>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: So today we have Jorge Soto who is going to be our
first speaker of hopefully a series of talks around the topic of civic media. Jorge is the
founder of CitiVox, and he has been working on technologies that empower citizens to
communicate with one another and with the governments. He was named one of the 35
innovators by MIT Tech Review in Mexico a few months ago. So, he has a lot of really
interesting stories around these technologies in many different countries. So, Jorge.
>> Jorge Soto: Oh, thank you very much. So I have this company, this start up called
CitiVox. And what we've been doing, we're using technology to provide tools that engage
citizens to participate and to collaborate between each other and also how they connect
to their governments and also how the governments or institutions can receive citizen
reports, manage that information and act upon that information.
I'm going to show you a little bit what we're doing and how we are doing it. But, first of all
it all started during Mexico's 2009 elections. At the time I founded another company at
the time; it was an SMS gateway. We provided all of the infrastructure for our companies
to send SMS between each other. And we decided to develop a project to track and
monitor Mexico's mid-term elections. It was the first time something like that had
happened in the region. What we did is we put together all the infrastructure of what we
already had with the SMS gateway. And we put together a map where citizens could
report and just send all the information that was going on during the elections. "It can be
somebody asked you how you voted or give you money for your vote," which is very
common in Mexico, that kind of practice still.
That project was called "Cuidemos el Voto" which means "Let's Protect the Vote," and it
was very successful at the time. It was replicated in -- The methodology of that was
replicated in several countries in Latin America. It was the first time that we realized the
real power of the technology that we had and how citizens really want to participate if
they have the correct tools for it.
It was very simple at the time. It was just sending an SMS, validating the information and
putting it in a map. No analysis of the information, no tracking of the information.
However, we received around 15,000 reports that we forwarded to the police. Of those
reports, unfortunately, back in 2009 nobody responded to what happened in those
reports. But we've learned a lot from that process. Then also in 2009 came also the
Mexican government, there was a proposal of taxing the Internet. There was a proposal
that said that there should be a 3% extra tax when using the Internet. It was in
November 2009. It was a very stupid idea. It was exactly the opposite of what other
governments were doing at the time.
So this academic from UNAM, from the biggest university in Mexico, created a post
saying that the Internet is a necessity with very clear data why this tax is regressive.
They interviewed a congressman and they asked him, "What do you think about this
post that says the Internet is a necessity." And he said, "The Internet is only a necessity
to watch porn."
And that kind of the comment generated this conversation on Twitter with the hashtag
"internetnecesario" which means the Internet is a necessity. We started collecting all that
information on Twitter. It was 2009. Twitter wasn't a big deal in Mexico. It was the first
time that people understood that Twitter wasn't just for saying, "I'm meeting at this
place," or, "I'm reading this kind of book;" it really helped for citizens to express
themselves and to organize themselves even to go out on the streets. They created that
march called Noticias en la Hashtag which means "Don't stay on the hashtag; let's go to
the streets." And we received around 120,000 different comments of why the Internet is
a necessity. We processed all those comments. We sent them in an e-mail to every
congressman and woman in Mexico.
We asked a senator what does she think about this Twitter movement and she said, "I
don't have a Twitter account because I do have a job." So this kind of thing really
showed the initial disconnection of this new society that was emerging or these new
connections of citizens and how our government was responding.
This ended up in us receiving an invitation to discuss this law in the senate and
eventually the law wasn't approved. It was the first time that we understood the power of
social networks. It was the first time the politicians understood the power of social
networks. And since then, the use of Twitter and the use of other kinds of [inaudible]
technologies have been used very much in Mexico to connect citizens and to alert about
different topics.
Then in 2010 violence spread out entirely in Mexico. I'm sure you heard about it. It didn't
happen suddenly; it happened very slowly. The truth is that there was a lot of
indifference from society at the beginning and then it was resignation. We didn't know
what was happening. We didn't know that the situation could get so much out of control
as it has. But citizens have eventually started organizing themselves and creating these
kind of networks to alert themselves and to contrast all the situation.
There are a lot of movements right now, mainly in social networks, that they are trying to
tell the stories. They are trying to tell the stories of people: it's not just 50,000 dead
people; it's 50,000 names, 50,000 sons, 50,000 brothers. But the truth is that there are
some cities in the north of Mexico mainly that are one bullet away from losing their
minds. There's a lot of chaos. There's a lot of panic in several cities. A lot of people don't
go out anymore at night. But what has happened is they've started using Twitter, they've
started using local forums to alert themselves. And these kinds of self-organized
communities emerged, mainly in the north of Mexico. Through particular hashtags
people started alerting themselves about whether they could go out or not.
