What are the biggest obstacles to your success?:
Oscar Salazar: It was the ignorance of some of the politicians in the country. When mainstream media asked questions about their opinions of the Twitter movement, one of them said: "I am not familiar with Twitter because I have a job and I do not have time for it". At that time we decided that we realized that Twitter is not an effective tool to reach people like them, that we needed to plan a different strategy, to use different tools, tools that the politicians in general are familiar with. That is why we decided to use email to send the Twitter diggest of the day, to attract the attention of of a group of people that were not familiar (at least most of them) with Twitter: the Mexican Congress and the Mexican Senate.
Homero Fernandez: Misinformation. Opportunism from some politicians who used the platform for their own proselytising. That the movement was not analyzing and considering all the relevant aspects; it was limited to the tax, and did not express concerns for the lack of internet access for most of Mexico's population.
How do you plan on overcoming those obstacles?:
Oscar Salazar: You have to test different tools and use those tools that might reach the people you want to engage in your project.
Homero Fernandez: We created the platform with links to objective, updated information, so people could easily understand the problem with all its aspects and angles. Instead of just reading a 140 characters message, they could find at a single place all the information they needed in order to arrive to their own conclusions.
What problem is your project aiming to overcome?:
Oscar Salazar: Our platform had two purposes: the first one was visibility, we needed to gather and take out all the messages from Twitter and put them on a website so that anyone could see the real-time discussion of #internetnecesario, even if they were not Twitter users. The other objective was to inform the members of the Congress and the Senate that there was major opposition to the tax from a large percentage of the population.
Alberto Bustamante and Homero Fernandez: Disinformation. After a while we realized that, even when it was readily apparent that many people were actively participating with the #internetnecesario hashtag, at a certain level they did not know what it was they were discussing or the purpose of the discussion. The objective was lost in the cloud of data. So we decided to act and help organize the data into a platform with our skills and time.
What are the roots of that problem?:
Oscar Salazar: The original problem was the disconnect between the Congress and the people they represent. The Congress did not ask the civil society for their opinions about the new Internet tax. But the practical problem our platform intended to solve was to get the #internetnecesario message out of Twitter and to turn it into a political petition for the members of the Congress and the members of the Senate.
Homero Fernandez: We did not like the way journalists were covering the news: all the emphasis was around Twitter as a tool, as a social phenomenon, and they were not discussing why people were protesting. Journalists were not providing objective information to the people and the information was confusing, disperse and subjective.
Why did you personally become involved in this project?:
Oscar Salazar: As an ICT expert working on mobile techologies and activism, I worked on July 2009 on a project called Cuidemos el Voto. At that time, the information was generated from text messages (SMS), emails, twitter, and reports on a website. The main objective of Cuidemos el Voto was to report incidents and irregularities in the electoral process.
Alberto Bustamante and Homero Fernandez: Our group of friends started the conversation via Chat and Twitter and we realized how important the decision of the internet tax was. Most Mexicans do not have access to the Internet, and a new tax would increase the digital divide and reduce the opportunities to access to knowledge, culture and development. So we decide to move from our talk to action and we rapidly created www.internecesario.info to help anyone inform him or herself. It was a group decision.
Are you providing unofficial channels of information that should be provided by the government?:
Oscar Salazar: From my perspective, while I was not providing information that should be provided by the government, I think that the government should facilitate discussion channels for their citizens. Twitter is one of them, but there are not so many twitter users in Mexico. So we had to build this platform to serve as a channel to bridge the opinions of Internet users with their representatives.
Why is the government not providing the information?:
Oscar Salazar: My opinion is that before the #internetnecesario campaign, the government did not know the potential of new media tools to communicate with their citizens. Since Twitter and similar tools are relatively new technologies in Mexico, the government is still trying to figure out how they will use it to improve their communications.
How does the information published on your website turn into offline change?:
Oscar Salazar: At the end of each day, all the messages sent via Twitter during the day were wrapped together and sent via email to every single member of the Congress and the Senate to explain why the Internet is a necessity. Soon after we began sending the emails, members of the Senate invited members of the Mexican Twitter community to a formal, face-to-face meeting at the Mexican Congress, where active members of the campaign used strong arguments to convince the senators to change their minds and abstain from taxing the Internet.
Homero Fernandez: The offline change was the result: at the end the tax was not approved and many people that had not engaged ever before in a political dialogue now are actively discussing other relevant topics online. Now even influential journalists look at the conversations on twitter to write their pieces and op-eds.
What is an example of how information on your website has led to a concrete change?:
Oscar Salazar: The project www.internetnecesario.org and the movement #internetnecesario as a whole was successful because we achieve our goal: the politicians finally listened to the people that would have been affected by the Tax, the internet users.
