Green Design » Transparency and Human Rights

China Gradually Improves Environmental Transparency

Ben Block — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:15:00 +0000

Very little is known about pollution levels throughout China, despite the country's worsening air quality and imperiled waterways.

In 2006, Chinese environmentalist Ma Jun estimated that 100 cities nationwide provided no public data on water pollution.

Two years later, the Ministry of Environmental Protection authorized its Measures on Open Environmental Information, a new effort at public disclosure. The freedom-of-information law requires municipalities to provide details on which companies violated pollution regulations or caused large pollution incidents, as well as how much contamination these polluters discharged into the environment.

The measure has been implemented for a year, and cities across China are slowly becoming more forthright with environmental information, according to a study by U.S. and Chinese environmental groups.

The Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI), a partnership of Ma's Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs and the U.S.

Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), filed information requests with 113 cities in September 2008. The groups requested lists of polluters that received punishment and of local residents who filed environmental complaints.

The PITI rated the cities on a 100-point scale based on their compliance with the disclosure requests, responses to citizen petitions, and public records of environmental violations.

Of the 113 cities, only four ranked higher than 60: Ningbo in Zhejiang province, Hefei in Anhui province, Fuzhou in Fujian province, and Wuhan in Hubei province, the groups reported.

Most cities have only recently begun efforts at transparency, but some are already responding to information requests, said Alex Wang, an NRDC lawyer. "For those people who say China is not able to do good disclosure or have a transparent government...our index says that is not true," Wang said.

Although China's largest cities, Beijing and Shanghai, did not rank highly on the index overall, Wang noted that specific local efforts can serve as examples for other municipalities. Shanghai ranked first in disclosure of environmental violations due largely to its daily monitoring and supervision system. Beijing ranked first in disclosure of environmental complaints.

Smaller cities are also demonstrating reform. Weihai in Shandong province was the first city to publish pollution levels on its Web site, which the city updates every hour. Changzhou in Jiangsu province publishes environmental violations in the local government-owned media.

But these cities remain the minority. "There is still a lot of non-disclosure right now," Wang said.

Three out of four cities surveyed did not fulfill the disclosure requests. Some cities responded that disclosure would reveal corporate secrets or compromise economic growth, the report said.

Cities with poorer air quality were less likely to disclose pollution information, the study found. "Maybe cities that are more polluting don't want that known," Wang said. "We're still doing further analysis to understand that."

Cities that were more developed economically generally performed better on the PITI. Overall, the 56 cities surveyed in eastern China, a wealthier region, averaged 36.1 points. The 34 cities studied in central China averaged 27.7 points, and the 23 western China cities scored an average 22.6 points.

Deborah Seligsohn, the World Resources Institute's China program director, said that Chinese laws come into practice gradually, suggesting that full disclosure may require several more years.

"Information disclosure is very new in China and results are quite mixed, but institutionalizing the principle in this law is a major step," Seligsohn said.

The United States and China agreed in June to enhance cooperation on climate change and energy issues. The initial memorandum of understanding focused mostly on technology cooperation, however, rather than on measures to improve government transparency.

But technology support may not be sufficient. Elizabeth Economy, director of Asian studies with the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, said that measures to improve
Chinese government transparency will be an important component in reducing greenhouse gases and other forms of pollution.

"As the U.S. considers how best to assist China in moving aggressively to combat climate change, building in effective monitoring and compliance incentives and constraints will be essential," Economy said during a Congressional testimony [PDF] she gave earlier this summer.

This piece originally appeared on Worldwatch Institute

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(Posted by Ben Block in Transparency and Human Rights at 11:15 AM)

China Gradually Improves Environmental Transparency

Ben Block — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:15:00 +0000

Very little is known about pollution levels throughout China, despite the country's worsening air quality and imperiled waterways.

In 2006, Chinese environmentalist Ma Jun estimated that 100 cities nationwide provided no public data on water pollution.

The measure has been implemented for a year, and cities across China are slowly becoming more forthright with environmental information, according to a study by U.S. and Chinese environmental groups.

The Pollution Information Transparency Index (PITI), a partnership of Ma's Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs and the U.S.

The PITI rated the cities on a 100-point scale based on their compliance with the disclosure requests, responses to citizen petitions, and public records of environmental violations.

Of the 113 cities, only four ranked higher than 60: Ningbo in Zhejiang province, Hefei in Anhui province, Fuzhou in Fujian province, and Wuhan in Hubei province, the groups reported.

But these cities remain the minority. "There is still a lot of non-disclosure right now," Wang said.

Three out of four cities surveyed did not fulfill the disclosure requests. Some cities responded that disclosure would reveal corporate secrets or compromise economic growth, the report said.

Deborah Seligsohn, the World Resources Institute's China program director, said that Chinese laws come into practice gradually, suggesting that full disclosure may require several more years.

"Information disclosure is very new in China and results are quite mixed, but institutionalizing the principle in this law is a major step," Seligsohn said.

This piece originally appeared on Worldwatch Institute

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(Posted by Ben Block in Transparency and Human Rights at 11:15 AM)

The Rights of Future Generations

Alex Steffen — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 01:30:00 +0000

Some people seem to have a hard time even understanding the concept of the rights of future generations. The idea that people who do not yet exist have the right to assert their needs in our lives is one that seems to be hard to fully grasp.

Think of this example: If someone set a bomb to go off in a public square 100 years from now, is he committing a crime? Should he be stopped? Almost everyone would say yes. Should he be tried before a court of law and prevented from doing further harm? Most of us would agree that he should.

Now, here's the tricky part: climate change is the bomb, and your great-grandkids are the victims.

By transgressing planetary boundaries, we are seriously and effectively permanently undermining the ability of the planet to provide the kind of climate stability, ecosystem services and renewable resources that future generations will need to maintain their own societies. In the worst case scenarios, we are in fact dooming many of them to extreme suffering and early death. Life on a planet 10 degrees hotter is not something we would wish to have inflicted on ourselves.