For example in Monterrey, north Mexico, there's a hashtag called "mtyfollow." And at the
very beginning people started saying, "There's a gun fight at this place hashtag
mtyfollow." So whenever -- It was amazing. When you go out in Monterrey and
everybody is at a barrio or a house of someone and you want to go back to your place,
the first thing you do is you go to Twitter, follow the mtyfollow hashtag and figure out if
you can go to your house and which road to take.
These kind of networks, to be honest, are very self-controlled. They work in a very
artisan way to say one thing, but it has worked and it has connected citizens. And in
some way, I think these kind of interactions are reconstructing social fabric in Mexico. It's
totally based on trust, and we are understanding that being a citizen should not be a
passive function anymore. We are going out to the streets. We are reclaiming our streets
back again, and we are filling in the gap where the government has failed to provide
services.
I think new generations, we are not thinking in hierarchies any more. We are thinking in
networks. And we want to see our governments and institutions as [inaudible] within that
network. And our governments and our institutions, this is how they are right now. This is
the Department of Administrative Modernization of the Mexico City government. I could
have taken this picture back in 1992 but I took it in June 2012. There is clearly a deficit in
the agility, in the innovation, and in the capacity of our institutions to respond to how
citizens, how we are connecting ourselves.
This is how they are doing analytics. This is how they are managing all the citizen
reports, and this is how they are doing real-time mapping. So on the one side...
>>: I just have a question. When you say "they," do you mean both federal and regional
governments and you mean across the political spectrum? Is that "they?" Everybody?
>> Jorge Soto: Yeah, I mean across the political spectrum. I mean all the institutions.
Not only in Mexico. I will show more examples in other places in Latin America and
Africa.
And on the one side we have citizens who don't trust the government. We have a
government that doesn't trust the citizens. We have media that is not reporting what is
going on anymore. I don't know if you heard but there was this major newspaper of
Ciudad Juarez in the north of Mexico that two years ago on the front page they said,
"Okay, drug dealers, we give up. What do you want us to say?"
And then the governments are promoting these kinds of laws that censor the Internet in
some way. So citizens are like in the middle of this spiral of fear, and we have no
institutions to connect. We have no media that [inaudible] the situation. Citizens are
empowering themselves and going to the social networks to connect and to create these
trusted networks.
What these kinds of things show, for example, there is a state in Mexico called Veracruz
which is on the east. And there's a law right now in Veracruz that if you report a rumor on
Twitter, you can be charged up to five years in jail. How do you validate that it's a rumor
or not? It's complete arbitrary right now.
So this kind of thing not only hurts the Internet, which it does, but it shows our radical
disconnection between citizens, we are already talking and how our government is
responding. The truth is that we have 21st century citizens that are trying to talk to our
20th century institutions.
However, as I told you, power structures are changing and we have a chance to reframe
and rejuvenate our institutions. Society shapes technology but the use of that technology
is shaped by the conditions in which that society lives. For example, Twitter: I don't know
how you use Twitter here in Seattle, where in Mexico it's a life-saving thing. It's not a
place where I say that I'm partying at a particular place; it's a place where I say, "Don't
go to this particular place because something's going on."
I'm just going ahead of this context that I just gave you. I'm going into what CitiVox is
doing. So we're taking advantage of the situation, and we're creating tech tools for civic
engagements. Our main objective is to improve technology to bridge the gap between
and among citizens and their institutions. We have three types of tools: one is oriented
totally for decision-makers, one is for citizens for participation and the other one is for
accountability.
We are in around ten countries right now, mainly Latin America but we have made some
projects in Eastern Europe and Africa. And we have over 50 organizations, 1.5 million
citizen reports, and let me show you a bit about this.
So the first thing, it's a platform that we developed that's oriented for decision-makers.
And the main idea is for them to turn reports into actionable information. So what we are
doing, we are getting all the detailed information that is already out there or if it's not
already out there we try to encourage the institutions to go find information, for example,
open up an SMS channel, open up an IVR, a Facebook website, an e-mail, a Twitter
account. And then, we provide them with a platform so they can manage that information
in a much more efficient way and they can analyze, also, all that information in real time.
