The Island:
Sri Lanka: Sunday, February 26, 2017.
Sri Lanka
took over 20 years of activism to get Right to Information legislation. This
elephantine gestation has an upside. We now have an RTI law, at least on paper,
that is amongst the strongest in the world – the Canadian-based Centre for Law
and Democracy think-tank flags it as the third best out of 110 countries.
Recent media reports flag already notable cases where RTI has been used to gain
information, and also where it has floundered, with government still getting
into gear around responding to requests and also actively resisting compliance
by feigning ignorance. This is to be expected, given that we are just over a
fortnight into the enactment of the law. What’s lacking are innovative
approaches to raising awareness and taking RTI, which rests entirely on the
demand from citizens for information from public authorities, to the grassroots linking it with the daily lives of those who need timely, accurate
information the most.
Realising the
potential of RTI in 2017 requires twinning it with last mile technologies
citizens already have, notably the mobile phone. Much of the implementation of
the law, even with proposed digitisation of government records, relies on paper
based transactions. Awareness raising to date has followed tried and tested
models of workshops, training of trainers, lectures, roundtables, panel
discussions, various websites to promote and monitor the implementation of RTI,
frequently asked questions, short guides, posters and booklets. Clearly, a
concert of approaches embracing the reach of mainstream print and electronic
media is needed. But where discussions fall short are ways through which to
harness the reach and influence of social media, instant messaging and SMS.
Imagination
to use more traditional communications vectors like the postal service, are
also lacking in RTI promotion. Methods can range from public notices in all
post offices around RTI and pre-paid forms that can be filled out and posted on
demand, and stamps promoting the law. If the President can send us all
greetings on January 1, by the same token, his office can leverage their
influence over telcos to send out a message or two on what is a law that is the
embodiment of yahapalanaya giving to citizens the power of oversight,
scrutiny and accountability.
There is also
the excellent trilingual 1919 hotline and related website, run by the
Government Information Centre which falls under the Presidential Secretariat
and predates RTI legislation. I proposed last year a way in which the website
and hotline service could be revamped to support and strengthen RTI
implementation. This kind of platform can serve as an intermediary or as a
concierge service, providing citizens with both the information they need to
make use of RTI and thereafter, on demand, providing them with the means
through which to lodge RTI requests. These requests could be tracked, monitored
and delivered through the same platform, not unlike the RTI portal in Uganda
called ‘Ask Your Gov’ or India’s ‘Your RTI’ platform. This idea, proposed as
part of the Open Government Partnership process, was apparently approved by
Cabinet and is slated to, again on paper, come online by the end of the year in
some avatar.
But given the
vicissitudes of government, what can be done aside from this, by civil society?
A great deal, if we can only think out of the box. Cutting-edge technologies
like bots – completely automated, algorithmic agents that work with popular
instant messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, Skype and Viber to process
natural language queries posed by users. Installation is as easy as adding a
friend or new account to the app – completely intuitive, second nature to most
users, and non-technical. When installed, a query like "Who is responsible
to give me information in a public authority?" will generate a response
that takes from Section 25 of the RTI Act, presented in a manner that strips
away the legal jargon. This is not just a random question. It is one of many
that Transparency International Sri Lanka has uploaded to a dedicated website
dealing with RTI in the form of a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) list. While
at present it requires a citizen to go to this website and seek out the
relevant section and question, the same question asked from a bot from any
platform that supports the technology can result in the immediate delivery of
accurate information, for free, over desktop, mobile or tablet, anywhere in the
country, at any time.
Sadly, bot
technology is only possible, at the moment, in English. This may make it of
limited use at the last-mile and the grassroots. What technologies can be
leveraged at this stage around RTI? Much can be done with public-private
partnerships that see local government entities partner with telcos to inform subscribers
around their rights under RTI. These can range from SMS campaigns that are
limited to specific grama niladari divisions, to the promotion of RTI through
billing printing on what millions get every month details of how to access
information on RTI. Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR), tried and tested
technology used by banks to ordering a pizza, works on any phone and without
any Internet connection. Structured queries - navigated by voice in Sinhala,
Tamil or English, or by punching a number on the keypad - can offer even
illiterate citizens information around the basics of RTI for free, if
government with the support of telcos create an RTI hotline anyone can dial
into.
Anytelco
knows with a great degree of accuracy where a mobile is at a given point of
time. Government institutions - departments, ministries and other public
authorities that fall under the RTI legislation - are fixed locations with
specific geographic coordinates, that don’t often change. It is possible, not
unlike the international roaming activation reminder that automatically pops up
over SMS when a subscriber goes to Bandaranaike International Airport, to have
the details of the relevant Information Officer appear on phones that come
within say a ten-meter radius of the main entrance or reception of a public
authority. To avoid spam, citizens can opt out from these SMS updates, but the
idea is to promote by default to everyone the fact that every public authority
needs to now have, by law, an Information Officer citizens can address queries
to.
But say
government will soon realise the folly of promoting accountability and start to
block or back-track. What then can civil society do? Technologies like
FrontlineSMS are easy to install and free, allowing the smallest community based
organisation to send short messages, over any mobile network, to a select group
of RTI enablers or champions, who then forward the SMS to a broader group, and
so on. Just ten out-going messages can, if forwarded to ten more, in just ten
hops, reach one thousand citizens. Costs are kept to a minimum, yet the reach
is potentially unlimited if sufficient numbers of citizen-cells are architected
and activated, per division, district or province.
I haven’t
even touched on what’s possible over social media, albeit with a demographic
bias weighted towards those between 18 – 34, or in effect, first, second or
third time voters. Given that this demographic would be amongst those most
involved and interested in politics, the promotion of RTI amongst them is critical
in order to create over the longer-term a citizenry unafraid of using the law
to hold government accountable. Short-form videos, leveraging popular YouTube
stars like ‘Gappiya’ to incorporate RTI in their programming, animated images
called GIFs, posters, stickers for use in instant messaging apps, short audio
recordings called podcasts, fan pages, public chats on Viber these are just
some ideas to piggyback on the ubiquity of mobile devices connected to social
media in order to promote RTI, aside from mainstream media campaigns.
Ways to
promote RTI don’t necessarily have to embrace technology. The reverse side of
train and bus tickets, for example, can promote RTI, reaching millions every
single day. I would argue though that the promotion of a law that is only as
powerful as those who use it and how often it is used needs to embrace what are
already today vectors through which news and information are disseminated
online. RTI champions in 2017 cannot ignore how technology, both pervasive and
persuasive, can assist in every aspect from initial query to final response. We
have a really strong law. We can also be a country that showcases how RTI can
be entrenched amongst a connected citizenry.
I really hope
I see that in my lifetime.
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