Governances – Integra LLC

Anti-corruption, Civil Society, Democracy & Governance, Elections, Governances, Open Project Positions, Rule of Law

Project Director, USAID Analytical Services V (ASV)

Position: Project Director, USAID Analytical Services V (ASV)

Location: Remote/Washington DC

Integra is seeking Project Director candidates for an upcoming proposal on the multi-year Analytical Services V contract. This mechanism will provide the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance’s Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (DCHA/DRG) with the means to support US foreign policy objectives by promoting resilient, democratic societies. Support for DRG is vital to the pursuit of freedom and national security and is essential to achieve the Agency’s and the US Government’s broader social and economic development goals. The IDIQ will directly build on USAID’s DRG Strategy by supporting USAID Missions and other operating units to develop strategies and projects that will have the greatest impact.

Responsibilities:

Provide overall leadership and technical direction throughout the project’s life with a focus on achieving results as described in the contract.
Provide technical inputs on select activity proposal efforts.
Serve as a primary point of contact for USAID staff and relevant stakeholders, reporting on progress, assessing evolving needs, and communicating lessons learned.
Contribute to technical work products, provide quality assurance, and own the delivery of high-value reports and workshops to USAID clients.
Work with Integra home-office staff in personnel, contract administration and financial management of the overall project.

REQUIREMENTS:

Advanced degree in economics, statistics, sociology, international development or other social science fields.
Minimum of 10 years of experience in MEL and research activities for international development.
Minimum of 5 years of experience in direct management or oversight of USAID projects.
Experience working with USAID/DRG, BHA or OTI preferred.
Expertise in democratic governance, participation and inclusion, DEIA, free and fair elections, promoting independent media, civic engagement, rule of law, human rights, e-governance and digital democracy, anti-corruption, and countering authoritarianism highly preferred.
Proficiency in USAID regulations, FAR, ADS, procurement procedures, and contract compliance.
Experience managing teams of internal staff and consultants resulting in successful project delivery, with a strong preference for experience in managing the concurrent implementation of multiple task orders under similar IDIQ mechanisms.
Demonstrated experience in technical proposal writing skills for USAID, Department of State, Millennium Challenge Corporation, or other donors for procurement opportunities.
The ability to produce high-quality technical work expeditiously and independently.
Strong people skills evidenced by client and team management experience, including through Project Manager roles.
Proficiency in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Remuneration Package: A competitive package would be offered based on salary history and
work experience.

HOW TO APPLY: Qualified and interested candidates should submit a cover letter and CV to jobs@integrallc.com. Please include “Project Director, USAID Analytical Services V (ASV)” in the subject line of the e-mail. No phone calls please. Only short-listed candidates will be contacted.

Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.

Integra provides equal employment to all participants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, veteran or marital status.

October 18, 2024/by jschur

Anti-corruption, Democracy & Governance, Governances, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

New Ekiti state website enhances transparency

Kayode Fayemi, Governor Nigeria’s Ekiti state, has declared yesterday his administration is ready to integrate fully Information and Communications Technology (ICT).

Kayode Fayemi, Governor Nigeria's Ekiti state with a big smile

Kayode Fayemi, Governor Nigeria's Ekiti state, is happy about future the preliminary success of the Ekiti state's website. (image: file)

He even launched a new official website for the state. The new website will enhance accountability and transparency in governance he believes. The website is also expected to be interactive, easing access to government by providing diverse information on government activities.

The website also linked to Social Media sites like Facebook, Slideshare, Google Plus, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube, as well as mobile applications for Android and Blackberry devices, while Nokia and iPhone versions will be released within a month. Since its’ launch, the website has become the second most visited in Nigeria.

Ekiti is said to be the first state to have Quick Reference (QR) Codes integrated into its website. Fayemi also disclosed that his administration was providing laptops for students in public secondary schools.

While, the Ekiti State University (EKSU) is expected to be fully connected to the internet in two months time to allow students access to e-library. The site is expected to serve as an interactive platform between the people of the State and the government to get feedback and as means of engaging the younger generation.

Segun Adekoye

March 1, 2012/by actualize

Democracy & Governance, Governances, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Ghana embarking on e-government projects

Eleven Ghanian government departments and agencies will commence with e-government projects to improve service to its citizens, the government said on Wednesday.

William Tevie, National Information Technology Agency (NITA) Director General, encouraged members to get the discussions out of the way to get procedures underway. (image: flickr.com)

These agencies include Food and Drugs Board, National Communication Authority, Births and Death Registry, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Regional integration, Accra Metropolitan Assembly, Passport Office, National Health Insurance Scheme, National Information Technology Agency, Minerals Commission and Registrar Generals Department.

