STUDY ON THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA FOR ENHANCING

PUBLIC TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN

EASTERN EUROPE AND THE COMMONWEALTH OF

INDEPENDENT STATES: EMERGING MODELS,

OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES

UNDP Bratislava Regional Centre1

October, 2011

1 Study produced by the UNDP Bratislava Regional Centre with the support of Natalia Kosheleva, independent

consultant.

2

Contents

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ............................................................................................................. 3

SCOPE AND METHODOLOGY OF THE STUDY ...................................................................... 5

RELEVANT PREVIOUS RESEARCH .......................................................................................... 5

REGIONAL CONTEXT ................................................................................................................. 7

DEVELOPMENT OF INFORMATION SOCIETY ............................................................... 8

DEFICIENT SYSTEM OF CHECKS AND BALANCES ..................................................... 9

OPEN DATA INITIATIVES ................................................................................................ 10

WEB 1.0 CIVIC INITIATIVES ............................................................................................ 12

WEB 2.0 PROGRESS IN THE REGION ............................................................................. 13

SOCIAL MEDIA AS A DOMAIN FOR PUBLIC COMMUNICATION ................................... 14

EMERGING MODELS OF SOCIAL MEDIA USE TO ENHANCE PUBLIC

TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY ......................................................................... 16

INFORMATION SHARING ................................................................................................ 17

CROWDSOURCING ............................................................................................................ 20

CROWD-TO-COMMUNITY PROJECTS ........................................................................... 37

CONCLUSIONS ................................................................................................................... 41

INSTRUMENTS FOR PROMOTION OF THE SOCIAL MEDIA USE FOR

TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN PUBLIC SECTOR ..................................... 42

APPROACHES USED IN THE PAST AND ON-ONGOING INITIATIVES IN EASTERN

EUROPE AND THE CIS ...................................................................................................... 42

IMPACT OF VARIOUS APPROACHES ON SOCIAL MEDIA USE FOR PUBLIC

TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY ................................................................. 44

ANNEX: LIST OF SPECIALISTS INTERVIEWED BY THE STUDY ..................................... 46

3

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In many countries of Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the

executive branch of the government dominates and sometimes even controls legislative and

judiciary branches and media, the executive also controls the flow of information between the

public administration and the citizens that in many cases can exchange critical information only

privately. The rapid development of social media is considerably changing this pattern. Blogs,

forums and social networking sites can transform personal conversations and individual opinions

into a subject of public debate.

This study identifies the following models of social media use to enhance public transparency

and accountability:

Information sharing: individuals and groups of civic activists use commercial social

media platforms (forums, blog platforms, social networking and video hosting websites)

to disseminate information about the quality of the public services, eventual

mismanagement and corruption;

Crowdsourcing: individuals and groups of civic activists create their own specialized

social media platforms through which users can publish information about instances of

corruption or other public interest information;

Crowd-to-community model takes crowdsourcing one step further by stimulating

cooperation between website users and offering to them various ways to engage for

achieving a common objective. .

Through social media individual reports can produce considerable impact if they manage to

attract attention of other users and the media; as a follow up of the publication of information

individuals or organizations can utilize existing legal mechanisms to put pressure on the

authorities to act and demonstrate political will to investigate and prosecute reported violations.

Crowdsourcing projects create impact through:

Effective use of social media tools to promote joint activities toward common objectives

– frequent posting of new information, use of emotional narrative, interaction with other

users;

Promote coverage by regular and online media; it drives new visitors and new reports;

Utilization of transparent verification mechanisms to confirm or denounce a case of

corruption, e.g. publication of photos, documents, comments by other visitors;

Factors that contribute to the success of crowdsourcing activities are as follows:

Activities were launched by individuals or institutions having a proven track record in the

field;

Activities are able to ‘convert’ information into action that leads to desirable outcomes

(e.g. corrupt tenders are cancelled, streets are fixed, etc.);

Activities have secured support of relevant executive authorities and high ranking public

officials.

All crowdsourcing projects face two common challenges. First, they need to ensure the steady

inflow of new reports; second, they have to prove the credibility of these reports. Anonymity of

reports lowers the barriers for submission of information, but undermines its credibility. Projects

4

that aspire to make authorities take some action on the reports submitted also have to overcome

resistance of public officials.

The first crowdsourcing initiatives in Eastern Europe and the CIS were inspired by similar

projects outside the region – e.g. FixMyStreet in the UK and Ushahidi2-powered crowdmapping

project in Kenya. The idea was promoted in the region by IT-specialists and civic activists;,

lately it appears that authorities are starting to utilize these tools as well.

Crowd-to-community projects build on crowdsourcing model and add various mechanisms to

promote on-going engagement of users with the project, members of their informal on-line and

off-line networks and other users. These projects use sophisticated social media platforms, their

development and operation requires substantial investment, so they are quite rare – in Eastern

Europe and the CIS this study identified only two projects utilizing crowd-to-community model.

The study also looks at the approaches used in Eastern Europe and the CIS to promote the use of

social media to enhance public transparency and accountability and contains recommendations

for UNDP programming in the area of public administration reform, anti-corruption and local

governance building on the phenomenon of social media.

2 http://ushahidi.com/

5

SCOPE AND METHODOLOGY OF THE STUDY

The present study on the role of social media for enhancing institutional transparency and

accountability in Eastern Europe and the CIS was commissioned by the UNDP Bratislava

Regional Centre. The study had several objectives:

- to provide an assessment of the social media scene across Eastern Europe and the CIS

and to identify existing cases of social media use to enhance public transparency and

accountability;

- to formulate general recommendations for UNDP programming as well as specific

recommendations for three countries – Armenia, Kazakhstan and Kosovo3 – selected to

participate in the forthcoming regional programme.

The study was conducted over the period of two months in August and September 2011. The

study began with review of previous research on the use of social media for transparency and

accountability in Eastern Europe and the CIS as well as internationally. In the process of this

review a list of social media projects contributing to public transparency and accountability was

developed. Selection of projects was based on two criteria. First, a project had to “harness

collective intelligence”, which is the principle feature of Web 2.04. A Web 2.0 site should allow

users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators of user-

generated content in a virtual community5. Second, a project had to contribute to better

transparency and accountability of public agencies of all levels, including election commissions.

A maximum variation sampling strategy was purposefully used to select the projects from the list

for detailed examination. Cases included in the sample had to represent the maximum variety of

operation models as well as to ensure wide geographic coverage of the region.

The second stage of the study included in-depth semi-structured interviews with social media

experts from various Easter Europe and the CIS countries and with representatives of selected

projects. Interviews were conducted in person, via skype and phone.

Conclusions and recommendations that emerged from the analysis of collected data were

presented to the UNDP Bratislava Regional Centre and representatives of UNDP Country

Offices in Armenia, Kazakhstan and Kosovo responsible for the forthcoming UNDP social

media-related regional programme. Their comments as well as data collected through a number

of in-depth semi-structured interviews with anti-corruption specialists from these three countries

were used to adapt the recommendations to country contexts.

RELEVANT PREVIOUS RESEARCH

Media Sustainability Index (MSI) is an annual study that examines the level of media

development in a number of countries around the world. In Eastern Europe and the CIS MSI

covers 21 countries. In each country a group of local media specialists is brought together to

reflect on various aspects of media development and assign numerical scores to a number of

3 Referred to throughout this report in the context of the UN Security Council Resolution 1244 (1999)

4 Tim O’Reily. What Is Web 2.0. http://oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html?page=2 5 Web 2.0 at Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

6

indicators. Since 2008 MSI looks at social media and its relations with regular media. MSI 2011

report6 that reflects the situation in the media sector in 2010 was used as one of the primary

sources of information on social media for this study.

The issue of social media received considerable attention in the 2009 NGO Sustainability Index

for Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia report7. The publication includes an article by A.

Katz “The Quiet Revolution: How Technology Is Changing the Civil Society Landscape in

Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia” that presents a number of cases of social media use by

NGOs.

In 2010 Open Society Foundation released a report called “Global mapping of technology for

transparency and accountability”8. The study looked at more than 100 projects around the world

that were using data collection and visualization tools as well as mobile technologies and social

media to enhance transparency and accountability on all sectors of the society.

The majority of projects presented in the report focused on executive or legislative branches of

government. There are also projects targeting judicial branch, media, private sector, and donors.

Nearly half of the projects were in the field of election monitoring, and many of those used the

Ushahidi9 platform. A number of projects focus on transparency in the legislature, e.g. by

tracking legislative bills and posting profiles and voting records of members of legislatures.

Another popular model is to collect citizen complaints and deliver them to relevant authorities or

private companies.

One of the key findings of the report is that “technology for transparency and accountability

projects have a better chance of effectively producing change when they take a collaborative

approach, sometimes involving government and/or service providers”10

.

“Harnessing Social Media Tools to Fight Corruption”11

report prepared by the London School of

Economics and Political Science for Transparency International looks at a number of civil

society initiatives around the world that have successfully incorporated social media

technologies. The report also comes up with recommendations for Transparency International on

approaches to the use of social media and establishment of new networks of anti-corruption

volunteers.

The recent Internews study “Social Change and the Russian Network Society”12

explores the use

of new information technologies in Russia and their contribution to the social change. The study

came up with four recommendations on how supporters of traditional media development can

build the capacity of new digital networks and move towards making the next generation of

media development a reality.

6 Media Sustainability Index 2011: The Development of Sustainable Independent Media in Europe and Eurasia.

IREX, 2011. 322 p. Retrieved from http://www.irex.org/project/media-sustainability-index-msi 7 2009 NGO Sustainability Index for Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia. USAID, 2010. 242 p

8 Avila, R., H. Feigenblatt, R. Heacock, N. Heller. Global mapping of technology for transparency and

accountability. Retrieved from http://www.transparency-initiative.org/reports/global-mapping-of-technology-for- 9Ushahidi, which means "testimony" in Swahili, was initially developed to map reports on the cases of violence in

Kenya after the post-election fallout in the beginning of 2008. http://ushahidi.com/ 10

Ibid, page. 5 11

Bekri, D., Dunn, B., Oguzertem, I., Su, Y., Upreti, S. Harnessing Social Media Tools to Fight Corruption. Final

project for degree at LSE Department of International Development. London. 2011. 46 p. 12

Asmolov, G., J. Machleder. Social Change and the Russian Network Society: Redefining Development Priorities

in New Information Environments. Internews, 2011. 32 p. – August 2011

7

The report “Connected Citizens: the power, peril and potential of networks”13

presents findings

of the study done by the Monitor Institute for the Knight Foundation. The study examined around 70

social media projects around the world and identified several patterns of network-centric

practices that are already working today, and could be promising for future civic engagement:

Listening to and consulting the crowds: Actively listening to online conversations and

openly asking for advice;

Designing for serendipity: Creating environments, in person and online, where helpful

connections can form;

Bridging differences: Deliberately connecting people with different perspectives;

Catalyzing mutual support: Helping people directly help each other;

Providing handrails for collective action: Giving enough direction for individuals to take

effective and coordinated action.

The study also came up with recommendations for grant-makers interested in supporting civic

social media projects.

REGIONAL CONTEXT

The UNDP Bratislava Regional Centre covers 25 countries and territories in Central and Eastern

Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia14

. Most of these countries used to be part of the socialist

system. Transition to democracy and market economy in the region was based on governance-

centric approach to development15

. Transition produced different outcomes for different

countries and led to increased socio-economic diversity in the region. Highly varied levels of

Internet penetration in different countries of the region – from 1.6% in Turkmenistan to 75.7% in

Estonia16

– is one of manifestations of this diversity.

Interestingly, levels of internet penetration in the region significantly correlate with perceived

levels of corruption: the more people have access to Internet in a particular country, the less

corrupt that country is perceived to be (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Correlation between internet penetration and corruption perception.

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80

Internet Penetration (% of population)

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Scearce, D. Connected Citizens: the power, peril and potential of networks. Knight Foundation, 2011. 55 p. 14

UNDP site. http://europeandcis.undp.org/home/AboutUs/ 15

Verheijen, T., ‘The what, when and how of governance in Europe and the CIS: a reform agenda sui generi’,

Development & Transition, Issue 12, United Nations Development Programme & the London School of Economics

and Political Science, 2009, pp. 3-5. 16

Internet World Stats, http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats3.htm

8

Note: Corruption Perception Index is measured on the scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 10 (very clean).

