Working with NGO’s in central & eastern European countries to promote better transparency using interactive tech tools – ittriga09

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Last week I was lucky enough to get involved in ittriga09 – a conference that was part of a larger project that started last year run by Transitions Online in Prague. The project, Interactive Tools for Better Transparency, had this aim: (taken from the Transitions Online project spec as seen here on Dan Mcquillans blog post about it last year)

“This year-long initiative seeks to provide NGOs in the new member states of the EU (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Bulgaria) with web tools and strategies that will better enable them to promote transparency and good governance norms in their respective countries. The Internet is a powerful tool for the dissemination of information to the public and policymakers; however, NGOs in this region have been slow to adopt Internet-based approaches and, as a result, a great deal of their socially-useful research remains unavailable or poorly organized, having limited influence on public policy.”

The project kicked off with a training seminar in Prague, which the excellent Dan Mcquillan from Make Your Mark (an NM client) spoke at, which kicked off some excellent pilot projects over the last year. This conference was about reviewing those projects and looking to the ‘what next’ for them all.

I volunteered to get involved to give the group some practical tips and techniques in testing their sites and getting them ready for users, and to also talk about how they can start reaching out to their audiences online now they have started building platforms, using buzz monitoring and network mapping.

It was fantastic and very inspiring, on so many levels:

Meeting some of the people working at the NGO’s and hearing about their missions, challenges and great work they do in their countries.

These NGO’s only starting to look at these new online technologies last year and how much learning they’ve done in the last year and the excellent pilot projects they’ve put together so quickly.

Seeing some of the other examples of online activism, campaigning and freedom of information sharing from some of the excellent speakers.

A couple that were particularly interesting and I’d recommend having a look at:

Tony Bowden from mySociety showed us some of this organisations fantastic UK-based campaigning sites, do check out mySociety and in particular FixMyStreet and WhatDoTheyKnow.

And Sami Ben Garbia from Global Voices talking about digital activism in highly internet censored Tunisia – one really interesting campaign was the practice of Geobombing – with this example of it being used by Tunisian activists from the collective blog Nawaat.org to link tens of video testimonies of Tunisian political prisoners and human rights defenders to the Tunisian presidential palace’s location on Google Earth, because YouTube is banned in Tunisia. Absolutely fascinating.

Following this conference a lot of the delegates went straight onto Barcamp Baltics that weekend (some of the techies involved but also the non-techies from the NGO’s who are finding themselves slipping into geekdom!) which sounded excellent and extremely international with 23 countries represented.

And the exciting thing for me now is to see the conversations following on from this event; that this is not the end of a project, but the start in a lot of ways; the news of more funding secured for another pilot project to get off the ground; and the ideas floating around of these NGO’s from different countries working collaboratively on projects to get ideas off the ground more quickly, cheaply and without being lost in the sea of the individual organisations work.

All in all, I am so glad to have been involved, if only to see the amazing work that is going on in organisations I didn’t know existed and how quickly and in a nimble way they are starting to adapt to the new online world and do their good work within spaces that their audiences are now residing. I look forward to seeing the projects progress and staying involved to help out where I can and keep learning & being inspired from these excellent digital projects happening in organisations all over Europe.

(image credit – Yaroslav Azhnyuk)

Anna wrote this on 14.02.09 – 1 comment
It's filed in the Democracy, Development, Ethics, Events & conferences, Interesting box