William Tevie, National Information Technology Agency (NITA) Director General, disclosed this at the stakeholders’ meeting on e-payment system implementation on Tuesday in Accra.

He said the meeting aimed to tackle issues concerning the online payment for government e-service being deployed in the varying stages of the implementation process. The e-government project ensures the presence of important and relevant government information on the web be noted.

The e-services being developed are a Content Management System (CMS) for managing hosted content on the government portal, a payment gateway allowing portal applications to receive payments from customers, e-forms and a document management application. The project is expected to provide a free flow of information between department and agencies, service providers and the public.

He also stated that NITA played a central role in the government e-service such as the geGov currently being used by the Registrar Generals Department and the Ghana Revenue Authority, which was a Public Private Partnership. “An e-justice system, e-immigration, e-parliament, e-passport and e-Government Procurement system are envisaged,” he added.

Tevie urged the participants to use the meeting to deliberate and come out with recommendations that would help establish an effective online payment system that would be of benefit to the economy.

Segun Adekoye

February 29, 2012/by actualize

Democracy & Governance, Governances, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Ruling on Tunisian internet censorship delayed

The Higher Tunisian Court trial about blocking certain websites has been postponed until 22 February.

Tunisian internet censorship issues remains undecided. (image: file)

The issue arose late last year after Tunisian lawyers filed lawsuits. They felt national policy was lax around access to adult websites. They proposed these be blocked, calling into question internet freedom.

The ATI (Tunisian Internet Agency) appealed the lawsuit, noting the financial and technical difficulties of censorship.

Throughout ousted President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s term internet filtering was implemented.

Tunisia’s has four million internet users. The government considers ICT central to helping the country’s growing economy.

February 16, 2012/by actualize

Civil Society, Democracy & Governance, Governances, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Twitter to block tweets

Micro blogging service and social media website Twitter revealed yesterday that they now have the ability to block certain Tweets from other users across the world. While certain Tweets may be perfectly legal in some countries, Twitter will begin to restrict Tweets in specific countries where content may be contentious.

Twitter now has the ability to block certain Tweets from other users (image: Bartelme Designs)

“Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country while keeping it available in the rest of the world. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression,” Twitter wrote on their blog.

As an example, the company said that Tweets with “pro-Nazi content” will not be visible in France and Germany, where it is banned – but will be visible to the rest of the world.

The announcement comes in stark contrast to a blog post last year during the Arab uprisings, when Twitter said it won’t censor Tweets.

“We do not remove Tweets on the basis of their content. Our position on freedom of expression carries with it a mandate to protect our users’ right to speak freely and preserve their ability to contest having their private information revealed.”

Charlie Fripp – Acting online editor

January 27, 2012/by actualize

Civil Society, Democracy & Governance, Elections, Governances, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

2011: A revolutionary year in democracy and governance

"Mohamed suffered a lot. He worked hard. But when he set fire to himself, it wasn't about his scales being confiscated. It was about his dignity." —Mannoubia Bouazizi, Tunisia Photograph by Peter Hapak for TIME

2011 will be remembered as the year that democratic awakening occurred in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Activists used information and communication technology (ICT) tools to organize and coordinate political demonstrations that brought an end to long-standing regimes and paved the way to landmark elections.

Time Magazine fittingly awarded the “Person of the Year” accolade to the protester. What would come to be known as the “Arab Spring” began in Tunisia’s under-developed town of Sidi Bouzid, where the late Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor whose wares were confiscated by the police, set himself on fire outside of a government building in December 2010. Few would have predicted that Bouazizi’s actions would trigger an uprising that brought an end to Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s 23-year-old regime on January 14th.

Video clips of the first protests, including demonstrations at the spot where Bouazizi set-himself on fire, were recorded on mobile phones, posted on YouTube, and spread across Tunisia and in the Arab world when they were shared on Facebook before news media outlets such as Al Jazeera began running their stories, reports Robert Mackey in the New York Times.

The Tunisian revolutionary spirit spread in neighboring Egypt. Inspired by events in Tunsia, political demonstrations began in January as thousands took to the streets in anti-government protests against poverty, rampant unemployment, corruption, and demanding an end to the 30-year autocratic rule of President Hosni Mubarak, writes Cara Parks in The Huffington Post.

