Tag: Digital Organizing

The following is a guest post by Christian Douglass, a TechChange alumni from TC104: Digital Organizing and Open Government. 

What makes the Open Government Partnership – seemingly another multilateral good governance initiative — worth watching?

It’s not because it’s grown from eight to fifty-eight countries in under two years. That’s fast, and fifty-eight is a respectable number – it demonstrates momentum – but plenty of multilaterals, like the Community of Democracies, reach that number early on.

The Open Government Partnership (OGP) is President Obama’s international expression of his pledge to make his administration the most transparent in U.S. History: In November 2012, after a trip to all-the-reform-rage country of Burma, President Obama secured a commitment from the once international pariah to work towards OGP eligibility by 2016. Time will tell if the cadre of former generals will meet that tall order, but they have showed a willingness to try. The international community, including the U.S., is bending over backwards to help.

President Obama also made the OGP a top-line message in a recent Oval office visit by four African heads of state. As a carrot for being democratically elected governments, Cape Verde, Malawi, Sierra Leone, and Senegal were invited to the U.S. in March. Those that were OGP eligible, such as Cape Verde and Malawi, committed to join. Sierra Leone pledged to work towards eligibility. A rule of thumb: If the President mentions anything twice, the bureaucracy takes notice. As a result of the visit, don’t expect OGP to be taken out of talking points until the next election cycle.

But there are two really good reasons to watch the OGP:

First, the role of civil society. One of three co-chairs is a CSO, as well has half of the 18-member steering committee. Additionally, countries are required to form, track, and review commitments in conjunction with civil society during the action plan lifecycle. Governments have to develop commitments in conjunction with local civil society stakeholders, as well consult with the OGP steering committee before finalizing their commitments. This is no panacea, but it represents a very significant opportunity for civil society.

Secondly, the OGP is action –not talk – driven: the first eight country self-assessment reports on action plans are being publically published in the next several months. An independent third-party will review the progress of the action plans and publish their findings by October. Thus, 2013 is a big year for the OGP. If it is too maintain momentum and solidify legitimacy, the independent assessment process has to produce credible reports of each country’s accomplishments for public review.

And here is why the OGP might be different: Countries develop their open governance projects, as long as they fall within the parameters of the OGP five “grand challenges” that focus on the four OGP principles: Transparency, Citizen Participation, Accountability, and Technological Innovation.

For example, as a part of their OGP commitment, Mongolia recently announced they have instituted electronic balloting, removing another opportunity for voting officials to influence the outcome – which can slowly build trust in governing institutions. Brazil recently instituted “clean slate” laws: No official may have a criminal record. This may sound baseline and intuitive, but after the law was passed it was revealed that many officials had records.

Each country designs and owns which handful of projects they launch. In this way, the good governance accomplishments of OGP partner countries might be like the tenure of former Secretary of State Clinton.

Secretary Clinton did not choose one big “legacy” accomplishment, like advancing Middle East peace. Instead, like a good venture capitalist, the State Department, under her guidance, seeded projects around the globe as diverse as promoting better cook stoves in Asia to battling human trafficking in India. She had her theme of “economic statecraft,” but what that meant in each country was context specific.

The Open Government Partnership, if it is to be deemed successful, may be measured in that same way: A thousand local good governance developments all adding up to something big and continuous. In that way, it is very much an initiative for the Internet Age, where a thousand voices in Egypt can start something that can’t be bottled up.

Our OpenGov 101 Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is a Semifinalist in the Knight News Challenge! Submitted in partnership with Global Integrity, we’re hoping to develop a global curricula to connect the open government community with the tools, experts, best practices, and organizations driving the field forward. While we still have some skepticism of MOOCs as a cure-all for online education and believe there are many ways to improve how MOOCs are executed, in this case we believe a MOOC format makes sense.

We believe the challenge for OpenGov isn’t just making new tools to open up governments, but empowering citizens to use those tools to pursue accountability and transparency. After all, open data has little value if people can’t use it (according to the Harvard Business Review), or as we put in our introduction to our Digital Organizing and Open Government course:

But don’t take our word for it. There are a number of very cool finalists in the remaining 40 in the refinement phase, so head on over and check them out if you like. We’ve left applause and feedback for a few already!

