- Notes from the director

The thematic focus of this newsletter is Internet and democracy, in recognition of Spider's work in this area as well as the upcoming Stockholm Internet Forum on 18-19 April 2012. The forum, with its theme Internet Freedom for Global Development, has attracted many participants from around the world, including several of our partners and collaborators from Asia and Africa. We are particularly pleased that six representatives from the Spider-supported network ICT4Democracy East Africa will attend the Stockholm Internet Forum. We appreciate the article “ICT and Democracy - a complex field” by our East African partner Lillian Nalwoga (CIPESA) in this volume, highlighting the use of ICT in furthering democractic processes in Uganda, and the complexities this entails.

We also recognize the upcoming Global INET 2012 in Geneva on 24-25 April that will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Internet Society (ISOC). During this event ISOC will inaugurate the Internet Hall of Fame to showcase the history of the Internet and the invaluable contributions of some of the world’s Internet pioneers. These committed individuals have built the technical and cultural foundation for the global Internet. In the words of Vint Cerf, the Father of the Internet, on 12 September 2001 (in response to 9/11): “Information is the torch of truth and its free flow is the bloodstream of democracy.” We are honoured that Internet pioneer Prof. Oliver Popov at DSV has agreed to write an article for this issue, “Internet – inherently democratic and transformative.” The article offers an in-depth historical analysis of the open standards of the Internet and the value of ‘rough consensus and running code.’

In the next Spider ICT4D Seminar on 26 April, Johan Hellström (PhD student at DSV) will present his research on mobiles and democracy in East Africa: "Mobile hype? The role of mobile technology in transparency, accountability and participation.” We welcome you to this exciting seminar that is also webcast.

Finally, as you can see from our new web site, Spider 2.0 is making good progress. We have recently launched our first project in Cambodia, in partnership with the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) and Open Institute, and more projects are in the pipeline. We have also granted Master travel grants to eight partner universities and research grants for six of our ongoing projects. A new call for research grants will be announced shortly.

Paula Uimonen, Director of Spider.

 

 

By: O.B. Popov

The Internet is an omnipresent, global, decentralized, generative, and almost cosmic information space. It was designed for communication and collaboration, based on a resilient, robust and hence a reliable network infrastructure capable of preserving most of the services even in case some of the member nodes are lost. It has proved to be a fertile platform for social interaction, economic innovation and progress, entertainment, knowledge sharing and distribution, which also includes a massive amount of trivia and activities that are not legal.

It is tolerant and inherently democratic since all data packets are created equal. There are no guarantees for the quality of what is being delivered over the network. This may be considered as a symbol of fairness in global networking since each device or actually the user behind it has a kind of intended functionality. They, the users, also bring awareness and autonomy through the intelligent end points, which induce self-determinism as long as there is a commitment to the Internet open protocols.

Modeling Internet through its traffic patterns, studying its performance and moreover economic, cultural and social impact is a tremendous and ever challenging task due to the number of different states, their intrinsic dynamics, the combinatorial growth in size and numbers of users, and their unlimited creativity. The evolution and advancement the Internet depends on developing comprehensive and coherent parsimonious models of its behavior, and looking for things that do not change - termed as the invariants.

The invariants come from many different origins; the engineering ideas and design concepts translated into protocols that range from the original IP to HTTP; the Internet governance principles such as the light, devolved and almost informal framework that signifies a unique blend of local and national regulations, self-imposed values and constraints, and multi-stakeholder organizations and institutions with their own interests and ambitions. Most important of all, for almost thirty years, the Internet has been guided and fostered by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), under the umbrella of Internet Society, based on the imagination and the vision of its members. This paradigmatic conglomeration of creativity and yet simplicity and moderation, which inter alia has been expressed through thousands of Request for Comments (RFC) documents and is echoed in the words of one of the principal Internet architects David D. Clark with “We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code”.

Since the dawn of the Internet, it has been rather problematic for governments and traditional telecommunications companies that were actually state monopolies to understand that something can work and work so well without and beyond their control. They simply could not comprehend that consensus is one of the invariants of human civilization and it has a similar semantic imprint as democracy. Born in the research and education labs in United States, embraced by Europe and later by the rest of the world, the Internet harbored the same inclinations towards freedom and autonomy, and analogous attitudes towards restrictions and authorities as the plethora of scholars and students who contributed to its development.

