Social media, accountability, and public transparency

STUDY ON THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA FOR ENHANCING PUBLIC TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN EASTERN EUROPE AND THE COMMONWEALTH OF INDEPENDENT STATES: EMERGING MODELS, OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES

UNDP Bratislava Regional Centre1 October, 2011

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Study produced by the UNDP Bratislava Regional Centre with the support of Natalia Kosheleva, independent consultant.

Contents EXECUTIVE SUMMARY .............................................................................................................3 SCOPE AND METHODOLOGY OF THE STUDY ......................................................................5 RELEVANT PREVIOUS RESEARCH..........................................................................................5 REGIONAL CONTEXT .................................................................................................................7 DEVELOPMENT OF INFORMATION SOCIETY ...............................................................8 DEFICIENT SYSTEM OF CHECKS AND BALANCES .....................................................9 OPEN DATA INITIATIVES ................................................................................................10 WEB 1.0 CIVIC INITIATIVES ............................................................................................12 WEB 2.0 PROGRESS IN THE REGION .............................................................................13 SOCIAL MEDIA AS A DOMAIN FOR PUBLIC COMMUNICATION ...................................14 EMERGING MODELS OF SOCIAL MEDIA USE TO ENHANCE PUBLIC TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY .........................................................................16 INFORMATION SHARING ................................................................................................17 CROWDSOURCING ............................................................................................................20 CROWD-TO-COMMUNITY PROJECTS ...........................................................................37 CONCLUSIONS ...................................................................................................................41 INSTRUMENTS FOR PROMOTION OF THE SOCIAL MEDIA USE FOR TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN PUBLIC SECTOR .....................................42 APPROACHES USED IN THE PAST AND ON-ONGOING INITIATIVES IN EASTERN EUROPE AND THE CIS ......................................................................................................42 IMPACT OF VARIOUS APPROACHES ON SOCIAL MEDIA USE FOR PUBLIC TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY .................................................................44 ANNEX: LIST OF SPECIALISTS INTERVIEWED BY THE STUDY .....................................46

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY In many countries of Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the executive branch of the government dominates and sometimes even controls legislative and judiciary branches and media, the executive also controls the flow of information between the public administration and the citizens that in many cases can exchange critical information only privately. The rapid development of social media is considerably changing this pattern. Blogs, forums and social networking sites can transform personal conversations and individual opinions into a subject of public debate.

This study identifies the following models of social media use to enhance public transparency and accountability:  Information sharing: individuals and groups of civic activists use commercial social media platforms (forums, blog platforms, social networking and video hosting websites) to disseminate information about the quality of the public services, eventual mismanagement and corruption;  Crowdsourcing: individuals and groups of civic activists create their own specialized social media platforms through which users can publish information about instances of corruption or other public interest information;  Crowd-to-community model takes crowdsourcing one step further by stimulating cooperation between website users and offering to them various ways to engage for achieving a common objective. .

Through social media individual reports can produce considerable impact if they manage to attract attention of other users and the media; as a follow up of the publication of information individuals or organizations can utilize existing legal mechanisms to put pressure on the authorities to act and demonstrate political will to investigate and prosecute reported violations.

Crowdsourcing projects create impact through:   

Effective use of social media tools to promote joint activities toward common objectives – frequent posting of new information, use of emotional narrative, interaction with other users; Promote coverage by regular and online media; it drives new visitors and new reports; Utilization of transparent verification mechanisms to confirm or denounce a case of corruption, e.g. publication of photos, documents, comments by other visitors;

Factors that contribute to the success of crowdsourcing activities are as follows:  Activities were launched by individuals or institutions having a proven track record in the field;  Activities are able to ‘convert’ information into action that leads to desirable outcomes (e.g. corrupt tenders are cancelled, streets are fixed, etc.);  Activities have secured support of relevant executive authorities and high ranking public officials.

All crowdsourcing projects face two common challenges. First, they need to ensure the steady inflow of new reports; second, they have to prove the credibility of these reports. Anonymity of reports lowers the barriers for submission of information, but undermines its credibility. Projects 3

that aspire to make authorities take some action on the reports submitted also have to overcome resistance of public officials.

The first crowdsourcing initiatives in Eastern Europe and the CIS were inspired by similar projects outside the region – e.g. FixMyStreet in the UK and Ushahidi2-powered crowdmapping project in Kenya. The idea was promoted in the region by IT-specialists and civic activists;, lately it appears that authorities are starting to utilize these tools as well.

Crowd-to-community projects build on crowdsourcing model and add various mechanisms to promote on-going engagement of users with the project, members of their informal on-line and off-line networks and other users. These projects use sophisticated social media platforms, their development and operation requires substantial investment, so they are quite rare – in Eastern Europe and the CIS this study identified only two projects utilizing crowd-to-community model.

The study also looks at the approaches used in Eastern Europe and the CIS to promote the use of social media to enhance public transparency and accountability and contains recommendations for UNDP programming in the area of public administration reform, anti-corruption and local governance building on the phenomenon of social media.

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http://ushahidi.com/

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SCOPE AND METHODOLOGY OF THE STUDY The present study on the role of social media for enhancing institutional transparency and accountability in Eastern Europe and the CIS was commissioned by the UNDP Bratislava Regional Centre. The study had several objectives: - to provide an assessment of the social media scene across Eastern Europe and the CIS and to identify existing cases of social media use to enhance public transparency and accountability; - to formulate general recommendations for UNDP programming as well as specific recommendations for three countries – Armenia, Kazakhstan and Kosovo3 – selected to participate in the forthcoming regional programme.

The study was conducted over the period of two months in August and September 2011. The study began with review of previous research on the use of social media for transparency and accountability in Eastern Europe and the CIS as well as internationally. In the process of this review a list of social media projects contributing to public transparency and accountability was developed. Selection of projects was based on two criteria. First, a project had to “harness collective intelligence”, which is the principle feature of Web 2.04. A Web 2.0 site should allow users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators of usergenerated content in a virtual community 5 . Second, a project had to contribute to better transparency and accountability of public agencies of all levels, including election commissions.

A maximum variation sampling strategy was purposefully used to select the projects from the list for detailed examination. Cases included in the sample had to represent the maximum variety of operation models as well as to ensure wide geographic coverage of the region.

The second stage of the study included in-depth semi-structured interviews with social media experts from various Easter Europe and the CIS countries and with representatives of selected projects. Interviews were conducted in person, via skype and phone.

Conclusions and recommendations that emerged from the analysis of collected data were presented to the UNDP Bratislava Regional Centre and representatives of UNDP Country Offices in Armenia, Kazakhstan and Kosovo responsible for the forthcoming UNDP social media-related regional programme. Their comments as well as data collected through a number of in-depth semi-structured interviews with anti-corruption specialists from these three countries were used to adapt the recommendations to country contexts.

RELEVANT PREVIOUS RESEARCH Media Sustainability Index (MSI) is an annual study that examines the level of media development in a number of countries around the world. In Eastern Europe and the CIS MSI covers 21 countries. In each country a group of local media specialists is brought together to reflect on various aspects of media development and assign numerical scores to a number of 3

Referred to throughout this report in the context of the UN Security Council Resolution 1244 (1999) Tim O’Reily. What Is Web 2.0. http://oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html?page=2 5 Web 2.0 at Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 4

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indicators. Since 2008 MSI looks at social media and its relations with regular media. MSI 2011 report6 that reflects the situation in the media sector in 2010 was used as one of the primary sources of information on social media for this study.

The issue of social media received considerable attention in the 2009 NGO Sustainability Index for Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia report7. The publication includes an article by A. Katz “The Quiet Revolution: How Technology Is Changing the Civil Society Landscape in Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia” that presents a number of cases of social media use by NGOs. In 2010 Open Society Foundation released a report called “Global mapping of technology for transparency and accountability”8. The study looked at more than 100 projects around the world that were using data collection and visualization tools as well as mobile technologies and social media to enhance transparency and accountability on all sectors of the society.

The majority of projects presented in the report focused on executive or legislative branches of government. There are also projects targeting judicial branch, media, private sector, and donors.

Nearly half of the projects were in the field of election monitoring, and many of those used the Ushahidi 9 platform. A number of projects focus on transparency in the legislature, e.g. by tracking legislative bills and posting profiles and voting records of members of legislatures.

Another popular model is to collect citizen complaints and deliver them to relevant authorities or private companies.

One of the key findings of the report is that “technology for transparency and accountability projects have a better chance of effectively producing change when they take a collaborative approach, sometimes involving government and/or service providers”10.

“Harnessing Social Media Tools to Fight Corruption”11 report prepared by the London School of Economics and Political Science for Transparency International looks at a number of civil society initiatives around the world that have successfully incorporated social media technologies. The report also comes up with recommendations for Transparency International on approaches to the use of social media and establishment of new networks of anti-corruption volunteers.

The recent Internews study “Social Change and the Russian Network Society”12 explores the use of new information technologies in Russia and their contribution to the social change. The study came up with four recommendations on how supporters of traditional media development can build the capacity of new digital networks and move towards making the next generation of media development a reality.

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Media Sustainability Index 2011: The Development of Sustainable Independent Media in Europe and Eurasia.

IREX, 2011. 322 p. Retrieved from http://www.irex.org/project/media-sustainability-index-msi 7 2009 NGO Sustainability Index for Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia. USAID, 2010. 242 p 8 Avila, R., H. Feigenblatt, R. Heacock, N. Heller. Global mapping of technology for transparency and accountability. Retrieved from http://www.transparency-initiative.org/reports/global-mapping-of-technology-for9 Ushahidi, which means "testimony" in Swahili, was initially developed to map reports on the cases of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout in the beginning of 2008. http://ushahidi.com/ 10 Ibid, page. 5 11 Bekri, D., Dunn, B., Oguzertem, I., Su, Y., Upreti, S. Harnessing Social Media Tools to Fight Corruption. Final project for degree at LSE Department of International Development. London. 2011. 46 p.

12 Asmolov, G., J. Machleder. Social Change and the Russian Network Society: Redefining Development Priorities in New Information Environments. Internews, 2011. 32 p. – August 2011

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The report “Connected Citizens: the power, peril and potential of networks”13 presents findings of the study done by the Monitor Institute for the Knight Foundation. The study examined around 70 social media projects around the world and identified several patterns of network-centric practices that are already working today, and could be promising for future civic engagement:  Listening to and consulting the crowds: Actively listening to online conversations and openly asking for advice;  Designing for serendipity: Creating environments, in person and online, where helpful connections can form;  Bridging differences: Deliberately connecting people with different perspectives;  Catalyzing mutual support: Helping people directly help each other;  Providing handrails for collective action: Giving enough direction for individuals to take effective and coordinated action.

The study also came up with recommendations for grant-makers interested in supporting civic social media projects.

REGIONAL CONTEXT The UNDP Bratislava Regional Centre covers 25 countries and territories in Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia14. Most of these countries used to be part of the socialist system. Transition to democracy and market economy in the region was based on governancecentric approach to development 15 . Transition produced different outcomes for different countries and led to increased socio-economic diversity in the region. Highly varied levels of Internet penetration in different countries of the region – from 1.6% in Turkmenistan to 75.7% in Estonia16 – is one of manifestations of this diversity.

Interestingly, levels of internet penetration in the region significantly correlate with perceived levels of corruption: the more people have access to Internet in a particular country, the less corrupt that country is perceived to be (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Correlation between internet penetration and corruption perception.

Corruption Perception Index

7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

Internet Penetration (% of population)

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Scearce, D. Connected Citizens: the power, peril and potential of networks. Knight Foundation, 2011. 55 p.