Correlation coefficient is 0.698.

DEVELOPMENT OF INFORMATION SOCIETY

Most governments of the Eastern European and the CIS countries attended the World Summit on

the Information Society (WSIS) and signed the Geneva Declaration of Principles and the Tunis

Commitment17

. Participating governments declared “commitment to build a people-centred,

inclusive and development-oriented Information Society, where everyone can create, access,

utilize and share information and knowledge, enabling individuals, communities and peoples to

achieve their full potential in promoting their sustainable development and improving their

quality of life”18

. The first key principle formulated in the Geneva Declaration says that

“governments, as well as private sector, civil society and the United Nations and other

international organizations have an important role and responsibility in the development of the

Information Society and, as appropriate, in decision-making processes”. The Plan of Action19

adopted in Geneva called for the development of national e-government initiatives and services

in order to enhance transparency, accountability and efficiency at all levels of government.

Achievements of the national governments of the Eastern European and the CIS countries in the

field of e-government development – as measured by the UN e-government development index20

– vary significantly. The least developed e-government is in Turkmenistan (index value is

0.3226), the most developed is in Estonia (0.6965). Median value of e-government development

index for the region is 0.5181. Higher levels of e-government development are associated with

lower levels of corruption (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Correlation between levels of e-government development and corruption perception.

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

0 0,1 0,2 0,3 0,4 0,5 0,6 0,7 0,8

E-Governance Index

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Note: UN e-government development index is measured on the scale of 0 (the lowest) to 1 (the highest). Corruption

Perception Index is measured on the scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 10 (very clean).

Correlation coefficient is 0.701.

In 2011 eight governments (of Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, Philippines, South Africa,

United Kingdom, USA) have created the Open Government Partnership21

. On September 20,

17

WSIS web-site. http://www.itu.int/wsis/basic/index.html 18

WSIS-03/GENEVA/DOC/4-E. Declaration of Principles: Building the Information Society: a global challenge in

the new Millennium, 2003. 19

WSIS-03/GENEVA/DOC/5-E, Plan of Action, 2003. 20

United Nations E-Government Survey, 2010. The index can take values from 0 (lowest) to 1 (highest). 21

Open Government Partnership, http://www.opengovpartnership.org/about

9

2011 the founding governments endorsed the Open Government Declaration and announced

national action plans. These governments declared their commitment to:

Increase the availability of information about governmental activities;

Support civic participation;

Implement the highest standards of professional integrity throughout national

administrations;

Increase access to new technologies for openness and accountability22

.

22 countries of from the Eastern Europe and the CIS region were found eligible to join the Open

Government Partnership. 16 of them have already decided to join and are working on their

commitments.

DEFICIENT SYSTEM OF CHECKS AND BALANCES

The ultimate goal of transition in the countries of Eastern Europe and the CIS is to build

democratic societies with a strong system of checks and balances. This transformation is not

complete. In most countries, the executive branch of the government dominates and sometimes

even controls the legislative and judiciary branches and other public institutions including media

and civil society organizations (CSOs). Furthermore, democratic indicators have deteriorated

significantly in the region over the past three years, a period that coincides with the impact of the

global economic crisis (this trend is documented among others by UNDP’s research on the

governance implications of the global economic crisis in Eastern Europe and Central Asia23

, and

by the Democracy Index 2010 report from Economist Intelligence Unit24

, also corroborated by

other international assessments e.g. by Freedom House).

All countries in Eastern Europe and the CIS have laws that guarantee free speech, access to

public interest information and government accountability. But implementation of these laws

remains inadequate. Major media outlets, especially TV, fail to perform their watchdog function,

which creates favorable environment for corruption. There is significant correlation between

country scores for Free Speech Objective of Media Sustainability Index (MSI) measured by

IREX and country scores for Corruption Perception Index (CPI) measured by Transparency

International (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3. Correlation between freedom of speech and corruption

0

0,5

1

1,5

2

2,5

3

3,5

4

4,5

0 0,5 1 1,5 2 2,5 3

MSI Free Speach Score

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22

Open Government Declaration, http://www.opengovpartnership.org/open-government-declaration 23

http://www.rcpar.org/contents_en.asp?id=475 24

“Democracy in Retreat”, http://graphics.eiu.com/PDF/Democracy_Index_2010_web.pdf

10

Note: MSI Free Speech score is measured on the scale of 0 (lowest) to 4 (highest). Corruption Perception Index is

measured on the scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 10 (very clean).

Correlation coefficient is 0.687.

Watchdog CSOs are few. The information they collect is often ignored by mainstream media,

especially TV, which at present serves as the main source of information for majority of the

population in the region. This considerably undermines the ability of CSOs to fight corruption

and keep public officials accountable. (There is significant correlation between the score for

advocacy capacity of NGOs as measured by USAID NGO Sustainability Index and CPI (Fig. 4)).

Fig. 4. Correlation between NGO advocacy capacity and corruption.

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

0,0 1,0 2,0 3,0 4,0 5,0 6,0 7,0

NGO SI Advocacy Score

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Note: NGO SI scores are measured on the scale of 7 (lowest) to 1 (highest). CPI is measured on the scale of 0

(highly corrupt) to 10 (very clean).

Correlation coefficient is -0.693.

OPEN DATA INITIATIVES

The Open Government Declaration calls for increased access to information and disclosure about

governmental activities at every level of government and for provision of high-value information,

including raw data, in a timely manner, in formats that the public can easily locate, understand

and use, and that facilitate reuse. Governments should seek feedback from the public to identify

the information of greatest value to them, and take such feedback into account to the maximum

extent possible25

.

Several countries of Eastern Europe and the CIS already have open data portals that provide

governmental information (Table 1). Majority of these portals are in the EU member states.

Interestingly, most of them were launched not by governmental institutions, but by civil society

organizations.

Table 1. Open government data projects

Country Launched in Portal Launched by

EU/ Estonia N/A pub.stat.ee/px-

web.2001/Dialog/

statfile1.asp

Statistics Estonia

25

ibid

11

EU/ Lithuania N/A lt.ckan.net Open Knowledge Foundation

EU/ Poland N/A pl.ckan.net Open Knowledge Foundation

EU/ Slovenia N/A si.ckan.net Open Knowledge Foundation

EU/ Czech

Republic

N/A cz.ckan.net Open Knowledge Foundation

EU/ Hungary N/A hu.ckan.net Open Knowledge Foundation

EU/ Hungary 2007 kozadat.hu Neumann Nonprofit Kft. with support

of the Office of the Prime-Minister

EU/ Slovakia 2010 Datanest

datanest.fair-

play.sk

NGO Fair-play Alliance

Moldova 2011 data.gov.md Government of Moldova, with financial

support of the World Bank

Albania 2011 open.data.al A team of IT specialists running one of

the largest Albanian portals

shqiperia.com. The project was

launched with the financial support of

the Open Society Foundation

Georgia 2010 Public

Information

Database

opendata.ge

Institute for Development of Freedom

of Information with financial support of

the Open Society - Georgia Foundation

Russia 2009 OpenGovData.ru Ivan Begtin (personal project)

The cases of the Moldova open data portal launched by the Moldovan government and the

Russian OpenGovData.ru launched by an individual, Russian IT-specialist Ivan Begtin, represent

extremes in the range of open government data initiatives in the region. But they have a lot in

common, e.g. use similar approaches to promote the use of open government data.

In 2010, the Government of the Republic of Moldova launched the Governance e-

Transformation process, which is supported by a USD 20 million grant from the World Bank.

The Open Government Initiative (initially called the Open Government Data Initiative) is part of

this process. According to Vlad Manoil, E-services and open data coordinator with the e-

Government Center, the initiative started small – by establishing a small group of ministries

supportive of the idea. This group prepared 65 datasets that made the initial content of the

Moldova open data portal launched on April 15, 2011. On April 29, 2011 the Prime Minister of

Moldova signed the open government data directive that requires all ministries and public

agencies to publish three datasets per month on data.gov.md.

The Open Government Initiative (OGI) also includes activities to stimulate public interest in and

demand for open data. OGI organized training for media representatives and established

partnership with Moldova NGO Council to identify what data was of most interest for the civil

society. OGI also launched the eTrasformation Apps contest to stimulate the use of open data.

The contest included competitions for existing projects and for project ideas proposed by NGOs.

The best project award went to Alerte.md (see page 34). Crowdmap of preschool daycare

facilities in Moldova was recognized as the best NGO idea and was awarded an implementation

grant.

OpenGovData.ru portal is a personal project of Russian IT-specialist Ivan Begtin. In 2009 Begtin

was studying the issue of open data and discovered that many open data portals were launched

and maintained by non-governmental organizations. This inspired him to develop and launch an

12

open data portal for Russia. Begtin searches for datasets of government data on websites of

government agencies himself and uses tips from portal visitors.

Ivan says that his goal is to promote the idea of open data to application developers: data is

valuable only when it is used. Begtin delivers public lectures and presentations on open data to

public officials and IT specialists. Recently he and five other like-minded individuals got

together and launched the Apps4Russia competition for web application developers and the

websites that use open government data. Contest entries can be submitted from June 31 to

October 30, 2011. By the end of September organizers have received about 30 applications.

Contest entries include, e.g. the website about benefits granted to Russian citizens by various

laws (lgoti.info); the website nalogometer.ru where a person can calculate the amount of taxes he

or she pays. Prompted by competition website visitors, the Apps4Russia also started to collect

ideas for projects based on open government data.

WEB 1.0 CIVIC INITIATIVES

Internet has allowed watchdog CSOs to communicate to people directly via websites. In Eastern

Europe and the CIS there is a number of websites that report on performance of various branches

of government, such as:

Slovakian NGO Fair-Play Alliance, launched in 2002 by journalist Zuzana Wienk,

develops and maintains databases on political party finance. Fair-Play Alliance created an

open government data portal and a website where members of parliament can disclose

their income information.

Koho Volit (How they vote) (kohovolit.eu) website offers user-friendly information

about activities and voting patterns of the members of national legislatures in the Czech

Republic and Slovakia, and of the representatives of these countries to the European

Parliament. The site recently launched the “Write to them” application (napistejim.cz)

that allows people to send e-mails to their MPs.

Macedonian Metamorphosis Foundation has recently launched Vistinomer.mk

(Truthmeter) that analyzes the promises of politicians and presents this analysis in an

easy to read aggregated form. Another project of the Metamorphosis Foundation, web-

application Glasomer.mk (Votemeter), allows citizens to compare their positions on

various issues with those of political parties.

Polish project Mam Prawo Wiedzieć (I have the right to know) (mamprawowiedziec.pl)

collects information about candidates and elected public representatives from websites,

flyers, politicians’ blogs, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other online and traditional

media sources and presents it in a user-friendly format.

Hungarian Kepmutatas (Hypocrisy) (kepmutatas.hu), launched by Freedom House

Europe and Transparency International Hungary, provides information on electoral

campaign spending by political parties.

Romanian Porcisme (porcisme.ro) collects information about corruption cases and waste

of public money from mass media and publishes is online. Porcisme’s information

gathering strategy is based on the premise that if a story was published in mass media, it

must have been verified prior to publication.

Russian vyborov.net, launched in March 2011, plans to offer citizens complete

information about 2010 and 2011 elections and Russian political parties.

Website Executioners of Ukraine (http://kat.in.ua), launched by a group of civic activists,

maintains a database of unlawful court decisions.

13

These and similar projects are very creative, but they are based on the Web 1.0 Internet paradigm

of one-way communication where users can only consume information.

WEB 2.0 PROGRESS IN THE REGION

Web 2.0 websites allow users to do more than just receive information. Users are able to create

their own content and to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue. The

term ‘Web 2.0’ emerged in 1999; at present, it is often replaced with the term ‘social media’.

Examples of social media are social networking, chat rooms, message boards, podcasts, photo

and video sharing, blogs and micro-blogs, RSS and widgets26

.

