Mexican Twitter users poked fun at their politicians back in April when congressman Nazario Norberto Sánchez of the Revolutionary Democratic Party sponsored a bill to more closely monitor and regulate the use of Facebook and Twitter with the aim of disrupting the use of online social networks by drug cartels and organized crime. “The bill would make sharing information that helps others break the law or avoid it a criminal act,” writes Alexis Okeowo in Time.

Mexican Twitter users reacted with laughter and scorn when they heard about the bill, with many saying that the proposed legislation was just an excuse for the government to act as Big Brother. Instead of cracking down on Twitter and Facebook use, some analysts say that law-enforcement and intelligence agencies should adapt to the new technology by creating fake identities on the sites to track criminals down instead of seeking to regulate the sites.

Twitter is back in the controversial spotlight today after journalist José Cárdenas used his Twitter account (30,000 followers) to release the contents of a letter allegedly written by kidnapped former presidential candidate Diego Fernandez de Cevallos along with an accompanying photograph. Both the picture and letter are circulating widely on Twitter among the political class:

However, to put everything into context, the news about Diego Fernandez de Cevallos’ letter can still not compete with “#martesdechucknorris“, a weekly tradition among Twitter users in Mexico to creatively discuss Chuck Norris’ superhuman abilities:

La siguiente es una ponencia que di en el Segundo Encuentro de Web 2.0 de Espacio Público.

Hoy vamos a hablar sobre las nuevas tecnologías y su potencia para hacer cambio progresivo en nuestra sociedad, pero vamos a empezar en el año 1435, en el norte de Francia, donde Jean Mielot, un sacerdote y intelectual francés comenzó a trabajar como el escribiente para Felipe el Bueno, el duque de Borgoña.

A veces todo cambia

Hoy en día, cuando tenemos una sobreabundancia de información es difícil recordar que desde la invención de los rollos de papiro en el Antiguo Egipto los libros fueron publicados así. Cada libro que existió fue hecho a mano, uno por uno, con una pluma y tinta. Como se puede ver en esta foto, Mielot estaba copiando palabra por palabra de un libro para crear otro.

Los textos que los escribientes copiaron casi siempre tenia que ver con la iglesia, la institución más poderosa en Europa durante el segundo milenio. Las monarquías y la iglesia decidieron cuales libros podían ser publicados y cuales no. Ellos tenían el control de como se difundía la información por palabra escrita.

Cuando Jean Mielot recibió su nuevo puesto de trabajo en el año 1435, ser escribiente fue algo prestigioso, en la misma manera que hace cinco años ser periodista fue algo considerado muy prestigioso. Pero lo que Jean Mielot no sabía, lo que seguramente no esperaba, es que el próximo año en 1436 un orfebre alemán que se llama Johannes Gutenberg comenzó a trabajar en su nueva invención. Gutenberg tomó inspiración de las prensas mecánicas que facilitaron la producción de aceite de oliva y el vino, y inventó la imprenta de tipos móviles.

Hay una gran ironía que Johannes Gutenberg es más conocido para su creación e impresión de la Biblia de Gutenberg en 1450. Anteriormente, cada biblia fue copiado a mano, y sólo los sacerdotes y los príncipes tenían acceso a lo que se consideraba el gran libro de la sabiduría.

Otros europeos dependían de los sacerdotes a transmitir el contenido de la Biblia durante sus sermones semanales. Digo que hay ironía en la publicación de la Biblia de Gutenberg, porque la imprenta de Gutenberg fue finalmente responsable por la caída del poder del Vaticano y la Iglesia Católica en europa.

70 años después de la Biblia de Gutenberg estuvo bastante común que los elites europeos publicaron sus propios libros. Martín Lutero, un sacerdote y profesor alemán, fue un autor que lo hizo. En 1522 publicó una traducción de la Biblia en alemán en lugar del estándar Latín. Era un desafío directo al poder de la Iglesia Católica. En lugar de depender de los pocos sacerdotes y elites que hablaba latín, la Biblia ahora fue accesible a todos los alemanes.

Más tarde Lutero publicó sus 95 tesis que se difundió rápidamente por toda Europa, y así empezó la reforma protestante, y la caída del Vaticano como el centro del poder en Europa. Sin la imprenta de Gutenberg, la Reforma Protestante no podía haber pasado.

Tampoco la revolución científica del siglo 17 o la Ilustración del siglo 18. Ambos movimientos dependían de la difusión rápida y amplia de ideas como las del Copérnico, Galileo, y Isaac Newton. De hecho, tal vez la revolución científica se hubiera realizado mucho más antes si la imprenta ya había existido. Lamentablemente, antes de la imprenta, no había manera de publicar, compartir, y agregar las ideas de otros.

La imprenta de Gutenberg se transformó la sociedad mundial. El periodismo, la democracia representativa, y las universidades modernas – todos llegaron a existir gracias a la imprenta de Gutenberg.

Hacia La Autoría Universal

Antes de la imprenta, los europeos dependieron de los sacerdotes para saber lo que había dentro de un libro. Hoy simplemente abren el libro y empiezan a leer. Es una diferencia fundamental y revolucionaria.

Pero los escribientes protestaron. Dijeron que, con la imprenta de Gutenberg, es tan fácil publicar y distribuir libros que una persona ya no podía confiar lo que leyó en un libro, que la gente no sabía como elegir lo que debería leer. Incluso Martín Lutero, la persona que benefició más que cualquier otra persona de la imprenta gutenberg dijo: “La multitud de libros es un gran mal. No hay ninguna medida de límite a esta fiebre por la escritura.” Son las mismas reflexiones que escuchamos hoy con respeto al internet.

La imprenta de Gutenberg, dio lugar a una europa que hoy tiene un nivel de alfabetismo que es casi cien por ciento.

Dos académicos estadounidenses, Denis G. Pelli y Charles Bigelow, muestran que estamos marchando lentamente por un camino hacia la “autoría universal.”

En su investigación, comparan el aumento de los autores de libros publicados al año desde 1400 hasta hoy con el aumento de autores de blogs, los autores de Facebook, y los autores de Twitter. Como se puede ver en el gráfico, se tomó 600 años para llegar a un millón de autores de libros al año. Por el contrario, sólo tardó cinco años en llegar a un millón de autores de los blogs, tres años para llegar a un millón de autores de Facebook, y dos años para llegar a un millón de autores de Twitter. Hay que preguntar, que viene después de Twitter?

El mundo ha cambiado fundamentalmente gracias al alfabetismo y ya sabemos que va a cambiar fundamentalmente por la “autora universal.”

Cuatro observaciones sobre el Web 2.0 para el cambio social

Quería revisar la historia de la imprenta porque me parece un recuerdo importante que el cambio social siempre llega mucho más después de la invención de una nueva tecnología. El impacto de cada nueva tecnología siempre depende en los usos y las reglas que nosotros creamos. La radio puede enseñar a un pueblo como protegerse de la malaria. O puede contribuir al genocidio como sucedió en Rwanda. La agricultura industrializada puede alimentar a todos o puede causar la obesidad. Siempre depende de nosotros.