UNDP site. http://europeandcis.undp.org/home/AboutUs/ 15 Verheijen, T., ‘The what, when and how of governance in Europe and the CIS: a reform agenda sui generi’, Development & Transition, Issue 12, United Nations Development Programme & the London School of Economics and Political Science, 2009, pp. 3-5.

16 Internet World Stats, http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats3.htm 14

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Note: Corruption Perception Index is measured on the scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 10 (very clean).

Correlation coefficient is 0.698.

DEVELOPMENT OF INFORMATION SOCIETY Most governments of the Eastern European and the CIS countries attended the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and signed the Geneva Declaration of Principles and the Tunis Commitment 17 . Participating governments declared “commitment to build a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society, where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and knowledge, enabling individuals, communities and peoples to achieve their full potential in promoting their sustainable development and improving their quality of life” 18 . The first key principle formulated in the Geneva Declaration says that “governments, as well as private sector, civil society and the United Nations and other international organizations have an important role and responsibility in the development of the Information Society and, as appropriate, in decision-making processes”. The Plan of Action19 adopted in Geneva called for the development of national e-government initiatives and services in order to enhance transparency, accountability and efficiency at all levels of government.

Achievements of the national governments of the Eastern European and the CIS countries in the field of e-government development – as measured by the UN e-government development index20 – vary significantly. The least developed e-government is in Turkmenistan (index value is 0.3226), the most developed is in Estonia (0.6965). Median value of e-government development index for the region is 0.5181. Higher levels of e-government development are associated with lower levels of corruption (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Correlation between levels of e-government development and corruption perception.

Corruption Perception Index

7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 0

0,1

0,2

0,3

0,4

0,5

0,6

0,7

0,8

E-Governance Index

Note: UN e-government development index is measured on the scale of 0 (the lowest) to 1 (the highest). Corruption Perception Index is measured on the scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 10 (very clean).

Correlation coefficient is 0.701.

In 2011 eight governments (of Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, Philippines, South Africa, United Kingdom, USA) have created the Open Government Partnership21. On September 20, 17

WSIS web-site. http://www.itu.int/wsis/basic/index.html WSIS-03/GENEVA/DOC/4-E. Declaration of Principles: Building the Information Society: a global challenge in the new Millennium, 2003.

19 WSIS-03/GENEVA/DOC/5-E, Plan of Action, 2003.

20 United Nations E-Government Survey, 2010. The index can take values from 0 (lowest) to 1 (highest).

21 Open Government Partnership, http://www.opengovpartnership.org/about 18

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2011 the founding governments endorsed the Open Government Declaration and announced national action plans. These governments declared their commitment to:  Increase the availability of information about governmental activities;  Support civic participation;  Implement the highest standards of professional integrity throughout national administrations;  Increase access to new technologies for openness and accountability22.

22 countries of from the Eastern Europe and the CIS region were found eligible to join the Open Government Partnership. 16 of them have already decided to join and are working on their commitments.

DEFICIENT SYSTEM OF CHECKS AND BALANCES The ultimate goal of transition in the countries of Eastern Europe and the CIS is to build democratic societies with a strong system of checks and balances. This transformation is not complete. In most countries, the executive branch of the government dominates and sometimes even controls the legislative and judiciary branches and other public institutions including media and civil society organizations (CSOs). Furthermore, democratic indicators have deteriorated significantly in the region over the past three years, a period that coincides with the impact of the global economic crisis (this trend is documented among others by UNDP’s research on the governance implications of the global economic crisis in Eastern Europe and Central Asia23, and by the Democracy Index 2010 report from Economist Intelligence Unit 24, also corroborated by other international assessments e.g. by Freedom House).

All countries in Eastern Europe and the CIS have laws that guarantee free speech, access to public interest information and government accountability. But implementation of these laws remains inadequate. Major media outlets, especially TV, fail to perform their watchdog function, which creates favorable environment for corruption. There is significant correlation between country scores for Free Speech Objective of Media Sustainability Index (MSI) measured by IREX and country scores for Corruption Perception Index (CPI) measured by Transparency International (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3. Correlation between freedom of speech and corruption Corruption Perception Index

4,5 4 3,5 3 2,5 2 1,5 1 0,5 0 0

0,5

1

1,5

2

2,5

3

MSI Free Speach Score

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Open Government Declaration, http://www.opengovpartnership.org/open-government-declaration http://www.rcpar.org/contents_en.asp?id=475 24 “Democracy in Retreat”, http://graphics.eiu.com/PDF/Democracy_Index_2010_web.pdf 23

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Note: MSI Free Speech score is measured on the scale of 0 (lowest) to 4 (highest). Corruption Perception Index is measured on the scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 10 (very clean).

Correlation coefficient is 0.687.

Watchdog CSOs are few. The information they collect is often ignored by mainstream media, especially TV, which at present serves as the main source of information for majority of the population in the region. This considerably undermines the ability of CSOs to fight corruption and keep public officials accountable. (There is significant correlation between the score for advocacy capacity of NGOs as measured by USAID NGO Sustainability Index and CPI (Fig. 4)).

Fig. 4. Correlation between NGO advocacy capacity and corruption.

Corruption Perception Index

7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 0,0

1,0

2,0

3,0

4,0

5,0

6,0

7,0

NGO SI Advocacy Score

Note: NGO SI scores are measured on the scale of 7 (lowest) to 1 (highest). CPI is measured on the scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 10 (very clean).

Correlation coefficient is -0.693.

OPEN DATA INITIATIVES The Open Government Declaration calls for increased access to information and disclosure about governmental activities at every level of government and for provision of high-value information, including raw data, in a timely manner, in formats that the public can easily locate, understand and use, and that facilitate reuse. Governments should seek feedback from the public to identify the information of greatest value to them, and take such feedback into account to the maximum extent possible25.

Several countries of Eastern Europe and the CIS already have open data portals that provide governmental information (Table 1). Majority of these portals are in the EU member states.

Interestingly, most of them were launched not by governmental institutions, but by civil society organizations.

Table 1. Open government data projects Country EU/ Estonia

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Launched in N/A

Portal pub.stat.ee/pxweb.2001/Dialog/ statfile1.asp

Launched by Statistics Estonia

ibid

10

EU/ Lithuania EU/ Poland EU/ Slovenia EU/ Czech Republic EU/ Hungary EU/ Hungary

N/A N/A N/A N/A

lt.ckan.net pl.ckan.net si.ckan.net cz.ckan.net

Open Knowledge Foundation Open Knowledge Foundation Open Knowledge Foundation Open Knowledge Foundation

N/A 2007

hu.ckan.net kozadat.hu

EU/ Slovakia

2010

Moldova

2011

Datanest datanest.fairplay.sk data.gov.md

Open Knowledge Foundation Neumann Nonprofit Kft. with support of the Office of the Prime-Minister NGO Fair-play Alliance

Albania

2011

open.data.al

Georgia

2010

Russia

2009

Public Information Database opendata.ge OpenGovData.ru

Government of Moldova, with financial support of the World Bank A team of IT specialists running one of the largest Albanian portals shqiperia.com. The project was launched with the financial support of the Open Society Foundation Institute for Development of Freedom of Information with financial support of the Open Society - Georgia Foundation Ivan Begtin (personal project)

The cases of the Moldova open data portal launched by the Moldovan government and the Russian OpenGovData.ru launched by an individual, Russian IT-specialist Ivan Begtin, represent extremes in the range of open government data initiatives in the region. But they have a lot in common, e.g. use similar approaches to promote the use of open government data.

In 2010, the Government of the Republic of Moldova launched the Governance eTransformation process, which is supported by a USD 20 million grant from the World Bank.

The Open Government Initiative (initially called the Open Government Data Initiative) is part of this process. According to Vlad Manoil, E-services and open data coordinator with the eGovernment Center, the initiative started small – by establishing a small group of ministries supportive of the idea. This group prepared 65 datasets that made the initial content of the Moldova open data portal launched on April 15, 2011. On April 29, 2011 the Prime Minister of Moldova signed the open government data directive that requires all ministries and public agencies to publish three datasets per month on data.gov.md.

The Open Government Initiative (OGI) also includes activities to stimulate public interest in and demand for open data. OGI organized training for media representatives and established partnership with Moldova NGO Council to identify what data was of most interest for the civil society. OGI also launched the eTrasformation Apps contest to stimulate the use of open data.

The contest included competitions for existing projects and for project ideas proposed by NGOs. The best project award went to Alerte.md (see page 34). Crowdmap of preschool daycare facilities in Moldova was recognized as the best NGO idea and was awarded an implementation grant.

OpenGovData.ru portal is a personal project of Russian IT-specialist Ivan Begtin. In 2009 Begtin was studying the issue of open data and discovered that many open data portals were launched and maintained by non-governmental organizations. This inspired him to develop and launch an 11

open data portal for Russia. Begtin searches for datasets of government data on websites of government agencies himself and uses tips from portal visitors.

Ivan says that his goal is to promote the idea of open data to application developers: data is valuable only when it is used. Begtin delivers public lectures and presentations on open data to public officials and IT specialists. Recently he and five other like-minded individuals got together and launched the Apps4Russia competition for web application developers and the websites that use open government data. Contest entries can be submitted from June 31 to October 30, 2011. By the end of September organizers have received about 30 applications.

Contest entries include, e.g. the website about benefits granted to Russian citizens by various laws (lgoti.info); the website nalogometer.ru where a person can calculate the amount of taxes he or she pays. Prompted by competition website visitors, the Apps4Russia also started to collect ideas for projects based on open government data.

WEB 1.0 CIVIC INITIATIVES Internet has allowed watchdog CSOs to communicate to people directly via websites. In Eastern Europe and the CIS there is a number of websites that report on performance of various branches of government, such as:  Slovakian NGO Fair-Play Alliance, launched in 2002 by journalist Zuzana Wienk, develops and maintains databases on political party finance. Fair-Play Alliance created an open government data portal and a website where members of parliament can disclose their income information.  Koho Volit (How they vote) (kohovolit.eu) website offers user-friendly information about activities and voting patterns of the members of national legislatures in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and of the representatives of these countries to the European Parliament. The site recently launched the “Write to them” application (napistejim.cz) that allows people to send e-mails to their MPs.  Macedonian Metamorphosis Foundation has recently launched Vistinomer.mk (Truthmeter) that analyzes the promises of politicians and presents this analysis in an easy to read aggregated form. Another project of the Metamorphosis Foundation, webapplication Glasomer.mk (Votemeter), allows citizens to compare their positions on various issues with those of political parties.  Polish project Mam Prawo Wiedzieć (I have the right to know) (mamprawowiedziec.pl) collects information about candidates and elected public representatives from websites, flyers, politicians’ blogs, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other online and traditional media sources and presents it in a user-friendly format.  Hungarian Kepmutatas (Hypocrisy) (kepmutatas.hu), launched by Freedom House Europe and Transparency International Hungary, provides information on electoral campaign spending by political parties.  Romanian Porcisme (porcisme.ro) collects information about corruption cases and waste of public money from mass media and publishes is online. Porcisme’s information gathering strategy is based on the premise that if a story was published in mass media, it must have been verified prior to publication.  Russian vyborov.net, launched in March 2011, plans to offer citizens complete information about 2010 and 2011 elections and Russian political parties.  Website Executioners of Ukraine (http://kat.in.ua), launched by a group of civic activists, maintains a database of unlawful court decisions.

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These and similar projects are very creative, but they are based on the Web 1.0 Internet paradigm of one-way communication where users can only consume information.

WEB 2.0 PROGRESS IN THE REGION Web 2.0 websites allow users to do more than just receive information. Users are able to create their own content and to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue. The term ‘Web 2.0’ emerged in 1999; at present, it is often replaced with the term ‘social media’.

