Hello Government – Better governance in 140 characters?
Kitschelt, Friedrich
Prakash, Pranesh
Bastion, Geraldine de
Mbabazi, Rosemary
Compared to Germany, many government officials in developing countriesare embracing social media as a means to listen and engage in conversation with their citizens. In particular in countries with weak institutions, new forms of digital media for governance are promising alternatives. The IT Minister from Rwanda, the Policy Director of the Centre for Internet&Societyand the State Secretary of the BMZ will discuss the chances and limitations of social media for governance and will debate government usage and political culture between Germany, Rwanda and India.
 A few opening words. My name is Geraldine. I'm part of the Republican program management team and also put together the Global Innovation Gathering together with the help of many great people this year. And this is the final session that we're going to have as the Global Innovation Gathering. We've been having great talks outside in the trailer for the last days where we've had a lot of micro talks from all the fantastic people who joined from all over the world this year. We've been making fantastic things at the maker space and this last day of Republica we have been fitting the stage six with a number of really great sessions and I'm very proud to be moderating the final one. We had a session this morning already which is also kindly co-organized by the Ministry for Economic Corporation and Development and this last session is also organized by the Ministry and the first session we had this morning focused on freedom of speech, the digital media being used by different activists around the world and now we're going to kind of turn that around and look at the government perspective of things. So this session has the title Hello Government, Better Governance in 140 Characters and we are going to be discussing how governments around the world are using digital media for political participation and communication with their citizens and the ups and the downsides that has. Now I'm going to sit down and introduce my wonderful panelists to you. I'm very proud to welcome from the Ministry of Economic Corporation and Development, Ms. Ozula Mula who has a background in human rights. Before she joined the BMC she was working at the Foreign Ministry and has extensive background on these topic matters and is now head of the department for basic questions and policy questions in the bilateral development communication at the Ministry. Welcome. Next to her maybe you just saw him give a great speech on our stage one. Very, very happy to have with us Pranesh Parakash who is the policy director at the Center for Internet and Society and yes we're really happy to have you here and thanks so much for doing two talks back to back. And Didier has kindly joined us. I'm so sorry I'm usually really good. I've learned a lot of really long last names. Nekuri Ifun Furah. Okay. You tried? Yes I tried. Well thank you for bearing with me and I'm really, really happy that you could join us today. Didier is the director general in charge of the ICT Ministry of Youth and ICT in Rwanda, a country that's really taking very great steps in this topic matter so I'm very glad you can be with us today. And I think as a kind of guest appearance panelist I'm going to ask the fantastic Nanjira Sambudi who's doing great research on eGovernment's matters at the IHUB to join us in the course of this discussion and kind of make a fish ball out of it. So with that I'd like to kick off in the topic matter with just a little story. So I was in Rwanda last year and I had the honor of meeting the minister of ICT and youth and I had great friends in Rwanda who helped me organize this meeting but just before the meeting I wanted to make sure this was happening and I sent him a tweet and he responded within minutes and after the interview the same thing happened. I sent a tweet saying man this was such a great interview, you're a great person and I got a response within seconds basically. I was so impressed with this. I actually said to him in the interview he had, I really wish there was more of this kind of direct political communication culture in Germany. And usually you say that many of the governments and countries that I travel to meet have a kind of more open attitude towards this than we do in Germany. Now yesterday you sent a tweet to the head of the development group within the German parliament, Dagmar Wehr, who was supposed to meet this morning and what happened next? Yeah, I forgot for a minute that I have the mic with me. Well we just tweeted in anticipation of today's meeting and in a matter of few minutes we got also the response from her and I was actually very pleased to see also that the same trend which is happening in Rwanda is also, it's not only a Rwandan thing, it's happening everywhere. So I can provide a contrast if maybe. So recently at the World Intellectual Property Organization there were discussions going on about things that I follow and I was unhappy about the position being taken by the Kenyan government and I was having a discussion with another Kenyan scholar about it and you know we tweeted at IP Kenya and I found out within half an hour they responded to what we were saying by not only replying to us on Twitter but by actually going to a senior official who's negotiating it at the World Intellectual Property Organization, getting her response and you know pasting that on Twitter for us and I thought that was fantastic and by contrast the Indian government, the responsible organizations, the responsible departments aren't even on Twitter. Well, Pranesh and DD, I'm very honored to be here on the panel with you and I take up our moderator's question that she would like to be more in contact with the government and you might be surprised to learn that the Ministry of Economic Cooperation Development has the third strongest presence of the German government so you're welcome to follow us on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Google+. And the example of Rwanda is impressive. Why do you think that is? I mean please don't take this the wrong way but you would expect ministries who are in charge for instance of internet questions in Germany to sort of lead the way when it comes to using these media to get into a dialogue about the things they're meant to be taking care of like building up our infrastructure and making policy decisions about net political questions. So how come the DM set is the strongest one in the bunch? Well, if we work together with our developing partners we have to be a thread-sitter and I think in our cooperation with developing countries they have to find their own ways but we can certainly be of assistance and support their decisions and in the new government agreement. So the inspiration from abroad is kind of bringing the ministry to the front of the political bunch. That's an interesting take. So where does the inspiration come from? Maybe you can explain to us a little bit about the political culture in Rwanda and why the government has taken such a strong stance to use specifically Twitter also to reach out to citizens. I think from the run-in perspective the leadership, the top leadership vary from the very early stages got really engaged and even gave the direction. If I go back the last 13 years our leadership that's already back in the year 2000 had already a clear understanding, a clear vision of where they want to move Rwanda and there was a succession of investments, a succession of decisions made already during that time in terms of putting the infrastructure. That's where we made most of our investment in terms of fiber-optic connecting all the corners of the country but also a strong desire to connect to the citizens. And how come Twitter, like why is the government so strong? Maybe you want to say a little bit like I learned for instance your health ministry has like an official tweet up where they answer questions about health. There are all these stories of like well I had a problem so I just send the president a tweet and then he fixed it and it just seems a bit too good to be true. So why was specifically this social network chosen? I know it sounds too good to be true but it is true. Starting from the example you just gave from the president of the republic is among the few leaders who manage himself his own account. Normally you have politicians most of the time they have an office in charge of communication managing the account of the president but he is the one himself managing his account. So I've met a lot of people who just tried to tweet and then got excited because they realized actually the president replied to them directly. So this is a model of governance where government want to be a little bit more close to the citizens listening to the citizens and also it's the whole effort of being more transparent more open but also be more accountable to the constituents. So I kind of want to pick up on that because another thing the minister said when I was interviewing him is that the tweet is more important. It's more important maybe than a phone call or an email because it's out in the public domain. That raises a critical question though especially when we're looking at these media and developing contexts. Same I think they would apply to Germany because not all people have access to these media. So where does that leave the rest of the people who are not sending tweets? How are their voices being heard? So that's something that we have to send for Internet Society when around three years ago almost now when the Indian government was developing its social media guidelines for central government. At that point we pointed out that we have to be very careful that Twitter and social media and Facebook and all these things aren't given preference over those who are actually traveling from their villages to go see their parliamentarians or those who are actually engaging in offline protests because after all only around 10% of the Indian population has Internet access. Of course that might make us in a little bit of time the third largest Internet population in the world. But it's still not a large part of the Indian population that has good access to the Internet still. And to give one concrete example that came up recently rather than just this fear, in the US they did a big data review recently and they found that there was this app that a municipality in the US was using to detect where there were potholes in the road. So people could download that app and the municipality would appropriately respond except and this is perhaps we expected it was mainly richer people who were downloading those apps, mobile phones and what ended up happening was that the resources