Journalism For Peace

Crowdmapping torture in Egypt

Egyptian blogger Abdelrahman Hassan. Photo: Hanna Sistek.

CAIRO — “The last ten years torture became systematic. So I thought, why not plot these violations on a map?” says Abdelrahman Hassan.

The 31-year-old programmer is part of the Egyptian tech savvy youth who finding digital solutions to his country’s problems. We catch him on the way back from Smart Village, a cybercity in the western suburbs of Cairo.

Hassan explains that the use of torture went from being a special treatment of political dissidents to spreading much wider during the last decade.

But it wasn’t until the blogging scene took off in 2004-5 that people started sharing their experiences and realizing the extent of the violations.

“That’s when topics which were never discussed in media started being discussed online,” he says.

So Hassan built a platform for people to report the abuses: A torture map. He would personally connect the torture victims with organizations providing medical and legal support — the human rights organization El Nadeem and The Hisham Mubarak Law Center. He wrote the program on top of Google maps using initial data and site documentation from tortureinegypt.net, a blog set up by journalist/activist Noha Atef. 

The torture map was launched in the summer of 2010. So far 2-3 new cases are reported each month.

“I am sure violations happen with larger frequency but the site didn’t get much exposure to the mainstream public,” Hassan explains.

Most of the reports are submitted by relatives of the victims. But after the revolution the number of reported police abuses have declined.

“The abuse of prisoners seems to have become the responsibility of the military now. There are military trials and military prisons so we have shifted our attention there,” says Hassan.

A reason for the shift might be that police are less active in general. This is leaving a security vacuum for the military to fill, which they are poorly prepared for civilian law enforcement.

Luckily, activists can now blog and use social media to bring attention to these violations.

“Otherwise so many people would have remained in jail. There are many examples of military cases being dismissed after pressure by new and old media,” Hassan says.

His next project is a pre-election violations map, tracking problems along the campaign trail.

Hanna Sistek

April 6 — Mission not accomplished

CAIRO — “Egypt is our mother!”

“Raise your head, you are Egyptian!”

Sixty odd members of the April 6 Youth Movement took to the streets, or rather the narrow alleys, of Islamic Cairo Thursday night to ”invite people to feel the revolution.”

It also marked the first sohour gathering after the uprising — an annual Islamic observance when the early morning meal of Ramadan is shared.

”In the past they attacked our sohours and caught us, but now we are free. Or at least a little free,” laughs Ahmad Shurrab, 25, an architect and member of the loose-knit organization since last year.

The movement started as a Facebook group in the Spring of 2008 initially to support an industrial town strike in El-Mahalla El-Kubra on April 6. The event came to symbolize the national struggle against the Mubarak regime and spurred an annual day of protest.

”But we got no response. In the end it was good for us. If [Mubarak] would have responded then maybe the revolution wouldn’t have happened. But he refused to deal with us, so then most of Egyptians refused him too,” says Amr Elgandy, a skinny, sincere 22 year old.

”Mubarak destroyed this country. This is the reason for this revolution. There was no health care. Police caught people without reason.”

”When I ask the police why you catch, push, hit me, then they tell me you work with USA, you want to destroy this country. But I’m a young man. I want freedom. I want to choose my leaders,” says Elgandy.

So did one of the founders of the April 6 Movement, Asmaa Mahfouz, 26. She recorded a video that went viral and sparked the January 25 revolution. In it, she urged people to join her in Tahrir Square, saying she’s just a girl, but was going to protest against the regime and if the men had some guts, they should join.

Many activists still perceive this revolution as ongoing, though.

The regime charged Mahfouz for defamation of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) on Facebook and Twitter. The charges were dropped about a week ago.

”This is not human rights!” says Eltayeb, referring to the emergency law barring citizens from bad-mouthing the army. Human rights groups charge that 10,000 Egyptians have faced the secretive military tribunals since the uprisings began — more than in the entire three decades of rule by deposed President Hosni Mubarak.

In front of the Al-Hakim mosque, the activists have started chanting slogans against Army Commander-on-Chief Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, demanding his resignation. The protesters were accompanied by the drumming of a sufi mystician, totally clad in white cotton.

As head of SCAF, Tantawi is a stark reminder of the remaining vestiges of the brutal Mubarak regime.

