Professional Documents
Culture Documents
21-03-2011
Frans Staal
Master Thesis Information Management | Tilburg School of Economics and Management
Frans Staal
s679600
EXAMINATION COMMITTEE:
Dr. B.A. Van de Walle | Thesis supervisor (Tilburg University)
Prof. dr. P.M.A. Ribbers | Second reader (Tilburg University)
ABSTRACT
Many scholars believe that the recent emergence of social media and mobile technology in the
development world fuels its democratization while other scholars question this effect and argue that
technological empowerment of citizens alone is not enough. This study focuses on examining the societal
factors that influence the effects of social media on the democratization of society, and how design and
deployment decisions of social media crowdsourcing tools can influence the interaction between social
media and democracy by taking into account the social context.
To explain the social context, this research proposes the use of the media system dependency theory as it
is aimed on how different societal systems influence the effect of media information on its audience. To
design better social media tools this research proposes the web of system performance as it is aimed to
design better IT systems by taking into account the social context.
To examine the interaction between social media and democracy, a case study was conducted on the use
of Ushahidi in Afghanistan during the presidential elections of 2009 and the parliamentary elections of
2010. Ushahidi is specifically designed for crowdsourcing information during political instability and
natural disasters and is therefore a valuable platform to examine for this research. Afghanistan currently
experiences a period of rapid change and political instability and is among the most undeveloped
countries of the world. Therefore, Afghanistan is a challenging society to deploy Ushahidi and its society
could benefit greatly of the alleged democratization effect of social media.
The purpose of this research is explorative. Qualitative methods were used to collect data through in-
depth interviews, documents and archival records. The data was represented in a narrative about the
deployments of Ushahidi in Afghanistan.
The narrative shows users of social media services like Ushahidi instances are in most cases young, male,
wealthy, more educated, and living in urban areas. On a macro-level the potential of crowdsourcing
information in crisis situations can be estimated by using the social, technological, economic and political
figures. In some cases these figures can show that crowdsourcing information in a crisis situation among
citizens is not feasible, like in Afghanistan where the platform was mainly used by journalists and election
monitors. In other cases the figures can help those who want to deploy and design social media to identify
different social groups which each have different requirements of the social media platform.
PREFACE
With the completion of this thesis I complete my Master of Science degree in Information Management at
Tilburg University. This thesis also marks the end of a personal era, wherein I was granted the liberty to
learn many lessons in- and outside the college rooms. I’m thankful for the people I met, the education I
received, and being able to enable my potential as many were not granted the same opportunities.
I’m grateful for the mentoring of Dr. B.A. Van de Walle who encouraged me to choose a research topic
which I’m passionate about and to explore research fields that may be unknown for me. Connecting
different research fields and conducting interdisciplinary research takes a lot of time and effort. It took
almost a year of hard work to finish this thesis, and in that period Dr. B.A. Van de Walle dedicated a lot of
his time to comment on my thesis. I can underline the importance of interdisciplinary research for the
field of information management and I am thankful that Dr. B.A. Van de Walle stimulated this.
I want to thank my wife Elina, and my friends for their everlasting support and attention. They listened to
me while I was sharing my thoughts on my research, while I probably did not make any sense to them.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of figures ..............................................................................................................................................................................................9
1 Introduction .................................................................................................................................................................................. 11
1.1 Problem indication .......................................................................................................................................................... 11
1.2 Problem statement & research questions ............................................................................................................. 12
1.3 Research approach .......................................................................................................................................................... 12
1.4 Structure of the thesis .................................................................................................................................................... 13
2 Literature review ........................................................................................................................................................................ 14
2.1 Ushahidi ................................................................................................................................................................................ 14
2.1.1 Technical specifications of ushahidi ................................................................................................................... 15
2.1.2 Examples of Ushahidi’s deployments ................................................................................................................ 17
2.2 Socio-technical system design .................................................................................................................................... 20
2.2.1 Socio-technical system ............................................................................................................................................. 20
2.2.2 Socio-technical requirements for IT system performance ....................................................................... 21
2.3 Sociopolitical effects of media .................................................................................................................................... 24
2.3.1 What is a democracy? ............................................................................................................................................... 25
2.3.2 The role of information and communication in democracies ................................................................. 26
2.3.3 The role of mass media in societies .................................................................................................................... 27
2.4 Sociopolitical effects of the Internet ........................................................................................................................ 32
2.4.1 Research on democratizing effect of internet diffusion............................................................................. 32
2.4.2 Effect internet on individual media system dependency .......................................................................... 34
2.4.3 Digital literacy .............................................................................................................................................................. 35
2.4.4 Crowdsourcing ............................................................................................................................................................. 36
3 Methodology.................................................................................................................................................................................. 37
3.1 Research design ................................................................................................................................................................ 37
3.1.1 Research purpose ....................................................................................................................................................... 37
3.1.2 Research methods ...................................................................................................................................................... 37
3.1.3 Research strategy ....................................................................................................................................................... 38
3.1.4 Case study design ........................................................................................................................................................ 38
3.2 Data collection methods ................................................................................................................................................ 38
3.2.1 Selected sources .......................................................................................................................................................... 39
3.2.2 Sample selection .......................................................................................................................................................... 39
3.3 Data analysis....................................................................................................................................................................... 40
3.3.1 External validity .......................................................................................................................................................... 40
3.3.2 Reliability ....................................................................................................................................................................... 40
4 Case study narative .................................................................................................................................................................... 41
4.1 Afghanistan – current situation ................................................................................................................................. 41
4.1.1 Introduction of Afghanistan ................................................................................................................................... 41
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4.1.2 Political system ............................................................................................................................................................ 42
4.1.3 Economy ......................................................................................................................................................................... 43
4.1.4 Media ................................................................................................................................................................................ 44
4.2 Alive in Afghanistan ........................................................................................................................................................ 45
4.2.1 Narrative of Alive in Afghanistan in 2009........................................................................................................ 45
4.2.2 Impact of Alive in Afghanistan 2009 .................................................................................................................. 47
4.3 Narrative of Alive in Afghanistan in 2010 ............................................................................................................. 48
4.3.1 Impact of Ushahidi instances in Afghanistan in 2010 ................................................................................ 51
4.4 Factors influencing success of Ushahidi deployments .................................................................................... 52
4.4.1 Societal factors ............................................................................................................................................................. 52
4.4.2 Design decisions .......................................................................................................................................................... 54
4.4.3 Deployment decisions ............................................................................................................................................... 55
5 Discussion....................................................................................................................................................................................... 58
5.1 The link between social media and democracy .................................................................................................. 58
5.2 MSD-theory ......................................................................................................................................................................... 58
5.2.1 Macro-context .............................................................................................................................................................. 58
5.2.2 Meso-context................................................................................................................................................................. 60
5.2.3 Micro-context................................................................................................................................................................ 61
5.3 Analysis based on WOSP ............................................................................................................................................... 61
5.3.1 Hardware requirements .......................................................................................................................................... 61
5.3.2 Software requirements ............................................................................................................................................ 61
5.3.3 Human requirements ................................................................................................................................................ 62
5.3.4 Communal requirements......................................................................................................................................... 62
5.4 Outside influences ............................................................................................................................................................ 63
5.5 Value of using WOSP and MSD-theory .................................................................................................................... 63
6 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 64
6.1 Research limitations ....................................................................................................................................................... 65
6.2 Recommendations ........................................................................................................................................................... 66
7 List of References ........................................................................................................................................................................ 67
8 Appendices ........................................................................................................................................................................................1
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1 – SMS reporting and feedback cycle in Ushahidi v0.1 ("Ushahidi :: Crowsourcing Crisis
Information (FOSS)," 2010) .............................................................................................................................................................. 16
Figure 2 – Project 4636 ("Ushahidi :: Crowsourcing Crisis Information (FOSS)," 2010) ...................................... 18
Figure 3 – Socio-technical levels (Whitworth, 2009) ............................................................................................................ 22
Figure 4 – Web Of System Performance (Whitworth, 2009) ............................................................................................. 23
Figure 5 – MSD theory (Ball-Rokeach & DeFleur, 1976) ...................................................................................................... 28
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Figure 6 - Hypothetical Model for the influence of Communication Technologies and Endogenous
Sociocultural Structures on Democratic Growth Based on Relationships Identified by MSD theory
(Groshek, 2009) ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 33
Figure 7 – The Alive in Afghanistan website in 2009 (Presentation about Alive in Afghanistan, 2010) ......... 46
Figure 8 ("Alive in Afghanistan," 2010) ....................................................................................................................................... 49
Figure 9 – Afghan Election Mapper ("Afghan Election Mapper," 2010) ........................................................................ 50
Figure 10 – Afghan2010.com Observer Report Map ("Afghan2010.com Observer Report Map," 2010) ...... 51
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1 INTRODUCTION
Many scholars believe the Internet will speed up the spread of effective democracies, especially with the
emergence of Web 2.0 appliances in recent years (Groshek, 2009). Before the Internet people largely
consumed information through mass media. Now people can create and share information massively
through social media, taking the democratization of information into a new era (For-mukwai, 2010). Still
social, political, economic, and technical barriers remain and it is not until recently, social media played a
role during sociopolitical instability, for example with the use of Twitter in Iran (Burns & Eltham, 2009).
In crisis management, victims can participate as ‘living sensors’ that can generate a lot of useful
information (Banzato, Barbini, D'Atri, D'Atri, & Za, 2010). Ushahidi is a software platform that is
specifically created to enable this potential of individuals to share relevant information. Ushahidi was
created during the Kenyan elections in 2008. Witnesses of acts of violence can use Ushahidi by sending
reports through SMS about what they have seen. As a result of growing public interest, the Ushahidi
platform has been rebuild into a tool that any person or organization can use to set up their own platform
to collect and visualize information. Ushahidi has been used during several elections and crisis situations,
including the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile (Okolloh, 2009). Still, many unanswered questions, certainly
in academic literature, remain on the interaction between tools like Ushahidi and society, and the societal
factors, and the design and deployment decisions that influence that interaction. This chapter will go into
an indication of the problem area (section 1.1), the problem statement and research questions (section
1.2), the research approach (1.3), and finally the structure of the complete document (section 1.4).
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crowdsourcing tools (For-mukwai, 2010). Social media is commonly defined as “a category of sites that is
based on user participation and user-generated content.” (White & Plotnick, 2010) Crowdsourcing is
outsourcing tasks, which were originally performed by professionals, to a large diffuse group or
community, through an open call (Howe, 2009; Okolloh, 2009).
During political instability, social media enables to quickly create an online community for crowdsourcing
information on the situation. The familiarity of social media websites like Twitter and Facebook have led
to the emergence of such communities but the Ushahidi platform aims to be more valuable in these
situations as it is specifically designed to be a tool for democratizing information, increasing transparency
and lowering the barriers for individuals to share information (Goolsby, 2010). Scholars, and the
Ushahidi-team itself acknowledge that still many question remain on how Ushahidi can best be deployed,
and case studies and interviews are needed to get a better understanding (Hersman, 2010; "Ushahidi ::
Crowsourcing Crisis Information (FOSS)," 2010).
This research tries to help those who want to deploy platforms like Ushahidi or want to design new
platforms which have the best ‘fit’ with their societal environment. Organizations raising funds for these
projects can benefit from researches like these to explain how these social media services are helping
societies. Findings can also help to stop projects that are likely to fail, in an early stage.
This research will hopefully also help scholars as a source on the connection between society and social
media and on how social media interacts with democracies, especially in regions with complicating social,
economic, political, and technical factors.
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1.4 STRUCTURE OF THE THESIS
Chapter 2 will include a description of what is Ushahidi and cover the relevant theoretical propositions,
chapter 3 explains the methodology for this thesis, chapter 4 contains the narrative of the case study on
Alive in Afghanistan, chapter 5 contains a discussion on how the theoretical propositions in chapter 2
explain the Alive in Afghanistan case narrative, and chapter 6 contains the conclusion.
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2 LITERATURE REVIEW
Yin (2003) argues “the purpose of a literature review is to develop sharper and more insightful questions
about the topic.” The problem statement and research questions in chapter 1, and chapter 3 which
describes the methodology, could only be written after a comprehensive literature review based on
publications from a wide range of fields. This chapter will first explain what Ushahidi is and how it is
used, section 2.2 describes the current literature on measuring performance of socio-technical systems,
section 2.3 describes the current literature on the sociopolitical effects of media, and section 2.4 describes
the current literature on the sociopolitical effects of the Internet and social media in particular.
