about the progress, impact, and efficiency of the projects. (So far, few have.)

Why Civic Participation?

Does transparency lead to accountability? If citizens have more information about the activities of their government, and more access to that information, then will public officials be compelled to perform their jobs more competently? Will citizens demand that their input be taken into consideration in the shaping and enforcement of policy decisions? Recently, some scholars and observers are casting doubt on that long-held assumption. “Transparency mobilizes the power of shame,” writes Jonathan Fox, “yet the shameless may not be vulnerable to public exposure. Truth often fails to lead to justice.” In a podcast interview earlier this year with Fabiano Angelico of Transparência Brasil, he echoes Fox's argument, claiming that Brazilian politicians who have been repeatedly outed as corrupt are still re-elected, often times because of their corruption. In such cases Angelico advocates that special, appointed judges with proven track records should bar repeatedly corrupt politicians from running for office. This challenges classical notions of liberal democracy: that citizens should ultimately hold their leaders accountable by supporting or removing them from office on election day. But Guillermo O'Donnell supports Angelico's proposal, noting that modern democracies require both “vertical accountability”, as in elections, and “horizontal accountability”, such as inter-governmental regulatory agencies that are empowered to sanction politicians that don't follow the law.

Another example of transparency failing to lead to accountability can be found in Liberia where President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 2005, modeled after a similar post-Apartheid truth commission in South Africa. The TRC is very much an agent of horizontal accountability, tasked with investigating and publishing information related to more than 20 years of civil conflict in the country, and sanctioning elected officials who were criminally involved. In June 2009 the TRC issued its final report, which named 50 individuals - including Johnson-Sirleaf - who should be barred from public office for 30 years because of their direct involvement in the country's civil war. President Johnson-Sirleaf, however, remains in power, ignoring the recommendations of the TRC while implementing her own transparency and anti-corruption legislation. Despite her controversial past, Johnson-Sirleaf is still seen by many as a strong leader with a strong international profile who can help Liberia return to peace and democracy.

Most researchers and observers do agree that greater transparency will not lead to increased accountability unless proactive civic engagement is shaped around the information that is published. Several of the projects we've documented aim to use social networks to bring about this engagement. #InterNetnecesario in Mexico, for example, used a combination of Twitter, blog posts, and media outreach to put pressure on Mexican legislators to eliminate a three percent tax on internet access that was passed without the the media or civil society's consultation. It is a classic example of transparency plus civic participation leading to accountability. Mexican Twitter user Alejandro Pisanty published information about the newly passed law that was not formerly available. A decentralized, online protest then took place using Twitter, blogs which acted as filters and added context, and email petitions to Mexican senators. The Mexican Chamber of Deputies soon realized the size and strength of the opposition to the tax and invited representatives of the online protest into the Chamber to make their arguments against the tax, which they had been rehearsing online over the previous few weeks. However, #InternetNecesario has also (so far) proved to be a temporary phenomenon that in no way builds systematic processes to continually promote transparency or to hold leaders accountable in the future. Cuidemos El Voto offers an example of a more sustained project that aims to prevent electoral misconduct - and specifically the buying of voters - during federal and local elections. By partnering with the Office of the Special Prosecutor, which was established in 2002 to document past human rights abuses, Cuidemos El Voto attracted official federal endorsement of the voter misconduct they documented. It is difficult, however, to measure the impact of making more visible the buying of votes by politicians and political parties and we have yet to see an example of a candidate or party who was barred from office for electoral misconduct that was reported on a website like Cuidemos el Voto.

Other project leaders were skeptical that increased civic discussion will ultimately lead toward improved governance. Vivek Gilani of Mumbai Votes says that online discussions tend to be rooted in personal opinion and gossip whereas his project aims to provide readers with crisp, clear assessment based on facts. He does not wish to provide users with a space to participate, but rather a resource to become better informed in order to vote for the most qualified candidates.

How to Bring About Accountability?

A number of websites we've reviewed function as portals where citizens can list their complaints - in general about their community, and specifically related to their government's administration of their community - to put pressure on the government to be more responsive to their needs. Examples include Ishki in Jordan, Kiirti in India, and Penang Watch in Malaysia. The varying goals and strategies of these projects point to a distinction that Andreas Schedler makes between two different dimensions of accountability: on the one hand, the capacity or the right to demand answers (”answerability”) and, on the other hand, the capacity to sanction. Of course, as grassroots projects, none of the websites we reviewed are empowered with any official capacity to sanction. But several projects do seek answerability in a variety of ways.

Ishki was started by four Jordanian technologists who were tired of hearing the same complaints muttered over and over again without any action or plan for action. They created a website to collect citizen complaints against the public and private sector as a way to better understand and visualize the most common complaints in Jordanian society. Their strategy is then to work with mainstream media organizations - newspapers and radio stations - to create stories about recurring complaints with the hope that increased coverage in the media will put pressure on public officials to respond. In this sense, Ishki serves as a community filter between internet users at large and mainstream media looking for interesting watchdog stories to report on. Users can also submit and sign petitions, though the most recent petition was posted two months ago. So far we have no examples of public officials responding to complaints or petitions that originated on the website.

In India, Kiirti takes a slightly different approach from Ishki. Rather than relying on print and broadcast media as an instrument to put pressure on public officials, they send emails directly to the relevant agencies in major Indian cities to ask them to follow up on the complaints submitted to Kiirti. Founder Selvam Velmurugan says that a streetlight was repaired and a mud path was paved because of complaints submitted to Kiirti. It might seem strange that submitting a complaint to a website which is then relayed to the proper agency is more effective than submitting the complaint directly to the agency itself in the first place. It certainly isn't more efficient. But perhaps the public visibility of such complaints - and the responses by officials to those complaints - is an incentive for public officials to react. They are therefore able to show not only the demand for their work, but also their responsiveness.