And we don't really have the ethical or legal right to inflict it on our descendants. There is no legitimate basis for thinking that we have the right to use the planet up, that the property rights of our generation trump the human rights of all generations to come.

Put it another way: ethically, our riches are not our own. We hold the planet in trust, and as long as we don't use more of the planet's bounty than can be sustainably provided in perpetuity, we have the ethical right to enjoy the best lives we can create. But the minute we stray into unsustainable levels of consumption, we're not in fact spending our own riches, but those of future people, by setting in motion slow-fuse disasters that will greatly diminish their possibilities.

Unfortunately, nearly everyone in the developed world now enriches their lives at the cost of future generations. As Paul Hawken says, “We have an economy where we steal the future, sell it in the present, and call it G.D.P."

Now, obviously, most of us did not intend to find ourselves in this situation, and so we have a legitimate argument that we need a reasonable amount of time to change and eliminate our ecological impact. What a reasonable amount of time is, though, is becoming the subject of fierce debate, especially since it's clear that many people's definition of a reasonable time for change is sometime after they're dead.

The really interesting question: if future generations have legal rights -- and it's pretty clear they do -- in what courts might those rights be defended, and how?

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Transparency and Human Rights at 5:30 PM)

The Rights of Future Generations

Alex Steffen — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 01:30:00 +0000

Now, here's the tricky part: climate change is the bomb, and your great-grandkids are the victims.

The really interesting question: if future generations have legal rights -- and it's pretty clear they do -- in what courts might those rights be defended, and how?

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Transparency and Human Rights at 5:30 PM)

VIDEO: A New Sound

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:50:41 +0000

by Eric Hess

Green For All (the organization started by Van Jones in 2007) has a new video out that’s worth taking two minutes to watch:

(If the video doesn't work, watch it on YouTube.)

Why do I like it? It gives a clear audible and visual depiction of the difference between a dirty fossil fuel economy and a clean energy economy. Visually demonstrating green jobs — along with promoting smart policies to back them up — helps move the issue into the foreground of public debate. And it’s short, well-produced, and sharable to boot.

This piece originally appeared in sightline.org

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Transparency and Human Rights at 4:50 PM)

Future Melbourne

Alex Steffen — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:42:47 +0000

We're big fans of open government efforts.

Future Melbourne is a pretty amazing project, an attempt to harness the power of open government and collaboration to tackle the kinds of foresight and planning efforts even most big cities find themselves unable to take on. Their agenda is pretty ambitious:

Future Melbourne has a vision for the municipality to be a bold, inspirational and sustainable city in 2020. To realise this vision, six high level goals have been set: to build a city for people, a creative city, a prosperous city, a knowledge city, an eco-city and a connected city. The achievement of each of these high level goals is built on attaining thirty three secondary goals and these in turn are built on one hundred and fifty two underpinning goals.

While I haven't had time to go through the whole thing in detail, I can say it's of mixed quality. Still, that said, much of it is excellent, and all of it seems to at least be aimed at the right sort of targets. Take their ecological goals as an example:

Goals to be an eco-city:
1. Zero net emissions city
2. The city as a catchment
3. Resource efficient
4. Adapted for climate change
5. Living and working in a dense urban centre

Similar efforts are springing up elsewhere, like the NY future initiative, which is very cool, because while ideas matter, especially local ideas. Often part of the inertial power of the status quo is simply the high cost of finding, developing and explaining better solutions. Another part is the ability of bureaucracies to control the debate around plans and policies, draining the passion and life out of them, and (as Richard White said) using boredom the way a skunk uses smell.

These kind of open planning efforts have the potential to both drop the cost of compiling, sharing and explaining good ideas, and to keep the debate about those ideas more lively. We're still in the infancy of these sorts of efforts, but they're really worth keeping an eye on.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Transparency and Human Rights at 11:42 AM)

Transparency Means Nothing Without Justice

WorldChanging Team — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:32:11 +0000

By Cory Doctorow

The footage of police action at last summer's Climate Camp – and the lack of response since – demonstrates the limits of a cyber-liberty dream

An activist is arrested as others participate in a march towards Kingsnorth power station from the Camp For Climate Action 2008. Photograph: Daniel Berehulak/Getty

We cyber-liberties types are very big on government transparency -- on the right to carry our cameras into every altercation with authority and to put it all online. We make the problems visible, hoping that this will solve them. Little brother watches back!

Transparency is indeed a virtue in government. Knowing what MPs and cops and regulators are up to is a vital precursor to doing something about it. That's why people in authority naturally shy away from transparency.

That's the reason for Gordon Brown's proposal to make MPs' expense accounts into a state secret, immune from Freedom of Information requests, and the frankly insane new law that makes it illegal to photograph a copper, a soldier, or many public buildings if these photos could be used "in preparation of an act of terror". (Never mind that there's no evidence that terrorists rely on photos to plan their attacks – outside of technothrillers and 24, that is.)

But a recent meeting on police violence at Climate Camp, called by the Lib Dem MP David Howarth, illustrates just how woefully inadequate transparency on its own is at checking the abuse of authority. Howarth's presentation – which included a short video comprising footage from the BBC, Sky news, and many citizen journalists' cameras – showed how the extraordinary police presence at last summer's Climate Camp near Kingsnorth power station in Kent led to a series of abuses of power.

The video showed police harassment of journalists, beatings dealt to unresisting peaceful protesters, humiliating and unwarranted search procedures, unjustifiable seizure of personal property, and so on. The police – 1,400 officers from 26 forces – justified all this force by characterising the Climate Campers as violent rioters, noting that 70 police officers had been injured while on duty at the event (it was subsequently revealed that the officers were "injured" by sunstroke, insect bites, etc – no injuries are attributed to scuffles with the protesters).

