Democracy & Governance – Page 5

Mobiles: Sustaining & Coordinating Aid Distribution

Photo Credit: UN

Amartya Sen famously once observed that famines rarely occur in democratic or even relatively free societies, rather from inequalities built into the societal mechanisms of food distribution. The current famine declared by the U.N. in Southern Somalia, exemplifies his case and point.

New mobile technologies and ICTs in aid projects, however, can be used to streamline the coordination between aid organizations on the ground, populations desperate for aid delivery, and those funding the projects abroad—and make them more sustainable.

As Charles Kenny points out, the modern expansion of international markets and improved international assistance have drastically reduced the probability of famines solely resulting from weak governance.

Alternatively, the government—or those in charge—must deliberately choose to deprive their people of food and, “…actively exercise the power to take food from producers who need it or deny food assistance to victims,” Kenny writes in Foreign Policy.

The political atmosphere within the two regions of Southern Somalia is a huge factor towards the most recent accumulation of mass malnutrition and starvation.

Lacking a sovereign state, citizens must rely on the governance provided by the decentralized al Shabab—who blames food aid for creating dependency—which does little to ensure access to food, preventing malnutrition, or improving livelihoods of the population.

In February 2010, the militant group ousted the World Food Program (WFP), followed by their expulsion of three other aid agencies, where they were accused of spreading Christian propaganda.

Photo Credit: BBC

Al Shabab removed the food aid earlier this month, declaring that agencies without hidden agendas were free to operate in their areas. Later, they announced that expelled agencies, namely WFP, remained banned.

Despite these efforts of dissuasion, WFP airlifted 10 tons of food to Southern Somalia last Wednesday. Mobile technologies can used to track this aid to ensure that it is kept out of the hands of al-Shabaab and into the hands of the malnourished.

Ensuring that they honor their word and delivering aid are two battles to overcome, encouraging harmony for further aid distribution is another.

If al-Shabab upholds their promise to allow food aid in the upcoming months, there should be coordination to make these programs and projects happen efficiently and sustainably—between Southern Somalia’s civil society, the government, and aid agencies who hold the resources.

Aid agencies should capitalize on ICTs to enhance the collaborative effort between organizations and individuals with eyes on the ground, and those pulling the funding strings up in Washington.

Edward Carr who works in famine response for USAID on the ground in the Horn of Africa, says,

…we are going to have to use our considerable science and technology capacity to really explore the potential of mobile communications as a source of rapidly-updated, geolocatable information about conditions on the ground to which people are responding with their livelihoods strategies

Although this new way of collecting information for benefit incidence analysis is useful for tracking who each dollar benefits, it is only resourceful in the long-term if put into a local social context.

Who is the most impacted, but most importantly, why- is what truly matters in the long run.

August 9, 2011/by actualize

Anti-corruption, Civil Society, Democracy & Governance, Elections, Governances, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Rule of Law

Measuring and Assessing Gov 2.0, Election Monitoring, & Citizen Media

This summer I have wrote a lot about good governance programs to fight corruption, improve government effectiveness and accountability, and how they they are crucial to developing countries economic development, overall prosperity, and empowerment of civil society. One issue, however, can be the monitoring and evaluation of democracy and governance projects, which can sometimes be difficult–public opinion surveys as a form of measurement can be fraudulent, or uneven, and systems can be disorderly. Although ICTs are not a panacea for a development, they can help to streamline democratic and good governance strategies, and embolden civil society to play a participatory role. Some of the ways ICTs can be employed in democracy and governance projects, such as e-government strategies, election monitoring systems and enabling citizen media, can drastically improve the efficiency of these initiatives. Based on what I have learned so far, below are suggestions for monitoring and evaluation for an e-governance strategy, how to implement an election monitoring system from the beginning til the end, and how best to measure the effectiveness of citizen media:

1. E-government and Participation

Benefits: Transparency can be enhanced through the free sharing of government data based on open standards. Citizens are empowered to question the actions of regulators and bring up issues. The ability of e-government to handle speed and complexity can also underpin regulatory reform. E-government can add agility to public service delivery to help governments respond to an expanded set of demands even as revenues fall short.

First, on the project level, question if the inputs used for implementation and direct deliverables were actually produced. The government’s progression or regression should not rely solely on this because there are other outside variables. For the overall implementation, ask if the resources requested in place, and were the benchmarks that were set reached? Featured below is a timeline on how to implement a good e-government strategy.