This is the platform. So what we are doing interweaving different reporting channels as
you can see here. You can see that it can be on Facebook, it can be Twitter, it can be
directly from the web or e-mail or whatever. And it's like a G-mail like interface where the
institutions can actually process the reports, validate information, respond to the citizens
in a confidential way and analyze information in real time.
As you can see here, the reports can have different statuses. It can have different
categories; they create their own categories. And it can have media or not depending on
the reporter. At the end the main objective is to close the feedback loop. The feedback
loop it involves several stages. So, the first one is data. We need to measure, capture
and store data. How can we put that data into context to make it emotionally resonant?
Then there must be consequence. How can all this information illuminate paths for
action? And finally, action and feedback into the platform once again.
Each report, as you can see, is geo-tagged. It can have pictures. You can have a
conversation with the citizen. It can have a high priority or not. You can make it public or
private if you want to, and it can be verified or not. I'm going to show you examples of
how other institutions are using it.
>>: Is this the public view or is that the private [inaudible]?
>> Jorge Soto: All these that I'm showing you are what decision-makers are looking at.
Decision-makers can be a government institution. It can be an NGO. It can be a
company. But this is where all the information is coming through and how they are
responding to that information.
We are providing also real time analytics. So it maps, [inaudible], real time analysis of all
the information. And everything is based on comparative statistics, so the main objective
is for you to understand in a single view what is the problem, where is the problem and
when is the problem.
And also the main objective is for them to make better, efficient decisions based on real
data and not based on perceptions only. There was one example where this major of the
north of Mexico that said, "I want citizens to send me all information. I want to test these
tools and I want citizens to tell me how I should name the new school that I'm building."
And around 80 percent of the reports said, "First of all, solve the water problem that we
have." So it's cool, always, to build a school. Nobody will deny that we need more
schools. But there are priorities for citizens. And there are several views that show you
the main objectives to make better decisions, so this is all the ones that had media. And
also, one other things is that the conversation is already out there. So on the one hand
you have all the channels that you're opening up for citizens to report and on the other
side all the conversation that is already out there on Twitter. So how can you grab all
that conversation and also listen to that conversation?
So for example, if you look at here we are tracking several hashtags in Monterrey,
mtyfollow, CIC, CIC Communities, Security, etcetera, etcetera. And the idea is that on
the one side you have all the reports [inaudible], on the other side you have how citizens
are collaborating between each other. And you can also analyze that conversation and
try to understand the communities around that conversation. So what you're looking at
right now is an example of all the conversation that happened during the Venezuelan
election.
And well the platform, we've implemented this -- This is a decision-maker platform. I'm
going to show you some examples now. But this platform is in Spanish, in English, in
French, in Portuguese, in Arabic. It has APIs to receive information and to publish all the
information also so there can be public site or public applications for citizens to also
consume the information. And it centralizes our generation. We've learned a lot in terms
of security. The one that is receiving the reports doesn't know the identity of the reporter
but they can respond and create a conversation with citizens.
And there is a public side of this. So I'm going to show you some examples. So the
backend, the one that I just showed you is exactly the same for all our customers but the
front end is different. So for example, this is Venezuela elections back in October 2012.
We worked with a group of young people, an organization of young people, to track and
monitor Venezuela's elections. There was a call center. Everything mostly was via call
center or via Twitter. And we trained them on how they should validate information, how
they should take care of the information or analyze it themselves. And we worked
together with interaction institutions for that.
Also the Mexican elections: here we work with the same example where we started the
company back in 2009 with Cuidemos el Voto but it was a 2012 project. We've learned a
lot since then. We tried to work with the official institutions, the Mexican institution that
solves election crimes; it's called FEPADE. It's like the Mexican police that solves all
crimes related to elections. The problem was first of all when we tried to work with the
FEPADE and we told them, "We're going to create this platform for citizens to report and
to participate." And their first answer was, "But that means that I'm going to receive a lot
of reports and then, we're going to have a lot of things to do." But that was the idea, to
receive a lot of reports and for them to encourage citizens to monitor their own elections.
Then, when they agreed that this was going to happen with or without them, they
decided to participate. And we said, "Okay, let's connect our platforms. Give us an API
so we can send you all the information in real time. We will be responsible for validating
all the citizen reports; we will do that." So we created a team of around 50 people that
were trained, that were receiving all the citizen reports. Once they were able to validate
the reports, the idea was to forward it to the FEPADE in real time.
They said, "Give us a couple of days until we figure out the API." They came back in a
couple of days and said, "We don't what an API is." And so, "Why don't you just send us
an e-mail every two hours." And the elections in Mexico go from eight a.m. to six p.m.
