Digital Democracy

Tomorrow, January 28 from 3:00 to 6:00 pm, we’ll be presenting at Eyebeam’s Activist Technology Demo Day. Come say hi and check out our Occupy Votes & Choose Your Democracy systems in action.

Update 2/1/12: It was a great day! Check out our photos here: http://bit.ly/wJl35R 

“From Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, technology has played an important role in shaping contemporary resistance and the representation of these events in the media. What new tools of protest and occupation have emerged over the past year? How does their use help to shape tomorrow’s democracies?” — Eyebeam

We’ll be joining 15 other projects and organizations, presenting on how we’ve used tech to help activism.

Eyebeam is located at 540 W 21st St. New York, NY 10011 (map).

See you there!

At crossroads in my life, I bike across countries. Nine years ago, I biked across the United States. Today, I find myself at another transition: I am moving on from my role as President of Digital Democracy. In honor of that change, I’ll be crossing the Dominican Republic and Haiti on the island of Hispaniola.

Haiti faced a crossroads when it was devastated by the 2010 earthquake. Digital Democracy had a team on the ground at the time, which meant the event shook me to the core as well. The Dd team sprang into action, contributing to humanitarian aid efforts to map where people were in need to help save lives.

Yet once Haiti disappeared from the headlines, the real work to rebuild the country began. In response to increased levels of rape post-earthquake, we worked to empower women as key actors in Haiti’s reconstruction with a commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative. This year we worked in Haiti to launch the 572 call center, the country’s first rape-response hotline (a sort of 911 for violence against women), connected to a secure database and interactive mapping system. Next we’re working to scale these solutions nationally.

Now I’m at a crossroads too. Over the past three years Digital Democracy has grown from an idea to an accomplished nonprofit. With Dd a sustainable organization, I’m ready to move on and am looking to explore opportunities that allow me to pursue innovative projects with larger enterprises. I’ll still be involved in Digital Democracy, in a guiding role to support the work of my co-founder Emily and our amazing staff.

Since Digital Democracy launched, I’ve been able to draft policy in Iraq, securely document crimes against humanity in Burma/Myanmar, develop an international education initiative, work with government heads and active citizens in the Caucasus, host trainings with Secretary Clinton in the lands that my family fled from, and speak at US Congress and at the White House. It’s meant the world to me to work on these initiatives with such incredible people over the past few years. When I biked across the US I learned that people can achieve anything they put their minds to. I’m excited to see what this new trip will teach.

Tune in to Bike Hispaniola to join my friend Rob Munro & me on the journey. Follow the blog, featuring a live map that updates our location, twitter feed, photos and more. Please ask us questions, share tips and ideas, and let us know of people and sights to see. I’ll be sharing stories and stopping by our partners’ offices in Port-Au-Prince to see the call center staff and further explore how technology can continue to make a difference in Haiti and around the world.

You can sponsor my 500 mile ride by contributing to Digital Democracy’s end of year matching campaign in honor of the trip. All donations will go to Digital Democracy core programming in Haiti and beyond in 2012 – not the ride itself – and be doubled by generous matching donors.

Happy holidays to you and thank you for your support over these years. I look forward to hearing from you and keeping in touch wherever my travels take me and where yours take you.

Sincerely,
Mark Belinsky

Editors Note: In Dd’s work around the world, we have seen first-hand the critical need for ordinary citizens to access unfiltered content online. Take Thailand, where we have profiled the work of journalist Chiranuch Premchaiporn who has faced jail time for content posted to the comment section of the news site Prachatai. Currently, legislation is afoot in US Congress that reminds us all too closely of internet rules that have negatively impacted the lives of our partners abroad. Dd welcomes our newest Advisory board member, Jesse Friedman who guest authors this post:

You may have heard about SOPA, the innocuously-named yet frighteningly over-broad Stop Online Piracy Act. If you believe in the power of technology as a social and economic good, and think that due process of law is a good thing, now is the time to take action against this noxious bill that’s zooming through the US House of Representatives. If you are an American citizen, you can call your representative now to voice your opinion on it: http://engineadvocacy.com/voice/ 

This past year has demonstrated the astonishing power of Internet technology to effect change for the better, and shown the potential for more to come. From Arab Spring to the Occupy movement and beyond, we’ve seen policy brutality exposed on YouTube, movements organized on Facebook, and conversations and events “broadcast” in real time through novel live-streaming technologies. None of this would have been imaginable just a few years ago.