Así que hoy, brevemente, quiero revisar cuatro observaciones básicas del Web 2.0 y unos proyectos que ejemplifican lo bueno y malo de cada observación.

Primera observación: Los nuevos medios bajan el costo de producir, remezclar, y distribuir contenidos de alta calidad.

Vimos esto en marzo cuando Greenpeace en Inglaterra hizo un video muy bueno, pero también barato, para difundir información sobre el hecho que Nestle usa productos de aceite de palma que contribuye a la deforestación en Indonesia y Malasia. Como todas las empresas grandes, Nestle tiene una pagina en Facebook y miles de personas llegaron a su pagina para dejar comentarios de protesta. Al principio Nestle respondió borrando los comentarios y criticando los usuarios de Facebook. Unas semanas después y Nestle pidió disculpas y anunciaron que ya no van a usar productos que vienen del bosque lluvioso. La lección de esa campaña es usar creatividad, difundir la información por canales múltiples, y coordinar acciones a nivel local y mundial.

Por supuesto anunciaron la nueva política como si fuera su idea, pero eso no es lo que importa.

La campaña contra Nestle muestra el bueno de que hoy es tan fácil producir y distribuir contenidos de alta calidad. Pero la tendencia tiene un peligro también. Por uno, es demasiado fácil crear campañas que no resultan en nada. Por ejemplo, firmar una petición que no va a hacer ningún cambio. O cambiar la imagen de tu perfil de Facebook o Twitter para mostrar tu apoyo a una causa. Esas acciones no hacen daño, pero no hacen cambio social tampoco. Segundo, ahora es tan fácil crear una campaña por nuevos medios que muchos recibimos más que 20 correos al día sobre varias campañas. Y lo que pasa es que no prestamos atención a ninguna.

Segunda observación: El Internet es una plataforma (casi) sin fronteras:

Vimos esto el mes pasado cuando Jason Sadler, un americano, hizo una campaña por Twitter llamado One Million T-shirts, o un millón camisetas. La idea fue pedir usuarios de Twitter por sus camisetas usadas y enviarlas a Africa, un proyecto muy tonto, pero con buenas intenciones. Cuando algunos usuarios de twitter en africa se enteraron de la campaña, las pocas personas que andan en dos culturas, que hablan dos o mas idiomas. Son los puentes importantes que cruzan las brechas que nos dividen.

Tercera observación: Hay una sobreabundancia de información pero no de conocimiento.

Nada está aumentando más en nuestro mundo que la información. Cada año los académicos estiman el crecimiento de información en el internet y cada año la cifra actual supera lo que habían esperado. Para comunicar información efectivamente hay que crear visualizaciones como esta que muestra el uso de transporte público en varios países. Con una gráfica se comunica la misma cantidad de información que tres paginas de texto.

Lamentablemente, lo que hacen la mayor parte de los sitios web con mucha información es simplemente agregar y presentar todos los datos. Como humanos no podemos digerir tanta información y vamos a otro sitio. Hay que aumentar nuestro conocimiento sin abrumar nuestro capacidad de comprender la información. Tenemos que ser más selectivo en lo que publicamos, lo que leemos, lo que compartimos.

Cuarta observación: El internet es para gatos, porno, peleas, y quejas.

Si creen que todos los usuarios del internet están conectados para mejorar el mundo, pronto van a estar deprimidos. Se van a dar cuenta que el internet es para gatos, prono, peleas, y quejas. Porque el internet somos nosotros, y nosotros somos humanos. Siempre es más fácil quejarse que resolver una problema. Por eso, cuando vamos a los cafés, y cuando comemos con nuestros familiares, todos se están quejando, pero pocos hablan de como están resolviendo los problemas.

Hay un sitio de Malasia que se llama Penang Watch. Es un lugar para reportar y coleccionar quejas a cerca del municipio y su gobierno. Los voluntarios que administran el sitio tienen un proceso definido de como gestionan las quejas que reciben. Más que 50% de las quejas se resuelvan. Es impresionante ver como un pequeño sitio web como este ha transformado y mejorado el gobierno municipal de Penang.

Siempre es más fácil ser cínico que trabajar duro. Pero hay que recordar que el cinismo es idealismo que no sabe como expresarse, que no sabe como implantar la visión que muchos queremos para nuestra sociedad. Nuestro reto es pensar profundamente de como podemos y debemos aprovecharse de nuevas herramientas para convertir el cinismo en acción sostenible.

El internet ha existido por 40 años. El web 2.0 ha existido por un poco mas que 5 años. Pero el impacto social apenas ha comenzado y depende en nosotros como será el impacto.

My time off: amazing. Beyond words. Every since: a disaster.

It seems that my computer just couldn’t deal with such a lack of attention. And so, mysteriously, while it wasn’t being used at all, the logic board gave out. I spent about three days troubleshooting everything it could possibly be, sure that by now I know how my computer works as well as anyone working at an Apple store.

That was a humbling experience. Finally, with my head hung low, I made my way through Mexico City’s labyrinthine arteries and one-way alleys to find one of three official Apple stores here. (Mexico and Brazil are the only two other countries in the western hemisphere with official Apple stores.) They’re taking care of business, but it means that I’m without my laptop or my data for the rest of the month.

I’m often bothered by my dependence on Google’s server farms, and the fact that they control so much of my data. But, on the other hand, when something like this happens I am grateful beyond words for Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader, Google Calendar, and everything else that has kept me functional this past week. The tension between personal and corporate ownership of our data is something I think will keep playing out for the next few decades at least.

Venezuela

Tomorrow morning I am headed to Venezuela, this time without my laptop. And, given my last experience in Caracas, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

I’m looking forward to seeing how Venezuela has changed in the past three and a half years since I was last there. It seems that there are reasons for both optimism and pessimism. President Hugo Chavez surprised many observers by more or less accepting defeat in a referendum that would have enabled his indefinite re-election. On the other hand, freedom of speech in the country has taken a big hit. On Friday the government issued an arrest warrant for Guillermo Zuloaga, owner of Globovision, the last remaining television station that is openly critical of the Chavez administration.

On Global Voices Advocacy, Laura Vidal and Marianne Diaz have done an excellent job covering the rise of official online censorship in Venezuela. This has taken the form of legal threats, such as Chavez’s condemnation of NoticieroDigital.com; the somewhat-controversial blocking of access to some websites; and a government-led initiative of allegedly 30,000 youth meant as a counter-offensive to “imperialist messages” spread on social networks and blogs. (Though these 30,000 youth haven’t published a single blog post since April.)

However, compared to the Venezuelan government’s repression of opposition print and broadcast media, information can still flow relatively free online, and hopefully across the country’s debilitating partisan divide. I will be in Venezuela to give a presentation and workshop about digital media to effect social change. They are both part of Espacio Público’s second annual “Web 2.0: Ideas that Connect” conference.

