We’ve got some exciting news at mySociety.

As you know we’ve been helping with the Kenyan Mzalendo website for a while now. And, we’ve been lucky enough to gather interest in Mzalendo‘s codebase from a number of other countries.  These range from Ghana to South Africa, and even as far afield as Paraguay. It’s amazing and humbling for us, but we’ve recently realised one thing: Mzalendo has a wealth of history in Kenya, and an amazingly complex political association. It’s also the name of the website there. So we needed a new name that would allow the code to be changed without the change being associated with the original Kenyan Mzalendo.

Enter Pombola. This is the new name for the codebase which powers TheyWorkForYou, Mzalendo, Odekro, ShineYourEye, work-in-progress Kuvakazim and other parliamentary monitoring websites across Africa and the world.

You may ask, “Why Pombola? What does it mean?”

Well, it is a pretty easy word to remember.  And no one else is using it (possibly because we created it!). The word is a mix of the initials PMO (Parliamentary Monitoring Organisation) and Tombola.

“A Tombola?” I hear you cry in surprise. Well, in a Tombola, you are making a choice with no information at all – just selecting a ticket and hoping that you get lucky.  A Pombola site aims to be the opposite – you’ll get as much information as possible about your elected representatives, so that when you make a choice in future, you’ll have all the facts.

If you’re interested in using the code you’ll find the repository here on github, along with some documentation.

If you’re not technical but still want to use this then please contact me and we can discuss what we can do!

And remember, this may monitor parliaments now, but you could use it for anything (*)

(*) Disclaimer: please only use for good.

A few days ago, one of our international contacts, Matthew Landauer from the OpenAustralia Foundation, posted to the Alaveteli mailing list about a recent experiment in crowdsourcing FOI requests. It’s pretty interesting stuff, so I asked if we could share more widely.

Matthew tells us: “It’s a project called DetentionLogs and it’s a collaboration between a small group of freelance journalists, Guardian Australia, New Matilda, The Global Mail and OpenAustralia Foundation.

The journalists have done some FOI [requesting] to get a summarised list of around 7000 “incidents” that have happened in detention centres. Then, if members of the public are interested in finding out more they can help out by doing a further FOI request for detailed information about the incident via RightToKnow, OpenAustralia’s FOI site which uses Alaveteli.”

But what’s the history? According to the Guardian, over the past few years there’s been a sharp rise in the number of specific incidents in Australia’s two largest immigration detention centres. Elections are coming up soon (though still not confirmed) and the topic of immigration is one of the fiercest political debates around the elections. The co-founders of DetentionLogs came across a large PDF document on the Immigration Department’s disclosure log, with a summary of the incidents – and the project sprang from there.

The idea is that people can view the visual database, see incidents and click on them to adopt them or flag them. Adopting an incident takes you to the RightToKnow website where you can submit a pre-drafted FOI request to get more details. You also have the option to edit it, but the page opens with all the incident data that is needed to match the request with the incident you clicked on. Flagging an incident makes it appear brighter on the visualisation, drawing other people’s attention to it. Global Mail asked two requesters to share their reasons for participating here. It’s interesting reading, but also quite shocking.

So far there have been around 125 FOI requests made through this site. But it’s not all been plain sailing…

Matthew writes this of his challenges: “This is what I’ve learned from the experience so far:

• The government department in question (department of immigration) is clearly concerned by the crowdsourcing, so much so that each of these requests is being handled personally by the director of FOI policy for the department and they’re doing whatever they can to shut things down, including in this case, a misinterpretation of the FOI legislation. Kat Szuminska and I wrote an opinion piece on this for the Global Mail.
• The relationship between the multiple websites involved in DetentionLogs confuses people a bit. People might start on the global mail “behind the wire” site and then get directed at RightToKnow to make the FOI request. So, we’ve had a couple of cases where people gave their email addresses to RightToKnow, we message them and then they thought that the DetentionLogs project had given us their email address without permission.
• There is no way currently in Alaveteli to contact a group of people. What I ended up doing is taking an email that the DetentionLogs people wrote, exporting a list of email addresses by hand from the database and emailing them personally on behalf of the DetentionLogs people. This was hardly ideal, it confused people. I think I would much prefer that people who make a request in one of these FOI crowdsourcing campaigns could optionally sign up to a mailing list or a public forum where they could discuss strategy and such things.”