In northwestern Malaysia, Penang Watch takes the accountability agenda one step further with a series of steps to communicate with - and then harass - city officials until citizen complaints are answered. Complaints submitted to PenangWatch.net are first verified by a team of volunteers, and then forwarded to the relevant authority and/or individual to answer or resolve the complaint. If there is no response within a week or two then a reminder is sent out. If the complaint is still not dealt with after two more weeks then a profile of the complaint is featured on the website and the negligent agency/individual is “named and shamed” on the website, and via emails to all council departments and media organizations. Project coordinator Ong Boon Keong says that “roughly 300 complaints are submitted through Penang Watch per year” and that so far they have “been able to settle 50 percent of submitted complaints.” Illegal shop houses in Penang's UNESCO World Heritage site have been shut down because of complaints submitted to the website.

Working With, Not Against, Government

Penang Watch coordinator Ong Boon Keong is eager to point out that the website aims to improve the local government's performance by “providing it with both positive and negative feedback.” Some observers, such as Archon Fung, worry that that the adversarial nature of many transparency and accountability websites erodes trust in governments and institutions, and presents the government as more inefficient and wasteful than it really is. Others say that a constant barrage of reporting about scandals desensitizes people to actual instances of government corruption. There are even suggestions that in countries that are new democracies, watchdog reporting can lead to dissatisfaction with democracy itself and lead to riots and chaos.

The effect of governmental transparency that is about accountability may be simply to make that problem worse, to further de-legitimize government, because what the transparency system is doing is helping people catch government making mistakes. That's good. You do want to catch government making mistakes. But you want transparency and information systems that also highlight when government is doing a good job.

Much of the current activity around governmental transparency is like creating a big Amazon rating system for government that only allows one- or two-star ratings. But that's not necessarily the case. You could also construct governmental transparency systems that provide the full five-star range.

Indeed, we have found many websites that strive to highlight the worst actions of corrupt officials, but few if any that reward effective performance and clean track records. In the future it is recommended that transparency and accountability websites strike a balance between criticizing poor government performance and celebrating that which is worth duplicating.

Accountability Verus Self-Governance

The thirty case studies we have collected so far illustrate both the potential and the extreme difficulty in bringing about accountability (either answerability or sanctions) by shaping civic engagement about public information. But, then again, accountability isn't the only stated objective of several of the projects we've reviewed. In addition to demanding better performance from government, platforms like Cidade Democrática can also facilitate better community self-governance that does not rely on public officials or understaffed agencies. Like other complaint websites we have reviewed, Cidade Democrática enables Brazilian citizens to list problems related to their municipality. Other users are then encouraged to list potential solutions to the problems and draft strategies and action plans. So far successful solutions have depended on government involvement, but in the future one can envision that communal gardens, walking paths, and even recycling programs can all be coordinated by citizens without government involvement.

Similarly, we are told by Map Kibera co-founder Mikel Maron that a World Bank study found that Kibera residents pay on average ten times more for water than the average person in a wealthy Nairobi neighborhood with municipally supplied, metered water service. Voice of Kibera could be used as a platform to petition government and tribal leaders to enact measures that bring down the cost of water. However, it could also be used as a visualization of daily water costs as an incentive to bring new suppliers into the neighborhood which would increase competition and lower prices. In other words, these platforms can be used by citizens to put pressure on their governments, but they can also be used by citizens to directly improve their communities without depending on public officials.

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In Mexico, Irma Eréndida Sandoval heads up a laboratory to document corruption and research the best transparency policies. “Laboratorio de Documentación y Análisis de la Corrupción y la Transparencia” at UNAM, the Autonomous National Mexican University, is one of the most prestigious institutions in Latin America.

In Iceland, parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir is promoting the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, a proposal to create a global safe haven for investigative journalism in Iceland that would improve freedom of expression and transparency worldwide by protecting watchdog groups and whistleblowers from libel censorship.

It is important not only approve good laws to promote transparency and openness but also protect a free country from becoming less transparent. An activist from Germany, Franziska Heine, initiated the most successful e-petition in German history, aimed to prevent a law which would give the German police the right to create and maintain censorship lists with websites to be blocked by German ISPs. It was signed more than 134,000 times. Franziska is part of the anti-censorship movement and is engaged in several activities and organizations which fight against surveillance, data mining, censorship and other threats to civil rights.

But good laws and proactive citizens are not enough; tools are also important to enable women around the world to take action and promote transparency. Margarita Padilla, an IT engineer and the former director of the magazine Mundo Linux is making a difference. She creates and maintains systems with a social approach and also promotes openness with her website Sin Dominio.

Mercedes de Freitas from Venezuela is the Executive Director of Transparencia Venezuela, the local chapter of Transparency International and is former Ashoka Changemaker Fellow for her work in promoting civic participation to increase government accountability.

These are surely just a few examples of women around the world who are using technology to challenge corruption, improve the performance of institutions, and create better policy to engage citizens and hold public officials accountable. As a recent article by Alexandra Starr notes, both the fields of technology and government have long excluded women from participation despite their impressive track record for approaching both policy and technology with more realism and tact than their male counterparts.

Software companies and parliamentary buildings around the world are still mostly dominated by men, but this is changing quickly thanks to a new generation of women technologists, activists, and politicians. I would be remiss to not highlight the work of our female researchers and research reviewers who, it must be said, have proven themselves to be the hardest working members of our team on the Technology for Transparency Network.

Renata Avila, who wrote the profiles of all of the women above, is a lawyer, human rights activist, the country lead of Creative Commons Guatemala, and the director of Primer Palabra. She has worked with the Rigoberta Menchu Tum Foundation, Harvard University, the Public Voice, and Women in International Security. Twitter: @avilarenata.

Sopheap Chak is a graduate student of peace studies at the International University of Japan. Meanwhile, she is also running the Cambodian Youth Network for Change, which mobilizes young activists around the country. She was previously advocacy officer of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights (CCHR) where she helped lead the “Black Box Campaign” to fight against police corruption in Cambodia. Twitter: @jusminesophia.