And we decided that we were going to send them an e-mail with all the validated reports
every two hours. At twelve p.m. we received an e-mail from their service saying, "Our email is full. We will not be able to receive more e-mails."
And it didn't work until next Wednesday. So that's how institutions are in Mexico or in
Latin America in general. At the end we received a lot of reports; we received like more
than 100,000 reports and they were able only to validate 700 of those. So it was the first
election that there was a lot of participation in social media in Mexico. And the
institutions are still 20th century institutions and sometimes with 19th century processes
as you can see.
We worked with this international organization to track Ukraine's elections also. Here it
was a little bit different. We have two different kinds of citizen reports. The first one was
official server reports and the second one was citizen reports. So the officials of service
were validated by default and being published by default. And citizen reports required
someone to validate the information and if they decided to make it published then they
would make it public.
They created this campaign that went viral in Ukraine. I don't understand the ad but it's
something about zombies. It's a very cool visual. It says something like, "If you don't
vote, you're a zombie," something like that. But it's all of the city going out walking as
zombies. It was a viral video on Facebook and Twitter.
This one is very, very interesting. We also tracked Yemen's elections last year. Here it
was very interesting for -- It was not a real election because there was only one
candidate and he was already the president. But it was a very interesting exercise. It
was the first time in 35 years that people were able to vote; although, they were all going
to vote for the same guy but they were able to vote. And it was the first time also that
women were able to vote. And so we received around 9,000 citizen reports via SMS;
100 percent of the reports were via SMS through this [inaudible] here.
And what really got me thinking is that these people, although they've never lived
democracy the way that we have, they already understood that elections are much more
than just going out and filling out a paper. They were reporting. They were empowering
themselves and participating.
And something very similar happened. This is not real election tracking, but this is
something also that happened in Egypt that we were involved with. We integrated with
Facebook. And the Constituent Assembly of Egypt last year, they made public the
constitutional draft and they asked citizens to participate and give their comments and
opinions on five main subjects on the constitution. It was integrated with Facebook. It's a
very big deal -- Facebook -- in Egypt also. The thing that I like about this project is that
the kind of topics they were able to participate in were something like, "What should we
do with the separation of the church and the state? What should we do with the right to
due process? What should we do with the right of women in politics?" and those kind of
things.
But one very interesting thing is that the dynamics of Egypt and Mexico are very similar.
We have around -- Egypt's population is 80 million people, and they have around 30
percent Internet access, very similar to Mexico. And the other example that we had prior
to Egypt around election crowd sourcing was Iceland. And Iceland is like a small city;
there are 200,000 people. Everyone is connected. They have a very high economic
access.
But Egypt? No. Even that being the case 68,000 participated and 981 articles were
edited in the constitution thanks to citizen participation. Since it was integrated on
Facebook we have demographics. We know how many females, how many males
participated and what ages they were.
Another kind of [inaudible] that we have is governance. So all these that I just showed
you are election tracking and monitoring. This is governance. Governance is where we
work with government institutions. So for example, we just launched the open
government platform of La Paz, Bolivia where citizens are reporting. And they call it
closer government not open government which I think is much better because open
government, we are understanding open government as just putting out data and that's
it. That's an open government.
And I think that's a very, very basic thing of what open government means. It means that
it should be useful for citizens. So here is a place where the people of La Paz can be
aware of where the garbage truck will go to pick up your garbage, when you are going to
receive water in your house, so these kinds of things that really concern citizens. It's a
place where the government is working as a platform for them to understand better the
dynamics.
This is also a very interesting one. It's the Mexican FCC where you can report all the
problems in terms of telecommunication problems. One very interesting thing is that we
have analyzed that Telcel fails the most on Wednesdays at six p.m. We don't know why
but that's when most reports happen. And there's a spike always Wednesdays at six
p.m. So there's a probability that you will not be able to make a five-minute call at that
time.
There was this case Telcel failed in Mexico City a few months ago. And Mony de Swaan
is the chairman of this institution. He is very active on Twitter. And every time there is a
problem in telecommunications everybody goes to Twitter and criticizes him. And this
time when this happened he said, "Okay, if you keep on sending me, on Twitter, your
complaints, I will not be able to do nothing. Go to the web site and actually report so I
can have the tools to [inaudible] or do something about it." So this was on a Wednesday
and on the next Monday the political pressure was so powerful -- because on this official
platform it was evident that there was a major failure -- that Telcel decided to reimburse
around two dollars to every Telcel user in Mexico City which is a lot. So peer pressure or
pubic shame is very useful sometimes.