In the last twenty years, many things have changed such as national and international regulatory frameworks, which introduced competition in the areas of communications and electronic services to the benefit to its customers and users. The old telecom companies, absorbed their arrogance, slowly adopted the Internet technology and forcefully entered the deregulated market. Governments understood that the Internet has become an agent of societal development and progress in every aspect of the contemporary society. Openness and transparency through the availability and accessibility of data and decision-making processes (which are made possible by the Net) are crucial for both preserving freedom and democracy or facilitating social movements towards them. The ideas that the access to the Internet should be considered as one of the basic human rights and that it may be considered as a public good are becoming a reality.

At the same time, governments are often about power and control, a privilege that nearly all governments share. From the very beginning there have been inclinations and attempts to control the public Internet and impose a form of censorship over the transmitted content. In a world where even crimes and terrorism are digital, and cyber war readiness is on agenda on many governments, it is their legitimate right and duty to protect the society in general from fraud, embezzlement, the distribution of offensive material that is morally, culturally and religiously inflammatory and unpalatable. This mission has produced a myriad of policies, strategies and tools to impose restrictions on and block various parts of the global Net. While, the ingenuity of the technology and the creativity of the users make permanent Internet blackouts virtually impossible, there are many examples where the access to the various Internet content has been either severely restricted or entirely blocked.

There are no boarders or passport controls for the Internet packets. Hence, in addition to regulatory and legal frameworks that should be derived and enforced on the international arena, one needs an extensive technical expertize and skills in the areas of packet inspection, DNS filtering and poisoning, monitoring, surveillance, and perverted routing. There are ways through anonymization and delegation of the rights to bypass and circumscribe various censorship techniques. However, at the end of the day, the resources and the power of the government are limitless, as is their ability to identify other governments where similar ideas resonate well and who are willing to collaborate to impose cross-border monitoring and control.

The existence of numerous misconceptions about the Internet does not help in the ongoing battle for free and democratic Internet. One of those is that if something is on the Internet, it must be true. Another one is that the Net is amicable place by default. The Internet is no different then the world we live in. Indeed, it is the reflection of the society multiplied by the power of the Net as a function of its ability to contract space and compress time.

The real answer to address questions such as national security and safety, crimes that range from on-line fraud and phishing to child pornography, terrorism and human trafficking, is international collaboration through consensus combined with increased responsibility and accountability. Masking the need to control and restrict under the pretext of concerns for the intellectual property rights (the EU flavored ACTA and the US ill-fated SOPA) are hardly steps in the right direction.

After almost quarter of a century, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), an agency of the United Nations and therefore an organization with governments as members, is going to work on the International Telecommunication Regulation (ITR) with respect to the Internet. For this purpose, ITU is holding a series of preparatory meetings and consultations that will commence with the final conference in December of 2012. Currently, the underlying agreement does not deal with any of the existing Internet standards, or with the issues related to content and infrastructure. There are states, led by some of the world key political and economic players, which are pushing hard for the inclusion of the Internet regulation into the ITR treaty.

This takes the innovative, creative, and democratic attributes of the global Net out of the hands of the consensus-driven multi stakeholder communities, and standard bodies such as IETF, who have successfully met both technical and political challenges of the Internet since its inception, and giving the power mainly to the governments. As the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) demonstrated, whenever only governments are involved, there are natural obstacles for the civil society to fully participate and contribute towards a positive outcome that will make sure that all the inherited invariants of the Internet are preserved and propagated.

WSIS posited that transparency and decentralization are crucial for the diffusion and progress of the Internet. A fair, open and intensive debate is very much needed to ensure that the input from the public is present, discussed and eventually incorporated into the decisions to be made during the ITU main meeting by the end of the year.

As Rebecca MacKinnon argues in her book “Consent of the Networked”, the debate is no longer about whether or not the Internet is a force for political freedom and democracy or global tool for repression manipulation, but how the technology and governance may be improved and made more resilient to controlling and centralizing sentiments. The later are counterproductive for any stipulation of civil liberties including the freedom of speech on the Internet.

Ultimately, it is the moral duty and existential necessity for every generation to discover on its own the fundamental notions and implications of freedom and democracy. The same is true for the present generation signified by Twitter, You tube and Facebook. By using the instruments that make the whole Internet their neighborhood, it is possible that as John Perry Barlow writes to “create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace” that will “be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before”.

In that civilization deep packet inspection does not translate to massive privacy invasion, and people still believe in “rough consensus and running code”.

Oliver Popov is Professor and Head of the Systems Analysis and Security Unit at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University.