Chicago

From Caracas I head to Chicago for British Council’s Transatlantic Network 2020 meeting. Many thanks to Zadi for getting me involved. I’m looking forward to hanging out with old friends like Noel and meeting new ones like Trisha Wang and Raúl Ramírez.

The British Council was founded in 1934, between the two World Wars, and has been spreading the United Kingdom’s soft power ever since. It receives funding from the UK government, but most of its income actually comes from the English teaching classes and certification exams that it coordinates around the world. It’s mission, according to Wikipedia, is to “build mutually beneficial cultural and educational relationships between the United Kingdom and other countries, and increase appreciation of the United Kingdom’s creative ideas and achievements.” The UK is hardly alone in investing in cultural centers to spread its influence, culture, and language abroad. Germany has the Goethe-Institut. France has its Alliance Française. Spain has the Instituto Cervantes. And Italy has its Società Dante Alighieri.

But there are two new, interesting players in the field: China and India. Over the past five years China has nearly 300 Confucius Institutes in 88 countries to teach Chinese language and promote Chinese culture. The Indian Council for Cultural Relations has similarly established new cultural centers abroad and plans to launch many more. In fact, a center is planned to launch soon here in Mexico City. I highly recommend a two-part radio documentary from the BBC on how both countries plan to use these centers to increase their soft power around the world.

But back to the British Council. The Transatlantic Network 2020 grew out of a research study the British Council commissioned in early 2008 to better understand how Europeans and North Americans perceive one another. As far as research studies go, this one is a a pretty entertaining read.

• “46% of Europeans seeing the US as having a negative influence in the world today. This compares with just 20% of Americans seeing the EU’s influence as negative and 57% seeing it as positive.”
• “Europeans were also more likely to have strong negative stereotypes of Americans with 55% seeing Americans as being manipulative, 47% seeing them as selfish and 45% seeing them as aggressive. The most positive character trait Europeans saw in Americans was bold and daring (48%). American views of Europeans were rather more positive with 36% seeing Europeans as respectful; however 34% of Americans viewed all Europeans as snobbish.”
• “Despite the intervening ocean, Canadians and Americans tend to feel closer to most European countries than the latter do to each other.”
• “Several nationalities, including Americans, British, French, Germans and Europeans generally, are considered “keen consumers.” However, both the French and British are also seen to be particularly “snobbish,” while the Americans are considered “manipulative,” “bold” and “aggressive.” Of all the characteristics discussed, respondents around the world were least likely to think that Americans are “sensible,” “respectful” or “reliable.”

Acknowledging the cultural and perceptive rift between North America and Europe, the British Council created the Transatlantic Network 2020, with an inaugural summit in Ireland last year. Every year a new class of young leaders from North America and Europe is added to the network, and each year another summit is convened, its location alternating between Europe and North America. The hope is that these young leaders will discuss mutual problems, collaborate on projects, and help spread more transatlantic understanding.

The over-arching theme of the week-long meeting in Chicago is “Using Technology to Create Social Change,” a topic I just can’t seem to get away from. I will be part of the “immigration and integration” track. I’m curious to see how Chicago’s government and non-profits address its immigration and integration challenges. I think there will also be some fascinating conversations with the European members about the differences between American and European integration. The media has been covering the topic a lot over the past couple years, and the general rhetoric is that America is successful in its assimilation of immigrants while Europe has failed in its multicultural segregation. That idea was echoed over and over again in a recent New York Times profile of former Amsterdam Mayor, Job Cohen, “The Integrationist“:

Marcouch represents an interesting possibility for the European future — one that might mirror the American immigrant story in some ways — in which newcomers internalize the ways of their adopted land and apply them with an intensity that natives may have lost.

It’s true that many first-generation immigrants are the most patriotic of American citizens. And it’s an idea that appeals to me, but I have a feeling that our explorations through Chicago’s immigrant neighborhoods will reveal a city that is much more segregated and divided than a New York Times journalist living in Europe would like to admit.

Mexico

I’m getting settled in Mexico City, but it’s been more of a challenge than I had anticipated. It’s been six years since I last lived in Mexico. I had forgotten about its Kafkaesque bureaucracy, about my strong distaste for anyone who wields power from a rubber stamp. If all goes well then later today I will sign the contract for my new apartment in Condesa, a trendy Art Deco neighborhood that was once a racetrack and is now filled with old money and young expats. It’s a rather predictable neighborhood for someone like me to settle in. All the cool kids are moving west to Roma, but I don’t think I’m ready for the transnational-hipster-ethnic-class-gentrification conversations that are so central to living in places like Roma, Williamsburg, and downtown LA. For now I’ll enjoy Condesa’s leafy avenues, even if its means paying $2 for a morning coffee.

I haven’t had a chance to connect with old friends here yet or meet many new ones. And I have missed out on what seem like some pretty cool events. Really wanted to make it to Postopolis, but neither time nor energy were on my side. Saturday’s naked bike ride looks like it was a blast too.

So I’ll be back in two weeks to start my new job, watch the last six games of the World Cup, and do some photo-walking with De La who will be in town. Word.

“Global Voices is …” – A description of Global Voices, from the voices of the community itself. Filmed at the 2010 Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Santiago, Chile.

I have already said so many goodbyes that it is starting to feel like I’m dragging this on. But I realized that I have yet to mention my departure from Global Voices here in my own little carved-out corner of cyberspace. It has been five years since I first started working on Global Voices as the regional editor for Latin America and three years since we launched Rising Voices.

It has been the most amazing experience of my life …

I am staring at my computer screen, at a complete loss for words. There is just no way for me to articulate the meaningfulness of the friendships that have formed, the projects I have seen flourish, the small moments with so many inspiring and talented people all across this globe. I get choked up every time I wander down the path of nostalgia, every time I look through my pictures on Flickr, every time I read the overwhelmingly generous notes of support and incredible video messages I’ve received over the past few weeks.

It is enough to make me wonder if I’ve made a terrible decision. But in order to continue growing we sometimes need to step outside of where we are most comfortable to face new challenges with new groups.

What’s Next

In the past five years I haven’t spent more than three consecutive days offline. That hyper-connectivity has allowed me to maintain meaningful relationships around the world, but I think that it has also taken away part of my humanity; my ability to reflect, to appreciate art, to literally and figuratively disconnect. Starting tomorrow I will spend the next two weeks completely offline. No email, no web pages, nothing. Just a few books and my journal.

When I re-emerge next month I will begin the next chapter of my life. I will turn 30. I will be living in Mexico City, where I will attempt to forge a glocal life. I will be working with Open Society Institute’s Latin America and Information programs to help them think strategically about the use of technology by civil society in Latin America.

I’ll have much more to say about all of this come next month, but now it’s time for me to close this laptop and keep it closed. It’s time to hit the road.

Over the past few months I’ve read somewhere around 200 academic papers related to transparency, accountability, and e-governance. Over that time I’ve reached several conclusions, all of which I am documenting in a series of posts on Global Voices. But the conclusion that has determinedly raised its hand more than any other is this: graduate school corrupts effective communication.