”We won’t relax until Egypt becomes a democracy. That’s our target,” says Eltayeb.

Meanwhile, in the back alleys, it’s time for sohour.

The protesters break their fast with a traditional meal of mashed beans and vegetables fortified by the excitement of writing history on this warm Cairo night.

Hanna Sistek

Photos: Hanna Sistek

Cairo: Uneasy path from dictatorship to functioning state

CAIRO — “I Googled everywhere, but I couldn’t find you!” yells a good-looking 25-year-old guy at Tahrir Square as we’re passing by, on our way home on a hot, bustling Cairo night.

We laugh, and so does his group of friends.

Cairo is definitely tech savvier than a year ago, with free fast wifi at the airport as well as on the bus back from American University’s new campus. Data connection for our mobile phones is a mere 16 cents per day.

We arrive on Monday night to a crescendo of traffic, horns and people happy from breaking the day’s Ramadan fast. But not everyone is amused by the post revolutionary changes here in Egypt.

“The situation on the road is horrible. Nobody is following the traffic rules any more and the police can’t care less,” says our taxi driver Hasan.

Less than a minute later, a pedestrian rams our car with a metal pull cart, scraping the side. He doesn’t even apologize nor stop when Hasan, tearing his hair, steps out to inspect the damage.

“It never used to be THIS way”, he complains.

The fact is it isn’t easy to go from dictatorship to an orderly, functioning state.

People we talk to are unhappy with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) — the military leadership, which is temporarily governing the country.

At the moment, they are not allowing big demonstrations on Tahrir Square and they have banned international monitors for the upcoming election, which has been postponed until at least November, and possibly into December.

Sabah Hamomou, a blogger and editor at the country’s largest newspaper, Al-Ahram, has noticed an ominous silencing of journalists.

“The owners of the private media here had relationships with the former regime. Otherwise, they couldn’t have gotten the permission to start their papers. And now they are firing some columnists who are critical of the SCAF,” she told us over a meal.

Tomorrow, we are meeting more digital activists.

Hanna Sistek

Crossposted from Spot.us. Photos by Hanna Sistek.

Tweet Nadwa connects Egyptian activists on and offline

CAIRO — “The intellectual elite is totally out of touch with what really happens on the streets.”  

“Only a small segment of people are on Twitter and Facebook. How can we reach out to those who are not?”  

These are the concerns raised at the funky Tahrir Lounge just few minutes away from Tahrir Square, one of the Arab Spring hot spots in Cairo.   

I’m at Tweet Nadwa, a gathering that combines both real and virtual worlds. Nadwa means ”forum” in Arabic. The comments are limited to 140 characters online or 140 seconds offline.  

Live tweets during the meeting are projected on a huge canvas. Location tags on the tweets reveal that the global Egyptian diaspora are also participating in the event. The gathering could rival a Silicon Valley tech event for the amount of tweets, iPhones and gadgets of all sorts.

Members of the core group that helped spark the Jan 25 uprising gather in the inner yard of the meeting space. The scene is vibrant: Youth in their twenties and early thirties don t-shirts and jeans; some women wear colorful veils, others do not.

Among the participants are an influential group of Egyptian bloggers — many who write under pseudonyms and are largely known only by their Twitter handles. Collectively, they have been raising public awareness about torture and other democratic issues for more than 10 years and have played a critical role in the uprising against the Mubarak regime.  

The Tweet Nadwas have already gained a reputation as a “new socio-political movement” by IDC, an influential international development consulting firm in Giza. Activists discuss a variety of issues, including the role of the Muslim Brotherhood, a conservative Islamist group in Egypt.  

Today, the topic is citizen journalism. The overcrowded room listens to experienced bloggers share tips for producing good coverage.  

“Citizen journalism has the most impact when the stories get picked up by the mainstream media. Citizen journalism reaches only a tiny segment of the society,” says Gigi Ibrahim, better known in these circles as @Gsquare86 and for her blog, The Angry Egyptian.   

People wave their hands in the air in reponse to Ibrahim’s advice. This is how they show support to a Tweet Nadwa speaker instead of clapping their hands.

Ibrahim continues her thoughts in a tweet about the mainstream media, referred to as #msm.  

Other Tweet Nadwa participants share their experiences about being harassed by the police and military while practicing citizen journalism. Some of them have been questioned; others arrested.  