 

 

By: Lillian Nalwoga

In many countries, ICTs have been deployed to enhance communication, citizen advocacy, and democracy, as well as to enhance government transparency and accountability. In addition, ICTs are helping governments to become more efficient and effective in their interactions with citizens and in the delivery of services.

Uganda has not been left behind in the deployment of ICT tools to enhance governance, transparency and accountability. Various ICT tools in use, ranging from Internet based social media such as wikis, blogs, Facebook and Twitter, to more traditional media like radio and television, and print media.

Innovations, especially in mobile telephony, have showcased the capability of ICT for improved transparency and accountability in the delivery of public services. In the run-up to the elections, ICT tools were used broadly, for campaigning, tallying results, monitoring the actions of political groups and the electoral body, for civic education, and for activism. The tools included mobile phones, automated calls, and crowd sourcing platforms, radio and television, as well as social media. All these may have contributed to transparency in the elections, if although probably not to voter turn-out, which stood at 59% during the presidential poll, noted by Uchaguzi, Uganda.

Innovative platforms such as Uchaguzi and UgandaWatch 2010 crowd sourced information through SMS, from citizens reporting mainly on election irregularities. Uchaguzi, run by the Citizens' Coalition for Electoral Democracy in Uganda (CCEDU), and other civil society organisations, aggregated “citizens’ and election observers’ voices in near real time” on the elections, incorporating mobile phones, mapping tools, Twitter and Facebook on its online portal. On the other hand, UgandaWatch 2011 was a citizen-oriented online hotline similar to Uchaguzi, which encouraged citizens to report problems encountered in the electoral process. This system was jointly run by the Democracy Monitoring Group (DEMGroup) and CCEDU.

For its part, the Uganda Electoral Commission deployed an SMS platform that enabled citizens to verify their voter registration details. Through an SMS short code accessible across all mobile networks the commission enabled voters to send their voter-ID number and receive information verifying the polling station, parish and sub-parish where they had registered to vote, noted by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES). This provided a chance to voters who had no Internet access to verify their voting location and save time by avoiding going to the wrong polling stations.

A study conducted by the Collaboration on International ICT Policy in East and Southern Africa (CIPESA), with support from Spider, identified twenty-four ICT tools and seven main categories of use:

• Information provision
• Election monitoring
• Lobbying and activism
• Voter registration
• Elections reporting
• Citizen policing
• Civic participation: Post Elections

Social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs enabled information generation, sharing and awareness creation through alternative communication media where citizens' voices get heard. Pressure groups such as Activists for Change (A4C), Honour Your Vote, and the Return Our Money Campaign are examples of how activists have mobilised citizens to take an active role in democratic processes in Uganda. Political leaders are also using social media as vital tools for engaging with their constituencies, campaigning and fundraising.

The usability of these tools shows how citizens interact, not just with each other, but also with their elected officials, and have mechanisms for providing feedback to the relevant stakeholders, these innovations all clearly point to how ICT can instigate democracy and accountability while stimulating the need for open governance in Uganda.

However, the most immediate challenge to the adoption of these tools is that few Ugandans are embracing them. With a coverage of nearly 100% and with 910,000 new subscribers added each year the market penetration for voice calls currently stands at 45%. Studies have also shown that nearly half of mobile phone subscribers own at least two SIM cards. Moreover, even among the phone-owning class, for many use beyond voice (and Facebook) is not much to write home about.

The cost of accessing and using ICT, language barriers and low literacy levels as well as minimal attention by the government to boost the use of ICT in governance all hinder the effective use of these tools. It is therefore crucial for organizations that use ICT for participation and democracy to carry out extensive assessments before deploying the technology, collaboration rather than duplication, creating awareness and capacity among users, and continuously assess the impacts of ICT initiatives.

The CIPESA study found that while organisations were convinced that ICT had eased their work, helped them to communicate to wider audiences, empowered the citizens and promoted transparency, they were largely unaware of the numbers of people they were reaching or the extent of the impact created by their ICT tools. Project sustainability, addressing unequal access to and use of technology, literacy levels and promoting awareness were among the factors, which the study found to be important to the success of ICT for participation projects.

Lillian Nalwoga is Policy Officer at CIPESA. More information about the ‘ICT tools’ report and the Open Governance Readiness Study can be found on the CIPESA website, www.cipesa.org

 

 

By: Caroline Wamala

A number of organizations in east Africa are using ICT to hold leaders accountable, fight corruption, monitor service delivery, and contribute to building a democratic culture. The East Africa ICT4Democracy Network, supported by Spider, was launched in June 2011 to enable the participating organisations to have stronger impact, build a more sustainable initiative, and further enhance people’s capacity to act and participate in democratic processes.