Examples of social media are social networking, chat rooms, message boards, podcasts, photo and video sharing, blogs and micro-blogs, RSS and widgets26.

Over the past 3-4 years the use of social media in Eastern Europe and the CIS has grown tremendously. For example, in 2010 65% of Internet users in Hungary, 61% in Romania, 56% in Poland 27, 75% in Serbia, and 59% in Ukraine28 had accounts on social networks. According to the ComScore Global Study, Russia has the most engaged social networking audience worldwide.

In August 2010 74.5% of Russian internet users visited at least one social networking site and spent there an average of 9.8 hours per visitor per month29. In 2011, the average time spent on social networks by Russian users increased to 10.2 hours a month - nearly twice the time US users spend on the average within social sites30.

The data on the use of social media in Eastern Europe and the CIS is patchy. This study has looked for possible proxy indicators. The cloud of countries and regions on the Global Voices website can give a rough idea of the social media use and development in different countries of the region (Fig. 5). Global Voices is a community of more than 500 bloggers around the world who report on blogs and citizen media in their countries 31 . The size of the font reflects the number of reports on a particular country or region published on the site.

Fig. 5. Cloud of regions and countries on the Global Voices website.

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Universal Maccan International Social Media Research, Wave 3. Presentation at http://www.slideshare.net/mickstravellin/universal-mccann-international-social-media-research-wave-3 27 Social Media Boom in Eastern Europe. International Digital Marketing. June 1, 2010, http://internationaldigitalmarketing.com/tag/romania/ 28 Social media in the Ukraine and Russia. http://www.slideshare.net/jbell99/social-media-in-russia-and-ukraine2011 29 Russia Has Most Engaged Social Networking Audience Worldwide. http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/10/Russia_Has_Most_Engaged_Social_Networking_ Audience_Worldwide 30 Why Russia’s social media boom is big news for business. http://mashable.com/2011/06/20/russia-social-mediamarketing/ 31 Global Voices, http://globalvoicesonline.org

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Note: Eastern European and the CIS countries are marked in red.

Russia is an obvious leader, which can be attributed in part to the fact that Russian citizens make almost 30% of the internet users in the region.

SOCIAL MEDIA AS A DOMAIN FOR PUBLIC COMMUNICATION Rapid development of social media has considerably changed the communication patterns in the region. Blogs, forums and social networking websites have eliminated the borderline between private conversations and public discussions. ‘Kitchen talks’ of the Soviet era when people exchanged critical information and self-published materials and even planned civic protests through informal communication with friends have moved online and have become public. So now any citizen who has access to Internet is able to reach a much wider audience than ever before. Already there are numerous examples of people utilizing social media to criticize public officials and even mobilize others to protest.

Use of social media to mobilize citizens to participate in public protests has recently attracted a lot of attention. The youth protests against the communist party winning the national elections in Moldova prompted the emergence of the term ‘Twitter revolution’. The term was coined by Evgeny Morozov, a US-based social scientist from Belarus, in his blog post on April 7, 2009 he wrote: “Ever since yesterday's announcement that Moldova's communists have won enough votes to form a government in Sunday's elections, Moldova's progressive youth took to the 14

streets in angry protests. As behooves any political protest by young people today, they also turned to Facebook and Twitter to raise awareness about the planned protests and flashmobs”32.

But even Evgeni Morozov believes now that the role of social media as an instrument to start a revolution was significantly overrated33. Off-line informal networks and more traditional means of communication are also very important. Etan Zukerman from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University calculated that 700 people tweeted on April 2009 events in Moldova, and only 200 of the were in the country at that time34. Nonetheless, social media was an important source of information on developments in the country for the rest of the world.

Governments and politicians have quickly realized the potential of social media as a communication domain. Response ranges from suppression and intimidation of critical voices to the use social media to promote government or party agendas.

For example, in 2007 many Bulgarians were frustrated with the decision of the Supreme Administrative Court that opened the Strandja nature park, Bulgaria’s oldest natural preserve, to commercial development. Several NGOs and bloggers called on people to protest. As a result protesters blocked one of the biggest intersections in Sofia. Police arrested 35 participants on the grounds that the demonstration was not officially approved.

In the aftermath of those events one of the bloggers, Sofia-based designer Michel Bozgounov, was summoned by the police for promoting "illegal demonstrations" and had to sign a "statement of warning" that his website would be monitored by the authorities35. “On the stairs one of the police officers told me “in private” that I should be more careful what I am writing about in future, because journalists have a better defense against possible prosecution and I am just an ordinary person, an independent blogger”, Bozgounov wrote afterwards in his blog36.

“I wasn’t prepared for the avalanche of comments and people feeling concerned by this precedent, because the whole blogosphere felt that this was a strike against the free speech in the virtual world in Bulgaria”, posted he later 37 . The story was also covered by national and international media, including Bulgarian National TV. Many politicians and public executives are embracing social media as means of communication with people. Danica Radisic, Serbian online communication consultant, believes that social media changes the relations between politicians and citizens making them more personal and immediate. Politicians can not ‘hide’ anymore behind the party platforms and have to learn to listen to citizens and talk about what they believe in.

In some cases the use of social media by politicians and public executives is quite on par with its participatory nature. For example, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev engages in informal conversations on Twitter. There are instances when people tweet to him about cases of corruption. For example, on February 28, 2011, Tim Stigal wrote that he was asked for USD 300,000 for arranging a meeting with Vladislav Surkov, First Deputy to the Head of President’s Administration. Medvedev tweeted in reply: “Showed your tweet to V.U. Surkov. Call his office.

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Moldova's Twitter Revolution. Posted by Evgeny Morozov, April 7, 2009, http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/07/moldovas_twitter_revolution 33 Interview to Kommersant newspaper, http://www.kommersant.ru/Doc/1597287 34 ibid 35 Bulgarian Bloggers Meet with Big Brother. Bloomberg Businessweek. March 27, 2008. http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/mar2008/gb20080327_492983.htm 36 Michel Bozgounov’s blog. http://www.optimiced.com/en/2007/07/18/a-short-story-to-speak-or-not/ 37 ibid

15

Tell, who is asking for money”38. Medvedev’s aid Arkady Dvorkovich also talks to people on Twitter and even takes their advice. For example, according to Dvorkovich, the idea to establish president’s mobile offices that go to Russian regions to collect petitions from citizens came from a Twitter user39. In Kazakhstan, Member of Parliament Marat Abenov uses Twitter, Facebook and his official blog to discuss issues of corruption and ways to combat it.

The Russian government started to use crowdsourcing, a social media technology, to collect citizens’ comments on proposed laws (gosdiscuss.ru). (The term ‘crowdsourcing’ refers to soliciting input from an undefined large group of people or community through an open call to do the task that traditionally was performed by specific individuals 40 .) In the past, Russian people also could submit their comments on draft laws by sending letters to the legislature. The utilization of social media made the collection of comments more transparent as everyone can see submitted items. Crowdsourcing approach has already been used to discus the Law on Police, the Law on Health Care (zakonoproekt2011.ru) and the Law on Amateur Fishing (r.zakonfom.ru/node/134).

Still, in many cases politicians and public executives use social media in an old-style one-waycommunication fashion. Their blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter micro-blogs are maintained by their PR secretaries and feature only official information. For example, in Kazakhstan all senior public executives have blogs on blogs.e.gov.kz, but officials hardly add any posts.

Regular media is also actively embracing social media technologies. Sites of many media outlets allow readers to post comments and encourage citizen reporting and voting as means to increase audience loyalty. Journalists search blogs and social networks for story tips. Many journalists have their own blogs and use them to report news that for some reason they can not get published in their media outlets.

There are examples when independent media outlets launch blog-hosting facilities on their website to increase the range of views available to visitors. For example, in Russia Slon.ru, an online publication for business people, and website of the leading independent radio station Echo of Moscow provide blogging platforms that host blogs of opposition politicians and public activists. In Serbia B92.net, online information and entertainment portal that belongs to B92 media group, features VIP Bloggers facility that serves as a center for online political discussions.

In Moldova, similar projects were launched by Unimedia and Publika media holding companies.

In Romania, one of the main TV news channels hosts a blogging platform (voxpublica.realitatea.net).

EMERGING MODELS OF SOCIAL MEDIA USE TO ENHANCE PUBLIC TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY The majority of the cases of social media use to enhance public transparency and accountability that were identified within the framework of this study are civic initiatives. Ordinary citizens and informal groups of civic activists often use commercial social media platforms – forums, blog platforms, social networking sites and video hosting – to disseminate information about cases of 38

Medvedev Twitter account http://twitter.com/#!/medvedevrussia Dvorkovich Twitter account, http://twitter.com/#!/advorkovich 40 See the definition of crowdsourcing on Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing 39

16

corruption and poor performance of public executives. Further in this study this mode of social media use will be called information sharing.

There is also a rapidly growing number of cases of individuals and civil society organizations establishing their own social media platforms to collect information on various topics, e.g. violation of election laws, bribes, suspicious public tenders, municipal problems as well as to collect signatures under on-line petitions. This mode of social media use is labeled crowdsourcing.

This study has identified several cases in which social media platforms are designed not only to collect information, but to promote interaction between people coming to the website and to build a community committed to protecting citizen rights and keeping public official accountable.

This emerging mode of social media use was labeled crowd-to-community model.

A number of social media projects in the region were prompted by the failure of public authorities to provide necessary services to the citizens. These projects aim to compensate for this failure by linking people who need services with those who are ready to provide them:  In 2010, "Ja Za Kraljevo" project (jazakraljevo.rs) in Serbia used Ushahidi to collect information about people and locations where help was needed after the earthquake.  Russian “Map of help to victims of forest fires” (russian-fires.ru) connected people who suffered from the 2010 fires and those who were ready to help them.  Later in 2010, “Cold Weather” (holoda.info) used the same approach to help people when heating, electricity or water was cut off during winter time.  Russian “Virtual Alarm Bell” (rynda.org), launched in 2011, builds of the experience of the above two projects and uses crowdsourcing technology to collect information about all kinds of help that people need or offer.  Bulgarian map of garbage dumps (ng.btv.bg/map) was created by bTV as part of the Clean Bulgaria campaign. People can report locations of the garbage dumps and upload corresponding photos that are placed on the map. People are also encouraged to launch their own clean up projects and report on them on the map.

This mode of social media use can be called citizen-to-citizen model. These projects help citizens to build informal self-help networks and reduce their over-reliance on governments. This over-reliance is believed to slow transition to democracy and development of civic society in Eastern Europe and the CIS, so citizen-to-citizens projects make an important contribution to social progress in the region. But as they don’t directly contribute to transparency and accountability of public officials, their analysis is outside the scope of this study.

INFORMATION SHARING There are numerous examples when individuals use social media – blogs, forums, social networks and video hosting sites like YouTube – to disclose information about instances of corruption. Sometimes these publications lead to prosecution of revealed violations.

This study followed two cases – one in Kazakhstan and one in Russia - when social media was used by individuals to report on instances of corruption in institutions of higher education. In Kazakhstan, Janna Kaikenova used official blog platform blogs.e.gov.kz to write a complaint to the Minister of Education. She reported that when her nephew applied to the Karaganda Police

17

Academy, he was asked for a bribe of US 5,000 for admission. Kaikenova did not get any official reply and most likely no action was taken41.

In Russia Viktor Simak reported on a potentially fraudulent admission scheme in one of the leading medical universities. The report that was posted on a student forum of this university resulted in an investigation by the law enforcement authorities and dismissal of the head of the university.

Case study Disclosure of student admission fraud scheme in the Russian Medical University In July 2011 Moscow-based data management specialist Viktor Simak was asked by a friend who was applying to several Medical Schools to assess his chances to get admitted.