Source: ITU

2. Strengthen Rule of Law with Crowdsource Election monitoring:

Benefits: Support for election monitoring may be provided prior to and/or during national or local elections and can encourage citizens to share reports from their community about voting crimes, ballot stuffing and map these crimes using Ushahidi. By documenting election crimes, it can provide evidence of corrupt practices by election officials, and empower citizens to become more engaged.
Drawbacks: Publicizing information to the broad public means without checking the information’s validity these systems can be abused in favor of one political party or the other, and elections can be highly contested.

Photo Credit: movement.org

Below are systematic instructions on how to implement the “all other stuff” needed for a election monitoring system, like Ushahidi:

Step 1. Create a timeline that includes goals you have accomplished by different marker points leading up to the election, and reaching target audiences

Step 2. The more information reports the better for the platform, but consider a primary goal and focus on filtering information about that goal to the platform, put it in the About section.

Step 3. Target your audience and know how they can be reached for example

Community partners
Crowd
Volunteers

Step 4. Figure out who your allies are—NGOs and civil society organizations that will want to support, and provide resources for more free and fair elections in your country. Figure out what groups would be best for voter education, voter registration drives, civic engagement or anti-corruption. Building a new strategy on top of the already existing ones will help to promote the campaign and making it more sustainable overtime.

Step 5. Reach out and meet with the groups you have targeted—and make sure to identify people from that country living abroad, reach out to the diaspora. Ask yourself the following questions when the program is implemented: should all reports be part of the same platform? Should reports come in before voting begins or just offenses taking place during elections? What about outreach after the election takes place for follow-up M&E?

Step 6. Get the word out to as many citizens as possible using flyers, local media, and target online influencers, such as those on Twitter or Facebook. Attract volunteers to assist in the overall outreach and publicity plan—a volunteer coordinator, technical advisor and, if possible, a verification team or local representatives, to relay and confirm what monitoring the electoral processes is all about.

Step 7. Information sources:

Mobiles: Frontline SMS can work as reception software for submissions via text.
Email/Twitter/Facebook: Consider creating a web form to link people to on social networks which asks for everything you need, including, detailed location information, category and multimedia.
Media Reports and Journalists: Have volunteers look in the news for relevant information to be included in the reports
Verification team: Either a local organization or journalist works best—on site that is able to receive alerts from the platform on events happening around their polling stations to be able to verify what is going on. Cuidemos el Voto modeled Ushahidi slightly for incoming reports from whitelisted people to show up automatically, for example non-governmental election monitoring organizations.

Step 9. Monitoring and Evaluation

Closing the loop of information: How will you show citizens who provided information on electoral fraud that you received it? Have a system in place to tell community representatives that the information was received and it will be acted upon.
How will you act on that information in the country’s courtrooms, though? Make sure to preserve the documentation of election fraud that your platform has received so that it can serve to hold the perpetrators accountable in court.

3. Citizen Media

Citizen media allows content to be produced by private citizens outside of large media conglomerates and state run media outlets to tell their stories and provide bottom up information. Also known as citizen journalism, participatory media, and democratic media, citizen media is burgeoning with all of the technological tools and systems available that simplify the production and distribution of media

Benefits: In addition to the above-mentioned benefits, citizen media also allows a sense of community where up-to date news covers a variety of angles, stories, and topics found in hard to reach places.
Drawbacks: It can be risky for the citizens journalists and their supporters. They can be identified and targeted by members of the oppression, where they will be put in jail or tortured. There is no gatekeeping, verifying, or regulating the information—this is not a problem when it comes to video or photos, but definitely with information. Also, connectivity issues may not allow citizens to upload the information.
Helpful Resources: This journalist’s toolkit is a training site for multimedia and online journalists.
Monitoring and Evaluation for citizen media projects: Governments have foreign policy and economic agendas that guide their choices on how they fund projects, therefore, it’s important that the grantees and activists understand and share the same objectives. This is also beneficial to learn from projects over time to avoid redundancy and enhance efficiency of implementation.
Measurement approaches—Some corporate funding agencies like the Gates Foundation, Skoll Foundation, and Omidyar Network insist on measuring citizen media projects, while other funding agencies like the Knight Foundation insist less on measurement. It’s important to measure both quantitative and qualitative outcomes and give constructive feedback to the contributors so that they can become more effective.

