A Technological Spring in the South Caucasus
By Onnik Krikorian | Wednesday, April 17 2013, TechPresident
Riven by ethnic conflict and destabilized by geopolitics, the year ahead
might prove to be a tumultuous one in the three South Caucasus countries of
Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. Armenia held its presidential election in
February but is still experiencing ongoing protests. Now eyes are already
starting to focus on its two neighbors, which will hold their elections
this autumn – and new tools will be available to monitor potential
outbreaks of violence.
Long gone are the days when blogs were the main medium for online activism
in the region. The last time they played a crucial role was in 2008, when
clashes during Armenia’s 20-day post-election State of Emergency left 10
people dead. Now activists and watchdog groups are using new web
applications to track border activity and monitor potentially volatile
situations. Meanwhile, municipal governments deploy similar tools, hoping
to collect public input in a new way.
Border areas
Along Georgia’s northern border, near the disputed territory of South
Ossetia, activist NGOs are using a platform called Elva to monitor
conditions and look out for early warning signs of violence. Village
representatives use SMS to fill in information, which is tracked in a
database and presented in an online map.
Elva’s project manager, Jonne Catshoek, has helped others re-use the
software in other contexts. It was also used to monitor the state of
Georgia before parliamentary elections in 2012 and will likely be deployed
for the October 2013 presidential election there. Observers used it to
gather information about how supporters of the government, opposition
supporters, and undecided voters reacted to certain issues and incidents.
But the platform might see more use in the South Caucasus region for its
earlier purpose. The de facto border separating Armenia and Azerbaijan is
extremely volatile, with more than 3,000 people, including civilians,
killed since a 1994 cease-fire officially suspended fighting between the
two countries.
So alarming is the situation that in 2011 the International Crisis Group
warned of an “accidental war” breaking out, and tensions remain high. In
March, for example, two Armenians were captured by Azerbaijani soldiers
when they inadvertently crossed the border.
Catshoek said this is a familiar situation for NGOs using Elva. The
platform has played a role in facilitating the release of Georgian citizens
who were detained after accidentally crossing into South Ossetia, he added.
“Giorgi,” a Georgian who lives in the village of Dvani on the border,
described one such incident to techPresident in August for a previous
story. Speaking to techPresident through a translator, he said, “A man from
Gori came to the village to visit a relative. In the morning he went to buy
tobacco and did not come back. We suspected that he had been detained by
Russian borderguards. I sent a notification through the network and that’s
how we found out where he was.” The man was released after three days.
Giorgi adds that since he started acting as his community’s representative,
“Now people in my community call me when someone is detained.”
“The reason I participate in the network is that my community benefits from
it,” he continued. “We live in the area [where] detentions are quite
frequent because the border [that separates Georgia and the breakaway South
Ossetia] is not well defined. Often people cross it without realizing they
have done so. In cases like this, I notify the network and then through the
network we receive information about the development – where the person is
and if the relevant actors are involved.”
Saferworld, a British NGO that works with local communities to improve
security for civilians in conflict zones, is excited about Elva. Tabib
Huseynov, the group’s South Caucasus Regional Coordinator, said, “We have
established community networks in various conflict-affected areas
[throughout the South Caucusus]. We support these community-based networks
to engage with the security providers, regional governments and authorities
to articulate their concerns and jointly work out solutions. So, by working
more closely with these conflict-affected communities, we are trying to
increase understanding of their safety concerns and to demonstrate how
local needs can be responded to more effectively, even in advance of
political resolution of the conflicts.”
Catshoek sees an opportunity for Elva in the Armenian context as well –
possibly after the release of a new version next month.
Election monitoring
Elva’s second line of business, elections, is another area where web tools
have attracted attention around the world.
In Armenia, activists concerned about the integrity of the May 2012
parliamentary elections launched a mapping tool called iDitord as a means
to collect reports of violations via SMS, telephone, Twitter and the web.
The site administrators collected about 1,000 reports between iDitord’s
launch in early April and the end of polling on election day. The
effectiveness of platforms like these can be difficult to gauge, but
iDitord must have been considered a threat by some: the day before voters
went to the polls, attackers attempted to take iDitord down by flooding it
with web traffic in a denial-of-service attack. The site was down for only
20 minutes that day and a few hours during another attack on election day
itself.
Undaunted, project managers beefed up security and again deployed iDitord
in this year’s presidential election on Feb. 18. There were three attempts
to bring the site down, but each failed, said Samvel Martirosyan, director
and project coordinator of iDitord.
Martirosyan says the results were worth the effort: of “252 applications”
of election violations made to the prosecutor’s office, he told
techPresident, 46 “came from iDitord.” Out of 13 criminal cases opened
after the election, he said, two came from iDitord reports. Those cases are
ongoing, he said.