Since 2009 admission to Russian universities is based on the applicants’ results at the Universal State Exam (USE).

Introduction of the USE still causes heated public debates that are widely covered by media, including national TV channels.

Proponents argue that the USE helps to eradicate corruption in admission committees at the universities, which in the past could manipulate results of admission exams.

In Russia topics related to the USE and corruption in education are open for public discussion and are widely covered by all media.

Under the new systems an applicant is allowed to submit up to 15 applications - to five different universities choosing up to three different departments in each of these universities. The process of admission to state-funded student positions has three stages called waves. Admission commissions rank all applicants based on their USE scores. The resulting lists of applicants are openly published, usually at university websites. The top cohort of applicants has the right to accept admission during the first wave. As applications can be submitted to several universities, applicants who have the highest scores often can choose between several universities. So during the first wave some applicants from the top cohort withdraw their applications and some student positions remain vacant. Then applicants with lowers scores get the opportunity to be admitted. This process is repeated two more times.

A friend of Victor Simak had a relatively low USE score and Easy access to ‘raw’ data – asked Victor to review the lists of applicants to Moscow Medical lists of applicants were Universities to assess his chances for admittance. Simak available online. downloaded lists of applicants with their scores from university websites. Altogether there were about 20 thousand applicants.

The analysis revealed applicants with high score who were eligible for admittance to 5-6 different places. Simak also found 600 people with very high scores who applied only to the Pirogov Russian Medical University. These applicants were eligible for 800 state-funded student positions at three departments.

This seemed strange, so Simak posted this information on the Simak used social media 41

As per correspondence with the author on September 6, 2011

18

student forum of the university and wrote a letter to the head of the university. (Four days later, when Simak and the head of the university were invited to an interview to Echo of Moscow radio station, the head claimed that he never received this letter.)

that allowed him to reach many people who would have personal interest in the case.

Over several days Simak’s post was read by about 15 thousand Crowd-sourcing: other people and 200 comments were posted. One of the students forum users added reported that names of these 600 people were almost identical information to the case. with the names of the people who had been on the list of applicants in the previous year. None of the 600 suspicious applicants found by Simak responded to his post.

Three days after Simak posted this information on the forum, the Media coverage brings story was picked by media, eventually making even to national more attention to the case TV. Wide media coverage forced the university to revise the lists and leads to action. of applicants and remove 601 names. “The role of media was crucial. For three days when I was writing about this case on the student forum, nobody paid attention. Only after media picked the case, some action was taken”, said Simak in an interview to Echo of Moscow radio station42.

The Russian Student Union (RSU) lodged a complaint to the Russian Student Union used prosecutor’s office requesting to investigate the case. RSU existing legal mechanism. representatives said that they had reports from applicants to the Pirogov Russian Media University who were asked to pay 400 thousand rubles (about 10 thousand euros) for admission. RSU suspected that the university forged the lists of applicant by adding ‘dead souls’ to admit people who paid the bribes during the third way of admission after fake applicants with high score didn’t claim their student positions.

The head of the Pirogov University initially said that applicants’ lists were illegally modified by hackers. The investigation launched by the prosecutor’s office later revealed that all names of fake applicants were entered from computers in the admission commission by people who used commission passwords. The investigation continues, but the head and several staff members have already been fired.

Several media reports on this case mention that in 2010 the Importance of broader Higher School of Economics analyzed the results of admission context: 2011 is election campaign to Russian universities and found that students admitted year. to the Pirogov University had very low USE scores despite the large number of applications submitted. Those findings were made public by Russian Information Agency Novosti, but no reaction followed.

Several factors played important role in this case:  Easy access to raw data. Lists of applicants were available online, so it was easy to get information for further analysis.

42

Interview to Echo of Moscow on August 10, 2011, http://www.echo.msk.ru/programs/razvorot-morning/801138echo/

19



Choice of social media platform. Victor Simak posted his findings on the student forum where his information would definitely reach the audience with high personal stake in the issue.  Regular media picked on the story.  Information was ‘converted’ into action. The Russian Student Union used existing legal mechanisms by lodging a complaint with the law enforcement authorities.  Political will. In Russia in 2010 and 2011 there were several major corruption investigations involving high ranking officials. It is yet to be seen if these anti-corruption activities will continue after the parliamentary elections in December 2011 and the presidential elections in March 2012.

It is likely that all these factors have to come together to ensure that disclosure of a corruption case leads to its successful prosecution.

Informal watchdog groups also use social media to create collective accounts of wrongdoing by public officials. For example, a group of Russian civic activists called the Community of Blue Buckets that fights against improper use of car emergency lights by public officials has group pages on LiveJournal blog platform (ru-vederko.livejournal.com) and VKontakte and Facebook social networking websites, a Wiki-page and a Twitter account. One of its leaders, Danila Lindele, also has a blog on the website of Echo of Moscow radio station. Members of the Community of Blue Buckets collect evidence about the cases of improper use of car emergency light and other traffic rules violations by public executives, and post them online. The group also sends petitions to authorities and lodge complaints to courts. Activists distribute car stickers promoting their cause. Currently they collect money to set a billboard in Moscow. Money is collected via Internet pay systems, SMS and in cash.

Informal watchdog groups encourage citizens to publish their own reports on their group pages, so these projects come close to the model of a stand alone crowdsourcing website.

CROWDSOURCING Many crowdsourcing projects in the region are based on the open source Ushahidi technology.

One of the first Ushahidi-powered projects in the region was launched in Kyrgyzstan.

Crowdsourcing projects represent a social media adaptation of traditional approaches used by civil society organizations. Watchdog initiatives collect information about abuse of power by authorities and make it public. The logic is that disclosure of this information will cause public outrage and law enforcement authorities will be forced to prosecute reported violations. Some watchdog organizations use existing legal mechanisms to push authorities to initiate investigation. Crowdsourcing technologies, especially crowdmapping, speed up the processing of reports submitted by individuals. People can almost instantly see how their stories and experiences fit into the bigger picture.

Civic engagement initiatives encourage citizens to identify and address issues of public concern.

Projects of this type collect various public interest information, e.g. on environmental contamination, state of the roads, etc. The information is then both made public and passed to relevant authorities. Social media simplifies the processing of citizens’ reports and instantly makes them public.

Election Monitoring 20

There is a growing number of projects that use social media to collect and present results of election monitoring. These projects are a crossover between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. To ensure the accuracy of reported information, these projects use pre-selected trained monitors. Social media instruments are used to collect and present their reports. Regular citizens are also encouraged to submit information.

For example, in 2010 Internews-Ukraine organized a Twitter coverage of October 31 local elections. The project recruited over 100 journalists and civic activists who were trained to use Twitter. Their reports were immediately made public on electua.org website. The Georgian branch of the Institute of War and Peace Reporting used similar approach during local elections in Georgia in May 2010. The Institute hired several bloggers trained in election reporting and sent them to different precincts to monitor and report. All reports were published in real time on geoelection.ge website43.

The use of Ushahidi for election monitoring purposes is growing rapidly. While in 2010 there was probably only one Ushahidi-powered project in the region, 2011 saw the launch of at least five (Table 2).

Table 2. Social media election monitoring projects.

Year 2010

2010

2010

2010

2010

2011

2011

43

Country/ Website Elections Georgia/ May geoelection.ge local elections Georgia/ May cdi.org.ge local elections Georgia/ May votegeorgia.ge local elections

Ukraine/ October local elections Kyrgyzstan/ June constitutional referendum Kyrgyzstan/ October parliamentary elections FYR Macedonia/ June parliamentary elections

Description

Launched by

Text reports submitted via blogs.

Institute of War and Peace Reporting

Text reports collected from citizens via text messages, phone calls or e-mails.

Used geocommons technology to map information pulled from several observer organizations.

Text reports submitted via Twitter.

Civic Development Institute

Save.kg

Ushahidi-powered

Save.kg

Ushahidi-powered

mojotizbor.mk

Ushahidi-powered

Altynbek Ismailov in cooperation with Coalition for Democracy and Civil Society Altynbek Ismailov in cooperation with Coalition for Democracy and Civil Society NGO coalition including Macedonian Center for International Cooperation, Macedonian Institute for

electua.org

Transparency International Georgia

Internews-Ukraine

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2010/06/03/georgia-social-media-deployed-for-local-elections/

21

2011

2011

2011

Turkey/ June general elections Bulgaria/ October presidential elections Russia/ December parliamentary elections

http://secim20 11.crowdmap. com fairelections.iz borenkodeks.c om

Ushahidi-powered

Ушахиди.рф [ushahidi.rf]

Ushahidi-powered

Ushahidi-powered

Media and Institute for Democracy “Societas Civilis” A group of student of the Istanbul Bilgi University Institute for Public Environment

Youth branch of the democratic political party ‘Yabloko’

‘Truthmeters’ This type of crowdsourcing initiatives is dedicated to monitoring if politicians and public officials keep the promises they made to the public. Macedonian Vistinomer (Truthmeter) (vistinomer.mk) launched by the Metamorphosis Foundation is a Web 1.0 realization of this idea.

Russian Dal Slovo (Gave a promise) (dalslovo.ru) and Slovo Vlasti (The promise of authorities) (ulyanovskcity.ru/promises.php) projects use social media approach.

Dal Slovo project was launched in the end of 2010 by a team of three activists from the city of Ekaterinburg. People can add promises made by all Russian politicians and public officials to the website, add news and comments to pending promises, and report if promises were fulfilled in time or not. The project team maintains a blog that reports mostly on technical aspects of project development.

In 2010, the project team and site visitors added seven promises to the website, in 2011 – already 126. Entries range from the promise of Ekaterinburg mayor to repair a certain street (this one was fulfilled) to the promise of the Russian president to fire heads of municipalities for poor performance and corruption (still pending).

Slovo Vlasti follows the promises made by public officials in Ulianovsk region. The project was initiated by the Governor Sergei Morozov44. In the spring of 2011, he invited representatives of local on-line media to discuss ways to increase accountability of public executives in the region.

Soon after this meeting, UlianovskCity news portal launched a special section where citizens could report about promises made by public officials and evaluate their implementation. There is also an analytical mechanism that summarizes information about performance of all public officials tracked by the project and an option to send any of them a petition by e-mail.

Case study: Use of Ushahidi in Kyrgyzstan The year 2010 in Kyrgyzstan was marked by the revolution in April, interethnic conflict and constitutional referendum in June

44

Gov2People. http://gov2people.ru/index.php/katalog-proektov/item/20-slovo-vlasti

22

and parliamentary elections in October.

In June 2010, when violent interethnic conflict broke up in Osh Transfer of idea via internet. region in Southern Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek-based entrepreneur Altynbek Ismailov decided to use Ushahidi to monitor the riots.

Ismailov had no previous experience with website development and had never been involved in civic activism. He learned about Ushahidi in April 2009 at Ted.com, a not-for-profit site sharing interesting ideas. The Ted.com report that he saw was about the use of Ushahidi in Africa.

Ushahidi is available free of charge, but there was no Russian- Challenge: software may be language version of the application, so he had to do the unavailable in local translation. When the platform save.kg45 was ready, the riots were language. already over.

Then Ismailov had the idea to use save.kg to monitor the Verification of reports by constitutional referendum in June 2010. He was looking for specially trained and means of verification of reports, and approached non- authorized people. governmental Coalition for Democracy and Civil Society that was going to have observers at the polling stations around the country.

The parties agreed that these observers would submit information to save.kg and would verify reports sent by other people.

On the referendum day, information was collected via SMS with the help of free FrontlineSMS software. Ismailov had 15 operators who were uploading information to the Ushahidipowered website. Most reports indicated that everything was going fine.