Over the past 3-4 years the use of social media in Eastern Europe and the CIS has grown

tremendously. For example, in 2010 65% of Internet users in Hungary, 61% in Romania, 56% in

Poland 27

, 75% in Serbia, and 59% in Ukraine28

had accounts on social networks. According to

the ComScore Global Study, Russia has the most engaged social networking audience worldwide.

In August 2010 74.5% of Russian internet users visited at least one social networking site and

spent there an average of 9.8 hours per visitor per month29

. In 2011, the average time spent on

social networks by Russian users increased to 10.2 hours a month - nearly twice the time US

users spend on the average within social sites30

.

The data on the use of social media in Eastern Europe and the CIS is patchy. This study has

looked for possible proxy indicators. The cloud of countries and regions on the Global Voices

website can give a rough idea of the social media use and development in different countries of

the region (Fig. 5). Global Voices is a community of more than 500 bloggers around the world

who report on blogs and citizen media in their countries31

. The size of the font reflects the

number of reports on a particular country or region published on the site.

Fig. 5. Cloud of regions and countries on the Global Voices website.

26

Universal Maccan International Social Media Research, Wave 3. Presentation at

http://www.slideshare.net/mickstravellin/universal-mccann-international-social-media-research-wave-3 27

Social Media Boom in Eastern Europe. International Digital Marketing. June 1, 2010,

http://internationaldigitalmarketing.com/tag/romania/ 28

Social media in the Ukraine and Russia. http://www.slideshare.net/jbell99/social-media-in-russia-and-ukraine-

2011 29

Russia Has Most Engaged Social Networking Audience Worldwide.

http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/10/Russia_Has_Most_Engaged_Social_Networking_

Audience_Worldwide 30

Why Russia’s social media boom is big news for business. http://mashable.com/2011/06/20/russia-social-media-

marketing/ 31

Global Voices, http://globalvoicesonline.org

14

Note: Eastern European and the CIS countries are marked in red.

Russia is an obvious leader, which can be attributed in part to the fact that Russian citizens make

almost 30% of the internet users in the region.

SOCIAL MEDIA AS A DOMAIN FOR PUBLIC COMMUNICATION

Rapid development of social media has considerably changed the communication patterns in the

region. Blogs, forums and social networking websites have eliminated the borderline between

private conversations and public discussions. ‘Kitchen talks’ of the Soviet era when people

exchanged critical information and self-published materials and even planned civic protests

through informal communication with friends have moved online and have become public. So

now any citizen who has access to Internet is able to reach a much wider audience than ever

before. Already there are numerous examples of people utilizing social media to criticize public

officials and even mobilize others to protest.

Use of social media to mobilize citizens to participate in public protests has recently attracted a

lot of attention. The youth protests against the communist party winning the national elections in

Moldova prompted the emergence of the term ‘Twitter revolution’. The term was coined by

Evgeny Morozov, a US-based social scientist from Belarus, in his blog post on April 7, 2009 he

wrote: “Ever since yesterday's announcement that Moldova's communists have won enough

votes to form a government in Sunday's elections, Moldova's progressive youth took to the

15

streets in angry protests. As behooves any political protest by young people today, they also

turned to Facebook and Twitter to raise awareness about the planned protests and flashmobs”32

.

But even Evgeni Morozov believes now that the role of social media as an instrument to start a

revolution was significantly overrated33

. Off-line informal networks and more traditional means

of communication are also very important. Etan Zukerman from the Berkman Center for Internet

and Society at Harvard University calculated that 700 people tweeted on April 2009 events in

Moldova, and only 200 of the were in the country at that time34

. Nonetheless, social media was

an important source of information on developments in the country for the rest of the world.

Governments and politicians have quickly realized the potential of social media as a

communication domain. Response ranges from suppression and intimidation of critical voices to

the use social media to promote government or party agendas.

For example, in 2007 many Bulgarians were frustrated with the decision of the Supreme

Administrative Court that opened the Strandja nature park, Bulgaria’s oldest natural preserve, to

commercial development. Several NGOs and bloggers called on people to protest. As a result

protesters blocked one of the biggest intersections in Sofia. Police arrested 35 participants on the

grounds that the demonstration was not officially approved.

In the aftermath of those events one of the bloggers, Sofia-based designer Michel Bozgounov,

was summoned by the police for promoting "illegal demonstrations" and had to sign a "statement

of warning" that his website would be monitored by the authorities35

. “On the stairs one of the

police officers told me “in private” that I should be more careful what I am writing about in

future, because journalists have a better defense against possible prosecution and I am just an

ordinary person, an independent blogger”, Bozgounov wrote afterwards in his blog36

.

“I wasn’t prepared for the avalanche of comments and people feeling concerned by this

precedent, because the whole blogosphere felt that this was a strike against the free speech in the

virtual world in Bulgaria”, posted he later37

. The story was also covered by national and

international media, including Bulgarian National TV.

Many politicians and public executives are embracing social media as means of communication

with people. Danica Radisic, Serbian online communication consultant, believes that social

media changes the relations between politicians and citizens making them more personal and

immediate. Politicians can not ‘hide’ anymore behind the party platforms and have to learn to

listen to citizens and talk about what they believe in.

In some cases the use of social media by politicians and public executives is quite on par with its

participatory nature. For example, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev engages in informal

conversations on Twitter. There are instances when people tweet to him about cases of

corruption. For example, on February 28, 2011, Tim Stigal wrote that he was asked for USD

300,000 for arranging a meeting with Vladislav Surkov, First Deputy to the Head of President’s

Administration. Medvedev tweeted in reply: “Showed your tweet to V.U. Surkov. Call his office.

32

Moldova's Twitter Revolution. Posted by Evgeny Morozov, April 7, 2009,

http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/07/moldovas_twitter_revolution 33

Interview to Kommersant newspaper, http://www.kommersant.ru/Doc/1597287 34

ibid 35

Bulgarian Bloggers Meet with Big Brother. Bloomberg Businessweek. March 27, 2008.

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/mar2008/gb20080327_492983.htm 36

Michel Bozgounov’s blog. http://www.optimiced.com/en/2007/07/18/a-short-story-to-speak-or-not/ 37

ibid

16

Tell, who is asking for money”38

. Medvedev’s aid Arkady Dvorkovich also talks to people on

Twitter and even takes their advice. For example, according to Dvorkovich, the idea to establish

president’s mobile offices that go to Russian regions to collect petitions from citizens came from

a Twitter user39

. In Kazakhstan, Member of Parliament Marat Abenov uses Twitter, Facebook

and his official blog to discuss issues of corruption and ways to combat it.

The Russian government started to use crowdsourcing, a social media technology, to collect

citizens’ comments on proposed laws (gosdiscuss.ru). (The term ‘crowdsourcing’ refers to

soliciting input from an undefined large group of people or community through an open call to

do the task that traditionally was performed by specific individuals40

.) In the past, Russian

people also could submit their comments on draft laws by sending letters to the legislature. The

utilization of social media made the collection of comments more transparent as everyone can

see submitted items. Crowdsourcing approach has already been used to discus the Law on Police,

the Law on Health Care (zakonoproekt2011.ru) and the Law on Amateur Fishing (r.zakon-

fom.ru/node/134).

Still, in many cases politicians and public executives use social media in an old-style one-way-

communication fashion. Their blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter micro-blogs are maintained by

their PR secretaries and feature only official information. For example, in Kazakhstan all senior

public executives have blogs on blogs.e.gov.kz, but officials hardly add any posts.

Regular media is also actively embracing social media technologies. Sites of many media outlets

allow readers to post comments and encourage citizen reporting and voting as means to increase

audience loyalty. Journalists search blogs and social networks for story tips. Many journalists

have their own blogs and use them to report news that for some reason they can not get

published in their media outlets.

There are examples when independent media outlets launch blog-hosting facilities on their

website to increase the range of views available to visitors. For example, in Russia Slon.ru, an

online publication for business people, and website of the leading independent radio station Echo

of Moscow provide blogging platforms that host blogs of opposition politicians and public

activists. In Serbia B92.net, online information and entertainment portal that belongs to B92

media group, features VIP Bloggers facility that serves as a center for online political discussions.

In Moldova, similar projects were launched by Unimedia and Publika media holding companies.

In Romania, one of the main TV news channels hosts a blogging platform

(voxpublica.realitatea.net).

EMERGING MODELS OF SOCIAL MEDIA USE TO ENHANCE PUBLIC

TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY

The majority of the cases of social media use to enhance public transparency and accountability

that were identified within the framework of this study are civic initiatives. Ordinary citizens and

informal groups of civic activists often use commercial social media platforms – forums, blog

platforms, social networking sites and video hosting – to disseminate information about cases of

38

Medvedev Twitter account http://twitter.com/#!/medvedevrussia 39

Dvorkovich Twitter account, http://twitter.com/#!/advorkovich 40

See the definition of crowdsourcing on Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing

17

corruption and poor performance of public executives. Further in this study this mode of social

media use will be called information sharing.

There is also a rapidly growing number of cases of individuals and civil society organizations

establishing their own social media platforms to collect information on various topics, e.g.

violation of election laws, bribes, suspicious public tenders, municipal problems as well as to

collect signatures under on-line petitions. This mode of social media use is labeled

crowdsourcing.

This study has identified several cases in which social media platforms are designed not only to

collect information, but to promote interaction between people coming to the website and to

build a community committed to protecting citizen rights and keeping public official accountable.

This emerging mode of social media use was labeled crowd-to-community model.

A number of social media projects in the region were prompted by the failure of public

authorities to provide necessary services to the citizens. These projects aim to compensate for

this failure by linking people who need services with those who are ready to provide them:

In 2010, "Ja Za Kraljevo" project (jazakraljevo.rs) in Serbia used Ushahidi to collect

information about people and locations where help was needed after the earthquake.

Russian “Map of help to victims of forest fires” (russian-fires.ru) connected people who

suffered from the 2010 fires and those who were ready to help them.

Later in 2010, “Cold Weather” (holoda.info) used the same approach to help people when

heating, electricity or water was cut off during winter time.

Russian “Virtual Alarm Bell” (rynda.org), launched in 2011, builds of the experience of

the above two projects and uses crowdsourcing technology to collect information about

all kinds of help that people need or offer.

Bulgarian map of garbage dumps (ng.btv.bg/map) was created by bTV as part of the

Clean Bulgaria campaign. People can report locations of the garbage dumps and upload

corresponding photos that are placed on the map. People are also encouraged to launch

their own clean up projects and report on them on the map.

This mode of social media use can be called citizen-to-citizen model. These projects help

citizens to build informal self-help networks and reduce their over-reliance on governments. This

over-reliance is believed to slow transition to democracy and development of civic society in

Eastern Europe and the CIS, so citizen-to-citizens projects make an important contribution to

social progress in the region. But as they don’t directly contribute to transparency and

accountability of public officials, their analysis is outside the scope of this study.

INFORMATION SHARING

There are numerous examples when individuals use social media – blogs, forums, social

networks and video hosting sites like YouTube – to disclose information about instances of

corruption. Sometimes these publications lead to prosecution of revealed violations.

This study followed two cases – one in Kazakhstan and one in Russia - when social media was

used by individuals to report on instances of corruption in institutions of higher education. In

Kazakhstan, Janna Kaikenova used official blog platform blogs.e.gov.kz to write a complaint to

the Minister of Education. She reported that when her nephew applied to the Karaganda Police

18

Academy, he was asked for a bribe of US 5,000 for admission. Kaikenova did not get any

official reply and most likely no action was taken41

.

In Russia Viktor Simak reported on a potentially fraudulent admission scheme in one of the

leading medical universities. The report that was posted on a student forum of this university

resulted in an investigation by the law enforcement authorities and dismissal of the head of the

university.

Case study

Disclosure of student admission fraud scheme in the Russian Medical University

In July 2011 Moscow-based data management specialist Viktor

Simak was asked by a friend who was applying to several

Medical Schools to assess his chances to get admitted.

Since 2009 admission to Russian universities is based on the

applicants’ results at the Universal State Exam (USE).