of the government were being diverted to the elite rather than being spent as it otherwise was. So that's an important concern that we have to keep in mind while encouraging accountability and direct communication, etc. I would be interested on your take on this too, the question of the digital divide, A, when it comes to designing partnership programs with other governments but also how you think that applies to the German context? Well, ICT has a great potential for good governance. But I agree with you that there is a danger of an increased imbalance between those who have access and those who don't have access. And to be connected is one thing but to be capable of using social media is another. So capacity building I think is at hand. And you have to take into consideration local communication and consumption habits and the cultural context, societal context. Of course there isn't some rural areas, maybe there is a high density of cell phones and you can send an SMS, there is a pothole and maybe it is fixed but the tool itself, I mean the social media is just a tool, it's neither good nor bad but it still depends on decisions that are taken after the message is sent on whichever way to the decision maker. I would like maybe to just to add a little bit on the Rwandan context again. Not everyone has a smartphone in Rwanda. We have people who have very basic phones, they can only send text. So on case by case and depending on the level of penetration of ICT, the level of literacy, there is always a way when there is political will to actually engage with the constituents. For our case for example we have one day by the constitution where the president with the parliament and the leaders engage with the citizen for two days. So what happens is it's live on TV, people can text, can tweet, can use Facebook, any other means to be able to engage. This meeting is chaired by the president himself and it's increased the level of accountability because any question can come anywhere and it's on the public domain. So this is, I just wanted to give an example of less sophisticated methods actually to engage with the citizen and it works. And Jera I brought you up on stage because I know you have a whole lot to say on this topic matter. And in our pre-discussion we had, I picked up this example from Kenya which I read about late last year. You had, or its ongoing process of land reform in Kenya. And cabinet secretary of Kenya said we're specifically looking at social media like Facebook and Twitter to listen to what citizens have to say and on that basis make demands based policy decisions. Now this question of land reform is one that specifically also addresses people in rural areas and so that question of the digital disconnect, I was wondering like, you know, this may sound great, you know, it's a great press release but what does that actually mean to people? Right, Kenya. So it was a nice sounding thing that did not even take off even with what is already there and what's already organized. And I tend to think of the issue of the digital divide really just as a translation of what has already been happening pre-technology in natural divides, right? So technology is not going to be the panacea. And so even if it's only certain people in certain economic, you know, sort of capabilities, spaces that have access now, it doesn't mean that they are not citizens either. And also, exactly, and also what happens is as more and more people see, and I've seen this in Kenya where a lot more people see that, you know, they're watching the news and there's this whole thing about, you know, Tweet and Facebook, they drive the demand to get access. So that also translates to political will, it translates to economic opportunities. So I tend to think of it as a way that for what is already there, we have to make it work. We're not going to get to a point where everybody, there's universal access and then it starts to make sense. So in the case of the land's policy thing, we don't know if that even happened. It's something that is not as well thought out as the random case, but we are trying to get our governments to sort of realize with the difference being in Kenya, citizen media usage has been preceded by government's will to use these spaces. And so it was really just something that sounded nice for campaigning to say, you know, this will be a digital government. And so now they have, they're now being forced to get to a point where, okay, we have to walk the talk. They have no idea yet. And I know they keep saying, you know, they'll follow the random example. So that's just a basic overview. Why don't you respond to that? No, and along with, I completely agree in Nigeria that the idea of the digital divide, it might seem like one yet another thing, but in many ways it actually mirrors the kinds of divides that already exist in terms of, you know, what languages you're comfortable with in terms of, you know, your capability of actually using the, not just the technologies and having access to technologies, but using it effectively as a form of, you know, petitioning the government, et cetera. So if you don't speak the necessary language, if you don't, you know, have the ability to crunch the big data that they're putting out in form of open data and to make effective use of it. There are all these kinds of things which mirror existing gaps and divides, and it's not just a matter of pure access or economics. And then again, to the, oh, you have, you already have a discussion. I'll take my questions. I feel our discussion focuses on the people, but how about the people in government? They have also to be able to respond to the tweets and the emails. So we have to do some capacity building and some, they have to be, how can the capacity be so much higher to use? Otherwise there is no correspondence, sir, between the government and the citizens. I totally agree. But again, then I wonder how come the, you know, the capacity seems to be so much higher to use these technologies in the run and government. If I may give an example, and I don't know if this is Trin Ronda, it tends to be an age thing as well. And that's we, so like Kenyan government. Aware of the fact that I'm known as a panel. No, no, no. And I don't mean that in that way. I've seen this flaunted as a, and I think it's not, it's not a justifiable excuse, it's a pretty good one that you can put off as a smokescreen, that it's only the young people. And so, you know, we are all in the government, and I don't mean this like in Germany, I've seen this in Kenya where they're like, give us a chance. We're dawned, you know, you young people with your, you know, your things. And so, and I'm like, no, it's not about that. It's all about communication. And it's really going back to the idea of what technology is here to do. It is not the pernicious. It is here to enhance those skills that we're supposed to really have in effect. In India, you could say that politicians are making much better use of social media slowly, and it's, you know, being ramped up. But they're doing that to a much greater extent than the government. And within the government, it's interesting to see what kinds of things are really embracing social media. So, the traffic police, they've embraced social media big time in multiple cities. And it raises some, you know, some privacy concerns. They're tweeting out the license numbers, et cetera, of, you know, people caught speeding and asking for help in, you know, catching some vehicle and all kinds of things. So some privacy concerns are raised there. But it's very interesting to see who are embracing it and who aren't within government. So do you have like terribly young or terribly capable? Like what do you do with your government leaders to make them happen? I sometimes wonder also whether it's a little bit of like, you know, after the total devastation basically of your country, the idea of having to reinvent yourself 20 years ago, pretty much the same time where the internet became mainstream and also perhaps in Africa, something that could be foreseeable, an economic force. Do you think that has anything to do with it? It's actually a mix of several things. I mentioned initially, first of all, this strong political will to be meaningful, not only to, you know, not only become a leader and forget this contact with the people. In fact, from the very beginning, Randa is always, after the 1994 genocide, our leaders have always tried to be as much as possible close to the citizen. That's quite normal, especially after what happened in 1994. But also, it's all technology, any new technology, there's always that fear. And the more, of course, you grow, the more you are more fearful to embrace technology. I think it's being bold, it's about leadership, it's about leading by example. Once for example, the president started tweeting himself, well, the prime minister realized that he has to tweet. The minister has started to tweet. The police, the... So it's leading by example, huh? It's actually leading by example. Yeah. I have a question for the other panelists, which is, when I look at how people are interacting with those in power, whether it's the government, you know, departments and officials or politicians, a lot of the comments they get are venomous, hateful, are not constructive in the least. And it's not as though these people are in a position to just keep blocking everyone who they don't want, because they have to take inputs from everyone, right? So how can we expect governments to, you know, negotiate the space where it's not polite conversation. It's not, you know, a space where people raise their hands and are called and engage in meaningful discussion necessarily. What are governments to do? What do you do with your Rwandan trolls? I think that's where actually freedom of expression is. You will not always have necessarily very good or encouraging conversation. They are good. It's actually just a translation of how this world is. So everyone is free to express what they think. And it's really up to you to take the constructive part and to build on it. And anything that is not helpful, you try to understand why. And if you find that there is no reason and there is no, you can, well, in that case, you just put it aside and you move on. So it's really about opening to everyone the opportunity to talk to the government. Actually, you are posing the question, what government does a digital society need? On one hand, it has to be open and democratic enough to respond to the citizens' rising expectations. But on the other hand, it has to be strong enough to protect the people against abuse. So I think this is a balance that has to be stroke and stricken, whatever. English is not my native language. That's why it's also important that in the