This crowdsourcing experiment is still a work in progress, and it will be interesting to see how it turns out. It’s great to see how the Alaveteli software can be adapted to fit a specific campaign and hopefully that can inspire others to use it in a similar way. Mail Us to see how.

[1] Crowd by Michael Dornbierer

[2] Fountain pen from William Arthur fine stationary

[3] Experiment from Peter Megyri

A lot of people come to mySociety to reuse our code having seen the UK websites, which is great! Then you can see what we’re trying to do in the UK and how you could replicate it abroad. But what I wonder, and what lead me to write this blog post, is are we reining in your imagination for what these platforms could be used for?

9 times out of 10, when someone contacts me about FixMyStreet, it’s for street reporting problems. Naturally, it’s in the name of the platform!  But we do get the occasional request to use it differently, which is something we’re really keen to explore. Here are some things I think it could be used for, that aren’t street related:

1) Antiretroviral Drug shortages in clinics in Africa.

The background: 34% of the world’s HIV positive population currently live in Southern or Eastern Africa [1]. These people need antiretroviral drugs to survive, some of which could be supplied by the Government’s medical stores, some of which could be supplied by charities, but it is often reported that there are shortages of drugs at some clinics [2][3]

The concept: A mobile responsive FixMyStreet site which health clinic staff can use to report the status of their stock to the relevant supplier. The site would instantly send an email to the clinic supplier when the staff member dropped a pin on their clinic on a map in the site. There could be different alert categories such as “stock running low”, “stock critically low” and “Out of stock”

Impact it would hope to achieve: The aim would be to enable clinics to report on the status of their stock far enough in advance that the supplier could order and deliver stock before they hit the Critically low or Out of Stock status. This would mean that people would always be supplied with ARVs if they need them. Another point would be that patients could check the map to see if the clinic in their area has stock of the ARVs they need, and potentially choose another clinic if there is a shortage.

2) Contributing data on endangered wildlife

The background: It’s no surprise to anyone to hear that some species of wildlife are under threat. Wildlife conservation charities, like the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), annually monitor population levels for endangered species [4] to ensure they have accurate data on population growth or decline and the lifestyles and habitats of the wildlife they are aiming to preserve.

The concept: A mobile responsive FixMyStreet site which allows people to report sightings of endangered animals to wildlife conservation charities. The site would be tailored for area (eg the endangered animals native to certain countries) or could simply be per species (eg mammals, avians etc). The public would then be able to take a picture of the animal, attach it to the report and leave a short message, like “2 adult bitterns accompanied by young seen at 10:41am). The report will give the charities the location the animal was spotted in and they will be able to add this to their research data.

Impact it would hope to achieve: Hopefully this idea would contribute valuable data to the research of Wildlife Conservation charities. Another hope is that it would make people more interested in the wildlife in their surrounding area, thus more involved in conserving it and its habitat.

3) Reporting polluted Waterways

The background: You may have seen the reports from China earlier this year about the dead pigs found in the Huangpu River [5]. It’s not just a Chinese phenomenon: around the world rivers, canals and lakes are becoming more and more polluted. [6] In fact the statistics coming from the UN are quite shocking[7]. This not only has a harmful effect on wildlife in the river, but could lead to longer term issues with clean drinking water, especially in countries where cleaning polluted water is an expensive option.

The concept: This is very similar to the classic FixMyStreet. A website would be set up where a person could submit a photo and report of a polluted waterway by dropping a pin on a map at the position of the river. This report would then get sent to the local council or persons responsible for caring for the waterway.

Impact it would hope to achieve: Similarly to FixMyStreet in the UK, this would help to get citizens more actively involved in their local area and government. The idea would also be that the council would hopefully start dedicating more resources to clear rivers and waterways. Or local residents could form a group to remove litter themselves. In the case of chemical or oil spills this would obviously not be advised. However if chemical waste or oil spillages were noticed to be originating from specific buildings then the council would have the opportunity to bring this up with the residents or companies in these buildings.

