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Case Study: The Report Card on Vote Report India Version 1.0

The 2009 Indian Lok Sabha elections have come to an end and so has version 1.0 of Vote Report India.

We have had our successes and failures and I have talked about some of them before.

I think we did a lot of things well –

- We were able to get the website up within a week, thank to some great work by the Ushahidi and eMoksha teams.

- We were able to build a number of important relationship, with civil society organizations (like Jaago Re/ One Billion Voters, National Network for India, Liberty Institute, Citizens for Justice and Peace, and Women’s Political Forum), traditional media organizations (like Al Jazeera) and new media organizations (like Global Voices, Indipepal, Desipundit, BlogAdda, NGO Post and Digital Democracy). In fact, our partnerships page looks like a literal who’s who of the important players working on the Indian elections.

- We were able to generate a lot of buzz for Vote Report India, on blogs, on Twitter, and in mainstream media within a very short time.

- We have been able to build a vibrant Vote Report India community that has been active in supporting us on both the technical and outreach side.

Here are some things that have not gone well –

- We haven’t been able to establish a relationship with any big Indian media organizations on one hand, and National election Watch and the Election Commission on the other hand, in spite of some serious discussions.

- We haven’t been able to integrate the Swift functionality into Vote Report India (aggregating feeds from multiple sources and crowdsourcing the tagging etc.) on our original timelines.

- We haven’t been able to get users to submit reports in large numbers. We have a little more than 200 reports in the system, which isn’t bad. However, we would have needed many more reports to capture the complexity of the 2009 Indian elections.

- The voter turnout in all four phases has been low, putting a question mark on the effectiveness of all digital civil society campaigns like Vote Report India.

Here are some lessons from Vote Report India version 1.0 –

- It’s still difficult to build a grassroots movement in India exclusively on the internet. Even online campaigns need to be supported by mainstream media for reach and SMS for the feedback loop. We had SMS, but we didn’t have the resources to advertise on mainstream media.

- In a country like India, which has a free and noisy news eco-system, transparency initiatives like Vote Report India need to not only get original reports from users but also aggregate reports from mainstream media.

- Transparency, in terms of availability of information in a usable format, is not a big enough incentive for Indian users. Users expected Vote Report India to closeloop the issues and give them feedback, and we were not set up to do that.

On the whole, I think that we did quite well, given our time and resource constraints.

Our biggest achievement, I think, was being able to build a vibrant community around Vote Report India and we are grateful to all the people who contributed to the project.

As I said, this was only version 1.0 of Vote Report India. We will take a short break and then relaunch Vote Report India as a platform to crowd-source the performance monitoring of our elected members of parliament, using the Ushahidi/ Swift engines. We will move the present homepage to 2009.votereport.in and start new pages like 2014.votereport.in for new elections, including local assembly elections.

Selvam and I, along with the other members of the core team, will continue to devote a substantial part of our time to Vote Report India. We are looking to expand our team, so do write to us at votereportindia@gmail.com, if you would like to become involved in a significant way.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics, my blog on social media and social change.

The DigiActive Guide to Twitter for Activism

We are very excited to announce the release of The DigiActive Guide to Twitter for Activism.  Following the recent protests in Moldova, the value of Twitter as a tool for digital activism is more prominent than ever.  Yet in addition to bringing greater awareness to that tool, the hype surrounding Moldova revealed misunderstanding of the value of of Twitter for activism and, even though the realists responded strongly, there was not a stand-alone resource which clearly defined how Twitter could be used by activists.  We hope this guide will fill that void.

Click the cover image to download the guide (PDF format)

The guide provides a wealth of information on Twitter activism.  It  begins with an introduction to the platform (p. 5) and its terminology (p. 6) and then lays out five uses of Twitter for activists, each illustrated by a case study (p. 6-11).  The guide then presents a step-by-step strategy for using Twitter for political and social change (p. 12) along with a list of do’s and don’ts (p. 14) for campaigners.  The guide ends with additional resources for Twitterers, such as applications that help you use Twitter (p. 16), further reading (p. 20), and even alternatives to Twitter (p. 18).

The guide was written by Andreas Jungherr, a master’s candidate in political science at the University of Mainz in Germany, and was reviewed and improved by scholars, activists, and the DigiActive team, all for your reading enjoyment.  Please respond with your feedback in the comments section below.

A Note for Translators:  The guide is published under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial Attribution license and we welcome translation by individuals and organizations who will release their version under the same conditions. To receive a copy of the guide in an editable format, please e-mail Contact AT DigiActive DOT org.