Introduction of the USE still causes heated public debates that are

widely covered by media, including national TV channels.

Proponents argue that the USE helps to eradicate corruption in

admission committees at the universities, which in the past could

manipulate results of admission exams.

In Russia topics related to

the USE and corruption in

education are open for

public discussion and are

widely covered by all media.

Under the new systems an applicant is allowed to submit up to 15

applications - to five different universities choosing up to three

different departments in each of these universities. The process of

admission to state-funded student positions has three stages called

waves. Admission commissions rank all applicants based on their

USE scores. The resulting lists of applicants are openly published,

usually at university websites. The top cohort of applicants has

the right to accept admission during the first wave. As

applications can be submitted to several universities, applicants

who have the highest scores often can choose between several

universities. So during the first wave some applicants from the

top cohort withdraw their applications and some student positions

remain vacant. Then applicants with lowers scores get the

opportunity to be admitted. This process is repeated two more

times.

A friend of Victor Simak had a relatively low USE score and

asked Victor to review the lists of applicants to Moscow Medical

Universities to assess his chances for admittance. Simak

downloaded lists of applicants with their scores from university

websites. Altogether there were about 20 thousand applicants.

The analysis revealed applicants with high score who were

eligible for admittance to 5-6 different places. Simak also found

600 people with very high scores who applied only to the Pirogov

Russian Medical University. These applicants were eligible for

800 state-funded student positions at three departments.

Easy access to ‘raw’ data –

lists of applicants were

available online.

This seemed strange, so Simak posted this information on the Simak used social media

41

As per correspondence with the author on September 6, 2011

19

student forum of the university and wrote a letter to the head of

the university. (Four days later, when Simak and the head of the

university were invited to an interview to Echo of Moscow radio

station, the head claimed that he never received this letter.)

that allowed him to reach

many people who would

have personal interest in the

case.

Over several days Simak’s post was read by about 15 thousand

people and 200 comments were posted. One of the students

reported that names of these 600 people were almost identical

with the names of the people who had been on the list of

applicants in the previous year. None of the 600 suspicious

applicants found by Simak responded to his post.

Crowd-sourcing: other

forum users added

information to the case.

Three days after Simak posted this information on the forum, the

story was picked by media, eventually making even to national

TV. Wide media coverage forced the university to revise the lists

of applicants and remove 601 names. “The role of media was

crucial. For three days when I was writing about this case on the

student forum, nobody paid attention. Only after media picked the

case, some action was taken”, said Simak in an interview to Echo

of Moscow radio station42

.

Media coverage brings

more attention to the case

and leads to action.

The Russian Student Union (RSU) lodged a complaint to the

prosecutor’s office requesting to investigate the case. RSU

representatives said that they had reports from applicants to the

Pirogov Russian Media University who were asked to pay 400

thousand rubles (about 10 thousand euros) for admission. RSU

suspected that the university forged the lists of applicant by

adding ‘dead souls’ to admit people who paid the bribes during

the third way of admission after fake applicants with high score

didn’t claim their student positions.

Russian Student Union used

existing legal mechanism.

The head of the Pirogov University initially said that applicants’

lists were illegally modified by hackers. The investigation

launched by the prosecutor’s office later revealed that all names

of fake applicants were entered from computers in the admission

commission by people who used commission passwords. The

investigation continues, but the head and several staff members

have already been fired.

Several media reports on this case mention that in 2010 the

Higher School of Economics analyzed the results of admission

campaign to Russian universities and found that students admitted

to the Pirogov University had very low USE scores despite the

large number of applications submitted. Those findings were

made public by Russian Information Agency Novosti, but no

reaction followed.

Importance of broader

context: 2011 is election

year.

Several factors played important role in this case:

Easy access to raw data. Lists of applicants were available online, so it was easy to get

information for further analysis.

42

Interview to Echo of Moscow on August 10, 2011, http://www.echo.msk.ru/programs/razvorot-morning/801138-

echo/

20

Choice of social media platform. Victor Simak posted his findings on the student forum

where his information would definitely reach the audience with high personal stake in the

issue.

Regular media picked on the story.

Information was ‘converted’ into action. The Russian Student Union used existing legal

mechanisms by lodging a complaint with the law enforcement authorities.

Political will. In Russia in 2010 and 2011 there were several major corruption

investigations involving high ranking officials. It is yet to be seen if these anti-corruption

activities will continue after the parliamentary elections in December 2011 and the

presidential elections in March 2012.

It is likely that all these factors have to come together to ensure that disclosure of a corruption

case leads to its successful prosecution.

Informal watchdog groups also use social media to create collective accounts of wrongdoing by

public officials. For example, a group of Russian civic activists called the Community of Blue

Buckets that fights against improper use of car emergency lights by public officials has group

pages on LiveJournal blog platform (ru-vederko.livejournal.com) and VKontakte and Facebook

social networking websites, a Wiki-page and a Twitter account. One of its leaders, Danila

Lindele, also has a blog on the website of Echo of Moscow radio station. Members of the

Community of Blue Buckets collect evidence about the cases of improper use of car emergency

light and other traffic rules violations by public executives, and post them online. The group also

sends petitions to authorities and lodge complaints to courts. Activists distribute car stickers

promoting their cause. Currently they collect money to set a billboard in Moscow. Money is

collected via Internet pay systems, SMS and in cash.

Informal watchdog groups encourage citizens to publish their own reports on their group pages,

so these projects come close to the model of a stand alone crowdsourcing website.

CROWDSOURCING

Many crowdsourcing projects in the region are based on the open source Ushahidi technology.

One of the first Ushahidi-powered projects in the region was launched in Kyrgyzstan.

Crowdsourcing projects represent a social media adaptation of traditional approaches used by

civil society organizations. Watchdog initiatives collect information about abuse of power by

authorities and make it public. The logic is that disclosure of this information will cause public

outrage and law enforcement authorities will be forced to prosecute reported violations. Some

watchdog organizations use existing legal mechanisms to push authorities to initiate

investigation. Crowdsourcing technologies, especially crowdmapping, speed up the processing

of reports submitted by individuals. People can almost instantly see how their stories and

experiences fit into the bigger picture.

Civic engagement initiatives encourage citizens to identify and address issues of public concern.

Projects of this type collect various public interest information, e.g. on environmental

contamination, state of the roads, etc. The information is then both made public and passed to

relevant authorities. Social media simplifies the processing of citizens’ reports and instantly

makes them public.

Election Monitoring

21

There is a growing number of projects that use social media to collect and present results of

election monitoring. These projects are a crossover between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. To ensure the

accuracy of reported information, these projects use pre-selected trained monitors. Social media

instruments are used to collect and present their reports. Regular citizens are also encouraged to

submit information.

For example, in 2010 Internews-Ukraine organized a Twitter coverage of October 31 local

elections. The project recruited over 100 journalists and civic activists who were trained to use

Twitter. Their reports were immediately made public on electua.org website. The Georgian

branch of the Institute of War and Peace Reporting used similar approach during local elections

in Georgia in May 2010. The Institute hired several bloggers trained in election reporting and

sent them to different precincts to monitor and report. All reports were published in real time on

geoelection.ge website43

.

The use of Ushahidi for election monitoring purposes is growing rapidly. While in 2010 there

was probably only one Ushahidi-powered project in the region, 2011 saw the launch of at least

five (Table 2).

Table 2. Social media election monitoring projects.

Year Country/

Elections

Website Description Launched by

2010 Georgia/ May

local

elections

geoelection.ge Text reports submitted via

blogs.

Institute of War and

Peace Reporting

2010 Georgia/ May

local

elections

cdi.org.ge Text reports collected from

citizens via text messages,

phone calls or e-mails.

Civic Development

Institute

2010 Georgia/ May

local

elections

votegeorgia.ge Used geocommons

technology to map

information pulled from

several observer

organizations.

Transparency

International Georgia

2010 Ukraine/

October local

elections

electua.org Text reports submitted via

Twitter.

Internews-Ukraine

2010 Kyrgyzstan/

June

constitutional

referendum

Save.kg Ushahidi-powered Altynbek Ismailov in

cooperation with

Coalition for Democracy

and Civil Society

2011 Kyrgyzstan/

October

parliamentary

elections

Save.kg Ushahidi-powered Altynbek Ismailov in

cooperation with

Coalition for Democracy

and Civil Society

2011 FYR

Macedonia/

June

parliamentary

elections

mojotizbor.mk Ushahidi-powered NGO coalition including

Macedonian Center for

International

Cooperation,

Macedonian Institute for

43

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2010/06/03/georgia-social-media-deployed-for-local-elections/

22

Media and Institute for

Democracy “Societas

Civilis”

2011 Turkey/ June

general

elections

http://secim20

11.crowdmap.

com

Ushahidi-powered A group of student of

the Istanbul Bilgi

University

2011 Bulgaria/

October

presidential

elections

fairelections.iz

borenkodeks.c

om

Ushahidi-powered Institute for Public

Environment

2011 Russia/

December

parliamentary

elections

Ушахиди.рф

[ushahidi.rf]

Ushahidi-powered Youth branch of the

democratic political

party ‘Yabloko’

‘Truthmeters’

This type of crowdsourcing initiatives is dedicated to monitoring if politicians and public

officials keep the promises they made to the public. Macedonian Vistinomer (Truthmeter)

(vistinomer.mk) launched by the Metamorphosis Foundation is a Web 1.0 realization of this idea.

Russian Dal Slovo (Gave a promise) (dalslovo.ru) and Slovo Vlasti (The promise of authorities)

(ulyanovskcity.ru/promises.php) projects use social media approach.

Dal Slovo project was launched in the end of 2010 by a team of three activists from the city of

Ekaterinburg. People can add promises made by all Russian politicians and public officials to the

website, add news and comments to pending promises, and report if promises were fulfilled in

time or not. The project team maintains a blog that reports mostly on technical aspects of project

development.

In 2010, the project team and site visitors added seven promises to the website, in 2011 – already

126. Entries range from the promise of Ekaterinburg mayor to repair a certain street (this one

was fulfilled) to the promise of the Russian president to fire heads of municipalities for poor

performance and corruption (still pending).

Slovo Vlasti follows the promises made by public officials in Ulianovsk region. The project was

initiated by the Governor Sergei Morozov44

. In the spring of 2011, he invited representatives of

local on-line media to discuss ways to increase accountability of public executives in the region.

Soon after this meeting, UlianovskCity news portal launched a special section where citizens

could report about promises made by public officials and evaluate their implementation. There is

also an analytical mechanism that summarizes information about performance of all public

officials tracked by the project and an option to send any of them a petition by e-mail.

Case study:

Use of Ushahidi in Kyrgyzstan

The year 2010 in Kyrgyzstan was marked by the revolution in

April, interethnic conflict and constitutional referendum in June

44

Gov2People. http://gov2people.ru/index.php/katalog-proektov/item/20-slovo-vlasti

23

and parliamentary elections in October.

In June 2010, when violent interethnic conflict broke up in Osh

region in Southern Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek-based entrepreneur

Altynbek Ismailov decided to use Ushahidi to monitor the riots.

Ismailov had no previous experience with website development

and had never been involved in civic activism. He learned about

Ushahidi in April 2009 at Ted.com, a not-for-profit site sharing

interesting ideas. The Ted.com report that he saw was about the

use of Ushahidi in Africa.

Transfer of idea via internet.

Ushahidi is available free of charge, but there was no Russian-

language version of the application, so he had to do the

translation. When the platform save.kg45

was ready, the riots were

already over.

Challenge: software may be

unavailable in local

language.

Then Ismailov had the idea to use save.kg to monitor the

constitutional referendum in June 2010. He was looking for

means of verification of reports, and approached non-

governmental Coalition for Democracy and Civil Society that was

going to have observers at the polling stations around the country.

The parties agreed that these observers would submit information

to save.kg and would verify reports sent by other people.

Verification of reports by

specially trained and

authorized people.

On the referendum day, information was collected via SMS with

the help of free FrontlineSMS software. Ismailov had 15

operators who were uploading information to the Ushahidi-

powered website. Most reports indicated that everything was

going fine.