Quantitative—Objectives may sometimes change in response to your context, but keep the end goal in mind, continue to measure yourself against the objectives. This can be done through web analytics or web metrics—website performance monitoring service to understand and optimize website usage
Qualitative—Primarily anecdotal and used to shift policy objectives. In the end, however, it’s about visualizing the change you are trying to bring in the world, and making it happen.

August 4, 2011/by actualize

Civil Society, Democracy & Governance, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Citizen Journalist? Consult the Mobile Media Toolkit

The recent rebellions in the Middle East and North Africa have shown to the world the power of recording and disseminating revolutionary events often denied by oppressive regimes; and the proliferation of mobile phones has proved to be a necessary piece of media weaponry for these citizen journalists.

How then, can mobiles be used to maximize the efficiency of their citizen journalists?

The Mobile Media Toolkit created by MobileActive, clarifies problems that may arise while using mobiles in media and assists citizen journalists in their endeavors to deliver their own perspectives of events to the rest of the world.

The Toolkit—available in English, Spanish and Arabic—provides how-to guides, wireless tools, and case studies on how mobile phones are being used for reporting, news broadcasting, and citizen media.

Citizen journalists often report out of necessity so mobile phones are a rapid, covert, and cheap communications channel to suits their needs. In hostile regions where journalism is censored or banned altogether, citizen reporters must be prepared for reacting to quickly changing situations and security measures.

MobileActive’s online resource has information relevant for varying prototypes, from the basic Java phones to the latest smartphone. The tool kit has five main components consisting of:

Creating the Content—Knowing how to capture multimedia enables reporters to capture breaking news and information at a moment’s notice. This section discusses capturing content (like photos, video, audio, and location information) on phones, both smartphones and otherwise; editing that content; (briefly) sharing that content online.
Sharing Content from Mobile to Media—Explores content platforms that let mobile phone users (including trained journalists, untrained content producers, or even “readers”) easily upload content to various mediums. This section also looks at blogging, microblogging, and uploading multimedia.
Delivering Content Online from Media to Media—Covers how to make content (text, audio, video, and more) accessible to a mobile audience in various ways, including text message alerts, audio channels like phone calls and radio, mobile web, mobile apps, and location-based services.
Engaging the Audience—This section articulates how to engage audiences on their mobile phones to make it more participatory. Since social media has become an important conduit for engagement, understanding mobile social media, “listening” to the audiences are saying, and thinking about audiences as participants and content creators rather than passive recipients of content. The section focuses on helping media organizations see their mobile-using audiences as participants in the media process.
Making Sure Information is Secure

The Mobile Surveillance Primer helps identify and understand the risks involved with mobile communication in citizen journalist’s work. The Primer goes over basic mobile surveillance, and acknowledges what kind of information can be transmitted by or stored in your phone.
The Tips and Tools section discusses specific use cases
Mobile Active’s Security Risk Primer—to help activists, human rights defenders, and journalists assess the mobile communications risks that they are facing, and then use appropriate mitigation techniques to increase their ability to organize, report, and work more safely.

MobileActive’s new Mobile Media Toolkit covers all the bases in what citizen journalists should know about reporting with their mobile phones.

Hopefully this how-to initiative will encourage more citizen journalism efforts beyond the Middle East and North Africa to all repressive governments, enhancing efforts for citizens to hold their government’s more accountable and transparent.

August 3, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Democracy & Governance, Mobile, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Texts and Balances: Nigeria’s 2011 Election

Photo: MobileActive

In Nigeria’s presidential election this April, election observers sent over 35,000 daily text messages to document validity or corruption of the election counting and results. The theory behind Project Swift Count 2011 was that having election observers at voting locations around the nation equipped with mobile phones could immediately report foul play. The theory worked—statistically significant samples by independent organizations verified the published election results from the Nigerian election bureau—indicating that corruption was minimal or nonexistent.

The National Democratic Institute worked with the government of Nigeria to hire 8000 election observers to monitor 4000 voting stations. A parallel vote count was collected and corruption monitored and reported. The observers documented peoples votes, whether they were pressured by anyone, and if all the candidates were listed. Then, the observers each sent a minimum of five text messages during the course of voting to verify the following events:

Photo: NDI

1. Voting accreditation booths opened on time

2. Closing of accreditation booths on time

3. Close of voting booths

4. Starting time of vote counting

5. Accurate reporting of final votes at verified time the next day

Subsequently, political corruption was stymied and the election results were accurate in terms of the sample NDI collected. President Jonathan Goodluck was elected in a fair and clean democratic election.