As an employee of a tech company and a member of Digital Democracy’s advisory board, I’m terribly concerned that if SOPA were to become law, this blossoming of empowerment through web-based innovation would grind to a halt. In the name of copyright enforcement, SOPA gives corporations outsized and unchecked power to stop the business of perfectly respected sites, without due process of law. (For a bit more detail, here’s a good infographic and a great video.)

The chilling effect on innovation on the Internet could be awful in two major ways. First, entrpreneurs would be severely discouraged from creating any website that hosts user-generated content; one errant link out to a site that illegally distributes copywritten content offshore, and they could be shut down in a week without any court involvement. Second, SOPA would institute a censorship regime on the Internet in the US, both by effectively compelling individual websites to review all their user-generated content, and also by empowering the US Attorney General to rework the plumbing of the web and block access to sites.

The recording industry says that SOPA’s opponents are overreacting, that we can trust them to judiciously apply these unprecedented powers of corporate thuggery to go after only really bad guys. But their track record of intimidating helpless individuals with huge lawsuits says otherwise. Plus, the way the law is written, just about anybody could make spurious claims or even outright lies about a site and still get that site shut down.

A broad base, from web entrepreneurs to news editors to human rights organizations to even the recording industry’s hometown LA Times, has slammed this bill as a huge step backwards for freedom, due process, and innovation. If you’re in the US, add your voice to the chorus, and tell your congressperson right now that they need to vote against SOPA. Just put in your name, phone number, and zip code and you’ll be connected directly to their office: http://engineadvocacy.com/voice/

I’ve joined Digital Democracy because I believe in the need for technology tools to be harnessed to empower the voices of marginalized groups and ordinary citizens to fight for their human rights. I hope you’ll join me and millions of others in working to keep the web a safe and healthy place for innovation and political action by voicing your opposition to SOPA today.

Jesse Friedman is a member of Digital Democracy’s advisory board. He leads marketing for Google Politics & Elections, and is part of the company’s team resisting SOPA. 

What does democracy mean to you? In 2011 the Digital Democracy (Dd) team has asked this question of people around the world. Egyptians in Tahrir Square, #Occupy protestors in Zuccotti Park, women in tent camps in Port-Au-Prince and folks at home have given us many answers, including freedom of speech and equal opportunity. The theme uniting them all? Participation: the ability for all people’s voices to be heard & represented in their community’s governance.

Human rights abuses are barriers to participation. Rape, violence, censorship, police brutality, lack of access to education, discrimination – these abuses silence voices and prevent participation. Dd works with groups striving to participate by helping them leverage technology to more effectively fight for their human rights. 

Mark & I co-founded Dd in 2008 because we thought technology tools had the ability to help the most marginalized people participate in their societies in a meaningful way. Three years later, there are 7 billion people on the planet and close to 6 billion mobile phones. We work to help people turn their mobile phones into tools for freedom and participation, shifting the paradigm so marginalized communities can participate in societies like Haiti, Burma and Guatemala.

In 2011, we have seen the impact of Dd’s programs around the world. Our programs have built the confidence and empowered our partners to participate more effectively in their societies.

• Women in Haiti use blogs and photos to share stories of violence, the breakdown of elections, and hope. They use digital pens, databases and maps to document their experiences. They launched a call center to provide emergency support to rape survivors and they have combined all of these tools to advocate for the changes necessary to end violence in their community.
• Refugee youth in Indianapolis have used photography as a process and a tool to break down prejudices between different ethnic groups, bring diverse stories from their community to welcoming ears, and help kids grow into community leaders and build strong friendships across ethnic divides.
• Indigenous youth in Guatemala used digital video cameras and a blog to report on elections, bridging the voices of rural & indigenous communities to the national conversation about their choice for a new leader.

This year has shown that on all levels, participation transforms possibility.

Next year, we plan to dive deep in Haiti and reignite our work in Burma. In Haiti, we aim to grow the use of our comprehensive technology system and support the position of our partners as leaders in the fight against rape.  In Burma, we continue to partner with civil society organizations & brave human rights advocates to influence secure communication and information-sharing. We will continue to be agile and small, working with lean budgets to maximize resources to do smart and effective work. 

Over three years, your donations have transformed Dd from an idea into an organization. Now, Dd is taking it to the next level. We are building our first board of directors and are now officially a public charity (501c3), making donating easier and allowing your full donation to go to Dd’s work and partners on the ground.