2.1 USHAHIDI
This research focuses on Ushahidi, which means ‘testimony’ or ‘witness’ in Swahili and was created in
January 2008 during the Kenyan post-election violence as a simple mash-up, using user-generated reports
of citizen journalists and Google Maps to visualize reports of violence in Kenya on a map. Ushahidi
emerged into an open source platform, crowdsourcing events through email, SMS or web forms that
allows users to gather reports of critical situations and visualize it on a map or timeline (Starbird & Palen,
2010; Zanello & Maassen, 2009). Ushahidi is created by its makers to be the “simplest way of aggregating
information from the public for use in crisis response” and to “bridge the gap between relief efforts and
distress calls from around the country, as well as provide a more accurate picture of what was going
on.”(Sturm, 2009) Ushahidi argues on their own website that they build “tools for democratizing
information, increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories.” ("The
Ushahidi Platform," 2010)
After its creation in 2008, Ushahidi has been used for aggregating information in various crisis situations
including natural disasters, political disruption and the swine-flu outbreak (Paudel, Harlalka, & Shrestha,
2010; Poblet, Casanovas, & Cobo, 2009). The posting of information can be done directly by witnesses but
is also done by NGOs (McLaren, 2009; Sturm, 2009). The events can be placed in different categories (like
riots, property loss, peace initiatives, etc.) and they are marked with a corresponding symbol on the map
(Sturm, 2009).
The creation of Ushahidi was a direct response to the Kenyan presidential elections of late 2007, both
presidential parties claimed to have won the polls. The president Mwai Kibaki, who tried to extent its term
won according to the final contested presidential results, but the opposition leader Raila Odinga claimed
the results were fraudulent. There was a government ban on live media and also self-censorship within
the mainstream media. Some international media continued to broadcast live but local media did not dare
to resist to the ban. The government argued false or biased reporting would result in more ethnic-based
violence. The government also wanted to review the media reports before being published or broadcasted
(Makinen & Kuira, 2008; Okolloh, 2009).
Many Kenyans turned to other ways of getting information and SMS text messaging became a popular way
of sharing information, although the government had disabled the ability to send bulk SMS messages. Also,
social media websites like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Twitter were increasingly used to organize and
share information about the crisis and violence (Makinen & Kuira, 2008). Ory Okolloh, one of the founders
of Ushahidi, was an active Kenyan blogger during the post-election violence and she asked her readers in
Kenya to share information about violence they witnessed or heard about and that was not being reported
by the media, in the comments or via email. The response was ‘overwhelming’ and led to the idea of a
dedicated website which became Ushahidi. Ory Okolloh shared her thoughts on her blog and asked if there
were Kenyan ‘techies’ that could build a dedicated website where people could anonymously report about
incidents of violence online or SMS and are visualized by showing their location on a map. Within two
days a group volunteers was formed and the Ushahidi.com domain was registered (Greenough, Chan,
Meier, Bateman, & Dutta, 2009; Okolloh, 2009).
The first instance of Ushahidi was created in less than two weeks using open source software with a team
of 15-20 developers working voluntarily. Over 250 people began using Ushahidi to report violence and
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radio stations started using the website as an information source. The website was also used for
individuals or groups who wanted to know where help is most needed (Goolsby, 2010; Okolloh, 2009).
The website generated a lot of attention because of the frequency with which new, unreported incidents
were reported on the Ushahidi website (Okolloh, 2009). The information Ushahidi generated raised
discussions about the performance of the mass media as an unbiased observer. For instance, bloggers
criticized the mass media focusing on the accusations between Kibaki and Raila while the unnecessary
killings by the police were underplayed (Makinen & Kuira, 2008).
The people of Ushahidi believed that this tool could have potential in other crisis situations as well. With
the help of funds from NGO Humanity United the platform was redeveloped as a tool to help local and
international NGOs in crisis situations, from early conflict warning to tracking a crisis situation as it
evolves. Ushahidi is one of the few technical innovations that is not from a ‘developed country’ and has
been adapted by different ‘developing countries’ (Greenough, et al., 2009; Paudel, et al., 2010).
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Figure 1 – SMS reporting and feedback cycle in Ushahidi v0.1 ("Ushahidi :: Crowsourcing Crisis Information (FOSS)," 2010)
files. It has built-in support for generating PDF files, flash movies, and GIF, JPG and PNG images. PHP is
typically used in combination with Apache, which is an open source webserver, and MySQL, which is an
open source relational database management system (Wandschneider, 2006). These characteristics make
it possible that everyone can setup a webserver (this can be any computer with an Internet connection)
and use the Ushahidi PHP package for free (Paudel, et al., 2010; Wandschneider, 2006).
On the first Ushahidi website, all reports were checked manually by the Ushahidi staff who would call
reporters to verify reports or check other sources e.g. mainstream media. Reports that seemed plausible
but were not verifiable yet, were posted with a ‘not verified’ label (McLaren, 2009; Sturm, 2009). In other
deployments of Ushahidi there is also a process whereby the reports are verified and provided with a
credibility score by NGOs. This is needed in political crises situations, where there is often an ‘information
war’ (McLaren, 2009; Smith, 2010; Sturm, 2009).
Ushahidi can create mashups using the Google Maps API and the SIMILE Timeline API. This mashup
generates a timeline interface on a digital map showing items in a timeframe defined by the user. The
SIMILE Timeline allows users to select the time interval with a dynamic slider (Sophia B. Lui & Palen,
2009). An Application Programming Interface (API) is an implemented interface in a software program
that allows the software to interact with other software (Hofstede & Fioreze, 2009). With SIMILE Timeline
it is possible to create a timeline with one or more ‘time bands’ which can be panned from left to right by
dragging with the mouse or scrolling with the mouse wheel. SIMLE Timeline is part of the SIMILE research
project run by W3C, MITL and CSAIL, that is focused on creating tools to increase the interoperability of
disparate digital collections. SIMILE stands for Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in
unLike Environments (Good & Wilkinson, 2006). The Google Maps API allows developers to integrate data
points with the web mapping service application provided by Google (Hofstede & Fioreze, 2009).
Ushahidi can visualize the information in different ways. The first visualization is a map where every item
on the map can be clicked to show temporal information. The map shows big icons where there are more
reports and they can be shown separately by zooming in on the map. Ushahidi allows the use of different
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icons and colors to categorize the reports. The second visualization is a timeline on the bottom with the
send-in reports visualized per day, hour, etc. (Sophia B. Lui & Palen, 2009). The data can also be visualized
with Google Maps alternatives like Virtual Earth and OpenStreetMap, but the Google Maps API is required
for the ‘geocoding’ of the reports (McLaren, 2009).
For sending SMS, Clickatell can be used which is a communication provider specialized in bulk messaging
services and SMS gateway connectivity. Ushahidi uses Clickatell to send SMS text messages to, for
example, Ushahidi reporters (Haynes, 2009).
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Soon after the earthquake Patrick Meier initiated the deployment of Ushahidi for Haiti which was a joint
effort with The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, UN OCHA/Colombia and the
International Network of Crisis Mappers. Ushahidi-Haiti went live within an hour. Within 5 days, the free
SMS shortcode 4636 was launched which evolved into Project 4636 (also known as Mission 4636) where
several organizations became part of a crisis response process (Saxton, Neely, & Guo, 2010).
Ushahidi was used in this process for crowdsourcing data from people on the ground in Haiti so that
humanitarian needs and relief organization services can be more quickly and effectively coordinated. The
SMS-text messages that were sent to 4636 were first sent to a translation service that is provided by
CrowdFlower and Samasource. Samasource crowdsources work digitally. One of Samasources’ initiatives
was the ‘1,000 jobs Haiti initiative’ which already started before the earthquake. After the earthquake the
initiative continued. Samasource teamed up with CrowdFlower, a venture-backed startup that helps
companies outsource microtasks, to rapidly provide paid work to hundreds of Haitian participants in the
program. After the translation, the SMS text messages were turned into reports by Ushahidi that were
forwarded to multiple organizations like InSTEDD, the Red Cross and U.S. aid organizations (Saxton, et al.,
2010; "Ushahidi :: Crowsourcing Crisis Information (FOSS)," 2010; Zook, et al., 2010).
Ushahidi was used for (user-driven)aggregating of all kinds of information collected through multiple
channels (not only SMS). Individuals and organizations both inside and outside Haiti reported news or
requested for help via multiple channels. Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter had a prominent
role in this process along with more traditional websites. Rescue teams and NGOs saved time and energy
because they didn’t need to sort all this information themselves (Saxton, et al., 2010; Zook, et al., 2010).
However, the ability to send local, on-the-ground knowledge via mobile devices to be systemized and
shared online distinguished Ushahidi. Only 11 % of the Haitians have access to the Internet while 33 % of
the Haitians have access to mobile phones. Ushahidi highlights the benefits of using multiple channels
(Zook, et al., 2010).
Altogether, the deployment of Ushahidi in Haiti was a successful step for the humanitarian use of
information technology. The director of the ICT4Peace foundation, Daniel Stauffacher argues that: "In the
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history of the use of Internet technology for humanitarian purposes Haiti was a milestone."(Heybrock, 2010)
Patrick Meier argued that “the Haiti Quake is the first disaster in which open-source, online platforms are
being heavily utilized.” A U.S. Marine Corps officer stated that the work of Ushahidi in Haiti “is saving lives
every day.” (Zook, et al., 2010) Erik Hersman argues that Ushahidi proved in Haiti that useful crisis
information can be crowdsourced. The US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton underlined the critical role of
Ushahidi in a speech on 21 January (Fildes, 2010).
After the Haiti earthquake in January, an earthquake with a magnitude of 8.8 struck Chile (Meier, 2010a).
Within one hour, the volunteers of Ushahidi started the deployment of Ushahidi for Chile and it took a
couple of hours to get the platform up and running. Within 24 hours the management of the website was
passed on to students of the Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs in the US,
supported by the Chilean diaspora (Fildes, 2010). Some of the involved students were skeptical of
Ushahidi-Chile at first but when soon after that messages communicating the needs and locations of
people who lacked basic supplies and water were coming in, they perceived the Ushahidi-Chile website to
be a successful way to gather information during this disaster (Stauffer, 2010).
The deployment could be done in such a short time because the Ushahidi Tech Team could simply clone
the Ushahidi-Haiti version for Chile. The Ushahidi-Chile platform used the translations of the platform into
Spanish by Oscar Salazar, who translated the platform for the deployment of Ushahidi during the Mexican
election. Oscar Salazar also helped to mobilize a network of volunteers to offer Spanish-English
translations (Meier, 2010b; Rotich, 2010). Within 48 hours more than 100 reports were posted on the
platform. Messages like: "Send help. I'm stuck under a building with my child. We have no supplies", were
reported soon after the launch of the site (Fildes, 2010; Meier, 2010a).
Ushahidi emerged as a platform to gather and visualize reports on post-election violence in Kenya
(Okolloh, 2009). Since then, many Ushahidi deployments have focused on monitoring elections. To name
some examples; for the Indian general elections of 2009, Vote Report India (votereport.in) was created. It
is a collaborative citizen-driven election monitoring platform. In this deployment, Ushahidi was also used
to look at all the tweets with certain keywords (Hersman, 2009b). The Cuidemos el Voto mashup
monitored irregularities during the federal elections of 5 July 2009 in Mexico and used emails, SMS, and
Twitter (Rotich, 2009a). The National Society for Human Rights (NSHR) used Ushahidi to monitor the
elections in Namibia and collected reports about fraud, undue influence, and violence intimidation (Rotich,
2009c). Other examples of election monitoring with Ushahidi include Mozambique, Togo, Lebanon,
Ethiopia, Burundi, Colombia, Guinea, Brazil, Sudan, and Afghanistan ("The Ushahidi Platform," 2010).
The organization that started the Vote Report India project, eMoksha, has been involved in many more
projects since. It developed the Sharek961 website to empower citizens to collect election-related
incidents in Lebanon, it offered the technical backbone for Alive in Afghanistan (which is the case that is
studied for this research), it was the technical partner of the Sudan Vote Monitor and it created Kiirti,
which is a platform to promote awareness and citizen engagement in India ("eMoksha," 2010).
Meanwhile, Ushahidi tries to improve their products and services by, for example, setting up situation
rooms which can react quickly on crisis situations and gather a team of volunteers when help is needed.