Ismailov tried to raise money for his project, but could not secure

funding from donor agencies working in Kyrgyzstan. Then he

was advised to use ChipIn website. He received 22 contributions,

slightly over USD 500 in total. Half of this money was used to

cover project telecommunication expenses, another half – to pay

the operators.

Crowdsourcing for financial

support.

After the referendum, Ismailov took a job with the Coalition for

Democracy and Civil Society to do other Ushahidi-powered

projects. The next one was to monitor parliamentary elections in

October 2011. Currently Ushahidi-powered crowdmap is used to

monitor development projects in the areas affected by the June

2010 riots (projects.coalition.kg). The latter project relies on

volunteer reports from citizens, but these reports are few.

Challenge: ensuring on-

going submission of citizen

reports.

Ismailov gets regular support from three IT-managers employed

by the Coalition. He also would like to have a full-time staff

member promoting the project on social networking websites by

engaging in discussions with other users. At present there is no

funding for this position. But even if he had funds, finding a

person to fill this position would be a challenge: there are no

Challenge: lack of

specialists.

45

Now Save.kg is located at jib.me.

24

specialists of this kind in Kyrgyzstan.

The government of Kyrgyzstan initially supported the idea to use

Ushahidi to monitor the referendum: “They were using all

possible resources to help us by connecting us with local

government branches”, said Ismailov in his interview to

Technology for Transparency46

. At the time of parliamentary

elections the government was less enthusiastic, probably because

the project was not favoring any of the parties.

The attitude of authorities

depends on the political

situation.

The story of Ushahidi-powered projects in Kyrgyzstan offers some valuable lessons:

Importance of efforts to collect and disseminate successful project models. The story

about the use of Ushahidi in Africa inspired a series of crowdsourcing projects in

Kyrgyzstan.

Due to the availability of open source software, crowdsourcing projects are relatively

easy to launch. The most challenging task is to ensure high reporting activity. One option

is to find a strong institutional partner and use its off-line networks of activists and

volunteers. Another is to promote the project via social networks.

Ability of projects to use this second option can be limited by the availability of funds

and the lack of specialists.

Corruption Monitoring

A majority of corruption monitoring projects collect reports about instances when bribes were

paid or extorted. Reports are anonymous. Information can be submitted on-line and via mobile

apps.

Table 3. Crowdsourcing corruption monitoring projects.

Country Website Description

Kazakhstan vzyatochnik.info The project collects information about cases of

corruption in Kazakhstan universities. It was launched

in the end of 2010 by a person who calls himself Mr.

Incognito (or Marat Shaken).

Kazakhstan gosotkat.info This is the second project of Mr. Incognito launched to

collect reports about kick backs in public procurement.

During the period of this study this site was featuring

and announcement that collection of reports is stopped

due to the lack of support from authorities and the lack

of funding.

Kazakhstan vzyatka.crowdmap.com Ushahidi-powered “I was asked to give a bribe” project

was launched by Internews-Kazakhstan in March 2011

to collect information about instances of bribe extortion

in the CIS counties.

Russia roskomvzyatka.com Crowdmap of bribe cases in Russia. Site was launched

in the beginning of 2011 by a US businessman of

Russian origin Elliot (Ilya) Goihman who owns of a

company that develops websites and mobile

applications

Russia nalapu.net In September 2011 Russian Student Union launched a

46

http://transparency.globalvoicesonline.org/project/savekg

25

web forum where student can report about bribes

extortion in Russian higher education institutions.

International bribespot.com Site was developed and launched by international team

coming from young program developers from Estonia,

Lithuania, Finland and Iran in April 2011 during

Garage48 startup event in Tallinn. Ushahidi-powered

project collects reports about bribes from all over the

world.

Russia otmenta.ru Collects reports on cases of abuse of power by Russian

police. The site was launched by Russian civic activist

and IT-specialist Oleg Kozlovsly.

Russia rospil.info Crowdsources information about potentially corrupt

public tenders and lodges complaints with law

enforcement authorities.

Reporting activity on these websites is generally low. By October 2011, Roskomvzyatka that

was launched in the beginning of 2011 collected 892 bribe reports. BribeSpot, launched in April

2011, received 750 reports from all over the world. “I was asked to give a bribe” project,

launched in Kazakhstan in March 2011, collected 23 reports from Russia, Kazakhstan and USA.

Actually reports to the latter project were submitted only in March and April 2011, then

reporting stopped. Given that only in Russia 38.6 million people use Internet on a daily basis47

,

and national survey commissioned by the Russian Ministry of Economics in 2011 found that

51% of Russian citizens either paid or were asked to pay a bribe48

, the number of submitted

reports is very low.

Fig. 6 shows the changes in the number of reports submitted to roskomvzyatka.com between

January 2010 and September 2011. The site was officially launched in March 2011, so reports

before that date were submitted while the website was in testing mode. The number of reports

peaked in March and April 2011 when the project was covered by social, online and regular

media. The number of reference to roskomvzyatka.com project in Russian-language blogs also

peaked in March (Fig. 7). But then bloggers’ interest in the project sharply fell, and the number

of reports considerably decreased. This supports the above conclusions that crowdsourcing

projects have to be constantly promoted to stimulate reporting and that media coverage is an

effective means for promotion.

Fig. 6. Number of reports submitted to roskomvzyatka.com between January 2010 and

September 2011.

47

Internet in Russia. Spring 2011. Public Foundation Opinion report.

http://bd.fom.ru/pdf/Internet%20v%20Rossii%20vol%2033%20vesna%202011%20short.pdf 48

http://www.rbc.ru/digest/index.shtml?rosgazeta/2011/07/05/33344990

26

Source: http://roskomvzyatka.com/, retrieved on September 8, 2011

Fig. 7. The number of references to roskomvzyatka.com in Russian language blogs (September

2010 – September 2011).

Source: Blogosphere Pulse. Yandex.ru.

Note: Y-axis shows the average percentage of posts that include the word of interest out of the total number of posts

per week.

Corruption crowdmaps are similar to the projects that collect reports about cases of corruption

via hot lines. Hotlines also have to be promoted continuously to ensure the steady inflow of

reports.

NGOs that operate hotlines use collected information for advocacy purposes, and it is these

advocacy efforts that produce impact. Roskomvzyatka and BribeSpot projects are based on the

premise that if information is made public, it will be used. This is not necessarily happening, so

at present these projects hardly have any impact.

Crowdsourcing projects collect anonymous reports. This lowers barriers to people who would

like to submit information, but raises the issue of the credibility of collected information. For

example, vzyatochnik.info collects anonymous reports about cases of bribe extortion by

professors in Kazakhstan universities. University authorities often claimed that information on

the website were libelous. So the project set a verification mechanism49

. It recruited volunteers

among students of all Kazakhstan universities who check the reports by talking to other students

49

Verification Mechanism (in Russian), http://vzyatochnik.info/news/235-proverka-structure

27

and conducting mini-surveys. The project also cooperates with student NGOs. Names of

volunteers and partner organizations are not disclosed to ensure their protection and prevent

possible pressure. When a report about corrupt activities of a professor is published on the

website, the concerned person has an option to comment and this comment is also made public.

Vzyatochnik.info also tried to link collection of information to existing legal mechanisms.

Initially, the project agreed with Kazakhstan fiscal police that they would investigate reported

cases. Later, the police declined to do so on the grounds that they could not act upon anonymous

reports50

.

The story of Vzyatochnik.info offers the following lessons about challenges that crowdsourcing

projects can face:

Anonymity of reports can undermine the credibility of collected information.

Anonymity of reports can also be a barrier to the use existing legal mechanisms to act on

reported cases of corruption.

Russian RosPil project (rospil.info) effectively addresses these challenges. RosPil uses

crowdsouring to collect information about potentially corrupt public tenders. People are asked to

submit description of the suspicious tender and corresponding link so that the project team can

check and verify the information. Then project leader Alexey Navalny on his own behalf lodges

complaints with the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service that is responsible for the oversight

and control of public procurement.

Alexey Navalny is a lawyer, political activist and one of the most popular Russian bloggers. He

is widely known as an active fighter against corruption.

Case study

Alexey Navalny’s anti-corruption efforts

Alexey Navalny actively uses social media for his anti-corruption

activities. He maintains active blogs at LiveJournal blog platform

as well as at Echo of Moscow and Slon.ru websites. He has also

launched RosPil project to fight corruption in public procurement

and RosYama project to fight poor quality of Russian roads.

Alexey Navalny holds law and finance degrees. In 2000-2007 he

was an active member of the democratic political party

“Yabloko”. In 2007, he was one of co-founders of the national

democratic movement “People”. In 2008, Navalny launched the

Union of Minority Shareholders that works to ensure transparency

and accountability of large companies where Russian government

is a majority shareholder. In 2009, Navalny worked as an aid to

the governor of Kirovsk region.

Knowledge of legal

mechanisms.

Commitment to democratic

values.

Strong motivation to

participate in public

activities.

Long history of political

activism.

In 2009, Navalny used his blog to publish information VTB bank

paying 50% above the standard market price for drilling

equipment, which indicated possible corruption. Authorities

investigated the case, but no fraud was found.

Information-sharing.

In November 2010, Navalny used his blog to post documents Media helps to reach wider

audiences and attract new

50

Vzyatochnik.info, Wikipedia, http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vzyatochnik.info

28

revealing that 120 billion rubles were stolen in the course of a

Transneft construction project to build of a pipeline from Siberia

to the Far East. The project was funded by the Russian

government. The story was covered by independent media and

made Navalny popular among the liberally minded part of the

Russian public. Authorities started investigation into the

Transneft case, but soon reported that money was not stolen, just

‘misused’.

supporters.

Building on public interest in the Transneft story, Navalny

launched the RosPil project (rospil.info). People can submit

information about public tenders where they suspect corruption,

e.g. the price is considerably higher than regular market prices,

the time allocated for contract implementation is too short. In

Russia all government institutions are required to publish tenders

online, so interested citizens can find this information. Reports to

RosPyl website are anonymous, but a person who submits a

report has to provide a link to the governmental website where

he/she found the tender and explain why it is suspicious.

Relative ease and safety of

reporting.

Citizens are used as

monitors and experts.

Navalny has a team of lawyers who check submitted information

and prepare complaints to the Federal Antimonopoly Agency. All

complaints are made on behalf of Navalny. Texts of complaints

and responses to them are available on-line. As of October 2011,

RosPil team has submitted 58 complaints; 32 of them were found

valid by the Federal Antimonopoly Agency and tenders were

cancelled. This has saved the taxpayers over 7.5 billion rubles.

Expert verification of

submitted information and

preparation of documents

for off-line activities.

Transparency of the

operations.

RosPil project is funded by private donations via online pay

system Yandex.Dengi. Navalny estimated that he would need 3 to

5 million rubles for the project and asked people for support in his

blog. It took just one day to collect the first million rubles. From

February to May 2011, Navalny received more than 6.5 million

rubles. Donations came from about 15 thousand individuals.

Crowd-sourcing for funding.

The money goes to Navalny’s personal account. He decided not

to set an NGO to avoid possible pressure from the government.

Navalny publishes all information about receipt and use of money

in his LiveJournal blog.

Transparent use of funds.

In May 2011, Navalny launched RosYama project (rosyama.ru),

which helps citizens to use existing regulatory and legal

mechanisms to demand that authorities fix potholes on the roads.

A person can submit information, and the website automatically

generates a letter to the Traffic Safety Inspection that has to be

printed out and send by regular mail. If the complaint is not

processed in due time, the website can generate a complaint to the

prosecutor’s office. Information about the status of each reported

case is available online.

Verification of information

using photos.

Use of legal expertise.

Easy conversion of on-line

report into off-line action.

Transparency of process.

In August 2011, Navalny used his blogs to start an e-petition

campaign to request due investigation of an allegedly corrupt

transaction: in 2008 a company affiliated with Victor Vekselberg,

29

presently the head of the governmental Skolkovo Foundation,

purchased the building of the Hungarian Embassy to Russia for

USD 21 million and then immediately sold it to the Ministry of

Regional Development for USD 111 million.