This morning, in preparation for today’s post on parliamentary informatics websites, I re-read Arthur Edwards’ 2006 paper “Facilitating the monitorial voter: retrospective voter information websites in the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.” It provides some useful context to a few case studies of voter information websites. But the 30-page paper should really be a three-paragraph blog post. Between those few paragraphs of helpful context, I have to suffer through pages and pages of paragraphs like this one:

According to institutional theories of political action, political actors make their choices within an institutional context of certain rules of conduct, codes of rights and duties, and methods constituting a ’logic of appropriateness’ (March and Olsen, 1996:252). A part of the institutional context of ICT design and usage in democratic practices is the political system (Hagen, 2000). Political institutions include formal and informal constitutional rules, including the electoral system, the party system and executive-legislative relationships. Against the backdrop of these political system properties, we can evaluate the ‘appropriateness’ of information-seeking by voters and choices made by the designers of political websites (see also: Hoff, 2000). In this section, I address the two dimensions of voters’ information needs and relate these to political system properties. What follows also serves as the basis for the selection of the cases.

In case you’re having a tough time deciphering just what Edwards is getting at, let me help: absolutely nothing. Or how about this for slurred obviousness:

The idea of responsiveness is captured in the cyberneticians’ classification of essential capabilities of a control system. Such a system requires instruments for effecting change in the state of the world (generally referred to as ‘effectors’) as well as ‘detectors’ for providing data about the state of the world. Transparency in its fullest sense thus requires that citizens be able to exert an influence on (to ‘control’) the way that public services are provided, based on their views or preferences about how they are provided, as well as knowing about the decisions that are made.

That comes “Transparency Mechanisms: Building Publicness into Public Services” by Lindsay Stirton and Martin Lodge.

Why, one might ask, can these highly educated individuals no longer write in standard English? And why does it take them so many words – and so many syllables – to make such simple observations? While I have no concrete evidence that Edwards, Stirton, and Lodge wrote with clarity before they enrolled in graduate school, my hypothesis is that there is a strong culture of calculated confusion in academia that deliberately isolates graduate students from The Real World.

I don’t know how to battle against the disease, or which noble warriors are waging the war, but perhaps a “Journal of Comprehensible Writing from Academics” could help highlight and celebrate the woefully under-represented examples of clarity and effective communication in academia?

Update: I realized that it’s in bad form – and even hypocritical – of me to only complain about poorly written scholarship without pointing to the good stuff. So, two examples of clearly written, well researched, and insightful papers about transparency:

• “The uncertain relationship between transparency and accountability” by Jonathan Fox
• “Corruption and the Watchdog Role of News Media” by Sheila S. Coronel

That’s all.

Nothing defines a road trip like its soundtrack. Tomorrow Alejandro is driving from Reno to Albuquerque and was in the market for some musical accompaniment. There are different types of road trip mixes, of course. Some are meant to wake you up, to inspire some air drumming on the steering wheel. Others are meant to rouse reflection, ideally as you pass through the vast expanse of nothingness from Death Valley National Park to the creeping condo hell of the outskirts of Las Vegas.

This one is the latter, a mellow mix that perhaps even dares the question, now what do I want to do with my life? De La, when you pass through Flagstaff don’t forget to drop in on Macy’s and give ‘em a wink for me.

Download (Right click, save as)

Weekends like this. Locked up in my room, or in various cafes, with a constant intake of caffeine to keep my fingers tapping on the keyboard to the rhythm from my tinny laptop speakers. Right now: J-Live.

Yesterday I worked about 12 hours on a single post, a general introduction to the aid transparency movement over at Global Voices. Today and tomorrow I have two more mega-posts.

In between the research and the misery, I’ve found a little asymmetry – specifically regarding the portrayal of the so-called pacification of Rio’s slums in preparation for the Olympics and World Cup.

First, from Sarah Lacy, a Bay Area technology writer who is working on a book about technology in emerging markets. The painfully predictable title of her post: “Coming Up From The Favelas: Brazil’s Slumdog Entrepreneurs“:

One year ago, no one would even deliver pizza here. What’s changed in a year? Specifically, the city is doing something about the problem, embarking on a project of “pacification.” As it was explained to me, newly-trained, SWAT-style cops take each favela back, driving out the drug dealers, by any means necessary, in a recognition that the situation isn’t just a bad neighborhood, it’s an urban war-zone. Being new to the force, these police officers have a clean slate with the residents of the favela, and so are able to continue to protect it, keeping the peace. So far, eight favelas have been pacified. Residents I spoke with talked about the relief of being out from under the daily violence: Suddenly they can be a part of the city. But many are still wary. “This is the best I’ve seen the community in a long time, but I’m still scared,” said Nivea Mendes of the pacified favela Babilonia. “Very few people trust the government. They are just out for an election. I’m still skeptical.” Put another way, even though they’re physically gone, the drug dealers still have power in these neighborhoods—for now.

Next, “Retaking Rio” by The Nation foreign correspondent, Christian Parenti, whose writing I’ve been following more closely after watching The Fixer with Marc in Italy.

When I visited, police had occupied the community for about a week. “When the BOPE came in, there was excessive brutality,” Cláudio explains. Now officers carrying machine guns have a checkpoint at the favela’s entrance and patrol its maze of hillside paths and stairways. Thus far the residents have not received any new services along with the police crackdown. In fact, about 100 families have had their water cut off …

“They are just beating people up. Two weeks ago they took four guys. These guys had work papers, but the cops arrested them on drug charges anyway,” says a short, tattooed 23-year-old named Max. He wears red shorts and plastic flip-flops and leans on the wall of the old wooden shack where he lives with his wife, Amanda. A small radio blares a tinny stream of baile funk, essentially Brazilian hip-hop, as Amanda does dishes by an outdoor tap just off one of the main stairways. A few other young men, shirtless and wearing baggy shorts in the heat, gather as we talk. “Most people just want the cops to go away and find someone else to harass,” adds Amanda. “They treat us like criminals. They force us inside after 11. If you have what they think is too much money, they take it from you.”

Interesting to see how two different foreigners – each with relatively little experience or knowledge about Brazil – came away with such differing impressions of the pacification initiative, and the Favelas themselves. I think it probably has to do with the fact that journalists tend to write their stories before they arrive to the scenes where they are reporting from. Lacy’s agenda: to show that technology is having a transformative impact in some of the poorest and roughest communities in the world. Parenti’s agenda is a little more complicated, but it’s clear from his prolific writing that he envisions the role of the journalist to be someone who speaks out for the vulnerable and destitute.

Unsurprisingly, I’m much more impressed with the coverage we’ve seen on Global Voices, which relies heavily on the reports from residents of the favelas, and also cites the opinions of local cariocas (Rio residents), and even police bloggers. (So many Brazilian police officers use blogs and Twitter to offer their own perspectives of public security in Brazi that UNESCO commissioned a study of the Brazilian police blogosphere.)