Ismailov tried to raise money for his project, but could not secure Crowdsourcing for financial funding from donor agencies working in Kyrgyzstan. Then he support. was advised to use ChipIn website. He received 22 contributions, slightly over USD 500 in total. Half of this money was used to cover project telecommunication expenses, another half – to pay the operators.

After the referendum, Ismailov took a job with the Coalition for Challenge: ensuring onDemocracy and Civil Society to do other Ushahidi-powered going submission of citizen projects. The next one was to monitor parliamentary elections in reports.

October 2011. Currently Ushahidi-powered crowdmap is used to monitor development projects in the areas affected by the June 2010 riots (projects.coalition.kg). The latter project relies on volunteer reports from citizens, but these reports are few.

Ismailov gets regular support from three IT-managers employed Challenge: by the Coalition. He also would like to have a full-time staff specialists. member promoting the project on social networking websites by engaging in discussions with other users. At present there is no funding for this position. But even if he had funds, finding a person to fill this position would be a challenge: there are no 45

lack

of

Now Save.kg is located at jib.me.

23

specialists of this kind in Kyrgyzstan.

The government of Kyrgyzstan initially supported the idea to use The attitude of authorities Ushahidi to monitor the referendum: “They were using all depends on the political possible resources to help us by connecting us with local situation. government branches”, said Ismailov in his interview to Technology for Transparency 46 . At the time of parliamentary elections the government was less enthusiastic, probably because the project was not favoring any of the parties.

The story of Ushahidi-powered projects in Kyrgyzstan offers some valuable lessons:  Importance of efforts to collect and disseminate successful project models. The story about the use of Ushahidi in Africa inspired a series of crowdsourcing projects in Kyrgyzstan.  Due to the availability of open source software, crowdsourcing projects are relatively easy to launch. The most challenging task is to ensure high reporting activity. One option is to find a strong institutional partner and use its off-line networks of activists and volunteers. Another is to promote the project via social networks.  Ability of projects to use this second option can be limited by the availability of funds and the lack of specialists.

Corruption Monitoring A majority of corruption monitoring projects collect reports about instances when bribes were paid or extorted. Reports are anonymous. Information can be submitted on-line and via mobile apps.

Table 3. Crowdsourcing corruption monitoring projects.

Country Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan

Russia

Russia 46

Website vzyatochnik.info

Description The project collects information about cases of corruption in Kazakhstan universities. It was launched in the end of 2010 by a person who calls himself Mr. Incognito (or Marat Shaken). gosotkat.info This is the second project of Mr. Incognito launched to collect reports about kick backs in public procurement.

During the period of this study this site was featuring and announcement that collection of reports is stopped due to the lack of support from authorities and the lack of funding. vzyatka.crowdmap.com Ushahidi-powered “I was asked to give a bribe” project was launched by Internews-Kazakhstan in March 2011 to collect information about instances of bribe extortion in the CIS counties. roskomvzyatka.com Crowdmap of bribe cases in Russia. Site was launched in the beginning of 2011 by a US businessman of Russian origin Elliot (Ilya) Goihman who owns of a company that develops websites and mobile applications nalapu.net In September 2011 Russian Student Union launched a

http://transparency.globalvoicesonline.org/project/savekg

24

International bribespot.com

Russia

otmenta.ru

Russia

rospil.info

web forum where student can report about bribes extortion in Russian higher education institutions.

Site was developed and launched by international team coming from young program developers from Estonia, Lithuania, Finland and Iran in April 2011 during Garage48 startup event in Tallinn. Ushahidi-powered project collects reports about bribes from all over the world.

Collects reports on cases of abuse of power by Russian police. The site was launched by Russian civic activist and IT-specialist Oleg Kozlovsly.

Crowdsources information about potentially corrupt public tenders and lodges complaints with law enforcement authorities.

Reporting activity on these websites is generally low. By October 2011, Roskomvzyatka that was launched in the beginning of 2011 collected 892 bribe reports. BribeSpot, launched in April 2011, received 750 reports from all over the world. “I was asked to give a bribe� project, launched in Kazakhstan in March 2011, collected 23 reports from Russia, Kazakhstan and USA. Actually reports to the latter project were submitted only in March and April 2011, then reporting stopped. Given that only in Russia 38.6 million people use Internet on a daily basis 47, and national survey commissioned by the Russian Ministry of Economics in 2011 found that 51% of Russian citizens either paid or were asked to pay a bribe48, the number of submitted reports is very low.

Fig. 6 shows the changes in the number of reports submitted to roskomvzyatka.com between January 2010 and September 2011. The site was officially launched in March 2011, so reports before that date were submitted while the website was in testing mode. The number of reports peaked in March and April 2011 when the project was covered by social, online and regular media. The number of reference to roskomvzyatka.com project in Russian-language blogs also peaked in March (Fig. 7). But then bloggers’ interest in the project sharply fell, and the number of reports considerably decreased. This supports the above conclusions that crowdsourcing projects have to be constantly promoted to stimulate reporting and that media coverage is an effective means for promotion.

Fig. 6. Number of reports submitted to roskomvzyatka.com between January 2010 and September 2011.

47

Internet in Russia. Spring 2011. Public Foundation Opinion report. http://bd.fom.ru/pdf/Internet%20v%20Rossii%20vol%2033%20vesna%202011%20short.pdf 48 http://www.rbc.ru/digest/index.shtml?rosgazeta/2011/07/05/33344990

25

Source: http://roskomvzyatka.com/, retrieved on September 8, 2011

Fig. 7. The number of references to roskomvzyatka.com in Russian language blogs (September 2010 – September 2011).

Source: Blogosphere Pulse. Yandex.ru.

Note: Y-axis shows the average percentage of posts that include the word of interest out of the total number of posts per week.

Corruption crowdmaps are similar to the projects that collect reports about cases of corruption via hot lines. Hotlines also have to be promoted continuously to ensure the steady inflow of reports.

NGOs that operate hotlines use collected information for advocacy purposes, and it is these advocacy efforts that produce impact. Roskomvzyatka and BribeSpot projects are based on the premise that if information is made public, it will be used. This is not necessarily happening, so at present these projects hardly have any impact.

Crowdsourcing projects collect anonymous reports. This lowers barriers to people who would like to submit information, but raises the issue of the credibility of collected information. For example, vzyatochnik.info collects anonymous reports about cases of bribe extortion by professors in Kazakhstan universities. University authorities often claimed that information on the website were libelous. So the project set a verification mechanism49. It recruited volunteers among students of all Kazakhstan universities who check the reports by talking to other students 49

Verification Mechanism (in Russian), http://vzyatochnik.info/news/235-proverka-structure

26

and conducting mini-surveys. The project also cooperates with student NGOs. Names of volunteers and partner organizations are not disclosed to ensure their protection and prevent possible pressure. When a report about corrupt activities of a professor is published on the website, the concerned person has an option to comment and this comment is also made public.

Vzyatochnik.info also tried to link collection of information to existing legal mechanisms.

Initially, the project agreed with Kazakhstan fiscal police that they would investigate reported cases. Later, the police declined to do so on the grounds that they could not act upon anonymous reports50.

The story of Vzyatochnik.info offers the following lessons about challenges that crowdsourcing projects can face:  Anonymity of reports can undermine the credibility of collected information.  Anonymity of reports can also be a barrier to the use existing legal mechanisms to act on reported cases of corruption.

Russian RosPil project (rospil.info) effectively addresses these challenges. RosPil uses crowdsouring to collect information about potentially corrupt public tenders. People are asked to submit description of the suspicious tender and corresponding link so that the project team can check and verify the information. Then project leader Alexey Navalny on his own behalf lodges complaints with the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service that is responsible for the oversight and control of public procurement.

Alexey Navalny is a lawyer, political activist and one of the most popular Russian bloggers. He is widely known as an active fighter against corruption.

Case study Alexey Navalny’s anti-corruption efforts Alexey Navalny actively uses social media for his anti-corruption activities. He maintains active blogs at LiveJournal blog platform as well as at Echo of Moscow and Slon.ru websites. He has also launched RosPil project to fight corruption in public procurement and RosYama project to fight poor quality of Russian roads.

Knowledge of legal mechanisms.

Commitment to democratic values.

Strong motivation to participate in public activities.

Long history of political activism.

In 2009, Navalny used his blog to publish information VTB bank Information-sharing. paying 50% above the standard market price for drilling equipment, which indicated possible corruption. Authorities investigated the case, but no fraud was found.

Alexey Navalny holds law and finance degrees. In 2000-2007 he was an active member of the democratic political party “Yabloko”. In 2007, he was one of co-founders of the national democratic movement “People”. In 2008, Navalny launched the Union of Minority Shareholders that works to ensure transparency and accountability of large companies where Russian government is a majority shareholder. In 2009, Navalny worked as an aid to the governor of Kirovsk region.

In November 2010, Navalny used his blog to post documents Media helps to reach wider audiences and attract new 50

Vzyatochnik.info, Wikipedia, http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vzyatochnik.info

27

revealing that 120 billion rubles were stolen in the course of a supporters.

Transneft construction project to build of a pipeline from Siberia to the Far East. The project was funded by the Russian government. The story was covered by independent media and made Navalny popular among the liberally minded part of the Russian public. Authorities started investigation into the Transneft case, but soon reported that money was not stolen, just ‘misused’.

Building on public interest in the Transneft story, Navalny launched the RosPil project (rospil.info). People can submit information about public tenders where they suspect corruption, e.g. the price is considerably higher than regular market prices, the time allocated for contract implementation is too short. In Russia all government institutions are required to publish tenders online, so interested citizens can find this information. Reports to RosPyl website are anonymous, but a person who submits a report has to provide a link to the governmental website where he/she found the tender and explain why it is suspicious.

Relative ease and safety of reporting.

Navalny has a team of lawyers who check submitted information and prepare complaints to the Federal Antimonopoly Agency. All complaints are made on behalf of Navalny. Texts of complaints and responses to them are available on-line. As of October 2011, RosPil team has submitted 58 complaints; 32 of them were found valid by the Federal Antimonopoly Agency and tenders were cancelled. This has saved the taxpayers over 7.5 billion rubles.

Expert verification of submitted information and preparation of documents for off-line activities.

Transparency of the operations.

Citizens are used monitors and experts.

as

RosPil project is funded by private donations via online pay Crowd-sourcing for funding. system Yandex.Dengi. Navalny estimated that he would need 3 to 5 million rubles for the project and asked people for support in his blog. It took just one day to collect the first million rubles. From February to May 2011, Navalny received more than 6.5 million rubles. Donations came from about 15 thousand individuals.

The money goes to Navalny’s personal account. He decided not Transparent use of funds. to set an NGO to avoid possible pressure from the government.

Navalny publishes all information about receipt and use of money in his LiveJournal blog.

In May 2011, Navalny launched RosYama project (rosyama.ru), which helps citizens to use existing regulatory and legal mechanisms to demand that authorities fix potholes on the roads.

A person can submit information, and the website automatically generates a letter to the Traffic Safety Inspection that has to be printed out and send by regular mail. If the complaint is not processed in due time, the website can generate a complaint to the prosecutor’s office. Information about the status of each reported case is available online.

Verification of information using photos.

Use of legal expertise.

Easy conversion of on-line report into off-line action.

Transparency of process.

In August 2011, Navalny used his blogs to start an e-petition campaign to request due investigation of an allegedly corrupt transaction: in 2008 a company affiliated with Victor Vekselberg, 28

presently the head of the governmental Skolkovo Foundation, purchased the building of the Hungarian Embassy to Russia for USD 21 million and then immediately sold it to the Ministry of Regional Development for USD 111 million.