A volunteer lawyer helped Navalny to collect all documents for

this case and prepare a complaint to the Moscow office of the

Russian Investigative Committee.

Use of experts.

Navalny also asked people to submit e-petitions to the Federal

Investigative Committee and to the President. Texts of the

petitions and links to the official website where they could be

submitted were provided in the text of the post51

.

Crowd-mobilization: people

are given all necessary

information to minimize

their effort.

Alexey Navalny, who openly calls the ruling United Russia a

party of ‘crooks and thieves’, is very popular among the

democratically minded part of the public. Navalny’s supporters

launched group pages on LiveJournal and main social networking

websites. Activists produce and distribute car stickers with

slogans in support of Navalny.

Pro-government activists accuse Navalny of serving US interests.

The Federal Security Service requested Yandex to disclose

personal data of people who donated money to RosPyl project.

Soon after Yandex complied, some of Navalny’s supporters

received suspicious telephone calls from a person who introduced

herself as a journalist and asked to comment why they gave

money to Navalny.

In May 2011, the Investigative Committee launched a criminal

investigation against Navalny’s related to his work in Kirovsk

region.

Navalny’s case adds several important insights about factors that can enhance performance of

social media projects:

Leader’s background. Navalny is a professional lawyer, and his projects effectively use

existing legal mechanisms. He is also a seasoned opposition politician and a charismatic

leader. His posts, interviews and public speeches are quite harsh and sarcastic, which

makes them more appealing to people.

Importance of emotional appeal for harnessing public support. This finding is

corroborated by other studies. The book “Emotions in Politics and Campaigning”

published by the European Association of Political Consultants maintains that to reach

people communications should be emotional52

. The report “Harnessing Social Media

Tools to Fight Corruption” prepared by the London School of Economics and Political

Science recommends to use an accessible emotional narrative as a tool to motivate and

encourage civic participation in social media anti-corruption initiatives.

High intensity of communication. Navalny uses several social media platforms. He often

writes several posts a day to his main blog on LiveJournal.

Continuity of action and evolutional development. Navalny’s current projects build on

many years of previous persistent work. Fig. 8 shows that his popularity in Russian

51

http://echo.msk.ru/blog/navalny/799074-echo/ 52

http://www.eapc.eu/pages/news/news-detail-view/article/book-emotions-in-politics-and-campaigning/1/

30

language blogosphere was growing slowly. The first peak in the end of 2010 corresponds

to the publication of the report on Transneft, peaks in the first half of 2011 – to the launch

of RosPyl project.

Strong grassroots support. RosPyl project has an estimated budget of over USD 100,000,

and all necessary money was raised through individual donations. Navalny supporters

have organized on-line and off-line support campaigns.

Absolute transparency of project activities and the use of funds. All steps taken by

Navalny and his team of lawyers – including financial transactions - are made public

through his blog and RosPyl website.

Fig. 8. The number of references to Alexey Navalny in Russian language blogs (2002 – 2011).

Source: Blogosphere Pulse. Yandex.ru.

Note: Y-axis shows the average percentage of posts that include the word of interest out of the total number of posts

per week.

Evaluation of Government Performance

Russian project eGovLive invites visitors to rate the quality of the provision of e-government

services in their region (ru-egov.ru/region_ratings) and give substantive comments. eGovLive

was launched in 2011 to disseminate information about the progress of e-governance in Russia.

Besides the public rating facility, the website features news, information about best e-

government practices in Russia and around the world and about social media presence of

Russian politicians and public executives. The level of user activity is still low: in the beginning

of October 2011 the rating facility had only 44 entries.

This type of social media projects represents a crossover between watchdog and civic

engagement projects.

31

Civic Engagement Projects

Crime Monitoring

Bulgarian blogger and civic activist Boyan Yurukov believes that Bulgarian authorities fail to

disclose complete information about crime incidents and cases of missing people. To address this

problem he launched two Ushahidi-powered projects:

lipsva.com that collects information about missing people;

crime.bg that collects information about criminal incidents.

Reporting activity on both websites is low.

Russian project “Where is the casino?” (gdecasino.org/gdecasino.ru) collects information about

location of illegal gambling clubs.

Environment Contamination Monitoring

There are several Ushahidi-powered projects that collect public interest information about

environmental contamination (Table 4).

Table 4. Crowdmaps of environmental contamination.

Country/

Region

Website Description

Bulgaria belene.org/map Environmental Association “Za Zemiata” running

campaign against the construction of Belene nuclear

power plant uses Ushahidi to collect information about

nuclear sites in Bulgaria.

Western

Balkans

bewman.crowdmap.com Ushahidi-powered crowdmap53

launched by the Balkan

E-Waste Management Advocacy Network Project that

covers four countries: Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia and

Serbia. It aims to improve e-waste (discarded electronic

devices) management. The site collects information

about all kinds of e-waste.

Russia radiation.crowdmap.com Radiation Map was launched by a group of Russian

activists after explosions at Fukushima nuclear power

plant in Japan to collect information about the radiation

situation around the world.

Reporting on Municipal Problems

These projects build upon the model pioneered by British FixMyStreet.com (Table 5). People

can submit online reports about municipal problems pinning them to the online city map. The

reports are published on the website and forwarded to relevant municipal authorities. When

reported problems are fixed, website users can mark them accordingly. Publication of reports

creates additional pressure on municipal authorities to fix the problems. Projects of this type

make communication between citizens and authorities more transparent which in turn contributes

to higher accountability of municipal executives.

Table 5. FixMyStreet-like projects in Eastern Europe and the CIS

53

A Crowdmap is a tool that allows you to crowdsource information and visualize it on a map and timeline

32

Country Website Description

Georgia chemikucha.ge FixMyStreet Georgia/ Chemikucha was launched by

Transparency International Georgia. The website

collects reports from Tbilisi residents and passes

them to municipal authorities.

Serbia rupanaputu.crowdmap.com Rupa na Putu (Pothole on the Road) was launched by

Belgrade municipal company ‘Beogardput’

responsible for maintaining city roads. People can

report only about potholes on the roads and

sidewalks.

Macedonia popravi.mk Popravi (Fix) was launched by a group of IT

specialists. It collects reports from all municipalities

in Macedonia.

Moldova alerte.md The Ushahidi-powered site collects reports about

municipal problems in Chisinau. It was launched by

MediaPoint, a group of young civic activists who

believe in the power of social media to change

society.

Russia yamanayame.ru “Pothole next to pothole” is a Russian watchdog

project that collects information about potholes on

Russian roads. The project was launched in

Krasnoyarsk, but people can report problems in any

Russian city.

Russia dorogi.teron.ru The project has evolved from a regular page on the

online forum in the city of Perm to a crowdmap.

Russia StreetJournal.org My Territory project was developed by a group on IT

specialists. It was launched in the city of Perm and

already covers nine Russian cities.

Russia imhonn.ru The site allows residents of Nizhny Novgorod to

report about problems, launch petition campaigns and

monitor if local public officials do what the promise.

Russia daisignal.ru FixYourStreet was launched in 2011 by municipal

authorities of the city of Kazan.

Russia gis.krd.ru/umk Started as a crowdmap of illegal construction sites.

The project was launched by the Administration of

the city of Krasnodar. The service was expanded, and

now people can submit reports about all kinds of

municipal problems.

Russia zalivaet.spb.ru The site was launched by a student living in the city

of Saint Petersburg to collect information about

leaking roofs.

Russia rosyama.ru Project collects information about potholes on the

roads and helps people to report these problems to

authorities (More details about this project were

provided in Case 3).

This study took a detailed look at three cases of social media use to report problems to

municipalities to learn more about their internal ‘mechanics’ and emerging challenges.

33

Case studies:

FixMyStreet Georgia/ Chemicucha.ge – Tbilisi, Georgia

FixMyStreet Georgia was launched by Transparency International

Georgia. “Chemi kucha” is Georgian for "our street”. The project

was inspired by a presentation of the British FixMyStreet project

at the Social Media for Social Change Conference in Tbilisi in

April 2010. Eurasia Partnership Foundation (that organized the

Social Innovation Camp Caucasus within the framework of this

conference) offered small grants for NGOs willing to launch their

own social media projects. Transparency International Georgia

jumped on the opportunity and submitted a proposal.

Inspiration comes from a

successful project in another

country.

The grant was awarded. The project started on October 1, 2010

and ended on September 30, 2011. Total project budget was USD

20,742. (Project proposal and budget are available at

Transparency International Georgia site

http://www.transparency.ge/en/project/fixmystreetge-

chemikuchage-0).

Availability of funding.

According to the project coordinator Mathias Huter, the project

used FixMyStreet open code. Translation and necessary

adaptation of the code took about six months and were done by

Transparency International Georgia staff – a programmer and a

web-designer.

It took a long time to persuade Tbilisi mayor to cooperate with the

project; he agreed only couple days before the official launch of

Chemicucha.ge on March 21, 2011. The mayor attended the

press-conference organized by Transparency International

Georgia, which helped to attract a lot of press attention and ensure

broad media coverage. As a result, within the first 72 hours of

operation over 4,800 people visited the website and 164 reports

were submitted.

Endorsement of high

ranking public officials

helped to secure broad

media coverage.

Media coverage helps to

attract people to the

website.

Since then, the project did not receive much media attention.

Transparency International Georgia advertised the project in print

media and on Facebook. Visitors have an opportunity to print

flyers and disseminate them to promote the project.

The website has 100-250 visitors a day – more on weekdays and

less during the weekend.

Reports to Chemicucha.ge are not pre-moderated. Mathias Huter

says it was a deliberate choice to lower the project operational

costs and increase sustainability. Once coding is complete, project

maintenance will require just USD 200-300 per year – cost of

web-hosting and domain maintenance. In the beginning this no-

supervision model created some problems. Municipal officials

marked problems as resolved once the orders to fix them were

issued. This prompted the project team to add a verification

34

mechanism that allows people to comment if a problem was really

solved.

According to Mathias Huter the staff of mayor’s office did not

have an internal software system to handle reports, which created

an additional challenge to the project. In addition, it was not

always clear who was responsible for what. Now all reports from

the website are sent to an e-mail address at the mayor’s office and

then forwarded to relevant departments.

According to Mathias Huter, when the project was just launched,

the mayor’ office used Chemicucha.ge to monitor how efficiently

different departments dealt with reported problems.

As of October 6, 2011 Chemicucha.ge has collected 844 problems

reports, and 566 of them were resolved. Mathias Huter believes

that crowdsourcing projects should help people to solve their

problems, otherwise they are doomed to fail.

Importance of positive

outcomes for project

sustainability.

Grant funding to the project ended on September 30, 2011.

Transparency International Georgia will continue to maintain the

website at its own expense.

Alerte.md – Chisinau, Moldova

Alerte.md was launched by MediaPoint, a group of young

Moldovans who believe in new media as a driver of social

change. MediaPoint was established in 2010 by four students;

now the group is made of about 30 people who work on a

voluntary basis; in 2011, MediaPoint registered as NGO.

Highly motivated group of

volunteers.

Twice a year MediaPoint holds a planning session where its

members brainstorm project ideas and then select one or two to be

pursued. The idea of Alerte.md emerged at the December 2010

planning session, and was inspired by the British FixMyStreet

project. MediaPoint team decided to use Ushahidi to power their

project.

Inspiration comes from a

successful project in another

country.

Alerte.md was launched in February 2011. MediaPoint promoted

it on social networks, which generated a lot of traffic to the site.

At the same time, MediaPoint contacted Chisinau mayor’s office

to offer cooperation. But, according to project coordinator Mihai

Lupascu, city officials were preparing for the June municipal

elections and did not pay any attention to the project.

In July 2011, Alerte.md won the eTransformation Apps contest

organized by the government of Moldova. This attracted attention

to the project, it was widely covered by regular media, including

national TV. As a result the number of visitors and number of

reports to the site peaked, but then again went down (see Fig. 1

and Table 6).

Media coverage is

important to promote the

project.

35

Fig. 9. Number of reports submitted to Alerte.md.

Table 6. Alerte.md website statistics.