I’ve mentioned Viva Favela before when I interviewed the site’s editor, Rodrigo Noguerira, while we were both in Sao Paulo:

The concept of the project is extraordinarily simple, and in line with the work we’ve been doing at Rising Voices: teach a group of residents how to document their community using text, images, and video, and them upload some of that material to the internet. But the impact of following around police officers with a video camera – which they know will wind up online – shouldn’t be underestimated. This video by Viviane Oliveira shows how police don’t warn children and families to stay inside even as they’re preparing for possible gunfire:

Viva Favela’s YouTube channel is filled with dozens of similar videos. But it doesn’t just focus on the violence. It also gives us a glimpse of daily life in neighborhoods where most people are still to fearful to visit, from basketball to clever movies about recycling to a local b-boying group.

Viva Favela reminds me in many ways of HiperBarrio here in Medellín. In fact, I’ve long thought that Rio de Janeiro should follow Medellín’s strategy of building integrated public transit to the centers of the most violent neighborhoods which are then outfitted with modern libraries, schools, and health clinics. Travis Fox argues that free trade agreements and economic globalization also contributed to Medellín’s recovery:

Ten days ago I gave some love to Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor and publisher of The Nation, for her excellent introduction to their website redesign. I felt that it really struck the right mix of humility and ambition. I also think that The Nation is fortunate to have a writer as talented at Christian Parenti, but I hope that increasingly in the future the magazine and website will take advantage of the wealth of important writing taking place within the very communities that they report on.

Often times I work myself harder than my body is able to support, but this past month has been especially rough. And now I’m paying the price. I arrived to Bogotá yesterday morning with deep purple bags under my eyes, a sore throat, and about enough energy to stumble into the taxi that took me to my hotel and sleep for 18 hours straight. The rest has been a blur … kind of like the past four weeks. Exactly a month ago I left Los Angeles for Berlin to give a brief talk on our Technology for Transparency research at Re:publica. A video of the talk is available on YouTube. Then it was to Austria for this year’s Prix Ars Electronica jury for the digital communities category, which was filled with fascinating conversations about how digital communities are evolving as the internet – and our online experiences – evolve as well. An indicative excerpt from our Jury Statement, which will be published in September when the winners are announced at the Ars Electronica Festival:

The jury observes that, increasingly, new and old digital communities alike are relying on commercial platforms like Facebook, Google Maps, and Twitter, which create easy entry points for ordinary citizens to become more involved in issue-based campaigns and discussions. However, the ultimate profit motive of these corporations is often inherently opposed to the culture of openness, sharing, and freedom that have defined the first two decades of the World Wide Web.

Fisherman in Venice

Then, after a 12-hour intermission in Venice, it was immediately off to Perugia for this year’s International Journalism Festival where I spoke on two panels. The first – about social translation and the news industry – is available online (where you can see Bernardo make his superman appearance a few minutes into the panel). The second panel – on new media in the Middle East – I was completely unprepared for, but it was an opportunity to show off the projects and websites of some friends from the region. It is also always a pleasure to participate in any discussion with Naseem Tarawnah and Donatella Della Ratta. They both always inspire me every time I hear about their latest projects. Check out last month’s Creative Commons Beirut Salon that Donatella helped organize. And also Naseem’s work on 7iber.com – one of my absolute favorite citizen media communities, which is based in Amman, Jordan. As I write this Ramsey Tesdell – also of 7iber.com – is back in Beirut with Noha and several other friends for the Arab Women Techies meetup.

I am grateful that the International Journalism Festival uploaded videos from all the panels and presentations because frankly I was only able to attend just a few as I was finishing up our research for the Technology for Transparency Network. This was supposed to be just a quick three-month mapping of interesting projects and it has turned into much more thanks to the hard work of our team. For anyone interested in the role of technology in improving governance in developing countries, our researchers’ regional overviews are must-reads.

Antonio Lopez

From Perugia I took a train down to Rome to finally meet Antonio Lopez whose work at World Bridger Media I have long admired. I highly recommend that anyone interested in new media literacy should take a good look at both of his websites. Antonio is currently a professor of media studies at John Calbot University in Rome and invited Bernarndo and I to give a basic introductory presentation to Global Voices. The presentation went well – the students seemed interested, and perhaps even inspired. (Then again, they were also drawn to the evening event by extra credit points and free food.) But the most interesting part of the experience for me was doing some work at a nearby café and overhearing (OK, eavesdropping in on) the conversations of the American students about their classes and professors. “Oh my god, earlier today our professor asked the class, ‘what is globalization’,” complained one girl, “and so I type into the Facebook chat, ‘like, why doesn’t someone ask her to look it up on Wikipedia?”

Walking through central Rome, Antonio – an unabashed enthusiast of the internet – and I had some good conversations about students who can’t pay attention in class because they’re on Facebook the entire time, and tourists who never look up because they’re constantly staring at their GPS-enabled iPhone tourist maps. I’ve been thinking a lot about the basic nature of education – its purpose, its evolution, its pros and cons – thanks to Panthea Lee who kindly gave me a copy of the 2008 Ways of Learning edition of Lapham’s Quarterly when I saw it sticking out of her bag in DC. Highly recommended. As a starter, check out William Deresiewicz self-deprecating takedown of Ivy League culture.

Over the next three days I traveled from Rome to Madrid to Buenos Aires to Santiago de Chile. It felt like both crossing continents and crossing centuries of immigration. In many ways Rome felt more similar than Madrid to Buenos Aires. Stranded at Europe’s largest hotel in Madrid because of a pilots’ strike in Argentina, I happened to have a wonderful and unexpected dinner conversation with a couple in their late 60’s who had never even left their province in southern Argentina until they decided to take a 14-day guided tour of Western Europe. Their humility and enthusiasm was infectious. Everyone else was complaining about the pilots’ strike, about how nothing ever works in Argentina, about all the delays just a week earlier because of the volcanic ash. And then this couple found a reason to appreciate just about everything. They were married for over 40 years and still held hands while eating dessert. I was reminded, yet again, of Louis CK’s “Everything’s Amazing and Nobody’s Happy.”

Buenos Aires was a blur: 10 hours of work a day in my favorite cafe, a quick visit to the Feria de Libros, dinners with friends, and a stroll through many of the Worker’s Day street festivals. From the moment I arrived to Santiago it was nothing but work in preparation for our 2010 Global Voices Citizen Media Summit, which was stressful, wonderful, and emotional for reasons I’ll get into in a later post. Some rough notes from a few of the sessions are already on the summit blog. Videos from the summit will soon be posted here. In the meantime, I love just flipping through the pages of photographs on Flickr.

Some of the lovely ladies and gentleman from Global Voices

And now here I am in Bogotá. Tonight I will meet with Juanita Leon who has done some inspiring work at La Silla Vacía. Tomorrow I get to finally meet Georg Neumann of Transparency International who is leading a session on social media for the Americas chapters of TI. And in the afternoon I’ll catch up with my dear friend Carolina Botero who has been hard at work with the Karisma Foundation to improve the quality of online and offline education in Colombia.