We can’t do this work alone. We ask you to please participate in Digital Democracy’s work and mission by contributing directly or donating in the name of a loved one. (We’ll send a card thanking you and your gift recipient!) You can double your impact now, as gifts received by December 31, 2011 will be matched by generous anonymous donors. Help us reach our $5,000 matching challenge!

Exciting Update [12/31/11]: You have helped us raise & exceed our matching challenge!! Please donate TODAY to help us raise $20,000 to start 2012 ready to make it the best Dd year yet! 

With gratitude, Emily.

Thanks to all our friends, partners, advisors & supporters who joined us last Thursday for Digital Democracy’s 3rd Birthday Party. We are so grateful we were able to celebrate with all of you.

Photos from the event are up on our Flickr … check out the excellent images by Jon Reznick, as well as the fun photos shot by party-goers in the photobooth, with automatic uploads thanks to Mifi. If you’d like a print of one of Jon’s images, please contact him directly. A professional photo makes a great gift for the holidays.

Huge thanks to Elizabeth Hodes Custom Cakes & Sugar Art, who not only contributed the best looking cake we’d ever laid eyes on, it was delicious to boot! Thanks to DJ iBeat & Will for spinning tunes and our excellent gang of volunteers who kept the party running smoothly. Thanks to Trader Joe’s for providing delicious snacks, Lucy’s Whey for the excellent cheese trays, Sustainable Party for eco-friendly supplies, and Bulldog Gin & Brooklyn Brewery for the great libations.

Finally, thanks to the great folks at Google’s Community Affairs Team for contributing a fancy new Google Chromebook to the cause. Thanks to raffle sales, tickets & donations party-goers were able to contribute more than $2,000 to Dd’s core mission to empowering marginalized communities, donations that are being doubled by generous donors.

We can’t wait to see where we are a year from now!

Digital Democracy is turning 3 this month! Come celebrate with us on 11/17 at the RH Gallery in TriBeCa, New York City. Bring your phone, try out new tools & learn more about how Dd is empowering marginalized communities to leverage technology to fight for their human rights. Get your tickets now! Early bird tickets are $10 and available until Sunday, November 6. Full price tickets online (and at the door) will be $15.

See you there to enjoy….

• DJ iBeat spinning for your dancing & listening pleasure
• Bulldog Gin & Brooklyn Brewery for the open bar
• Elizabeth Hodes Custom Cakes & Sugar Art for our custom-designed cake
• Lucy’s Whey for CHEESE

There will be fun to go around…

& you can WIN. Enter our raffle for a chance to take home a brand new Google Chromebook…

...thanks to Google's New York City office of Community Affairs

Play telephone, spread the word, and if you bring 10 friends you get a free raffle ticket. Questions? Email Biz at biz [at] digital-democracy [dot] org.

Thank you to everyone who’s donations will make this a special night! And feel free to check out these photos from our 1st Anniversary at OpenPlans and 2nd Anniversary at New Work City.

What is an open-source protest (or in Egyptian nomenclature, a wiki-revolution)? Can technology tools be used to develop new methods of distributed grassroots decision-making? It’s clear that the Occupy movement is about something much bigger and greater than one person or group … how can the large numbers of people who identify with the movement contribute to decision-making?

The past few weeks I have been spending time in Zucotti Park as part of the people’s microphone. Since tech-based amplification is banned, people have improvised, and together shout the words of whoever is speaking until it is loud enough so that everyone can hear them. That decision making is slow and laborious, while also beautiful and egalitarian.

“What do the protesters want?” is an oft-repeated chorus coming from mainstream media.

OccupyVotes is an open source approach to encourage participatory decision-making: collect & prioritize our ideas in an open, efficient & accountable way.

With around 10,000 votes in the first 36 hours of launching the site, it’s exciting to see the project taking off. It’s clear that this platform helps fill a void – people want to share their vision for demands for the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Occupy Votes was built on the open-source All Our Ideas platform. Not only does it allow visitors to vote with the ideas they like best, it provides them a forum to submit their own ideas and see the votes by other users. As more people contribute their ideas, we look forward to taking a deeper look at the data to understand the differences between opinions from those voting inside Liberty Park, in other US cities, from different platforms and around the world. Stay tuned to find out what the data has to say about the decision making process.

It’ll be interesting to get deeper into the data to understand the differences between opinions from those voting inside Liberty Park, in other US cities, from different platforms and around the world. Stay tuned to find out what the data has to say about the decision making process.