Rebekah Heacock is currently a master's candidate at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, where she studies the intersection of ICT and development and edits SIPA’s blog, The Morningside Post. She previously lived and worked in Uganda, where she co-developed and directed a series of conferences on post-conflict development for American and African college students. Twitter: @rebekahredux.

Manuella Maia Ribeiro is a recent graduate of Public Policy Management from the University of São Paulo, Brazil. Since 2007 she has been researching how governments can promote transparency, accountability and participation through the use of information and communication technologies. Twitter: @manuellamr.

Namita Singh is a researcher and consultant focused on participatory media. She studied mass media and mass communication at Delhi University and has a Master of Arts in Social Work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai. Namita will soon begin her Ph.D. research in the UK on the processes and impact of participatory video. Twitter: @namitasingh.

Carrie Yang is a a postgraduate student studying new media at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The focus of her research is on citizen journalism and new media product development. She studied English at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in Guangzhou, China. Twitter: @Carrie_Young.

Sylwia Presley is a blogger, photographer and activist who is passionate about social media marketing for the non-profit sector and social media for social change. She has organized numerous events including Barcamp Transparency UK last summer in Oxford, which she hopes will be replicated in other European countries this year. Twitter: @presleysylwia.

Aparna Ray is an independent qualitative research consultant by profession who is keenly interested in people, cultures, communities and social media/software. She writes both in English and Bangla, (the latter being her mother-tongue), and covers the Bangla blog world on Global Voices. Twitter: @aparnaray.

Laura Vidal is a Venezuelan studying Science Education in Paris, France. She blogs at Sacando la Lengua about languages, literature and interactions in society, and deeply believes in the uniqueness and importance of every culture, and in the study of them as a mirror to our own.

Do you know other women working in the fields of technology and transparency? Please link to their websites, blogs, and Twitter accounts in the comments section below!

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It makes a great deal of sense for The Economist to focus their attention on the US, UK, New Zealand, and Australia; all four countries have relatively high rates of internet penetration and their federal governments have shown a commitment to publishing government data in machine readable format, which can then be analyzed and re-used on websites with interactive visualizations. But what is happening in other countries around the world where, for example, citizens might be more concerned about police bribery than campaign finance reform? Over a three-month period eight researchers and eight research reviewers from Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, China, and Central & Eastern Europe will document around 40 case studies of technology projects that aim to promote transparency, accountability, and civic engagement. Every two weeks we will publish an overview of their last eight case studies with the goal of promoting conversation and coming to a deeper understanding of how technology can be used to improve governance in developing democracies.

Bloggers Adopt Politicians in Brazil

Let's begin in Brazil where a pro-democracy civil society organization inspired a well known muckraking radio journalist who in turn challenged Brazilian bloggers to each “adopt a local politician” in order to keep an eye on their work and hold them accountable. Dozens of bloggers joined immediately, but it wasn't until Everton Zanella, a web developer based in Sao Paulo, decided to list and categorize all these activist bloggers that the phenomenon turned into a cohesive movement. Our Brazil-based researcher, Manuella Maia Ribeiro, sat down with Zanella to interview him about the successes and challenges of the project. Fabiano Angelico, our research reviewer who is also based in Sao Paulo, congratulates the project for its focus on local accountability when so many of these types of projects are focused only on federal governments. But he still feels that there is “room for a more efficient approach” and suggests that the bloggers should pick a monthly topic and try to raise awareness and advocate for more government data related to that one topic. He also suggests that the project should encourage its participant bloggers to interact more with journalists, civil society organizations, and universities.

It is worth noting that a similar “adopt a politician” campaign began in Peru in 2008 when the well known journalist Rosa María Palacios asked citizens to mount pressure in order to get information about the operational expenses of national congressmen. Juan Arellano wrote an in-depth review of the project, which is no longer active (though still has 1,500 members on Facebook) following an overwhelming resistance by most congressmen.

Promoting Collaboration Among Human Rights Groups in Cambodia

Cambodia has among the highest number of NGO's per capita anywhere in the world. There are dozens of organizations throughout the country publishing information about human rights and human rights abuses, but they tend to file these reports on their individual websites or, worse, in lengthy PDF reports that are sent via email to their funders. With the goal of promoting more collaboration among human rights, organizations the Cambodian Center for Human Rights has launched Sithi.org, a map-based visualization and archive of human rights violations and related news which can be filtered by category and sub-category. Preetam Rai, our research reviewer for Southeast Asia suggests that Sithi.org make contact with Cambodian bloggers to spread more awareness about the initiative outside of just the human rights activist community. By distributing their data via Facebook and Twitter - and by presenting the project at local tech meetups - they are more likely to attract the interest of Cambodia's enthusiastic 20-something generation of techies. Lastly, Preetam recommends giving more visible attribution to the organizations that contribute reports to the map so that there is more of an incentive to do so.

A Twitter Tag Protest in Mexico

Can a single tag on Twitter reverse a bad policy decision by federal senators? In Mexico “#InternetNecesario” seemed to do just that, eliminating a law that was approved by Mexico's Chamber of Deputies to impose a three percent tax on internet access. But can Mexico's extensive community of Twitterers use the platform to influence policy that affects more than just their beloved internet? So far we haven't found any examples, but anyone interested in organizing a political advocacy campaign via Twitter would be well served by reading this case study by Renata Avila. She speaks with Oscar Salazar, Alberto Bustamante, and Homero Fernandez about some of the opportunities and challenges when it comes to distilling useful information from an avalanche of Twitter messages and then turning that information into offline political change. Laura Vidal, our research reviewer for Latin America, comments that #InternetNecesario is an example of what she feels is an increasing trend of citizens taking in the slack when governments fail to consult with civil society and mainstream media fails to hold up a magnifying glass to their actions.