On Thursday I’m off to Medellín to spend some time with HiperBarrio, one of the most successful of all the amazing Rising Voices grantee projects. They have received some more local funding from the local government to replicate the successes of their project in many of the other libraries around Medellín. I also look forward to meeting the HiperBarrio participants in Ituango, one of the regions of Colombia that has suffered the most from recent violence and forced displacement.

I will also be following the exciting presidential campaign here that concludes with the election at the end of the month. La Silla Vacía is organizing a presidential debate and is collecting questions for the debate from its readers via YouTube. I hope to record a few “Yo Pregunto” videos myself while I’m in Medellín, and hopefully the HiperBarrio citizen journalists can help me.

All that plus the final report from our Technology for Transparency research in the next week and a half. Clearly I am not learning the lesson that my body is trying to teach me, but I’ve already made myself a promise that I will spend the vast majority of June offline. Hugs and high fives.

This week I’m in Perugia, a central Italian, pre-Roman village that sits on a high bluff overlooking a sea of impossibly green pasture that is tucked in each evening by a thin blanket of sunset-tinted fog. The surrounding National Geographic-like views are a reminder of the importance of keeping your enemies in clear sight. Perugia, famous as a study abroad Mecca for young Americans and East Asians, is also home to the annual Umbria Jazz Festival, Bacci chocolates, and the International Journalism Festival, which predictably is why I am here along with a team of Global Voices colleagues including Portnoy, Marc, Bernardo, and nearly the entire army of the Global Voices in Italian team.

Yesterday afternoon Portnoy, Marc, Bernardo and I spoke on a panel about social translation and its relevance for the news industry. (Wait a minute, there’s still a news industry?) Portnoy began by discussion by recounting his personal journey as Global Voices’ first volunteer translator. He liked both the ethos and the content of Global Voices, he said, and wanted to introduce it to Taiwanese bloggers. So, without asking any permission, he simply began translating posts he found interesting from English into Chinese. Today content from Global Voices is regularly translated into over twenty different languages.

I followed Portnoy with a more general overview of the wide range of social translation initiatives that have cropped up over the past few years. I began with a local example that was introduced to me by Rome resident Antonio Lopez. Here in Italy there are actually not one, but two, competing groups of volunteer translators who record, subtitle, and distribute the latest episodes of Lost each week. The two groups compete both in terms of quality and the amount of time that it takes after an episode is first aired in the US to distribute it with subtitles via BitTorrent here in Italy. I am told that over the years the quality of the translations have improved and that subtitled versions are now available just a few hours after the episodes first air.

Another example of social translation that pre-dates the era of blogging and Web 2.0 platforms is “scanlation“, the process of scanning, translating, editing, and re-distributing comic books, especially manga from Japan. These unauthorized translations are distributed as complete PDFs on BitTorret and via IRC chat rooms.

A similar initiative in China translates whole copies of the Economist magazine into Chinese and re-distributes them as print-quality PDF’s on the Eco China web forum.

While social translation – the unpaid translation of information and art – has existed since language itself, the social web brings about new possibilities for coordinated, systematic platforms and workflows. Examples of social translation websites include Wikipedia, which is available in over 100 languages. (Students at Effat University in Saudi Arabia recently used Google’s Translator Toolkit to translate over 100,000 words from the English Wikipedia into Arabic.)

TEDtoChina began as an unauthorized project that offered summaries of TED talks in Chinese. When TED found out about the project they didn’t send a cease and desist letter; they took the idea and ran with it, launching a highly interactive social translation community to encourage the volunteer subtitling of TED videos into as many languages as possible. There are now around 6,500 translations of TED talks by 2,500 volunteer translators in 75 different languages.

Global Lives is a long-running art project that looks at a day in the life of 12 individuals from different countries, cultures, and circumstances around the globe. The raw footage is available on the website, but is best experienced as an art installation. You walk into a dome of screens, each one simultaneously playing continuous footage documenting the lives of Edith Kaphuka from Malawi, James Bullock from San Francisco, Dusan Lazic from Serbia, and many others. When one person’s day becomes boring, another screen catches your interest. To translate the raw footage from its original language into English (and sometimes other languages as well) the Global Lives team relied on Facebook and dotSUB. For example, a Facebook group was started to translate the video of Edith Kaphuka from Malawi into English. They reached out to Malawians living in the United States and Canada, many of whom dedicated a small amount of time to help in the collective effort.

Meedan uses a combination of machine and volunteer translation to encourage cross-cultural discussion between English and Arabic speakers around events taking place in the Middle East:

The Arabic word ‘meedan’ – ميدان – means ‘a town square’ or ‘gathering place.’ Meedan.net is a digital town square where you can share conversation and links about world events with speakers outside your language community. Everything that gets posted on meedan.net is mirrored in Arabic and English – whether it’s the headlines you read, the comments you write, or the articles you share.

“Translated By Humans” is a similar project with an innovative editing platform that allows users to translate content between English, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarussian, and Lithuanian. Like Global Voices, their content is categorized by topic, original author, and translator. Translations can be marked both public or private.

Yeeyan is another major player in the social translation field in China. The site was shut down for a couple months, but is now back online and active. Volunteers on the site translate a range of content (mostly about technology) from English into Chinese. They have also experimented in content partnerships with The Guardian and CBS.

Finally, I end by pointing to Jaqi Aru, a “community of bilingual and trilingual residents of El Alto, Bolivia committed to promoting the use of the Aymara indigenous language on the Internet.” Their about statement goes on: “Through translation projects and the creation of content using digital media we want to contribute and enrich content in our language in cyberspace.”

To underline the importance of Jaqi Aru I need to go back to the creation of Global Voices in 2004. Global Voices began with a small meeting of twenty or so bridge-bloggers from places like Malaysia, China, Kenya, Iraq, and Iran. Everyone there was highly educated, traveled frequently, and spoke English fluently. Because of this we all felt that we belonged to a cohesive, global community and that our blog posts linking to each other were forming the basis of a new and exciting global conversation. In 2004 the vast majority of Arab bloggers wrote in English because 1) they wanted to be part of this global community and 2) there simply wasn’t much of an online, Arabic-speaking audience to read their content. Today those same bloggers are now writing in Arabic and there are far more Arabic blog posts published every day than any one person – or entire army – could possibly track. (Though Amira and our Middle East team on Global Voices do a pretty great job.)

The Arabic-language blogosphere took shape because it reached a critical mass. At some point Arab bloggers realized that it would be more rewarding to write in Arabic – to communicate with their own communities – than to write in English in order to be part of a vague sense of global community. Ideally we would all blog in at least two languages to be both local and global, but time is always the enemy. Arabic is such a major language that it was only a matter of time until a critical mass of bloggers and, importantly, blog readers developed. But the vast majority of languages around the world do not have an online critical mass and their disappearance is accelerating as, for example, Aymara speakers abandon their native tongue in order to take part in the rich information and social capital available online in Spanish.