There are now three core Ushahidi Situation Rooms in the world: Boston, New York and Geneva. They are
fully trained and continue to train others (Belinsky, 2010; Meier, 2010a). Ushahidi also aims to offer more
technical possibilities by launching an improved version of the platform, a SaaS version called Crowdmap,
and a new tool called Swiftriver ("The Ushahidi Platform," 2010). The first beta of Swiftriver is only
recently launched. It is a tool to filter and verify information from different sources such as Twitter, blogs,
and news reports. “Swifriver initially uses computer algorithms to spot and discard duplications and to mash
the different channels into one coherent feed. This filtered stream is then scrutinized by volunteers before it is
plotted on the map for all to see.” (Fildes, 2010) Although Swifriver and Crowdmap are not covered in this
thesis as they were only recently created, they are interesting developments to watch.
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2.2 SOCIO-TECHNICAL SYSTEM DESIGN
This section will focus on describing theories and models that derived from theories on the performance
of systems in a social context, and are best suited for platforms like Ushahidi.
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Goolsby (2010) argues users develop socio-technical behavior, which involves “the use of new information
resources and advanced communications technology to make different decisions, collaborate in new ways
with a mixture of trusted and less trusted people, and make their own information selectively transparent to
the larger socio-technical world, which has the dividend of encouraging trust in oneself.” Goolsby (2010)
argues that crisismapping tools like Ushahidi need more research regarding socio-technical behavior to
understand how behavior is changed by and will change social media as community maps will provide for
new experiments in social behavior. Tools like Ushahidi can even be seen as a socio-technical behavior
experiment to get insight in how people might use or misuse these new socio-technical innovations
(Goolsby, 2010).
The requirements defined in WOSP are mostly based on TAM and related models (Whitworth, 2009;
Whitworth, et al., 2006). TAM, the technology acceptance model, was introduced by Davis et al. (1989).
TAM tries to explain the behavior of IT use and uses two main variables to predict this: perceived
usefulness and perceived ease of use. Perceived usefulness is the expectation of the user that the
technology can improve its performance and perceived ease of use is the user’s expectation on how little
effort is needed for using the IT system. TAM is related to a wide range of models like TRA, TPB, IDT and
UTAUT which are all focused on individual technology acceptance while WOSP also addresses the social
interaction. The requirements defined in WOSP are not new in the field of computer science but their
integration into one framework is new. The WOSP model is designed to be used for system design but also
system evaluation (Whitworth, 2009).
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2.2.2.1 MEASURING PERFORMANCE ON DIFFERENT SOCIO-TECHNICAL LEVELS
A socio-technical system is a way to interpret reality, even nonphysical. It is how the system is described
and how multiple systems can be described (economic, cognitive, social, information, software). During
the technological innovations, new systems and higher levels have emerged into socio-technical systems.
Whitworth (2009) explains: “In the 1950s/60s computing was primarily about hardware, while in the
1970’s it became about business information processing, and in the 1980s about ‘personal computing’. With
the 1990s, internet and email computers became a social medium, and in this decade social computing has
flourished with chat rooms, bulletin boards, e-markets, social networks, wikis and blogs. Computing
‘reinvented itself’ each decade or so, from hardware to software, from software to Human-Computer-
Interaction, and now from Human-Computer-Interaction to social computing.“(Kuutti, 1996; Whitworth,
2009) The hardware level represents the physical level while the software system represents the
information level (data and code). The human-computer-interaction level is based on the personal
requirements (what can the system do for me) and is about how a person perceives the system. The socio-
technical system level is on the communal level and is about technology as a part of groups, organizations,
communities and societies (Kuutti, 1996; Whitworth, 2009).
The levels sit on top of each other and form the top-level system. Hence, a socio-technical system is a
system that consists of all levels and their interactions. The hardware and software form the technical
system while the personal requirements and the requirements of the social environment form the social
system. At the socio-technical level communities can emerge from autonomous yet interdependent
individuals interacting (Kuutti, 1996; Whitworth, 2009). When systems evolve the focus of performance
emerges to higher levels. If hardware fails, the whole system fails but when hardware and software show
good performance there can still be usability failure or social failure. The physical, information, personal
and communal requirements form together the socio-technical requirements (Whitworth, 2009). Every
level raises different problems and WOSP can be applied to any system level, but not all at once.
Whitworth has defined specific ‘webs’ with different names for each system level (see Figure 3). The web
area shows the overall performance of the IT system and the web shape shows the profile of the IT system
which should fit its environment. The web lines represent tensions between requirements. Improving one
aspect tends to reduce the other. Improving one performance aspect of the IT system at the expense of
another aspect may not improve the IT system. It is even possible that later versions of IT systems can
perform worse. It is possible however to expand the web by ‘pulling’ two or more sides at once. In theory,
any aspect on any system level can combine with any other aspect (Whitworth, 2009; Whitworth, et al.,
2006).
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Figure 4 – Web Of System Performance (Whitworth, 2009)
It is hard to define the right IT system requirements because there are many goals involved when
designing complex socio-technical systems. Designers have to consider the social consequences to
improve the community performance. In STS design, performance and progress have proven to be multi-
dimensional (Whitworth, 2009).
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understanding? Morale: Does the online community have goodwill, is it socially an enjoyable place to be,
without social conflict, and do members help others? Order: Are the rules or norms of social interaction
supported, giving social predictability? Freedom: Are valid ‘rights’ granted broadly to allow bottom-up
participation? Privacy: Does the community respect the right not to communicate? Openness: Does the
community let new ideas in or out? Transparency: Can people easily see what is going on? Identity: How is the
community identity maintained against ideological hijack, e.g. by online constitution, by membership rules,
by community logo, slogans or symbols?”(Whitworth, 2009)
Also on this level, the tensions between two communal requirements makes STS design difficult. For
example, there is a tension between order and freedom. Whitworth (2009) argues that this tension can
also be seen in the various forms of democracy. “There is no single magic bullet strong or pure enough to
kill all the devils of system performance.” Focus on one system requirement causes problems to pop-up
elsewhere. STS design therefore requires an innovative balance of conflicting requirements (Whitworth,
2009).
The connectivity-privacy line in WOSP is defined on the HCI-level as the confidentiality-richness line
(Figure 4 c). Richness represents the human meaning that is communicated and confidentiality is to
control over one’s image to another. This line introduces a social dimension to IT systems based on
meaning exchange. The underlying psychological processes of meaning exchange have been theorized by
many scholars and have been integrated in a cognitive three process (C3P) model which defines three
meaning exchange processes that work simultaneously: Resolving information, relating to others, and
representing the group. The first process, resolving information, is long acknowledged by scholars and
derives from theories on rational decision making. Rational analysis assumes the required information is
available, correct and gatherable without altering the decision situation, while in reality it is often not.
People can be uninformed, misinformed and information gathering may lead to changing situations
because of, for example, a political problem. The C3P model acknowledges these and many other problems
with information resolving and ads a social dimension: Relating to others and representing the group
(Whitworth, Gallupe, & McQueen, 2000).
Relating to others stands for the non-rational people process because “the judgment of who is
communicating affects the meaning of what is said.” (Whitworth, 2009) Relating to the group defines the
normative influences where people seek unity. Within groups some people may dislike each other and
have little relationship with each other but they are willing to conform to the group. Groups have a many-
to-many interaction structure where each group member is required to continuously monitor the
positions of all other members, so the group can work as one: “Supporting group structure means more
than just maintaining a membership list. It extends to formal group norms (constitutions) , group delegated
powers (authorities and roles), methods of new norm formation (e.g. parliamentary systems), sanctions
(laws), group defined procedures (bureaucracy), and other social functions.”(Whitworth, 2009; Whitworth,
Van de Walle, & Turoff, 2000)
Whitworth (2009) argues that these three meaning exchange processes of C3P are related to three
cumulative stages in Internet development: A global knowledge exchange system which is established
with websites like Google and Wikipedia, a global interpersonal network which is currently developing
with social media like Facebook and Twitter, and a global communal identity, which is still undeveloped as
social features like leadership, democracy, and justice are not yet proven to be well supported by internet
technology. Whitworth also believes that each process has different communication requirements: literal
meaning exchange is the informational communication level which is for example downloadable on
websites, interpersonal meaning exchange needs two-way communication with identification or richness
for emotional exchange, and communal meaning exchange needs high connectivity and can be
anonymous.
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experience that media theories need to be redefined as social media, and other Web 2.0 appliances,
change the relation between consumers and producers, and between citizens and their government (Ball-
Rokeach & Jung, 2009). Peña-López (2010) argues that we have to redefine the roles of citizens,
governments and organizations in the new Information society but to do this the ‘old’ role of citizens,
governments and organizations must be understood. This section will explain the societal playing field for
platforms like Ushahidi by describing the sociopolitical context and theories on the effect of the media on
society and individuals.
25
democracies. Therefore he emphasized the importance of associations because when people come
together for mutual purposes they are able to overcome selfish desires: “Associations lead to a self-
conscious and active political society and a vibrant civil society functioning independently from the state”
(Tocqueville, et al., 2005).
26
dependent on information. Citizens can use information technology to form quality opinions and citizens
need communication technology to get that information and to share their opinions (Peña-López, 2010).
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2.3.3.1 MASS MEDIA AS AN INFORMATION SYSTEM
In MSD-theory, media is defined as an information system, not a persuasion system (Ball-Rokeach &
DeFleur, 1976; Ball-Rokeach & Jung, 2009). Ball-Rokeach and Jung (2009) argue that this was a paradigm
shift that had five major implications for further research: “By conceiving of the media as an information
system, (1) it directed attention to a relationship between producers and consumers where producers
control scarce information resources, and consumers utilize those resources to make sense of, and act
meaningfully in, their personal and social environs; (2) it was possible to examine all media products
for their potential information value, crossing entertainment and news genres; (3) it encouraged
viewing media consumers as active processors of media resources, not passive receptors, thus
incorporating the active audience perspective that had developed in uses and gratifications without
asserting anarchical audience interpretive freedoms; (4) it allowed the possibility that some media
effects were intentional and others were not; and (5) it encouraged a multilevel analysis made possible
by the ecological notion of a dependency relationship.”
Societies become more complex and media technology improves. Therefore the cognitive, affective and
behavioral effect, among individuals and society as a whole, of media information becomes more
depended on the uniqueness and social centrality of the information functions of media systems. These
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unique information functions include information gathering, information processing, and information
delivery. For example, media can gather and deliver information about the government’s actions, they can
deliver entertainment for ‘fantasy-escape’, and deliver vital information in emergency situations. The
centrality of information functions is an indicator of the significance of the information function (Ball-
Rokeach & DeFleur, 1976; Ball-Rokeach & Jung, 2009). People’s dependence on information is also higher
when there is more change and conflict in society. Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur (1976) argue that “forces
operating to maintain the structural stability of a society coexist with forces toward conflict and change.” In
a process of modernization there is usually a lot of conflict until society adapts to the new social reality
and new structural stability is formed.
When Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur (1976) introduced the MSD-theory, they argued that the audience can be
highly dependent on the information resources controlled by the media system to achieve their goals,
while the media system hardly ever requires access to resources controlled by an individual to achieve
their goals. Therefore the media system is central to the function of personal and social life in rapid social
change. In time of natural disasters or other crisis situations, the majority of people first becomes aware of
such events through mass media information channels (Ball-Rokeach, 1998; Ball-Rokeach & DeFleur,
1976; Ball-Rokeach & Jung, 2009).
The cognitive, affective and behavioral effects media and/or society have can feed back and change both
society and the media. This is what Ball-Rokeach & DeFleur (1976) refer to as the tripartite relationship
which is illustrated in Figure 5. Feedback loops include, for example, the changes in media consumption
and media production decisions (Ball-Rokeach & DeFleur, 1976).
2.3.3.2 AUDIENCES
In MSD-theory, ‘audience’ is defined as one analytical unit while there is no mass audience that acts as a
coordinated unit that controls resources or has shared goals. The analytical unit ‘audience’ represents the
individual and analysis can show individual archetypes at best (Ball-Rokeach, 1985).
Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur (1976) identify five cognitive effects of media information. The first cognitive
effect in which media play a vital role is ambiguity. Ambiguity occurs when people get insufficient
information or contradictory information. When there is ambiguity in a crisis, people know there is a crisis
but information about that crisis is incomplete or there are contradicting stories. In that case media can
play a role in ambiguity resolution. In some cases there is an ongoing ambiguity creation and resolution
like when there is rapid social change or sociopolitical instability. In these cases the dependency on media
is relatively high. The second cognitive effect is attitude formation. As media-focus on topics constantly
changes, so does the attitude of individuals and society. This is related to the third cognitive effect which is
agenda-setting. As media must select a few topics out of a large set of possible topics, and audience is
more dependent on media, the personal agenda is influenced by the media. A fourth cognitive effect is that
peoples’ system of beliefs expands as people learn about other people and their beliefs. People still have
the same beliefs but these beliefs are broadened. The fifth cognitive effect is the impact on peoples’ values.
In most cases media does not change peoples’ values but they can clarify these values as they can
represent value conflict within society. As media reports this conflicts people are triggered to clarify their
own values and choose between contradicting values (Ball-Rokeach & DeFleur, 1976; Ball-Rokeach &
Jung, 2009).
Media can also have affective effects. Media can cause fear, anxiety, and happiness through news but also
entertainment. Media can also influence the morale of society with, for example, reporting on sporting
events or the speech of a political leader. When media information is more negative on certain social
groups, these groups experience a feeling of alienation. Media can also decrease this alienation like, for
example, the alienation of Afro-Americans in the U.S.A. (Ball-Rokeach & DeFleur, 1976).
Besides cognitive and affective effects, media also influences behavior. When people do things because of
media information that they otherwise would not have done, media caused activation. If people do not act
29
as they would have done because of media, media caused de-activation. Behavioral effects all come down
to these two overt action effects (Ball-Rokeach & DeFleur, 1976).
The dependency relations with the media are formed through personal goals of the audience and these
personal goals are an important factor in explaining why media has different effects on the beliefs,
feelings, and behavior of individuals. The three main goals that create media dependency relations are:
understanding, orientation and play which each have two dimensions: a personal and a social one. This
leads to six types of individual-level media dependency relations: Solitary play, Social play, Action
orientation, Interaction orientation, Self-understanding, and Social understanding (Ball-Rokeach & Jung,
2009; Loges & Ball-Rokeach, 1993). Ball-Rokeach and Jung (2009) explain what these individual-level
media dependency relations imply: “Understanding the social world around you is a social understanding
goal, and understanding yourself is a personal goal. Figuring out how to interact with others is the social side
of orientation and figuring out what actions you want to take is the personal side. When the presence of other
people is an important part of your consumption of media entertainment, you are engaging in social play, but
when the presence of others is not a concern, you are exhibiting the solitary or personal side of play.”
The structural location in the information environment also causes differences between individuals as
some individuals have access to alternative information systems and others do not have that access (Ball-
Rokeach & Jung, 2009).
30
are not present in other systems like religious or educational systems. Therefore the political and
economic system have a central dependency system which other systems do not have.
Individuals grew up in a society where the media system has a range of information and communication
roles. Ball-Rokeach (1998) stipulates that “it is that range of media roles that sets the range of potential
media dependencies of individuals.” By explaining the relationship between structural levels of
interdependence between social systems and the media system, we can have a better understanding of the
media dependencies of individuals that can be and are developed (Ball-Rokeach, 1985).
Structural dependencies are not static but undergo change. This can be incremental change and
sometimes rapid changes under conditions of, for example, modernization or war. Structural
dependencies can be analyzed by identifying the goals of the systems. In modern societies, the most
important dependency relations are those between the (commercial) media system and the economic and
political system. These dependency relations are symmetrical because the economic and political system
need the media to reach their goals and the media system needs the political and economic system to
reach theirs (Ball-Rokeach, 1985; Tai & Sun, 2007).
The interdependence between the media system and economic system in modern societies causes the
media system to be the primary link to the economic system for individuals. The interdependence
between the media system and political system causes the media system to be the link between political
decision making and the citizen. Citizens and politicians may not like the role the media is playing in
politics but they are both dependent on the information resources of the media system (Ball-Rokeach,
1985). While this interdependence forces the media, political, and economic systems to cooperate it also
causes conflict. Each side will try to maximize its resources to increase the other sides dependence or
decrease the own dependence on the other system. Ball-Rokeach (1985) summarizes this paradox: “Forces
pressing symmetry and cooperation thus coexist with forces pressing asymmetry and conflict.”
Dependency relations between the media system and other social systems, such as the family, educational,
and religious systems, are mostly asymmetric in modern societies because the goals of these social
systems are more contingent on the information resources of the media system than the media system
goals are contingent on these other social systems. “The media system derives its legitimacy primarily from
the political and economic system, not from the family, educational, religious, or other social systems.” (Ball-
Rokeach, 1985) The dependency of, for example, the religious system on the media system is illustrated by
the often heard critique on the media’s role in reinforcing or declining the religious values. This critique is
an acknowledgement to the societal roles the media system play as structural media dependencies affect
the core processes of societal life: development, change, conflict, control, and stability (Ball-Rokeach,
1985).
In pre-modern societies or societies undergoing a process towards modernization, individuals intuitively
rely more on interpersonal networks than they do on the media system to reach their goals. When the
quality of the media system is low or the technical infrastructure limits the reach of the media system, an
oral culture of information sharing is stimulated. It is in these conditions that the structural location has
an important influence on the dependency of individuals on the media system (Ball-Rokeach, 1985).
Between the macro- and micro-level, Loges and Ball-Rokeach (1993) define a meso-level where
interpersonal networks are positioned. “Interpersonal networks are the critical link between the structural,
system-level MSD relation that affect the production process and the micro MSD relations that affect
individuals’ consumption of media messages.” (Ball-Rokeach & Jung, 2009) Interpersonal networks can
enhance or limit media effects in communities. “Media stories often stimulate interpersonal conversations.
Sometimes these conversations may challenge the premises of the media story or filter the meaning of the
story such that it ultimately conforms to the social network’s attitudes and norms. On other occasions,
interpersonal conversations may reinforce the meaning as conveyed by the media.” (Ball-Rokeach & Jung,
2009)
31
By using structural dependencies to explain individual media dependencies there is a meaningful context
for analysis of differences in individual dependencies and essential information is gained for
understanding the similarities and variations in individual media dependencies. Individual media
dependencies are, like structural dependencies, examined through the same conditions: The ambiguity
and degree of threats in the social environment, the activities of the media system, the activities of
interpersonal networks, and the structural locations of the individual and its community. The social
environment may be ambiguous when it is unpredictable, for example the economy. In such a case
individuals experience cognitive and affective discomfort. Threat also makes the social environment
ambiguous. Media dependencies are more intense when the media system is needed to signal, interpret,
and organize responses to war, crisis situations, and other potentially threatening situations. The media
system shapes the opinions of individuals on the degree of ambiguity or threat in those situations,
certainly when the interpersonal networks are unable to do so. The MSD-theory is influenced by on what
information the media system focuses (foci). The foci in interpersonal networks discourse and the foci in
the media system both shape the personal goals of the individual (Ball-Rokeach, 1985).
There are multiple examples of researches using macro-level structural dependency relations to explain
individual media dependency. Tuchman (1978) argues that in capitalist societies, the media system
reinforces the capitalist values while the capitalist system legitimizes the profit-making goal of the media
system. Other research shows that in authoritarian nations, governments provide substantial monetary
resources for the media system while the media system focuses on propaganda for the current regime (Tai
& Sun, 2007). Research in the U.S. showed that media-religious dependency relations causes the
obsessiveness on abortion in American society (Ball-Rokeach, Power, Guthrie, & Waring, 1990). Still, many
researches have sidelined the role of the social system in media system dependency relations which was
emphasized in the original MSD-theory but individual dependency relations can eventually best be
explained by the structural dependency relations, contextual factors (social environment), media factors,
individual factors and interpersonal factors (Tai & Sun, 2007).
32
represents a large variety of information systems. This evolving media system however, has such an
important societal role that in developed countries even small outages can seem catastrophic for
businesses and individuals that all take part in a global information network (Ball-Rokeach & Jung, 2009).
Empirically examining the environmental origin of a dependency relationship that crosses levels of
analysis from media producers (macro) to media consumers (micro) becomes continuously more
problematic as the distinction between producers and consumers becomes more vague (Ball-Rokeach &
Jung, 2009). Ball-Rokeach (1985) already acknowledged the complexity of empirical studies on the effects
of radio and television broadcasts and emphasized this statement in a recent paper, published with Jung
(2009) in light of the recent developments.
Measuring the effect of specific broadcasts and websites is by scholars perceived to be problematic and
studies measuring the effect of social media platforms like Ushahidi have not been done yet (Ball-Rokeach
& Jung, 2009). However, analysis of data on a macro-level is possible. One good example is the research of
Figure 6 - Hypothetical Model for the influence of Communication Technologies and Endogenous Sociocultural
Structures on Democratic Growth Based on Relationships Identified by MSD theory (Groshek, 2009)
33
Groshek (2009) in which he examined what effect increased Internet diffusion has had on democratic
growth in developed and developing countries by analyzing macro-level panel data for 152 countries from
1994 to 2003 using a MSD-theory framework. Groshek (2009) uses MSD-theory to explain how Internet
diffusion could affect democracies because of two reasons. The first reason is that the greater the number
and centrality of information functions, the greater the audience and societal dependency on that medium.
The second reason is that media diffusion and dependency increase over time and the potential effects
will increase even more when there is a high degree of structural instability in society (Ball-Rokeach &
Jung, 2009; Groshek, 2009).
Groshek (2009) also addresses the ‘prosumer’ characteristics of the Internet: “Internet diffusion subsumes
the actual growth of the Internet itself, which addresses both the number and centrality of information
functions identified by media system dependency theory. That is, increased Internet diffusion and access
creates a situation whereby information available on the Internet grows exponentially through user creation
and participation as the Internet reaches more and more individuals, which can be assumed to increase the
number and centrality of information functions online for specific communities and nations.”
While the Internet is an infinite repository of information and all consumers can produce information,
many Internet users are overwhelmed by the amount of information and use the Internet only for email
and entertainment. So, although these users are technically empowered to use the Internet to monitor
their government to ensure the protection of human rights they often do not use this power (Groshek,
2009).
Groshek (2009) formed the hypothesis that Internet diffusion predicts increased democracy across all
countries, based on the MSD-theory, and examined the effect of the variables urbanism, education,
resources, media development, sociopolitical instability and democracy, that were earlier identified by
Weaver et al. (1985) in their study on the relationship between media and economic productivity. The
variables Internet diffusion, UN Human Development Index, and population (control variable) were added
(see Figure 6). The findings suggest that Internet diffusion has a meaningful effect on democracy, which
was measured using the Polity 2 democracy scores ("Polity IV Annual Time-Series Database," 2007), The
data also suggest that countries that were already more democratic diffused the Internet more and
therefore the positive effect of Internet diffusion on democracies was greater in countries that were
partially democratic already. The democratizing effect of the Internet seems limited among non-
democratic countries but also proved statistically significant. Groshek (2009) assumes this difference is
caused by limitations in these countries because of national policies and measures like filtration software
to limit the free flow of information.
Groshek (2009) stipulates that Internet diffusion does have a positive effect while earlier studies on radio
and television diffusion measured a negative effect on democracy in non-democratic countries. Still, the
positive effect of Internet diffusion on democracy is modest.
34
played a marginal role in communication information about the disease. However, SMS alone did not
constitute a credible source for most people….The internet played a much more important role when the
epidemic contaminated more areas.” (Tai & Sun, 2007)
The government was aware of the spread of information on the Internet and sent directives to website
managers to remove postings about deadly diseases. Chinese civilians sought alternative ways to get
answers to their questions and used chat rooms and bulletin boards. Web administrators were more
tolerant towards these forms of publication (Tai & Sun, 2007).