And there's another project that I wanted to talk about very quickly; it's in Bogota,
Colombia. This one is called Hacemos Latira Bogota, "Let's make Bogota beat." The
idea here is to report minor crimes, but the most interesting thing is that they don't care
about the minor crimes. They care about the context of the city when that happens. So
when you report that somebody stole your cell phone, they will say, "Okay, how was the
city when that happened? Was there light or not? Was there garbage or not? Was there
graffiti or not?" So we're trying to analyze the context of the city with what happened and
with the very philosophical theory that if you solve the context, you solve the problem.
We still don't have data yet but we're working on it. And the third kind of project is what
we call civic innovation; it's where we work with NGOs or with a group of people to make
the message much more evident and also to make more citizens participate. So, for
example, last year in the U.S. there was a documentary film called "Waiting for
Superman" talking about the education problems. Well in Mexico our "Waiting for
Superman" is called "De Panzazo." It's exactly the same. It's talking about all the
problems that we have in Mexico which are very different to what you have here. But, we
have the largest union in Latin America which is a teachers' union, and they are very,
very powerful. So they created this documentary to exhibit all the problems around the
corruption in that union. And they launched this website where also they encourage
students, through their smart phones, to film whatever is going on inside their schools
and to make it public. And this movement has grown very much even though the new
president of Mexico in his inaugural speech said that he will make an education in his
first year. Let's see what happens. But this kind of technology is also combining a
traditional tool, like a documentary film, and also for opening up spaces for citizens to
participate.
We have also this project. As you know in Mexico it's the second most dangerous county
to be a journalist in the world right now. After Iraq, it's Mexico. So we have a couple of
projects that are working with Article 19 which is an organization that protects journalists.
And on the one side we are making public where most problems happen against
journalists in Mexico and Central America. And also they are about to launch like a
"What's Up?" app, that is entirely focused for journalists. So the idea is that you will open
the app on your smart phone, and it will ask you what kind of journalism you are doing at
that particular place. And based on the kind of journalism you're doing and where you
are standing, it will tell, "Okay, you have a risk of something. Take care." And there is
also an internal network of connecting journalists where you can keep on monitoring and
tracking each other and alerting each other.
So they are also using these kinds of tools to protect themselves. And then, the
Monterrey project: Monterrey is the second largest city in Mexico. It's in the north of
Mexico. And in the last three or four years violence has spread terribly in Monterrey.
Citizens have come out and they created this institution called Centro De Integracion
Ciudadana which means Center for Citizen Integration. It's an institution financed by the
business men in Monterrey, and they are connecting all the Twitter conversations, the
mtyfollow hashtag and other channels, to the official institutions, to the [inaudible] policia
of Monterrey, to the military and to the state. And they are also providing free legal and
psychological assistance to everyone that reports to the platform and wants it.
They are combining traditional channels to advertise a platform like soccer matches or a
physical space in the malls. There have been excellent examples of how citizens are
engaging the government and the other way around. For example, they are making
public once a month in the major newspaper of the city how many reports they have
received in each municipality of Monterrey, how they are responding and if they aren't
responding. So they are putting a lot of pressure on the municipalities to engage.
One example that I love is somebody reported that they have stolen their car. And the
community started re-tweeting that information and telling them, "I've seen your car here.
I've seen your car here." And it took eleven minutes until someone said, "Your car is
parked here."
So that really talks about the sense of community and the sense of social fabric being
reconstructed and regenerated. All that I've shown you so far is some examples of what
we've been doing in the last two years. Now we've learned a lot. We are constantly open
to failure, that's why we are innovating. And we are experimenting a lot and seeing all
the results that we're having. But as you've seen, all those dynamics that I've showed
you are all in Latin America or Middle East or Africa. We don't have one project yet with
the dynamics of a developed country like the U.S. The thing is in the U.S. 87 percent of
Americans participate in a sport group, in an academic group, in a religious group or in a
neighborhood group or whatever, 87 percent of the U.S., of Americans. In Mexico it's
only around 6 percent. So we don't have a culture of participating. Not only in Mexico,
not in the entire Latin America. So there is [inaudible], if we don't participate, we don't
know each other, we don't trust each other and so on and so on.