If you’re interested in contributing to our submission, here are three easy ways to get involved:

1) Celebrating #OpenGovDay on April 8.

opengovday

April 8 marks three years since key provisions of President Obama’s Open Government Directive were due. We think this is a big deal worth celebrating – but we want to hear what you think.

This week, tweet @techchange or use the hashtag #OpenGovIs to tell us what open government means to you.

Then – on April 8 – join our Tweet Storm by following and using hashtag #OpenGovDay throughout the day. We’ll be retweeting the best #OpenGovIs submissions to amplify your voice – and we’ll be offering special deals on our new class – Digital Organizing and Open Government.

2) Feedback or Applause on our Submission

While “applause” won’t affect our entry’s chances of winning, it will give us a chance to see who finds our project interesting and give us a chance to reach out. If you have a comment or feedback, we’d love your ideas to refine and clarify our submission for the next phase.

 3) Talk with Your Organization about Partnership for the Day.

Watch this space, but we’re looking for institutional partners for the day. Let us know if you’re interested! Just tweet at us or leave a comment on this post. So far we’re proud to have organizations joining us such as Open Forum Foundation (@open4m), CrowdHall (@crowdhall), OpenGov Hub (@opengovhub), Global Integrity (@globalintegrity) and more!

This is a guest post by Matt McNabb, Principal of Caerus Associates. If you are interested in using mapping for digital organizing, consider taking our course Digital Organizing and Open Government. 

 

Today, my colleagues at Caerus Associates and I are able to announce the BETA launch of a new tool that helps businesses, NGOs, and governments collect, visualize, and share geospatial data in less developed emerging markets. We call it, CaerusGEO.

Geospatial in the Last Mile

The premise is simple. How can we leverage the cloud to deliver geospatial analysis to non-GIS users most familiar with basic, paper based workflows?

In our experience, most businesses, government institutions, and organizations in frontier markets rarely use technology across the enterprise. In some cases it’s a cost issue, in others it’s social stigma related.  But whatever the reason, ICTs are often used simply to support manual, tabular processes that already exist.

Want to run a survey? Use Word, Excel, and printer.

When it comes to spatial data, this challenge is only magnified. Collecting geospatial information can be hard enough, visualizing and sharing it can be even harder. As a result, geospatial information is often relegated to the expert user.  Of course, the GIS industry as a whole is trending towards accessibility, but rarely is it truly meaningful for most enterprises in less developed markets that simply want to know where things happen.

This is what got me interested in a tool widely used within the humanitarian response community called Walking Papers. The value proposition of Walking Papers has been that it extends geospatial data collection to pen and paper. Print off a map, mark it up, then convert what’s written into geospatial data. No magic. No optical character recognition. Just a simple paper insert that allows people without GIS units to collect spatial information in a way that could be easily geo-rectified.

The problem with Walking Papers is that it offers little back to the data collector. There is no visualization or data management. In fact, it’s really only a lightweight tool that lets the user print off a map and, through some gymnastics, let’s her then use it to edit a basemap on Open Street Map. It offers nothing for the non-technical user simply interested in using paper to collect information about events, or perceptions, or whatever other kinds of information one might be interested in seeing over the basemap.

For the past year, we’ve been wondering what it would take to create a tool that filled this gap. Let normal users capture geospatial data in paper formats and return analytical value once collected.

How It Works

This BETA of CaerusGEO is our first answer to this need. A user is able to create her own survey, find a place in the world where it will be centered, create an atlas and data collection sheets through a standard schema they created, and then manage, visualize, and share the data once uploaded. By bridging cloud analytics to paper workflows, we are able to drive value at enterprise level.

If you’re an NGO and want to integrate mapping into your polling, you can create a survey, manage the data, and facilitate sharing from start to finish. If you’re a business looking to understand your market, you can integrate it into your customer registration process and benefit from basic market intelligence. Although basic in form, the value is derived from a more reality-based understanding of workflows in these markets. Paper matters.