Tai and Sun (2007) found that “more than 40 % of the respondents first heard about SARS through sources
other than the mainstream media.” General observation on the role of the Internet and SMS on individual
media system dependency is that, during political instability, internet high-connectors intensify their
internet-usage while internet low-connectors narrow their media usage to mass media. Also, the changes
of information and communication technology changes the whole media system as the Internet is
integrated in the media system and its reach into personal and social life’s is broadened. “People have
broken away from state-orchestrated ideological indoctrination by the mass media and are increasingly
demanding information that is directly relevant and useful to them.” (Tai & Sun, 2007)
Peña-López (2010) tries to explain the relation between Internet diffusion and democracy and argues that
the positive effect of the Internet for citizens is explained by the fact that it can be used to debate,
negotiate and share opinions and ideas through the Internet, especially social media appliances. Citizens
who have access to the Internet hypothetically should not experience information scarcity because when
information becomes digital, it can be reproduced and transferred freely when basic infrastructures and
connectivity services are provided. Before the Internet, civilians were much more dependent on the media
and it was also much harder to get specific information which was, for example, stored in Government’s
paper archives or Libraries. There are now large amounts of data available for everyone to reuse and
remix. Also, people had to be physically together to share their opinions and the transaction costs of
getting people together, coordinating their communication and trying to reach consensus were huge. The
Internet lowers these barriers and allows every user to participate outside the mainstream media (Peña-
López, 2010).
35
Peña-López (2010) argues that digital skills can be divided into five literacy’s. Technological Literacy
covers the basic skills to interact with hardware and software, Informational Literacy covers the user’s
ability to get and manage information, Media Literacy is the ability to deal with different Media and
integrating them to create richer information, Digital Presence is the ability of user’s to establish a digital
identity, and the highest stage is e-Awareness, where one is aware on “how the world and our position – as
a person, group, firm, institution – varies because of digital technologies.” Only a fraction of the population
masters all these five literacy’s and therefore, even in the western countries, there is a digital elite. In
practice, therefore, the same hierarchies in the ‘offline world’ exist in the ‘online world’. For example,
bloggers with a lot of influence in the real world benefit from that influence online and people with little
influence read their blogs at a huge scale while their own blogs have little influence. Also, people tend to
use the Internet to receive information that confirms their current believe and information contradicting
those believes is filtered out more effectively then with traditional mass media (Dahlgren, 2009; Peña-
López, 2010).
2.4.4 CROWDSOURCING
The risk of crowdsourcing tools like Ushahidi is that ‘truth’ is not guaranteed but the idea of
crowdsourcing is that with enough volume the truth will cancel out the false reports. In the case of
Ushahidi there are examples of false reports of violence which caused a response of reports saying there
was no violence in the area (Okolloh, 2009). In his book on crowdsourcing, Howe (2009) argues that in
crowdsourcing projects, there must be someone in charge to make critical decisions about what to do, and
especially what not to do. Howe also argues crowdsourcing projects require a ‘benevolent dictator’ who
understands the socio-technical behavior of social media-using public, to help impose order and guide the
community. In most crowdsourcing projects, 1 % of the crowd creates the content, 10 % will validate it,
and the other 89 % will consume the content that is created.
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3 METHODOLOGY
To answer the research questions, a research design is needed. The research design therefore derives
from the problem statement and research questions, and embodies theories to provide guidance in
determining what data to collect and the strategies for analysing data (Yin, 2003). The research design for
this master thesis is conducting a single-case study on Alive in Afghanistan, which is an election
monitoring project which used the Ushahidi platform to monitor the presidential elections of 2009 and
the parliamentary elections of 2010 in Afghanistan.
The first section presents the research design which is based on the problem statement and research
question, the second section describes the data collection methods used for this research, and the third
section explains how the data was analysed.
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3.1.3 RESEARCH STRATEGY
The case study is the best research strategy. Yin (2003) argues there are five major research strategies in
social science: experiments, surveys, archival analysis, and case studies. “Each is a different way of
collecting and analyzing empirical evidence, following its own logic….In general, case studies are the
preferred strategy when ‘how’ or ‘why’ questions are being posed, when the investigator has little control
over events, and when the focus is on a contemporary phenomenon within some real-life context.”
This research focuses on identifying what societal factors in the real-life context influence the interaction
of social media crowdsourcing tools on the democratization process and how design and deployment
decisions influence this interaction. The case study proves to be the best fit, because Yin (2003) argues the
definition of the case study as a research strategy is that it is an “empirical inquiry that investigates a
contemporary phenomenon within its real-life context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon
and context are not clearly evident. The case study inquiry copes with the technically distinctive situation in
which there will be many more variables of interest than data points, and as one result relies on multiple
sources of evidence.”
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3.2.1 SELECTED SOURCES
Interviews are, as in most case studies, the most important source for this research. The interviews are
guided conversations with people who were involved in the Alive in Afghanistan project or who are
familiar with social and media issues in Afghanistan, and are used to retrieve in-depth information that is
currently not documented.
In this study, depth is more important than broadness. Therefore, unstructured interviews were chosen.
With unstructured interviews, the interviewer only prepares main questions and uses the response to ask
follow-up questions. Topics and issues were determined beforehand, like with semi-structured
interviews, but the sample size and questions were not determined beforehand as current literature does
not provide enough theoretical background (Mack & Woodsong, 2005).
Documents are relevant to almost every case study topic. In this research, mainly administrative
documents, reports and evaluations of NGOs, and newspaper articles are used. These types of documents
are useful but must be carefully used because they may not always be accurate. Archival records are also
relevant for this case study. Lists, maps, charts, organizational, records, and the Ushahidi instances on
itself are used in conjunction with other sources of information (Yin, 2003). The archival records and
documents were used to develop questions with a broad coverage of the issue, and to validate interviewee
comments.
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3.3 DATA ANALYSIS
This research uses explanation building as an analytic technique, which means it aims to analyze the case
study data by iteratively building an explanation about the case. This procedure is mainly used in
explanatory case studies, but in this case study it is used to develop initial hypotheses and propositions for
further studies. “In most existing case studies, explanation building has occurred in narrative form. Because
such narratives cannot be precise, the better case studies are the ones in which the explanations have
reflected some theoretically significant propositions.” (Yin, 2003)
The literature review shows current theoretical propositions are differing and incomplete. For example,
Groshek (2009) argues many scholars believe the Internet will speed up the spread of effective
democracies but refers to MSD theory (which is based on mass media effects) as a theoretical proposition
for a rival explanation. Also, although WOSP can be used to design better IT systems for communities, it
does not address deployments factors influencing the success of tools like Ushahidi (Whitworth, 2009).
Therefore, the findings of the narrative will be explained by existing theoretical propositions by using
pattern matching techniques, but this research also aims to find new and plausible explanations (Yin,
2003).
To judge the quality of the research, two criteria are used to test the quality: External validity and
reliability.
3.3.2 RELIABILITY
A research is reliable when there are no biases or errors made in the study. This would mean that another
investigator conducting the same research would have the same results. To increase the reliability of this
research, interview data was processed by using a data-analysis technique often referred to as ‘labeling’
(Baarda, et al., 2005). The transcripts of interviews were split into relevant fragments, then the fragments
were labeled, the labels were ordered to discover relationships, and then the label-structure was created
which is used to create the narrative.
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4 CASE STUDY NARATIVE
This chapter is the narrative of the single-case study on Alive in Afghanistan. The first section is a short
introduction on Afghanistan’s historical developments, geographical characteristics, population and
economic figures, governmental structure, and media. The second section contains an in-depth coverage
of the Ushahidi-deployments in Afghanistan. The third section describes the societal factors and design
and deployment decisions that were defined by the respondents to be influencing the success of the
Ushahidi deployment. This chapter is mainly based on interviews conducted for this research,
complemented with information from documents and archival records. The transcripts of these
interviews can be found in Appendix B of this master thesis.
41
state: ISAF, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), and the Afghan government.
UNAMA has long-term goals that are related to laying the foundations for sustainable peace and
development. The goals of ISAF are mostly short-term goals related to creating a safe society. Lt. Colonel
Wagemaker argues that there is a grey area between the short-term and long-term goals in which goals
related to forming a state where civilians have a feeling of unity should be met. To meet these goals
citizens need to feel they can influence the decision-making-processes in their country. UNAMA and ISAF
are autonomous organizations and it is difficult to create a joint policy to realize these goals of which it is
unclear who is responsible.
The capital of Afghanistan is Kabul which has a population of more than 2.5 million. The second largest
city is Herat and has a population of around 350.000. Afghanistan has many steep mountains with around
them many fertile ground and valleys, while in the south part of Afghanistan there are large desserts.
Afghanistan has a few large natural lakes and several reservoirs but still issues like limited fresh water
resources, inadequate supplies of portable water, soil degradation, overgrazing, deforestation,
desertification, and air and water pollution remain (The CIA World Factbook, 2009).
The total population of Afghanistan is estimated at 30 million people. Estimations are that 43.6 % of the
population is under the age 15, about 54 % is between the ages of 15 and 64 years, and 2.4 % is above the
age of 64. The average age of the whole population is estimated at 18 years and the life expectancy is
estimated around 45 years. The urban population is estimated at around 25 % and the annual rate of
urbanization is estimated at 5.4 % per year (The CIA World Factbook, 2009).
Almost all citizens of Afghanistan are Muslim. The majority is a Sunni Muslim and a minority of around 2
million citizens is a Shia Muslim, which are mostly part of the Hazara population group. The population
groups in Afghanistan are “Pashtun 42 %, Tajik 27 %, Hazara 9 %, Uzbek 9 %, Aimak 4 %, Turkmen 3 %,
Baloch 2 %, other 4 %.” (The CIA World Factbook, 2009)
Only the Pashtun are organized in small tribes with their own doctrines. The other ethnicities
(Afghanistan has a total of 55 ethnicities) are mostly organized as groups that can best be described as
closed communities. Those groups identify themselves by the region they come from, not their ethnicity.
The Pashtun are relatively conservative, the Taliban is mostly rooted in this tribe. The men of the tribe feel
loyalty to their tribe and, if called upon, are in many cases willing to assemble in arms for their tribes. This
loyalty also influences the political behavior of the tribe as decision-making is centralized and located at
the head of the tribe. In the city, people tend to be more liberal-minded and are more actively forming
opinions compared to the rural areas. Lt. Colonel Wagemaker argues that the tribal and communal
systems in the rural areas of Afghanistan (among other cultural, societal, spatial and economic reasons)
make Afghanistan a complex country where complicated anthropological studies are needed for a proper
understanding. That level of analysis is outside the scope of this research.
The most common spoken languages in Afghanistan are Afghan Dari (estimated at 50 %) and Pashto
(estimated at 35 %) but there are many other languages used as a native language by minority groups
across the country which have an official status in that region. Literacy among the population that is above
the age of 14 is around 43,1 % for males and 12.6 % for women. School life expectancy is also higher for
males who have an average school life of 11 years while women have an average school life of 5 years (The
CIA World Factbook, 2009). Current policies by ISAF, UN and EU are aimed at increasing literacy and
providing more education in Afghanistan, especially among women (EU Blue Book 2009 - the EU and
Afghanistan, 2009).
Emancipation of women is still an important issue in Afghanistan, especially in the rural areas. In Kabul
and other cities the difference becomes smaller and fewer women wear a burqa. Also, the women who
wear a burqa are often modern women who wear the burqa on the street due to social control.
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president since 7 December 2004 and was reelected with 49.67 % of the votes in 2009. The president is
both chief of state and head of government. The cabinet has 25 ministers who have been appointed by the
president and are approved by the National Assembly (The CIA World Factbook, 2009). “The president and
two vice presidents are elected by direct vote for a five-year term (eligible for a second term); if no candidate
receives 50 % or more of the vote in the first round of voting, the two candidates with the most votes will
participate in a second round.” (The CIA World Factbook, 2009) The National Assembly is Afghanistan’s
national legislature.
Besides presidential elections there are also parliamentary elections, which were last held on 18
September 2010: “The bicameral National Assembly consists of the Meshrano Jirga or House of Elders (102
seats, one-third of members elected from provincial councils for four-year terms, one-third elected from local
district councils for three-year terms, and one-third nominated by the president for five year terms) and the
Wolesi Jirga or House of People (no more than 249 seats). The members are directly elected for five-year
terms.” (The CIA World Factbook, 2009) Afghanistan has many political parties of which around 13 parties
have the most electoral support.
Afghanistan is divided into 34 provinces. Each province has its own capital and governor. Each province is
divided into a couple of districts resulting in a total of 398 districts in Afghanistan. Each district covers a
city or a number of villages and is represented by a district governor. The provincial governors and
district governors are elected during the presidential elections (The CIA World Factbook, 2009).