So I think the best tool still that has been used for neighbors, mainly for neighbors, to
communicate between each other and to make better decisions has been since the 90's
Yahoo Groups and Google Groups. And these tools haven't evolved since then. That's
where neighbors are organizing themselves, how should they decorate their street on
Halloween or who is the next to take the children to school or whatever. So right now
what we are doing, we just -- we haven't launched it yet but we just got approved for an
app in the Apple Store yet. We haven't migrated to other platforms. But we want to foster
self-organized civic interactions. We want to create the tools for citizens to create the
same dynamics that are going on in Yahoo Groups or Google Groups and to create
communities. So what we are doing is our first consumer web application. If you have an
iPhone and go to the Apple Store, you can download the CitiVox app.
The idea is this is a citizen-centric approach but we are trying also to control the source
of information and to create a platform where citizens can create their own interaction,
whatever they want. The idea for here is for every citizen to create a community, to invite
people to join their community, to geo-tag the community so the community can only be
discovered in a particular place. So for example, we can have a community of Redmond.
And if I go to Seattle, I will not be able to see that community. Only when I am in
Redmond I will be able to that community.
So the main idea for this is -- The idea behind this is institutions, being private or public,
we cannot make better decisions of how to improve people's lives if we limit public
participation to voting every once in a while. There need to be tools for citizens also to
collaborate and to engage. Twitter has been the best tool right now. I think there are
much more civic interactions on Twitter than in any other civic platform combined.
However, Twitter is a very noisy monologue and I think there can be better solutions
replicating all the dynamics that are already happening on Yahoo Groups or Google
groups.
So this is the newest thing that we're doing. It's a consumer web app. If you go to your
iPhone if you have one, it will be great to receive feedback from you. We haven't
launched it yet. I think it will take a couple of months until we launch it.
And finally just to wrap up this, I want to talk a little bit about open government and open
data and all that. We are very much involved in that. We organize a lot of Hack-a-Thon's
in Mexico and Latin America, open data Hack-a-Thon's, where we put together
developers, designers, journalists and government officials for 36 hours in the same
room and see what happens, them being together. We are actually collaborating with
Microsoft in the next Hack-a-Thon which is tomorrow, Microsoft Mexico.
But one thing is that the idea that transparency will restore public trust in democracy
rests on a very fragile assumption which is: if only people knew, everything would be
different. And what we have found out is that people, sometimes we don't want to know
and sometimes we don't care if we know. So the idea that if I know how much money
was spent on the streets outside my house and the street has a lot of pot holes, the idea
is that it will make me angry and it will make me want to participate and say, "Hey, you
should do that." But that's not always the case. Sometimes the end of government
secrecy with these open government and open data movements does not mean
necessarily the birth of the informed citizen. And we need to find ways of how to really
engage the citizen and how the citizen engages with the government and participates
with the government.
I'm not saying that these kinds of efforts are wrong. We have done these for the last
three years. But we will continue doing it because we are trying to community of civic
hackers that are participating with their governments. In the 20th century, the hackers of
the system were the lawyers because they knew how the system worked and they knew
the problems with the system. The hackers of the system of the 21st century are
engineers because that's how the government is moving. So we need to create this
community of developers and hackers that want to participate to create tools for
governments opening up and participating and also for citizens to participate.
Transparency is not only governments opening up; it's also citizens asking questions. So
we need to create those platforms.
As I told you we've done two kinds of Hack-a-Thons, one is in Mexico, entirely in Mexico.
And the second one, we're part of this movement called Desarrollando America Latina
which means Developing Latin America. We put eight different countries in Latin
America, we hack together during the first weekend of December and we compete
between each other and find the best solutions between each other. Tomorrow as I've
told you, it's the first Hack-a-Thon that we're doing outside of Mexico City; it will be in
Monterrey. That's why I have to go back so early.
But mainly in Latin America, in Mexico and in the U.S., I think this open government stuff
it's great. It's a great movement that we need to pursue, but we haven't seen results yet.
And sometimes it's very frustrating when we don't see results and it's been around for
two or three years and there hasn't been like really life-changing results in the kind of
democracy we're living.
But perhaps it's the same thing that I was discussing yesterday with a friend that
speaking the truth -- Everybody knows in Mexico who the drug dealers are. Everybody
knows in Mexico who are the corrupted politicians and what kind of side businesses
corrupted politicians have. Everybody knows. If you want to know where [inaudible] is
living, ask the neighbors. They already know. There's a difference between knowing the
truth and speaking the truth. I don't think the WikiLeaks cable actually said something
that you don't know already. We already knew everything the WikiLeaks cable said.
