Frontline communities holding responders accountable

Projects listed on this wiki are held by the wider community, and are listed here only for reference. Our goal is that they be worked on and owned in a distributed and communal way, and are thus Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike. All projects should be seen as open to feedback and as continual works in progress. Questions, comments, suggestions, etc can be sent to digitalresponse@aspirationtech.org.

Request

A way for frontline communities to hold response groups accountable.

Theory

Gathering voices, making those voices legible to systems (or visa versa), amplifying those voices while simultaneously routing through accountability mechanisms (such as funding and legal frameworks) can enforce accontability. This consolidation of voices will have an easier time holding others accountable than dispersed voices might.

This can, at its most simple, boil down to a statement of intent or need, followed by ongoing assessment of if needs are being fulfilled. Those statements and metrics can then be sent to the population, response organizations, donors, and constituents as the response unfolds.

The individual should be the gauge of compliance, and accountability should be to the people rather than to the donors. Metrics of success should be set by the local population, and it is possible for existing technology to provide overviews of status and to expose comprehensive objectives and understandings. This is the difference between a body cam, which is police regulated, and a bystander recording, which is community regulated.

The project

A simple standard ledger of templates for personal accounting, useful for individual planning and contributed to a community for auditing. A "Request for Proposals to Help," of sorts.

This might be as simple as the statement, from communities to response organizations of

"You will __(clear change)____ for (___population/region/etc____) by (___date___)" or responders to communities / communities to themselves of "We will __(clear change)___ for (___population/project/etc____) by (___date___)."

Surrounding facilitation practices and templates to arrive at these statements can be created. Existing technical tools might be implemented for this new purpose/space, such as the telling of stories being done through Global Voices or a platform such as MicroAggressions, Follow The Money to track how finances are being used, Get Satisfaction as shaming on the record, the Listening Project as asking frontline communities if aid has actually assisted their livelihoods, and Promise Tracker as logging politicians' promises and delivery.