countries themselves, there is some sort of a system in place, a judiciary system that sort of sets the frame to operate in. Very glad we've transitioned a little bit. And this has been very good. You've already touched on the topic of freedom. So I want to pick up on some of the topics that were raised in the panel that we had discussing that question. And yeah, so maybe just start with a Kenyan example on that when I was in Kenya last, which is, of course, one of the examples people uphold for being a strong democracy in East Africa, despite what happened in the 2007, 2008 elections, last elections, maybe you can tell that funny story too, when the world was watching for violence to break out again, like, oh, is it going to have everything went really, really well. However, there seems to be a lot of restrictions from the government when it comes to freedom of speech in many ways. And when I was there, a law was just passed where you told me it was actually passed by a parliament too, which is, for instance, restricting press freedom and the way that journalists, like really cracking down on journalists and making them personally liable for things that they wrote. So there's a bit of a, like, a vividly, perhaps, how these social media and other technologies are being pushed to be used for, like, people speaking out and sharing their voice, and then cracking down on that with policy on the other hand. And nowhere more peculiar than in Kenya for that. So just starting to what was just raised earlier about freedom of speech, we always say it also includes the right to offend, right, but then it becomes very tricky when the offense is taken personally by an individual who sits in a capacity of a government position or a political position. And in a place like Kenya, it's a democracy pretty much in transition. It's, there's a lot of pressure to flaunt it as this democracy that is strong, which is not entirely true. It's really a country that has just passed a constitution that yes has a bill of rights, but it's not been exercised yet. So you find spaces like social media are actually helping in sort of like testing out that space. But what's really interesting is as well, as governments and I mean as people attack governments, service providers and whatnot, there's over time a mechanism of self-regulation so that we have to finally move from just making noise to collectively organizing our voices towards something. So I think just to pick up on that point, I think the issue of trolls and the issue of freedom of speeches, they sometimes are, they overlap, but sometimes they're also orthogonal. So on the point of freedom of expression, in India, I think India presents a very interesting case study. The, the Center for Internet and Society have been criticizing some of the laws that have been putting put in place in India for a long while since 2008. Yet when it actually hit the, you know, mainstream media was when two girls from Mumbai, when a politician had died and the entire city was more or less shut down because of that. And, you know, one girl said, you know, we should pay our respects to him, but I don't see why threats of wildness should be used to shut down an entire city this way. And another girl, her friend, and both of them teenagers, like, you know, liked that comment. And that became a criminal case. They were arrested. And there was a national outcry about this. And that is the moment where the fact that the laws we have in India are horrific on this issue actually came to light because of Facebook. And, and so that, and since then there have been some more cases. And I think that presents an interesting fact about the, in a sense, the power of Facebook. People start asking questions about if I post something on Facebook, can I become criminally liable? Because that's not something they really have thought about. I, as a lawyer, keep thinking about these kinds of things. But I'm not like, you know, in a, in a, in a kind of exceptional position. People really feel that immediacy when it comes to social media. Right. And again, perhaps a lot to do with, you know, policy, not always being on top of the times. And, and a lot of these things still being in debate. But whilst we're on the topic of free speech and, you know, where, where does the right to hear the other opinion end? I want to bring up a specific kind of point about internet censorship, because I think it's quite an interesting round of nationalities that we have gathered on the panel to speak about this. Now, I, I sometimes get stick from like friends from America that say here in Germany, you know, their number one value freedom of speech is really not something that we consider quite so highly. But the, the right of the safety and the dignity of the individual person in Germany is rated higher. So in Germany, we censor the internet too, which has to do with our history and our political culture that we have here, which is for instance that we censor right wing, a Nazi in Holocaust related content. And, and there may still be, you know, good reasons, or there are many good reasons for doing that, that from our political perspective. Do you ever get approached with that issue that Germany is also a country censoring the internet and how we sort of argue why we get to do that for the things that we censor? No. Oh, okay. I mean, there might be historical and cultural sensitivities in different countries, but I personally was never approached with a question why you don't tolerate Nazi propaganda. I would be interested to ask you the same question. Runder also censors the internet if you want. If you read the internet freedom house report, it becomes quite clear there what kind of content you censor, which is content related to the genocide. Do you ever get asked that question why Rwanda censors the internet? Personally, no. But here maybe I can talk as a citizen of Rwanda. We have quite a particular context. What happened to Rwanda was it's still very fresh in the life of people. Twenty years ago, we had one of the worst genocide that happened in the world, and it's affected the whole tissue of the society that needed to be rebuilt from scratch. And our leaders invested a lot into reconciliation and unity. And it's a building process. We have people who still have the scars of the genocide. You can see that. They live with it. Those are people who had families completely wiped out. And I think our concession is very straightforward in terms of freedom of speech and freedom of association and freedom of information. But on the other side, and we want to have a new Rwanda which is not based on ethnicity as it used to be before the genocide that's led to the genocide, where people were promoting, first of all, what is different. The government back then, which was in power, was promoting the difference between the people as a political tool. Today, the new Rwanda is not based on ethnicity. It's not based on who is who. It's about opportunities, equal opportunities for everyone. And as for any genocide, any genocide that happened in the world, there are also, of course, genocide deniers who will say, for example, that it never happened. I'm sure in any part of the world it is the case. And as long as this freedom doesn't affect the unity, the cohesion of the people, I think that's actually, I'll say, even a dangerous fruit when people can start using this. And here I'm talking as myself. The unity for us is more important than actually the differences. So that's why, for instance, content that is very critical, oppositional, which goes against the current policies of the government on this specific topic matter, or that you said, like, genocide denying content is censored. Absolutely. I'll say it's not available, or it's not approved, but I'm not talking about any opposition, opposition against the government in terms of different policies. But for example, I take, for example, genocide ideology or denying the genocide, that's really something that's even for cities and not only the government. The way you phrase it, it's totally comparable to the situation that we have in Germany. However, I sometimes feel that this is sort of judged with two measures. You know, Western countries get to, you know, do that and get away, and a country like Rwanda would be very publicly criticized for it. I think there's a great deal of hypocrisy in reports like the Freedom House report, because for instance, on internet freedom, they don't look at private censorship at all. So the US, where there's mass surveillance, as is there in so many other countries, and the chilling effect that has, that doesn't get counted at all as part of it. The fact that intellectual property rights are being enforced by the government, and the one thing that the US government did, it has seized domain names. At least when the internet was shut down in Egypt or the Great Firewall of China, it's those citizens who are affected within those countries. When the US seizes hundreds of domain names, people all over the world are affected. So I think there's a great deal of hypocrisy in all of this, and not counting private censorship, etc. I just want to make a couple of other points on that issue. One is, I think the governments, that there is a difference between, you know, political censorship by governments, things that are written down in laws, and things that are not societally acceptable. I don't think there should be, there needs to be a one-to-one matching between these two. Okay, I think that some things might be legal even while being completely unacceptable in society, and when someone says it, everyone in society says that is completely unacceptable. We shouldn't be giving those people airtime on national media, etc. Okay, so that is one way of, you know, going about this, nudging by the government. Governments, I think, should nudge people in the right direction, not necessarily restrict people's ability to do things, but nudge them. Okay, and the second point is something I've forgotten, and we'll come back to later. Moesla, like that, judging with two different measures, like upholding ourselves as sort of the apostles of democratic values, and then looking very critically upon the countries, do you think that is something that you feel in your work at the ministry, maybe not specifically that the ministry does this, but other, that you witness other government entities sort of taking that hypocritical position? I think we should not treat digital media as an end in itself. It's a technical tool, and digital freedom is a variant of free expression. Digital participation is a variant of democracy. So, and these are political questions. So, whether you label something hypocritical, I think this is a judgment being trained as a German diplomat, I would not sort of