Better Government Through Better Maps

How we govern the land, people, resources, housing, and businesses of our communities depends on our perception of the physical space they occupy. “Kibera, a slum in Nairobi, Kenya, has its roots in the first World War,” writes Rebekah Heacock, when “the colonial government gave returning Kenyan soldiers land outside of the city center. After Kenya's independence in 1963, new land policies made Kibera into an illegal settlement. Despite this, the area has continued to grow. It now houses as many as 1.2 million people and is widely considered to be one of Africa's largest slums.” But until recently Kibera was largely “a blank spot on the Kenyan map” and aid organizations in the area did not share information with each other or the community at large. Map Kibera, a project started by Erica Hagen and Mikel Maron of Open Street Map, aims to change that dynamic by getting residents of Kibera more involved in creating maps of their own community and publishing information and news about infrastructure and services that are both available and needed. Kibera resident Douglas Namale says in a video published with the case study that the planning department has historically not had adequate geographic information about Kibera which has resulted in poor sanitation services. The collaboratively produced map of Kibera has been integrated into the Ushahidi-based Voice of Kibera, a website that tracks news from Kibera and locates it on a map interface. Readers can subscribe to updates via text message and/or email. Hagen and Maron - both Americans - are committed to staying in Kenya until at least August, but they recognize the importance of long-term attention until the project becomes sustainable and completely managed by local Kibera residents.

Comparing the Promises and Performance of Politicians in Mumbai, India

Vivek Gilani, the founder of MumabaiVotes.com was tired of seeing his family and friends vote for their representatives based on the promises candidates made in the lead-up to elections rather than their actual performance while in office. In 2004 he began building up an archive of media coverage that tracks what local politicians promised during elections and what they actually achieved once in office. The website now includes an impressive archive of articles and videos categorized by politician, political party, and voting district. Not every politician has a complete profile on the website, but many do. I chose a few names at random and searched for information about them on Google; their MumbaiVotes.com profile was almost always the first search result, providing a more comprehensive overview of the politician than could be found in a single article or, most certainly, the politician's own website. In her review comment Aparna Ray points us to Praja.org, a similar project based in Mumbai which tracks the attendance, related issues, and financial assets and liabilities of the city's elected politicians. Both projects are pieces to a larger puzzle, but it would be nice if they shared data so that readers have a more comprehensive overview of the performance, risks, and potential biases of their elected officials. Aparna also applauds MumbaiVotes for their offline outreach, university partnerships, and plans to print out and distribute a voter's guide in the lead-up to elections.

From “Not In My Backyard” to Greater Environmental Awareness

Without any doubt, China presents special circumstances when it comes to documenting online projects that promote transparency, accountability, and civic engagement. Online activity is highly regulated in China and website administrators must adhere to a strict policy of what can and cannot be published online. The difficulty of walking this line is intimated by a moderator of Jiang-Wai-Jiang, a community forum for residents living in Lijiang Garden, Baiyun District, Guangzhou. Lijiang Garden's mostly upper-class residents used the forum to disseminate information and organize protests against a proposed waste incinerator that the government was planning to construct nearby. Through coordinated efforts on the forum they “wrote proposals to relevant government departments, printed T-shirts with slogans, and demonstrated in front of the local supermarket,” writes Carrie Yang, our China regional researcher. Local authorities finally yielded to the protesters and announced that the incinerator would not be built in Lijiang Garden. The moderator of the forum, however, says that the online discussions led to more than just your standard “not in my backyard” activism: residents gained a greater understanding of the China's garbage problem and have begun discussing how the community can become more ecologically sustainable.

Networking Civil Society Organizations in Zimbabwe

Finally, we end in Zimbabwe where Kubatana.net was founded in 2001 to promote greater cooperation and information sharing among civil society organizations and with the general Zimbabwean public. Victor Kaonga spoke with Bev Clark and Amanda Atwood from Kubatana to learn more about how they aggregate information from civil society organizations and shape it into campaigns to change policy. Their website now lists profile pages for more than 230 NGO's, stores an archive of 15,000 documents related to civil society, and claims a mailing list of around 18,000 people. Still, examples of concrete, offline change as a result of the information collected and disseminated on Kubatana remain relatively scarce. We are informed, however, of a recent campaign to encourage Transparency International Zimbabwe to investigate the use of revenue from toll booths which are cropping up on roads and highways around the country.

Conclusion: Small Wins, Tough Longterm Projects

Our first round of case studies show us that online platforms like Discuz!, the Chinese software that powers the Jiang-Wai-Jiang community forum, or Twitter in the case of the “#InternetNecesario” campaign, can be used effectively to reverse government policy decisions and stimulate debate about important issues like waste removal and internet access. But both examples also reveal that such campaigns often depend on stirring the inspiration of those who are most likely to be negatively affected by the policy.

The other five case studies - Adopt a Local Politician, Sithi.org, Map Kibera, MumbaiVotes.com, and Kubatana - reveal the multiple challenges when it comes to building a sustainable community of citizen activists who are willing to regularly publish and disseminate information related to their elected officials and civic issues. Mere internet access is one challenge, as we witnessed with Sithi.org, but basic education about the responsibilities of government and elected officials is another major challenge to the success of projects like Adopt a Local Politician in Brazil.

Two weeks from now we'll be back with another review of case studies from Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, China, and Central & Eastern Europe. You can subscribe to our almost daily podcast of interviews with the leaders of these projects and follow us on Twitter for more updates and links to interesting news stories.

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In this podcast he explains why transparency and accountability projects tend to focus on federal rather than state and local governments and points us to one innovative project in Brazil in which bloggers ‘adopt' local politicians.

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Internet technologies give governments an unprecedented ability to monitor our communication, internet activity, and even the microphones on our cell phones. The Internet, however, also empowers citizens with new tools and tactics to hold their elected officials accountable, increase transparency in government, and promote broader and more diverse civic engagement.