July 2011 September 2011 Total from project

start

Unique Visitors 2698 558 7532

Visits 3048 595 8502

Pageviews 9492 2084 27787

The mayor’s office agreed to cooperate and assigned a person

from the PR department as a focal point. The banner of Alerte.md

was placed on the official website of the mayor’s office

(www.chisinau.md). The Alerte.md team sends citizens’ reports

to a focal point, who then forwards them to relevant departments.

On September 26, 2011 the project team made an official

presentation of Alerte.md at Chisinau mayor’s office and the

mayor publicly endorsed the project (without making any

financial commitments though).

Official recognition by

municipal authorities.

Alerte.md was developed and is operated by five people with

occasional help from other MediaPoint volunteers. All reports are

pre-moderated to avoid false ones: the moderator evaluates

reports based on the problem description provided (there are no

other means of verification). Comments are also pre-moderated to

avoid spam. According to Mihai Lupascu, the team rejects about

5% of submitted reports and 20% of comments.

My Territory (StreetJournal.ru) - Russia

The project was launched by a group of IT specialists based in the

city of Perm in the Urals. According to Alexey Shaposhnikov, the

leader of this group, the project was prompted by his frustration

Frustration as a source of

36

with inadequate performance of municipal works. One day,

Alexey was taking his child to school and noticed three open

sewer manholes along the way. He tried to contact local

authorities to get the problem fixed, but could not find anyone

who would take the responsibility. Shaposhnikov discussed the

situation with his friends and colleagues and they decided to look

for possible ways to make things better. Soon the group learned

about British FixMyStreet project and decided to launch a similar

one in Perm.

motivation.

Successful project in

another country as a model.

The group, according to Shaposhnikov, was quite pessimistic

about the prospects of the project, but they still decided to give it

a try. While the project was still in the development stage,

Shaposhnikov wrote to the governor of Perm region Oleg

Chirkunov. To his surprise, the governor responded and expressed

interest. This support opened the doors to other Perm officials.

Head of the Office of the Government of Perm Region Makar

German (a young man in his 20s) became a valuable ally to the

project and helped arrange meetings with many other public

executives. Still, the initial attitude of the majority of public

officials was reserved: they wanted to see how the project would

work.

Support of senior public

executives.

Though FixMyStreet code is open, Shaposhnikov and his

colleagues decided to develop their own code to be able to

upgrade and expand the project in the future. The first version of

the project was launched in July 2010. In November 2011 the

group plans to launch the new version that will have more

features.

StreetJournal.ru can be used to collects reports on problems in

any city in Russia and neighboring countries. Someone just have

to enter information about relevant municipal authorities and their

official e-mail addresses. Then people will be able to submit

reports online, and these reports will be then forwarded to

corresponding authorities.

Easy replication – no

technical skills necessary.

StreetJournal.ru is already used in nine Russian cities.

Shaposhnikov says that he has received expressions of interest

from Ukraine and the Baltic states, so the team plans to make the

system multilingual.

Shaposhnikov shared the story of StreetJournal.ru launch in the

city to Samara. A local citizen wrote about the project to the blog

of Samara mayor Dmitry Azarov. Azarov liked the idea and

ordered municipal agencies to register on the website. Alexey

Shaposhnikov notes that support of local authorities is crucial for

success of FixMyStreet-like projects. He says that, for example,

similar projects in Kurgan and Volgograd failed because of

resistance of local authorities.

Projects of this type depend

heavily upon support of

authorities.

According to Shaposhnikov, so far his team did not do anything

to promote StreetJournal.ru. As a result, the number of visitors is

37

quite low – usually 500 – 1000 unique visitors per day. When the

project gets covered in some online media, the number of visitors

peaks, to 20 thousands on one occasion.

Media coverage increases

traffic to the site.

Shaposhnikov and his team regard the project as a not-for-profit

endeavor, something they do to meet their intrinsic aspirations.

They work on the project in their spare time, so the development

process is slow. Shaposhnikov says that the project is still in the

inception phase, but the team has already learned a lot and has

ideas and plans on how to proceed with the project and increase

its functionality.

These three cases offer several important lessons:

Value of information about similar previous projects. Teams that launched the three

projects described above were inspired by FixMyStreet.com and built on its experience.

Importance of personal motivation. Strong motivation of project team members can

compensate for the absence of financial support.

Support of senior public officials is crucial for the success of this type of projects.

These projects enhance accountability of municipal authorities by making public their

performance on submitted reports. This data can be used by civic activists as well as by

authorities themselves to evaluate performance of various departments.

Electronic Petitioning

There are several websites that give people an opportunity to launch petitions to authorities and

collect signatures to them. Any user can publish the text of his/her petition, and site visitors can

comment and ‘sign’ petitions that they want to support. Further processing of petitions differs.

Russian onlinepetition.ru maintains online lists of signatures to each petition. The site also

publishes success stories shared by people whose petitions worked. Russian nasheveche.ru

generates a printable version of the petition and the project team sends it by regular mail.

Ukrainian petition.org.ua sends a petition to the e-mail address specified by the person who

initiated it, once the petition collects 500 signatures. Once a petition collects 1000 signatures, it

is printed out and sent by regular mail.

This type of crowdsourcing projects comes close to the next model – the crowd-to-comminity

one.

CROWD-TO-COMMUNITY PROJECTS

Several projects combine crowdsourcing with mechanisms that increase interaction of visitors

with the project and between each other. This interaction transforms a ‘crowd’ into a community.

Such projects require sophisticated web platforms, so their development and maintenance is

expensive. The study has identified only two projects of this kind in the region.

Russian social network for protection of human rights Tak-tak-tak (taktaktak.ru) was launched

by the Institute for Press Development-Siberia with financial support from the European Union

and USAID. The project recruited a group of volunteer experts. People can submit questions and

complaints and experts offer them advice. All questions, complaints, expert advice and

comments made on the website are public. People also have an option to launch groups to

38

investigate specific public interests issues and invite others to join them. Topics of investigations

vary – for example, a team of five people led by one of the experts is investigating a possible

fraud during the construction of a metro station in the city of Novosibirsk; the investigation

should result in a well prepared complaint to the law enforcement authorities.

Democrator.ru (Russia) combines social media technologies with civic activism techniques and

use of existing legal mechanisms to help citizens pursue their rights. The project calls itself the

system of electronic democracy. At present, it is probably the most comprehensive and

sophisticated web-based civic engagement system operating in the region.

Case Study

Democrator.ru

In 2008, Russian businessman Arkady Pavlov came up with an

idea to create a website that would make interaction between a

citizen who faces some problem and authorities responsible for

helping that citizen public and transparent. Pavlov hired a team of

IT specialists and provided the necessary funding.

Development started in September 2008. The project team studied

international experience, e.g. British FixMyStreet.com, Canadian

FixMyStreet.ca, German gov20.de, Dutch verbeterdebuurt.nl, US

SeeClickFix.com. Development continued till February 2010 and

included several test runs.

Use of international

experience.

Officially the project was launched in February 2010. It is run by

a team of 10 people, including 5 lawyers who provide advice and

consultation to users.

Citizens can use the site to report their problems. All reports are

open to other visitors, who can vote if they agree or disagree that

the problem reported is important. To submit a report, a person

has to register on the website and provide his/her name and home

address – as per Russian law this information has to be provided

when citizens apply to state agencies. When people vote, they

have to provide only their names - similar to signing a petition.

Visitors also can leave their comments.

The project offers its users a

variety of ways to engage

with other users and

members of their own

informal social networks –

on-line and off-line.

Users can control their level

of involvement with the

project.

Democrator.ru encourages users to use their personal networks of

friends and acquaintances to collect votes. There is an option to

send an e-mail with a problem description to one’s contacts and

share it on several social networking websites. There is also an

option that allows anyone to generate and print out flyers that

describe a problem and ask to come to the website to sign a

petition.

Once 50 or more votes are cast for a problem, Democrator.ru

generates a letter to the relevant authority and sends it both by e-

mail and registered mail. The project team uses Russian Post

official website to monitor the delivery of registered mail.

According to project director Andrei Bogdanov, the response rate

39

to registered mail is about 90%, while to e-mails – just 5-10%.

When reply letters arrive, they are scanned and posted online.

Now users can vote if they are satisfied with the reply or not. If

the majority votes against the reply, Democrator.ru’s lawyers

prepare a complaint to the relevant oversight authority.

If and when the user who launched the process thinks that the

problem was solved, he/she can mark it as resolved.

The project accumulates the data on people satisfaction with

responses of different authorities and prepares agency ratings.

The data is also aggregated by Ministries and by regions, so

website visitors can compare them by responsiveness and quality

of work with citizen applications. To enable this aggregation, the

project had to create a structured hierarchical database of state

agencies, which was a challenging task according to Bogdanov.

From individual cases to

bigger picture.

At the design stage, the project was presented at several start-up

events in Russia and USA. The launch was covered by several

Russian national newspapers and one national TV channel. Since

then, the project relies mostly on viral dissemination of

information to attract new users.

The strategy works. According to Bogdanov, by the end of the

first year of operation, in February 2011, Democrator.ru had 90

thousand registered users. In March 2011 there were 100

thousand users, in September 2011 – already 200 thousands, and

about 2 thousand new users were registering per day. The number

of problems reported by users exceeds five thousand. Bogdanov

believes that new users are attracted by success stories spread by

word-of-mouth.

Successful viral promotion.

Democrator.ru also offers services to institutional users. Civic

society organizations and political parties can get an account with

the system and follow citizen applications as well as launch their

own campaigns. All these activities are open to visitors of the

website, which can contribute to the public image of a party or

NGO. This service is provided by subscription and costs 2,000

rubles (about 50 euro) a month. The service is already used by

two political parties – Spravedlivaya Rossiya and Yabloko – and

several CSOs.

Project engages CSOs and

political parties to support

citizen petitions.

The project also offers services to state agencies and

municipalities that can set accounts on the site and use them to

work with citizen applications on-line. The service costs 2,000

rubles (about 50 euro) a month; so far no state agency has

subscribed.

State agencies avoid

engaging with citizens.

Democrator.ru has forums where project managers and users

discuss various topics related to system operation, including

funding. The project planned to recover its operational costs by

selling subscriptions to state agencies, but this is not happening

Users are involved in

discussion of project

operation.

40

yet. Users suggested starting collection of individual donations.

Now the project collects them via several on-line and off-line

channels. Yet most of the project expenses are still covered by the

founder, who has already invested USD 2.5 million.

According to Andrei Bogdanov, the Project Director,

Democrator.ru is based on four key pillars/principles:

- openness and transparency, all information is made public;

- collective action;

- feedback system, e.g. when people access responses of

public officials;

- community of users.

Bogdanov believes that community is the greatest achievement

and the most valuable asset of the project. There are users who

have already solved several problems through the project and

support other users on a regular basis.

There are also examples when people use Democrator.ru to solve

problems of their relatives and friends. Andrei Bogdanov shared

the following story. Residents of three small remote villages in

Vladimir region were suffering from cattle waste dumped from a

local farm. The waste collector was built close to the villages, so

people were suffering from foul smell. To make things worse,

during heavy rains the collector leaked and a local river was

regularly polluted. A relative of a local resident reported the story

on Democrator.ru. Users supported the case and it was reported to

the prosecutor’s office. The case was investigated. The

prosecutor’s office found that the farm violated existing

regulation and ordered it to close and remediate the collector.

Off-line social networks

allow people who don’t

have access to Internet to

benefit from project services

The project team is thinking about replicating the project in

Kazakhastan and Belarus, but at present there are no funds for

this. Bogdanov estimates that they would need around 5 million

rubles (around 120 thousand euros) to launch the project in

Kazakhstan. The said amount would cover the purchase of

necessary equipment, adaptation of software, translation and

development of a database of Kazakhstan state agencies.

The case of Democrator.ru confirms the conclusion that new initiatives benefit a lot when they

can build on the experience of similar projects. The case also adds several new lessons:

Viral promotion can work well for projects that help people to solve their problems.

The project offers its users a variety of ways to engage with other users and members of

their own informal social networks. Users can control their level of involvement with the

project. This increases commitment of users to the project and builds a sense of

community.