A volunteer lawyer helped Navalny to collect all documents for Use of experts. this case and prepare a complaint to the Moscow office of the Russian Investigative Committee.

Navalny also asked people to submit e-petitions to the Federal Investigative Committee and to the President. Texts of the petitions and links to the official website where they could be submitted were provided in the text of the post51.

Crowd-mobilization: people are given all necessary information to minimize their effort.

Alexey Navalny, who openly calls the ruling United Russia a party of ‘crooks and thieves’, is very popular among the democratically minded part of the public. Navalny’s supporters launched group pages on LiveJournal and main social networking websites. Activists produce and distribute car stickers with slogans in support of Navalny.

Pro-government activists accuse Navalny of serving US interests.

The Federal Security Service requested Yandex to disclose personal data of people who donated money to RosPyl project.

Soon after Yandex complied, some of Navalny’s supporters received suspicious telephone calls from a person who introduced herself as a journalist and asked to comment why they gave money to Navalny.

In May 2011, the Investigative Committee launched a criminal investigation against Navalny’s related to his work in Kirovsk region.

Navalny’s case adds several important insights about factors that can enhance performance of social media projects:  Leader’s background. Navalny is a professional lawyer, and his projects effectively use existing legal mechanisms. He is also a seasoned opposition politician and a charismatic leader. His posts, interviews and public speeches are quite harsh and sarcastic, which makes them more appealing to people.  Importance of emotional appeal for harnessing public support. This finding is corroborated by other studies. The book “Emotions in Politics and Campaigning” published by the European Association of Political Consultants maintains that to reach people communications should be emotional 52. The report “Harnessing Social Media Tools to Fight Corruption” prepared by the London School of Economics and Political Science recommends to use an accessible emotional narrative as a tool to motivate and encourage civic participation in social media anti-corruption initiatives.  High intensity of communication. Navalny uses several social media platforms. He often writes several posts a day to his main blog on LiveJournal.  Continuity of action and evolutional development. Navalny’s current projects build on many years of previous persistent work. Fig. 8 shows that his popularity in Russian 51 52

http://echo.msk.ru/blog/navalny/799074-echo/ http://www.eapc.eu/pages/news/news-detail-view/article/book-emotions-in-politics-and-campaigning/1/

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 

language blogosphere was growing slowly. The first peak in the end of 2010 corresponds to the publication of the report on Transneft, peaks in the first half of 2011 – to the launch of RosPyl project.

Strong grassroots support. RosPyl project has an estimated budget of over USD 100,000, and all necessary money was raised through individual donations. Navalny supporters have organized on-line and off-line support campaigns.

Absolute transparency of project activities and the use of funds. All steps taken by Navalny and his team of lawyers – including financial transactions - are made public through his blog and RosPyl website.

Fig. 8. The number of references to Alexey Navalny in Russian language blogs (2002 – 2011).

Source: Blogosphere Pulse. Yandex.ru.

Note: Y-axis shows the average percentage of posts that include the word of interest out of the total number of posts per week.

Evaluation of Government Performance Russian project eGovLive invites visitors to rate the quality of the provision of e-government services in their region (ru-egov.ru/region_ratings) and give substantive comments. eGovLive was launched in 2011 to disseminate information about the progress of e-governance in Russia.

Besides the public rating facility, the website features news, information about best egovernment practices in Russia and around the world and about social media presence of Russian politicians and public executives. The level of user activity is still low: in the beginning of October 2011 the rating facility had only 44 entries.

This type of social media projects represents a crossover between watchdog and civic engagement projects.

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Civic Engagement Projects Crime Monitoring Bulgarian blogger and civic activist Boyan Yurukov believes that Bulgarian authorities fail to disclose complete information about crime incidents and cases of missing people. To address this problem he launched two Ushahidi-powered projects:  lipsva.com that collects information about missing people;  crime.bg that collects information about criminal incidents.

Reporting activity on both websites is low.

Russian project “Where is the casino?” (gdecasino.org/gdecasino.ru) collects information about location of illegal gambling clubs.

Environment Contamination Monitoring There are several Ushahidi-powered projects that collect public interest information about environmental contamination (Table 4).

Table 4. Crowdmaps of environmental contamination.

Country/ Region Bulgaria

Western Balkans

Russia

Website

Description

Environmental Association “Za Zemiata” running campaign against the construction of Belene nuclear power plant uses Ushahidi to collect information about nuclear sites in Bulgaria. bewman.crowdmap.com Ushahidi-powered crowdmap53 launched by the Balkan E-Waste Management Advocacy Network Project that covers four countries: Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia and Serbia. It aims to improve e-waste (discarded electronic devices) management. The site collects information about all kinds of e-waste. radiation.crowdmap.com Radiation Map was launched by a group of Russian activists after explosions at Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan to collect information about the radiation situation around the world. belene.org/map

Reporting on Municipal Problems These projects build upon the model pioneered by British FixMyStreet.com (Table 5). People can submit online reports about municipal problems pinning them to the online city map. The reports are published on the website and forwarded to relevant municipal authorities. When reported problems are fixed, website users can mark them accordingly. Publication of reports creates additional pressure on municipal authorities to fix the problems. Projects of this type make communication between citizens and authorities more transparent which in turn contributes to higher accountability of municipal executives.

Table 5. FixMyStreet-like projects in Eastern Europe and the CIS 53

A Crowdmap is a tool that allows you to crowdsource information and visualize it on a map and timeline

31

Country Georgia

Serbia

Macedonia

Moldova

Russia

Russia Russia

Russia

Russia Russia

Russia

Russia

Website chemikucha.ge

Description FixMyStreet Georgia/ Chemikucha was launched by Transparency International Georgia. The website collects reports from Tbilisi residents and passes them to municipal authorities. rupanaputu.crowdmap.com Rupa na Putu (Pothole on the Road) was launched by Belgrade municipal company ‘Beogardput’ responsible for maintaining city roads. People can report only about potholes on the roads and sidewalks. popravi.mk Popravi (Fix) was launched by a group of IT specialists. It collects reports from all municipalities in Macedonia. alerte.md The Ushahidi-powered site collects reports about municipal problems in Chisinau. It was launched by MediaPoint, a group of young civic activists who believe in the power of social media to change society. yamanayame.ru “Pothole next to pothole” is a Russian watchdog project that collects information about potholes on Russian roads. The project was launched in Krasnoyarsk, but people can report problems in any Russian city. dorogi.teron.ru The project has evolved from a regular page on the online forum in the city of Perm to a crowdmap.

StreetJournal.org My Territory project was developed by a group on IT specialists. It was launched in the city of Perm and already covers nine Russian cities. imhonn.ru The site allows residents of Nizhny Novgorod to report about problems, launch petition campaigns and monitor if local public officials do what the promise. daisignal.ru FixYourStreet was launched in 2011 by municipal authorities of the city of Kazan. gis.krd.ru/umk Started as a crowdmap of illegal construction sites.

The project was launched by the Administration of the city of Krasnodar. The service was expanded, and now people can submit reports about all kinds of municipal problems. zalivaet.spb.ru The site was launched by a student living in the city of Saint Petersburg to collect information about leaking roofs. rosyama.ru Project collects information about potholes on the roads and helps people to report these problems to authorities (More details about this project were provided in Case 3).

This study took a detailed look at three cases of social media use to report problems to municipalities to learn more about their internal ‘mechanics’ and emerging challenges.

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Case studies: FixMyStreet Georgia/ Chemicucha.ge – Tbilisi, Georgia FixMyStreet Georgia was launched by Transparency International Georgia. “Chemi kucha” is Georgian for "our street”. The project Inspiration comes from a was inspired by a presentation of the British FixMyStreet project successful project in another at the Social Media for Social Change Conference in Tbilisi in country.

April 2010. Eurasia Partnership Foundation (that organized the Social Innovation Camp Caucasus within the framework of this conference) offered small grants for NGOs willing to launch their own social media projects. Transparency International Georgia jumped on the opportunity and submitted a proposal.

The grant was awarded. The project started on October 1, 2010 and ended on September 30, 2011. Total project budget was USD Availability of funding.

20,742. (Project proposal and budget are available at Transparency International Georgia site http://www.transparency.ge/en/project/fixmystreetgechemikuchage-0).

According to the project coordinator Mathias Huter, the project used FixMyStreet open code. Translation and necessary adaptation of the code took about six months and were done by Transparency International Georgia staff – a programmer and a web-designer.

It took a long time to persuade Tbilisi mayor to cooperate with the project; he agreed only couple days before the official launch of Chemicucha.ge on March 21, 2011. The mayor attended the press-conference organized by Transparency International Georgia, which helped to attract a lot of press attention and ensure broad media coverage. As a result, within the first 72 hours of operation over 4,800 people visited the website and 164 reports were submitted.

Endorsement of high ranking public officials helped to secure broad media coverage.

Media coverage helps to attract people to the website.

Since then, the project did not receive much media attention.

Transparency International Georgia advertised the project in print media and on Facebook. Visitors have an opportunity to print flyers and disseminate them to promote the project.

The website has 100-250 visitors a day – more on weekdays and less during the weekend.

Reports to Chemicucha.ge are not pre-moderated. Mathias Huter says it was a deliberate choice to lower the project operational costs and increase sustainability. Once coding is complete, project maintenance will require just USD 200-300 per year – cost of web-hosting and domain maintenance. In the beginning this nosupervision model created some problems. Municipal officials marked problems as resolved once the orders to fix them were issued. This prompted the project team to add a verification 33

mechanism that allows people to comment if a problem was really solved.

According to Mathias Huter the staff of mayor’s office did not have an internal software system to handle reports, which created an additional challenge to the project. In addition, it was not always clear who was responsible for what. Now all reports from the website are sent to an e-mail address at the mayor’s office and then forwarded to relevant departments.

According to Mathias Huter, when the project was just launched, the mayor’ office used Chemicucha.ge to monitor how efficiently different departments dealt with reported problems.

As of October 6, 2011 Chemicucha.ge has collected 844 problems of reports, and 566 of them were resolved. Mathias Huter believes Importance outcomes for that crowdsourcing projects should help people to solve their sustainability. problems, otherwise they are doomed to fail.

positive project

Grant funding to the project ended on September 30, 2011.

Transparency International Georgia will continue to maintain the website at its own expense.

Alerte.md – Chisinau, Moldova Alerte.md was launched by MediaPoint, a group of young Moldovans who believe in new media as a driver of social change. MediaPoint was established in 2010 by four students; Highly motivated group of now the group is made of about 30 people who work on a volunteers. voluntary basis; in 2011, MediaPoint registered as NGO. Twice a year MediaPoint holds a planning session where its members brainstorm project ideas and then select one or two to be pursued. The idea of Alerte.md emerged at the December 2010 planning session, and was inspired by the British FixMyStreet Inspiration comes from a successful project in another project. MediaPoint team decided to use Ushahidi to power their country. project.

Alerte.md was launched in February 2011. MediaPoint promoted it on social networks, which generated a lot of traffic to the site.

At the same time, MediaPoint contacted Chisinau mayor’s office to offer cooperation. But, according to project coordinator Mihai Lupascu, city officials were preparing for the June municipal elections and did not pay any attention to the project.

In July 2011, Alerte.md won the eTransformation Apps contest organized by the government of Moldova. This attracted attention coverage is to the project, it was widely covered by regular media, including Media important to promote the national TV. As a result the number of visitors and number of reports to the site peaked, but then again went down (see Fig. 1 project. and Table 6).

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Fig. 9. Number of reports submitted to Alerte.md.

Table 6. Alerte.md website statistics.