Rising Voices, the outreach and citizen media training initiative of Global Voices Online, has launched a new interactive website and global network of researchers to map online technology projects that aim to promote transparency, political accountability, and civic engagement in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, China, and Central & Eastern Europe. Over the next three months eight researchers and eight research reviewers will document at least 32 case studies of the most innovative technology for transparency projects outside of North America and Western Europe. By thoroughly documenting and evaluating each project with a standard methodology we aim to come to a better understanding of what tactics, tools, and tips are most effective in 1) making government information accessible to the general public in a meaningful way, 2) holding political and corporate leaders accountable to the rule of law and their campaign promises, and 3) promoting civic engagement so that a wider and more representative portion of citizens are involved in policy making and political processes.

Over the next three months we hope to find concrete answers to the following questions: Can technology for transparency projects be evaluated individually for impact, or should they only be seen as part of a larger accountability ecosystem? Does citizen participation in such projects lead to greater overall citizen engagement and more widespread demand for accountable public institutions? Do public institutions change their policies and behavior based on the input from citizen-led initiatives? To what extent does the usage of technology tools drive action around transparency?

The Need

As of January 19, U.S. cellphone users have donated more than $22 million in text-message donations alone. In fact, roughly one-fifth of the $112 million total that the American Red Cross has so far raised for Haiti has come via text messaging. Technology has clearly had an impact on global giving for humanitarian relief efforts. The priority right now is that the money gets to Haiti quickly and is spent as effectively as possible to save lives, and provide medical care and shelter. But in the longterm, as billions of dollars of aid money flow in to help rebuild infrastructure and entire industries, how can both Haitian citizens and donors hold institutions accountable so that development programs are run properly and without corruption?

As traditional media companies are forced to cut their budgets because of falling advertising revenue, investigative journalism and international coverage are the two most common areas to be disappear. David Simon, in his testimony before Congress about the death of the newspaper industry, said that with a vacuum of investigative journalism, “it is going to be one of the great times to be a corrupt politician.” Meanwhile, Transparency International's 2009 Corruption Perceptions Index reveals that corruption is still a severe and worldwide problem.

However, there is also growing enthusiasm about the use of social media as a powerful tool in promoting transparency and fighting against corruption. But how does the use of technology to promote transparency differ across regions, cultures, and types of governance? What skills and expertise are missing from the current technology for transparency projects? What types of relationships have they formed with media, government, and civil society organizations to increase their impact? We will document in-depth as many technology for transparency projects as possible to gain a better understanding of their current impact, obstacles, and future potential.

The Team

Global Voices has long been reporting about uses of digital media and technology to improve governance and fight against corruption. Several veteran Global Voices contributing authors are joined by leading transparency activists around the world to make up our team of researchers and research reviewers. We are also fortunate to count on the experience and insight of a board of advisors made up of the leading thinkers in the field of transparency and good governance.

For those of you on Twitter we have made lists of our researchers, reviewers, and advisors.

The Results

As of today you are able to read three case studies documenting projects based in Jordan, Chile, and Kenya. Ishki.com is a complaint brokerage which collects and organizes complaints from local citizens about the public and private sector. Vota Inteligente uses technology to provide Chilean citizens with more information about their elected officials. Mzalendo tracks the performance of Kenya's Parliament by documenting votes, publishing records, and providing analysis and context.

Over the next two weeks these three case studies will be joined by eight others. In addition to publishing at least 32 case studies over the next three months, we will also facilitate 16 discussions on Global Voices that provide more context and background information about the state of transparency, accountability and civic engagement in specific countries and regions. We are also building a toolset of the most effective tools used by the projects that we document. Click on any of the tools and you will see which projects have incorporated it as part of their strategy.

We realize that these are busy times and that few readers will be able to read all of the thorough case studies, background discussions, and tool profiles that we publish. For this reason we have created a weekly podcast that will feature five-minute interviews with leaders of some of the most interesting technology for transparency projects that we come across. You can click on this link to subscribe to the podcast in iTunes. So far we have interviews with Waheed Al-Barghouthi of Ishki, Ory Okolloh of Mzalendo, and Felipe Heusser of Vota Inteligente.

At the beginning of May we will also publish a traditional PDF report which highlights the most innovative and effective tools and tactics related to technology for transparency projects. The report will make recommendations to funders, activists, NGOs, and government officials regarding the current obstacles to effectively applying technology to improve transparency, accountability, and civic engagement. It will also aggregate and evaluate the best ideas and strategies to overcome those obstacles.

Our research will complement - and collaborate with - the work being done by like-minded mapping, discussion, and toolset projects including ParticipateDB, Participedia, the International Association for Public Participation, the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation, ePractice, MobileActive's mDirectory, and LocalLabs.

How to Help

This is a collaborative research project which is open to the participation and input of anyone interested in the intersection of technology and good governance. If you have suggestions for case studies that we should document and evaluate please get in touch via our contact page. If you are interested in contributing as a volunteer researcher you can register for a user account.

You can subscribe to our RSS feed for newly published case studies and to our podcast for interviews with leading doers and thinkers in the field. Please follow us on Twitter and become a fan of our page on Facebook to receive extra updates about daily news and information related to technology for transparency. Finally, if you would like to engage in debate and discussion about the application of technology to improve governance in countries outside of North America and Western Europe, please subscribe to the Transparency for Technology mailing list.

For years now there has been an ongoing debate about whether the Internet is good or bad for democracy. But we have few case studies and even fewer comparative research mappings of Internet-based projects that aim to improve governance, especially in countries outside of North America and Western Europe. Hopefully the Technology for Transparency Network will lead not only to more informed debate about the Internet's impact on democracy, but also to more participation and interest in projects that aim to empower and improve the livelihoods of citizens who were previously excluded from political participation.

