Sanjana Hattotuwa has written a really thought-provoking piece on the limitations of using (mapping) technology to track election irregularities –
Unless awareness campaigns before an election, and advocacy campaigns after which bring to light, including name and shame, perpetrators of elections violence, these exercises alone, including my own, have little chance of really strengthening democracy.
Almost all digital activism campaigns can be categorized as successes or failures depending on the standards you hold them to.
A lot of campaigns succeed in creating compelling content and setting off conversations around it. A few campaigns are able to motivate their constituents to come together to co-create something meaningful. Very few are able to translate this online engagement into offline action. A handful result in fundamental real-world change.
I’m breaking the first cardinal rule of digital activism here and subjecting my own campaign to serious scrutiny while it is still on.
People tell me that Vote Report India is already a success, and I guess it is, by most standards. We have a fairly active community of 35-40 volunteers who are helping out with debugging and reporting, promoting the project on social media, and even creating posters and videos to help the idea go viral. We have established a number of important partnerships, more than a hundred blogs have already linked back to the website, and the media stories are beginning to trickle in.
However, even as I put in twenty-hour days to do justice to Vote Report India, I can’t but feel that we haven’t succeeded at all. We have less than two hundred reports on our system and many of them have been entered by our volunteers. We set out to crowdsource election monitoring, and I have to admit that we have failed so far. And, then, there is the even higher ideal of really making a difference, really making the Indian election process more transparent, really naming and shaming those who try to manipulate it. If I test Vote Report India against that touchstone, we aren’t even close.
So, I’m really grateful to all of you for blogging about Vote Report India, for promoting it on Twitter and Facebook, for encouraging us with kind words and kind acts, but I need you to do more. I need you to go out and vote and then report your voting experience, and I need you to ask your friends, relatives, and colleagues to do the same. Vote Report India is a platform we built for you, and unless you use it, it will fail, at least in my eyes, even if a thousand blogs link to us, and a hundred news stories mention us.
The next phase of the elections is on April 30th, and I’m counting on you to vote and report, and help Vote Report India achieve its objective of increasing transparency in the Indian election process.
Update: Ory Okolloh has earlier written about the challenges in using Ushahdi for crisis reporting in DRC, and the challenges we face are strikingly similar to the ones she talks about.
In response, Patrick Meier argued that the solution is to use Ushahidi for crowdsourcing early response, apart from crowdshourcing early warning. In practical terms, it means giving users localized information in the form of email and SMS feeds, and closing the loop with officials so that incidents are not only reported but also resolved.
Indeed, one of the questions we are repeatedly asked by users is: what happens after we report an incident? Although the Vote Report India feed is freely available, and Al Jazeera is using it to import our data into their India election console, our users want more, and we aren’t set up (yet) to offer more.
Time for course correction.