continue the discussion on that level with labeling it. Certainly, we have to walk fine lines between censorship and the control, but certainly we all have a feeling what's right and what's should not be blown out. You're right. I don't want to, I don't want to, but this, I sometimes feel like there's a lot of scale code goating. It's like, oh, there's, oh, the Americans, they survey, boo, everybody else is surveying too, maybe on different scales, but it's very easy to point the finger sometimes, sort of rather than looking inward at your own policy decisions. Well, I see that all the time in India, for instance, where the bogey, for instance, of those American corporations like Facebook and Google and Twitter, they have different values, okay, they aren't respecting our cultural sensitivity, and they aren't, for instance, you know, engaging in the kind of censorship the government wants them to, okay, it's brought up, okay, and I think what isn't done is that they, whether these differences in value actually exist, isn't actually gone into in detail. So there are some culturally specific things. One example would be female fetuses are often aborted in India, okay, and we have regulations on advertising relating to that. I know in Brazil and in India, we have regulations about, around political content, around election time, okay, and those kinds of things, I think there isn't, those can be regulated, I agree completely, but it becomes a bogey very often in saying that they aren't, you know, somehow American free speech doesn't apply here. America has obscenity laws as well. America has all the same problems that other people do too. Election time, that's a great up-and-point. I'd like to get to like maybe some, toward the end of the session, some positive examples of how to deal with these things. Now, I think this is an interesting time, and I'm going to try to do this. So, you know, when that election violence in Kenya 2007, 2008 that we mentioned previously broke out, I heard, you know, the government then also was thinking of shutting down like mobile telephony in different media because they were thinking of the Rwandan example and how the media also contributed to not stopping the genocide, but rather like pushing people toward violence, but it didn't. And one of the reasons was because you guys invented Ushahidi and came in and actually spoke to the government and said, no, we can do something positive with these media instead. And I'm sure all of you know about Ushahidi already, so we're not going to talk about that. But coming back to the example of hate speech and limitations perhaps to freedom of speech, I know that you ran a project in the last elections called Ushagoozie, and maybe you want to talk a little bit and share what that was like. Yeah, sure. So, we have a lot of named types of projects, so everyone has to learn about them, but they're going global, so that's our contribution. So, again, in 2007, 2008 was the first time Kenya was confronted with the fact that there were all these tensions that had been suppressed. And so different players or contributors to this place were identified, but very little was known of the role that new media played. And so when the media was sort of shut down and the mobile telephony was shut down, Ushahidi came up because then they figured there's a way you can connect individuals to tell the story if you map it. And so over time, then again, we reached the 2013 elections or it was oncoming, and no one was still addressing the fact that a lot more people have gotten access to new media. There's a lot of unresolved issues. So we ended up just thinking, okay, let's set up a research monitoring project to better understand what this issue of hateful speech is. And well, acknowledging that technology is just helping people express it. And so, you know, running the project one and a half years on in Kenya, having done pilots in Ethiopia, looking in South Sudan, Myanmar, all over the world right now, what we're finding is in the Kenyan context, for instance, self-regulation is something that is becoming the next stage with freedom of speech or freedom of, you know, whether it was given or you demanded it, you know. So what we found is the government also has realized that this is a value so that they cannot legislate in any way because there are times, like with the ICC case, the citizens actually called up the hypocrisies of any government that was trying to say, you know, if we elect these people, you know, there'll be consequences. And like you said, the journalists who came in waiting for doom and gloom were put in a space squarely by Kenyans, citizens, by the way. But at the same time, citizens are regulating themselves in terms of we cannot go there because we know this is bad. So, you know, it'll be something like, I say something hateful online and other people in the panel me and actually insult me to a point of ridicule or they'll just counter that and drown it. So there's value in actually observing these things. And what we're hoping actually from the Omati project really is to give, contribute to this body of knowledge globally to understand that these are not just technological issues, these are societal issues. You have to address the root problem. It still comes back to who other players who can contribute to actually facilitating the spaces and need to address these problems. Yeah. And then I think we have time to take two, max three questions. Go ahead. So in India, a couple of years ago, we had this same issue where because of a problem with communism, people, 50,000 people left the city of Bangalore for the Northeast, fearing that there would be attacks on them. And this was amongst other things spreading over SMSs and a little bit on social media as well. The government's response in India was to restrict the number of SMSs that could be sent at that time. And I think it was absolutely the wrong response. And they also blocked Twitter accounts, which was completely ineffectual. I've done so on the CI's website, you can find out more about this. But just to quickly point out a contrast, the government of Canada, we had some Canadian interns with us at that point of time, they instead of restricting speech at that point time, they sent out SMSs to, you know, people, Canadians in India, saying, don't believe the rumors that are circulating right now. There might be reports of violence, but actually there aren't many instances of violence. And please don't spread these rumors any further. Okay. And that I think is a fantastic response. And the other point is, what happens in social media is at one level, what happens in writing, etc. In the media is one level. When people gather together, that's the more immediate danger. And there we need much greater amounts of policing. Yes. Hi. My name is Alicia Blasquez. I work for the one campaign, and I'm responsible for our campaigns work in Germany. And thank you for this really interesting panel and discussion. And Twitter is a really important tool for us to communicate about our work, but also to ask questions to the government and different ministries, the development ministry in Germany, but also other ministries. And very often we don't get any response, even when our members tweet at the German ministries, also development ministry. And it's really interesting for me to see that in the developing countries, the so-called, it seems that there is much more progress and it's less a question, more an encouragement to the German government and the development ministry to see whether there is something that you can learn and adapt from our partner countries in Africa and other developing countries. Because very often when I look at the Twitter feeds of the ministries, it looks like it's rather treating out press releases, but not really responding to the citizens. And I think it's a really huge opportunity for citizens to understand the value of the development politics, but also for you to explain better the politics you're doing. So an encouragement from my end. Thank you. Let's have a second intervention. Sorry. Thank you for the talk. What's really nice is here at the moment that we have one on the stage and today they have the most conversational world leaders in diplomacy. And I want to ask a little bit on the higher level when states interact, do you see that for all the participants on the stage? How your leaders are interact on Twitter and do you think it is possible that these interactions between politicians or world leaders are getting more transparent than it is today or in the past? Sorry. So are you asking if Paul Kagame is DMing with Angela Merkel as we're on the panel right now? How do leaders interact via social media? So not just politicians or government with their citizens, but like leaders amongst each other? Well, if I really take the run and case, it's the same way. It's not only the same way they engage with citizens for a variety of issues, both local and global, that's exactly the same way they engage with others. So they're able actually to discuss and to touch a variety of issues online using social media. What is it like in the ministry? Do you use social media activity within the ministry, also with other government ministries, also with other ministries and partner countries that you're perhaps collaborating with to communicate? Well, that might be an idea, but thank you very much for the constructive criticism. There's always room for improvement and certainly we can learn from our partner countries and they can learn from us. Yes, it's a mutual thing. I'm not a subject matter expert on this. I see some of these communications happening. I prefer things that are in the public rather than in DMs, etc., even if that might help because I want to be able to have right to information requests and get them out. But there is a resource called TWIPLOMACY that some folks are running and which does analysis on precisely this. So you might find that interesting if you haven't already heard about it. That's great. I'm going to ask a closing question and I don't want to put any of you on the spot, but I'd like to finish the panel by asking all of you three things. A, what would be your looking at the future of digital media and governance? What is your, this is a little bit of a platitude, but I thought it was going to work, your biggest hope in the way, you know, the potentials of this and perhaps also your biggest fear, what is the risk of doing this? And since it's about mutual learning, maybe one thing that you've learned from each other during the session that you're going to take away or during the day that you're going to take away and think about. I know you're good with being put on the spot because you were put on the spot to speak on the main stage today. So