Unique Visitors Visits Pageviews

July 2011

September 2011

2698 3048 9492

558 595 2084

Total from start 7532 8502 27787

project

The mayor’s office agreed to cooperate and assigned a person from the PR department as a focal point. The banner of Alerte.md was placed on the official website of the mayor’s office Official recognition (www.chisinau.md). The Alerte.md team sends citizens’ reports municipal authorities. to a focal point, who then forwards them to relevant departments.

On September 26, 2011 the project team made an official presentation of Alerte.md at Chisinau mayor’s office and the mayor publicly endorsed the project (without making any financial commitments though).

by

Alerte.md was developed and is operated by five people with occasional help from other MediaPoint volunteers. All reports are pre-moderated to avoid false ones: the moderator evaluates reports based on the problem description provided (there are no other means of verification). Comments are also pre-moderated to avoid spam. According to Mihai Lupascu, the team rejects about 5% of submitted reports and 20% of comments.

My Territory (StreetJournal.ru) - Russia The project was launched by a group of IT specialists based in the city of Perm in the Urals. According to Alexey Shaposhnikov, the leader of this group, the project was prompted by his frustration

Frustration as a source of 35

with inadequate performance of municipal works. One day, motivation.

Alexey was taking his child to school and noticed three open sewer manholes along the way. He tried to contact local authorities to get the problem fixed, but could not find anyone who would take the responsibility. Shaposhnikov discussed the situation with his friends and colleagues and they decided to look for possible ways to make things better. Soon the group learned Successful project in about British FixMyStreet project and decided to launch a similar another country as a model. one in Perm.

The group, according to Shaposhnikov, was quite pessimistic about the prospects of the project, but they still decided to give it a try. While the project was still in the development stage, Shaposhnikov wrote to the governor of Perm region Oleg Chirkunov. To his surprise, the governor responded and expressed interest. This support opened the doors to other Perm officials.

Head of the Office of the Government of Perm Region Makar Support of senior public German (a young man in his 20s) became a valuable ally to the executives. project and helped arrange meetings with many other public executives. Still, the initial attitude of the majority of public officials was reserved: they wanted to see how the project would work.

Though FixMyStreet code is open, Shaposhnikov and his colleagues decided to develop their own code to be able to upgrade and expand the project in the future. The first version of the project was launched in July 2010. In November 2011 the group plans to launch the new version that will have more features.

StreetJournal.ru can be used to collects reports on problems in any city in Russia and neighboring countries. Someone just have Easy replication – no to enter information about relevant municipal authorities and their technical skills necessary. official e-mail addresses. Then people will be able to submit reports online, and these reports will be then forwarded to corresponding authorities.

StreetJournal.ru is already used in nine Russian cities.

Shaposhnikov says that he has received expressions of interest from Ukraine and the Baltic states, so the team plans to make the system multilingual.

Shaposhnikov shared the story of StreetJournal.ru launch in the city to Samara. A local citizen wrote about the project to the blog of Samara mayor Dmitry Azarov. Azarov liked the idea and Projects of this type depend ordered municipal agencies to register on the website. Alexey heavily upon support of Shaposhnikov notes that support of local authorities is crucial for authorities. success of FixMyStreet-like projects. He says that, for example, similar projects in Kurgan and Volgograd failed because of resistance of local authorities.

According to Shaposhnikov, so far his team did not do anything to promote StreetJournal.ru. As a result, the number of visitors is 36

quite low – usually 500 – 1000 unique visitors per day. When the Media coverage increases project gets covered in some online media, the number of visitors traffic to the site. peaks, to 20 thousands on one occasion.

Shaposhnikov and his team regard the project as a not-for-profit endeavor, something they do to meet their intrinsic aspirations.

They work on the project in their spare time, so the development process is slow. Shaposhnikov says that the project is still in the inception phase, but the team has already learned a lot and has ideas and plans on how to proceed with the project and increase its functionality.

These three cases offer several important lessons:  Value of information about similar previous projects. Teams that launched the three projects described above were inspired by FixMyStreet.com and built on its experience.  Importance of personal motivation. Strong motivation of project team members can compensate for the absence of financial support.  Support of senior public officials is crucial for the success of this type of projects.  These projects enhance accountability of municipal authorities by making public their performance on submitted reports. This data can be used by civic activists as well as by authorities themselves to evaluate performance of various departments.

Electronic Petitioning There are several websites that give people an opportunity to launch petitions to authorities and collect signatures to them. Any user can publish the text of his/her petition, and site visitors can comment and ‘sign’ petitions that they want to support. Further processing of petitions differs.

Russian onlinepetition.ru maintains online lists of signatures to each petition. The site also publishes success stories shared by people whose petitions worked. Russian nasheveche.ru generates a printable version of the petition and the project team sends it by regular mail.

Ukrainian petition.org.ua sends a petition to the e-mail address specified by the person who initiated it, once the petition collects 500 signatures. Once a petition collects 1000 signatures, it is printed out and sent by regular mail.

This type of crowdsourcing projects comes close to the next model – the crowd-to-comminity one.

CROWD-TO-COMMUNITY PROJECTS Several projects combine crowdsourcing with mechanisms that increase interaction of visitors with the project and between each other. This interaction transforms a ‘crowd’ into a community.

Such projects require sophisticated web platforms, so their development and maintenance is expensive. The study has identified only two projects of this kind in the region.

Russian social network for protection of human rights Tak-tak-tak (taktaktak.ru) was launched by the Institute for Press Development-Siberia with financial support from the European Union and USAID. The project recruited a group of volunteer experts. People can submit questions and complaints and experts offer them advice. All questions, complaints, expert advice and comments made on the website are public. People also have an option to launch groups to 37

investigate specific public interests issues and invite others to join them. Topics of investigations vary – for example, a team of five people led by one of the experts is investigating a possible fraud during the construction of a metro station in the city of Novosibirsk; the investigation should result in a well prepared complaint to the law enforcement authorities.

Democrator.ru (Russia) combines social media technologies with civic activism techniques and use of existing legal mechanisms to help citizens pursue their rights. The project calls itself the system of electronic democracy. At present, it is probably the most comprehensive and sophisticated web-based civic engagement system operating in the region.

Case Study Democrator.ru In 2008, Russian businessman Arkady Pavlov came up with an idea to create a website that would make interaction between a citizen who faces some problem and authorities responsible for helping that citizen public and transparent. Pavlov hired a team of IT specialists and provided the necessary funding.

Development started in September 2008. The project team studied Use of international experience, e.g. British FixMyStreet.com, Canadian experience.

FixMyStreet.ca, German gov20.de, Dutch verbeterdebuurt.nl, US SeeClickFix.com. Development continued till February 2010 and included several test runs.

international

Officially the project was launched in February 2010. It is run by a team of 10 people, including 5 lawyers who provide advice and consultation to users.

Citizens can use the site to report their problems. All reports are open to other visitors, who can vote if they agree or disagree that the problem reported is important. To submit a report, a person has to register on the website and provide his/her name and home address – as per Russian law this information has to be provided when citizens apply to state agencies. When people vote, they have to provide only their names - similar to signing a petition.

Visitors also can leave their comments.

The project offers its users a variety of ways to engage with other users and members of their own informal social networks – Democrator.ru encourages users to use their personal networks of on-line and off-line. friends and acquaintances to collect votes. There is an option to send an e-mail with a problem description to one’s contacts and Users can control their level share it on several social networking websites. There is also an of involvement with the option that allows anyone to generate and print out flyers that project. describe a problem and ask to come to the website to sign a petition.

Once 50 or more votes are cast for a problem, Democrator.ru generates a letter to the relevant authority and sends it both by email and registered mail. The project team uses Russian Post official website to monitor the delivery of registered mail.

According to project director Andrei Bogdanov, the response rate 38

to registered mail is about 90%, while to e-mails – just 5-10%.

When reply letters arrive, they are scanned and posted online.

Now users can vote if they are satisfied with the reply or not. If the majority votes against the reply, Democrator.ru’s lawyers prepare a complaint to the relevant oversight authority.

If and when the user who launched the process thinks that the problem was solved, he/she can mark it as resolved.

The project accumulates the data on people satisfaction with From individual cases to responses of different authorities and prepares agency ratings. bigger picture.

The data is also aggregated by Ministries and by regions, so website visitors can compare them by responsiveness and quality of work with citizen applications. To enable this aggregation, the project had to create a structured hierarchical database of state agencies, which was a challenging task according to Bogdanov.

At the design stage, the project was presented at several start-up events in Russia and USA. The launch was covered by several Russian national newspapers and one national TV channel. Since then, the project relies mostly on viral dissemination of information to attract new users.

The strategy works. According to Bogdanov, by the end of the Successful viral promotion. first year of operation, in February 2011, Democrator.ru had 90 thousand registered users. In March 2011 there were 100 thousand users, in September 2011 – already 200 thousands, and about 2 thousand new users were registering per day. The number of problems reported by users exceeds five thousand. Bogdanov believes that new users are attracted by success stories spread by word-of-mouth.

Democrator.ru also offers services to institutional users. Civic Project engages CSOs and society organizations and political parties can get an account with political parties to support the system and follow citizen applications as well as launch their citizen petitions. own campaigns. All these activities are open to visitors of the website, which can contribute to the public image of a party or NGO. This service is provided by subscription and costs 2,000 rubles (about 50 euro) a month. The service is already used by two political parties – Spravedlivaya Rossiya and Yabloko – and several CSOs. The project also offers services to state agencies and State agencies avoid municipalities that can set accounts on the site and use them to engaging with citizens. work with citizen applications on-line. The service costs 2,000 rubles (about 50 euro) a month; so far no state agency has subscribed.

Democrator.ru has forums where project managers and users Users are discuss various topics related to system operation, including discussion funding. The project planned to recover its operational costs by operation. selling subscriptions to state agencies, but this is not happening

involved in of project

39

yet. Users suggested starting collection of individual donations.

Now the project collects them via several on-line and off-line channels. Yet most of the project expenses are still covered by the founder, who has already invested USD 2.5 million.

According to Andrei Bogdanov, the Project Democrator.ru is based on four key pillars/principles:

Director,

-

openness and transparency, all information is made public;

-

collective action;

-

feedback system, e.g. when people access responses of public officials;

-

community of users.

Bogdanov believes that community is the greatest achievement and the most valuable asset of the project. There are users who have already solved several problems through the project and support other users on a regular basis.

There are also examples when people use Democrator.ru to solve problems of their relatives and friends. Andrei Bogdanov shared the following story. Residents of three small remote villages in Vladimir region were suffering from cattle waste dumped from a local farm. The waste collector was built close to the villages, so people were suffering from foul smell. To make things worse, during heavy rains the collector leaked and a local river was regularly polluted. A relative of a local resident reported the story on Democrator.ru. Users supported the case and it was reported to the prosecutor’s office. The case was investigated. The prosecutor’s office found that the farm violated existing regulation and ordered it to close and remediate the collector.

Off-line social networks allow people who don’t have access to Internet to benefit from project services

The project team is thinking about replicating the project in Kazakhastan and Belarus, but at present there are no funds for this. Bogdanov estimates that they would need around 5 million rubles (around 120 thousand euros) to launch the project in Kazakhstan. The said amount would cover the purchase of necessary equipment, adaptation of software, translation and development of a database of Kazakhstan state agencies.

The case of Democrator.ru confirms the conclusion that new initiatives benefit a lot when they can build on the experience of similar projects. The case also adds several new lessons:  Viral promotion can work well for projects that help people to solve their problems.  The project offers its users a variety of ways to engage with other users and members of their own informal social networks. Users can control their level of involvement with the project. This increases commitment of users to the project and builds a sense of community.  Bridging digital divide. Well-educated young urban professionals are the first to embrace emerging technologies and rip their benefits. Elderly people, residents of remote and rural areas and the poor often lag behind. As a result, those who need the most help to protect their rights often have the least access to emerging online instruments. Off-line 40

social networks can help to narrow the digital divide. People who have access to internet can serve as online representatives for relatives and acquaintances who don’t have such access.

