In an era full of advertising, how do we get the best information about political candidates

Trying to get that could be hard, and it’s harder to remember what they were doing some years ago and what other public jobs they held. The answers to these questions could help citizens make a more informed choice.

Monitor Electoral (Electoral Monitor) is a site to visualize in one place political candidates’ history, platforms, and proposals. The site also tracks eight newspapers, counting the frequency of words, making it possible to visualize how many times a newspaper had mentioned a candidate, political party, or any other group.

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The main argument of Gladwell is based in the strength of the ties of the networks, he argues that the social movements that are based on strong ties could perform better and accomplish something more significant than the ones that are based on weak ties, the main difference between them as Gladwell put it is the use of internet and digital social networks, but that couldn’t be that simple.

I agree with him that internet has been a new tool to reach more people and to get information from other social circles, as described by Granovetter the weak ties are great to reach a large corpus of people in social networks and to get the news to a bigger audience, and in the other hand the strong ties are based on confidence on other people and they are helpful to involve closes friends in different issues. But I don’t agree in the some of the criticism that he does to the networks with weak ties.

First of all all networks have weak and strong ties, it is in that mix of ties that the power of networks is, the weak ties help to reach a larger audience, meanwhile the stronger ones help to organize the network. On the other hand, the social movements that had been happening in the last years have both dimensions, a physical one in the public space and a digital one, and in both the use of networks has been a key point.

The example that I’m more familiar with is the Ayotzinapa movement in Mexico, in this case the use of twitter and facebook helped to spread the word of what has happened, it was in the social networks that the news started to flow, people were sharing news, videos, images and opinions of the tragedy in Guerrero, in this case the weak ties that were in twitter and facebook were useful to reach a larger audience and also to show some information that wasn’t flowing in traditional media outlets, and the strong ties where useful to collect information that was trustworthy, it was easier to trust in and article shared by a close friend, or to aim to go to the streets when a close friend or a family member share the information on this sites.

The social networks also helped to start organizing the people, they were the new dorms, were people talk ad share ideas, and they were, also, were people organized to get out to the streets, where the word were spread, the demonstrations organised and where people talked to get out. Then there’s the moment to get to the streets, and here is where the strong ties also played a role, people where more likely to get out to the streets knowing that their friends where going to be there.

Then during the demonstrations the use of social networks and the presence of weak ties where crucial to get information of what was going on and to spread it in cases of police abuse, during the events the networks helped to follow in real time what was happening, getting photos, tweets and videos from different cities and to coordinate the actions, get information of police presence, etc. At the end of the demonstrations there were some arbitrary detentions by the police in those cases the use of internet was helpful to spread the word, getting video of police abuse and posting it online played a key role to gain attention and to get the people out of jail. In those cases the weak ties between networks and individuals helped.

One last thing is that even if networks are distributed and they don’t have a hierarchy, they have centralities and preferential attachment, this means that some nodes (people) are going to get more exposure on the networks, so they could take a decision a pass it along the network, also the messages that are posted by one of the central nodes are more visible than those that are from nodes with least ties.

The use of networks in social movements isn’t something new, the networks had been present since always, the main difference is that now we have new tools to build them and to create larger ones, this could be problematic, but also this could help to get more attention to other issues, to get more people out in the streets (as we saw in Mexico some months ago) and to coordinate larger movements.

Last September Mexico was shocked with the news of the kidnapping of 43 rural students of the Ayotzinapa Rural School in Guerrero, one of the poorest states in the country. Unfortunately hearing of disappearances, kidnapping, shootings and violence in the country has been something “normal” for the last years, with the “drug on wars” since 2006 the violence has scaled. But even in a country where we left counting gun shoots, the disappearance of 43 students was something to take in account, it wasn’t just a news, it was a scandal and the spark to go out to the streets and to the net.

During the first days of the news the people went out to the streets, there were demonstrations in all the mayor cities in Mexico, after some weeks the movement went further, there weren’t only cities in Mexico, there were demonstrations all over the world, from Mexico to Argentina to Boston, to Paris to New Delhi and so on. To accomplish this the use of social media played a key role, the use of hashtags in twitter as #AyotzinapaSomosTodos (We are all Ayotzinapa) or #AccionGlobalAyotzinapa (Global Action Ayotzinapa) was useful to spread the word in the first days.

There were also some key events that prompted the use of new hashtags as when the former Mexico’s General Attorney said that he has had enough in a press conference, talking about the reporters that where asking questions, but the phrase was taken by the social movement as a new flagship to say that the people is also tired from the politicians, as the graph shows the hashtag explode the same day.