The project cost around nine million dollars in total, including an independent evaluation of the funds. A group of independent researchers, including Katrin Verclas of MobileActive, carried out the evaluation, and found that nearly all the money could be accounted as originally proposed. These clean results have motivated other countries to utilize this system as well. NDI is currently working with Zambia to monitor their next elections with a similar plan.

Given the high use of mobile phones and the live stream of communication possible via SMS, mobile phones present another solution to promoting democratic elections. And with the spread of mobile satellite service around Africa, this project is scalable in other nations.

August 3, 2011/by actualize

Democracy & Governance, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

China Train Crash News Brought by Netizens on Weibo

Chinese rescuers work around the wreckage of train cars in Wenzhou in east China's Zhejiang province, Sunday, July 24, 2011. A bullet train crashed into another high-speed train, killing dozens of people and once again raising safety concerns about the country's fast-expanding rail network. (AP Photo/Color China Photo)

Photo Credit: Color China Photo

Twitter’s Chinese counterpart, Weibo, has been the primary channel to inquire how the tragic high-speed train accident occurred last week.

The July 23 collision of two high-speed passenger trains near the eastern city of Wenzhou killed 40 people, left 191 injured and is proving to be an ailing political problem for Beijing.

Within the past week, the government’s growing dichotomy is wearing on Chinese citizen’s patience, as authorities have pledged transparency but suppressed the cause of the incident.

Premier Wen Jiabao, in a rare news conference last Thursday at the site of the deadly train wreck, promised an, “open and transparent,” investigation of an accident, which has incited questions on the safety of the country’s new high-speed rail system.

This comes in lieu of the Communist Party’s propaganda office instructing the media to play down coverage of the accident and emphasize positive news in their weekend reports. Chinese citizens have turned to Weibo to try and uncover what happened.

Weibo is the company Sina’s version of Twitter, and has over 100 million users.

Last week, there were ten million messages about the crash on Weibo and twenty million on Tencent’s QQ.com Weibo, the other major Chinese microblog. When combined, these two microblogging sites have more users than Twitter has worldwide.

When the crash first occurred, survivor Yangjuan Quanyang’s Weibo account broke the news by posting a plea for help at 8:47 pm local time. According to China Daily, she wrote, “Our train bumped into something. Our carriage has fallen onto its side. Children are screaming . . . Come to help us please! Come fast!”.

In ten hours, Yangjuan’s plight for help was reposted more than 100,000 times and the criticism continue to grow.

Chinese public opinion and doubts about the accident are all filled with anger. In user-created polls with hundred of thousands of votes, netizens illustrate that are wholeheartedly dissatisfied with how the government handled the crash.

Online poll on how the government handled the wreck

Photo Credit: Penn Olson

Some of the questions they demand answers to are:

What is the reason of the accident? What equipment was destroyed by lightning?
Why the train body was buried, is it to cover up the evidence?
Why give up the rescue work for early reopening? Rescue the little girl can be considered a miracle?
Is the new Shanghai Railway Official competent? He was once demoted three years ago due to railway accident.
How many deaths are there?

The CCP Propaganda Bureau has tried to control the media about reports on the incident, in an attempt to bury this information. After covering information on the crash all week, the Beijing News had an image of the weather forecast on its front page Saturday.

The Hong Kong Journalists Association condemned the Bureau’s efforts, saying it “is appalled by such a move and demands that the CCP Propaganda Bureau withdraw this directive and allows the media to report the truth freely.”

Instead of relying on the reports of these journalists, the citizens are reporting their own news to each other—usually more timely and accurate, still, than those of traditional sources.

Similar to citizens reporting on the Arab Spring uprisings, or recent photos and stories from the apocalyptic scene in Syria, civil society from around the world recognize the power of social media to hold their government’s accountable and circulate information to one another.

The Chinese working knowledge on the interworking of their communities, cities and country are slowly slipping from government control, and falling into netizens hands in 140 characters or less.

August 1, 2011/by actualize

Civil Society, Democracy & Governance, Governances, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

E-participation Engages Worldwide Participation

Hilary Clinton at the Open government partnership

Photo Credit: U.S. State Department

Nation states, civil society groups, and private sector representatives from around the world, convened earlier this month at the Open Data Partnership (OGP) in Washington D.C. to discuss the best practices of open data e-government tools.