Aware of the potent effect that social media had in Tunisia’s uprising, the Egyptian government blocked Facebook, Twitter, and later Internet services to lead a crackdown on the largest protests the country had witnessed since 1970s, according to Parks. Despite violent clashes with the riot police, protests kept going not only in Cairo, the capital, but also in Alexandria and Suez, and two other major cities.

Photo Credit: Huffington Post

The revolution’s main goal was achieved with the resignation of President Mubarak on February 11th. Activist Wael Ghonim, a marketing manager for Google who played a significant role in organizing the January 25 protests by reaching out to young Egyptians on Facebook, credited the social networking site for the success of the Egyptian people’s uprising, says Catharine Smith in The Huffington Post.

“[…] This revolution started on Facebook. […] We would post a video on Facebook that would be shared by 60,000 people on their walls within a few hours. I’ve always said that if you want to liberate a society just give them the Internet. […],” Ghonim told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in an interview that Facebook and the Internet were responsible for the uprising in Egypt.

After Egypt, it was the turn of Syrians to protest against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Pro-democratic demonstrations began in January and young Syrians, inspired by the ousting of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt, began organizing protests online and then took them to the streets.

In this citizen journalism image made on a mobile phone, Syrian men carry bread loaves during a protest against Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime, in the coastal town of Banias, Syria, May 3, 2011 Photo Credit: AP

Syrian activists have been working their computers and mobile phones, updating Facebook pages, sending out messages over Twitter, and uploading videos onto YouTube to inform the outside world of what was taking place in their surroundings since foreign reporters were banned, reports Margaret Besheer for VOA news.

Libya was the revolution’s next stop in North Africa . Protests broke out in February in the eastern city of Benghazi and escalated to an armed conflict as forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi clashed with anti-government rebels. Gaddafi was captured and killed on October 24 bringing an end to four decades of autocratic rule.

Libya Crisis Map illustrates how ICTs can be applied in a conflict situation. This web-based platform was created by the Standby Task Force, and used the Ushahidi crowdsourced crisis reporting system to map latest news from Libya gleaned from Twitter and traditional news sources.

The LibyaCrisisMap platform was activated by the request of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) to the Standby Task Force (SBTF). The platform was fully handed over to OCHA supervision in April 2011, and continued to be supported by a team of volunteers until June 4th of 2011.

Yemenis also took up the streets in February to protest against President Ali Abdullah Saleh calling for his resignation. Saleh agreed a deal, in which he will transfer power to his deputy by February 2012, ahead of elections. Young Yemeni Activists are however angry that the deal guarantees immunity for Mr Saleh and his allies, reports the BBC.

The Kingdom of Bahrain, with financial, equipment and manpower backing from its Saudi neighbor, is the only government in the MENA region to have successfully crushed pro-democracy demonstrations, reports Adrian Humphreys in the National Post.

Revolutions in the spring paved the way to landmark elections in the fall.

Tunisian politicians engaged voters via YouTube ahead of the October 23rd elections of representative for the new Constituent Assembly, which will ratify a new constitution and appoint a new transitional government that will schedule elections for a permanent government. Tunisia Live, a startup news portal, launched Tunisia Talks on YouTube where citizens asked questions to politicians.

Egyptians also queued up in numbers at polling stations in the country’s first democratic elections. Citizens took up the responsibility to monitor the electoral process blogging and Tweeting about irregularities and fraudulent activities. Parliamentary elections will end in March and Presidential elections are scheduled for mid-2012.

ICTs in form of social media platforms, cell phones, and the Internet played a significant role in the push for democracy and governance not only in the MENA region but also throughout the world.

December 29, 2011/by actualize

Anti-corruption, Civil Society, Democracy & Governance, Elections, Governances, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Women in Development

ICT4Democracy in East Africa

Launched in June, ICT for Democracy in East Africa is a network of organizations seeking to leverage the potential of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to enhance good governance and strengthen democracy.

This initiative is funded by the Swedish Program for ICT in Developing Regio ns (SPIDER) and aims to promote collaboration amongst democracy actors in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Member organizations in the network are Kenya’s iHub, the Kenyan Human Rights Commission (KHRC), the Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA), Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET), Transparency International Uganda (TIU), and Tanzania’s Commission for Human Rights and Good Governance (CHRAGG).

iHub, an open space for the tech community in Kenya, hosted a governance workshop in October. The event brought together stakeholders in academia, government, civil society and the tech community to identify governance challenges—such as an uninformed or misinformed citizenry about their basic rights and an entrenched culture of corruption. The take away from the session was that ICTs—particularly mobile phones—provide citizens with the platform by which they can engage in governance solutions in a discreet, personalized way, anytime, anywhere.