I know you're always good at that. Okay, so very quickly. I just really hope for the Kenyan context that we start practicing the theories of democracy that we say exist in our country. So people get to finally not just say that the constitution guarantees your right to freedom. They practice it out and it becomes a thing that goes beyond a paper. Biggest fear of that is it's going to unify a lot of problems, a lot of deep seated historical issues and that has been happening and there's somewhat out in the open and we don't know how to reconcile them. On mutual learning, really, that's where the point of research and why I do the kind of research I do comes in because then we can share these bodies of knowledge and not necessarily in report format. It's in forums such as these that then we can talk. I have learned about Canadian Embassy actually doing something very interesting around countering rumors, something that we are studying right now and wondering what's the role of even foreign presence in your country in countering rumors at a time when panics, you know, terror threats are going around. So yeah, I've learned something from I think everybody. It's perfect. Thank you. Do you want to go next? Sure. In terms of what I fear, one that the issue I already mentioned about, we already discussed about digital and data divides and too much hope being placed in technology and especially centralized technologies, things like and closed gardens like Facebook, et cetera, which I think are tremendously bad idea yet that's where the people are right now and so we have to create alternatives. So one is that's the fear. Okay. In terms of hope, I think the eventual crumbling away of the negative connotations of bureaucracy, I think that would be a good thing if more direct interactions are possible. I work with many bureaucrats and politicians and I have to admit I'm very impressed by most of them, much more than the general, you know, population who think that bureaucracy is like hitting your head up against a brick wall. I haven't found that to be my experience, but I actually take the step to go to their offices and talk to them. Okay. If more people could actually have these direct interactions, I think that might be a good result. Mutual learnings, I think, Nanjir did a good answer for me. So I'll... All right. Didi, how about you? I think for the random context, but not only for Randa, also for Africa where we have more and more people being connected, we... I think that's something that we want to continue to emulate, not only for us, but as I say on the continent level, having more and more engagement with the people, allowing people actually to share their view, contribute to shaping the policies and building our future. I think that's something that we believe should be the next and should continue. And also being able actually to engage, to bring the contribution. So we also learning. It's not that we've got somewhere where we cannot learn. We're still learning also from other countries, but always improving governance. So I think digital media will really continue to be a tool. I'd actually like to just pay a compliment to the Grandi's government as a leader in this space that you're setting an example. So it's almost like the world is also watching. So... What is my hope for the digital future of governments? I wish that governments become more accountable and enhance democratic participation and become faster. And what I've learned from this panel is that with my sister from Kenya, I can talk Kiswahili. Beautiful. All right, everybody. I think that's a wrap for this panel. Could I get a big round of applause for this great round of speakers? Okay. Thank you so much. Before I let you go, I just want to make a couple of announcements. And I mean, you're free to go, but you're free to keep company on stage too. So it's nicer when you're not alone. First of all, I'd like you to give like a really big shout out to a fantastic Nigeria who did such a great job monitoring the stage today. You're awesome. So as I said earlier, this was the last session of this year's Global Innovation Gathering. And I just really want to say a very sincere thank you to all the people who made this possible. First of all, I'd really like to say thank you to our enablers, the GICED and BMCED, for being such great supporters and making this happen. I would specifically like to thank that man right there, Christiane Maline, for being just the best person to work with. And Sebastian Herod and his entire team, everybody sitting here. Jill, thank you. You were amazing. Of course, thank you also to Hef Fisher, who's in the front row there and his team from BMCED. And thank you to our partners who made this happen. And this is quite, I'm going to walk over here. We printed this little logo. It's going to make my life easier. I want to say a big thank you to Afri Labs for joining us with their entire network. I want to say thank you to FounderBus. I want to say thank you to Africa Hacktrip. And I want to say thank you to the AfriMakers team and Icebowl House, AfriMakers team, Rock the Innovation Maker Space this year. All great people. And I really hope I haven't forgotten anyone who would like to thank all of our fantastic participants. You are such great people. Throughout the whole last week, whenever there was a problem or an issue, somebody already fixed it before I even had time to take care of it. Like, amazing. Give yourselves a big round of applause. And I want to thank the two people without whom I could have never done any of this. So thank you, Gary. And thank you, Max. You are just the best. And with that, I would like you to ask you all to join us now for our closing session of Republica 2014. I really hope to see you all back for Republica 2015. And I also really hope that we get to do a global innovation gathering of Republica 2015 next year. And yeah, I think that's a wrap.
 A few opening words.  My name is Geraldine.  I'm part of the Republican program management team and also put together the Global Innovation  Gathering together with the help of many great people this year.  And this is the final session that we're going to have as the Global Innovation Gathering.  We've been having great talks outside in the trailer for the last days where we've had  a lot of micro talks from all the fantastic people who joined from all over the world  this year.  We've been making fantastic things at the maker space and this last day of Republica  we have been fitting the stage six with a number of really great sessions and I'm very  proud to be moderating the final one.  We had a session this morning already which is also kindly co-organized by the Ministry  for Economic Corporation and Development and this last session is also organized by the  Ministry and the first session we had this morning focused on freedom of speech, the  digital media being used by different activists around the world and now we're going to kind  of turn that around and look at the government perspective of things.  So this session has the title Hello Government, Better Governance in 140 Characters and we  are going to be discussing how governments around the world are using digital media for  political participation and communication with their citizens and the ups and the downsides  that has.  Now I'm going to sit down and introduce my wonderful panelists to you.  I'm very proud to welcome from the Ministry of Economic Corporation and Development, Ms.  Ozula Mula who has a background in human rights.  Before she joined the BMC she was working at the Foreign Ministry and has extensive  background on these topic matters and is now head of the department for basic questions  and policy questions in the bilateral development communication at the Ministry.  Welcome.  Next to her maybe you just saw him give a great speech on our stage one.  Very, very happy to have with us Pranesh Parakash who is the policy director at the Center  for Internet and Society and yes we're really happy to have you here and thanks so much  for doing two talks back to back.  And Didier has kindly joined us.  I'm so sorry I'm usually really good.  I've learned a lot of really long last names.  Nekuri Ifun Furah.  Okay.  You tried?  Yes I tried.  Well thank you for bearing with me and I'm really, really happy that you could join us  today.  Didier is the director general in charge of the ICT Ministry of Youth and ICT in Rwanda,  a country that's really taking very great steps in this topic matter so I'm very glad  you can be with us today.  And I think as a kind of guest appearance panelist I'm going to ask the fantastic Nanjira  Sambudi who's doing great research on eGovernment's matters at the IHUB to join us in the course  of this discussion and kind of make a fish ball out of it.  So with that I'd like to kick off in the topic matter with just a little story.  So I was in Rwanda last year and I had the honor of meeting the minister of ICT and youth  and I had great friends in Rwanda who helped me organize this meeting but just before the  meeting I wanted to make sure this was happening and I sent him a tweet and he responded within  minutes and after the interview the same thing happened.  I sent a tweet saying man this was such a great interview, you're a great person and  I got a response within seconds basically.  I was so impressed with this.  I actually said to him in the interview he had, I really wish there was more of this  kind of direct political communication culture in Germany.  And usually you say that many of the governments and countries that I travel to meet have a  kind of more open attitude towards this than we do in Germany.  Now yesterday you sent a tweet to the head of the development group within the German  parliament, Dagmar Wehr, who was supposed to meet this morning and what happened next?  Yeah, I forgot for a minute that I have the mic with me.  Well we just tweeted in anticipation of today's meeting and in a matter of few minutes we got  also the response from her and I was actually very pleased to see also that the same trend  which is happening in Rwanda is also, it's not only a Rwandan thing, it's happening everywhere.  So I can provide a contrast if maybe.  So recently at the World Intellectual Property Organization there were discussions going  on about things that I follow and I was unhappy about the position being taken by the Kenyan  government and I was having a discussion with another Kenyan scholar about it and you know  we tweeted at IP Kenya and I found out within half an hour they responded to what we were  saying by not only replying to us on Twitter but by actually going to a senior official  who's negotiating it at the World Intellectual Property Organization, getting her response  and you know pasting that on Twitter for us and I thought that was fantastic and by contrast  the Indian government, the responsible organizations, the responsible departments aren't even on  Twitter.  