So those are some of my ideas! What are yours?

We’re actively looking to support non-street uses of FixMyStreet so please do get in contact  on hello@mysociety.org with your ideas and we’ll work together to see how we can achieve them!

Oh, and, don’t worry if you still want a classic FixMyStreet, we’ll help you with that too!

References:

[1]http://www.unicef.org/esaro/5482_HIV_AIDS.html

[2]http://allafrica.com/stories/201307070100.html

[3]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3194149/

[4]http://www.rspb.org.uk/ourwork/projects/details/258718-annual-bittern-monitoring-

[5]http://behindthewall.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/18/17357810-china-rivers-dead-pig-toll-passes-13000-but-officials-say-water-quality-is-normal?lite

[6]https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/tackling-water-pollution-from-the-urban-environment

[7]http://www.unwater.org/statistics/en/

[8] Orangutan by Matthew Kang

[9] Primary colours by Vineet Radhakrishnan

The open data movement has been gathering momentum over the past few years, as citizens demand more accountability from the businesses, institutions and governments that form a part of their lives.

Last week, our international team was invited to take part in the first ever AbreLatAm (by the way: a clever word play on the Spanish word “abrelatas” which means can opener!). AbreLatAm is an unconference organised by our friends at DATA (Uruguay) and Ciudadano Inteligente (Chile).

The idea was to bring representatives from different sectors of Latin American civil society together to share experiences, strategies, challenges and hopes for Open Data. People came from all over, including Europe and the USA, to participate, creating an amazingly inclusive atmosphere.

Being an unconference, there was no set agenda. Instead, we started our time by writing provocative statements around open data, which people then had to defend or deny. Once the ice had been broken by passionate discussions about the merits of various ideas, we worked together to decide what we most wanted to learn from each other.

For me, the most important part was seeing the projects other people work on to strengthen transparency, citizen participation, and civil liberties in their own countries. It’s a humbling experience to realise that some things we take for granted are the subject of intense campaigning in other countries.

Each day we had a series of workshops around different topics. I facilitated one, trying to learn what people want from open source technology to make it more globally usable.

It’s funny, open source has such great aspirations, then you speak to people and realise that your creation has been tweaked so much for the local context that it’s almost easier for someone to write their own version. This is something we’ve really taken on board, and we’re working really hard to avoid this with all of our software.

I attended other workshops, learning about the challenges of building relationships with non-technical organisations – a key problem for most non-technical NGOs it seems. Most don’t have the money to pay for commercial web development.

Hopefully, AbreLatAm will have allowed some of these people to forge useful tech partnerships so they can develop their ideas together.

It was also extremely interesting to hear other people’s social, cultural and political experiences in relation to technology. One of the presentations that sticks most in my mind came from Laura Zommer of Chequeado.com. Her site verifies whether a politician’s statements are true, false, exaggerated or deceptive.

Her presentation was a very funny video using those statements as a song sung around Buenos Aires. I particularly liked the fact that the public stopped to listen, and sometimes gave money to the artist. I would like to think that this kind of satirical response to politicians will help people analyse and question what their elected leaders tell them.

Most of all though, the enthusiasm, energy and hope of all the participants left me with a feeling that we are slowly effecting change, in all of our countries, and if we work together we could do this throughout the whole world.

Over the past 6 months mySociety has been working in partnership with Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente to write collaborative…well let’s call them components for now, as there will be more information on these projects coming soon both from our Chilean friends and ourselves. This initiative is called POPLUS and we’re really really excited about what it means.

Most of this collaboration so far has happened via Skype or Google Hangouts, which due to the distance between our two countries probably won’t surprise you. However as mySociety were invited to attend the first AbreLatAm unconference in Uruguay on June 24th and 25th we decided that spending some time meeting FCI face to face would be invaluable for moving our joint projects forward. And we were right.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the advent of video conference methods like Skype and Hangouts have changed the way we can collaborate and I’m grateful. Sometimes though, it’s good to be able to sit down in a room and really understand through all that is and isn’t said, which ideas have inspired the team and which need to perhaps be shelved for another time. Marcel Augsburger, one of FCI’s developers, said it best when he said “I just want to go and work on all of this now!” at nearly 7pm on a Friday night.