And here's where transparency breaks down. We've known about all this since last August – seven months and more. It was on national news. It was on the web. Anyone who cared about the issue knew everything they needed to know about it. And everyone had the opportunity to find out about it: remember, it was included in national news broadcasts, covered in the major papers – it was everywhere.

And yet ... nothing much has happened in the intervening eight months. Simply knowing that the police misbehaved does nothing to bring them to account.

Transparency means nothing unless it is accompanied by the rule of law. It means nothing unless it is set in a system of good and responsible government, of oversight of authority that expeditiously and effectively handles citizen complaints. Transparency means nothing without justice.

Do we have justice in the UK? That depends on what happens to the coppers who swung the batons in the video, and on the commanders and politicians who directed them to commit civil and physical violence against peaceful, lawful protesters.

Transparency on its own is nothing more than spectacle: it's just another season of Big Brother in which all the contestants are revealed, over and over again, as thugs. Transparency on its own robs as much hope as it delivers, because transparency without justice is a perennial reminder that the game is rigged and that those in power govern for power's sake, not for justice.

This piece originally appeared in The Guardian.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Transparency and Human Rights at 2:32 PM)

Transparency and the Financial Crisis

Alex Steffen — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 18:01:27 +0000

Would greater transparency have helped stave off the current financial crisis? There's more and more evidence that it might have, and more and more voices calling for a new approach moving forward.

Consider this column by ally Dan Gillmor, in which lays out the case for the public's access to financial information:

Journalists have an opportunity, right now, to ask questions we need answered -- and they should be asking again and again, and again. Taxpayers (or rather our children and grandchildren, who'll pay for this) are forking over $700 billion to bail out financial institutions, the first installment of trillions we're collectively spending to try to save American capitalism itself. Yet we aren't allowed to know how the money is being spent. This isn't merely opaque; it's the blackest of boxes, and occasional queries from journalists aren't helping to make it transparent. Congress is the most culpable party in this case; as usual, lawmakers have dodged their responsibility, but an insistent journalistic campaign wouldn't hurt and might actually help dislodge some facts.
Once upon a time, news people went on campaigns when they saw the need. Sometimes this led to yellow journalism, as when newspaper owners used their publications to stir up the populace in dangerous ways. At other times, however, old-fashioned press campaigns led to change for the better; back when editorial pages had more influence in communities, a few courageous newspaper editors in the South campaigned for school integration, and made an enormous difference.

Journalistic activism -- precisely what we need despite most journalists' disdain for the idea -- won't save newspapers that are suffering from a perfect storm of dwindling leadership and advertising losses. But as Online Journalism Review's Robert Niles recently wrote, journalists should "accept the responsibility to demand action" based on what they learn when they do their jobs right.

Transparency International -- the world's most-respected anti-corruption NGO -- goes farther, saying that at its very root, the financial crisis is "a betrayal of the public trust," and arguing that the very first steps taken ought to be about ripping open closed doors and restoring public oversight to public money:

1) Regulation and supervision: Secure greater transparency and public accountability in order to restore public trust and adopt a far more consistent and internationally coordinated framework for regulation and supervision of all financial institutions.
2) Rescue measures: Ensure effective safeguards with transparency and accountability at the forefront, in all aspects of public management of taxpayers’ funds, in support of efforts to restore the sound functioning of financial institutions and markets.

3) Offshore havens: Halt evasion of all tax and financial regulations and the facilitation of illicit activities through use of “offshore havens” and ensure that these centres cooperate fully with other national and international authorities on the exchange of information.

4) Governance: Build strong corporate governance, including board accountability, with emphasis on executive compensation, risk management and disclosure on financial products.

5) Conflicts of Interest: Take measures to prevent conflicts of interest in the activities of credit rating agencies, auditing firms, and in relationships between financial firms and the public sector.

6) Investigations and Sanctions: Pursue appropriate criminal investigations in compliance with existing laws and regulations, and impose strong sanctions where corruption, insider trading and other abuses are found.

7) Aid: Take urgent action to address rising global poverty resulting from the current crisis by increasing official development assistance, with particular emphasis on those in greatest need and with the necessary accountability mechanisms.

Any bright green future will, of necessity be a far more transparent future. Openness is a quality of resilience and sustainability.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Transparency and Human Rights at 10:01 AM)

Universal Jurisdiction in the 21st Century

Sarah Kuck — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 22:14:16 +0000

Image credit: Wikipedia

The 21st century could be the time when we decide upon a solution that will bring justice those who commit crimes against humanity.

A growing global desire and the increasing potential capacity to punish those who commit heinous crimes started to take shape after World War II. With their mantra as "never again," members of the United Nations General Assembly began negotiations to form the world's first international court.

After decades of debate, the United Nations General Assembly put forth a treaty, which created the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in 2002. Approximately 108 states are members of the court, and about 40 states have signed but not ratified the treaty.

India, China, Russia and the United States are among those who have not signed. Although Clinton signed the treaty on his way out of office, President George W. Bush withdrew the signature.

In an opinion piece for the International Herald Tribune, Roger Cohen commented on how this impacted U.S. international relations, and what a new administration, such as Obama's, could mean for the ICC:

This remarkable, and gleeful, "un-signing" was followed by an aggressive campaign to oblige countries to make a formal commitment, under threat of U.S. reprisals, never to surrender U.S. citizens to the court.

Former Republican Congressman Tom DeLay caught the snarling Bush-Cheney view of the institution when he referred to a "kangaroo court" that was a "clear and present danger" to Americans fighting the war on terror.

As a result, I can think of no better place for President-elect Barack Obama to start signaling a changed American approach to the world, and particularly its European allies, than the ICC. Even short of American membership, which would involve a tough battle in Congress, there is much he can do. But "re-signing" followed by ratification should be Obama's aim.