Well, Pranesh and DD, I'm very honored to be here on the panel with you and I take up  our moderator's question that she would like to be more in contact with the government  and you might be surprised to learn that the Ministry of Economic Cooperation Development  has the third strongest presence of the German government so you're welcome to follow us  on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Google+.  And the example of Rwanda is impressive.  Why do you think that is?  I mean please don't take this the wrong way but you would expect ministries who are in  charge for instance of internet questions in Germany to sort of lead the way when it comes  to using these media to get into a dialogue about the things they're meant to be taking  care of like building up our infrastructure and making policy decisions about net political  questions.  So how come the DM set is the strongest one in the bunch?  Well, if we work together with our developing partners we have to be a thread-sitter and  I think in our cooperation with developing countries they have to find their own ways  but we can certainly be of assistance and support their decisions and in the new government  agreement.  So the inspiration from abroad is kind of bringing the ministry to the front of the political  bunch.  That's an interesting take.  So where does the inspiration come from?  Maybe you can explain to us a little bit about the political culture in Rwanda and why the  government has taken such a strong stance to use specifically Twitter also to reach  out to citizens.  I think from the run-in perspective the leadership, the top leadership vary from the very early  stages got really engaged and even gave the direction.  If I go back the last 13 years our leadership that's already back in the year 2000 had already  a clear understanding, a clear vision of where they want to move Rwanda and there was a succession  of investments, a succession of decisions made already during that time in terms of putting  the infrastructure.  That's where we made most of our investment in terms of fiber-optic connecting all the  corners of the country but also a strong desire to connect to the citizens.  And how come Twitter, like why is the government so strong?  Maybe you want to say a little bit like I learned for instance your health ministry has  like an official tweet up where they answer questions about health.  There are all these stories of like well I had a problem so I just send the president  a tweet and then he fixed it and it just seems a bit too good to be true.  So why was specifically this social network chosen?  I know it sounds too good to be true but it is true.  Starting from the example you just gave from the president of the republic is among the  few leaders who manage himself his own account.  Normally you have politicians most of the time they have an office in charge of communication  managing the account of the president but he is the one himself managing his account.  So I've met a lot of people who just tried to tweet and then got excited because they  realized actually the president replied to them directly.  So this is a model of governance where government want to be a little bit more close to the  citizens listening to the citizens and also it's the whole effort of being more transparent  more open but also be more accountable to the constituents.  So I kind of want to pick up on that because another thing the minister said when I was  interviewing him is that the tweet is more important.  It's more important maybe than a phone call or an email because it's out in the public  domain.  That raises a critical question though especially when we're looking at these media and developing  contexts.  Same I think they would apply to Germany because not all people have access to these media.  So where does that leave the rest of the people who are not sending tweets?  How are their voices being heard?  So that's something that we have to send for Internet Society when around three years ago  almost now when the Indian government was developing its social media guidelines for  central government.  At that point we pointed out that we have to be very careful that Twitter and social  media and Facebook and all these things aren't given preference over those who are actually  traveling from their villages to go see their parliamentarians or those who are actually  engaging in offline protests because after all only around 10% of the Indian population  has Internet access.  Of course that might make us in a little bit of time the third largest Internet population  in the world.  But it's still not a large part of the Indian population that has good access to the Internet  still.  And to give one concrete example that came up recently rather than just this fear, in  the US they did a big data review recently and they found that there was this app that  a municipality in the US was using to detect where there were potholes in the road.  So people could download that app and the municipality would appropriately respond except  and this is perhaps we expected it was mainly richer people who were downloading those apps,  mobile phones and what ended up happening was that the resources of the government were  being diverted to the elite rather than being spent as it otherwise was.  So that's an important concern that we have to keep in mind while encouraging accountability  and direct communication, etc.  I would be interested on your take on this too, the question of the digital divide, A,  when it comes to designing partnership programs with other governments but also how you think  that applies to the German context?  Well, ICT has a great potential for good governance.  But I agree with you that there is a danger of an increased imbalance between those who  have access and those who don't have access.  And to be connected is one thing but to be capable of using social media is another.  So capacity building I think is at hand.  And you have to take into consideration local communication and consumption habits and the  cultural context, societal context.  Of course there isn't some rural areas, maybe there is a high density of cell phones and  you can send an SMS, there is a pothole and maybe it is fixed but the tool itself, I mean  the social media is just a tool, it's neither good nor bad but it still depends on decisions  that are taken after the message is sent on whichever way to the decision maker.  I would like maybe to just to add a little bit on the Rwandan context again.  Not everyone has a smartphone in Rwanda.  We have people who have very basic phones, they can only send text.  So on case by case and depending on the level of penetration of ICT, the level of literacy,  there is always a way when there is political will to actually engage with the constituents.  For our case for example we have one day by the constitution where the president with  the parliament and the leaders engage with the citizen for two days.  So what happens is it's live on TV, people can text, can tweet, can use Facebook, any  other means to be able to engage.  This meeting is chaired by the president himself and it's increased the level of accountability  because any question can come anywhere and it's on the public domain.  So this is, I just wanted to give an example of less sophisticated methods actually to  engage with the citizen and it works.  And Jera I brought you up on stage because I know you have a whole lot to say on this  topic matter.  And in our pre-discussion we had, I picked up this example from Kenya which I read about  late last year.  You had, or its ongoing process of land reform in Kenya.  And cabinet secretary of Kenya said we're specifically looking at social media like  Facebook and Twitter to listen to what citizens have to say and on that basis make demands  based policy decisions.  Now this question of land reform is one that specifically also addresses people in rural  areas and so that question of the digital disconnect, I was wondering like, you know,  this may sound great, you know, it's a great press release but what does that actually  mean to people?  Right, Kenya.  So it was a nice sounding thing that did not even take off even with what is already  there and what's already organized.  And I tend to think of the issue of the digital divide really just as a translation of what  has already been happening pre-technology in natural divides, right?  So technology is not going to be the panacea.  And so even if it's only certain people in certain economic, you know, sort of capabilities,  spaces that have access now, it doesn't mean that they are not citizens either.  And also, exactly, and also what happens is as more and more people see, and I've seen  this in Kenya where a lot more people see that, you know, they're watching the news  and there's this whole thing about, you know, Tweet and Facebook, they drive the demand  to get access.  So that also translates to political will, it translates to economic opportunities.  So I tend to think of it as a way that for what is already there, we have to make it  work.  We're not going to get to a point where everybody, there's universal access and then it starts  to make sense.  So in the case of the land's policy thing, we don't know if that even happened.  It's something that is not as well thought out as the random case, but we are trying  to get our governments to sort of realize with the difference being in Kenya, citizen  media usage has been preceded by government's will to use these spaces.  And so it was really just something that sounded nice for campaigning to say, you know, this  will be a digital government.  And so now they have, they're now being forced to get to a point where, okay, we have to  walk the talk.  They have no idea yet.  And I know they keep saying, you know, they'll follow the random example.  So that's just a basic overview.  Why don't you respond to that?  No, and along with, I completely agree in Nigeria that the idea of the digital divide,  it might seem like one yet another thing, but in many ways it actually mirrors the kinds  of divides that already exist in terms of, you know, what languages you're comfortable  with in terms of, you know, your capability of actually using the, not just the technologies  and having access to technologies, but using it effectively as a form of, you know, petitioning  the government, et cetera.  So if you don't speak the necessary language, if you don't, you know, have the ability to  crunch the big data that they're putting out in form of open data and to make effective  use of it.  