ICT against corruption

ICTs in general, Interesting content on ICT4Peace 1 Minute

There’s a great story in the NY Times today on the use of the web to protect a whistle-blower in India and how a single person’s blog is helping the fight against corruption.The story chronicles the efforts of a single woman, Ms. Jayashree, who in fear of her husband started a blog to protect him.

She built her Web site, fightcorruption.wikidot.com, with help from her son, a doctoral student in computer science at Delaware State University. On the site, she chronicles her husband’s case and criticizes the government. An aficionado of India’s new right-to-information laws, she has acquired and uploaded reams of documents. She updates the site nearly every day and has received responses from around the world, including many from Indian émigrés who say they left the country because they found it too corrupt. Government officials in predicaments like her husband’s have sought advice.

Arun Duggal, a senior adviser to Transparency International, called the Web site pathbreaking for India.

“For an individual to use the powerful media of the Internet to take a stand against corruption, to expose wrongdoing, to build a campaign and a following, I think it’s the first time I’ve seen it,” said Mr. Duggal, who is based in New Delhi.

ARD Inc.’s Anti-Corruption Programme in Sri Lanka is the most web savvy of initiatives to address corruption in Sri Lanka. However, even it has some way to go in the use of new media and social networking to really engender public participation in web driven campaigns to raise public awareness on and against corruption.

Technorati Tags: ,

Published by Sanjana

An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance. I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002. I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents. Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs. Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts. I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.

Published

2 thoughts on “ICT against corruption”

  1. A great idea. Whatever can be done to stop this curse that debilitates our country and society must be done. And one of the most effective ways is to highlight the individual cases, naming names and encouraging the public to respond en-force. The ‘Leader’ Newspaper does a lot of this, but unfortunately each of the cases they expose appear to die a natural death from the lethargy of listeners and the lack of feedback that will have adequate exposure. The politicians involved in this, the ones that are supposed to serve us and the country should be first on the list of exposures – starting from the top.

  2. Pingback: Lawrence Lessig on ending corruption using ICT « ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace)

Comments are closed.