That's the main difference.
And we need to create tools to protect citizens and to encourage citizens to take
personal risk and confront the powerful and speak out the truth. Hopefully, eventually
this leads to real change in our cities and in our democracies. Thank you.
[applause]
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: So we'll open it up for questions that you might have.
>>: So to extent do you feel -- Especially in the context of elections because that's an important
part of this -- that the governments that you work with are willing to be partners in building a more
transparent system?
>> Jorge Soto: Well, what we have found out also is that during the election -- One very
interesting thing is that during the election day, it's very complicated now for governments to
actually create a major election fraud. It happens before if it happens. So we also need to create
tools that can monitor the elections before, not only during the elections. Because, during the
elections there're a lot of eyes looking at the election, there are a lot of institutions looking at the
elections. Governments where we have worked, sometimes it can be complicated like the
Venezuela case. But mainly candidates are the ones that don't want to use these kinds of tools.
The candidates in Latin America, in the Latin American context, they are using these kinds of tool
for prediction purposes exclusively. For example, I was explaining yesterday that we had this
project in the west of Mexico where we've been running this probably for a couple of years about
citizen reports and all that. And when there were elections, the candidate -- the one that was the
governor -- instead used that database to say, "Hey, vote for me." And that really hurt the project,
the platform and we lost trust with the citizens.
So they are understanding that there is a risk with these kinds of tools. In Mexico there was a war
on the hashtags on Twitter but I don't think it really changed the mind of people. There's a
conversation that's going on, on Twitter that does not reflect the conversation of the real polling
stations.
>>: I'm guess I'm asking about a slightly different kind of tool and that is if a government is willing
to participate in doing so, it's possible to build an election system such that citizens individually
can check on their own and see if there's fraud and see if the election is run properly and see
where the fraud is if there is fraud. But the government would have to be a partner in building the
system. And do you think from your experience that the government would be wiling to build the
system that allowed citizens to see when there's fraud?
>> Jorge Soto: Most of the time this kind of [inaudible] when we are talking with governments,
first of all what we need is political will because the tools are already out there. So it needs a lot of
political will. But they also need to understand that if -- In Mexico I don't remember one single
election that hasn't been questioned. Never. And it can be a great tool for the government to say,
"Hey, you want to question the next election, let's do it open. Let's do it as open as possible and
you will see that there's no problem with elections." So it can also be a tool for them also to open
up and to talk to citizens. But they need the political will. And I don't think that anyone in Latin
America will be the first country to do that.
>>: I'm thinking of something more something, but we should talk about this offline.
>>: So what's the model that CitiVox uses? Do you approach, you know, governments or these
public institutions? Are you like a consultant, they hire you and you do this design work? It's a
business also. Does have it a business model? Is a not-for-profit kind of organization? And who
funds the organization? Is it the clients, foundations? How does that work?
>> Jorge Soto: We are a for-profit business. And, yeah, they pay for the platform. That's how we
made this model. So the governments or the institutions or the decision-makers in general want
to use the platform. They pay for the platform. The pricing depends of the level of involvement.
We can be very much involved in the strategy and implementation of this or we can only provide
the technology for them to create and they create their strategy. So that depends.
The new product that we're launching that is for consumers, it's complete for free. We want first of
all to understand the dynamics if we are really adding value or not and then, we will figure out
how can we make money from that.
But, yeah, most of the time they contact us or we sell them the services.
>>: Very good. [inaudible].
>>: So you said your project is in Africa, [inaudible]?
>> Jorge Soto: Yeah, we did Benin's elections.
>>: I’m sorry?
>> Jorge Soto: Benin's.
>>: Oh.
>> Jorge Soto: We covered Benin's elections in 2010 or 11, I think. And we work with an
organization called [inaudible]. And we trained the people from Benin in Washington D.C. And
then, they went on the field and we connected to front line SMS for us to receive all incoming
SMS's. There was a power outbreak the first -- There were two elections. The one was the
president and the other one was the parliament. And in the president elections there was a power
outbreak and we lost around 17,000 reports. But we learned from that and three weeks later
when it was the legislative elections, we created all the replication of systems and security that
we needed and we received around 30,000 reports. But it was completely SMS-based. It was a
very -- We have all the case study if you want it. I can send it to you.