Volume of tweets related to #YaMeCanse, #Ayotzinapa, @EPN Source: Topsy.com

The organisation of the movement was articulated by social media, groups were formed in facebook, whatsapp was useful to organise the people in the street, twitter was a one to many channel of communication, streams of the demonstrations and photos in instagram were key part to keep the conversation alive. And now more than six months since the kidnap of the students and with different versions of what could happened to them, the networks are still active, the next image shows the network that has been build in Facebook related to xForAyotzinapa, there are groups as BostonForAyotzinapa, HelsinkiForAyotzinapa, etc.

Facebook network for BostonForAyotzinapa, ITESOconAyotzinapa, HelsinkiForAyotzinapa.

The situation in Mexico hasn’t change a lot from six months to now, but one of the main changes that the Ayotzinapa tragedy bring to the country was the construction of networks, they are still active organising forums, rallys, demonstrations and some other actions to put some pressure to the government and try to change Mexico. They are still connected by groups in facebook and twitter, the BostonForAyotzinapa Group is active organising forums in Harvard to rethink the violence and society in Mexico, there are groups working in NY to get the attention of the UN, in Europe to create awareness of what’s going on in Mexico. Even inside Mexico the networks are active, they could been not to mainstream and covered by the press, but the people are still going out to the streets, talking with each other and using social networks to push for a change.

For this assignment I’m going to take Action Path as the example, the creation of a geofence and an APP to get into this fence and participate in issues that are happening or going to happen could help to improve the number of people that participate in certain issues, this kind of technology makes ubiquitous the citizen participation, enabling the citizens to participate at any hour and with little time and effort.

In societies where the citizen participation isn’t rooted and where the citizens voice isn’t generally listen, the use of new technologies could help to change this, for example getting a web with all the responses that Action Path received could help to gain attention to certain issues and put some pressure in the political or project leaders.

The use of this kind of apps also helps to change the mindset about participation in public issues, now it’s possible to participate via an app sitting in a local cafe or while waiting for the bus, instead of attend a public meeting or writing a letter to a government official, this shift in the participation process abilities new entry points into the system.

One of the critiques that could come with this technologies is the oversimplification of civic participation, the amount of attention that a person could put into a mobile device to engage with a project could be limited, also the participation could be reduced to answer surveys or tu up-vote or down-vote projects instead of generate a dialogue between the government and the citizens and within the citizens. But on the other hand this technology also helps to get attention that other wise could have gone unaware, and I think this is where one of the main assets of Action Path stands.

The facility to gain attention in some issues that otherwise could go unattended could help to get the people interested in that issues, and not only while they wait for the bus are at a cafe, it could help them to go around and discover the community, walk around and get more notifications and engage with other topics or projects.

I think that most of the technologies that are designed to the monitorial citizens could help the other types to engage with local communities, informing the public about what’s going on in a community and getting them a easy way to participate makes a shift in the citizens models, I don’t think that would be instantaneous but little by little more people could engage in more public issues.

The ideal civic technology for me would be one that is affordable to anyone, not only for their price, but also for their convenience of use and for their learning curve, it should also be widely spread and as transparent as it could be. I don’t think there’s one technology that could be THE civic technology, but I could think about some examples of technologies that help the citizens and that get some of the characteristics.

The first one is the bicycle, this transportation technology has enabled the communication between communities for a long time, their presences in the cities is something normal, the learning curve of riding a bicycle is not to high. The main reason that I consider it a civic technology is because their use is getting people to transform their communities, in some rural areas the use of the bicycle help to get clean water, medical assistance or even get to school. One of the projects that I find more fascinating is in the Wixaritari mountains, where the Huicholes lives, a group of social entrepreneurs had been working with the local people in different kind of projects, but they realised that the children had to walk around 5 to 20 Km each day to get to school, the students would get tired to school so it could affect the way they learn. With the use of bicycles they could get faster and easily to classes, and not just to the school they could also travel to other communities.

Distances between communities. Photo: Wixabikla

The impact of the bicycle in the community is both in short and large term, in the short one the kids could get a more easy access to school and to other places, but in the large term preventing the childrens to drop out school or facilitating that they could attend, the community at large would get benefited. The use of bicycles in rural communities isn’t something new but from time to time is good to look back and see that a simple invention powered by human force could help to change a community and that we don’t always need to use the latest electronic technology or the most complicated line of code to change lives.

Photo: Esteban Gutierrez Hermosillo

The other technology that I have in mind is the use of SMS and text based applications like WhatsApp, the uses of sms had been around for a long time, from notifications to direct communication between people, and to banking transactions. The use of this technology has allowed rural areas of Mexico to get banking services, with the sms’s people could get p2p transactions, check their account balance and send money to others, the use of this kind of techonolgy in rural areas where banking/ATM’s aren´t accesible could help to change the communities, not just enabling them to do transections, but to get financial education and start saving money within their accounts and use less cash. It also helps to the government to facilitate the cash flow in this communities where some of them have the closest bank several hours away.