In the wake of 2012 Presidential elections, citizens need to be better educated, informed and engaged in the political processes to avoid post-elections clashes as it was the case in 2007. To this end, KHRC plans to tap into the potential of ICTs to increase citizen participation, monitor human rights violations, monitor the electoral processes, monitor government fulfillment of promises, carry out campaigns and also inform and educate its constituents and the public on various human rights and governance issues.

Civic participation and democracy monitoring is relatively weak in Uganda given that only 59% of registered voters cast their ballots in the February 2011 presidential elections, according to SPIDER. The proliferation of ICT tools, their potential to enhance communication and improve access to important information creates an opportunity for improved citizen engagement and advocacy towards increased transparency and accountability.

Through the strategic use of ICTs, Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET), aims to improve access to public services, increase efficiency, transparency and accountability of government and political processes to ensure that citizens are informed about government functions and promote efficient service delivery.

WOUGNET will particularly target women, in community based organizations (CBOs) located in the rural districts of Northern Uganda. WOUGNET aims build the ICT capacity of these (CBOs) to monitor public service delivery as part of its anti-corruption strategy.

Similarly, Tanzania’s CHRAGG is implementing a project that will create a system that will enable citizens to file complaints, check the status of already filed complaints and receive feedback through SMS. The project will help poor Tanzanians forego the transportation lodging costs involved in filing complaints in far off regional offices.

December 6, 2011/by actualize

Anti-corruption, Asia, Civil Society, Democracy & Governance, Eastern Europe, Elections, Governances, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Where we work

e-Government: a novel approach in tackling governance challenges?

The World Bank approved in June a $20 million credit to support Moldova’s Governance e-Transformation (GeT) project. According to Philippe Dongier, World Bank ICT sector manager, eTransformation is “about leadership commitment for institutional reform and for citizen-centric governance.”

The project is part of a Government initiative to address Moldova’s legacy of corruption and bureaucracy inherited during the Soviet Union era by improving and modernizing public sector governance and increasing citizen access to government services.

As part of an institutional reform, the Government established in August 2010 an e-Government Center charged to develop a “digital transformation policy, a government IT strategy, and an open data roadmap”. In April, Moldova became one of the first countries in the region to launch an open data portal.

“The initiative is aimed at opening government data for citizens and improving governance and service delivery,” says Stela Mocan, executive director of the e-Government Center.

Benefits of GeT

GeT has several intended benefits that include increased transparency. The Ministry of Finance recently released a spreadsheet of more than one million lines, detailing all public spending data from the past five years.

“Publishing information about public funds will increase transparency,” says Prime Minister Vlad Filat

GeT also intends to reduce the cost of public service delivery. Through “cloud computing” infrastructure—in which applications and data are accessible from multiple network devices—the Government also expects significant savings in public sector IT expenditure.

Promoting innovation in the civil society sector is another key feature of the project. The Bank’s Civil Society Fund in Moldova—which provides grants to nongovernmental and civil society organizations—is supporting the National Environment Center in the collection and mapping of information on pollution of water resources. Since 80% of Modova’s rural population use water from nitrate-polutated wells, this initiative aims to empower citizens with the necessary tools to hold the Government accountable on the environmental policy.

E-Government: a worldwide phenomen

According to the Wolrd Bank, “e-Government” is the use by government agencies of information technologies—such as Internet, and mobile computing—that have the ability to transform relations with citizens, businesses, and other arms of government.

Moldova is not the only country using ICTs as part of an innovative approach to address corruption and strengthen democracy.

Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan of the State of Maharashtra in Western India recently launched an e-Governance program that aims to tackle corruption by reducing personal interaction between the public and government officials and requiring government officials to use computers in their day-to-day operations. Limiting discretion and facilitating the process of tracking all transactions decrease the incidence of corruption.

To combat fraudulent activities during elections, the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) upgraded its computer and communication network in 2002 to verify the eligibility of voters who had lost their voting cards or whose names were missing from the manual voter registers in the respective polling stations.

ICTs’ potential for addressing governance challenges is significant. Through increased transparency and accountability, governments can better serve their citizens. Implementing successful e-Government initiatives in developing countries is a challenging endeavor. However, sustained political commitment to institutional reform, citizen-centric policies, and financial backing create an environment where ICT applications can improve governance.