During the upcoming election, the activists plan to use citizen journalism to report about election fraud and violence.  

“That is why it is important that more people learn to use their mobile phones in citizen journalism now, before the elections,” one of the speaker says.  

At the end of the event a young man walks around the room with a huge ink stamp and imprints a pro-democracy message on the arms of people reaching out from the crowd.

“No military trials for civilians,” the text reads.   

The activists plan to stamp the message on Egyptian paper currency.  

A new phase in the campaign to change the society is about to begin.  

Follow the hashtag #nomiltrials on Twitter.

Tanja Aitamurto.

Photos: Hanna Sistek.

Crossposted from Spot.Us.

Egypt’s ‘Arab Spring’ a decade in the making

David Faris, Roosevelt University Assistant Professor of Political Science. Photo: Univ. of Pennsylvania.

The supersavvy use of social media in the Egyptian uprising isn’t a surprise: Egyptian activists have a long history of using online tools for social reform, says David Faris, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Roosevelt University.

Activists started writing blogs in the early 2000s. Kefaya, the Egyptian movement for change, started holding demonstrations in downtown Cairo by coordinating protests with elite Egyptian bloggers. They took pictures and posted news in their own sphere, outside the mainstream media.

But it was video and photographs of alleged torture of detainees by police and the military that ignited the Egyptian public. The images went viral and brought the issue to the forefront of community debate — that civilians could be subjected to torture.

Soon, traditional news outlets began to cover the story.

Egypt’s Arab Spring is widely considered a result of this nearly decade-long activism.

Because of this long history in new media activism, activists were able to effectively use Facebook and Twitter efficiently during the uprising. They had the skills and trust that political aims can be accomplished with efficient media use. Likewise, Egyptian citizens began using this independent news sphere as a credible source of information.

Faris is looking forward to observing the next phase of this emerging political activism: the effects of several crowdsourcing efforts taking place in Egypt to collectively find new solutions to community problems.

“What is great about crowdsourcing is that it exposes everybody’s ideas to the light of the day, and subjects everybody’s ideas to criticism,” says Faris. “You can end up with better ideas when ideas are being vetted by thousands of people.”

While other political watchers warn that the digital divide can hinder the process, he believes it’s less of a problem than generally considered. Faris, who recently returned to Chicago from Cairo, wrote his dissertation about social media, blogging and political change in Egypt.

“Egyptians have access online for example through “thiefnets” or shared networks within apartment buildings. Families are big, and Internet access is being shared within families and relatives.”

Thus, online initiatives can have a wider reach than by merely citing national Internet penetration rates. But one problem still remains: most Egyptians don’t have online access so Internet-based political action can be perceived as an activity reserved for elite classes.

“Still, it is good to keep in mind that in the bad old days, there were 20 old dudes writing the constitution. They wouldn’t ask anyone. Now when it happens online, it is a much wider circle than it has ever been in Egypt,” Faris says.

Therefore, it is not like the old elite in a new form — this is a new elite, which is more inclusive than it was in the past.

Apart from the digital divide, there are other challenges which online policy makers have to meet. One of them is how to transfer the the activists’ more internal collaborative models to initiatives that also include officials.

According to Faris, “Communication and decision making is very egalitarian among the Egyptian activists. Things are being discussed in an open way, and decisions are made in informal processes.”

This way of working creates social trust between people who don’t know each other well.

“If the government wants to come in and say: ‘Hi everybody, what you should do today is and go online and talk about taxation,’ for example, not so many care,” explains Faris.

It is hard, maybe even impossible, to make issues that are government-centric exciting for people. Technology can’t make that happen.

“If we expect technology to be translated directly into policy we will be really disappointed. But if technology can enable conversations, new linkages can be built, and we can treat those as successful initiatives for bringing voices to conversation,” Faris says.

Crossposted from Spot.us

Tanja Aitamurto

The power of social media on the Egyptian uprising

Could the uprising in Egypt have happened without the Web?

This is exactly what social network researcher Alix Dunn and her colleagues asked of 1200 Egyptian activists at Tahrir Square in the weeks after President Hosni Mubarak was ousted from power in February.

“We get a lot of no ways, I have no ideas, and from serious offline organizers, a lot ‘of courses,’” Dunn says of the responses to the Tahrir Data Project.

