Tunisia: e-activism and the role of ICTs

Last week’s discussions pertaining to policy development and strategic planning got me thinking about a very unique country insofar as this topic is concerned. Tunisia, a small North African country, is best known for having undergone a revolution that ignited the ‘Arab Spring.’

Well, last spring I had the pleasure of studying abroad in Tunisia almost exactly one year after the country had just become newly independent from the former dictator Zine ben Ali. Almost every Tunisian I met is connected in some way as far as social media is concerned – most commonly with facebook. It is now understood that had it not been for these social networking tools, Tunisians would not have taken to the streets and demanded for change. Ironically, the government used these tools as ways to keep the public quiet – but obviously that was not enough.

After the revolution, there has been a tremendous boom in how Tunisians communicate and debate about the future of the country. ICTs have enabled doors to be opened to groups previously unable to participate in social activism. Groups in the southern part of the country who were the marginalized poor are now making their voices heard, thanks to ICTs that before were only accessed by select groups of people who were well educated and trained to navigate the murky waters of a censored internet.

In a report titled “Tunisia: From Revolutions to Insitutions,” authors Zack Brisson and Kate Krontiris cite this phenomena as “e-activism” which is evidence of a newly robust civil society. Many of these activists seek to change the political atmosphere in the country depending on their platforms (ex: traditional versus progressive, islam versus secular), and are using the internet as their tool. In response to these individuals and groups, the Tunisian Internet Agency, TIA, (which before was the agency responsible for censoring) is now engaging with – rather than harassing – activists.

The report covers a broad range of topics related to post-revolutionary Tunisia and where it is headed, but the one overarching theme is the role that ICTs have had in transforming civil society. This is just one example of what having the infrastructure and development in place can do for a country’s ability to use ICT as a tool for democratization.

Arab Spring: What We Learned About Tech and Revolution

The Arab Spring uprisings have been characterized by many as movements driven by social media interaction, and this observation is indisputable. But what we don’t know is the degree to which social media really played a role in the uprisings, and exactly what role these resources played. The Meta-Activism Project blog has recently posted an article that seeks to answer these questions.  ”Arab Spring: What Did We Learn About Tech and Revolution” offers an in depth look at the role social media holds in the Arab uprisings, and offers a preliminary method for measuring its impact.

The article views social medias role in a series of progressive steps. The first step is providing people with a safer space to share their preferences. The internet presents opposition groups with a chance to easily foster collective action by sharing their preferences and gaining the capacity to communicate with others to share that preference. The internet provided greater access to information, increased freedom of speech, and increased access to others, all of which helped grow the uprisings. Now that a group has been created for collaborative action, the next step, collaborative planning, is breached. In this sense, the internet provides a vast number of tools for communication that are much safer than many other methods of organizing. Now, the group is ready to take action and will usually mobilize in a coordinated action to do so.

Once the first group has been spurred into action, information cascades come into play. This is when people observe the actions of others, and choose to follow their lead and join the cause. When these information cascades are networked using multiple types of media, a sort of contagion erupts as the public rushes to support and join the cause. Social media also meant that the leaders of the uprisings could write their own legacies in a sense, since they were able to directly communicate their accounts of the story to international media.

Now here is the real beauty of social media- it creates a kind of catch 22 for repressive regimes. Once a revolution is underway and powerful (such as those in Egypt and Tunisia) the government is powerless to stop it, however, censoring social media has been shown to foster political resistance, and thus feed a revolution of its own. So in this sense, it seems that perhaps the repressive regime, to some extent, is soon doomed to fail at the hands of social media. I bet you didn’t imagine then when you created your account of facebook or twitter…

Lessons Learned: ICT4D

There are numerous lessons that I have learned this semester in our ICT4D class. Yet, the most outstanding lesson for me was the importance of creating an ICT4D tool that is tailored specifically for the community it is working with. I noticed over the semester that there were a number of great ideas for development tools that ultimately failed due to some divide/ miscommunication with the targeted community. I found that when the ICT4D tools were created with a specific group of people or community, there was often a lasting positive outcome. I think that understanding the importance of developing different or altered ICT4D tools for different communities is extremely important for my future international development work. It is easy to believe that one tool will provide aid to a large variety of people, but this does not often hold true in reality. There have been many good attempts at the implementation of various ICT4D tools in many nations, but without the right connection with the community and the people, the development tools are essentially worthless because the people will not continue to adapt and use the tools provided. If developers do not fully understand the community, then how can they really provide a technology that the people will understand, use and enjoy?

I still think the example in the video we watched in class about the various things villagers can do with a tomato is a wonderful depiction of the many different issues in the realm of development. A single tomato can be used in many ways – sold at the market, turned into tomato paste, dried out – and it is important for development groups to look at examples like this and see how to alter development tools in accordance with the community that they are targeting. A village close to the market could sell fresh produce at the market much easier than a village far away. The far away village, however, could be taught how to turn the tomato into tomato paste which would travel easier and provide a variation of the tomato so they would not have to compete with the fresher produce of the close village. Altering development programs is imperative to providing the community with tools that could ultimately produce a lasting change.