Why did we choose All Our Ideas? Other platforms exist, including Google moderator. With that system, good ideas often get stuck at the bottom of the laundry list and tend not to rise, unless a troll forces an issue up. People don’t tend to scroll. Or trolls will upvote only the issues that they’re interested in, not the rest. This creates lopsided results. Plus, this tool is easy to use and visually clear. The user interface is itself more democratic in that way.

All Our Ideas randomly generates a pairing. As more and more people vote, the information can become statistically representative and truly reflect the interests of the group. Or points of disagreement. All of that information is available in the data, which is open and available. We’ll be publishing it in the interest of transparency.

We’re looking to gather volunteers to set up a voting booth in Liberty Plaza (Zuccotti Park) and engage people in the process of voting and presenting their specific demands. This site is an initial attempt to see if the tool speaks to people. Digital Democracy has had some initial successes with this with our friends in Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco, and I’m hoping we can take the lessons and open source tools we’ve been working with around the world to continue to support the marginalized, even in this country – the 99%.

We welcome your thoughts, feedback and – of course – your ideas!

Disclosure: All of the ideas on the allourideas site are currently seeded from unscientific polls that I’ve seen covered in a variety of media sources. Fast Company, CNN, WSJ & occupywallstreet forum, plus Michael Haack and Matt Taibbi. Additional ideas related to financial concerns have been added by users. Thanks to the Meetup team for providing their headquarters in New York City for the Occupy Together Hackathon where this project was synthesized.

Update: Check out this Mashable article which talks about the project – Occupy Wall Street Hackathons Produce Digital Tools and New Activists and on the All Our Ideas blog.

Guatemala is a country with a complicated history. Although the 36-year civil war has ended, Guatemalan society is still struggling to rebuild from this history of war and ethnic conflict. One opportunity and challenge is the need to engage young Guatemalans, many of whom continue to be marginalized from political life. Participating in elections is not only a gateway to further civic engagement, reporting on elections offers an opportunity for the voices of youth which are rarely heard to help shape the national dialogue.

On September 11, 2011, Guatemalans went to the polls to vote in a presidential election. Who exactly was voting? Although 70% of the population is under the age of 30, historically very few young Guatemalans register and vote in national or local elections. The same holds true for indigenous women, who represent 20% of the population, yet hold a scant number of government seats. A pressing question is whether historically marginalized Guatemalans can find a way to engage in the elections process. How might participation levels change if young & indigenous Guatemalans are engaged on civic issues, and empowered with the journalism skills to report their views on the electoral process, before, during and after the actual voting day?

VOZZ is a youth-driven election project which empowers young Guatemalans with the information and training they need to be citizen reporters throughout the pre- & post-election period in Guatemala. Named by youth in crime-ridden Guatemala City, Vozz captures the spirit & voice – voz – of young people to share election stories from 50 municipalities throughout the country, creating lasting ties of civic engagement. They’ve been producing lots of content which is getting translated into three languages, including Kaqchikel.

Together with Kara Andrade, the HablaGuate team and an amazing coalition of local partners, we had the pleasure of developing curriculum and providing materials and strategy to this important initiative. Our initial work in Guatemala last year began with youth from a remote town called “Lancetillo”. The Project Einstein youth we worked with in that initial training reported, shot, and produced slideshows and then exhibited their work in La Antigua, Guatemala. This podcast of theirs also does a good job of detailing the work.

Vozz’s trained reporters are currently working on replicating their project in their own municipalities, including Mazatenango, Patzún and Zacapa, in preparation for the second round of elections on November 6. Stay tuned to Vozz.com.gt for their reports!

15 de septiembre 2011 ZACAPA – De por sí sabemos y ya es costumbre esperar que en cada época de elecciones todos los candidatos se adueñen de nuestros lugares públicos para poner supropaganda y dañar el ornato de nuestras comunidades,Pero también como es de esperar la publicidad que se pegaron en postes y piedras ya no vuelven a estar como estaban pues usan materiales altamente difícil de quitar y estos se quedan allí hasta que el ambiente los descompone o hasta que lleguen las elecciones nuevamente y vuelvan a colocar nueva propaganda sobre ellos… Read more.