“So I don’t know if it would be possible without the Internet. But I don’t think it would happen now without social media tools. You can’t build a mobilization effort without knowing who you can mobilize, and you couldn’t have membership lists before,” she says.

Nowadays, with the help of online tools, the activists can identify and map their members which enables more powerful mobilization efforts.

Dunn, who is the Egypt training network coordinator for MobileActive’s SaferMobile project, sees three major ways how the Web had an impact in Egypt: First, by making citizen journalism possible. Second, by speeding up real time information dissemination,and third, by creating super-amplified connectivity. 

Egyptian activists documented situations and posted pictures and video footage on the Web from Tahrir Square. Their reporting also created an important feedback loop for both Egyptian citizens and expats scattered across the world.

When citizen reporting revealed controversial police actions at Tahrir Square, it motivated more people to join the protests. Having the ability to post real-time visual information through social media was a groundbreaking for the activists.

“In the years 2004 and 2005, when these movements that had a prominent role in the uprising got started, there weren’t so many tools to capture multimedia and share it quickly,” Dunn says.

But now there were tools. And many people used them. But not as many as expected, Dunn points out.

“Technically, what happened in January, it was a small number of people, that managed to frame everything as if though the entire country was a part of an uprising, and they really weren’t. Maybe there’s two million in Cairo that were very happy about what was happening, and one million outside of Cairo. Those are small numbers in Egypt,” says Dunn of the nation that boasts a population of 80 million people and is the most populated country in the Middle East.

However, as activists got more people connected to the information network, they successfully gave voice to the uprising’s citizen-led narrative.

However, when Facebook, Twitter and YouTube became widely available, Egyptian activists became superorganizers, supermotivators and supernetworkers, as Dunn describes them. Combined with conventional grassroots activities utilized well before the social media era their capacity to reach people multiplied exponentially.

This amplified connectivity spread among Egyptians. When they made friends with well-connected people in protests, they also became well-connected. And, those new connections helped to transmit information even faster.

“You didn’t need to call your cousin to see what is going on, or wait if Al-Jazeera decides to send somebody to a tiny town, but you could see it online, real-time,” Dunn says.

Activists were able to disseminate information quickly, as though it was synchronized, which was crucial in mobilizing efforts.

“Being able to share information in real-time about a workers’ strike in a small town 400 miles from Cairo made issues in rural areas much more real in Cairo, where most of the activists and Egyptian intellegencia live. When you had a protest in rural Egypt, you could have a protest an hour later in Cairo, in support of the protest outside Cairo.

This makes a huge difference in how government responds to the protest, and how the narrative of the protest was packaged.”

But Dunn says it’s important to note that despite worldwide media reports Egypt was not gripped by a revolution — it was an uprising.

“There hasn’t been systemic structural changes that would be needed in order to call it a revolution. The army still has its foot on the neck of the country,” she says.

That’s evident as the uprising reaches its seventh month.

Activists continue to use new social technologies to evoke even more change in Egypt.

Tweets and posts from Tahrir Square spur the protest momentum and hint at further action.

“There has been an interesting change in people: Some of them have turned more towards the offline world. Others have become technocrats, and they are envisioning technological solutions to almost all problems.”

However, Dunn doesn’t see crowdsourcing having a big role in policy making. According to estimates, about 40 percent of Egyptians live below the poverty level, and most of Egyptians don’t have access to Internet.

“It is a big challenge to find ways to get these people on board, both online and engaged in political questions,” she says.

Crossposted from Spot.us

Tanja Aitamurto

Crowdsourcing + Policy making =?

In the picture above: Mary Joyce.

The post written by: Tanja Aitamurto.

“I haven’t seen many examples in which crowdsourcing has been used successfully
in policy making,” says Mary Joyce, a digital activism expert and the founder of Meta-Activism Project, a digital activism think-tank.

When used in policymaking, crowdsourcing has several challenges:   

First, the participation reflects an unpresentative sample of the population. For example, in Egypt only thirty percent of the population have Internet access, so obviously, the ones participating probably come from a certain socio-economic background. Therefore, the results are misleading.

Second, the platforms are game-able. If there is a voting opportunity, the voting can be easily gamed.

Joyce recalls after being elected in 2008, Barack Obama launched a tool called Open for Questions (picture below).

