South Africa Connect

Ory Okolloh discusses how government and civil society need to prepare for broadband.

Ory Okolloh addressed the audience at the National Broadband Forum to give her perspective on the draft framework based on her experience with e-citizenship, e-government and democratic participation. Ory is a Kenyan blogger and open-government activist who runs Mzalendo, a civic website that tracks the performance of Kenya’s Parliament and its Parliamentarians. She is also the founder member of Ushahidi.

She started off by speaking about how civil society should plays its part in the broadband revolution. Firstly, she pointed out that just as government needs to be held accountable for information made available online, so should civil society organisations. The questions to ask are: How open are we? How accessible is information from my organisation? Secondly, she said that civil society must prepare citizens for broadband by encouraging them to be content creators. In Kenya her organisation is preparing for broadband by running bar camps with local content generators in order to ‘localise the internet’ and make content relevant and usable to the public.

Ory spoke about how lucky we are as South Africans to have Freedom of Information legislation, something which Kenyans have been lobbying their government for eight years now. She encouraged South Africans to use the law in our favour – to demand that information is made available online and to challenge government, using relevant legislation, when these demands are not met.

The next step is making information accessible – and that means making data available in usable formats that can be remixed, mashed-up, mapped and interpreted by citizens, for citizens. Ory also spoke about how in preparing for broadband we should build applications or platforms for both the web and the mobile phone. While the advent of broadband is hot on our heels, at the moment people are most likely to access information through their mobile phones.

That brought her to her final point of how barriers to entry need to be as low as possible to enable citizen participation. She used the example of Mzalendo, which runs on $20 a month for hosting fees mainly, thanks to the strong user-generated aspect of the site. A strong online citizen movement is a powerful way to hold government accountable.