Written by David Sasaki · comments (16)
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On Space for Transparency, the official blog of Transparency International, Georg Neumann looks back at the state of anti-corruption activism for 2009:

Increasingly, anti-corruption activists have been in the line of attack. Journalists writing on corruption in politics and society such as Sri Lanka’s Lasantha Wickramatunga earlier this year have given their lives. Activists from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Burundi, Guatemala or Zimbabwe have faced threats or were being silenced. Anti-Corruption Day stands for a day to remember, recognise and honour these brave and fearless people, who went to prison or lost their lives believing that through fighting corruption they will make the world a better place.

Neumann also notes that 2009 saw the passing of a flawed review mechanism which doesn't require member states to seek input from independent NGO's based in their countries. In a five-minute YouTube video Peter Eigen, the founder of Transparency International, describes the important role of civil society in fighting corruption and improving governance:

But it wasn't all bad news in 2009, writes Neumann. There are now 40 Advocacy and Legal Advice Centers worldwide providing legal advice to victims of corruption. Also, online social media has proven itself a powerful tool in promoting transparency and fighting against corruption. In India, for example, J. N. Jayashree started a wiki to protect her husband whose safety was threatened as a result of his whistle-blowing activities. In Morocco an anonymous anti-corruption activist has begun posting videos to YouTube of police officers accepting bribes.

On Global Voices a number of posts commemorated Anti-Corruption Day last month. Bhumika Ghimire notes that Nepal was ranked by Transparency International as one of the world's most corrupt countries. Linking to other Nepalese bloggers, Bhumika's article shows how corruption in Nepal affects the economy, governance, public works, and even marriage.

'Arruda Out'. Twitpic by Cleudson Fernandes, Twitter user @cleudsonf, published with permission

In Brazil violence broke out on Anti-Corruption Day between police and protesters:

Protesters have been demanding the impeachment of the Governor of the Federal District, Jose Roberto Arruda, and his deputy, Paulo Octavio, in addition to a thorough investigation into all parties cited in the bribery scandal that led to a police operation codenamed Pandora Box. According to the investigation, Governor Arruda is the possible head of a R$ 600,000 (approximately $340,000) per month bribery scheme that has benefited allies among district members of parliament, businessmen and government officials.

Transparency HackDay in São Paulo, photo by Alexandre Fugita used under a Creative Commons license.

But there is also reason for optimism in Brazil when it comes to transparency and open governance, as Paula Goés explained a week before Anti-Corruption Day:

The first Transparência [Transparency] Hackday, “two days for hacking into Brazilian politics”, was launched in São Paulo at the beginning of October, and the last camp took place this week, on December 1st and 2nd, in the capital Brasília [pt]. Organized by journalists Daniela Silva and Pedro Markun [both pt], the event has free entry and is an opportunity for software developers, journalists and researchers to gather together to find ways to “scrape” data from official websites and create applications that bring transparency and participation to the political processes.

Global Voices editors also point readers to a number of posts around the blogosphere related to transparency, corruption, and government accountability. Peter Marton looks at the harmful role of corruption in rebuilding Afghanistan. In Ukraine, meanwhile, Petro congratulates the residents of Kabul for sentencing their mayor to four years of prison for corruption and imagines how quickly Kyiv's prisons would fill up if the same laws were enforced in his country. Writing in Registan.net, Alexander Visotzky looks at the corruption charges against Mukhtar Dzhakishev for the illegal sale of Uranium and concludes, “The fight against corruption in Kazakhstan is apparently much more of a political game than an attempt to root out corruption.” Writing from Japan, Scilla Alecci points to Transparency International's Ten Worst Corruption Cases of 2009 in Japan. Finally, writing from the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico, “Gil the Jenius” asks for tougher punishments against public officials convicted of corruption.

Looking back on anti-corruption activism in 2009 we see that an entrenched culture of corruption is still pervasive worldwide. But we also see a growing online discussion about what can be done to curb corruption, promote transparency, and increase civic engagement. In future posts we'll look more specifically at online discussions and internet-based projects to promote transparency and fight against corruption in Nigeria and China.

Written by David Sasaki · comments (6)
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—–

Five years ago I boarded a flight from San Diego to Boston to attend the 2004 Internet & Society conference at the Berkman Center. This was just a month after George Bush won the 2004 election and so there was an element of group therapy to many of the panel discussions. 2004 was the year when, according to Wired Magazine, the Internet invented Howard Dean. Dean's campaign was supposed to be the harbinger of a new era of net politics where the progressive grassroots took advantage of online tools like blogs and Meetup.com (this was before YouTube even existed) to bring about more enlightened, representative governance. Instead, according to the ever-snarky Register, “organized religion, not net religion, won it for Bush.”

While the majority of the 2004 Internet & Society conference was focused on deconstructing the US election, two of the fellows at the Berkman Center, Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman, wanted to widen the scope of the discussions to look at how the internet was affecting society and politics worldwide. Disillusioned by the arrogance and frequent incompetence of big media, Rebecca had just left CNN where she was working as the Beijing Bureau Chief. She came to the Shorenstein Center to study the relationship between blogs and international news coverage, with a specific focus on the coverage of North Korea.

Ethan meanwhile had recently published Making Room for the Third World in the Second Superpower, which served as a foundation for much of his later thinking and research about 1) the role that bloggers play in filling voids of information from “under-covered parts of the world” and 2) the role that “bridge-builders” play in amplifying their voices across cultural, national, and linguistic divides.

Even when we do have some information about under-covered parts of the world, we have another problem, what Ito terms “the caring problem”. People pay attention to subjects they care about. They tend to ignore subjects they know little about. Media, trying to serve its customers in a free market, responds by giving them more information on subjects they've demonstrated an interest in and ignoring other subjects. As a result, consumers don't get interested in new topics, as they're not exposed to them. So even if people blog or report about situations in the Congo, readers don't pay attention to these reports and the noosphere, the realm of thought and culture, remains weak in those areas.

