DemTech: Our Blog
Moments of Opportunity: Tech in Closed Societies
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In recent years, partly in response to the US State Department’s focus on internet freedom, we have seen increased interest in applying technology to closed societies to create more political space and…
Read MoreCrisis Mapping for the Masses
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Crowdsourcing is a really useful methodology for lowering the barrier to participation in reporting on events in real time, even though it isn’t a silver bullet, as I’ve commented.
Unfortunately…
Read MoreThe Wisdom of Crowds, or Why Justin Bieber is Off to North Korea
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Crowdsourcing is hot. Empowering everyday citizens to take small steps and have powerful impact through collective action is one of the most fascinating revolutions permitted by the Internet. The barrier to participation has dropped. Now anyone…
Read MoreCircumvention Tools: Not a Democratic Transition Strategy
There tends to be a lot of focus on the role of circumvention, mobile and social media tools in democratic struggles taking place in closed societies that tend to overstate their potential and impact in many cases. While these tools and…
Read MoreCitizen Election Monitoring: Demonstrated Accountability
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NDI’s work with citizen election monitoring groups provides an illustrative example of combining new technologies, effective methodologies and strong organizations to create positive political outcomes. A common approach to citizen election…
Read MoreCreating an Environment for Political Reform
An important component of success for activists struggling for democratic reform in closed societies involves the political environment in which they live and conduct their work. The challenges faced by activists in autocratic nations are immense…
Read MoreTechnology and the Struggle for Democracy in Closed Societies
So who has the upper hand when it comes to using technology to further their goals in authoritarian countries, the good guys or the bad guys? It is often said that in the early days of the Internet that many believed the technology alone will…
Read MoreICT at Work: Afghanistan Election Mapping and Uganda Citizen Hotline
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Recent NDI programs demonstrate the important role technology can play in supporting fragile democracies.
Afghanistan Elections
In the aftermath of last summer’s flawed Afghanistan presidential election we created…
Read MoreThe Integration of Technology into Democratic Development - a Shift is Underway
We’re in the midst of a pivotal moment in technology and politics in the international development field, which started in early 2009 and still seems to be gaining steam, where the linkages between politics, technology, democracy and foreign policy… Read More
A New Approach: ICT Blogging at NDI
(Promoted to top from August 17)
For my first post on the new NDI blog I thought I’d share thoughts on how we came to the decision to start blogging and what we hope to accomplish.
This NDI blog represents a new way of…
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