September 20, 2011/by actualize

Civil Society, Democracy & Governance, Governances, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Mobiles: Sustaining & Coordinating Aid Distribution

Photo Credit: UN

Amartya Sen famously once observed that famines rarely occur in democratic or even relatively free societies, rather from inequalities built into the societal mechanisms of food distribution. The current famine declared by the U.N. in Southern Somalia, exemplifies his case and point.

New mobile technologies and ICTs in aid projects, however, can be used to streamline the coordination between aid organizations on the ground, populations desperate for aid delivery, and those funding the projects abroad—and make them more sustainable.

As Charles Kenny points out, the modern expansion of international markets and improved international assistance have drastically reduced the probability of famines solely resulting from weak governance.

Alternatively, the government—or those in charge—must deliberately choose to deprive their people of food and, “…actively exercise the power to take food from producers who need it or deny food assistance to victims,” Kenny writes in Foreign Policy.

The political atmosphere within the two regions of Southern Somalia is a huge factor towards the most recent accumulation of mass malnutrition and starvation.

Lacking a sovereign state, citizens must rely on the governance provided by the decentralized al Shabab—who blames food aid for creating dependency—which does little to ensure access to food, preventing malnutrition, or improving livelihoods of the population.

In February 2010, the militant group ousted the World Food Program (WFP), followed by their expulsion of three other aid agencies, where they were accused of spreading Christian propaganda.

Photo Credit: BBC

Al Shabab removed the food aid earlier this month, declaring that agencies without hidden agendas were free to operate in their areas. Later, they announced that expelled agencies, namely WFP, remained banned.

Despite these efforts of dissuasion, WFP airlifted 10 tons of food to Southern Somalia last Wednesday. Mobile technologies can used to track this aid to ensure that it is kept out of the hands of al-Shabaab and into the hands of the malnourished.

Ensuring that they honor their word and delivering aid are two battles to overcome, encouraging harmony for further aid distribution is another.

If al-Shabab upholds their promise to allow food aid in the upcoming months, there should be coordination to make these programs and projects happen efficiently and sustainably—between Southern Somalia’s civil society, the government, and aid agencies who hold the resources.

Aid agencies should capitalize on ICTs to enhance the collaborative effort between organizations and individuals with eyes on the ground, and those pulling the funding strings up in Washington.

Edward Carr who works in famine response for USAID on the ground in the Horn of Africa, says,

…we are going to have to use our considerable science and technology capacity to really explore the potential of mobile communications as a source of rapidly-updated, geolocatable information about conditions on the ground to which people are responding with their livelihoods strategies

Although this new way of collecting information for benefit incidence analysis is useful for tracking who each dollar benefits, it is only resourceful in the long-term if put into a local social context.

Who is the most impacted, but most importantly, why- is what truly matters in the long run.

August 9, 2011/by actualize

Anti-corruption, Civil Society, Democracy & Governance, Elections, Governances, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Rule of Law

Measuring and Assessing Gov 2.0, Election Monitoring, & Citizen Media

This summer I have wrote a lot about good governance programs to fight corruption, improve government effectiveness and accountability, and how they they are crucial to developing countries economic development, overall prosperity, and empowerment of civil society. One issue, however, can be the monitoring and evaluation of democracy and governance projects, which can sometimes be difficult–public opinion surveys as a form of measurement can be fraudulent, or uneven, and systems can be disorderly. Although ICTs are not a panacea for a development, they can help to streamline democratic and good governance strategies, and embolden civil society to play a participatory role. Some of the ways ICTs can be employed in democracy and governance projects, such as e-government strategies, election monitoring systems and enabling citizen media, can drastically improve the efficiency of these initiatives. Based on what I have learned so far, below are suggestions for monitoring and evaluation for an e-governance strategy, how to implement an election monitoring system from the beginning til the end, and how best to measure the effectiveness of citizen media:

1. E-government and Participation

Benefits: Transparency can be enhanced through the free sharing of government data based on open standards. Citizens are empowered to question the actions of regulators and bring up issues. The ability of e-government to handle speed and complexity can also underpin regulatory reform. E-government can add agility to public service delivery to help governments respond to an expanded set of demands even as revenues fall short.

First, on the project level, question if the inputs used for implementation and direct deliverables were actually produced. The government’s progression or regression should not rely solely on this because there are other outside variables. For the overall implementation, ask if the resources requested in place, and were the benchmarks that were set reached? Featured below is a timeline on how to implement a good e-government strategy.