Smarter Public Safety

The very first place we thought to experiment was in the domain of public safety. What could be more obvious than the need for taking those antiquated paper and pushpin constructions used for crude crime mapping and making it more dynamic, analytical, and transparent?

As the Deputy Minister of Justice in Monrovia told me, ‘we send the police where the people are, not where the crimes are… this could help us see how to use our resources in a smart way.’ We can address this challenge by finding minimally intrusive places to insert paper maps into the pre-existing workflows of policing institutions and fusing them together for digital analytics by a single node with connectivity to the cloud.

In parallel, NGOs and violence observatories have the capacity to collect and share their own data, creating a basic framework opportunity for enhancing social accountability within the security sector domain. Perhaps most interestingly, by integrating paper-based mapping that connects to real geospatial data, the longstanding art of Participatory GIS in conflict management and of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design can be used in so many more ways.

Driving Value For The Private Sector

Public safety institutions are not the only ones we have learned can find value here. It’s also a pull for private sector development, particularly in the bottom of the pyramid. Microfinance institutions and others engaged in understanding their customer base face similar challenges.

By extending geospatial data capabilities to private sector development institutions and retail organizations, we have the prospect of significantly improving the precision and reach of private sector particularly to underserved areas.

So Much To Learn

Bending ICTs to the real-world challenges and workflows found in the last mile holds tremendous value to public and private sector institutions alike. For us, this experiment with geospatial information is only the beginning. We hope you’ll join us and give us feedback as our experiment moves on.

Matt McNabb is a member of the Board of Advisors for TechChange, and a Principal with Caerus Associates. For more, you can follow Matt and CaerusGEO on Twitter:  @mattrmcnabb  @caerusgeo

 

Are you interested in learning with TechChange? Check out our next class: Digital Organizing and Open Government. Class starts April 8, 2013. Apply Now.

How can USAID use mobile technologies to more effectively collect, analyze and share data?  These are the central questions we will be addressing as part of a new course TechChange has developed in partnership with the Mobile Solutions team at USAID and QED.

USAID, together with its partners, has the opportunity to increase efficiency, improve the quality of the information its uses, and better meet USAID goals related to its Forward Reforms, Evaluation Policy, and Open Data Initiative by utilizing mobile technologies to collect and disseminate data about people, projects, and programs. This course will help USAID Missions and implementing partners understand how to do just that.

Building off of the success of our 8-week online certificate course this fall on Accelerating Mobile Money, TC311 Mobile Data Solutions will be a four week online course (February 1-March 1, 2013) designed to build the necessary technical capacity to deploy mobile data collection strategies by bringing together Mission staff and implementing partners. The four weeks are structured as follows to provide a comprehensive overview of mobile devices in data collection.

Week 1: Introduction to mobile data solutions

  • What is mobile data? What are the benefits and challenges associated with collecting data wirelessly?

Week 2: Project design

  • Designing projects and preparing concept notes, scopes of work, other documents to include mobile technologies.

Week 3: Implementation

  • Study design and programming, training, field operations, data management

Week 4: Analysis, visualization and sharing

  • Utilizing data for decision-making, sharing with partners

The course will go beyond explaining the benefits of this approach. Participants will learn the questions to ask in order to assess projects (Are mobile technologies appropriate?); design them to achieve the maximum benefits possible (How should interventions be designed to take advantage of these technologies?), implement them (What device should we use? How do we train staff? What resources do we need in the field? At the Mission?), and report and share the data (How do we create visuals that can inform decision making? How do we share the results with beneficiaries and partners in-country?).

Featured tools, organizations and projects include: Episurveyor/Magpi, Formhub, Souktel, EMIT, uReport, TexttoChange, RapidSMS, GeoPoll, iFormbuilder, PoiMapper, Catholic Relief Services, DAI, NASA, OpenDataKit at UW, SweetLab, JSI, ICF International, Tangerine at RTI, Futures Group. The course will be delivered on TechChange‘s custom learning platform and will include a mixture of presentations by experts, tool demonstrations, selected readings, and activities including designing and analysing a survey using mobile software.