The effect of U.S. rejection of the court, combined with the trashing of habeas corpus at Guantánamo Bay, has been devastating. Allies from Canada to Germany that are court members have been dismayed by the U.S. dismissal of an institution they see doing evident good.
...
Obama should now confront U.S. responsibility, and signal a new commitment to multilateralism, in his attitude toward the court. After the terrible decade of the 1990s, with its genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda and the loss there of a million lives while the United States and its allies dithered, it is unconscionable that America not stand with the institution that constitutes the most effective legal deterrent to such crimes.

Universal Jurisdiction is vital for the creation of a just global society. Simply signing and ratifying a treaty will of course not instantly bring peace and justice to all, but the action would carry heavy significance none the less. I think Alex Steffen said it well when he wrote that "Universal Jurisdiction may not save us from the crazies, but it will weaken their rule and make them think twice - for them, somewhere, always, the gavel will be hanging in mid-air."

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(Posted by Sarah Kuck in Transparency and Human Rights at 2:14 PM)

Install a Trojan for Israel? Uh, no Thanks.

Ethan Zuckerman — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 21:24:03 +0000

During the conflict between Russia and Georgia this past summer, my friend Evgeny Morozov decided to study the dynamics of “cyberwar” by becoming a partisan. He lurked on Russian-language bulletin boards and followed instructions to download software that would allow him to participate in distributed denial of service attacks against Georgian websites. Some were simple webpages with a few lines of javascript designed, essentially, to press the reload button over and over. Others were slightly more sophisticated, written as .BAT files, but essentially using the same methodology. (Morozov, to be clear, isn’t especially sympathetic to the Russian cause, and it’s unlikely that his brief stint as cyberpartisan did any significant damage.)

It’s becoming increasingly common for realworld conflict to include a digital dimension, typically attacks designed to disable websites that promote the other side’s cause. In an article last summer, I questioned whether this form of activity really deserved to be called “cyberwar” as it’s not an attack on their forces or infrastructures, more analogous to graffiti than grenades. I got a lot of feedback on that story, including observations from some in the security community that there appeared to be two levels of hacking going on: the “kid’s stuff” that Morozov documented and larger attacks that some felt bore the fingerprints of commercial hacking groups like the Russian Business Network.
Against this backdrop, it’s not surprising to see hackers working in support of Israel and Palestine during the current Gaza conflict. Zone-H.org, a site that tracks website defacement and other forms of hacking, offers some interesting screenshots of US military sites defaced by Turkish hackers in support of Gazans. But what’s got cyberwar geeks buzzing is the “help-israel-win” project put together by a group of Israeli students and hackers.

The group’s website - which is moving around as pro-Palestinian hackers flood it with DDOS attacks - invites partisans to download an .exe file, install it on their computers and start it from a link on their desktop. The website - with instructions available in Hebrew, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian - doesn’t make it very clear what the tool does: “We created a project that unites the computer capabilities of many people around the world. Our goal is to use this power in order to disrupt our enemy’s efforts to destroy the state of Israel. The more support we get, the efficient we are!” In response to apparent user concerns, it includes the reassurances, “The file is harmless to your computer and could be immediately removed. There is no need for identification of any kind - anonymity guaranteed!”

Bojan Zdrnja of the Internet Storm Center has been analyzing the program and offers some good technical reasons (aside from whatever political reasons you might or might not have) to install the software. The code is obfuscated to make it harder to analyze, but he was able to determine that the program connects to one of thirteen IRC servers, where it waits for instructions for a target to attack. This is the working method used by botnets, collections of computers compromised by trojan horse software so that the botnet controller can unleash massive denial of service attacks. These attacks are usually a form of extortion - this excellent piece by Evan Ratliffe helps explain some of the economics behind the attacks and the measures some are taking to fend them off.

It appears that the “help-israel-win” folks are asking partisans to voluntarily join a botnet, which could be pointed at pro-Palestinian websites. In his analysis of the software, Zdrnja saw no evidence that the botnet was actually attacking anything - his client connected to an IRC room and waited for instructions, indefinitely. He worries, though, that the client has the ability to update itself and might currently be in a dormant state. If that’s the case, it’s easy to imagine an update that makes the software uninstallable, allowing the machine to be used as part of a botnet aimed at an arbitrary target.

In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t a huge technical development. By some estimates 1/4 of all Windows PCs are part of one or more botnets, and this new botnet would be quite modest in comparison to the commercial botnets discovered by police and system administrators. What’s interesting is the way in which citizen propaganda and hacking are coming together.

Pro-Israel netizens already have robust tools to allow them to support Israel’s political communication strategy. Give Israel Your United Support offers a downloadable tool that identifies online stories, surveys and other places where pro-Israel comments and votes can be left online. The tool urges partisans to respond to each of these stories - as anyone who’s run a media organization that reports on Israel and Palestine, stories on the conflict routinely generate 5-50x the traffic of other stories, in part due to efforts like GIYUS.

I suspect it’s a small step, conceptually, from downloading a tool that prompts you to post comments to one that controls your computer as part of a DDOS attack. There are, of course, a couple of critical differences. Join “help-israel-win” and you’re breaking the law in most jurisdictions. And you’re giving a group of Israeli hackers unprecedented access to your computer, including the ability to install software which would let them index your hard drive or attack random targets across the web. (Wouldn’t it be ironic if RBN or others had started a project based on nationalist sentiment designed to open back doors in computers to compromise them for commercial purposes?)

I’ll be very interested to see whether this idea takes off, either growing a robust botnet around this project or being adopted by other “cyberwarriors.” Whoever’s using these tools, this looks a lot like the dark side of Clay Shirky’s “ridiculously easy group forming.” It’s one thing to form groups to debate and counter opinion online - forming groups to shut down websites looks a lot like gang thuggery to me.

Thanks to Ron Deibert for pointing me to the Wired article on the “help-israel-win” project.

This piece originally appeared on Ethan Zuckerman's blog, My Heart's In Accra

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(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Transparency and Human Rights at 1:24 PM)

Happy Human Rights Day: Live and Do So Peacefully.