Both technologies -bicycles and SMS- are widely available, their uses help people to get a better live and to engage in some activities that other wise they couldn’t, the civic participation goes beyond voting or engaging with the government, it goes to the engagement with the community, in both examples the people could engage with their communities and use the technologies to get some changes, using the bicycles to attend to schools, get medicines or even attend community meetings could empower the citizens. In the othe hand the sms not only enable the people to get financial services, they also enable them to communicate between communities, get news faster from outside and even start selling their goods to other communities.

For my final project I’m working in a platform to monitor municipal elections in Guadalajara, the aim of the project is to concentrate information about the candidates, gathering the history of them, how did they performed in public positions, how much does they were earning in each public position, etc.

One of the main problems that we have in Mexico is that we don’t have “public memory” of our politicians, we see faces and hear names, but we don’t really know what is their history, how does the have worked, did they did it right or wrong, did they get involved in corruption scandals, what where their position in different matters.

Geting all the above in mind is that a group of friends and me started working in a spinoff of CiudadPixel.mx a blog that we have about cities and technology, the new feature of the blog is called “Monitor Electoral” (Electoral monitor // Alpha version) we are getting the information from the mayoral candidates, from the basic info such as their names, to a time line of their lives, getting political issues, educational ones and other interesting information. The next steps are going to be to add some new functions such as get the proposals of each candidate in different subjects, their teams, and what does the media says about them, also to build a table to run comparisons between them, like a fact sheet for comparing cellphones or computers.

One of the goals of the platform is to evolve to be open source and gain more people who are interested in participating, the idea is to be able to growth the platform to different kind of candidate not just for mayoral candidates. On the other hand this is also the beginning to build a politicians data base, where we could look up, we see some interesting opportunities in having this “public memory” where we could look back in elections campaign to have accountability on the politicians.

We have been talking about the social component of the platform, how could we get the people to engage with the site, how could we empower them? Those are two of the main questions we are trying to figure it out.

One of the flaws that we are having in Mexico is the lack of public information, not just open data, but also whist-blower information. Form the open data side there has been a movement from the civil society they started with Codeando México and Datamx.io, the platform gain attention from different governments and eventually the federal government launched a dedicated site for open data.

But on the side of investigative journalism and government accountability there hasn’t been to much in Mexico, the IFAI (Institute for Information Access and Data Protection) is the the government agency responsible for the Government transparency, but even with some regulations the access to public information is restricted some times even for non critical information such as public transportation or infrastructure contracts. Also with the violence and the “war on drugs” that is going on in the country to share information has become -in some matters- quite dangerous.

With that in mind some NGO’s and news websites launch MexicoLeaks, a platform for whistleblowing, where people could go online and anonymously send information to one or various NGO’s or websites, then the journalists and the people working with the NGO’s could publish the information. The goal of the platform as they describe it is: “that the impact of the disclosures is maximised, in a media level as well as in a civil an legal one”.

The use of technology in this kind of projects could help to get more citizens to participate with anonymous information, not just information about government, but also for some other issues like private companies. At the end its about making public information that could help the citizens to get a better place.

In a networked public sphere having the possibility to access information could help to get the citizens more engaged in public debates that other wise wouldn’t exist. Bringing new technologies to empower and at the same time protect the citizens is part of the construction of an active society that engages in public matters.

The Centro de Integración Ciudadana CIC (Center for Citizen Integration) is a citizen network in Monterrey that aims to reconnect the citizens between each other and with the municipal authorities. One of their goals is to awake the citizens to work for a better society. The CIC takes advantage of mobile technologies to enable the citizens to generate reports about the city and send them to the authorities.

The CIC is an NGO with a core group of employees who run the site and develop new services, their work is supported by citizens contributions and some donations, making it non related to the government.

One of the main features that the CIC have is called Tehuan (Us in Nahuatl). Tehuan is a platform to recibe and share citizen reports that are made via twitter, SMS, web or by a Mobile App. All the reports are stored in a public data base where anyone can access and see what’s happening in the city. At the same time the authorities have access to the data base, so they could interact with the citizens reports and take action. With this tool the interaction between citizens and authorities leaves a digital trail, meaning there could be statistics about the authorities responses. All the data from Tehuan is public and they have an API so more people could build up on them.