Although the Taliban was overthrown in 2001, it has regrouped in 2004 into a hard to fight guerrilla army
that fights local authorities as well as ISAF which caused Afghanistan’s security situation to worsen
drastically. The UN human indicator for Afghanistan remains extremely low, the rule of law remains weak,
and the economic growth has reduced to 3 % in 2008/2009 from an average of 10 % in recent years
(Crews & Tarzi, 2008; EU Blue Book 2009 - the EU and Afghanistan, 2009; Roy, 2009).
The ongoing conflict has a negative impact on democracy and human rights: “The situation surrounding
freedom of expression continues to slide as intimidation, threats, violence, and unjustified detentions are
reported from a number of quarters. Cultural, religious and political factors continue to severely limit the
lives and potential of Afghan women and the number of reported rape cases of women and children have
increased significantly in recent years. This situation is compounded by a lack of a functioning formal justice
system in large parts of the country and especially outside the main urban areas.”(EU Blue Book 2009 - the
EU and Afghanistan, 2009)
Politically, Afghanistan has entered a period of rapid change and social instability. The presidential
elections in August 2009 and parliamentary elections in 2010 were both problematic. The current Afghan
parliament has not been able to function effectively because of the voting system of the 2005 elections
which slowed down significant political party development and still allowed corruption, abuse of power,
weak institutions and lack of accountability to exist (EU Blue Book 2009 - the EU and Afghanistan, 2009;
European Security Strategy : a secure Europe in a Better World, 2009).
4.1.3 ECONOMY
The EU supports the democratization and respect for human rights in Afghanistan by investing in a good
infrastructure. As modern economies are heavily reliant on critical infrastructure including transport,
communication, power supplies, and the Internet, the modernization of Afghanistan can only be achieved
with a good infrastructure (European Security Strategy : a secure Europe in a Better World, 2009). One of
the EU’s its main approaches to support the democratization and respect for human rights is the support
of the electoral processes: “EU long term election observers for both the Parliamentary elections in 2005 and
the Presidential elections in 2009 were in-country for several weeks before the election-day, reporting on a
range of issues including access to media, voter registration, and equal treatment of candidates.” (EU Blue
Book 2009 - the EU and Afghanistan, 2009)
Lt. Colonel Wagemaker argues Afghan economy has taken a ‘giant leap’ forward. He witnessed how the
local economy in Baghlan province doubled in the period 2005-2007. One indicator that illustrates that
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people have more money to spend is that there has been a rapid increase in the number of exclusive goods
like cars, mopeds, and motorcycles, as well as the variety of goods provided in the shops. Another
indicator is the number and variety of the shops itself.
Despite the economy has improved significantly since the fall of the Taliban regime, Afghanistan is still
extremely poor and highly dependent on foreign aid: “Much of the population continues to suffer from
shortages of housing, clean water, electricity, medical care, and jobs. Criminality, insecurity, weak
governance, and the Afghan Government’s inability to extend rule of law to all parts of the country pose
challenges to future economic growth. Afghanistan’s living standards are among the lowest in the world.
While the international community remains committed to Afghanistan’s development, pledging over $57
billion at three donors’ conferences since 2002, the Government of Afghanistan will need to overcome a
number of challenges, including low revenue collection, anemic job creation, high levels of corruption, weak
government capacity, and poor public infrastructure.” (The CIA World Factbook, 2009) Unemployment in
Afghanistan is estimated at 35 %, population living below the poverty line is estimated at 36 % (The CIA
World Factbook, 2009).
Lt. Colonel Wagemaker argues that for democratization, some sort of economic progress and trust in the
future is needed. A functioning economy needs investments in infrastructure like roads, electricity, and
factories, but investors won’t invest when the situation in Afghanistan remains unstable. In the last thirty
years, the middleclass has largely disappeared while a big middleclass is needed for the economy and the
governance of the country. Also, a significant part of the intelligentsia is gone while they are needed for
opinion-making and agenda-setting.
4.1.4 MEDIA
When the Taliban governed Afghanistan they controlled the print media and radio and used them for
propaganda and religious programs, while televisions were totally banned. In recent years, media in
Afghanistan has developed significantly: “State-owned broadcaster, Radio Television Afghanistan (RTA),
operates a series of radio and television stations in Kabul and the provinces. An estimated 50 private radio
stations, 8 TV networks, and about a dozen international broadcasters are available. Also, there are more
than 30 community-based radio stations broadcasting.” (The CIA World Factbook, 2009) There are two
news agencies in Afghanistan: The Bakhtar News Agency which is owned by the government and Pajhwok
Afghan News.
Lt. Colonel Wagemaker argues radio is by far the most important medium in Afghanistan. The radio
diffusion is very large due to radio’s working on solar power or using a dynamo. Television is also a very
popular medium in the urban areas of Afghanistan. Particularly soap operas and talent shows are popular
among the Afghan TV-viewers.
Besides radio, mobile telephony also diffused rapidly after the Taliban was overthrown. While there only
are 129,300 main phone lines in use in Afghanistan, there are more than 12 million mobile phones used in
Afghanistan: “An increasing number of Afghans utilize mobile-cellular phone networks. Aided by the presence
of multiple providers, mobile-cellular telephone service continues to improve rapidly.” (The CIA World
Factbook, 2009). Todd Huffman argues that mobile telephony is one of the few success stories in
Afghanistan. There are, however, only 500.000 Internet users in Afghanistan. Internet access is growing
through Internet cafes but the number of Internet users is less than 2 % of the total population which is
estimated at 30 million (The CIA World Factbook, 2009). Lt. Colonel Wagemaker argues the main reason
Internet is lesser developed is that Internet needs literacy and the majority of the Afghan population is
illiterate. Also, electricity and access to the Internet are only available in the major urban areas. A reason
radio and mobile telephony emerged rapidly is because of the oral culture of Afghanistan. Also, wired
access, which can easily be destroyed by oppositional or insurgent groups, is not needed for radio and
mobile telephones.
Himelfarb and Paradi-Huilford (2010) argue that the sheer popular demand for communication, an
absence of viable landline substitute, government deregulation, and a competitive market have fueled the
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success of mobile telephony in Afghanistan. It is the fastest growing sector in Afghanistan today. “Taxes on
the mobile sector account for about 15 % of government revenue, and the sector has become one of the
largest employers of the local labor force, second only to the agriculture sector.” (Himelfarb & Paradi-
Guilford, 2010)
Besides calling, mobile money transfer is one of the most important innovations in Afghanistan. “About 97
% of Afghanistan is unbanked and therefore mobile money transfer proves to be a powerful mechanism for
helping to reduce corruption, foster security reform, and promote economic development.” (Himelfarb &
Paradi-Guilford, 2010)
Although mobile technology emerged rapidly, communication infrastructure remains a problem:
“Insurgents and vandals are able to disrupt communications either by attacking mobile towers, which cost
about $250,000 each, or by stealing the electrical generators the towers run on. During the 2009 presidential
elections the Taliban blew up eighteen Roshan towers alone, costing the company $14 million in total
damages.” (Himelfarb & Paradi-Guilford, 2010)
45
The Sharek961 website presented some multimedia and blogging content next to reports generated
through Ushahidi. Alive in Afghanistan was entirely based on this website and added no functionality
because of the short amount of time.
Todd Huffman was added to the team a few days later when eMoksha had already setup the website to
take over some technical maintenance. He is a freelance technologist who worked for Synergy Strike Force
and was located in Afghanistan at the time. Brian Conley connected with him through Twitter and
eventually Todd Huffman became a permanent member of the Small World News team.
Anyone in Afghanistan, including the journalists of Pajhwok news, could report turmoil, defamation, vote
tampering, and other incidents by email, SMS, Twitter (hashtag #afghan09) or by filling in a web form
("Baghdad bomb blast," 2009; Carlstrom & Hill, 2010; Fildes, 2009). Reports could be placed on a map of
Afghanistan alongside official reports from election monitoring groups, news media reports, and reports
from NGOs. As with any other Ushahidi instance, dots on the map can be clicked to see the report and
reports can be filtered by category or by using the timeline (Ackerman, 2009; "The Ushahidi Platform,"
2010).
The first Alive in Afghanistan project was completely funded by the volunteers that were involved and was
not affiliated with any of the official election monitoring organization working in Afghanistan during the
presidential elections of 2009 (Loe, 2009). One of the goals of the creators of Alive in Afghanistan was to
get stories from the rural areas of Afghanistan where there are no or little election monitoring
organizations and media coverage is scarce. The eventual goal of the creators of Alive in Afghanistan is to
help the transformation of Afghanistan into a democracy and support Afghanistan’s progress toward a
free and stable nation by generating better information about the ever-changing climate of the conflict in
the country ("Alive in Afghanistan," 2010). Brian Conley argued that the first Alive in Afghanistan project
was more of an experiment to find out what is possible with a platform like Ushahidi in Afghanistan in its
current state.
The creators of Alive in Afghanistan assumed that, although many civilians have access to the needed
technology to report incidents, they would not use SMS to report incidents because the majority of
Figure 7 – The Alive in Afghanistan website in 2009 (Presentation about Alive in Afghanistan, 2010)
46
Afghanistan is illiterate and the price of one SMS is the same as two minutes of talk time or one day of
bread for the family (Fildes, 2009). They also thought that, as Internet diffusion is very low in Afghanistan
and there wasn’t enough time to promote the platform, they would need to use another strategy (Lutz,
2009). The founders decided to rely on a number of about 80 reporters of Pajhwok news, and a couple of
foreigners working or doing research in Afghanistan to generate reports (Fildes, 2009; Loe, 2009; "The
Ushahidi Platform," 2010). Alive in Afghanistan focused on delivering information to the international
community so it would generate an indirect effect. Brian Conley argues Alive in Afghanistan was much
more accessible for the international community than Pajhwok news’ website.
Brian Conley states that, as they knew citizens would probably not use the system and they had little time
they did not add any functionality to the site or do any marketing to stimulate citizen-reporting (Lutz,
2009). For example, Alive in Afghanistan did not provide feedback to individual reporters, where in other
cases, like in Haiti during the aid after the earthquake, such a feedback loop had been setup (Fildes, 2009).
The key-functionality of Ushahidi, which is focused on citizen-reporting, remained. For example,
information about the reporters like name, phone number, etc. was not published on the website to lower
the barrier for civilians that are concerned about their privacy and safety (Loe, 2009).
The people of Small World News crosschecked the reports on authenticity and reports that were not
verified were marked as such (Fildes, 2009; Lutz, 2009). On election day there were about 250 reports
published. After the elections Alive in Afghanistan kept running to report the ongoing violence until the
parliamentary elections of 2010 and thousands of reports were collected.
Brian Conley argues that they did not build Alive in Afghanistan for citizen-journalism but they build a
rudimentary, informal election observation tool which evolved into a broader platform for media dialogue
and journalism support for trained reporters. It became a journalism strengthening project for supporting
a free and fair media system in Afghanistan. As the project kept running, filters and categories, including
security, election, governance, construction, sport, health, and innovation, were added to match the
changing interests and needs of the NGOs that used the platform. Also, news published by ISAF was added
to the website.
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an archived visual overlay that can be loaded into geographical information programs like Google Earth,
and by the Web Ecology Project which used Alive in Afghanistan as a primary source.
Alive in Afghanistan is accessible for the international community but it is not accessible for most Afghan
citizens, and even aid workers in Afghanistan have difficulty to access the Internet ("Afghanistan
Presidential election," 2009). Therefore, Alive in Afghanistan can only help Afghan citizens if it has indirect
effects through the international community. Brian Conley argues that one important achievement of Alive
in Afghanistan, as many other Ushahidi instances, is that it changed the way election monitoring is done.
Before these kind of tools were used, election monitoring was a weeks if not month-long process. Now the
information is instantaneously published on the platform. Brian Conley states that during the presidential
elections of 2009, people who were working in Afghanistan to monitor the elections told him that Alive in
Afghanistan was the best source for real-time news on election day.
Brian Conley argues that the most important argument that Alive in Afghanistan was a success is that on
election day it was already very clear that there was massive fraud all over the country. There were
videos, photos, and written evidence and testimonies collected by Pajhwok news. However, the
international media reported that there was little violence and fraud. It was not until a few days later that
the international media rectified these initial reports by reporting about massive fraud, corruption and
violence, while Alive in Afghanistan already showed the evidence on election day.
Brian Conley argues that tools like Ushahidi can often give a better overview of what is going on in crisis
situations compared to traditional media. Therefore these tools are important and their usage will
increase as more people will understand the benefits of using such a tool. Brian Conley argues this is
especially true when media companies have economic dependencies which pressure objective news
reporting to the audience.