Source: ITU

2. Strengthen Rule of Law with Crowdsource Election monitoring:

Benefits: Support for election monitoring may be provided prior to and/or during national or local elections and can encourage citizens to share reports from their community about voting crimes, ballot stuffing and map these crimes using Ushahidi. By documenting election crimes, it can provide evidence of corrupt practices by election officials, and empower citizens to become more engaged.
Drawbacks: Publicizing information to the broad public means without checking the information’s validity these systems can be abused in favor of one political party or the other, and elections can be highly contested.

Photo Credit: movement.org

Below are systematic instructions on how to implement the “all other stuff” needed for a election monitoring system, like Ushahidi:

Step 1. Create a timeline that includes goals you have accomplished by different marker points leading up to the election, and reaching target audiences

Step 2. The more information reports the better for the platform, but consider a primary goal and focus on filtering information about that goal to the platform, put it in the About section.

Step 3. Target your audience and know how they can be reached for example

Community partners
Crowd
Volunteers

Step 4. Figure out who your allies are—NGOs and civil society organizations that will want to support, and provide resources for more free and fair elections in your country. Figure out what groups would be best for voter education, voter registration drives, civic engagement or anti-corruption. Building a new strategy on top of the already existing ones will help to promote the campaign and making it more sustainable overtime.

Step 5. Reach out and meet with the groups you have targeted—and make sure to identify people from that country living abroad, reach out to the diaspora. Ask yourself the following questions when the program is implemented: should all reports be part of the same platform? Should reports come in before voting begins or just offenses taking place during elections? What about outreach after the election takes place for follow-up M&E?

Step 6. Get the word out to as many citizens as possible using flyers, local media, and target online influencers, such as those on Twitter or Facebook. Attract volunteers to assist in the overall outreach and publicity plan—a volunteer coordinator, technical advisor and, if possible, a verification team or local representatives, to relay and confirm what monitoring the electoral processes is all about.

Step 7. Information sources:

Mobiles: Frontline SMS can work as reception software for submissions via text.
Email/Twitter/Facebook: Consider creating a web form to link people to on social networks which asks for everything you need, including, detailed location information, category and multimedia.
Media Reports and Journalists: Have volunteers look in the news for relevant information to be included in the reports
Verification team: Either a local organization or journalist works best—on site that is able to receive alerts from the platform on events happening around their polling stations to be able to verify what is going on. Cuidemos el Voto modeled Ushahidi slightly for incoming reports from whitelisted people to show up automatically, for example non-governmental election monitoring organizations.

Step 9. Monitoring and Evaluation

Closing the loop of information: How will you show citizens who provided information on electoral fraud that you received it? Have a system in place to tell community representatives that the information was received and it will be acted upon.
How will you act on that information in the country’s courtrooms, though? Make sure to preserve the documentation of election fraud that your platform has received so that it can serve to hold the perpetrators accountable in court.

3. Citizen Media

Citizen media allows content to be produced by private citizens outside of large media conglomerates and state run media outlets to tell their stories and provide bottom up information. Also known as citizen journalism, participatory media, and democratic media, citizen media is burgeoning with all of the technological tools and systems available that simplify the production and distribution of media

Benefits: In addition to the above-mentioned benefits, citizen media also allows a sense of community where up-to date news covers a variety of angles, stories, and topics found in hard to reach places.
Drawbacks: It can be risky for the citizens journalists and their supporters. They can be identified and targeted by members of the oppression, where they will be put in jail or tortured. There is no gatekeeping, verifying, or regulating the information—this is not a problem when it comes to video or photos, but definitely with information. Also, connectivity issues may not allow citizens to upload the information.
Helpful Resources: This journalist’s toolkit is a training site for multimedia and online journalists.
Monitoring and Evaluation for citizen media projects: Governments have foreign policy and economic agendas that guide their choices on how they fund projects, therefore, it’s important that the grantees and activists understand and share the same objectives. This is also beneficial to learn from projects over time to avoid redundancy and enhance efficiency of implementation.
Measurement approaches—Some corporate funding agencies like the Gates Foundation, Skoll Foundation, and Omidyar Network insist on measuring citizen media projects, while other funding agencies like the Knight Foundation insist less on measurement. It’s important to measure both quantitative and qualitative outcomes and give constructive feedback to the contributors so that they can become more effective.

Quantitative—Objectives may sometimes change in response to your context, but keep the end goal in mind, continue to measure yourself against the objectives. This can be done through web analytics or web metrics—website performance monitoring service to understand and optimize website usage
Qualitative—Primarily anecdotal and used to shift policy objectives. In the end, however, it’s about visualizing the change you are trying to bring in the world, and making it happen.

August 4, 2011/by actualize

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