Sarah Kuck — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 02:07:53 +0000

On Dec. 10, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the first global definition of human rights. The document was written to promote the universal human right: to live and to do so peacefully. With versions available in more than 337 languages, the UDHR holds the record for the world's most translated document.

To celebrate Human Rights Day, our worldchanging allies at WITNESS -- who usually use video to document and expose human rights violations - are turning the camera around on themselves, friends and family to ask "What image opened your eyes to human rights?"

Head to their site to check out some of the footage they have collected so far or to leave your own thoughts. Check out past Worldchanging articles about WITNESS here and here.

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(Posted by Sarah Kuck in Transparency and Human Rights at 6:07 PM)

Jennifer Bussell on eGovernment, corruption and governance

Ethan Zuckerman — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:28:28 +0000

For the past decade or so, there’s been a movement to bring computers, telephones and other “information and communication technology” into developing nations to increase economic development and eliminate poverty. Those of us involved with this movement - colloquially called ICT4D (Information and communication technology for development) - have argued that information imbalances underly major problems in economic development. If farmers don’t know fair prices for their commodities in big cities, they’ll sell for too little money. If students can’t access textbooks or other resources, they’re doomed to a poor education.

There’s a strong critique of ICT4D that argues that the importance of information is overstated and that ICT4D proponents either overvalue information technology because they’re personally attached to the tools, or more sinisterly, because they’re looking to create developing world markets for these tools. Many supporters of ICT4D - myself included - will concede that there are lots of badly thought out and poorly executed projects that do little more than drop expensive technology in areas where it’s a scarce resource and likely to stay a scarce resource for a long time to come.

One bright light for the ICT4D field has been the rise of eGovernment, a movement that tries to get governments to deliver key services to citizens using digital technology. India has been the location for many eGovernment pilot projects, some of which have been very successful in delivering key information services to citizens. In many states, citizens can visit information centers where they can obtain driver’s licenses, business licenses, residency or birth certificates, and other critical documents.

Jennifer Bussell, a political scientist who recently completed a PhD at UC Berkeley, has spent a great deal of time studying these projects and asks a tricky and important question about eGovernment in India - why do some states adopt eGovernance more readily than others? Are there policy environments that we can put in place to make it more likely that eGovernment projects will succeeed and that they’ll affect the lives of citizens positively?

In a talk at the Berkman Center on Tuesday, she offered an interesting opening paradox. The state of Karnataka is comparatively wealthy and extremely engaged with information technology - its capital is Bangalore, the epicenter of India’s technology and outsourcing industries. Chhattisgarh is a new state, carved out of Madhya Pradesh in 2000, and is extremely poor and low-tech. We’d expect eGovernment services to catch on in Karnataka much more quickly than in Chhattisgarh… and we’d be wrong. eGovernment has caught on far more quickly in this young, poor state than in the technology giant, raising questions about what factors actually contribute to the success or failure of eGovernment projects.

To understand what’s going on in these two states - and indeed, across many of India’s states (Bussell developed her theories in seven Indian states and has tested them on nine additional states, analyzing 16 of India’s 28 states) - it’s important to understand corruption, and how eGovernment might affect corruption. Indian citizens pay a lot of money in bribes. It’s estimated that Indians pay $5 billion USD annually to bribe government officials. Sometimes this is wealthy citizens paying money to “jump the queue” and obtain services more quickly that average citizens. But extremely poor citizens pay bribes as well - Bussell references a study that suggests that citizens below the poverty line collectively paid $22 million in bribes to access essential and guaranteed government services.

Taking old, paper-based bureacracies and turning them into “e-government” services appears to squeeze some opportunities for corruption - “rent-seeking”, in the language of political economics - out of the system. It’s not entirely clear why this is - the service centers rolled out in Indian states don’t generally put computers in the hands of citizens and let them access services directly. There’s an opportunity for the operators of these new systems to seek bribes. But the digitalization of India’s massive railway system is a good example of what’s happened in some eGovernment systems. Before digitalization, it was difficult to purchase a ticket without knowing someone to bribe within the system. Now tickets can be purchased online, and transactions within railway stations are simple, efficient and bribe-free (even if you’re a clueless American looking for trains from Rajastan to Delhi, as happened to me not very long ago.)

Bussell argues that e-services tend to systematically reduce corruption, and that they therefore can be threatening to existing political elites. Elites have the power of transferring bureacrats, moving them from a job where it’s easy to seek bribes (the customs service) to one where it’s harder to do so. They exercise this power by demanding kickbacks from bureacrats, which they use as campaign finance. A politician whose political livelihood relies on control of bribes and rent-seeking officials is likely to be threatened by eGovernment efforts and might fight their introduction.

Bussell further theorizes that the removal of bribes could be a threat to political stability within coalition governments. A coalition can be thought of as a group of politicians all seeking a share of the benefits of being in control of a state’s government - part of this control includes control over offices with a high chance for gains through corruption. So she theorizes that we’ll see eGovernment projects succeed in areas where there’s lower corruption, and where there’s a single party in power.

She studies eGovenrment adoption by tracking how many services are available in a given state - some offer just a few, like driver’s licenses, while others offer dozens. Her models try to explain the adoption of eGovernment services in terms of several factors. Some turn out to be largely irrelevant. Technology infrastructure isn’t statistically significant in explaining why some states have aggresively embraced eGovernment. Nor is the time of adoption - states that started eGovernment earlier aren’t neccesarily ahead of the curve. And the level of economic development isn’t statistically significant either.

Corruption, on the other hand, is a strong factor - states with above average corruption (based on surveys by groups like Transparency International) have adopted 10.6 services on average, while those with below-average corruption average out at 20.1 services. Unitary government matters as well - single party governments with below average corruption adopt services more aggresively than coalition governments, even in below-average corruption states.