Alberto Bustamante and Homero Fernandez: As we explained before, now the people is aware and know that they can be a part of the discussions. And the people is better informed. However we are not utopists. We are clear that the internet will not fix our problems. Most of the people is still offline, the service is expensive and we need to fix such problems before.
How many people work on your project?:
How many hours a week do you personally spend on the project?:
Oscar Salazar: It was full-time work for our team. Although we were in different locations (I was in NYC at that time but I was virtually in Mexico), all the team worked together to achieve our goal. We worked throughout most of the day during the campaign and organized the information to send the emails to Congress.
Alberto Bustamante and Homero Fernandez: It took us from 7 am to 7 pm to create the Website and compile all the relevant information. We worked together at someone else's house and after that we just updated the webpage with relevant information.
How many hours does the whole team spend on the project?:
Oscar Salazar: The whole week the team was working all the time, organizing the communications, attending on-line and off-line meetings. Just 20 hours after we launched the project, we had exchanged up to 100 emails among us. Then we discovered Google wave.
Alberto Bustamante and Homero Fernandez: As we explained, we worked as a team and we spent 12 hours of our time.
What are the most time consuming tasks?:
Oscar Salazar: Project management and team management were the most time-consuming tasks.
Alberto Bustamante and Homero Fernandez: Curating the content. We had to decide which information was the most relevant, objective and accurate.
How do you extract value from large amounts of data? How do you build engagement around it?:
Oscar Salazar: The data gathered by the project helped our politicians better understand the role of the Internet in our society at this time. In our particular case, the Internet community was already engaged. It was easy to capture their attention because of the tax we were opposing. It was an absurdity. The proposal was to increase the prices of a service everyone needs, instead of lowering the barrier to access.
How do you verify the identities of participants on your website?:
Oscar Salazar: We did not verify the identities of participants on our website.
How do you attract new participants?:
Oscar Salazar: For those who were not Twitter users, we provide them the tools to be a part of the conversation.
Alberto Bustamante and Homero Fernandez: Anyone can send information via email, and if it is relevant and objective, will upload it to the website.
What has been the most effective method of spreading awareness about your project?:
Oscar Salazar: The awareness among the Internet users was already there, we just provided a channel to let the politicians know what the people were saying.
Alberto Bustamante and Homero Fernandez: Via our networks, our twitters accounts, blogs, chat.
What are the incentives to participate in your project?:
Oscar Salazar: The incentive was the opportunity to tell the authorities - to explain our representatives - what the Internet is and how we use it. It is not, as many of them think, just "entertainment" but much more. New generations understand that, so they wanted to speak out and tell the politicians that the Internet is a tool for development, for education, for culture. They do their homeworks, socialize and learn more about the world on the Internet. But the interesting thing is that many people from different ages and backgrounds were involved in the action, not only teenagers. Young adults, adults and elders participate as well. All the people worked towards a common goal: to not let the congress enact the law.
What skills and expertise would be of assistance to your project?:
Oscar Salazar: The team had all the skills required to run the project. They had the technology, the skills to program and the skills to organize a social strategy as well, since they organized a similar initiative a few months before the #internetnecesario.
Homero Fernandez: We had the skills and tools to complete the work: Three of us, Rodrigo, Homero and me are studying architecture, Daniela Hernandez is studying Law and Regina Pozo is studying art. So we decided to meet and work together as a team, we had access to information, equipment and tools to easily create the website.
How do you plan on financially sustaining your project? :
Oscar Salazar: The whole project was "donation - based". People donated time, expertise, hosting, and design skills. People shared the platforms on their different social networks and also various journalists discussed the topic in the print press and on radio.
Homero Fernandez: It was volunteer-driven and the platform is already there. If the debate continues, the platform will continue as well.
What other organizations are you working with?:
Oscar Salazar: Personally I am involved with Ushahidi and people from the United Nations. In Mexico, for Cuidemos el Voto, we worked with a network of NGOs that helped us implement the project. It was a platform used before #internetnecesario.
Alberto Bustamante and Homero Fernandez: Just our team.
Have you thought about developing your own tools?:
Oscar Salazar: We did develop our own tools. We used a Twitter API to aggregate the Tweets that used the hashtag #internetnecesario and we used open source technologies. Anyone can get our own code and adapt it for their own projects. Everything was built using open source tools and we decided to share it with everybody. Anyone can download it at http://github.com/ and use it for whatever they want.
Alberto Bustamante: We have experience in web design so we created our own tool, adapted to include all the information that we considered it was necessary to share with the people.
Has there been any communication between your project and government officials?:
Oscar Salazar: Yes. The Senate invited any participant willing to express their opinions on the topic to a hearing before the Congress to discuss the tax and expose the most relevant arguments.
Alberto Bustamante and Homero Fernandez: Our participation was online but we learned from someone else that the participants who visited the Congress used our Website as a reference to learn more about the subject.
