Blogpost: Technology for Transparency: Five Lessons Learned (Global Voices, 27 Aug 2010)

As we move into the second phase of the Technology for Transparency Network, Renata Avila and I have been working on a better mechanism for categorizing and sorting the dozens of organizations profiled on our site. One of our goals is to make it easier for users to find projects based not only on the country in which they're located but also on the particular sector or issue on which they focus and — we are the Technology for Transparency Network, after all — the different tools they use.

Download the presentation: Technology for Transparency Network: Five Lessons Learned

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Lesson #1: Technology helps projects collect data

In places where governments and corporations can't or aren’t willing to share information (or don’t maintain it in easily accessible formats), citizens are sometimes the best source of data about government and private sector activities. A number of tools exist to facilitate the collection of this data, either from open crowdsourcing, from a specific group of people such as trained volunteers or workers (this is often called “bounded crowdsourcing”), or from a combination of both. The information gathered from people online or via mobile phones can be used in addition to existing data (for example by supplementing more traditional election monitoring efforts) or to shed new light on processes or power structures (for example by monitoring the results of development projects).