In the period after the presidential elections of 2009, the platform fostered a dialogue for other media
outlets and helped Pajhwok news to set the agenda and alert other journalists of breaking news from
provinces across the country. Danish Karokhel, the director of Pajhwok news, states the reports were
often used by the radio stations, TV news channels, and daily newspapers (Ulbricht, 2010). Goolsby
(2010) argues Alive in Afghanistan became a community ‘mash-up’ where collections of data from many
sources created a remarkably complete map of important events in Afghanistan.
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Figure 8 ("Alive in Afghanistan," 2010)
not support the technology. In those cases SMS-messages were sent to the coordinator at Pajhwok news
who would manually enter the reports on the Alive in Afghanistan website.
Small World News dedicated a lot of its time and resources to the two other Ushahidi instances and other
projects outside of Afghanistan. Therefore, the Alive in Afghanistan 2010 project actually used the same
concept as the Alive in Afghanistan 2009 project. Citizen-reporting was technically possible but there was
no citizen reporting as this would at least require a large-scale promotion of the platform.
Brian Conley argues that during the parliamentary elections of 2010, like in 2009, Alive in Afghanistan
remained a valuable source for the international community to look for updates throughout the day. There
were fewer incidents then during the presidential elections of 2009. On election day there were around
150 reports. The site kept running afterwards and got over a thousand reports between September 2010
and January 2011.
Meanwhile, Small World News hoped it could enable Afghan organizations to use the methods and
approach of the Alive in Afghanistan project. FEFA (Free & Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan) was
one of the two organizations to do this. “FEFA is a national, independent, non-governmental institution
working to ensure that democratic processes are implemented transparently through networking, citizen
participation and good governance. It was established in May of 2004 by a coalition of civil society
organizations for the purposes of monitoring elections to ensure they are free and fair, promoting democracy
in the country, promoting public participation in public and electoral affairs, and advancing the
consolidation of public trust and faith in democracy and elections...FEFA was registered with the Ministry of
49
Justice on 12 June 2004 and is both an organization and a network. Its membership includes 15 domestic civil
society organizations committed to strengthening the participation of Afghan citizens in public life and
democratic processes, and an additional 16 organizations partner with FEFA during elections.”("Afghan
Election Mapper," 2010)
Pre-election data was collected through narrative reports of FEFA’s provincial coordinators and staff at
FEFA’s headquarters in Kabul. On election day, 400 observers of the nearly 7,000 observers working for
FEFA, based all over Afghanistan submitted reports through SMS at the opening of the polls and at the
closing of the polls. Observers answered nine simple Yes/No questions formulated by FEFA. These
questions were:
“Opening of polls (answers sent between 8am and 9am):
Did the polling center open at 7am?
Did you witness political interference at the polling station?
Did you observe any female staff working at the polling station?
Did you witness tampering and other problems with ballots or ballot boxes at the opening of poll?
Was it for the ink to be cleaned from the fingers of the voters?
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Did you witness political interference during the counting process?
Were you or other observers obstructed from observing the closing and count of the poll?” ("Afghan
Election Mapper," 2010)
These questions helped identifying irregularities, violence, intimidation, and other problems. FEFA
published the problems on the interactive map and collected more than 400 reports.
Small World News also helped Democracy International (DI), who work on democracy and governance
programs worldwide for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). DI was monitoring the
elections for USAID and initially contacted Small World News to source citizen commentary by using SMS
based polling but Small World News did not manage to establish this. Instead, Small World News created
an Ushahidi instance and SMS gateway to process the reports in the Ushahidi instance ("Afghan2010.com
Observer Report Map," 2010).
The goal of the project was to make the Afghanistan parliamentary election of 2010 more transparent,
more comprehensible for the international community and in particular for U.S. citizens. DI tries to
achieve this, in a similar way to FEFA, by collecting reports from the field observers, specifically with
respect to polling center openings, security, polling procedures, fraud and irregularities, and polling
center closings. The website can be reached by clicking on the ‘Observer Report Map’ button on the
Afghan2010.com website.
Figure 10 – Afghan2010.com Observer Report Map ("Afghan2010.com Observer Report Map," 2010)
51
Afghanistan. During the 2009 elections, more than 40 people were killed. According to the Independent
Electoral Commission (IEC), 3.68 million ballots were cast, which is significantly less than during the
presidential elections in 2009, where there were 4.6 million valid votes, and during the parliamentary
elections of 2005, where there were 6.4 million valid votes (Carlstrom & Hill, 2010).
Although the turmoil during the 2010 parliamentary elections was relatively low, the violence and threats
during months before the elections could have had a negative impact on the turnout (Carlstrom & Hill,
2010). Todd Huffman argues that it is also important to note that parliamentary elections tend to draw
lesser attention and generally have a lower turnout.
Todd Huffman argues the FEFA deployment was a huge success because information could be generated
rapidly and FEFA was much faster aware of what was going on. After the polls closed, FEFA stated it has
serious concerns about the quality of the elections because of a “worrying number” of government officials
interfering in the election process: “FEFA also documented incidents of ballot-stuffing, under-age voting,
and proxy voting - when one person votes on behalf of others.” (Carlstrom & Hill, 2010) FEFA already
reported some concerns on election day itself. For example, in the afternoon they reported on their site
that more than 1,500 observed polling centers opened late, and ink could easily be washed of the thumbs
of people who voted. They also reported positive news. They reported for example that security forces
performed their protection duties well overall.
Both the FEFA and DI Ushahidi instances did not collect and publish any reports after September 2010.
The first report on FEFA2010.com was posted on the 17th of July and on umap.Afghan2010.com on the 8th
of September. Both instances posted their last report on the 18 th of September because they were
specifically aimed at monitoring the 2010 parliamentary elections ("Afghan2010.com Observer Report
Map," 2010; "Afghan Election Mapper," 2010). As said, the Alive in Afghanistan is still posting new reports
generated by Pajhwok news.
4.4.1.1 EDUCATION
All respondents mention (digital) literacy as one of the main societal factors influencing participation. A
lot of people have access to mobile technology but because of their illiteracy they cannot report by
sending an SMS-text message, and they only know how to call phone numbers. This is especially true in
the rural areas.
For surfing the web, people do not only need to be literate but also have to be digital literate. For using a
platform like Alive in Afghanistan this means people would not only need to have the basic skills to
interact with the hardware and software, but also the skills to use social media.
Competences like literacy and digital literacy are of course a result of one’s education. Education also
causes other competences to be taught, like the understanding of the concepts of democracy and
participation. People who are more educated are generally more aware of what is happening in their
country and in the media and are also more open for change and new methods for fostering the civil
society.
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Brian Conley argues that even in the U.S., a lot of citizens do not realize how much control, power, and
influence they have, can have, and should have over their government. Education is not only needed to
understand how to use these tools but also to understand what they are good for. It is very difficult for
participatory projects to get people to understand their rights and responsibilities in a democracy.
Citizens need to actively take part in their society. Therefore it is important that they are encouraged to
use these tools.
Lt. Colonel Wagemaker argues that ultimately, every citizen wants to influence decision-making in their
society to a certain degree. He underlines a lot of citizens in Afghanistan are willing to make an effort for
their country because they want a better future for their children.
53
illiterate, and are hard to reach. An NGO asked eMoksha to setup the platform to monitor the elections and
a lot of NGOs used the platform.
Selvam Velmurugan argues the reason that in Lebanon, citizens did sent reports is probably because
Lebanon is more democratic and more evolved. Also in India, citizens mainly generated the reports and
the Indian media consumed the information.
4.4.1.7 GENDER
All respondents stated they had not thought about, or know of the influence religion has on citizen-
participation. They did state that gender is an important factor in participation in Afghanistan. In
Afghanistan, boys are significantly more educated than girls, causing a bigger barrier for the participation
of women in platforms like Alive in Afghanistan. While the role of gender is probably closely related to the
culture and religion of Afghanistan, it is problematic to generalize these factors on a macro-level.
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4.4.2.3 FREE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE
Ushahidi tries to offer a complete platform for crowdsourcing citizen reports, especially in development
countries. It is relatively easy to setup Ushahidi, and in most deployments Ushahidi has basically the same
functionality, although it is possible to change or ad functionality because it is open source.
As Ushahidi is free and open source, it encourages people to experiment with the software, no matter how
small the cause. This enabled eMoksha, for example, to create Kiirti, which allows a self-service
installation of Ushahidi in a few minutes, including SMS reporting. The fact that Ushahidi is free is also
important as organizations that deploy Ushahidi are mostly voluntary organizations which have little
funds available, and charging the use of Ushahidi would probably reduce the use of the platform (Goolsby,
2010).
4.4.3.1 PARTNERSHIPS
The most important aspect of deployments is the building of relevant partnerships for the project. To
make a project a success, strong, on the ground presence is needed. This can be a group of volunteers,
organizations, committed citizens, activists, or basically everyone who is willing to promote and use the
platform.
Finding the right partner, in most cases, needs the right momentum. For example, when newspapers are
reporting on a certain issue and an organization has a good idea for creating an Ushahidi instance for that
issue, it can try to partner with the newspaper and they can promote the website in the articles they write
about the issue.
Selvam Velmurugan states that eMoksha also experienced bad partnerships where a lot of energy was
invested, only to find out the partner was not as committed or motivated as needed. This is often because
at NGOs, there is a lack of accountability and partnerships depend on individual’s motivation. At eMoksha,
an equal amount of time is spend on projects that did not get launched as on the project that did get
55
launched. Selvam Velmurugan argues however that this impulsiveness and ad-hoc approach is needed
because you have to use the momentum to make the project a success. Therefore, partnering with
governmental organizations is probably not a good idea in the early stage because it takes a lot of effort
and they probably first want to see a working concept. It is better to create momentum and make the
project a success, and then approach the authorities while the project is running to hand it over. Brian
Conley also argues that the Afghan government and organizations like ISAF have different agenda’s which
might not be in line with the agenda of an organization like Small World News or eMoksha.
4.4.3.2 MARKETING
Another important aspect of an Ushahidi deployment is marketing. Todd Huffman argues that in
Afghanistan, people in the different parts of Afghanistan do not trust each other and therefore have to be
marketed separately. Selvam Velmurugan argues that people living in the urban areas are also more easily
marketed because they are more literate and the population is more concentrated. Reaching citizens in
rural areas needs more effort and a different approach, like using radio broadcasts or megaphones. Also,
by choosing the right partner the project can already be promoted. For example, a newspaper can report
about the platform, and in case of Pajhwok news the journalists can spread the word while on location.
Small World News hopes to promote the Alive in Afghanistan platform by using public service
announcements, and by driving around with megaphones and advertise the service. For the Alive in
Afghanistan website, Small World News would like to see it become more than just an Ushahidi instance
and hopes to add better support for video, photo, and blogging content. As for the deployment itself, Brian
Conley stated Small World News is considering working with a core of trained journalists in Afghanistan
to deploy Alive in Afghanistan together and then have these trained journalists train volunteers.
56
information is stored in the back-end and the information is only used to provide feedback (Goolsby,
2010). Selvam Velmurugan argues that this functionality is still needed in countries that are less
democratic or politically instable like Sudan or Afghanistan.
Goolsby (2010) argues that, in the case of Alive in Afghanistan, anonymity is needed because of the
potential dangers in Afghanistan if one’s activities are known. In these conditions anonymity may help
improve trust but this might not always be the case: “In other settings, identity issues may become more
important in encouraging trust among strangers. This is also seen as a potential drawback for first responder
authorities who want to know the source of information before committing resources and prefer to have
more accountable methods to validate information. People could get handles and so begin to establish
reputations that lead to status and trust. Links to their Facebook identity, website, or blog might even be
permissible, encouraging.” (Goolsby, 2010)
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5 DISCUSSION
This chapter discusses how the events described in the narrative in chapter 4 can be explained by the
theoretical propositions described in chapter 2 and where new and plausible explanations are needed. To
create this chapter, pattern matching techniques were used, as described by Yin (2003).
5.2 MSD-THEORY
The narrative in chapter 4 aims to identify societal factors influencing the success of a social media
service, being an Ushahidi instance. The MSD-theory mentioned in chapter 2 was introduced by Ball-
Rokeach and DeFleur (1976) to explain the effect of media information on its audience by taking into
account the societal system. This section tries to explain which societal factors influence the interaction
between social media and democracy on a macro-, meso-, and micro-level. On the macro-level, structural
dependency relations between different societal subsystems, like the economic system, the political
system, and the media system are defined. On the meso-level, the role of interpersonal networks can
influence the effect of media information in a positive or negative way, and on the micro-level, individual
archetypes can be defined.