This closed course is intended specifically for USAID and its implementing partners. But if are you interested in learning with TechChange and the topic of mobile data, Check out our upcoming course on Mobile Phones for International Development. Class starts on March 4, 2013. Apply now!

[UPDATE: Course rescheduled for April 8th, 2013]

We’re very sorry to inform you that we are rescheduling the Digital Organizing and Open Government course that was originally scheduled to begin on this Monday, January 7. If you have already paid for a seat in the course, we will (of course) refund your tuition in full if you so desire, or we will hold your spot in the rescheduled course as well as offering you a complimentary seat in our upcoming course: Tech Tools and Skills for Emergency Management. The reason for this unexpected schedule change at such a late date is that the Lead Facilitator, Christopher Neu, dislocated his shoulder and will be unable to type for several weeks. Rather than find a last-minute replacement, we opted instead to offer the course at a later date with the original experience intact. We apologize for any inconvenience and still hope to see you in class!

 

[ORIGINAL POST]

We’re excited about starting class on January 7th! We’ve already received applications from Senegal, Italy, Egypt, Spain, Cameroon, Kenya, Sweden, Haiti, India, UK, and more. However, we’ve had a number of questions about the course format, content, experts, and exercises that we wanted to address in more detail. Please let us know if this helps!

HOW IS THE COURSE ORGANIZED?

We’ve designed our courses specifically to combine self-paced multimedia content with real-time video engagement with experts. We have also included hands-on exercises to get you familiar with the tools under discussion under guidance from our staff. Courses are expected to take 5-9 hours per week of effort with a minimum of one real-time interaction, but can also be completed up to three months after the end of live courses. Broadly speaking, these are the themes that will be discussed during the four weeks of the course:

  • Week 1: Introduction to Core Themes (Jan. 7)
  • Week 2: Tech Tools for Digital Organizing (Jan. 14)
  • Week 3: Tech Tools for Open Gov and Open Data (US) (Jan. 21)
  • Week 4: Final Project–Toward Global Open Government (Jan. 28)

WHAT KIND OF CONTENT CAN I EXPECT?

Part of the course revolves around reading the latest research and discussing as a class. To that effect, we’ll be exploring the latest research from leading experts on “liberation technologies” such as Patrick Meier; crowd-sourced manuals (including one of our favorite: The Outsider’s Guide to Supporting Nonviolent Resistance to Dictatorship); and other videos, blog posts, and academic research. We try to balance the readings to contribute to expert discussions so that participants can dive deeper into core content in their field.

WHO ARE THE EXPERTS?

We’re excited about the broad panel of experts that we’ve lined up to hold live class discussions via video over the four weeks.

  • Kaushal Jhalla of the World Bank will be speaking about the challenges and potential of big data and development
  • Jordan Menzel of CrowdHall on the topic of using technology for public engagement and accountable government
  • Linda Raftree of Plan International, USA on open data and community engagement
  • Wayne Burke of the Open Forum Foundation on building sustainable communities around open government.

HOW DO THE HANDS-ON EXERCISES WORK?

Moving beyond content and experts, we’ve designed hands-on exercises for each week of the course to familiarize students with the tools under discussion.

  • Week 1: Explore application of social media tools with guides from Movements.org including Twitter and other social media.
  • Week 2: Public access tools such as CrowdHall to be used for engaging public figures in dialogue.
  • Week 3: Domestic/US-oriented open gov resources from Sunlight Labs including Open State Project, Stream Congress, and ClearSpending.
  • Week 4: International final project exploring open government in your home country: How can you get involved?

 

We hope this helps! Please let us know if you have any other questions by leaving a comment, tweeting @techchange, or sending an email to chris [at] techchange.org. Thanks!

Curious about learning with TechChange? Check out our upcoming class: Digital Organizing and Open Government. Class starts Jan 7! Apply Now.

Have you seen our latest video about TC104: Digital Organizing and Open Government?

This may just be a simple ad for our course, but it also showcases a lot of what we can do to create a learning experience through video. We thought we could use this video as a chance to show the process we go through any time we make a video.

