Blog response to “Find and describe an example of a “collaborative technology” designed to improve a flaw in government…, or, is “collaborative” always be the solution?
After I received the topic, I found that it is really hard to find a “collaborative” solution to address a governmental law. Surely there are tons of citizen data project came out from numerous hackathons here and there, and the Kenyan platform Ushahidi has really made many achievements in filling the blank left over by the government in disaster relief domain; but are they really solving the problems? And how much is collaboration contributing in solving the problem?
In hackathons, data citizens gathered is mostly helpful for city planners; in the Ushahidi platform, it is the disaster relief supporting organizations (NGOs) really utilizing the generated data and delivering help. They are far from the networked public sphere ideal in which citizens collaboratively filter information and set priorities.
Another good example is the “I Paid a Bribe” website in India. citizens can report where or when they paid a bribe to an official, in hope of reducing corruption in India. It has comprehensive visualizations of corruption status, and you can also report “I did not pay a bribe” or “I saw an honest officer”. I’m not sure how much they are moving out of “generating awareness” comfort zone now, but when similar websites appeared in China, the first who jumps out to stop them is the anti-corruption bureau – it said these websites alerted those corrupted officials and ruined the effort of covert agents collecting evidence for corruption. After all, you need evidence (not blog posts) in the court to take down corrupted officials.
(Screenshot: India’s corruption monitor)
I am not saying the effort of these projects is meaningless, but I argue that we should not value these projects solely in terms of values such as “generatively, openness, the importance of data, and individual liberty”. These values are valued much in western world, and they do exist in some successful projects; but it does not mean that citizen data projects that are not generative, open, and promoting individual liberty cannot make an impact. On the contrary, it is entirely OK if the data is owned by somebody else other than citizens, no matter it is government, NGO, or specialist group. Back to the examples, city planning data help city planners covering their blind points; disaster information in Ushahidi helps NGOs a lot in distributing relief resources. If president Modi or some other groups in India want to track down corruption, what harm could it be if data in “I paid a bribe” is not open to everybody? Being absorbed in “openness” itself is a closed mind.
However, I totally agree with Benkler that “different technologies make different kinds of human action and interaction easier or harder to perform”. I will give another Chinese example. The Pollution Map is an app designed by a environmental organization, it shows which company is polluting more then allowed by the law, and when did they promise to address their problems. What happens if they don’t change? Well, the app as another function – it display the brands having green supply chains. Consumers can refuse to buy the products who do not guarantee they are made with greenness in mind. After it is reported by independence investigative report (Chai Jing), the downloads surges and their servers soon experienced an overload. In this example, users of the man cannot contribute any information, but they can act according to the data neatly presented by the user interface – the data itself is not democratic, but the civil action is.
(Screenshot: the pollution map)
At last, open data is a solution, but not everything needs to be open. A white dog is adorable, but it is not necessary to have white paws, white nails, white eyeballs, and a white bark.