On July 12, more than 60 governments and 60 civil society groups joined the United States and Brazilian governments to pledge support on initiatives encouraging citizen’s participation, putting voters at the heart of solving their own society’s complex social issues.

The OGP is a new, multilateral initiative aiming to secure and define commitments from governments worldwide to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance.

The formal launch of the OGP is set for this September, when participating governments will embrace an Open Government Declaration, and announce their country action plans to promote OGP principles.

Last September at the United Nations General Assembly, President Obama challenged countries to embrace open government saying:

When we gather back here next year, we should bring specific commitments to promote transparency; to fight corruption; to energize civic engagement; and to leverage new technologies so that we strengthen the foundation of freedom in our own countries, while living up to ideals that can light the world

The new technologies that President Obama refers to are starting to be used throughout the globe—including Kenya’s Open Data Initiative and Huduma. These tools enable citizens to use their mobile phones or web browsers to bring public service problems that they encounter everyday to public discourse.

Viviane Reding, Vice President of the European Commission once stated that, “participation is the real goal of e-government,” and city administrators from Washington to Bangalore actively are recognizing that citizen reporting tools can help highlight some of the worst social and public service issues within their cities.

This acknowledgment infers that top down designation of funding will no longer be the course that that future governments around the world will take.

Notably, countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, India, Mexico, Norway, Philippines, South Africa, United Kingdom, and the United States and several large civil society groups—took part in the OGP pledge.

This is a huge step towards civil society empowerment, enabling the tax paying citizens to take collaboratively take charge of the changes they want to see in their communities—truly giving power back to the people.

July 29, 2011/by actualize

Anti-corruption, Civil Society, Democracy & Governance, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Rule of Law

Mexico’s Corruption Crackdown Is Always Top-Down

Photo Credit: Tribune Newspapers

This month, Mexican president Felipe Calderón, honored his recent Federal Anti-Corruption Initiative by arresting hundreds of federal detectives, prosecutors, and others, from the Mexico’s Attorney General office.

The recent expulsions are part of a broad effort across Mexico to clean up the corrupt police forces historically associated with organized crime, especially the drug cartels responsible for 40,000 deaths since Calderón came to power in 2006.

For the Mexican citizens, though, information on the detention of these authorities is inaccessible, stagnant, and corrupt practices go unprosecuted.

New anti-corruption mapping systems and platforms, however, can make these processes more transparent, and encourage citizen contribution, while holding dishonest authorities more accountable.

Last Tuesday, Mexican Attorney General Marisela Morales said that the agency was currently firing 424 officials, a majority of which failed to pass lie-detector tests, amongst other indicators aiming to oust corrupt authorities.

“We are strengthening our vigilance to make sure that our own officials abide by the law,” Ms. Morales said, according to the Wall Street Journal. This is the second substantial group of lay-offs for federal officers indicted in unlawful practices—last summer 10% of the entire federal police force was fired.

The office intends to administer the lie detector tests to all local, state and federal police this year, while aggregating the results and putting them in a national database, in an effort to ensure fired policemen will not be rehired.

Photo Credit: France 24

The recent measure coincides with Calderón’s Anti-Corruption law, approved last year by the Mexican Senate, created to diminish corrupt the police practices closely linked with the drug cartels.

Nevertheless, not evident within the current arrests is how the general public will be able to access this national database, and contribute to it on events they see everyday.

Particularly when the 2010 UN e-government survey found that Mexico had the most advanced e-services development in Latin America and Mexico’s IT spending is forecast to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10% over 2011- 2015.

Advanced within their connectivity and citizen participatory programs, Mexico should have this national database shared in an open source software system, similar to that of the Kenya’s Open Data Initiative.

Mexican residents should be able to view, and add their own instances of bribery and corruption to the database to lend their perspective on the, “bad cop vs. good cop,” boundary marks—helping to differentiate those people who supposedly protect them.

This website could also include an interactive Ushahidi map to illustrate towns where officers were arrested, and reporting features similar to Ipaidabribe.com.

These participatory mapping and reporting websites would allow Mexican citizens to demonstrate where corruption affects their everyday life the most, and where in public services corruption runs rampant.

Hopefully an engaging approach will help to prosecute abusers, rather than merely detaining them.

July 22, 2011/by actualize

Anti-corruption, Civil Society, Democracy & Governance, Elections, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

#ArabSpring Activists on How 140 Characters Help Unite

Syrian protests with a coffin being carried through the crowd

Photo Credit: Reuters

Current discourse on the Arab Spring excludes social media as the sole perpetuator of the movement—but scholars and activists alike, agree that technology has helped to unify and project, citizen’s feeling of dissent.