Bridging digital divide. Well-educated young urban professionals are the first to embrace

emerging technologies and rip their benefits. Elderly people, residents of remote and

rural areas and the poor often lag behind. As a result, those who need the most help to

protect their rights often have the least access to emerging online instruments. Off-line

41

social networks can help to narrow the digital divide. People who have access to internet

can serve as online representatives for relatives and acquaintances who don’t have such

access.

CONCLUSIONS

Social media is changing communication patterns in Eastern Europe and the CIS. Blogs, forums

and social networking websites have eliminated the borderline between private conversations

and public discussions. Any citizen or group of civic activists who has access to Internet is able

to reach and engage with a much greater number of other people than ever before. Comments

and pieces of information provided by individual users come together, which enables people to

look at the bigger picture and to see how their own story fits there.

This study has revealed several models of social media use to enhance public transparency and

accountability:

Information sharing: individuals and groups of civic activists use commercial social

media platforms (forums, blog platforms, social networking and video hosting websites)

to disseminate information about corruption.

Crowdsourcing: individuals and groups of civic activists create their own specialized

social media platforms, where users can publish information about instances of

corruption or other public interest information.

Crowd-to-community model takes crowdsourcing one step further by stimulating

cooperation between website visitors and offering people various ways to engage with

the project.

There are examples when information sharing had considerable impact and led to prosecution of

corrupt officials. This impact is made possible by a combination of the follows factors:

An individual report is published on a social media platform where other uses have a

stake in the issue.

The individual report attracts attention of regular media.

Someone – individual or organization – uses existing legal mechanisms to make

authorities act on the reported information.

There is political will to investigate and prosecute reported violations.

Crowdsourcing projects either use watchdog approach and collect reports about cases of

wrongdoing on the part of authorities, or take a civic engagement stance and collect information

about social and physical environments where people live.

All crowdsourcing projects face two common challenges. First, they need to ensure the steady

inflow of new reports; second, they have to prove the credibility of these reports. Anonymity of

reports lowers the barriers for submission of information, but undermines its credibility. Projects

that aspire to make authorities take some action on the reports submitted also have to overcome

resistance of public officials.

The following factors contribute to the success of crowdsourcing projects:

Effective use of social media tools to promote the project – frequent posting on new

information, use of emotional narrative, interaction with other users.

Coverage by regular and online media – it drives new visitors and new reports.

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Projects have transparent verification mechanisms, e.g. publication of photos, documents,

comments by other visitors who can confirm or denounce the reported case.

Projects were launched by individuals or institutions that have a proven track record in

the field.

Projects are able to ‘convert’ information into action that leads to desirable outcomes (e.g.

corrupt tenders are cancelled, streets are fixed, etc.).

Projects have secured support of relevant executive authorities and high ranking public

officials.

First crowdsourcing projects in Eastern Europe and the CIS were inspired by similar projects

outside the region – FixMyStreet in the UK and Ushahidi-powered crowdmapping project in

Kenya. IT specialists and civic activists were the first in the region who embraced the idea, but

authorities are starting to catch up.

Crowd-to-community projects build on crowdsourcing model and add various mechanisms to

promote on-going engagement of users with the project, members of their informal on-line and

off-line networks and other users. These projects use sophisticated social media platforms, their

development and operation requires substantial investment, so they are very rare – in Eastern

Europe and the CIS this study has found only two projects that use crowd-to-community model.

INSTRUMENTS FOR PROMOTION OF THE SOCIAL MEDIA USE FOR

TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN PUBLIC SECTOR

To provide recommendations for UNDP programming in the area of public administration

reform, anti-corruption, human rights and local governance building on the phenomenon of

social media, this study looked at recent and on-going initiatives to promote social media use for

social change in the region.

APPROACHES USED IN THE PAST AND ON-ONGOING INITIATIVES IN EASTERN

EUROPE AND THE CIS

Several approaches have been used in recent and ongoing initiatives. The first one is to collect

and disseminate information about existing projects. In most cases, this is done through apps

competitions like eTrasformation Apps in Moldova or Apps4Russia in Russia. On October 5,

2011 Russian Internet specialist Alena Popova launched Gov2People project (gov2people.ru)

that maintains a catalogue of Russian Web2.0 projects contributing to better governance,

publishes materials about developments in the field of social media in Russia and around the

world, and organizes on-line discussions where users have two compare two similar projects –

one Russian and one international.

Social Innovation Camp (SIC) is another model that has been adopted in the region. SIC brings

together people who understand social problems and have ideas how to solve them with software

developers and designers to create a community of practice where people can experiment,

discover, prototype and become advocates for using social media technology as a driver of

positive social change. Te model was pioneered in the UK and has already been replicated

several times in Eastern Europe and the CIS (Table 7).

43

Table 7. Social Innovation Camps and similar events in Eastern Europe and the CIS.

Event Time/ Location Organizers

Social Innovation Camp

Bratislava

September 2009/

Bratislava, Slovakia

The Central and Eastern European

Civil Society Forum

Social Innovation Camp Prague November 2010/ Prague,

Czech Republic

Respekt Institut

Social Innovation Camp

Caucasus

April 2010/ Tbilisi,

Georgia

Coalition of NGOs led by Open

Society Georgia Foundation

organized SCI Caucasus

Social Innovation Camp

Azerbaijan

September 2010/ Baku,

Azerbaijan

Transitions Online

Social Innovation Camp

Azerbaijan

July 2011/ Baku,

Azerbaijan

Transitions Online

Social Innovation Camp

Sarajevo

July 2011/ Sarajevo,

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Internews and Transitions Online

Gov2Camp February 2011/ Perm,

Russia

Business incubator, Higher

School of Economics - Perm

SocialCamp 2010 March 2010/ Kirov,

Russia

Internet Innovation Support

Foundation

SocialCamp 2011 July 2011/ Tver, Russia Internet Innovation Support

Foundation

For example, SIC Sarajevo brought together 80 people from all over the region. They had 48

hours to turn seven ideas accepted by the project into working web-applications. All teams

managed to produce working prototypes and were awarded $1,000 grants to continue

development of their projects54

.

Cassie Robinson, the UK researcher who was invited to evaluate the impact of the SIC Sarajevo

as well as several other SIC on the participants, has shared the following observations: SIC

teaches people to work within multi-disciplinary teams and apply a problem-solving perspective;

SIC gives participants a new perspective and inspiration; “through the Camp, they have been

able to go back into their workplace and approach things differently, with resilience and feeling

that anything is possible”, commented Robinson.

Networking between participants is another important positive impact of SIC. According to

Robinson, after the camp people have kept in touch, they feel that they have new networks and

can draw on these networks to keep themselves motivated.

Russian Social Camps (SC) in Kirov and Tver used a somewhat different approach. They

brought together representatives of Russian NGOs, IT developers and social media experts from

all over the region to learn from each other and take new ideas back to their organizations.

According to Tatiana Kargina, one of SC organizers, the format of the camp is constantly

evolving. Discussions during the first SC in Kirov revealed the need to involve business in the

exchange of ideas. Representatives of several web-pay systems were invited to the next SC in

Tver, and, according to Kargina, businessmen got many useful ideas from NGOs and IT people.

The second SC revealed the need to involve representatives of authorities, as they are also

important stakeholders of social projects.

54

Yes, we camp. Internews, http://www.internews.org/prs/2011/20110715_bosnia.shtm

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Another idea that came from the SC Kirov was an on-line course on social media for NGOs. It

took about a year to secure funding and develop on-line modules for the course. The target

audience is NGO staff members who already have project ideas – to be developed by the end of

the course.

The course starting in the end of October 2011 is called “Citizen 2.0”. It includes nine modules:

Introduction: What is Web 2.0 and social media.

Module 1: NGO website – basics.

Module 2: Web 2.0 project planning applications.

Module 3: Web 2.0 project management applications.

Module 4: Web 2.0 technologies for building partnerships, finding supporters and

volunteers.

Module 5: Internet-fundraising and crowdfinding.

Module 6: Information campaigns and media activism.

Module 7: Using Internet to organize off-line civic activities.

Module 8: Presentation of projects developed by participants.

Each module starts and ends with a webinar. Between webinars, students have to do a series of

home assignments. They also have an opportunity to ask questions to the teacher and get

consultations.

The course is based on open source course management system Moodle.com that, according to

Tatiana Kargina, would allow imitating the atmosphere of a social innovation camp where

participants can freely exchange ideas. SC team plans to run the course once and then hand it

over to Russian NGOs interested to administer it in the future.

Provision of financial support is the third approach used by those who would like to support the

use of social media to create social change. The Open Society Foundation and USAID have

corresponding grant programmes. Gov2People project is planning to attract private investment to

civic social media projects.

IMPACT OF VARIOUS APPROACHES ON SOCIAL MEDIA USE FOR PUBLIC

TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY

Dissemination of information about existing projects has proven to be very effective as an

instrument to promote the use of social media for transparency and accountability. Many existing

projects in the region were inspired by and built upon the experience of similar previous projects.

Two ideas that have been most often replicated in the region are the use of Ushahidi for election

monitoring and FixMyStreet.

Social Innovation Camps and their likes have not yet generated many projects particularly

focused on enhancing public transparency and accountability in Eastern Europe and the CIS. For

example, out of seven ideas that were turned into web application during SIC Sarajevo, only two

were addressing issues of public transparency and accountability:

Journalist2Journalist is a social network for journalists to share information about

infringement of their professional rights and launch protest campaigns when these rights

are violated.

Open Land Ownership Platform for Ukraine will crowdsource information about

privatizations of state land property: location of lots (including GPS data), size,

ownership details, when they were sold to private entities and at what price, and other

relevant data.

45

Out of six ideas selected for SIC Azerbaijan 2010, only one – crowdsourcing project collecting

information about environmental problems – was related to public transparency.

Social Innovation Camps help civic activists to materialize ideas that they already have, which

means that SICs have little direct impact on what ideas people want to pursue. SICs usually

produce working prototypes rather than ready-to-use web applications. The latter take several

months of work.

Grants helped to launch two projects – FixMyStreet Georgia and Russian Tak-tak-tak.

Dissemination of information about existing projects can inspire people to replicate them and to

build on their experience to create own ideas. SICs and grants help to implement these ideas. A

program that aims to promote the use of social media for some specific purpose should first

enable the generation of ideas and then support their implementation.

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ANNEX: LIST OF SPECIALISTS INTERVIEWED BY THE STUDY

Andrei Bogdanov, Project Director, Democrator.ru, Russia

Tetayna Bohdanova, civic activist, election monitor, blogger, Ukraine

Ivan Begtin, Director, Laboratory of Intellectual Data Analysis, Russia

Mathias Huter, Senior Analyst & Program Manager, Transparency International Georgia,

Georgia

Altynbek Ismailov, Projects Manager, Coalition for Democracy and Civil Society, Kyrgyzstan

Tatiana Kargina, Director of Development, Ecowiki.ru project, Russia

Diana Lungu, European Journalism Centre, the Netherlands, covers Moldova for Global Voices

Online

Mihai Lupaşcu, Coordinator of ALERTE.MD project, Moldova

Vlad Manoil, e-Services and Open Data Coordinator, e-Government Center, Moldova

Adil Nurmakov, blogger, Editor for Central Asia, Global Voices Online, Kazakhstan

Danica Radisic, online communication consultant, blogger, Serbia

Cassie Robinson, Designer/ Researcher / Positive Psychologist, thinkpublic, A Social Innovation

Think & Do Tank, UK

Alexey Shaposhnikov, Head of My Territory (StreetJournal.org) Project, Russia

Filip Stojanovski, Program Coordinator, Metamorphosis Foundation, Macedonia

Janel Bayastanova, Project Manager, Eurasia Foundation of Central Asia, Kazakhstan

Merita Mustafa, Program Manager, Program Transparency and Anticorruption, Kosova

Democratic Institute, Kosovo

François Vezina, Chief of Party, USAID’s Mobilizing Action Against Corruption Activity,

Armenia

Madina Bakieva, UNDP Country Office, Kazakhstan

George Hodge, UNDP Country Office, Armenia