2 years, 21 countries, some revolutions and a lot of new friends – Digital Democracy is proud to launch our first annual report. The online version and PDF below are interactive, so feel free to click on links and pictures to hear to stories and read more about our projects.
Digital Democracy 2009-2010 Annual Report

With deep gratitude to our global community of supporters who have made this work possible, we are thrilled to launch our first annual report. Covering the period from November, 2008, when we incorporated under the auspices of the Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy until the end of 2010, when we filed for our own independent non-profit status, the report documents our work to empower marginalized communities around the globe, and the inspirational ways they are using technology to build their own futures. Special thanks to Bill Hopkins Media for generously donating our New York office, Drew Frist for the Dd logo, Zago who designed this Annual Report, our team, our funders, our advisory board and generous individuals like you.

Societies are stronger when more people participate and along with the report, we also have a new promotional video to go along with it and help spread this message. Javier Saavedra is the editor with Steve Benjamin doing the graphics. All the footage is from our past two years in the field, either taken by us or our partners. We hope you like it:

Sincerely,
Emily Jacobi & Mark Belinsky, co-founders

In one year since CGI commitment, Digital Democracy has trained 150 women and built a database documenting over 400 cases of rape in Haiti.

Today we announce the launch of the only phone-based emergency response system dedicated to rape and sexual assault in Haiti. Together with our partners at  KOFAVIV, the Commission for Women Victims for Victims, we at Dd have designed, launched and tested the Call Center that is helping bring emergency care to victims in Port-Au-Prince. The KOFAVIV Call Center is supported by mobile-service providers Digicel and Voila, major phone providers in Haiti, where there is no 911 or similar system for reporting emergencies. Now, free calls to the number “572” connect victims to critical emergency care including medical, psychological and legal support.

The Call Center is one of four components of the Dd commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) to use technology to address rape and gender-based violence (sGBV) with women in Haiti. Dd and KOFAVIV are seeking $150,000 to support the Call Center and expand its reach throughout Port-Au-Prince, announced Dd at the CGI Annual meeting today.

“When we first started working with Haitian women leaders, there was no accurate information on the increasing rates of sexual violence in the tent-camps,” explains Emily Jacobi, our Executive Director. “The Call Center is a key component of an information management system we built with KOFAVIV to accurately capture data on the real scope of the problem, and get urgent preventative care to the most vulnerable cases.”

A recent report from Human Rights Watch observes that earthquake recovery has largely failed Haitian women and girls, noting, “Emergency contraception and other post-rape care is available in some health facilities, but many rape victims don’t have access to this care for the same reasons that women and girls have difficulty accessing other health services: they lack basic information about what is available and where, or they have difficulty paying for transportation to reach the services.”

Our partnership with KOFAVIV directly addresses this lack of information. Women who contact the Call Center receive urgent personal care, but the information collected also contributes to the macro-solutions for the problem. KOFAVIV collects data on cases and uses a system built by Dd to generate monthly reports, maps and data visualization to share with government and international bodies that provide critical security and lighting.

“The technology trainings that began in 2010 have brought about a major change in the capacity of grassroots women, particularly us, the women of KOFAVIV,” say Malya Appolon and Eramithe Delva, co-founders of KOFAVIV. “They have given us more confidence in ourselves, and have given us tools to help more people understand the reality of those living in the camps, a reality that gets harder everyday.”

KOFAVIV and Dd first partnered in April 2010, building a comprehensive system that uses technology to improve the fight against sGBV in Haiti. The partnership is the cornerstone of Dd’s commitment to CGI, promising to provide Haitian women’s groups the technical tools and training needed in their work to create a comprehensive approach to prevent rape in Haiti with a coalition of lawyers, health and psychosocial service providers, and strong networks of Haitian women and girls.

KOFAVIV & Digital Democracy Database System

“572 not only provides support to victims, it represents urgent medical care. When a woman calls our number within 72 hours of an incident, we ensure she gets the medical care she needs to prevent transmission of disease, HIV/AIDS and unwanted pregnancy,” says Jocie Philistin, a Project Coordinator for KOFAVIV. “Medical support is the first step to receiving ongoing legal and psychological support.”

Through the first month of testing, the Call Center was promoted in 24 tent camps and communities by KOFAVIV’s network of 65 Community Outreach Agents, some police precincts and the General Hospital. Ready to accept calls from throughout Port-Au-Prince, the Call Center needs financial support to spread awareness across the city.

The Abundance Foundation, United States Institutes for Peace (USIP), the Channel Foundation, USAID/OTI and individual donors have supported Dd’s work in Haiti to date.

Press Release: Dd & KOFAVIV Launch Only Emergency Response System Dedicated to Rape and Sexual Violence in …