Monitoring and documenting

From monitoring elections to recording police brutality, we as citizens are now equipped with all kinds of digital tools which enable us to collect and share information exposing wrongdoing and demanding transparency.

Why use it?

Collecting information in a concise and targeted way provides you with materials to base your work on. This can give your organisation credibility, and provide you with a running archive of your work.

Implicit in the act of documenting is the act of monitoring – of recording for posterity and accountability. Producing your own content puts the power of media creation and information control back in the hands of you and your community.

You can collect or document information by:

• doing surveys within your constituency or target audience
• using a digital recording device – eg. camera, video camera, audio recorder
• searching for existing data or content online
• making a request for data from the relevant public or government office
• creating an interactive platform inviting people to submit their own information (see our chapter on engaging communities in participatory projects and crowdsourcing)

How can I use it for my campaign?

To craft a good story, you must have good content. To design a great infographic, you must have good data. The quality of your raw materials is crucial.

Collecting data online

• Services like Surveymonkey or Ushahidi allow you to publish or present information in complex ways.
• Crowdsourcing, or outsourcing some information collection to your constituents, can also be an effective way of collecting data.
• Magpi is a tool that allows you to create and collect information through mobile phone surveys.

Curating content

• Curating content, or manually pulling together content from blogs, twitter feeds, or videos, is another good way to collect data.
• See this list of content curation tools from Emergency Journalism.

Your right to access public information

Public bodies operate with public money. Their role is to serve members of the public and the information they create and hold belongs to the public. National and international law recognises that members of the public have a fundamental right of access to information from public bodies.

Even if your country doesn’t have an ‘access to information’ law (called ‘Freedom of Information Act’ or ‘Right to Information Act’ in some countries), there are likely to be some provisions which require public officials to answer requests from the public. Go here for a full list of countries with access to information laws.

The right of access to information operates in two ways:

• Proactive: public bodies are required to provide, publish and disseminate information about their main activities, budgets and policies.
• Reactive: all people have the right to ask public officials and bodies for information about what they are doing and what documents they hold.

Read more: 3 steps to making an information request

Visit Tactical Tech's own Visualising Advocacy site for an in-depth look at some of the tools and techniques of data collection for advocacy work.

Recording media

Documenting through multimedia is the first step towards creating a pool of content on which to base your campaign or project. The more focused your approach, the clearer your vision of the end result will be – and that means less work, and less wasted time later.

Documenting can be a political act in itself, but your content will have greater impact if you share or develop it. Think about what the content could be used for:

• for an archive or a searchable database
• for posterity / monitoring purposes (see our chapter on documenting on the go)
• as source material for a digital story (see our chapter on digital storytelling)

How you document, and what format you use, will vary depending on what you want to achieve. In almost all cases, however, it is crucial to accurately log the time and date.

When recording video for a story, consider the kind of story you want to tell, plus the tone and length, and plan accordingly. For fictionalised stories, you can storyboard your shots - ie, outline them in sketches on paper beforehand.

For documentaries, the tendency is to document as much as you can - long-form interviews, contextual shots, action footage - and cut the footage down in the editing room to let a story emerge. There is no one right way or wrong way to go about documenting your reality; but there are a few few guidelines you can follow to make things easier.

Some tips to remember when recording media

• Practical Tips for Video - Recording, converting, editing and distributing your video
• Practical Tips for taking photos
• Practical Tips for Audio - Recording audio; recording audio for video or with a mobile phone; converting and editing your audio

Case Studies

Additional resources: 

• Go to Tactical Tech's message-in-a-box filming and editing section for more tips on shooting, audio, lighting, editing and more.
• Witness, a US-based NGO promoting the use of video for human rights advocacy, has a great set of resources around Documenting and Reporting with video. Have a look at their PDF on Filming for Human Rights Documentation, Evidence and Media.
• The Center for Social Impact Communication has produced a guide called Communicating via imagery, which provides a framework for non-profit organisations who want to use photography as a central element of their communications strategy.
• The Creative Activism website has a good module on Documentary and Video for Change, with a lot of examples.
• Digital Democracy has published a digital media training manual on basic concepts of framing and composition for photo and video.