There are all these kinds of things which mirror existing gaps and divides, and it's  not just a matter of pure access or economics.  And then again, to the, oh, you have, you already have a discussion.  I'll take my questions.  I feel our discussion focuses on the people, but how about the people in government?  They have also to be able to respond to the tweets and the emails.  So we have to do some capacity building and some, they have to be, how can the capacity  be so much higher to use?  Otherwise there is no correspondence, sir, between the government and the citizens.  I totally agree.  But again, then I wonder how come the, you know, the capacity seems to be so much higher  to use these technologies in the run and government.  If I may give an example, and I don't know if this is Trin Ronda, it tends to be an age  thing as well.  And that's we, so like Kenyan government.  Aware of the fact that I'm known as a panel.  No, no, no.  And I don't mean that in that way.  I've seen this flaunted as a, and I think it's not, it's not a justifiable excuse,  it's a pretty good one that you can put off as a smokescreen, that it's only the young  people.  And so, you know, we are all in the government, and I don't mean this like in Germany, I've  seen this in Kenya where they're like, give us a chance.  We're dawned, you know, you young people with your, you know, your things.  And so, and I'm like, no, it's not about that.  It's all about communication.  And it's really going back to the idea of what technology is here to do.  It is not the pernicious.  It is here to enhance those skills that we're supposed to really have in effect.  In India, you could say that politicians are making much better use of social media slowly,  and it's, you know, being ramped up.  But they're doing that to a much greater extent than the government.  And within the government, it's interesting to see what kinds of things are really embracing  social media.  So, the traffic police, they've embraced social media big time in multiple cities.  And it raises some, you know, some privacy concerns.  They're tweeting out the license numbers, et cetera, of, you know, people caught speeding  and asking for help in, you know, catching some vehicle and all kinds of things.  So some privacy concerns are raised there.  But it's very interesting to see who are embracing it and who aren't within government.  So do you have like terribly young or terribly capable?  Like what do you do with your government leaders to make them happen?  I sometimes wonder also whether it's a little bit of like, you know, after the total devastation  basically of your country, the idea of having to reinvent yourself 20 years ago, pretty  much the same time where the internet became mainstream and also perhaps in Africa, something  that could be foreseeable, an economic force.  Do you think that has anything to do with it?  It's actually a mix of several things.  I mentioned initially, first of all, this strong political will to be meaningful, not  only to, you know, not only become a leader and forget this contact with the people.  In fact, from the very beginning, Randa is always, after the 1994 genocide, our leaders  have always tried to be as much as possible close to the citizen.  That's quite normal, especially after what happened in 1994.  But also, it's all technology, any new technology, there's always that fear.  And the more, of course, you grow, the more you are more fearful to embrace technology.  I think it's being bold, it's about leadership, it's about leading by example.  Once for example, the president started tweeting himself, well, the prime minister realized  that he has to tweet.  The minister has started to tweet.  The police, the...  So it's leading by example, huh?  It's actually leading by example.  Yeah.  I have a question for the other panelists, which is, when I look at how people are interacting  with those in power, whether it's the government, you know, departments and officials or politicians,  a lot of the comments they get are venomous, hateful, are not constructive in the least.  And it's not as though these people are in a position to just keep blocking everyone  who they don't want, because they have to take inputs from everyone, right?  So how can we expect governments to, you know, negotiate the space where it's not polite  conversation.  It's not, you know, a space where people raise their hands and are called and engage in meaningful  discussion necessarily.  What are governments to do?  What do you do with your Rwandan trolls?  I think that's where actually freedom of expression is.  You will not always have necessarily very good or encouraging conversation.  They are good.  It's actually just a translation of how this world is.  So everyone is free to express what they think.  And it's really up to you to take the constructive part and to build on it.  And anything that is not helpful, you try to understand why.  And if you find that there is no reason and there is no, you can, well, in that case,  you just put it aside and you move on.  So it's really about opening to everyone the opportunity to talk to the government.  Actually, you are posing the question, what government does a digital society need?  On one hand, it has to be open and democratic enough to respond to the citizens' rising  expectations.  But on the other hand, it has to be strong enough to protect the people against abuse.  So I think this is a balance that has to be stroke and stricken, whatever.  English is not my native language.  That's why it's also important that in the countries themselves, there is some sort  of a system in place, a judiciary system that sort of sets the frame to operate in.  Very glad we've transitioned a little bit.  And this has been very good.  You've already touched on the topic of freedom.  So I want to pick up on some of the topics that were raised in the panel that we had  discussing that question.  And yeah, so maybe just start with a Kenyan example on that when I was in Kenya last,  which is, of course, one of the examples people uphold for being a strong democracy in East  Africa, despite what happened in the 2007, 2008 elections, last elections, maybe you  can tell that funny story too, when the world was watching for violence to break out again,  like, oh, is it going to have everything went really, really well.  However, there seems to be a lot of restrictions from the government when it comes to freedom  of speech in many ways.  And when I was there, a law was just passed where you told me it was actually passed by  a parliament too, which is, for instance, restricting press freedom and the way that  journalists, like really cracking down on journalists and making them personally liable  for things that they wrote.  So there's a bit of a, like, a vividly, perhaps, how these social media and other technologies  are being pushed to be used for, like, people speaking out and sharing their voice, and  then cracking down on that with policy on the other hand.  And nowhere more peculiar than in Kenya for that.  So just starting to what was just raised earlier about freedom of speech, we always say it  also includes the right to offend, right, but then it becomes very tricky when the offense  is taken personally by an individual who sits in a capacity of a government position or a  political position. And in a place like Kenya, it's a democracy pretty much in transition.  It's, there's a lot of pressure to flaunt it as this democracy that is strong, which is not  entirely true. It's really a country that has just passed a constitution that yes has a bill of  rights, but it's not been exercised yet. So you find spaces like social media are actually helping  in sort of like testing out that space. But what's really interesting is as well,  as governments and I mean as people attack governments, service providers and whatnot,  there's over time a mechanism of self-regulation so that we have to finally move from just making  noise to collectively organizing our voices towards something. So I think just to pick up on that  point, I think the issue of trolls and the issue of freedom of speeches, they sometimes are,  they overlap, but sometimes they're also orthogonal. So on the point of freedom of expression,  in India, I think India presents a very interesting case study. The, the Center for Internet and  Society have been criticizing some of the laws that have been putting put in place in India for a  long while since 2008. Yet when it actually hit the, you know, mainstream media was when  two girls from Mumbai, when a politician had died and the entire city was more or less shut down  because of that. And, you know, one girl said, you know, we should pay our respects to him,  but I don't see why threats of wildness should be used to shut down an entire city this way.  And another girl, her friend, and both of them teenagers, like, you know, liked that comment.  And that became a criminal case. They were arrested. And there was a national outcry about  this. And that is the moment where the fact that the laws we have in India are horrific on this  issue actually came to light because of Facebook. And, and so that, and since then there have been  some more cases. And I think that presents an interesting fact about the, in a sense, the  power of Facebook. People start asking questions about if I post something on Facebook, can I  become criminally liable? Because that's not something they really have thought about. I,  as a lawyer, keep thinking about these kinds of things. But I'm not like, you know, in a, in a,  in a kind of exceptional position. People really feel that immediacy when it comes to social media.  Right. And again, perhaps a lot to do with, you know, policy, not always being on top of the times.  And, and a lot of these things still being in debate. But whilst we're on the topic of free  speech and, you know, where, where does the right to hear the other opinion end? I want to bring  up a specific kind of point about internet censorship, because I think it's quite an interesting  round of nationalities that we have gathered on the panel to speak about this. Now, I, I sometimes  get stick from like friends from America that say here in Germany, you know, their number one value  freedom of speech is really not something that we consider quite so highly. But the, the right of  the safety and the dignity of the individual person in Germany is rated higher. So in Germany, we  censor the internet too, which has to do with our history and our political culture that we have  here, which is for instance that we censor right wing, a Nazi in Holocaust related content.  