Step 1: Conceptualize

The first step to producing any video is developing the content for it. Whether you’re dealing with a fictional narrative or factual documentation, whether your movie is thirty seconds or ninety minutes, the first and most important step will always be figuring out the story that you are telling.  We meet as a team – and with clients – to go over in detail exactly what information needs to be conveyed, and we develop a visual narrative around those ideas, drawing on the shared talents of our educators, tech experts, graphic designers, and video producer/editor (me!). From this collaborative process, we develop a script and produce a storyboard of what the final video will roughly look and flow like.

Step 2: Drawing/Filming

Once we have the concept fully fleshed out, we get to work on building the pieces we use for the final video. Our incredibly talented graphic designers draw the different pieces and make adjustments based on feedback; some of these pieces are fairly simple drawings, others are highly detailed and contain multiple frames of action that will ultimately get animated. Additionally, at this stage we produce a high quality audio track of the script, as well as potentially doing any live-action filming that is required (most commonly in front of a green-screen).

Step 3: Animating/Editing

Once we have the pieces made, we begin to assemble them together. Drawings are animated primarily using Adobe After Effects. First basic motions are mapped in time with the audio, and then more complex effects are added, such as sub-compositions/animations, lighting effects, motion effects, or anything else that’s needed. Generally, the animating phase begins while the drawing phase is still underway, so that if any problems arise with our original ideas for the video, we can easily and efficiently make adjustments. For example, in our TC104 video, we decided to flesh out the bike metaphor used near the beginning when the visual narrative around that section seemed weak, and it was a simple matter of drawing a few additional pieces and animating them into place.

Step 4: Revisions

The animation culminates in the production of a rough draft of the final video that is then reviewed first by the entire TechChange team. Here’s the rough draft we produced for TC104:

After any changes, we then go over a revised draft with the client. We carefully weigh their feedback to make a final round of adjustments to the video, and then we are done!

Key Takeaways

There are a few key lessons about this process that are worth highlighting and remembering:

  • The strength of the concept/story will carry over to the strength of the video. Having a strong script and audio track early in the process makes the whole process smoother.
  • Producing animations is a collaborative process. The input of experts and clients is extremely valuable, and our creative team is very talented and flexible in working to achieve the strongest possible video. Having multiple perspectives throughout the process is incredibly valuable, because viewers of the final product will have a wide range of perspective, too.
  • Producing animations is fun! It is an effective and easy way to uniquely convey any information to the entire world!

Hopefully this post has been an insightful look into our process. Please contact us with any questions about our process, or if you’d like us to help you produce videos!

TechChange is excited to announce a new partnership with Transitions (TOL), a Prague-based journalism and media training organization with a focus on the post-communist countries of Europe and the former Soviet Union. Running a variety of programs – from the publication of one of the first online magazines to cover political, social, economic and cultural issues in the region since 1999, to providing young reporters with intensive training on best journalistic practices  – TOL has been a regional leader on media and democracy building efforts.

Bringing their expertise on media and journalism development to their target region through our eLearning environment, TOL will be running their course: “Reporting on Education,”  adapting a course that the Guardian Foundation originally created for TOL and the BBC’s iLearn platform. And though journalist training is a broad endeavor, even when focusing on a particular region, we’re hoping that this course will help to not only train journalists, but also to elevate national and regional policy dialogue on the issues of educational reform, open governance and democratic accountability.

Counting gets underway at a polling station in Moscow following Russia’s Presidential election, 4 March 2012.*

This new institutional relationship and course topic comes at a time when the role of the media in promoting such topics is an ever salient issue, particularly in Eastern Europe. Over the past few months, the Kremlin has tightened control over various aspects of civil society and acted to counter what it views as foreign interference in Russia’s sovereign affairs, moves that included booting USAID, a key funder of media training and other efforts, out of the country.

TechChange has helped organizations address these challenges and co-authored a piece in the Huffington Post (USAID’s Eviction From Russia: An Opportunity for Online Learning as E-Development) expressing that:

“there is reason to believe that using widely-available technology, democracy promotion organizations have the potential to greatly influence dialogue by amplifying local practitioner voices, and giving domestic organizations a channel for collaboration with international experts.”