This is useful information for anyone attempting to build eGovernment systems and roll them out in developing nations, though it doesn’t offer much insight on what to do if you’re in a high-corruption, coalition-governed area. (Duck and cover, perhaps.) And there’s a intriguing larger question - how does the introduction of eGovernment affect corruption in the long term? Do states that adopt eGovernment systems become progressively less corrupt over time? Bussell’s intrigued by these questions and looking for ways to study them going forward, which is good news for anyone who cares about ICT4D and wants to make sure people are doing rigorous, careful evaluation of what works and what fails.

This post originally appeared on Ethan Zuckerman's blog, My heart's in Accra.

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(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Transparency and Human Rights at 10:28 AM)

The Complexity of Sharing Scientific Databases

Ethan Zuckerman — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:44:42 +0000

Creative Commons is a clever use of the copyright system intended to make it easier for people who want to, to share their work with others. Jonathan Coulton has used Creative Commons to enable an army of remixers and videomakers to produce promotional materials for his songs and albums. Authors like Dan Gillmor and Cory Doctorow have used Creative Commons to let people download, translate and make audio versions of their books. And Global Voices uses Creative Commons so that blogs and news sites can use our content without asking us for permission.

What about scientists?

That’s the research interest of my colleague Melanie Dulong de Rosnay. She’s using her time as a Berkman fellow to study alternative copyright systems and their usage and relevance within academic and library communities. Yesterday, Melanie presented research on the licensing of scientific databases and the obstacles such licensing presents to collaboration between scientists around the world.

Under US law, pretty much anything you write down is copyrighted. Scrawl an original note on a napkin and it’s protected until 70 years after your death. Facts, however, are another matter - they can’t be copyrighted. So while trivial but creative scribblings are copyrighted, unless you choose to release them into the public domain, the information painstakingly discovered about the human genome - DNA sequences, for instance - aren’t. But the containers they’re stored in - the databases they’re held in - can be copyrighted.

If I sound confused about this stuff, that’s because I am. And so were the folks at Science Commons, the project that spun off from Creative Commons to focus on open publishing of scientific information. For a couple of years, they offered a wonderfully complex FAQ on applying Creative Commons licenses to databases - the first question read “Can a Creative Commons license be applied to a database?” After a six paragraph answer to that question, the third question read, “So, a Creative Commons license can be applied to a database?”

The approach Science Commons is taking now is a different one - they’re now recommending use of a protocol that specifies how data can be made Open Access - the FAQ on that protocol explains that the complexities of asking scientists to release their data under Creative Commons licenses was so severe that Science Commons has ended up advocating for data to be released public domain, under the auspices of their protocol, instead.

This question of complexity is what Melanie’s research has focused on. She looked at the terms of use for roughly 200 databases necessary for work in the life sciences. Evaluating the terms on all those databases, she discovered that only seven met her stringent definitions of Open Access to data - these databases could be accessed without registration; they could be downloaded for local use; they could be incorporated into other works; they had clear, understandable terms of use. This last factor proved to be the most challenging. She spent hours reading these terms with other experts in the field and discovered that, a great deal of time, the experts disagreed on what was permitted under a specific agreement.

The reason this is important, Melanie explains, is that scientific research proceeds more quickly when researchers can share resources. But with databases encumbered by different, confusing legal protections, it can become a legal nightmare for researchers to do complex work building new tools that combine information from two databases in a novel way, for instance. And databases that are protected by access restrictions can be out of reach to scientists in developing nations who might not have the financial or technical resources to access them.

I was particularly intrigued by a comment from John Wilbanks, who runs the Science Commons project. He points out that a project like the database work Science Commons and Melanie are undertaking is basically one that seeks to make a cultural change, encouraging scientists to share data while retaining citation credit. In some scientific communities - particle physics, for instance - this is standard practice. In others - microbiology - it’s quite uncommon. Wilbanks suggests that this has something to do with the economics of the fields. There are only a few supercolliders, and physicists have to share them, while there are lots of bacteria out there.

I’m glad that researchers like Melanie are digging into these issues. I have a great deal of respect for anyone willing to take on the task of understanding these labyrinthine, illogical and extremely important systems… and a great deal of gratitude that I don’t do research in these areas myself… :-)

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(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Transparency and Human Rights at 9:44 AM)

Mapping electoral fraud in Zimbabwe

Ethan Zuckerman — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:27:08 +0000

As Zimbabwe faces a pivotal presidential election on March 29, expect a great deal of conversation about whether polls were free and fair. It may be very difficult to answer that question decisively, as the Zimbabwean government has been extremely restrictive in allowing election monitors into the country. AFP reports that the US and the EU have been denied access as observers; instead, the poll will be monitored by the African Union, SADC (the Southern Africa Development Community), China, Venezuela and Russia. Both SADC and the AU are heavily dominated by South Africa, which controversially pronounced the 2005 parliamentary elections as free and fair, despite widespread reports of human rights abuses.

There are lots of ways to rig an election, and it sure helps to be the incumbent if you’re planning on doing so. Morgan Tsvangarai, the candidate from the opposition MDC party, argues that the government has printed over 9 million ballots, which does seem like a lot for a nation of 5.9 million voters - he believes the excess ballots will be used to stuff ballot boxes. Other forms of rigging may be more subtle. The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission has recruited 90,000 polling officers, who will oversee voting at polling places. Polling officers are often asked to help illiterate voters cast their votes, which can lead to vote rigging. And the ZEC has primarily recruited schoolteachers - who are government employees - to serve as the polling officers.

The Zimbabwean government is evidently afraid that the US will attempt to monitor the election clandestinely. Government-controlled newspaper The Herald reports:

According to sources who work in the US embassy public affairs section, the embassy had decided to rope in the services of a number of NGOs, institutions and individuals to provide updates on the elections across the country.

Those recruited have also been mandated to provide “data” that will be used in the embassy’s final report on the elections and the briefing it will send back to Washington after the results have been announced for use in post-poll policy formulation. It is also understood that some of these NGOs and individuals volunteered their services when they heard that the US embassy was in the market for proxy observers.