My previous post about last Wednesday’s Future Tense event explored some speaker’s discussion on the West’s connection with new technologies, as either aiding or embedding the revolution.

Other panelists, however, elicited a more homegrown, internal perception on how the uprisings evolved.

Merlyna Lim, Professor of at the Consortium of Science, Policy and Outcomes and the School of Social Transformation – Justice and Social Inquiry Program at Arizona State University, discussed origins of anti-Mubarak protests in Egypt.

She claimed it was rooted before the Tahir moment occurred, stemming from three stages of organization—networks, narratives and claim making—to mobilize collective action.

The first protest organized exclusively online, without physical headquarters, was arranged by Kefaya in 2004. Using a website called Misr Digital, Lim recalls, the organizers increased the reach of the oppositions movement through the websites by engaging weak ties.

After the death of Khaled Said on June 6, 2010, the participatory youth culture, added emotions onto their organizational network’s narrative—and Egyptians feared being killed.

Khaled Said’s passing changed Egyptian’s view on human rights violations, the panelist stated. While it was once an abstract narrative, they are now saw concrete infringements by the regime—such as corruption, torture, and eventual death.

Egyptians shared these contentions, spreading them by networks. “The Tahir moment was facilitated by cabs, signs, cell phones, word of mouth, SMS, and social media provided the organizing platform,” Lim alluded.

Ahmed Al Omran & Oula Alrifai Photo Credit: New America Foundation

Another panel convened by Oula Alrifai and Ahmed al-Omran discussed their firsthand perspectives on the violence in Syria, and the political and social issues of Saudi Arabia.

Alrifai, a Syrian youth activist discussed the origins of the Syrian protests. With no independent media and post-imprisonment of an Al Jazeera correspondent, she stated, social media and video were the only ways to get information about the revolutions to the outside work.

However, the connections to do so were not always available.

For activists, using cell phones with cameras was the easiest way to take pictures and record videos, but since they had no networks in the ground someimtes they had to cross the borders. Some activists, “were crossing the borders to go to Jordan to download the videos in Internet cafés and (would) come back and fight again or be on the street and protest, risking their lives,” Alrifai said.

Ahmed al-Omran, a blogger for his site saudijeans.org, discussed the excitement many have felt across the Gulf of the revolutions.

Though the demand for freedom and justice in his home country of Saudi Arabia is similar, the dynamic is different—elections do not exist, and Saudis are largely politically unaware because citizens are not allowed to, “practice politics”.

Ahmed only became aware of politics when he started blogging in 2004, as he was not raised discussing the government, but social media gave him an outlet to learn about them. “I think that the Internet and social media has given this generation a space where they can express themselves and engage with one another and talk about the issues that are typically hard to talk about in the public sphere,” he said.

Ahmed also stated that an uprising similar to Egypt will be difficult in Saudi Arabia because of the monarchy, but predicts it will occur because time is on the people’s side. “Money is a short term resolution, these issues need a fundamental solution,” Ahmed poignantly observed, “At some point the money will run out, the oil revenues will not be there forever”.

Though opinions vary on how imperative social media was to aiding the Arab Spring uprisings, almost all scholars and activists agree—it is an organizational tool that can bring like-minded individuals to collaborate for change.

July 20, 2011/by actualize

Civil Society, Democracy & Governance, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

More Technologies, Same Social Inequalities

Photo Credit: CharlesFred on flickr

Since the Arab Spring uprisings, human rights activists worldwide have championed the power of technology, mainly the Internet and mobile phones, as tools for democracy and change. Evidence shows that they are right, social media played a role in bringing down dictatorships in the Middle East and North Africa. But other evidence shows that technology actually often reinforces social inequalities in other instances, giving more voice to the powerful, further drowning out the meek cries of the politically weak.

Social media has been successful when all social classes unite to take down the big bad evil dictators. The Arab Spring is the contemporary poster boy for this movement. The proletariat united, rose up, and took down the bourgeois in Tunisia and Egypt, and is still fighting in Syria, Libya, and other nations. Twitter hashtags and facebook groups were large players in mobilizing protestors, who came from all backgrounds—rich, middle-class, and poor—and simply communicated with their mobile phones to organize mass movements.

