Collaborative

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Reporting violence by text

Citizens of Madagascar sent SMS messages to Foko about reports of violence by the military and police during demonstrations against a takeover of the government. These reports were published on an online map, and a team of local bloggers checked the messages for accuracy. As traditional media was compromised at the time, Foko’s website alerted citizens to trouble spots and gave a richer picture of the crisis than traditional reporting while ensuring an independent information source existed to report on events.

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Disclosing government expenses

TheyWorkForYou is a website that connects citizens with Members of Parliament in the UK. Following a scandal in 2009 when the government sought to have MPs’ expenses claims kept secret, MySociety mobilised voters to send a few thousand individualised emails to MPs demanding transparency in the use of public funds. Soon after this campaign, the UK government agreed to disclose data on MP expenses.

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Following the money in Slovakia

Using Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, Fair Play gathers invoices and other documents that show how the Slovakian government spends its money, adds this material to a database connected to its website, and invites people to use this information to influence political change.  By making the information easy to access, a debate was created around public spending and pressure for change became so great that one Slovak construction minister had to resign.

 

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Collaboration tips

Working with freelancers

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Chat securely with Jitsi

Jitsi is a communications program that allows you to chat securely using well-supported protocols like SIP, XMPP / Jabber, AIM / ICQ, Windows Live, Facebook and Yahoo. You can also make audio and video calls and share or stream your desktop to someone else. Conference calls and call recording are also possible. Most importantly, all of these features can be used together with a strong encryption.

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Internet Relay Chat (IRC)

The details of users using live chat provided by Yahoo, Windows, Skype and Gmail are readily made available to law enforcement agencies by the companies involved.

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Collect data on a mobile

Magpi (formerly Episurveyor), is a web-based application that enables anyone to create a data entry form online, and then use this form to collect data on a mobile device. Once collected, data can be uploaded to the Magpi website for analysis or export. The Magpi mobile app is available for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and Symbian phones. Simple information can also be collected from ANY phone using SMS. The form designer is a web application which you can access via your browser; no installation is needed.

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Mapping with Ushahidi

Ushahidi is a highly flexible platform for information collection, visualisation and interactive mapping. It was originally developed to map incidents of violence during the Kenyan elections in 2008. Now Ushahidi (meaning 'testimony' in Swahili), is widely used in many different scenarios, including emergency response management and citizen media. See a full list of deployments.

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FrontlineSMS for mobiles

FrontlineSMS allows you to send and receive text messages over a mobile network.

Browser-based and built to run on Windows, Mac and Linux, FrontlineSMS can send text messages via phone, modem or online SMS aggregator.

Using Frontline SMS, you can deliver announcements, conduct polls and automate replies to incoming SMS. You can also visualise incoming data, helping you to quickly understand the results.

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Etherpad for online editing

Etherpad is an online word processor with formatting options. It offers a lot of the same features as Google Docs, but is not suited for sensitive information as it has limited password protection and access control features. It does have lots of other great features, however. Edits by different authors are colour coded, and there is a chat window which allows you to talk in real time to other people working on the same document. You can undo and redo changes easily, and import/export as text, HTML, PDF and other common formats.

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