This is where we are hoping that our partnership with TOL will further distribute valuable content – including across closed or semi-closed borders – and build up the capacity of a core group of journalists to report in an informative and engaging way on the sometimes complicated field of education. After all, the task of training journalists in this case isn’t geared just toward building a better media, but also a better, more equitable education system and more modern and democratic societies. We’re hoping that this first course will be yet another worthwhile addition to this process.

*Photo Credit: Credit: OSCE/Jens Eschenbaecher

Interested in digital activism and citizen journalism? Check out our 104 course on digital organizing, which will be run January 7 – February 1!

If you are interested in using technology for peacebuilding consider taking our course, Technology for Conflict Management and Prevention, starting July 23rd. 


 

Social media plays a major role in raising awareness about mass atrocities. In the most visible example, Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 video has garnered more than 90 million YouTube views. But the utility of social media for preventing atrocities goes beyond advocacy—a utility that the U.S. government (USG) should explore and embrace. How can the USG best leverage these tools for its atrocity prevention efforts?

For one, the White House should commission a study that assesses the value of creating a Mass Atrocities Prevention Center (MAPC) to collect, analyze, and distribute intelligence on atrocities from all relevant sources including social media platforms.

There are, of course, dangers in establishing new bureaucratic structures. In many cases, they muddle lines of communications and authority. But, certain new structures have significantly enhanced the USG’s response to complex threats. One such example is the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which could serve as a model for the MAPC.

The NCTC was created as a fusion center for intelligence from a range of disparate sources on terrorist activities.

As with terrorism, there is a wide range of potentially useful sources for garnering intelligence on atrocities. Social media platforms that are household names—YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook—can be used for documenting and warning about atrocities. Less well-known but equally useful initiatives such as Ushahidi and Small World News can serve a similar purpose.

Organizations are already using these tools to bring atrocities into the public eye. Amnesty International’s Eyes on Syria and Resolve’s LRA Crisis Tracker are two notable examples in this regard.

The USG should now look at ways to leverage the information from these and other “open” (i.e. unclassified) sources in its atrocity prevention efforts.

The MAPC would thus build a strong working relationship with the intelligence community’s Open Source Center given that, based on the center’s stated mission, it’s theoretically best positioned to collect intelligence from social media platforms.  As an independent center, the MAPC would then be able to synthesize open source with classified intelligence on atrocity threats.

A challenge brought by social media and other technological developments is the tsunami of information now available on any given event. In fact, humans today create as much information every fifteen minutes as collected by the Library of Congress in over two centuries. And endemic in the information overflow is falsehoods and untruths.

The 2008 Albright-Cohen task force on genocide prevention readily recognized these challenges:

“The bounty of information—which can only be expected to grow in the future—does not necessarily ease the analytic challenge. First, the amount of material can be overwhelming, and second, it is hard to judge the accuracy of the reporting. For example, a crucial and difficult task for analysts is to distinguish systematic killing of civilians from more general­ized background violence, as most if not all mass atrocities occur in the context of a larger conflict or a campaign of state repression.  The accuracy of analysts’ warnings will also depend on the extent to which they can identify warning signs or indicators of genocide and mass atrocities.”

The MAPC should have a directorate—based on the NCTC’s Directorate of Strategic Operational Planning (DSOP)—that develops an analytic framework for managing the high volume and veracity of intelligence flows. The MAPC’s version of the DSOP would inter alia identify the most relevant sources, develop a framework for analyzing social media, and create a comprehensive mass atrocity prevention intelligence strategy that synthesizes open and classified sources.

In sum, social media could be an important tool for improving the USG’s intelligence on mass atrocities. But the intelligence community and policymakers won’t be able to leverage these sources unless the USG has the bureaucratic structure in place do so. As of now, this structure doesn’t exist. The White House should consider standing up a MAPC to change the status quo.

 

Andrew Miller recently participated in TC104: Global Innovations in Digital Organizing. He works on conflict prevention at a Washington, DC think-tank and can be found on Twitter at @andrewmiller802.