Civic tech in malaysia and beyond
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This is a talk I did in Nottingham University Malaysia on Civic Tech.
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Civic tech in malaysia and beyond
- 1. Civic Tech in Malaysia Supported by This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. An Open Lecture of Sinar Project Ng Swee Meng <sweester@sinarproject.org> sinarproject.org
- 2. I am…. Supported by Sweemeng: Resident Tech Person
- 3. Sinar Project involve in... Supported by
- 9. We focus on…. Supported by
- 10. Can it work? Supported by
- 12. Supported by
- 14. How do we do civic tech Supported by
- 15. Popit with over 4000 People & Organizations Mapit with all electoral and administrative boundaries Poplus Components Fair Elections NGOS contribute boundaries Issue reporting sites lookup boundaries Able to map issues to constituencies and therefore hold elected representatives accountable People & Org Issue tracking sites use Popit ID and information Parliamentary Monitoring site uses Popit & Mapit information to show info and help users find representatives Transparency International Forest Watch BetterPenang Local Councils Aduanku.my FixMyStreet tindak.org Common Popit ID allows easy mapping of other sites to MPs Accountable Representatives / MyMP CuttleFish for email requests foi.sinarporject.org Alaveteli FOI site helps us keep track of requests for information
- 16. MALAYSIA, Sinar Project, http://sinarproject.org, @sinarproject Open Database/API Popolo/OCDS international open government data specifications Media CSO CSO In constrained environments info/data is hard to get & often lost Get organizations to share info and stored as structured open data accessible via public API Parliamentarian Website MP Statistics (Age/Gender) Influence Networks Reusable, continuously updated, increasingly complete Construction Contracts Legislative Proceedings Link PEPs to other datasets for transparency & accountability
- 17. Supported by
- 18. Supported by
- 19. Supported by
- 20. What’s the road block Supported by
- 22. Data not always available Supported by
- 24. Media law means things can bite Supported by
- 25. Tools alone does not fix problem Supported by
- 26. Skills and knowledge needed Supported by
- 29. Supported by
- 31. Supported by More research redux
Editor's Notes
- Not a philanthropist, not a billionaire, not a playboy. I’m software developer and sysadmin, and I happen to one of the founder of sinar project
- We are an organization that work on governance issue with the help of technology. There is a few aspect of our work
- This is a set of principle to make parliament more open and accessible. This is pretty important as a lot of decision on government is done in the parliament. From bills, to budgets.
- To essentially opening up government, make processes more transparent and again accessible to the people
- Once all the necessary process is ready, then we can start doing open data.
- We working on issue involving your rights on the digital space(the internet and what not). There is a few more issue on digital space, like DRM. But we are not focusing on that. Because the bigger issue is access of information
- The use of tech for improving the government and improving the citizen. Which covers a lot of software…
- We will only look usage outside of government, such as by civil society or citizen
- Using tools previously only available to government to non-profit is not just possible it is already happening. With more country have open data and join open government partnerships, more people build tools to look at their government and improve peoples live and improve the way many CSO work
- One of the popular project is open spending. Spending is very important, it shows where the money goes. As a tax payer people should start to care.
- Fix my street is another project. Originally build to find out how well a town council work, now it is used by town council as their official complaint system
- Then of course the have the representative site
- What we have build then?
- Some info on this slide is slightly outdated, but it illustrate the idea. What we build is a set of infrastructure revolve around people and organization database and boundary information.
- In Malaysia without FOI, Open Data, non-transparent authoritarian government basic information is hard to come by, and as open data even harder. Over 50 years of one government rule, politician and PEPs are entrenched in connected system. Valuable data in research by different organizations are often lost or not published. Never reused. By getting/importing research by different organizations of politicians, organizations, committees etc. and adding it into a structured flexible database based on Popolo standards which assumes imprecise and uncertain data we now have combined information as open data. With structured data/API we can now reuse this in a variety of ways, building elected representative websites with automatically improved information (previously sites were one & done), statistics, contact lists, network graphs. Single database, unique id’s with API also makes it easier to build apps linked to persons/orgs, hold them accountable in variety of ways.
- We also have a issue monitoring system, currently only in subang jaya.
- Our freedom of information site is a very important part of the process. It help streamline the current FOI process in selangor, we discover a few issue at hand.
- We finally have a parliamentary document site, donated by MP Ong Kian Ming. Now we can finally see the type of question our MP asked in the parliament. It is also a good source of information for doing research. We did a project on rape cases in malaysia, and we found out that this tool ca be powerful
- Currently in malaysia it is not easy CSO is not ready. Government is not ready
- Sometime the government as simply not transparent, information is not open by default. Even budget is hard to read, do not provide enough detail on how money is spent CSO is not ready. Government is not ready
- Information just not available CSO is not ready. Government is not ready
- The process can be bad, in this case the tendency to mark thing under OSA for example. Lack of FOI in federal level, the tendency to not release information CSO is not ready. Government is not ready
- Sedition law and media law limit the type of reporting and sharing of information. CSO is not ready. Government is not ready
- Also there is a tendency to think that software/tool/website solve everything. It doesn’t, it require people to work. But it can do things more effectively CSO is not ready. Government is not ready
- Organization particularly CSO might not have the skills. I choose data science here, because it is closest to what people doing civic tech will do CSO is not ready. Government is not ready
- The short version is, tools does not fix issue!
- We will need to start integrating different projects. Also we might to have to expand a little, to cover the thing we try to do in the graph above
- We will add a data portal, this help convert research into useful data(hopefully)
- Despite all the tools, I foresee more research needed to find out issue that we try to solve.
- Of course we will also do more on the ground research
- The short version is, tools does not fix issue!