Are there any legal obstacles to your work? Any laws that should be changed?:
Oscar Salazar: No, our work is technical, we are just providing tools and we do not face any legal obstacle.
Alberto Bustamante and Homero Fernandez: No, but there are several attempts to regulate the Internet. Just a couple of weeks ago, the ACTA treaty was discussed in Guadalajara, and also a politician said that using Twitter was harmful, because organized crime was taking advantage of it. From our view, it is just that they are not ready to deal with active citizens who are expressing their opinions.
Have there been any attempts to replicate your work elsewhere?:
Oscar Salazar: Not that I am aware of. But there are many attempts to replicate Cuidemos el Voto, more organizations are interested in the project and want to implement it for local and national elections. #internetnecesario addressed a Mexican problem but we will be happy to provide our tool to anyone that would like to use it.
What other projects in your region should we know about?:
Oscar Salazar: "Cuidemos el Voto" was one of the latest implementations of Ushahidi, and the first to be implemented in Latin America. The original idea of Andres Lajous and I was to enable citizens to report any voting irregularities or other problems using emails or SMS's during the election of new members to the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Congress. We partnered with the MIT's Center for Future Civic Media and different organizations in Mexico to launch the initiative. The project will re-launch for the local elections in 2010, in June, to promote transparency during election.
If someone gave you $10,000 how would you use the money?:
Oscar Salazar: For Cuidemos el Voto, basically I would improve the infrastructure. For example, to offer institutional accounts to different organizations, or to create an electoral observation platform so every single NGO can connectand use it to report different incidents during any electoral process.
If someone gave you $100,000 how would you use the money?:
Oscar Salazar:I would like to create a Think Tank for Projects using mobile technologies in Latin America.
What are your plans for 2010 and 2011?:
Oscar Salazar: I will open Cuidemos el Voto and then try to implement different platforms in Mexico.
Comments
Internet necesario, pensamiento crítico necesario...
Internet necesario seems to be part of the increasing movement in citizen media based on the questioning around the credibility of mainstream media and the decision-making of the government. This project is an example of how civil society agrees to organize and reunite efforts to respond to a government that acts without consulting, and a press that doesn’t connect the public opinion with the leaders of the country. The result is an organization proving that Internet can be a tool to encourage criticism and engage people to current affaires. Thanks to movements like this, we can see how communities use technology to participate and open the door to think deeply about the strategies of their leaders and the opinions shared by the users themselves.
Phenomena like this one invite us to ask if interactive media can actually encourage critical thought and if this critical thought can refine information found through the Web 2.0. Internet necesario responds to the disinformation caused by mainstream media and the bad moves that were made by the government in terms of technology. As it was seen in events in which Twitter provided a lot of citizen information, advantages and limitations were also part of the discussions. Something also seen in Iran and Venezuela, for example, since there were lots of conflicts around the credibility of the reports made by people.
The force of the movement started by Internet necesario is its understanding of the necessity in choosing and curate avalanches of information; so Internet and its people can become a reliable source. This innovating way of creating and moderating direct attachments between the source and the reader can also be the start point of many other movements that could try to observe the Mexican approach to Internet. After this movement, Mexico’s government can be seen in an isolated position in what it comes to international goals for development in which access to ICTs has become a right.
Even if the movement had an objective limited in time, it should continue as one more way to organize information around the observation of government’s and mainstream media actions. Associations, NGOs, communities of researchers and even the press could create a chain of information covering many spaces of communication, since the analysis made by Internet necesario on the public opinion through Internet became a source of reliable information. At the end, Internet necesario has followers, participants, and readers that can also be interesting for regular media looking for new pieces of information and of course, more audience.
Their work underlining the multiple uses of Internet will be an asset, and some more could be added to reinforce their main point. From the numerous advantages in education to communities involved in online communication for development, Internet necesario could continue with the space they already earned inside the Web to promote projects and divulgate knowledge around the advantages coming hand by hand with new technologies, and defend Internet as a priority to take into careful consideration inside the Mexican legislation.
How to build a response into a process?
So far #InternetNecesario has questioned my thinking more than any other about what type of projects we want to document here and what we want to learn from them. On the one hand, it clearly promotes very broad civic participation, increased transparency (much more published information about Mexico's telecom policy and how it compares to other countries), and government accountability (Congress responding to the arguments made by Twitter users and canceling the tax).
On the other hand, #InternetNecesario has also (so far) proved to be a temporary phenomenon that in no way builds systematic processes to continually promote transparency or to hold leaders accountable in the future. Had Alejandro Pisanty never published his Twitter message about the tax then perhaps the law would have passed without any scrutiny or protest. How can Mexicans ensure that won't happen in the future?
Is there a way to take the lessons learned and platforms created during #InternetNecesario and use them in a systematic way to hold Mexico's Congress accountable in all of their work, beyond just internet tax policy?
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