It was good to be able to work out niggly issues and share experiences with different systems. And to learn. Felipe Alvarez introduced us to FCI’s incredible website Vota Inteligente which is a great tool for comparing candidates for elections. We discussed micro-activism and why we think it works, we also discussed how to test if something does have any impact (we should have more to share on research soon!) and we discussed our hopes for attracting other people who would be interested in being a part of a larger community of developers, activists and civil society organisations who work together to create amazing things.

For the moment if you want to work with mySociety on any of the sites that we create internationally (Alaveteli, FixMyStreet and Mzalendo) please email hello@mysociety.org and ask for Jen (That’s me!).

I’ll bring you some more information soon on POPLUS and how to get involved with that!

The International team recently had an opportunity to meet with Mzalendo founders in Kenya. As you likely know, Mzalendo is the Kenyan Parliamentary Monitoring site similar to TheyWorkForYou which mySociety has helped re-build since June 2011 with support from the Omidyar Network.

Being in Nairobi gave us the opportunity to meet with some of the organisations who provide information that helps power Mzalendo.com. These included the National Taxpayers Association , whose detailed research into the usage of Constituency Development Funds (CDF) has been invaluable in enabling us to create scorecards on the site. The scorecards are used to rate MPs based on a number of criterion including (pre-elections) how they had overseen the spending of CDF funds in their constituency, their accessibility to their constituents and contributions to debate in Parliament as presented in the Hansard. We also met with the UN/DESA representative behind the www.bungeni.org initiative that has been working with several African parliaments interested in using ICT to open them up to the public.

We also attended the Open Government Partnership (OGP) Africa regional meeting in Mombasa. This two day conference brought CSOs and government officials from 13 African countries (plus a few from other parts of the world) together to discuss how open government works in Africa and to share experiences and recommendations. For mySociety the conference was a chance to meet CSOs and government officials from other countries in Africa to see how they are working towards openness in different ways.

Paul, (pictured gesturing wildly) our Head of International projects,
spoke briefly on the 2nd day on various topics such as making proceedings of parliaments and legislatures available in usable formats (a big theme for us across all the parliamentary monitoring sites we have helped create) and voting records. On the subject of voting, we managed to spark some debate, as the previous evening Kenyan MPs had voted to raise their salaries. This makes them the highest paid government officials in the world comparative to the average national salary.

It was good to finally put names to faces for some people we’ve been working with remotely, like Selima (pictured above in the pink top) from marsoum41.org, the Alaveteli inspired platform based in Tunisia. Selima raised some really interesting points about how important, and difficult, it is to keep momentum going after post-revolution elections.

We also met Gilbert Sendugwa from the Africa Freedom of Information Centre to talk about the potential of using Alaveteli platforms further across Africa. We should be discussing a pilot in one or two countries (yet to be decided!) which will begin in August 2013. That’s pretty exciting for us! About eight African countries have Freedom of Information (FOI) laws but their current implementation is weak by international standards.

Finally I wanted to share a story from Robert Hunja that really brought home to me the importance of local knowledge and consultation in any project, be it government- or CSO-run. (It’s paraphrased as my scribing isn’t fast enough to keep up with talking)

“Outside my father’s house runs a badly maintained road, but the local council didn’t have enough money to pave all of it, so they paved only sections. When I asked my father if he, or any other local residents had been consulted, he told me he was surprised he hadn’t been. He said if they had been consulted, and told money was limited, they wouldn’t have recommended paving only sections, but concentrating on a specific area of the road that had been the cause of many accidents.” Now the dangerous part of the road remains unrepaired, and the paved sections will cause problems as the disintegrate over time.

Overall the conference allowed an exchange of ideas which will hopefully
lead toward greater collaboration between governments and CSOs in Africa.

Also, though we may not have seen lions or giraffes, some local monkeys did express an interest in joining the conference, if only during lunch time!