5.2.1 MACRO-CONTEXT
Groshek (2009) examined the effect of Internet diffusion, urbanism, education, resources, media
development, overall development, and sociopolitical instability on democracy on a macro-level (see
Figure 6). The findings in chapter 4 largely correspond to the variables identified by Groshek on a macro-
58
level, and are in this section used to identify different societal systems, relevant for designing and
deploying social media platforms like Ushahidi.
59
Groshek (2009) does not address age and gender on a macro-level but they are said to influence
participation in chapter 4. It is unclear if the average age on a macro-level has any influence on citizen
participation but age is probably an important variable to identify individual archetypes (which are
described at the micro-level). Intuitively, gender plays an important role in Afghanistan because of the
religious and cultural factors. Because religion and culture are relatively abstract concepts, it is hard to
measure how religious and cultural factors influence Internet diffusion and democracy. Of course,
differences between genders can be found in figures on employment and education on a macro-level and
can be used for defining individual archetypes as well.
5.2.2 MESO-CONTEXT
Based on information of the macro-context, certain interpersonal networks can be identified. In the rural
areas of Afghanistan there is mainly a tribal culture where decision-making is centralized and there is an
oral culture. This make individual interaction and enabling with social media extremely difficult as social
media platforms like Ushahidi are focused on democratizing information and empowering individual
users in a leveled social context.
60
On the other hand, interpersonal networks also exist in the more urban areas, where citizens are more
actively involved in forming opinions. To form opinions, the issue of media system dependency becomes
more relevant and this will probably also increase the need for a platform like Ushahidi.
5.2.3 MICRO-CONTEXT
In MSD-theory, ‘audience’ is defined as one analytical unit while there is no mass audience that acts as a
coordinated unit that controls resources or has shared goals. The analytical unit ‘audience’ represent the
individual and analysis can show individual archetypes at best (Ball-Rokeach, 1985).
Based on the societal factors mentioned in chapter 4, users of social media services like Ushahidi instances
are in most cases young, male, wealthy, educated, and living in urban areas. By using the macro-context
information, the size of the social category that corresponds to this profile can be roughly estimated. For
example, only 18 % of Afghanistan is literate (Bank & Group, 2010), therefore at least 82 % of Afghan
citizens will probably not use the Ushahidi instance in its current state. In more developed countries, the
social category that is more likely to use social media services like Ushahidi instances becomes higher.
Individual archetypes can be divided in different social categories, which do not necessarily have to
correspond with the interpersonal networks. Each social category has different requirements of a social
media services like Ushahidi instances, which will be addressed in the next section.
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5.3.3 HUMAN REQUIREMENTS
Citizens can interact in two ways with the system: (1) reporting news, and (2) gathering information
published on the platform.
As for citizen-reporting: In case of Afghanistan, digital literacy or even literacy is low, and therefore ease
of use is very important. By enabling voice-based reporting on the software level, the ease of use for
illiterate citizens increases drastically. However, the capability of the system tends to decrease when ease
of use is increased. In case of Ushahidi, gathering information is much more difficult when citizens use
their mobile phone. The richness of the experience is low as there is no or limited meaning exchange when
SMS and voice-based response is used. This disallows the socio-technical system to emerge.
In the previous section it was argued that identifying different social categories helps in defining
requirements better. In more developed and democratic countries, the group that is, for example, illiterate
or poor is relatively low and the need for easier to use but less rich social media services like Ushahidi
instances is probably lower than in less developed and less democratic countries. In less developed
countries an elite of well educated, wealthy citizens using the platform might be enough to generate
enough reports but if they only live in certain areas it might be more valuable to enable citizens living in
rural areas with, for example, voice-based reporting because the elite may not represent the whole society
that is targeted with the platform.
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5.4 OUTSIDE INFLUENCES
WOSP addresses the fit of the IT system with the environment but does not address outside influences on
system performance like marketing, distribution, or funding. However, as deployments of Ushahidi are
mostly done by non-profit organizations who have little resources available, these are very important
issues that do no not compare to creating a socio-technical system in an organizational context or creating
a social media website with a revenue model.
Partnerships with media organizations or NGOs are vital for the emergence of these kind of platforms
because they have the power to mobilize people and promote the platform. Forming the right
partnerships is difficult however as partners may not always be fully committed to the cause, or might
have other interests that do not necessarily correspond with the goal of the project.
How to market the platform also depends on the circumstances in the country. Afghanistan has an oral
culture and radio is probably the best channel to reach citizens. In more developed countries regular
social media might be a more efficient way of marketing the platform.
Another problem is funding. For setting up the Ushahidi platform, little resources are needed. Still, some
resources are needed for setting up Ushahidi, and the promotion and marketing of the project. Also, the
training of local citizens could really benefit when more funding is available. However, it is hard to
fundraise for projects using Ushahidi as people do not fully understand them. Selvam Velmurugan
explained how eMoksha learned how to gain momentum and make the platform a success and maybe a
next step can be to create a successful business model for projects that gain momentum.
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6 CONCLUSION
This research aims to provide significant insight on the problem defined in this problem statement:
How do societal factors influence the interaction between social media crowdsourcing tools, and
the democratization process of societies and how can we design better social media crowdsourcing
tools, and deploy these tools better, by taking into account societal factors?
Each research question will now be answered separately and all answers together conclude the problem
statement.
What is Ushahidi?
Ushahidi is a website that was created during the post-election violence of Kenya early 2008. The website
was created by local bloggers to collect eyewitness reports of violence through SMS, web forms and e-
mail. The reports were shown on a map and timeline.
Because Ushahidi was very popular in Kenya, Ushahidi developed into a non-profit software company, and
Ushahidi has become an open source, social media, crowdsourcing platform which can be used for social
activism, citizen journalism, and collecting geospatial information.
What are relevant theories and methods for designing IT systems which support societal
interaction?
The performance of any IT system is defined by how well it interacts with its environment to gain value
and avoid loss. Therefore, the performance of social media is defined by how well it interacts with the
community that is targeted for the platform. Viewing the technical system and social system as one socio-
technical system allows us to analyze the whole system in which the social system includes the technical
system. To assess the performance of a socio-technical system like Ushahidi on the hardware, software,
human, and communal level, the web of system performance can be used, as it is focused on whatever
affects the system-environment interaction.
How can we explain the effect of media in society and on democracy?
To determine how social media interacts with democratization, we have to determine what a democracy
is and how it can be fostered. Democracy is basically a set of practices and principles that institutionalize
and protect freedom, like free and fair elections, governmental decisions-making based on the majority
rule, and the protection of basic human rights. Social media are linked to the theories of Tocqueville on
democracy because, in his book Democracy in America, he argued that free press is vital for democracy as
citizens can then become acquainted with the different opinions in their society, and stipulated the
importance of associations to participate in their society.
Because Tocqueville, and many other scholars, observed that free press is an important catalyst for
American democracy, it is not surprising that many politicians and scholars proclaim the potential of new
technologies to hasten the spread of effective democracies. Many also believed mass media, like television
and radio, would have a major impact on its audience, but these technologies failed to fulfill their
predicted social potential. To explain the effect of media information on the audience, this research used
the Media System Dependency theory, in which media and its audience are integral parts of a larger social
system. The main concept of the Media System Dependency theory is that mass communication involves a
large set of interrelated variables that can be simplified by three main variables: media, audiences, and
society.
How can we explain the effect of the Internet, and specifically social media, in society and on
democracy?
The Media System Dependency theory distinguishes the role of producers and consumers, but due to
social media, this distinction becomes vaguer. Because, in theory, citizens can influence the media system
by creating a new media channel, dependency on media functions in the media system is low, and the
dependency relationship between the media system and its audience becomes more balanced. However,
64
questions remain if this is true or if the effect of social media on society and democracy is more complex.
In a quantitative research on the effect of Internet diffusion on Democracy between 1993 and 2003, the
effect of Internet diffusion on Democracy is found to be significantly positive, but the effect is modest in
countries that are less democratic.
How do societal factors, design and deployment decisions affect the interaction of social media,
and specifically Ushahidi, with the democratization process?
The narrative focused on Alive in Afghanistan, and resulted in some lessons on why the effect of Internet
diffusion is modest in countries where there is little democracy, and development is low. Education is an
important issue. In Afghanistan, the majority of the adult population is illiterate. Therefore, citizens cannot
use the Internet to report incidents, or send SMS text messages. Even if people are literate, they also have
to be digital literate. Even in the developed world a lot of citizens do not have the skills to participate. Also,
Internet diffusion is much larger in urban areas, and where people are wealthier, relatively young and
more educated.
Therefore, the citizens using such a platform are part of a limited group, and it is unknown if the citizens
that are participating are a good representation of society, or if they are an elite. When we analyze the
country on a macro-level, we can determine the potential of a social media service. Those who deploy and
design the social media tools can choose a strategy of focusing on the potential of the social category that
is likely to use the platform, or focus on enabling other social categories by, for example, using automatic
voice based response. Social media can only, truly level the playing field if, for example, also poor people,
less-educated people, and women use the platform.
At this moment, the use of social media to foster democratization is relatively new and most projects are
focused on gathering valuable information, regardless if they are generated by a certain social group or
elite. In the short-run, finding the right partners, marketing the platform and funding these projects are
probably more important issues, and will remain to be important issues in the long-run when other, more
difficult to enable social groups will be targeted. Other important issues are about offering alternative
ways to interact, how social concepts like crowdsourcing and community building are fostered with the
right policies and providing proper contingency planning.
Although ultimately, all citizens should be able to use these systems, this is currently not feasible, even in
the developed countries. With these projects, organizations should analyze the environment and
objectives for the social media service, and then determine how they are going to market the platform and
which social category is marketed. This allows organizations to cancel projects in an early stage, or take
the right decisions to make the project successful.
65
When conducting unstructured or semi-structured interviews, reliability is always pressured by possible
bias of the interviewer or the interviewee. The interviewer can cause biased results by asking certain
questions which cause a certain response of the interviewee. The interviewee’s behavior might be
influenced by the setting or the mood of the interviewer. Also, the beliefs and perspectives of the
interviewer might influence the questions asked. The interviewee might be biased when the answers twist
reality, consciously or unconsciously. The interviewee might protect certain interests and therefore
deliberately alter or not mention information, but the interviewee might also be misinformed or not
remember the information correctly.
6.2 RECOMMENDATIONS
This research was exploratory and therefore further research is very important. However, this study is
already an useful source for those who want to deploy Ushahidi or design new social media platforms for
fostering democracy.
Ushahidi is a relatively new platform and its deployments are done by relatively small organizations
which are often doing their work voluntarily. These organizations can use the results of this study as a
helpful guide to determine if a project is feasible and to make better deployment decisions.
When deploying Ushahidi, information on the level of democracy, development, literacy, economy and
technology diffusion can help in determining if a project is feasible in the first place, and how the project
can best be deployed. The web of system performance is helpful at defining requirements on different
levels and getting a better understanding of how the Ushahidi instance interacts with it environment.
The combination of the media system dependency theory and web of system performance is especially
helpful when developing new software platforms and designing new social media services.
For scholars, this research offers enough theoretical propositions to allow quantitative studies on the
effect of societal factors, design and deployment decisions by analyzing multiple cases. Although the media
system dependency theory and web of system performance are useful theoretical propositions for
deploying and designing social media platforms like Ushahidi, further research is needed to integrate
them into a useful and grounded theoretical framework for scholars, and especially for organizations like
Small World News and eMoksha. Further research should focus on the importance of different societal
factors, design decisions and deployment decisions and how they influence each other. As the interaction
between social media and democracy addresses a wide range of research fields, research should focus on
integrating findings from a wide range of fields into comprehensive theories.
The media system dependency theory and web of system performance do not address the importance of
the partnerships, marketing and funding of these projects. The importance of these factors was one of the
main findings of this research and therefore this research did not include theoretical propositions on
these topics. Further research from fields of marketing and finance is therefore very helpful in addition to
theories on the societal factors and IT-system design.
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8 APPENDICES
Because the appendices may contain sensitive information the appendices were removed from this
version of the master thesis.