To solve the caring problem, Ethan continues, “will require a focus on bridge builders,” people who are able to contextualize conversations, issues, and debates from one community and introduce them to another. Some of the greatest examples of online bridge-builders at the time were Hossein Derakhshan from Iran, Joi Ito from Japan, Xiao Qiang from China, Ory Okolloh from Kenya, Salam Pax from Iraq, and Jeff Ooi from Malaysia.

Rebecca and Ethan wanted to bring some of these bridge-builders (later dubbed “bridge bloggers“) together to discuss, debate, and shape a shared vision for an inclusive, unmediated, global, grassroots conversation. About forty of us gathered in a medium-sized classroom at Harvard's law school to discuss how “the use of weblogs and other new technologies enhance online global dialogue and political advocacy.” At the end of the day Joi Ito and Jim Moore led a session with the objective of drafting a manifesto, which is just as applicable today as it was then.

Two of the most outspoken participants throughout the day's discussions were Hossein Derakhshan and Jeff Ooi, who are now in prison and parliament respectively. Reflecting on just how much can change in five short years, I decided to make a list of some of the international participants from that first Global Voices meeting and look at where they are now.

Ory Okolloh (Kenyan Pundit): At the time of the first Global Voices meeting Ory Okolloh was a student at Harvard Law School and an enthusiastic blogger known as “Kenyan Pundit.” Like other bridge bloggers, she frequently wrote about Kenya for a mostly Western audience and wrote about the West for Kenyans. Throughout 2005 she wrote seven posts on Global Voices introducing some of the pioneers from the African blogosphere. Today Ory continues to blog at Kenyan Pundit. She has spoken at both TED and Pop!Tech. And she has left the legal world to focus on the use of technology in activism with Ushahidi and Mzalendo.

Omar and Mohammed Fadhil (Iraq the Model): A mild controversy surrounded the participation of Iraqi brothers Omar and Mohammed Fadhil in the first Global Voices meeting. First of all, their trip was financed by Spirit of America, a patriotic US non-profit which supports the work of the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan. (At the meeting Jim Hake announced that Spirit of America had developed the first blogging platform to support Arabic text. As far as I'm aware the platform was never actually launched. Jim says the platform was used for three and a half years by “Friends of Democracy“.) Second, when Omar and Mohammed arrived to the US to attend the conference they received an unexpected invitation to visit President George Bush in the White House. A couple years later Bush even cited an Iraq the Model blog post in his address to the National Cattlemen's Beef Association (seriously):

The Iraqi people are beginning to say — see positive changes. I want to share with you how two Iraqi bloggers — they have bloggers in Baghdad, just like we've got here — (laughter) — “Displaced families are returning home, marketplaces are seeing more activity, stores that were long shuttered are now reopening. We feel safer about moving in the city now. Our people want to see this effort succeed. We hope the governments in Baghdad and America do not lose their resolve.”

There were even rumors that Omar and Mohammed were receiving funding from the CIA, an allegation that New York Times reporter Sarah Boxer found no evidence for. Today both Omar and Mohammed are based in the US where they are the Middle East Editors for the conservative online media network Pajamas Media. Mohammed is now studying programming at Open Source University while Omar is a graduate student in International Affairs at Columbia University. Omar still writes at Iraq the Model and published an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal in September.

Isaac Mao: Isaac is the co-founder of the first Chinese blogging platform CNBlog.org. As he wrote last year in The Guardian, his first post was published on August 5, 2002, and his infectious enthusiasm for blogging and sharing information quickly spread across China. If anything, Isaac's enthusiasm about the positive social impact of blogging has only grown. He was a fellow earlier this year at the Berkman Center where he continued his research on “Sharism.” In June Isaac and I co-curated the Cloud Intelligence Symposium at the Ars Electronica festival. He remains active in organizing barcamps and conferences in China, and is an advocate of online free speech.

Joi Ito: At the time of the first Global Voices meeting Joi introduced himself as the Vice President of International and Mobility for Technorati and his blog was called “Joi Ito's conversation with the living web.” He was at the time the ultimate internet geek, a clear writer with an international outlook and strong technical fluency. His personal IRC channel was a meeting place in 2004 and 2005 for everyone interested in blogs, wikis, and the social web. Even today you'll regularly find 50 - 100 people connected and just hanging out. Back in 2004 Joi focused much of his writing on “the caring problem” (and, to a lesser degree, getting Angelina Jolie to blog). He was also active with Isaac Mao back in 2005 trying to promote dialogue between Japanese and Chinese bloggers during a period of escalated antagonism between the two countries. Today Joi is the CEO of Creative Commons and a legal resident of Dubai. Earlier this year he led a workshop on Creative Commons and digital media with the Royal Film Commission of Jordan.

Jeff Ooi: Back in 2004 Jeff was blogging at Screenshots, which was hosted at Blogger. He also had launched USJ-Subyang Jaya, an English-language online news portal, ran a podcast called SuiteTalker, and managed a community of Malaysian photographers. Later he blogged for CNET Asia, and in 2007 he and Ahiruddin Attan were sued by the New Straits Times Press for 10 blog posts which they alleged were libelous. Last year he ran for office as a DAP candidate in the 2008 general election and won a seat in Malaysian parliament. He continues to blog regularly for Asian Correspondent.

Rashmi Sinha: We all went out to dinner at some Cambridge restaurant after that first GV meeting and I remember how everyone was circling around Jay Rosen, Hoder, and Joi Ito like they were celebrities. Such fawning always - especially among bloggers - drives me crazy. So I took a seat in the corner of the restaurant with a soft-spoken woman who said she was from India and that she recently finished her Ph.D. in neuroscience. (I had recently been in India and studied neuroscience for a couple years in college.) In January 2002 Rashmi founded Dialog Now, a blog which encouraged dialog between Indians and Pakistanis during the 2001–2002 India–Pakistan standoff. You can read her post from December 2004 about Global Voices here. Five years after the Global Voices meeting and she was voted by Playboy magazine as one of the ten sexiest CEO's in the world. Rashmi founded SlideShare in 2007 with her husband Jonathan Boutelle.

