We can campaign for change more effectively when citizens are empowered and armed with clear and accessible factual information, says Dr Rebecca Rumbul
You may have an MBA, but do you believe you can make a difference and help to tackle society’s biggest problems, from climate change to international inequality? Your answer may depend on whether you think of yourself as a consumer or a citizen. Studies show that when we think of ourselves as consumers, we’re less likely to tackle society’s biggest problems.
However, as the New Citizenship Project points out, when we think of ourselves as citizens, we’re more likely to participate, volunteer and come together to make our society stronger and more effective.
At mySociety we believe that strong democratic accountability and a thriving civil society are vital to our common welfare. Societies can only truly flourish when communities and governments are able to engage with each other effectively.
Digital technology has a big role to play in making it easier for people to get involved in the democratic process – what’s been christened ‘civic tech’. It can help them connect with government (national and local), hold their politicians to account, help local administrations deliver better services and, importantly, help them engage with both what’s going on both nearby and in the wider world. To put it succinctly – civic tech helps people to be active citizens. These connections can exist without technology, but it is a powerful, flexible and accessible enabler.
This process also helps authorities be more effective. It is impossible for a government to know how best to serve its citizens unless they engage with it and express what they need. Someone sitting in a parliament or administration can easily come up with an idea in isolation and decide to put it into practice. They can take soundings, analyse policy, consider similar programmes. But they can’t really know how their idea will be perceived unless they engage with their citizens.
This is most obvious when we look at how governments act to solve problems. Unless they interact with people, it is difficult to know whether a proposed solution is workable, meaningfully beneficial, or even appropriate in the first place.
Citizens can feel very estranged from the places and people that make decisions on how things are run and managed. In the UK we have a history of parliament as very removed from citizens, although this is now changing. The US, Italy and France now have leaders who were political outsiders and anti-establishment candidates. But changing the background of political leaders does not in itself improve democracy. For that to happen, citizens have to be able to play their part in identifying issues and helping with fair decision making.
There have always been grassroots citizen movements where people coalesce around common interests, with a greater or lesser degree of desire to lobby nationally or locally for change. Technology helps the people in such movements connect and mobilise more effectively. Civic tech is currently on a huge growth curve and becoming more mainstream. Look at the number of community groups that use Facebook or WhatsApp or Instagram to share information with like-minded people and encourage them to act. It is also being adopted by governments to help them engage with protesters, such as in France, where the ‘gilet jaunes’ movement prompted the government to launch a massive tech-enabled consultation.
It is worth noting, of course, that technology itself is apolitical, though it can be used in a very political way. The Cambridge Analytica scandal is a very clear example of digital tools being used to encourage action through highly targeted communications. The People’s Vote campaign in the UK has used digital tools such as online petitions to mobilise people on a national level.
In the UK mySociety’s TheyWorkForYou allows UK citizens to discover their local MP, view their voting record, see what committees they have attended, discover Parliamentary offices they hold, view their speaking record in Parliament, see their expenses declarations and even sign up to receive emails every time they speak (and whenever any subject that interests them is mentioned in Parliament). It also provides the MP’s Facebook page, Twitter handle and through a direct link to mySociety’s WriteToThem lets anyone write to their MP. The ability to monitor what parliamentarians are doing, and use that information to hold them to account, is a key tool in supporting healthy and responsive democratic structures.
But the way civic tech develops is not uniform around the world, and it needs a combination of circumstances to converge to truly have an impact. The coming together of citizen awareness, government buy-in and funding support is crucial to its success. Technologies which make information transparent, and which can be used to bring people together easily and at minimal, or better at no, cost to them, are needed now more than ever.
We recently interviewed politicians, civil servants and activists involved in democratic engagement across Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa and Uganda to learn more about how digital technologies are shaping democratic information flows in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The results can be found in our report Parliament and the People: How digital technologies are shaping democratic information flow in Sub-Saharan Africa. We discovered a vibrant, energetic and enthusiastic civic tech community and a real push for greater transparency and accountability in government coming from younger people. Using tech from WhatsApp to Facebook to Twitter, citizens are demanding better governance, and they are using non-profit parliamentary monitoring platforms such as Mzalendo in Kenya and ParliamentWatch in Uganda to inform their political conversations.
These platforms provide vital information on how politicians vote, how they spend government money and how they award contracts, historically processes that could be mired in corruption. Citizens are using this newly available information to better frame political demands and improve the quality of meaningful debate, again using digital means to facilitate and organise political action. Their hope is to close the distance between them and their institutions, create more participative governance, and work towards more accountable, transparent and responsive government. It is now up to governments to start listening.
We also need to be aware of how civic tech can adapt to address new challenges. In the UK, austerity has reduced local authority budgets, and there is plenty of evidence that some services are being squeezed: potholes are being filled less often, fly tips cleared less regularly. These might sound small in comparison to the big political decisions of the day. But they can have a negative effect on citizens’ wellbeing. And why shouldn’t residents hold their local authorities to account in fulfilling a legal obligation to maintain good community spaces? Affordable digital tools such as FixMyStreet are helping to bridge the gap; they help local councils manage backend processes while enabling citizens to report issues and monitor how they are being addressed.
Meanwhile, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), civic tech is being using to facilitate the demand for information. In DRC, everything is centralised on the capital, Kinshasa. The country is very large, and while there has been good work towards political decentralisation, the same is not yet true of administration. At present access to basic social services, access to authorities’ offices, is not guaranteed to everyone.
To help tackle this, the organisation Collectif24 has set up a site called TuNa Bakonzi, a Freedom of Information (FOI) site based on mySociety’s Alaveteli platform. This is an area where we’ve found that a configurable platform can be adapted effectively by local groups to meet their needs. Founder Henri Christin from Collectif24 came up with the idea after hearing about a Ugandan FOI site run on the same platform.
Henri hopes that the site will facilitate the demand for information, promote accountability and give citizens control in the fight against corruption. In a country where there are no public policies on internet governance and journalists are regularly exposed to false information, it will also allow people to make requests for information directly from the source. He believes it will be a barometer for transparency, showing whether a public institution is transparent, by way of the answers it gives — or does not give — to citizens’ requests.
What these projects have in common is that their roots are in citizen empowerment. We can campaign for change more effectively when we are armed with clear and accessible factual information. Citizen tech projects such as these promote active citizenship and foster participatory democracy, so that people can truly influence the activities and decisions which affect their everyday lives.
Dr Rebecca Rumbul is Head of Research at mySociety, a social enterprise which helps people to be active citizens. The organisation runs projects and services in the UK and globally to support participation in democratic systems.
