Putting corruption on the map

Students at the Singularity University in the United States were issued a challenge: What would you do in order to positively affect the lives of 10 billion people in 10 years time? Some students came up with the idea of launching a website to expose corruption and CorruptionTracker.org was born.

One of the people behind the newly-launched site is Nikola Danaylov: “One of our goals is to give people a voice, to expose corruption and to map it out via crowdsourcing. This way you can visually represent corruption across the globe."

It's a very ambitious project. “But," says Danaylov, “if you aim high, even if you do not reach your goal, you still achieve more than if you aim low."

The idea is that anyone from anywhere in the world can make a complaint about corruption on the website. The complaints are collected and added to a map on the website. The team hopes to create a platform where people can complain about corruption anonymously.

Libel
Dieter Zinnbauer from the anti-corruption organisation Transparency International (TI) warns that there are problems with this method of working:

“If it's run badly, there is a risk that people will use it to libel others, to spread lies about other people. Another challenge is to make sure that something happens. If people report information to a platform that records all those complaints about corruption, and after a long while, nothing happens, people will get the feeling that it’s just a place to blow off steam and that will be very, very frustrating.”

Text messaging
Another concern is digital security: can governments trace complaints back to the people who made them? Can a government simply block access to the website? CorruptionTracker is still in its infancy and is still working out ways to circumvent these sorts of problems. Mr Danaylov notes: 

“Technology is always a double-edged sword. Any technology can be used for positive as well as negative goals; it can save people's lives or it can destroy them. We are looking at several mechanisms in order to diminish or cut out slanderous or libellous reports as much as possible."

He adds that they are looking into the possibility of using text messaging to register complaints about corruption if the site gets blocked:

“The most popular method of communicating in developing countries is through text messaging. We know that in India more people have access to a mobile phone with a text message function than have access to running water or a toilet. Everything is done through text messaging in those countries."

Hot topic
Mr Zinnbauer agrees that anti-corruption is trendy at the moment:

“In general, people are getting more and more frustrated by corruption and are also getting more and more concerned about it. We see this in questionnaires and in case reports as well. There are lots of very hopeful examples of people fighting corruption and lots of these cases are generating media attention."

He is referring to the attention paid by the global media by the 13-day hunger strike staged by Indian social activist Anna Hazare. His protest has been judged a success; politicians have promised to do something about corruption. Whether they will actually honour their promises remains to be seen.

It also remains to be seen how popular CorruptionTracker proves to be. So far there are just 30 complaints on the site and the global map where the complaints are posted looks a little bare. The highest number of complaints comes from India, followed by Belgium with six corruption reports. Will this idea really lead to a better life for 10 billion people in 10 years time?

 

Mr Danaylov shrugs off the question and points to the revolution in Egypt; thousands of people used online platforms to express their anger about corruption and organise the protests that eventually led to the fall of the Mubarak regime.

“Those were platforms that were barely used in the months before the protests started but as soon as people discovered them, they were using them all the time. That's the point of crowdsourcing; we can't control how popular a site becomes."

(Source : Radio Netherlands Worldwide)