CONCLUSIONS Social media is changing communication patterns in Eastern Europe and the CIS. Blogs, forums and social networking websites have eliminated the borderline between private conversations and public discussions. Any citizen or group of civic activists who has access to Internet is able to reach and engage with a much greater number of other people than ever before. Comments and pieces of information provided by individual users come together, which enables people to look at the bigger picture and to see how their own story fits there.

This study has revealed several models of social media use to enhance public transparency and accountability:  Information sharing: individuals and groups of civic activists use commercial social media platforms (forums, blog platforms, social networking and video hosting websites) to disseminate information about corruption.  Crowdsourcing: individuals and groups of civic activists create their own specialized social media platforms, where users can publish information about instances of corruption or other public interest information.  Crowd-to-community model takes crowdsourcing one step further by stimulating cooperation between website visitors and offering people various ways to engage with the project.

There are examples when information sharing had considerable impact and led to prosecution of corrupt officials. This impact is made possible by a combination of the follows factors:  An individual report is published on a social media platform where other uses have a stake in the issue.  The individual report attracts attention of regular media.  Someone – individual or organization – uses existing legal mechanisms to make authorities act on the reported information.  There is political will to investigate and prosecute reported violations.

Crowdsourcing projects either use watchdog approach and collect reports about cases of wrongdoing on the part of authorities, or take a civic engagement stance and collect information about social and physical environments where people live.

All crowdsourcing projects face two common challenges. First, they need to ensure the steady inflow of new reports; second, they have to prove the credibility of these reports. Anonymity of reports lowers the barriers for submission of information, but undermines its credibility. Projects that aspire to make authorities take some action on the reports submitted also have to overcome resistance of public officials.

The following factors contribute to the success of crowdsourcing projects:  Effective use of social media tools to promote the project – frequent posting on new information, use of emotional narrative, interaction with other users.  Coverage by regular and online media – it drives new visitors and new reports.

41

   

Projects have transparent verification mechanisms, e.g. publication of photos, documents, comments by other visitors who can confirm or denounce the reported case.

Projects were launched by individuals or institutions that have a proven track record in the field.

Projects are able to ‘convert’ information into action that leads to desirable outcomes (e.g. corrupt tenders are cancelled, streets are fixed, etc.).

Projects have secured support of relevant executive authorities and high ranking public officials.

First crowdsourcing projects in Eastern Europe and the CIS were inspired by similar projects outside the region – FixMyStreet in the UK and Ushahidi-powered crowdmapping project in Kenya. IT specialists and civic activists were the first in the region who embraced the idea, but authorities are starting to catch up.

Crowd-to-community projects build on crowdsourcing model and add various mechanisms to promote on-going engagement of users with the project, members of their informal on-line and off-line networks and other users. These projects use sophisticated social media platforms, their development and operation requires substantial investment, so they are very rare – in Eastern Europe and the CIS this study has found only two projects that use crowd-to-community model.

INSTRUMENTS FOR PROMOTION OF THE SOCIAL MEDIA USE FOR TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN PUBLIC SECTOR To provide recommendations for UNDP programming in the area of public administration reform, anti-corruption, human rights and local governance building on the phenomenon of social media, this study looked at recent and on-going initiatives to promote social media use for social change in the region.

APPROACHES USED IN THE PAST AND ON-ONGOING INITIATIVES IN EASTERN EUROPE AND THE CIS Several approaches have been used in recent and ongoing initiatives. The first one is to collect and disseminate information about existing projects. In most cases, this is done through apps competitions like eTrasformation Apps in Moldova or Apps4Russia in Russia. On October 5, 2011 Russian Internet specialist Alena Popova launched Gov2People project (gov2people.ru) that maintains a catalogue of Russian Web2.0 projects contributing to better governance, publishes materials about developments in the field of social media in Russia and around the world, and organizes on-line discussions where users have two compare two similar projects – one Russian and one international.

Social Innovation Camp (SIC) is another model that has been adopted in the region. SIC brings together people who understand social problems and have ideas how to solve them with software developers and designers to create a community of practice where people can experiment, discover, prototype and become advocates for using social media technology as a driver of positive social change. Te model was pioneered in the UK and has already been replicated several times in Eastern Europe and the CIS (Table 7).

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Table 7. Social Innovation Camps and similar events in Eastern Europe and the CIS. Event Social Innovation Camp Bratislava Social Innovation Camp Prague Social Innovation Caucasus Social Innovation Azerbaijan Social Innovation Azerbaijan Social Innovation Sarajevo Gov2Camp SocialCamp 2010 SocialCamp 2011

Time/ Location September 2009/ Bratislava, Slovakia November 2010/ Prague, Czech Republic Camp April 2010/ Tbilisi, Georgia

Organizers The Central and Eastern European Civil Society Forum Respekt Institut

Coalition of NGOs led by Open Society Georgia Foundation organized SCI Caucasus Camp September 2010/ Baku, Transitions Online Azerbaijan Camp July 2011/ Baku, Transitions Online Azerbaijan Camp July 2011/ Sarajevo, Internews and Transitions Online Bosnia and Herzegovina February 2011/ Perm, Business incubator, Higher Russia School of Economics - Perm March 2010/ Kirov, Internet Innovation Support Russia Foundation July 2011/ Tver, Russia Internet Innovation Support Foundation

For example, SIC Sarajevo brought together 80 people from all over the region. They had 48 hours to turn seven ideas accepted by the project into working web-applications. All teams managed to produce working prototypes and were awarded $1,000 grants to continue development of their projects54.

Cassie Robinson, the UK researcher who was invited to evaluate the impact of the SIC Sarajevo as well as several other SIC on the participants, has shared the following observations: SIC teaches people to work within multi-disciplinary teams and apply a problem-solving perspective; SIC gives participants a new perspective and inspiration; “through the Camp, they have been able to go back into their workplace and approach things differently, with resilience and feeling that anything is possible�, commented Robinson.

Networking between participants is another important positive impact of SIC. According to Robinson, after the camp people have kept in touch, they feel that they have new networks and can draw on these networks to keep themselves motivated.

Russian Social Camps (SC) in Kirov and Tver used a somewhat different approach. They brought together representatives of Russian NGOs, IT developers and social media experts from all over the region to learn from each other and take new ideas back to their organizations.

According to Tatiana Kargina, one of SC organizers, the format of the camp is constantly evolving. Discussions during the first SC in Kirov revealed the need to involve business in the exchange of ideas. Representatives of several web-pay systems were invited to the next SC in Tver, and, according to Kargina, businessmen got many useful ideas from NGOs and IT people.

The second SC revealed the need to involve representatives of authorities, as they are also important stakeholders of social projects.

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Yes, we camp. Internews, http://www.internews.org/prs/2011/20110715_bosnia.shtm

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Another idea that came from the SC Kirov was an on-line course on social media for NGOs. It took about a year to secure funding and develop on-line modules for the course. The target audience is NGO staff members who already have project ideas – to be developed by the end of the course.

The course starting in the end of October 2011 is called “Citizen 2.0”. It includes nine modules:  Introduction: What is Web 2.0 and social media.  Module 1: NGO website – basics.  Module 2: Web 2.0 project planning applications.  Module 3: Web 2.0 project management applications.  Module 4: Web 2.0 technologies for building partnerships, finding supporters and volunteers.  Module 5: Internet-fundraising and crowdfinding.  Module 6: Information campaigns and media activism.  Module 7: Using Internet to organize off-line civic activities.  Module 8: Presentation of projects developed by participants.

Each module starts and ends with a webinar. Between webinars, students have to do a series of home assignments. They also have an opportunity to ask questions to the teacher and get consultations.

The course is based on open source course management system Moodle.com that, according to Tatiana Kargina, would allow imitating the atmosphere of a social innovation camp where participants can freely exchange ideas. SC team plans to run the course once and then hand it over to Russian NGOs interested to administer it in the future.

Provision of financial support is the third approach used by those who would like to support the use of social media to create social change. The Open Society Foundation and USAID have corresponding grant programmes. Gov2People project is planning to attract private investment to civic social media projects.

IMPACT OF VARIOUS APPROACHES ON SOCIAL MEDIA USE FOR PUBLIC TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY

Dissemination of information about existing projects has proven to be very effective as an instrument to promote the use of social media for transparency and accountability. Many existing projects in the region were inspired by and built upon the experience of similar previous projects.

Two ideas that have been most often replicated in the region are the use of Ushahidi for election monitoring and FixMyStreet.

Social Innovation Camps and their likes have not yet generated many projects particularly focused on enhancing public transparency and accountability in Eastern Europe and the CIS. For example, out of seven ideas that were turned into web application during SIC Sarajevo, only two were addressing issues of public transparency and accountability:  Journalist2Journalist is a social network for journalists to share information about infringement of their professional rights and launch protest campaigns when these rights are violated.  Open Land Ownership Platform for Ukraine will crowdsource information about privatizations of state land property: location of lots (including GPS data), size, ownership details, when they were sold to private entities and at what price, and other relevant data.

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Out of six ideas selected for SIC Azerbaijan 2010, only one – crowdsourcing project collecting information about environmental problems – was related to public transparency.

Social Innovation Camps help civic activists to materialize ideas that they already have, which means that SICs have little direct impact on what ideas people want to pursue. SICs usually produce working prototypes rather than ready-to-use web applications. The latter take several months of work.

Grants helped to launch two projects – FixMyStreet Georgia and Russian Tak-tak-tak.

Dissemination of information about existing projects can inspire people to replicate them and to build on their experience to create own ideas. SICs and grants help to implement these ideas. A program that aims to promote the use of social media for some specific purpose should first enable the generation of ideas and then support their implementation.

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ANNEX: LIST OF SPECIALISTS INTERVIEWED BY THE STUDY

Andrei Bogdanov, Project Director, Democrator.ru, Russia Tetayna Bohdanova, civic activist, election monitor, blogger, Ukraine Ivan Begtin, Director, Laboratory of Intellectual Data Analysis, Russia Mathias Huter, Senior Analyst & Program Manager, Transparency International Georgia, Georgia Altynbek Ismailov, Projects Manager, Coalition for Democracy and Civil Society, Kyrgyzstan Tatiana Kargina, Director of Development, Ecowiki.ru project, Russia Diana Lungu, European Journalism Centre, the Netherlands, covers Moldova for Global Voices Online Mihai Lupaşcu, Coordinator of ALERTE.MD project, Moldova Vlad Manoil, e-Services and Open Data Coordinator, e-Government Center, Moldova Adil Nurmakov, blogger, Editor for Central Asia, Global Voices Online, Kazakhstan Danica Radisic, online communication consultant, blogger, Serbia Cassie Robinson, Designer/ Researcher / Positive Psychologist, thinkpublic, A Social Innovation Think & Do Tank, UK Alexey Shaposhnikov, Head of My Territory (StreetJournal.org) Project, Russia Filip Stojanovski, Program Coordinator, Metamorphosis Foundation, Macedonia Janel Bayastanova, Project Manager, Eurasia Foundation of Central Asia, Kazakhstan Merita Mustafa, Program Manager, Program Transparency and Anticorruption, Kosova Democratic Institute, Kosovo François Vezina, Chief of Party, USAID’s Mobilizing Action Against Corruption Activity, Armenia Madina Bakieva, UNDP Country Office, Kazakhstan George Hodge, UNDP Country Office, Armenia

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