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On the 12 June 2009 the tenth presidential elections were held in Iran. After Iran’s official news agency the Islamic Republic News Agency, announced that the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won the election. The European Union expressed “concerned about alleged irregularities” and the opposition party Presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi stated that he “won’t surrender to this manipulation.”. Mousavi believed strongly that the election was rigged and called for peaceful protests against the “manipulation”
What resulted from Mousavi’s call was hundreds of thousands of Iranians taking to the streets and a swift reaction by the Iranian government to stop these protests. In many cases the clashes between government forces and protestors turned violent. One of the actions the Iranian government took was to prevent news agencies (especially foreign news agencies) from reporting on what was taking place in the country.
Prior to the election the government had also banned access by the citizens to social networking sites such as Facebook, this can only be seen as an attempt to stifle opposing views.
With the ban on foreign media and the Iranian governments control over the local media local activists and ordinary citizens took to the internet to tell the world what was going on. The micro-blogging platform Twitter became a key avenue for Iranian citizens to communicate what was going on in their country. Twitters immediacy and accessibility (Iranian citizens were not only using the internet to access Twitter, they were using SMS to get messages onto Twitter). Pretty soon what started to emerge was that Iran was in a state of revolution.
Twitter was not the only Social Networking site to be used by the citizens in Iran. Flickr, Facebook, Youtube and others were used to communicate what was going on.
#Iranelection has highlighted again (#mumbai – the hashtag used on twitter during the Mumbai attacks) is that a) peoples ability to organise, communicate and improve their circumstances is greatly improved by technologies such as the Internet and Mobile phones and b) the traditional way of doing things is fast coming to an end. The big media houses were shown up again as being lumbering giants who are behind the times.
Social Media expert Robert Scoble at the 140 character conference (which ran between the 15/06/2009 until the 17/06/2009) asked from CNN at the 140conf “Where was CNN on that day, at that time?” (referring to the Iran revolution).
The response from the CNN representative Rick Sanchez “We had people in Iran watching the events unfold, live. Our people were tear-gassed. We were there.”
Scoble response e to Sanchez, “How would we know that? Why didn’t you share that side of the story with us as it was happening? You couldn’t because your show wasn’t on!”
The world exists around shows, people exist around shows. They (the world and people) do not wait for shows.
Progressive Governments can learn a great deal from #iranelection, they must learn that people will make use of open, transparent communication systems in attempting to improve their lives. Progressive Governments must start taking advantage of the high mobile phone penetration rates to create bi-directional communication channels that feed into their developmental programmes: COMMUNICATE.
In South Africa, Government love to spend millions on fancy, complicated, inefficient marketing and communications campaigns. Yet these campaigns are yet to show strong results in favour of the investment. These campaigns do not build communities that allow the citizen to constantly engage with Government or other citizens. #iranelection proves that citizen to citizen support is remarkable through open platforms such as Twitter.
Of course Governments need to be wary. Being open to public (not media) scrutiny does have it pitfalls. Look at the screenshot below, once again from Twitter. On the plus side it does keep government honest, Batho Pele is not a one way street.
Hopefully the people of Iran will get the government they deserve.
Embedded below is a interesting presentation given by Tino Kreutzer. The presentations is on Internet and Online Media Usage on Mobile Phones among Low-Income Urban Youth in Cape Town, South Africa. The results are interesting.
We were invited by International Idea to give a presentation on how ICT can be used to enhance civic participation in governance and democracy. Embedded below is the presentation that was given.
Since late 2007 we have been engaged with the Ekurhuleni Metropolitian Municipality (EMM) in first verifying and assessing its indigent policy and indigent progamme and now we are working on developing an indigent register for the EMM.
Municipalities are obligated by policy to provide Free Basic Services to indigent citizens. An indigent register is a critical tool in allowing municipalities to do this effectively, yet todate the vast majority of municipalities have not developed workable indigent registes. The EMM is arguably the first municipality in the country to develop a standalone indigent register – as opposed to having it’s billing system substitute for an indigent register.
The indigent register we have developed is based on widely available Internet technologies. This has meant the cost of development and ownership is significantly lower. The system allows the EMM to rapidly manage its indigent application, asssessment and verification processes. Some of the key features of the system we have developed include:
The system currently stores the data for over 60,000 indigent households in the EMM.
The Star newspaper reports that the Eastern Cape Department of Health website has an error message with some colourful explanations for why the 404 error has taken place.
The error messages reads as follows:
PAGE NOT FOUND
Sorry….but the page you are looking for cannot be foundThis could happen for several reasons:
1. The page may have been reached in error.
2. The page may have moved.
3. The page may no longer exist.
4. The page is on holiday and will be out of the office until next week or when it feels like coming back.
5. The page was considered redundant and was given a raise so it now works even less.
6. The page performed and illegal operation and was promoted to vice-president.
7. The page was on strike. We are busy negotiating with the unions now for better wages so it can come online.
8. The page is running late. This could be because the taxi’s need to collect at least another 404 passengers.
9. The page is sleeping . After all, this is African time we are talking about.
According to the Star the department claim that their site was not hacked.
Wow its December already. 2007 has just flown by, and 2008 is looking choc-a-block full. I’ve been bouncing around the country meeting with municipalities talking to them about how they have gone about developing their indigent policies and what systems they use.
One of the key issues that keep’s popping up at each visit is the need municipalities have to cross reference their local datasets against national datasets.
This issue got me asking “what has happened to governments e-Government programme?”
There used to a great deal of talk about e-Government. A lot of that talk seems to have died down. If you visit either the DPSA or SITA website you really don’t get much of an idea as to what government has done. A quick read through the lists of contracts awarded by SITA and you’ll see a lot of money has gone to funding administrative improvement projects – these don’t help immediately speed up service delivery at the local level.
Why is it so hard for a municipality to get a simple list of who lives in its jurisdiction and what they earn is hard for me to understand, its not like that data is not there.
Maybe it’s all the skills shortages fault?
Or maybe it’s just a lack of vision at the level of programme mangers. Maybe they don’t know what can be done, maybe they don’t know who can help them, maybe they don’t know that they need to play nice with others in the public sector, and there are a lot of potential maybes.
My experience leads me to believe that a simple request like “Who lives in my jurisdiction and what do they earn”, is in fact not such a simple request.
Not because it’s technically impossible, it’s actually quiet simple – we once demonstrate how data taken from the Department of Social Developments SOCPEN database could be used to cross reference against an indigent list, it took us about two weeks to source the data and build a simple application for demonstration purposes, – but because when you ask that question you are immediately encroaching on other people’s domains. And people guard those domains.
Its not only national departments that hold on tightly and need to be poked with a big stick in order to share, I’ve come across instances where municipalities plainly refuse to share their data with national departments.
Hopefully in the not too distant future we’ll actually see a more cohesive public sector working together towards the same goals.