That certainly makes sense. If I were a consular officer with the US state department, I’d be talking to anyone I could to try to get believable elections data. Unfortunately, this is likely to put additional pressure on reporters in Zimbabwe who are attempting to cover events. MISA - the Media Institute of Southern Africa, a leading free-press NGO in Zimbabwe - reports that they, along with several indepedent journalism organizations, are being accused of being “recruited” by the US Embassy. These accusations are based on the fact that MISA representatives attended a meeting in Pretoria on “the state of the media in Zimbabwe and the upcoming elections.” (Indeed, it’s this meeting that the Herald uses as “evidence” that journalists and NGO workers are now working for the US embassy.) These accusations raise the danger level for independent journalists in Zimbabwe, which was already extremely high.

All this is useful context in considering the project that activist organization Sokwanele announced today: a Google maps mashup of election-rigging incidents. Each icon on the map corresponds to a media report of an incident that controvenes SADC standards for a free and fair election. Clicking on an icon will take you to the issue of Sokwanele’s Zimbwbe Elections Watch newsletter, which summarizes media report on the elections, and to a database record, where each instance is coded as to which SADC rules it violates.

The Sokwanele site is very careful to note that these media reports represent a sample of violations of SADC standards. It’s very difficult for journalists to afford to travel to rural areas, so reports of possible rigging in those locations are less likely. And since Zimbabwe’s press climate is quite constrained, it’s likely that many incidents of election fraud will go unreported.

Sokwanele has employed some clever and careful tactics here. Because they’re not accepting reports of election fraud, they’re not reporters so much as aggregators. That may help them steer clear of Zimbabwe’s laws which require journalists to be licensed - were they to attempt a strategy like Ushahidi’s of allowing citizens to report incidents of violence, I suspect they’d be shut down immediately.

Will Sokwanele’s map show us whether the Zimbabwe election was rigged? It’s possible that it already has - the map is filled with incidents of “political cleansing”, violence where people who don’t hold membership cards in ZANU-PF have been chased out. If you can’t safely make it to a polling place, you can’t vote. There are countless reports of failures to register voters, of food being given to government supporters and not to the opposition, of violence from police and troops against citizens.

It’s hard to know what a map like this can do in a situation as volatile as the Zimbabwe elections. Very, very few Zimbabweans can afford to go online and look at the map before casting their votes. And Mugabe’s government is unlikely to be shamed by this thorough cataloging of offenses. But it’s possible that SADC might, and that international attention to the circumstances surrounding the election could make it harder for observers in countries that neighbor Zimbabwe to close their eyes to election rigging.

(This article first appeared on Ethan's excellent personal blog, My Heart's In Accra)

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(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Transparency and Human Rights at 4:27 PM)

Mapping electoral fraud in Zimbabwe

Ethan Zuckerman — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:27:08 +0000

As Zimbabwe faces a pivotal presidential election on March 29, expect a great deal of conversation about whether polls were free and fair. It may be very difficult to answer that question decisively, as the Zimbabwean government has been extremely restrictive in allowing election monitors into the country. AFP reports that the US and the EU have been denied access as observers; instead, the poll will be monitored by the African Union, SADC (the Southern Africa Development Community), China, Venezuela and Russia. Both SADC and the AU are heavily dominated by South Africa, which controversially pronounced the 2005 parliamentary elections as free and fair, despite widespread reports of human rights abuses.

There are lots of ways to rig an election, and it sure helps to be the incumbent if you’re planning on doing so. Morgan Tsvangarai, the candidate from the opposition MDC party, argues that the government has printed over 9 million ballots, which does seem like a lot for a nation of 5.9 million voters - he believes the excess ballots will be used to stuff ballot boxes. Other forms of rigging may be more subtle. The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission has recruited 90,000 polling officers, who will oversee voting at polling places. Polling officers are often asked to help illiterate voters cast their votes, which can lead to vote rigging. And the ZEC has primarily recruited schoolteachers - who are government employees - to serve as the polling officers.

The Zimbabwean government is evidently afraid that the US will attempt to monitor the election clandestinely. Government-controlled newspaper The Herald reports:

According to sources who work in the US embassy public affairs section, the embassy had decided to rope in the services of a number of NGOs, institutions and individuals to provide updates on the elections across the country.

Those recruited have also been mandated to provide “data” that will be used in the embassy’s final report on the elections and the briefing it will send back to Washington after the results have been announced for use in post-poll policy formulation. It is also understood that some of these NGOs and individuals volunteered their services when they heard that the US embassy was in the market for proxy observers.

That certainly makes sense. If I were a consular officer with the US state department, I’d be talking to anyone I could to try to get believable elections data. Unfortunately, this is likely to put additional pressure on reporters in Zimbabwe who are attempting to cover events. MISA - the Media Institute of Southern Africa, a leading free-press NGO in Zimbabwe - reports that they, along with several indepedent journalism organizations, are being accused of being “recruited” by the US Embassy. These accusations are based on the fact that MISA representatives attended a meeting in Pretoria on “the state of the media in Zimbabwe and the upcoming elections.” (Indeed, it’s this meeting that the Herald uses as “evidence” that journalists and NGO workers are now working for the US embassy.) These accusations raise the danger level for independent journalists in Zimbabwe, which was already extremely high.

All this is useful context in considering the project that activist organization Sokwanele announced today: a Google maps mashup of election-rigging incidents. Each icon on the map corresponds to a media report of an incident that controvenes SADC standards for a free and fair election. Clicking on an icon will take you to the issue of Sokwanele’s Zimbwbe Elections Watch newsletter, which summarizes media report on the elections, and to a database record, where each instance is coded as to which SADC rules it violates.

The Sokwanele site is very careful to note that these media reports represent a sample of violations of SADC standards. It’s very difficult for journalists to afford to travel to rural areas, so reports of possible rigging in those locations are less likely. And since Zimbabwe’s press climate is quite constrained, it’s likely that many incidents of election fraud will go unreported.