It was a tool to let citizens submit and vote about questions for the new President. The idealistic plan didn’t work out quite that way after marijuana legalization activists gamed the site and voted up their own questions.  

“But technology has the potential to support in several processes. Every instance of digital activism involves reaching out, and technology has the benefits of increasing speed and reach, with decreased cost,” Joyce says.  

That is why we see success stories in the pre-policymaking era, Joyce says. In Egypt, social media helped people to get organized for the revolution.  

But these success stories don’t happen by default, according to Joyce.

The benefits of digital activism can be gained only if certain conditions are met: 

1. There has to be a good outreach strategy to tap into diverse networks.  

2. There needs to be both online and offline activities. The reciprocity of online and offline world leads to better results. If the process happens only online the connections are usually very weak.

3. There has to be a clear value proposition for the participants. Whether it is an online platform for people to participate in conversation or crowdsourcing crisis information, the plausible promise of the project has to be clear.

Otherwise the energy participants invest in the process will drain to sand, and that can hinder future activity in similar projects.  

For example, Wathiqah.com, the platform to crowdsource Egyptians’ opinions about constitution lacks that value proposition, Joyce points out. (More about Wathiqah in our previous post.)  

“What will happen to the opinions that Egyptians express on the platform? Will somebody pass their message on to policy makers?” she asks.

She adds that constitution shouldn’t be written online just because it can be done, but the question should be: Can technology add value to the policymaking, and if so, how?  

“The technology is the easy part. The more challenging part is to have real impact with these projects,” she says.  

And that capacity for impact requires a broad, diverse user base—a critical element that is becoming scarce as so many projects over-emphasize online action.  

“There’s tremendous competition in reaching the audience. For example, in Egypt, there are multiple initiatives to write constitutions online,” Joyce says.

Editorial credit: Wendy Norris.

Crossposted from Spot.Us.

Constitutional crowdsourcing site launched

Ben Rowswell, co-founder of Cloud to Street, in San Francisco.
Photo: Hanna Sistek

SAN FRANCISCO: Egyptians can now discuss their proposed constitution at www.wathiqah.com, a new crowdsourcing site that launched last week.

The constitution webpage was developed by volunteers at a series of hackathons at Stanford University. After a round of amendments, the site now boasts six guiding principles and seven proposed articles. 

Ben Rowswell, one of the founders of the non-profit organization Cloud to Street – helped create wathiqah.com at the request of Egyptian presidential candidate Mohamed ElBaradei and his National Association for Change.

Rowswell traveled from Stanford to Cairo to help with the implementation of the site, where “a number of bugs were revealed”, he says. 

For a week,Rowswell worked with activists from ElBaradei’s campaign, to improve the software and rewrite the code to accept responses in Arabic.

“We made quite a few late night calls to the coders from the hackathon to get the site working”, he laughs, when we met up for a coffee in Potrero Hill, a leafy neighborhood in San Francisco. 

Now, it’s up to the ElBaradei campaign to spread the word and get people in the 20 administrative units in the Egyptian state to participate.

The crowdsourcing platform is just one way to involve Egyptians. There will also be organized offline events, where participants will discuss printed copies of the proposed constitution. Still, there has been some criticism against the online efforts.

“Some human rights organizations even pointed out that this might increase the digital divide in the society”, Rowswell admits. Optimally, a combined effort of technical and offline advocacy will ”enable as many Egyptians as possible to participate.” 

In Morocco, a similar exercise took place this spring, when King Mohamed VI created a committee to revise the Moroccan constitution. In a private initiative, two computer geeks set up the crowdsourcing site www.reforme.ma. In little over a month’s time, the site garnered the opinions of 150,000 Moroccans on the constitutional amendments. The huge response spurred the committee to reflect the crowdsourced opinions in the new draft constitution.

But that’s where things get tricky. How do you sum up the voices of 150,000 people?

Wathiqah has created a system that lets the most popular comments rise to the top of the site. The ElBaradei campaign will be responsible for analyzing the comments and using them to revise the draft constitutional proposals.

However, the question remains: Is there existing software that might help analyzing large numbers of crowdsource responses, so the process isn’t dependent on a few “gatekeeping” analysts. Anyone know? Please share your experiences on our Google spreadsheet.

Hanna Sistek