Tehuan reports heat map. Source: CIC (2014)

Tehuan is working since 2011 and they have processed more than 100,000 reports, just in March 2015 they already have 295. The most interesting part, at least for me, is the follow up to the authorities, the platform process the data from the citizens and the government so they could know when the authorities take action, and they deliver insights about that, making the process more transparent, and kind of a competition between the municipalities.

Efficiency by area and municipality. Source: CIC (2014)

The platform has been really successful with the Monterrey citizens and the municipalities, one of their main success has been to get the citizens to participate again and to inform the government, building up the link between citizens and government officials is something that could seem difficult, in Monterrey they experienced a high wave of violence during the last years, and the use of this tools combined with social media channels like twitter and facebook had enabled a new way of public participation.

The other success of the CIC is the follow up to the government actions, get to know in how many days does the reports are closed, who is responding better and when the people are reporting are key points to evaluate the government and call them into accounts if something is not working.

At last but not least the building of trust between the citizens is one of their main assets, in a country plagued with violence and corruption get to trust an institution is not an easy task and they are doing it.

In an effort to show the work that the civil society has been developing for the last years, more than ten NGOs mounted an exhibition at the Guadalajara City Museum, called “Tómala” (take it), the exhibition showed in a playful way the work of the activists in different issues, from human rights to urban mobility and political accountability.

The main idea behind the effort was to connect to more people and demonstrate that the civil society is working hard trying to develop a more human city, also the exhibit was looking forward to encourage more people to take action in different issues. During the time that it was mounted there were conferences and discussion panels that were streamed to a broader audience.

After the exhibitions finished and new connections were made between NGOs the ¡Tómala! exhibition pivoted into a new “organisation of organisations” a new network for collaborative work from NGOs and citizens. Now one of the main actions that the network is performing is called “Diálogos de frente” (Front dialogue), where they host discussion panels from a variety of issues that affect the citizens in a direct or indirect way.

Photo by ¡Tómala!

The team behind the ¡Tómala! initiative work closely with civic leaders, generating new panels and looking for new ways to generate a dialogue between politicians, NGOs and citizens, they have made different dialogues and then they generate an abstract with key points that is published in their web making it easier to any interested citizen to get informed about an specific issue.

¡Tómala! website

The ¡Tómala! initiative has been around for more than one year, I found really interesting that they keep doing the dialogues and the people is keeping going to them, I would say is a new opportunity in Guadalajara to be involved in public issues and get to know more people, at the end the network that is being build with this events could evolve into something really interesting and at least a more informed and participatory society.

How could “Citizen Journalism” be defined? The term refers to two broader concepts, to narrow it I’m going to refer to the ten elements of journalism that Kovach and Rosenstiel enlist in the Introduction of “Elements of Journalism”:

1. Journalism’s first obligation is the truth
2. Its first loyalty is to the citizens
3. Its essences is a discipline of verification
4. Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover
5. It must serve as an independent monitor of power
6. It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise
7. It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant
8. It must keep the news comprehensive and in proportion
9. Its practitioners have and obligation to exercise their personal conscience
10. Citizens, too, have rights and responsibilities when it comes to the news.

With this ten elements its possible to have a better idea of what journalism is and what does it requieres. In essence there’s a strong relation from the journalists and the public, the public trust in what the journalists publish and use that information to participate in the public debates of the society.

In the other hand the citizens are the public actor, not just an individual, but the action of the individual in the collective. So I would define the Citizen Journalism as the active role of the citizens in the process of the news, collecting information, analysing it, and disseminating it to the public. Also one key difference that I find is the backup of an institution, the citizen journalists doesn’t have this backup as the “traditional” ones does.

In Mexico there has been an uprising in citizen journalism during the last years, the “war of drugs” has led to the emergence of new news sites from “El Blog del Narco” (covering confrontations and violence) to new mapping projects of missing people and clandestine graves.

Photo: Sopitas.com

The #PorLosDesaparecidos is a project that tries to map all the 26,000 missing people (Data from 2013, and counting), it is an effort from a group of people in Mexico D.F, they took the database from the National Commission of Human Rights and also allow to more people to register missing people, the result is a crowdsourced map that shows where were reported the missing people, it could help to know in which states are more dangerous, then correlate the information with the political parties in the government and start to trace some history.

#PorLosDesaparecidos

I find very interesting the new role that the citizens are playing in democracies, now the power isn’t only in the voting, the use of information with new tools are empowering them, It’s easier to tell a story in new ways, even stories that might not be appearing in traditional news outlets or that could represent a direct confrontation to the government found their way through the citizens.

In a country where the traditional media are too close to the government and where the violence is uprising, it’s important to empower the citizens to participate in the public debates, to encourage them to take action, even if its with a blog post a tweet or a map, I believe that the main goal is to have an conscious society that could speak for it self.