Affiliated Network for Social Accountability (ANSA-Africa)

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COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE

ANSA-Africa is a project of the Economic Governance Programme, IDASA

Publications

Technology for transparency: the role of technology and citizen media in promoting transparency, accountability, and civic participation
May 2010
Edited by David Sasaki
Global Voices

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

This report is the culmination of four months of research examining the objectives, challenges, successes, and effects of online technology projects that aim to promote transparency, political accountability, and civic engagement in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, China, and Central & Eastern Europe. A team of eight regional researchers documented a total of 37 case studies of relevant technology projects. Though this report contains only executive summaries of each case study, full interviews including audio podcasts and related documents, are available on our website.¹ In addition to the in-depth case studies, we have also documented over 30 project listings, which provide basic descriptive information and context about related projects.

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

What is Transparency?

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.² 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.

Both of these assumptions are demonstrably false. The Stasi, for example, had one agent for every 166 citizens of East Germany. And when you add informants to the formula, John O. Koehler has estimated that there was one spy per every 6.5 citizens.³ Who was surveilled and who was surveilling? It is often more difficult to differentiate each side of the transparency window than we assume. The concrete division we make between the government and its citizens is, in fact, a thin and constantly shifting membrane. The second assumption of the transparency metaphor - that the process of seeing through the medium does not substantially alter the nature of what is being viewed - has also been proved false. Beth Noveck, in a conversation with fellow open government advocate, Tim O'Reilly, observed that a new directive requiring stricter documentation of government meetings led to an increase in “informal lunches” where public officials can discuss topics without making their discussions publicly accessible. Such behavior could lead many to believe that public officials are discussing secrets they wish to hide from public view, but Noveck points out that most government officials simply don’t have time to discuss, document, and then implement.

The Transparent Society

The Stasi stored enormous amounts of data about the citizens of East Germany. It sifted through their garbage, collected “odor” samples of their sheets and underwear,⁴ and tapped phone lines to listen in on citizens’ private conversations. The point was to spread fear as much as it was to collect information. But, as common as government surveillance of citizens was and continues to be,⁵ the fall of the Stasi in 1990 also illustrates another natural impulse that has been at the heart of investigative journalism and the transparency movement over the past few decades, and that is citizens demanding both information and accountability 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.⁶ This process is still ongoing today and has been a painful part of German reunification,⁷ 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.⁸

From the Fourth to the Fifth Estate?

The notion of the press as watchdog is more than 200 years old. Yet the idea of vigilant media monitoring government and exposing its excesses has gained new traction in many parts of the world, writes Sheila S. Coronel in “The Media as Watchdog.”⁹ There are many examples¹⁰ and countless movies¹¹ based on stories that reveal how investigative journalism ensures justice, transparency, and accountability. The press monitors the day-to-day workings of government in order to help citizens assess the efficacy of its performance. Watchdog journalism exposes 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, writes Coronel. As Thomas Jefferson famously remarked¹²: “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.”

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.¹³ 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, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.

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.¹⁴ 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.¹⁵

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 advertisements, 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 time intensive work that goes into investigative journalism.

As traditional media companies are forced to cut their budgets due to falling advertising revenue, investigative journalism and international coverage are the two most common areas to disappear. David Simon, in his testimony before Congress about the death of the newspaper industry, remarked that with a vacuum of investigative journalism, “it is going to be one of the great times to be a corrupt politician.”¹⁶

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 that rely on the volunteer contributions of citizens who are not necessarily trained journalists.¹⁷

One such platform is WikiLeaks, which earlier this year published a video of US soldiers firing on a van that was picking up an injured journalist in Iraq.¹⁸ WikiLeaks is a website where any citizen whistleblower can anonymously upload a leaked document that exposes wrongdoing.¹⁹ In an interview with Russia Today, WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange makes an important distinction between source information and the contextualization of that information which informs the public and shapes public opinion.²⁰ According to Assange, Washington Post reporter David Finkel apparently had access to the video, or at least the transcript, which helped inform his reporting.²¹ 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.

For example, newspapers have traditionally employed a “crime beat” reporter to visit the local police department, publish selections from the crime report, and help add context to crimerelated statistics. Today websites like Oakland Crimespotting²² and EveryBlock²³ automatically take crime report data from police department websites and display it on a map interface which can be filtered by time, location, and crime type. While such automated websites don’t replace the need for the contextualization of such information, they do open up that process to anyone willing to invest the time to understand the spread of crime across location and time.

http://www.everyblock.com/