Participating organisations are:

• iHub, Kenya
• Women of Uganda Network,
• Kenya Human Rights Commission, 
• Transparency International, Uganda
• Commission for Human Rights and Good Governance
• Collaboration on International ICT Policy for Eastern and Southern Africa, Uganda

For further information about the projects, visit www.ict4democracy.org.

The core problem is that despite the concerted efforts by international agencies, governments and local donors, ignorance prevails about human and citizen rights among the majority of communities. This perpetuates a culture of poor or bad service delivery across all sectors.

“In the developed world generally everyone is aware that water is a human right, health is a human right, in sub-Saharan Africa, or east Africa, people are unaware of these rights, clean water, or access to health is seen as a favour.”

Ashnah – CIPESA at M4D2012 New Delhi

Informing people about their rights to government services is the first step to engaging communities in holding their government accountable to better service delivery.

“So we are not just demanding accountability, we are making communities aware that you are entitled to freedom of expression, entitled to clean water, health etc. so we are engaging them, and they are participating, they are knowledgeable…we are going beyond survellieng and hold someone accountable.”

Ashnah – CIPESA  at M4D2012 New Delhi

 

Are ICTs the road to democracy?
While ICT can raise awareness on good governance, spread information on human and citizen rights and help monitor service delivery, it is

"merely an amplifier, that acts within the environment it is embedded in. ICT is not the panacea none of our projects think or say that technology is the answer, technology is probably solving 5% of the problem, the other 95% requires us as a people to come together. As long as the cohesion and symbiotic relationships in this network continue these projects will explode into some serious change and become sustainable, we are working together and mobile technology is creating effective change and the same model can be applied in other places, we are building something by learning from each other.”

Angela and Hilda – iHub at the M4D2012 Conference in Delhi

 

Caroline Wamala is Project officer at Spider and post-doc researcher at Karlstad University.

 

 

 

By: Lillian Nalwoga

Uganda stands at the threshold of an opportunity to boost the use of ICT to enhance democracy, governance and transparency through Open Government Data. Up to 99% of the country is covered by the telephone network, and Internet use is growing, with 850,200 mobile and 84,558 fixed Internet subscribers - translating into approximately 4.5 million Internet users. This is fuelled by greater availability of fibre optics, affordability of Internet-enabled mobile phones, and a growth in service providers.

Indeed, a study conducted by CIPESA in March-April 2012 established Uganda’s readiness for Open Government Data indicated that although Uganda is technically ready to open up its data to the public through ICTs political will is still insufficient. Open Government Data can enhance transparency, increase accountability and promote civic engagement in public service delivery. Citizens need to have access to information and policies to make informed political decisions. Access to information such as national demographics, government expenditures, poverty statistics, health and agricultural data, and government procurement – could make the delivery of public goods far more efficient and effective.

With the current legal and policy framework in place to implement Open Government Data and the creation of institutional frameworks and investments in ICT in public administration by the National IT Authority (NITA-U) all point to different efforts by government towards availing open data to the public. However, the Access to Information Act passed in 2005 is yet to be operationalized and information on ministerial and institutional websites is often not in a reusable format which supports the argument that there still exists a lack of general political will in the actual implementation of OGD. For instance, in July 2011, Uganda’s Minister for Finance and Planning attended the preparatory meeting for the Open Government Partnership (OGP) and pledged that Uganda would join the initiative. To date, this has not been achieved and no clear explanation has been offered by the government for its move.

The conclusion is that to successfully implement Open Government Data you need not only the right legislation, infrastructure, institutions and the competent human resource but also commitment to implement all these. The capacity and demand to re-use Open Government Data in Uganda exists in initiatives such as the Open Data Uganda and Publish What You Fund.

Accordingly, CIPESA is embarking on an advocacy and awareness-raising campaign on the potential of ICTs for democracy and governance, among them Open Government Data in Uganda. This will involve dissemination of the “State of Open Governance in Uganda”-study and how ICTs are promoting civic participation to various stakeholders and building a network of civil society organisations to lobby government to leverage on ICT toward a more transparent, accountable and democratic state.

 

Lillian Nalwoga is Policy Officer at CIPESA. More information about the ‘ICT tools’ report and the Open Governance Readiness Study can be found on the CIPESA website, www.cipesa.org.