>>: How do you manage, how do you deal with people that try to manipulate the system? From
trolls to -- For example, in the case of [inaudible] I'm assuming that perhaps the union would have
wanted to try to [inaudible] going on in discussion. How do you deal with that?
>> Jorge Soto: Well, first of all the reports that are coming through Twitter, we have a couple of
algorithms that doesn't let bots, Twitter bots to participate and also doesn't let replication of
tweets. So if you already said something, the next one will not come. So that's keeping a little bit
clean.
But the institution that is receiving the reports needs to verify the information. So all the reports
are not being made public. They can decide if all of they are going to be made public at the
beginning or private. But if they receive the reports, they validate the information and they decide
if they make public each report. However, that does not affect the internal analytics. We have an
option for each report to be marked as spam. If you mark it as spam then the system starts
learning that particular person or that combination of words if it happens again it will be marked
as spam. So the system is learning but it needs human interface right now for to have it learn.
>>: You had talked about the problems and the frustrations of having open government solutions
in place for a while and not seeing results. And yesterday we were talking about one of the things
that you think is a precondition for success is to create greater trust in the community and that will
make these institutions more legitimate and more effective. Is there some data metric that you are
looking at that is a proxy for increasing trust so that you'll know if you're being successful or are
you just monitoring participation? Is there some measurement of an outcome of increasing social
capital that comes out of this system?
>> Jorge Soto: Well, right now we're measuring participation and how it has changed, increasing
or decreasing. We're also measuring the response of the institutions, how they are responding
and if it has changed their processes or the way they are thinking. It's very complicated to have a
quantitative metric of these kinds of things. At the end it's all intangible capital. It's how are we
trusting each other? Are innovating processes? Are we opening up spaces?
I think open government and the use of all tech tools for civic interaction, we are in a very, very
early stage. We are all learning. There is no silver bullet. And if we are going into this space I
think the problem is that 9,000 reports in Yemen, is that a lot or is that very little? I don't know. It's
a much bigger population -- Or 64,000 reports in Egypt in an 80 million population. Is that a lot or
not?
So it depends. The other way of the coin to see it is there're 64,000 people that wouldn't be able
to participate if they didn't have this tool. So I think we're still learning and eventually I hope we
will be able to have qualitative and quantitative metrics that can tell us if this is working or not
working.
>>: [inaudible]
>>: Yeah, I was running through the mobile app that you're working on. How are you letting -Are people forming the groups?
>> Jorge Soto: Yeah.
>>: Just like whatever group that they want that's in the area?
>> Jorge Soto: Whatever the group they want. We are not controlling the platform right now; we
want it to be very open and to see how they are participating.
>>: And it's like a reply-all model as opposed to like the Twitter and Blogcast?
>> Jorge Soto: It's the ones that are inside one community. You can discover communities and
you can join a community. And if you are in that particular community you will receive the
information.
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Well thanks a lot -- Oh, one more.
>>: So one of the problems we seem to face in our area is that there's so much data online and
so few people who have the skills to analyze and decide what's meaningful. And, you know, the
professional news media is just in decline because their revenue model almost is going out of
existence. And so one of the groups I'm involved in is thinking about doing is actually doing
workshops and training to teach ordinary citizens more about what to look for and how to dig
through the data the government provides.
And I'm just curious if you've looked at doing anything like that to create more citizen activists
who are willing to volunteer to do the analysis that the professional news media is not capable of
doing anymore?
>> Jorge Soto: Yeah, we're seeing -- Through these kinds of tools we're seeing a lot of people
that are really analyzing the information and doing the work that journalists are not doing. In
Mexico the thing that we have is [inaudible] -- We don't have investigative journalism. We have
press releases. So the media is working as press releases.
But one very interesting thing is that they take a lot of the information from Twitter. Although, it's a
very close community in Mexico; there are only around two million accounts, something like that.
All the information that happens on Twitter, the media replicates it and then goes to the TV or
goes to the newspapers and that's how people are analyzing or receiving their news.
But there are people out there that are analyzing all the public data of the crime-related numbers
that are out there, and they are comparing how the governments are buying stuff and to whom.
So they are doing it just for fun. I don't think there is an institution that is really doing this kind of
work on a regular basis in Mexico. But at the end these kinds of tools, what they are doing is they
are opening up spaces for more amateurs, more people that go out and play with the data and
then perhaps discover something and through Twitter make it available to everyone.
>>: Thanks.
>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Well, thanks a lot everyone for coming. And we're going to be
hanging out for a few minutes if you have more questions.
[applause]