R@D: Mobile Activism in African Elections - a Comparative Case Study

The purpose of Research@DigiActive (R@D) is to produce applied, thought-provoking, actionable research at the cutting edge of Digital Activism. It seeks to highlight and disseminate studies in the new academic field of digital activism by publishing short papers by promising scholars. To submit a paper or get more information, please contact our Director of Applied Research, Patrick Meier, at Patrick AT Digiactive.org.

Title: Mobile Technology in African Elections: a Comparative Case Study

Author: Rebekah Heacok

Abstract: The proliferation of mobile phones in Africa is transforming the political and social landscape of the developing world, empowering people to source and share their own information and to have a greater say in what comes to international attention. This R@D product compare the use and impact of mobile technology in three recent African elections: Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Kenya.

In Nigeria’s April 2007 presidential election, a local civil society organization used free software to collect over 10,000 text message reports from voters around the country, boosting citizen participation in a political process many Nigerians doubted. In Sierra Leone’s August-September 2007 elections, trained local monitors used mobile phones to collect data from designated polling sites, enabling the independent National Election Watch to compile and release an accurate, comprehensive analysis of the election almost two weeks before the official report. And in Kenya’s December 2007 election, a group of local digital activists developed and implemented a citizen reporting platform to allow Kenyans to report and track post-election violence during a month-long media blackout, collecting and publishing a comprehensive account of riots, displacement and human rights abuses that serves as one of the best available records of the crisis.

Read the publication…

Campaign: Mobile Phones Against War in Congo

Description: Last week a coalition of students and activists have asked mobile phone users to “Cell Out” in solidarity with the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where millions have died as a result of conflict over coltan, a rare mineral used in cell phones and other electronics.

Digital Tools Being Used: mobile phones

What Are They Doing: Friends of the Congo with the help of university students at dozens of colleges and universities in the United States and around the world had made this action as part of the “Break the Silence Week”, an effort to raise awareness among cell phone users and others about the ongoing civil war in the DRC and the role of minerals such as coltan in stoking the conflict.

In “Break the Silence Week”, you will find a lists of events in different parts of the world which you can join or support.

Theory: Poverty & Digital Activism

As our contribution to Blog Action Day, I’d like to offer a response to a common question I receive: “How can you promote digital activism in resource-constrained societies if poor people don’t have access to digital tools?”

In answering this question, it isn’t sufficient to respond with the multiple examples of activists without substantial resources mounting brilliantly creative and successful campaigns for social an internet center supported by the Brazilian Ministry of Culture and political change like the strikers in Egypt using Facebook, the Help Fouad campaign in Morocco, and anti-FARC activists in Colombia.

Answering this question in a persuasive way requires a more thorough analysis of how access to digital tools is changing and what this means for political activism.  The key trends here are sky-rocketing increases in mobile phone subscriptions in developing countries and more shared mobile phones and computers.  The digital divide is no longer defined by computer ownership.  There are simply too many other ways to get on the network.

Let’s take Brazil as an example.  To quote an article from World Politics Review from earlier this year: “In Brazil, the spread of communications technology is proceeding at breakneck speed. Internet usage statistics are breaking records every month.  As a result, Brazilian society is changing in ways that have hardly begun to be understood.”
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Campaign: Sex Education from a Mobile Ringtone

A ringtone that repeats the word “condom” sung in different melodies to spread the word of safe sex in India. According to Yvonne MacPherson, this is the “first time a mobile ring-tone had been used to communicate a social or public health message.” So far, the ringtone has been downloaded over 270,000 times and is helping to spark conversations about safe sex and to break condoms out of being a taboo subject (no pun intended).

Digital Tools Being Used: mobile cell phones (more info at MobileActive and ICT4Peace)

Tactic: SMS/Map Mashup Protects Human Rights in Kenya

Description: Ushahidi.com is a Kenyan web site that records reports of violence sent by SMS and e-mail on a Google Earth map. It provides living testimony to the atrocities committed following the recent presidential elections in that country. (”Ushahidi” means “testimony” in Kiswahili.)

Organizer: The idea for the Ushahidi web site was created by the bloggers behind KenyanPundit.com, WhiteAfrican.com, MentalAcrobatics.com, AfroMusing.com, and Skunkworks and was built by developer David Kobia.

Purpose of Action: To create a visual map of human rights abuses.

Organizing Tools: SMS, Google Earth, web site

Outcome: A political resolution to the election crisis has not yet been reached.

Ease of Replication: Replicating the Ushahidi map is rather difficult, as it is actually a mash-up of SMS messages and a Google map. You will need a developer friend to make it. However, other digital map applications, like Frappr, are quite easy to use.

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