Hoder: At the first Global Voices meeting Hoder led a session titled “How to build a blogosphere.” The title is a somewhat pompous allusion to his claim that he is personally responsible for the tremendous growth of Persian-language blogs in Iran. In November, 2001 he created a step-by-step guide on how to set up a blog in Persian and in the next couple years the Iranian blogosphere grew to become one of the most vibrant and politically active around the world. At the second Global Voices summit in London Hoder met our then-contributor from Israel, Lisa Goldman, and decided to visit her a month later. It is so interesting to look back at the New York Times op-ed he published during his visit, and also at Lisa Goldman's account of their time together. Hoder was arrested in Tehran on November 1, 2008. He is allegedly being held in Evin Prison and there has lately been a lot of talk about his role in the Iranian show trials following the Green Revolution. Hoder is an extremely complicated guy. I'm pretty sure he's managed to piss off every single person who has ever considered him a friend. Of course, we all want him out of prison. But it is difficult to know the best way to advocate for that to happen; especially when we don't even really know why he's in prison in the first place. Cyrus has been following the story closely and I assume that he will continue to do so until Hoder is released. You can get more context about Hoder and all the controversies surrounding him on his Wikipedia page.

Yvonne T. Chua: Yvonne is an investigative journalist and journalism trainer for the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. In 1999 she wrote “Robbed: An Investigation of Corruption in Philippine Education” and at the time of the Global Voices meeting she was interested (way ahead of her time) in how new media would change journalism training. Today PCIJ is one of the leading centers in teaching digital media for investigative reporting in South East Asia. Their 20th anniversary conference in September was focused on new media and democratization.

Akwe Amosu: She joined allAfrica.com as its founding executive editor in 2000 and at the time of the first GV meeting she was working on Peace Africa, an aggregator of news and information related to peacekeeping missions in Sub-Saharan Africa. At our third Global Voices Summit in Delhi, India she organized a small meeting of African and Chinese bloggers to encourage more open discussion about the impact of Chinese presence in Africa and African presence in China. She is now the Africa Advocacy Director for Open Society Institute and the Senior Policy Analyst for Africa at the OSI Policy Center. She is also a member of Global Voices' board of directors.

Other participants of that first Global Voices meeting include Krista Baumane, Alex Steffen, Dan Gilmor, Darius Cuplinskas, David Weinberger, Debra Bowen, Ejovi Nuwere, Janet Haven, Jeff Jarvis, Jeremy Drucker, Jerzy Celichowski, Jim Moore, Jonathan Peizer, Kwindla Kramer, Marc Danziger, Matt Burden, Michelle Levesque, Oh Yeonho, Philip Carter, Ramu Dhara, Rodger Desai, and Terry Fisher.

It was, looking back on it, a mix of elite bloggers, affiliates of the Berkman Center, and affiliates of Open Society Institute's Information Program.

The most important outcome of the meeting, however, was an agreement to develop an index of bridge blogs from around the world. Hoder began the process by listing the blogs of all the participants at the meeting on his own personal wiki. That list was later transferred to the Global Voices wiki. (Here is what the wiki looked like back in 2005.) We soon realized that a static wiki-based list of blogs wasn't interactive enough. Rebecca proposed using Bloglines as an aggregator of “bridge blogs” from around the world. (Very interesting to look back and see which bloggers from early 2005 are still blogging today and which countries - like Madagascar - aren't even listed.) Ethan suggested that we use the tag “globalvoices” on Delicious to track bridge blog posts. But it wasn't until Paul Frankenstein - then a summer intern at the Berkman Center - began posting daily roundups of the global blogosphere that Global Voices began to take its present form.

My first post on Global Voices was exactly five years ago to the day. I suggested that BloggerCon IV be held outside of North America and Western Europe. (It seems that the 2010 Global Voices Summit will be our first south of the equator.) In June 2005 I was hired as the first Global Voices regional editor and began posting daily roundups of what bloggers throughout Latin America were writing about. My first roundup post summarized reactions by Mexican bloggers to a 2005 communique posted by the Zapatistas (shortly after I had traveled to Chiapas). Throughout 2005 I recruited as many authors to write about Latin America on Global Voices as possible. Iria Puyosa, Eduardo Ávila, Georgia Popplewell, Roy Rojas, and Alán Flores were among the first contributing authors.

I could spend hours reminiscing about those first months of Global Voices. It was such an exciting time. We really believed that we were on the cutting edge of a sea change in how citizens around the world would communicate and find out about one another. And we were. That's not to say that our mission was complete. Even now, we're still only about 10% there. But what an amazing 10% it has been. Over the next few years following that first meeting we would discover three major obstacles to our mission and we would develop new projects to meet those challenges.

Today I am sitting at De Prague Cafe in Beirut, a meeting place of poets, intellectuals, and bloggers. I hear Arabic, English, French, and Italian. Sami just stopped by. Then Noha, Donatella, and Ayesha. We hadn't planned on meeting up here, but bloggers find fast wi-fi like camels find water.

I am reading a post that Rebecca published on December 3, 2004. It is about what an ideal world news service would look like. And I am realizing that we did it. We built that. We worked our asses off to do something that we should all really be proud of.

Yes, we still have a long, long way to go. I am more cognizant of that than ever after attending last week's Arab Bloggers Meeting. Evgeny's latest article in the Prospect does a pretty good job listing just a few of the challenges.

But the point is, we're not just making lists of what is wrong. We are making lists of what needs to be done to make it right. And, month by month, year by year, we're slowly checking those items off.

Written by David Sasaki · comments (3)
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Written by David Sasaki · comments (6)
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