I also found certain development programs we studied in class extremely interesting. I really enjoyed looking into the use of ICTs in programs like Ushahidi and ICT4Peace. I think that there should continue to be a strong emphasis on Social Media and the way it can alter the course of an entire nation. This semester the country I researched  was Tunisia. During my research, I came across numerous articles about the use of technology and the progression of the Arab Spring. Technology played an extremely large role in the complete turmoil and reformation of entire nations. I think it would be interesting if the class spent time on modern examples like the Arab Spring that clearly demonstrate the positive and negative aspects of the rapid spread of technology. With a large amount of help from Social Media, countries like Tunisia are becoming democratic after multiple decades under dictatorship.

ICT4Peace and Humanitarian Aid

ICT4Peace is a humanitarian organization that began in Switzerland. The ICT for Peace Foundation aims to “enhance the performance of the international community in crisis management through the application of Information Communications Technology – technologies that can facilitate effective and sustained communication between peoples, communities and stakeholders involved in crisis management, humanitarian aid and peace-building”. The use of ICT for humanitarian aid is not a new approach, but should be examined more carefully. There are countless benefits that can come from the use of ICT in disaster response, humanitarian aid and peace-building. ICT4Peace has worked with the Ushahidi foundation in the past (http://www.ushahidi.com). One of the more recent projects that the ICT4Peace foundation took part in was in the recent elections in Tunisia. The Arab Spring destroyed the political structure of Tunisia and other Arab nations. Tunisia, like many of these nations, are currently trying to rebuild their government based on a democracy. For a nation that had been under control of a dictatorship for decades, democratic elections are an extremely new concept and can sometimes be scary. The people do not know what to expect; however, in order for a new political body to be formed, the elections must be carried out successfully. The first ever democratic elections for Tunisia took place on October 23, 2011. Wtih the invitation of the Tunisian “Higher Independent Election Committee” and aid from Ushahidi, ICT4Peace created an online monitoring platform for the election called “Carte de Controle du Processus Electorale”. The program used 850 trained reporters throughout Tunisia that reported back to the headquarters giving updates, reports and observations of the progress of the election. The information was verified and placed on a map that all people could access and track the election progress in their area and in the nation as a whole. This program is only one of the many humanitarian projects ICT4Peace has contributed to. The use of ICTs can make the people of a nation feel more comfortable and at ease about change after disaster. The ICT4Peace Foundation is one good example of the proper use of ICTs for humanitarian aid and the impact they can have on the peace-making and rebuilding of a nation.

 

http://ict4peace.org

Election Day Map: http://ict4peace.org/updates/monitoring-tunisias-first-election-ict4peace-foundation-instance-superieure-independante-pour-les-elections

Social Media: Rebellion, Reform and Conflict Resolution

The Arab Spring began in Tunisia in December 2010. The wave of demonstrations and protests spread quickly throughout the Arab world with the aid of Social Media. Social media became a vehicle for change in the nation led by a dictator. The spread of knowledge through social media, created a wave in which all people of Tunisia began to demand freedom and democracy. The use of social media caused the rebellion to spread rapidly. However, an importance use of social media is for the promotion of peace and crisis management in developing nations. One organization that uses social media as a means of creating peace is the ICT for Peace Foundation. ICT4Peace foundation seeks to use ICTs to bridge the gaps embedded in Tunisian society. The foundation attempts to work in accordance with the WSIS Tunis Declaration, which outlines methods to promote peace and to prevent conflicts by using ICTs for identifying conflict situations by early-warning systems, promoting peaceful resolution, supporting humanitarian action, and assisting post conflict peace-building and reconstruction (http://www.itu.int). During the recent democratic elections in Tunisia – the first in the history of their independence – ICT4Peace worked in accordance with Ushahidi to create a mapping program that followed the progress of the election on Election Day. This use of social media promoted more people to participate in the elections since they could track the participation of other citizens in their area. Additionally, Ushahidi is another good example of an organization that uses social media to promote peace and crisis management. Ushahidi is “a non-profit tech company that develops free and open software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping.”  Providing access of an immense amount of information to the citizens of Tunisia, allows the people to better understand the events taking place in their nation. One Ushahidi user stated that the program has “dramatically changed the face of how individuals and communities can influence democracy and economic development around the world”. Social media plays a large role in the spread of rebellion as well as using it to promote peace, reform and conflict resolution. The use of social media is a powerful method to rapidly spread knowledge to a large group of people.

Social Media and the Arab Spring

I thought this topic was really interesting because everyone knows about the violence and military ordeals of the Arab Spring, but the social media side is not as obvious. We also have not talked a lot yet of about the role (or lack there of) of the government in development. This article describes the efforts of protesters in utilizing social media like twitter and Facebook and also using ICT in the form of mobile phones. Phones were used by mass broadcast media to talk to protesters on the ground. Mostly, media was used to disseminate  information about the protest movement and provide anti-government propaganda, but the article states that once they were in full-swing, the use of social media died down.  One thing I found interesting in the article was the governments attempt at destroying the social media efforts. They attempted to hack and delete the main player’s social media profiles and the Egyptian government even shut off the internet and mobile phone services. This proves how effective the social media movement was if the government felt the need to destroy the social media outlets.