It seems logical, then, to assume that social media and technology penetration will lead to more democracy and social justice. The more blackberries in a country, the less the economic disparity. The more rural telecenters, the less political corruption. Or at least so goes the thinking.

Studies show otherwise. To the extent that inequalities between social classes are affected at all by the increase in ICT usage, they often became stronger and disparity increases. In a DFID study in 2005 on telephone use in India (Gujarat), Mozambique, and Tanzania, researchers found the most wealthy and educated people used phones more and with greater frequency, in both urban and rural areas. Other studies show that not only do more educated and wealthier people have greater access to ICTs, they also value them more, and use their for more development related activities as opposed to entertainment than poorer populations. Furthermore, the rich and smart are far more likely to produce digital content, solidifying the stronghold of the elite in societal knowledge production.

The relationship between ICT penetration and social inequalities, then, is more complex than the Arab Spring would suggest. The difference with the Arab Spring is that the people united to take down one leader, whereas daily life features far more social classes and political opinions, halting social change, or at least considerably slowing it down. While technology helped bring social justice to entire nations, it did not eliminate social classes within the nations.

In order to decrease social inequalities in ICT usage, then, ICT designers and national policymakers should consider stipulations to favor usage of their technology by marginalized social classes. Whether it be reducing costs to allow poorer classes to buy the product or developing voice recognition technology to engage the illiterate, extra effort will be needed to reduce the social inequality of ICT usage. Preliminary efforts by USAID’s Women in Development initiative show promise; other agencies should mimic their efforts to increase ICT usage among digital minority populations. Without these extra efforts to assist marginalized populations, ICTs will only further embed developing nations with social and economic inequalities, leading to future instability and lower quality of life.

July 19, 2011/by actualize

Democracy & Governance, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

The Dissident Internet: Who Opens the Gateway?

Photograph: Ahmed Jadallah/Reuters

This year’s Arab Spring revitalized claims that information technologies can serve as a catalyst for fueling revolutions and liberate oppressed citizens. Amid the most recent Syrian and Libyan eruptions, though, opinions on the role of the U.S. government and Western companies are largely divided.

While some argue that the U.S. has created programs to help activists circumvent censorship technologies and amplify their voices; others argue that Western companies are the creators of censorship technologies and the Internet should be taken back from the corporations.

Last Wednesday, Future Tense sponsored an event in Washington exploring the promise and limitations of new technologies in spreading democracy.

Two panelists on different sides of the spectrum weighed in the West’s role in these initiatives.

Michel Posner, Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, discussed the U.S. government’s approaches to conflicts in the Middle East, citing $70 million in grants being spent toward these endeavors.

He noted approximately 12 circumvention programs currently being funded by the U.S. State Department including a cell phone panic button, Internet suitcases, a “slingshot” for censored content, and training to help activists operating in repressive areas.

Posner described the Internet as crucial to assisting these past revolutions, and for those in the future.

In the next 20 years five billion people worldwide who will come online, he projected—will an open Internet allow them to take part in the global conversation? Or will they have web-filtered content similar to the search engine Baidu in China, or have to go on a censored, religious network like Iran’s Halal?

Poser argues that the U.S. government’s role in Internet freedom is standing for universal human rights to help empower civil society, “It is up to the people of each country to build societies in which governments respect not some rights part of the time, but all of the rights of the governed, every day. The role of the international community is to offer support — technological and institutional.”

This “international community” also involves large technology companies like Microsoft and Google, in order to maintain an open Internet, he stated—pressing corporations to join the Global Network Initiative.

Some, though, believe that corporations need to change their course of involvement entirely.

Baidu error message

Rebecca MacKinnon Senior Schwartz Fellow at New America Foundation and co-founder of Global Voices, found current inclusion for a free Internet difficult, noting that Western technologies companies sell censorship software to the oppressive regimes.

Governments rarely act directly to restrict the Internet and instead, she maintains, policies are mediated through privately owned and operated services, as in the case with Baidu and Halal.

Post-revolution activists in Egypt uncovered a contract for surveillance software made by a Western company being used all over the Middle East and similar software still is, MacKinnon asserts.

With the, “West Censoring the East”, she remarks, how can the Internet evolve in a way to serve the citizen instead of serving other powerful entities? How can people in power use it without abusing it?

The only way the Internet can only be kept free is if Western “netizens” engage online, and insist on structural and policy changes that would expand throughout the globe.

These changes, MacKinnon observes, must start in the West because other governments will then duplicate its structure,