With the Gov 2.0 Summit going on right now (yeah, I wish I was there too!), all attention among US bloggers/posters is on gov 2.0 issues and applications and American-style civic media. While I am absolutely interested in the evolution of civic media in established and stable political communities, I am also very interested in what kinds of civic media and underlying civic infrastructure we can create and deploy in other parts of the world where they are actively involved in basic political design (aka “constitution-making”).
A few recent examples, which I’ve mentioned in previous posts, keep me very hopeful that in more and more places people will be able to deploy easy-to-use technology to enable new levels and forms of public participation in the process of designing government. The idea of constitution-making through SMS might sound laughable to traditional advisors to constitution-writing bodies, but the convergence of a variety of technologies takes the idea from laughable to plausible. It should at least give us pause long enough to consider some new combinations and process.
Across the developing world people have for many years leapfrogged certain technologies that are foundational pieces of infrastructure in the developed world, and cellular technology is foremost among those. From disaster response to mHealth, a variety of researchers and organizations have been developing and successfully deploying mobile phone applications for rural and dispersed populations in many countries. Relying on a wide variety of combinations of SMS and webtools, these systems make real-time public education and collection of information not only possible but increasingly valuable sources of information and response.
A few recent examples of SMS applications, civic media, and visualization tools point the way towards how innovative supporters of constitution-making can, in the field, deploy unique and tailored systems to alter the role (and level of participation) of the public in the process of designing new governance.
To start with, the recent Afghanistan presidential election was tracked by people in the field and updated throughout through a mapping and visualization tool that included both voter turnout but also relative levels of violence. The service was produced in partnership with the Global Development Commons by US AID.
GeoCommons
Because of the data layers loaded, the GeoCommons application allows users to select and overlay a variety of interesting and relevant data, such as threat assessments, demographics, and poppy cultivation. Those of us here in the US could certainly use these kinds of tools for our own frequent elections (and one has to wonder about the interesting data that people would load and the new connections and questions that people would start to ask as a result of the information). Deployed in other countries for presenting important and relevant information, such as the real-time voting results and violence data, such tools would be very useful during a constitution-making process, and would give viewers (both the public as well as participants in a constituent assembly) a potentially different understanding of where and how things are playing out, in real time.
Another application that draws on existing SMS technology (along with Web and email) to gather and visualize various distributed data is Ushahidi. Their cool tagline is “Crowdsourcing Crisis Information,” and indeed it’s designed for individuals to report and pull down crisis information. The data submitted by individuals is mapped geographically but also temporally, allowing users to see both maps and timelines of events.
Ushahidi.com
We can easily see this application being redeployed during the several months of a constitution-making process, capturing and visualizing the priorities and suggestions submitted by individuals across a country, shown by by region and locality, but also revealing any trends or shifts in the public consciousness across the course of the process. Rather than a relative handful of “representatives” sitting in a constituent assembly being the only ones debating the interests of their constituencies, such discussion could be augmented in real-time by direct data from across the country.
Another interesting civic media application is NationBuilder by Jim Gilliam, demonstrated by White House 2. The site enables people to collaborate on priorities, policy, and talking points, and in the case of White House 2, allows Americans the opportunity to see what executive branch policy might be like if it were a true democratic system of governance rather than an individual, executive function.
The potential with a site like this is obvious: a space for a dispersed population to assemble in a virtual forum to collaborate on creating and debating/voting on constitutional principles, establishing local and national priorities, and collaborating on political design options and preferences. Whether used just as dynamic input to the constitution-making process and the debates of the constituent assembly or as a major component of actually identifying and selecting design options, the potential for this kind of civic media to change the nature of citizen responsibility for a new constitutional order is clear.
www.sokwanele.com
The fourth app that I want to highlight, and which I’ve highlighted in a previous post on Zimbabwe, is the ZIG Watch portion of the Sokwanele.com site. This site includes a variety of useful and interesting information and apps to keep individuals informed about the background political agreements and the changing state of affairs in terms of things like reports of abuse and transgression against the agreements (tracking and displaying news reports).
Looking across just these four examples of civic media, mobile applications, and data visualization, we can easily imagine combinations of these used to draw directly on the interests, ideas, and preferences of a large distributed population to provide entirely new input to constitution-making processes and in the process provide very valuable real-time data and information about participation and evolving preferences to members of a constituent assembly, other agencies, and other observing / supporting organizations, to say nothing of creating an incredibly rich informational feedback to the constituents themselves.
A constitution-making process in places like Zimbabwe or perhaps Nepal, armed with information-rich sites with up-to-date background information and useful visualization tools like ZIG Watch, augmented with collaboration, mapping, and visualization sites that enable citizens to collectively create and endorse priorities and political design options, layered with data on demographics, opinions, participation, and violence, would enable an entirely new discourse and experience. Such a process with those civic media tools and built on the specific local civic infrastructure could create, especially in “developing” countries, a whole new dynamic in terms of participation, innovative thinking, and grass-roots buy-in to both the process of designing a government as well as the resulting design itself.