Sokwanele has employed some clever and careful tactics here. Because they’re not accepting reports of election fraud, they’re not reporters so much as aggregators. That may help them steer clear of Zimbabwe’s laws which require journalists to be licensed - were they to attempt a strategy like Ushahidi’s of allowing citizens to report incidents of violence, I suspect they’d be shut down immediately.

Will Sokwanele’s map show us whether the Zimbabwe election was rigged? It’s possible that it already has - the map is filled with incidents of “political cleansing”, violence where people who don’t hold membership cards in ZANU-PF have been chased out. If you can’t safely make it to a polling place, you can’t vote. There are countless reports of failures to register voters, of food being given to government supporters and not to the opposition, of violence from police and troops against citizens.

It’s hard to know what a map like this can do in a situation as volatile as the Zimbabwe elections. Very, very few Zimbabweans can afford to go online and look at the map before casting their votes. And Mugabe’s government is unlikely to be shamed by this thorough cataloging of offenses. But it’s possible that SADC might, and that international attention to the circumstances surrounding the election could make it harder for observers in countries that neighbor Zimbabwe to close their eyes to election rigging.

(This article first appeared on Ethan's excellent personal blog, My Heart's In Accra)

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(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Transparency and Human Rights at 4:27 PM)

Samantha Power on stopping genocide

Ethan Zuckerman — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 17:45:36 +0000

Samantha Power has a hell of a resume. She’s a celebrated journalist, a Pulitzer-winning author, a Harvard professor and an Obama advisor. She deserves the recognition she gets - she’s one of the smartest people in the world on foreign policy, and especially on the subject of mass atrocities.

She starts with a story about the Rwandan genocide, which killed 800,000 people in a very short time, with almost no intervention from the outside world. She tells us that, on April 21, 1994, the New York Times ran a story about 200-300,000 people who’d already died in the genocide. That day, reporters met with Colorado congresswoman Patricia Schroeder, asking her why the US government wasn’t doing anything about Rwanda and why the genocide wasn’t seen as newsworthy. Schroeder told the reporters that House members were getting dozens of calls about the lives of gorillas and apes, but no calls about human lives.

At that point, Power tells us that there was an endangered species movement, but no endangered people’s movement. We’ve embraced the idea of the holocaust in the US, built a museum to it, but “we haven’t figured out how to implement ‘never again’”.

In this century, we have an anti-genocide movement, a student movement that has appeared “almost out of nowhere.” There are more people involved on high school and college campuses that is now “bigger than the anti-apartheid movement.” The goal of this movement is to raise the political cost for not standing up against genocide.

The movement has done some very creative things. It’s run a thorough divestment campaign, trying to get businesses, university and government investors out of Sudan. They’ve launched “1-800-GENOCIDE”, a toll-free number that allows you to enter your zipcode and contact your congressperson directly. “They’ve lowered the transaction cost of stopping genocide.” They issue genocide grades to representative, which leads to Congressmen calling 19-year old students and saying, “I got a D-! How do I get a C?”

Despite the political environment, this movement has put tremendous bottom-up pressure on the Bush administration, leading to support for a 26,000 person UN force in Darfur. And it’s led to huge amounts of humanitarian aid. Unfortunately, this aid needs to be heated and cooked, and women are still being forced to leave the camps to seek firewood and getting raped in the process. And almost no country has stepped forward to put troops in harms way to defend these camps.

She sees flaws in the movement - it’s American-centric, and it hasn’t gotten traction outside of the US. She believes the US is primed to fight genocide because of our obsession with the holocaust. (Bruno, sitting next to me, strongly disagrees - he sees lots of European movements and argues that they simply don’t coordinate with US movements for obvious reasons.) Power believes we need this to be a global movement - “Governments won’t gravitate to protecting our ports or reigning in loose nukes - they won’t protect against genocide in other countries without pressure.”

She believes that the US has a credibility problem in international institutions. “It’s hard to denounce genocide on Monday, continue waterboarding on Tuesday, and ask for troop commitments on Wednesday.” The recovery is going to take some time, “and it’s going to require more than just an Obama presidency.” (This is a clear violation of TED rules, which demand that you don’t sell from the stage, but it gets good applause.)

Power’s most recent work is on a biography of Sergio Vieria de Mello, the UN diplomat killed in Iraq in the first suicide bomb in that country - she honors his life in a biogaphy titled Chasing the Flame.

She describes de Mello as “a cross between James Bond and Bobby Kennedy - not many people in the UN have those qualities.” She celebrates his ingenuity, referring to him as “a decathalete of statebuilding in failed states.” He worked in 14 war zones, spoke seven languages and took on some of the hardest tasks the UN had to offer, including how to figure out how to feed refugees in Eastern DRC without feeding the genocidaires.

His death was a terrible illustration of the fact that the Bush administration did no pre-war planning to respond to terrorism, despite the fact that the administration went to war by connecting Saddam and terror. The US military was so woefully unprepared that the rescue effort for de Millo involved a women’s handbag and a curtain rope used to haul debris off him. “The upside of Sergio’s death and the other 21 who died that day is that the US military created a search and rescue team.”

She offers four lessons from Sergio’s life:
- Find a balance between refusing to talk to evil and excusing it
- Find a way to give aid without damaging people’s dignity
- Don’t let your fear get in the way of action - recognize genuine threats
- Be aware of the complexity of these issues, but don’t be overwhelmed by it.

It’s clear Power has more she wants to say, and that she almost can’t stop talking about de Mello and the lessons of his life. One of my fellow bloggers argues that she’s too close to the story - there’s a strong sense from this talk that she was profoundly affected by de Mello’s death and can’t let go of the story.

This piece is Creative Commons licensed and may be found here.

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(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Transparency and Human Rights at 9:45 AM)