In Yerevan, election monitors used iDitord to track May 5 municipal
elections that some political analysts and civil society activists consider
to be a continuation of the post-presidential standoff between the
government and opposition in that country.
Across Europe and the world, these platforms are still in their infancy. In
Russia, civil society NGO Golos received 5,339 reports when it launched a
platform to monitor the 2012 presidential election there. That’s a little
more than five times the reports than were received through iDitord
although Russia, with 142 million people, is 45 times more populous than
Armenia. Nevertheless, analysts believe they could become increasingly
important.
International observers might not be invited to monitor Azerbaijan’s
presidential election in October, but the potential might be there for
local civil society groups to do so instead, aided by interconnecting
platforms across voice, SMS, social media and the web.
“I think that there is a place and a need for such systems, and that need
could increase depending on how things change in the coming months with
regard to election observation,” said an international worker previously
based in Azerbaijan. This person spoke to techPresident on condition of
anonymity given the sensitivity of election monitoring in the country,
which Freedom House and Human Rights Watch have given low marks for
openness.
“And even if observation of this fall’s presidential elections is conducted
as it has been in the past,” this person continued, “the knowledge gleaned
from such systems would be an interesting complement and comparison to
in-person election observation.”
Monitoring abuse
Activists hope these techniques can be applied to other instances where the
state has a contentious relationship with the truth.
Last October, Transparency International hosted a hackathon in Moscow,
including participants from Azerbaijan, to explore how citizens might use
technology to report on corruption and abuse of power.
One of the outcomes was a pilot project focused on abuse of women. Stop
Harassment will be implemented in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, and then
introduced in other regions. According to its developers, the purpose of
the project is to “pressurize the government into responding properly” to
the problem of gender-based corruption, domestic violence, and sexual
harassment.
Transparency International in Azerbaijan told techPresident, via its
Georgia office, that a final version of the project will be launched later
this year.
`Through such an online platform women in Baku will be able to anonymously
report incidents of harassment via SMS, email, as well as [=85] through
Facebook and Twitter to a site that would map and categorize the facts of
harassment and would also let women share their stories,’ wrote Milena
Marin, Transparency’s Data and Technology Coordinator, on the
organization’s web site.
Working with government
But web tools can also provide opportunities to work with, rather than
pressure, government. Earlier this year in Yerevan, the city in Georgia
where monitors used Elva to monitor the mood before elections, the mayor
announced that city officials would participate in iYerevan, a site that
allows citizens to suggest improvements to the city like public art or new
uses of open space. In Tbilisi, Transparency International Georgia launched
the Georgian equivalent of Fix My Street, a platform that cites problems
like potholes or graffiti and tracks the city’s response, at an event
featuring the mayor and city officials. The platform, Chemikucha.ge,
received more than 35,000 page views and 162 problem reports in its first
72 hours of operation.
Activists and NGOs have been experimenting with online tools and
Internet-powered applications in the Caucasus region for years, but not all
of them have attracted the same amount of attention. In April 2010 a social
innovation camp held in Tbilisi attracted participants from all three
countries – Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the host country, Georgia. The main
outcome of that workshop was a prototype project to monitor deforestation
in Armenia. It failed to arouse widespread interest but was one of the
earliest examples of an organization using new mapping tools in a crisis.
Two months later, the Georgian Young Lawyers Association, along with
Transparency International Georgia, the International Society for Fair
Elections, the Caucasus Research Resource Centers, and the National
Democratic Institute, launched Vote Georgia, an election-monitoring
platform.
The activist and watchdog community in Georgia continues to experiment with
similar tools. Another platform was used in last year’s crucial
parliamentary election in Georgia, which saw the first democratic change of
government at the ballot box in the entire region.
These tools allow people in the South Caucusus to communicate quickly with
people outside the region, but they might not be immediately useful to
locals.
According to household surveys conducted by the Caucasus Research Resource
Centers for its 2012 Caucasus Barometer, 46 percent of respondents in
Armenia, 59 percent in Azerbaijan, and 49 percent in Georgia said they
never accessed the Internet.
Catshoek, 28, a Netherlands native, says that with the rapid proliferation
of Internet-enabled smart phones the situation is likely to change
significantly in the coming years. Meanwhile, Elva and Ushahidi, a mapping
platform that serves as the basis for several tools, also support SMS.
Catshoek is optimistic. He moved to Tbilisi in August 2009, he said, in
order to apply a background in democracy support and conflict analysis to a
region that has come to fascinate him. He sees great potential in Elva.
“Elva started as a relatively small project,” he said, “but seeing how it
has benefited local communities, I quit my day job last year and turned
Elva into an independent NGO.”
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