We don’t yet know if Jaqi Aru will be successful in creating a critical mass of Aymara-language bloggers, but we do know that it would never take place unless someone started somewhere. (Ruben Hilari from Jaqi Aru will speak about the project at the Global Voices Summit in Chile in a couple weeks. Also, I see via Belen that a journalist and Guaraní teacher in Paraguay recently became the first blogger to write in Guaraní.)

I end my blabbering by claiming that news media companies can learn from social translation initiatives. Specifically:

• Treat your audience as collaborators. Respect them and invite them to help translate your content for free in order to distribute it across linguistic divides. Recognize them when they do.
• Learn how to use cheap tools. Media companies pay ridiculous amounts for professional translators and proprietary software when cheap – often free – tools exist.
• Instead of paying costly, monolingual journalists to parachute into a region, translate local news from local sources and add context so that your audience can better understand the stories.

Some major newspapers are starting to get it. La Stampa here in Italy, for example, is able to keep up their coverage of international news by regularly translating and publishing content from Global Voices in Italian.

Four years ago Portnoy and I were speaking on another panel about translation and the internet – at the 2006 Global Voices Summit in Delhi. Just like this time around, we prepared our talk about an hour before we gave it. It inspired several people in the audience to start their own versions of Global Voices in other languages. Soon “Global Voices in Chinese” was joined by French, then Spanish, and now Global Voices content is regularly translated into twenty different languages by 300 volunteers and is one of the biggest success stories of online social translation. I believe that most of these volunteer translators dedicate their time to the project in order to be part of a global community that is not grounded in monolingualism (though, admittedly, English is still the fundamental bridge language). Last night at dinner with Portnoy, Marc, and the Global Voices Italian team I was reminded once again of just what a special community we have.

What follows is a hyperlinked version of my talk at this year’s re:publica conference in Berlin. For a 30-minute talk it was probably a little dense, a bit abstract, and maybe too close to home for a Berlin audience, but here it is nonetheless.

This morning Evgeny Morozov showed us how how governments are using the internet and new technologies to surveil and monitor their citizens. He was followed by Jeff Jarvis who managed to invite everyone here to get naked with him, and also pointed out the benefits of personal transparency. So we have the government looking at us. And we have ourselves looking at each other. But now I want to look more closely at some projects and platforms in which we monitor the activities of our government.

Specifically I want to tackle three questions: one, what do we mean when we say ‘transparency’? Two, what does the loss of investigative journalism mean for our ability to hold our government’s accountable? Three, what is the potential of technology to bring about more government transparency and accountability in the future?

Two False Assumptions

Before I get started I must first offer my apologies. I promised myself that I would make no mention here of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, or of the Stasi, or that movie that we Americans love so much, The Lives of Others. But, in fact, the Stasi and the story that is depicted in the Lives of Others perfectly illustrate a tension that exists in all societies, but is now taking new shapes with the influence of technology.

The very metaphor of transparency suggests a medium through which we view things and through which others can view us. This metaphor makes two important assumptions, as J.M. Balkin has noted. First, it assumes that what is on one side of the transparent medium is conceptually separate from what is on the other side. Second, it assumes that the process of seeing through the medium does not substantially alter the nature of what is being viewed.

Of course, both of these assumptions are false. The surveillance techniques of the Stasi are now infamous and I don’t think that I need to name all of them, especially here. But what is interesting is that the Stasi had one spy for every 66 citizens of East Germany. And when you add part time informants to the formula, some calculations estimate one spy per every 6.5 citizens. Who was surveilled and who was surveilling? It is often more difficult to differentiate each side of the transparency window than we assume.

The Stasi stored huge amounts of data about the citizens of East Germany. It sifted through their garbage, collected samples of their sheets and underwear in order to someday match their odors, and most famously tapped phone lines to listen to their phone calls. The point was to spread fear as much as it was to collect information. As common as government surveillance of citizens was and continues to be, the fall of the Stasi also illustrates another natural impulse that has been at the heart of investigative journalism over the past few hundred years and that is citizens demanding both information from their government.

On January 15, 1990 a large crowd formed outside of the Stasi headquarters and demanded access to the information the Stasi had collected over the previous 40 years. This process is still ongoing today and has been a painful part of German reunification, but it reveals to us a change that is taking place in many countries around the world as they transition from societies where only the government surveilled its citizens to what David Brin calls “The Transparent Society,” where citizens and governments surveil each other.

From the Fourth to the Fifth Estate?

In front of a US Senate committee about the future of journalism, David Simon, the producer of my favorite television show ever, The Wire, said this – and I’m paraphrasing: “without investigative journalists, it’s going to be a great time to be a corrupt politician in this country.” In his statement to the Senate he held little regard for bloggers, saying that we just copy and paste the content of newspapers and sprinkle on top our own coffee shop opinions. So I wanted to examine this statement more closely. Is it really true that mainstream journalism prevents corruption of government officials? And, if so, will that process disappear as the institutions of mainstream journalism disappear?

The best book I was able to find about the role of news media in improving governance was just published last year. The book is Public Sentinel (pirate link), which is edited by Pippa Norris. It charts the idea of the press as a Fourth Estate, an institution that exists primarily as a check on those in public office.

As Thomas Jefferson famously said: “The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

There are many examples and countless movies based on stories that reval how investigative journalism ensures justice, transparency, and accountability. Beyond investigative journalism, the press also monitors the day-to-day workings of government in order to help citizens assess the efficacy of its performance. Watchdog journalism can expose the corruption of a traffic policeman, the wrongdoings of a priest, or of billion dollar financials scandals. The best investigative journalism doesn’t doesn’t just expose corrupt individuals, but entire systems that are flawed and in need of reform.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, when many countries moved from authoritarian to more democratic styles of governance a new industry called media development was born. The assumption was that a healthy press would lead to healthy democracies. So donors like the Ford Foundation, the United States government, and the World Bank began funding projects that would train reporters and editors in investigative journalism as well as the business side of the news industry. Many of these projects began in the former Soviet Union, then spread to the Balkans, and are now common in Africa and Southeast Asia. But there are criticisms of watchdog journalism too. Some observers argue that that the adversarial nature of watchdog journalism 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. In Asia there are criticisms that western style watchdog journalism doesn’t lead to the type of social harmony that is valued in Asian societies.

Watchdog journalists have come up against two major obstacles to their work – the state and the market. The state censors their work and threatens their safety. The market demands that they make their work entertaining enough to sell newspapers, magazines, and website subscriptions. In many countries the media industry has been privatized to shield it from government control only to find that there is now no business model to sustain the work that goes into investigative journalism. This has led to a lot of concern about the decline of the fourth estate, but also to a lot of excitement and enthusiasm about the rise of the so-called fifth estate – networked citizen media platforms.

One of those platforms that has received a lot of attention over the past week is WikiLeaks, which published this video of US soldiers firing on a van that was picking up an injured journalist. WikiLeaks is a site where any citizen whistleblower can anonymously upload a leaked document that exposes wrongdoing. Here is its founder Julian Assange on Russia Today:

Jullian makes an important distinction between the source information and the contextualization of that information which informs the public and shapes public opinion. As he says in the video, there was a Washington Post reporter who apparently had access to this video or at least the transcript, which he incorporated into his story. But increasingly reporters are not the sole custodians of source information. Rather than relying on journalists to procure and distribute information from the government to citizens, we now see a new approach where citizens demand information from their governments and use online tools and platforms to make sense of that information collectively, and use it to hold their leaders accountable.

The Role of Technology in the Transparency Movement

A lot of attention has been given to projects like They Work For You in Britain and OpenCongress in the United States, but there has been much less attention given to transparency and accountability websites and tools in developing countries. For the past five years I have been working for an organization called Global Voices, where we have been tracking bloggers and citizen media projects from around the world. Often times we would come across citizen media projects that specifically aim to improve governance in their countries, but we didn’t have the resources or time to evaluate these projects and their impact in a systematic way.

Fortunately we were approached by two funders – Open Society Institute and Omidyar Network – who wanted a better understanding of the role of technology in the transparency and accountability movement, and so at the beginning of this year we launched the Technology for Transparency Network to document 40 case studies of technology projects that aim to promote greater transparency, accountability, and civic engagement. In addition to documenting the projects we are also building a toolbox of the tools and applications they use, and a series of blog posts examining questions related to transparency in the six regions we are focusing on.

We have found four major categories of projects so far:

Complaint websites:

Ishki – In September 2008 four Jordanian technologists developed Ishki.com 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.

Kiirti – 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.

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.

Cidade Democratica – 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 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.

Tracking Parliament:

Mzalendo – Co-founder Ory Okolloh explains that the idea for the project came about after the website for Kenya’s Parliament was shut down following protests by some MPs who were embarrassed about their CVs being published online. The initial goal of Mzalendo, then, was to provide the basic information that otherwise would have been available on the official parliamentary website. 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.

Vota Inteligente – Profiles all MP’s, political parties, and election candidates in Chile in order to keep Chilean citizens with more information about their elected officials. Prior to the election they evaluated the election websites of the major presidential candidates and found that on average they only published around 20% of the necessary information for voters to make an informed decision. After using mainstream media to put pressure on the candidates, the candidates’ websites were quickly filled with more informative content.

Mumbai Votes – 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.

Elections:

Sudan Vote Monitor – Today (Wednesday April 15) is the third and final day of the Sudanese election, the first multiparty election to take place in Sudan in over 20 years. Sudan Vote Monitor is one of many Ushahidi-based websites we have reviewed that allow voters to report irregularities by submitting text messages which are then verified by a partner NGO and placed on a map. Similar websites include Cuidemos el Voto in Mexico and Vote Report India.

VoteReport PH is yet another example of an Ushahidi-based website to crowdsource the reporting of voter fraud and election irregularities. But most of these projects only attract the participation of very few users because there is not broad awareness that the websites exist at all. VoteReport PH is different in that for the past six months they have been going around the country and giving voter education classes about how to use automated voting machines (which are being used for the first time next month), and simultaneiously they also teach people how to submit reports to VoteReporter PH by sending text messages. We’ll find out next month if this pre-election voter outreach leads to greater participation on the platform.

Guatemala Visible aims to bring about more public accountability and transparency around the process to which officials, such as supreme court justices, are appointed to public office by elected politicians. Like most countries, Guatemala has a long history of political appointments based on connections, campaign donations, and favors. Guatemala Visible uses social media to let politicians know that citizens are monitoring the appointments of judges and other officials, and to let citizens keep better track of the process.

Budget Accountability

In the US we recently passed the largest economic stimulus program in our country’s history. And to track how that money was spent the government created Recovery.gov. ProPubica similarly created Eye on the Stimulus which also tracks how the money is spent. In Kenya they had their own stimulus program called the Constituency Development Fund which started in 2003 as a way to fund local governments to improve their local infrastructure. 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.

Our Budget – The city council in Tel Aviv, Israel – like most municipal governments – releases its annual budget in PDF format. All the data is there, but there is no way for citizens to visualize or analyze expenses. So this project uses OCR technology to create an Excel spreadsheet version of the city budget. Volunteers go over and check every entry, and then they make visualizations and graphs of how the municipality is spending taxpayer money. But, importantly, in the end they decided that litigation was a better strategy than time-consuming, technological solutions.

Dinero y Politica – In Argentina, political parties must disclose all of the campaign contributions they received at least two weeks before the election. But they only have to disclose those numbers in a PDF report, which, once again, doesn’t let citizens analyze the data to see relationships between political interests and politicians. So this group has created an interactive database which maps donations and creates visualizations of which parties receive donations from which companies and labor unions.

Miscellaneous

Then there are a few projects which don’t really fit into any of the above categories. For example, in Brazil there is a very simple project which asks Brazilian bloggers to each adopt a local city politician and blog about the activities of that person on a weekly basis. Though the project has a few problems that we’ve documented, it’s also a very nice way to let elected officials know that their actions are being watched and I believe that every city should have a similar program.

Finally, I want to end with a project based in Kenya that reveals the importance of maps in deciding how we allocate resources in our communities. This project is called Map Kibera and it’s the first available online map of Kibera, the largest slum in Kenya. I like this project because it shows just how difficult it is to build up enough information in a community to start influencing policy and accountability on a systematic basis. A group of Kibera residents were given GPS devices and taught how to map their own community. Now they are being trained to use Flip video cameras and local cyber cafes to report news about their community which shows up on this map.

The Power and Perceived Danger of Information

Allow me to conclude by coming back to modern day Germany. With German Reunification in October, 1990 came an intense debate about what to do with the stacks of files the Stasi kept about the lives of East German citizens. While many argued that the files should be opened, others insisted that the information remain closed. Prime Minister Lothar de Maizière even predicted murders of revenge against former Stasi employees if the files were made accessible. There was a fear that East Germans were not ready to see the information collected about themselves. This argument – that the general public is not fit to handle information about their community and themselves – is often used by governments and institutions as an excuse to hold private that which should be publicly disclosed.

Back to Kibera. In a video published on YouTube, resident Douglas Namale says that the local planning department has historically not had adequate geographic information about Kibera which has resulted in poor sanitation services.

In fact, much of the information collected by development groups and the Kenyan government is not shared with Kibera residents. Robert Neuwirth explains in his book “Shadow Cities” how a study commissioned by the United Nation and World Bank found that, on average, Kibera residents pay ten times as much for water than the average person in a wealthy neighborhood with municipally supplied, metered water service. The study was distributed widely at development conferences, but was never shared with Kibera’s own residents for fears that it would lead to rioting.

“Perhaps it’s true that people in Kibera could riot over water,” Neuwirth allows. “After all, Kibera has been the scenes of riots in the past … Still, Kibera’s people deserve to know the facts about their lives. What’s the point of studying the water kiosks of Kibera if, when the study is done, the information is not shared with the people who are most at stake?”

If projects like Map Kibera succeed, then such information does not need to be shared with the people … they will share it among themselves.