And, and there may still be, you know, good reasons, or there are many good reasons for doing that,  that from our political perspective. Do you ever get approached with that issue that Germany is  also a country censoring the internet and how we sort of argue why we get to do that for the things  that we censor? No. Oh, okay. I mean, there might be historical and cultural sensitivities in  different countries, but I personally was never approached with a question why you don't tolerate  Nazi propaganda. I would be interested to ask you the same question. Runder also  censors the internet if you want. If you read the internet freedom house report,  it becomes quite clear there what kind of content you censor, which is content related  to the genocide. Do you ever get asked that question why Rwanda censors the internet?  Personally, no. But here maybe I can talk as a citizen of Rwanda. We have quite a particular  context. What happened to Rwanda was it's still very fresh in the life of people.  Twenty years ago, we had one of the worst genocide that happened in the world,  and it's affected the whole tissue of the society that needed to be rebuilt from scratch. And our  leaders invested a lot into reconciliation and unity. And it's a building process. We have people  who still have the scars of the genocide. You can see that. They live with it. Those are people who  had families completely wiped out. And I think our concession is very straightforward in terms  of freedom of speech and freedom of association and freedom of information. But on the other side,  and we want to have a new Rwanda which is not based on ethnicity as it used to be before the  genocide that's led to the genocide, where people were promoting, first of all, what is different.  The government back then, which was in power, was promoting the difference between the people  as a political tool. Today, the new Rwanda is not based on ethnicity. It's not based on who is who.  It's about opportunities, equal opportunities for everyone. And as for any genocide, any genocide  that happened in the world, there are also, of course, genocide deniers who will say, for example,  that it never happened. I'm sure in any part of the world it is the case. And as long as this  freedom doesn't affect the unity, the cohesion of the people, I think that's actually, I'll say,  even a dangerous fruit when people can start using this. And here I'm talking as myself.  The unity for us is more important than actually the differences.  So that's why, for instance, content that is very critical, oppositional, which goes against the  current policies of the government on this specific topic matter, or that you said, like,  genocide denying content is censored. Absolutely. I'll say it's not available,  or it's not approved, but I'm not talking about any opposition, opposition against the government  in terms of different policies. But for example, I take, for example, genocide ideology or denying  the genocide, that's really something that's even for cities and not only the government.  The way you phrase it, it's totally comparable to the situation that we have in Germany. However,  I sometimes feel that this is sort of judged with two measures. You know, Western countries get to,  you know, do that and get away, and a country like Rwanda would be very publicly criticized for it.  I think there's a great deal of hypocrisy in reports like the Freedom House report,  because for instance, on internet freedom, they don't look at private censorship at all.  So the US, where there's mass surveillance, as is there in so many other countries,  and the chilling effect that has, that doesn't get counted at all as part of it.  The fact that intellectual property rights are being enforced by the government, and the one thing  that the US government did, it has seized domain names. At least when the internet was shut down  in Egypt or the Great Firewall of China, it's those citizens who are affected within those  countries. When the US seizes hundreds of domain names, people all over the world are affected.  So I think there's a great deal of hypocrisy in all of this, and not counting private censorship,  etc. I just want to make a couple of other points on that issue. One is, I think the governments,  that there is a difference between, you know, political censorship by governments,  things that are written down in laws, and things that are not societally acceptable.  I don't think there should be, there needs to be a one-to-one matching between these two.  Okay, I think that some things might be legal even while being completely unacceptable in society,  and when someone says it, everyone in society says that is completely unacceptable. We shouldn't  be giving those people airtime on national media, etc. Okay, so that is one way of, you know, going  about this, nudging by the government. Governments, I think, should nudge people in the right direction,  not necessarily restrict people's ability to do things, but nudge them. Okay, and the second  point is something I've forgotten, and we'll come back to later.  Moesla, like that, judging with two different measures, like upholding ourselves as sort of the  apostles of democratic values, and then looking very critically upon the countries,  do you think that is something that you feel in your work at the ministry, maybe not specifically  that the ministry does this, but other, that you witness other government entities sort of taking that  hypocritical position?  I think we should not treat digital media as an end in itself. It's a technical tool,  and digital freedom is a variant of free expression. Digital participation is a variant of democracy.  So, and these are political questions. So, whether you label something hypocritical,  I think this is a judgment being trained as a German diplomat, I would not sort of  continue the discussion on that level with labeling it. Certainly, we have to walk fine lines  between censorship and the control, but certainly we all have a feeling what's right and what's  should not be blown out. You're right. I don't want to, I don't want to,  but this, I sometimes feel like there's a lot of scale code goating. It's like, oh, there's,  oh, the Americans, they survey, boo, everybody else is surveying too, maybe on different scales,  but it's very easy to point the finger sometimes, sort of rather than looking inward at your own policy  decisions.  Well, I see that all the time in India, for instance, where the bogey, for instance, of  those American corporations like Facebook and Google and Twitter, they have different values,  okay, they aren't respecting our cultural sensitivity, and they aren't, for instance,  you know, engaging in the kind of censorship the government wants them to, okay, it's brought up,  okay, and I think what isn't done is that they, whether these differences in value actually exist,  isn't actually gone into in detail. So there are some culturally specific things. One example would  be female fetuses are often aborted in India, okay, and we have regulations on advertising  relating to that. I know in Brazil and in India, we have regulations about, around political content,  around election time, okay, and those kinds of things, I think there isn't, those can be regulated,  I agree completely, but it becomes a bogey very often in saying that they aren't, you know,  somehow American free speech doesn't apply here. America has obscenity laws as well. America has  all the same problems that other people do too. Election time, that's a great up-and-point. I'd like  to get to like maybe some, toward the end of the session, some positive examples of how to deal with  these things. Now, I think this is an interesting time, and I'm going to try to do this. So, you  know, when that election violence in Kenya 2007, 2008 that we mentioned previously broke out,  I heard, you know, the government then also was thinking of shutting down like mobile telephony  in different media because they were thinking of the Rwandan example and how the media also  contributed to not stopping the genocide, but rather like pushing people toward violence,  but it didn't. And one of the reasons was because you guys invented Ushahidi and came in and actually  spoke to the government and said, no, we can do something positive with these media instead.  And I'm sure all of you know about Ushahidi already, so we're not going to talk about that. But  coming back to the example of hate speech and limitations perhaps to freedom of speech,  I know that you ran a project in the last elections called Ushagoozie, and maybe you want  to talk a little bit and share what that was like. Yeah, sure. So, we have a lot of named types of  projects, so everyone has to learn about them, but they're going global, so that's our contribution.  So, again, in 2007, 2008 was the first time Kenya was confronted with the fact that there were  all these tensions that had been suppressed. And so different players or contributors to this place  were identified, but very little was known of the role that new media played. And so when the media  was sort of shut down and the mobile telephony was shut down, Ushahidi came up because then they  figured there's a way you can connect individuals to tell the story if you map it. And so over time,  then again, we reached the 2013 elections or it was oncoming, and no one was still addressing the  fact that a lot more people have gotten access to new media. There's a lot of unresolved issues.  So we ended up just thinking, okay, let's set up a research monitoring project to better understand  what this issue of hateful speech is. And well, acknowledging that technology is just helping  people express it. And so, you know, running the project one and a half years on in Kenya,  having done pilots in Ethiopia, looking in South Sudan, Myanmar, all over the world right now,  what we're finding is in the Kenyan context, for instance,  self-regulation is something that is becoming the next stage with freedom of speech or freedom of,  you know, whether it was given or you demanded it, you know. So what we found is the government  also has realized that this is a value so that they cannot legislate in any way because there are  times, like with the ICC case, the citizens actually called up the hypocrisies of any government that  was trying to say, you know, if we elect these people, you know, there'll be consequences. And  like you said, the journalists who came in waiting for doom and gloom were put in a space squarely  by Kenyans, citizens, by the way. But at the same time, citizens are regulating themselves in terms  of we cannot go there because we know this is bad. So, you know, it'll be something like,  I say something hateful online and other people in the panel me and actually insult me to a point  of ridicule or they'll just counter that and drown it. So there's value in actually observing these  things. And what we're hoping actually from the Omati project really is to give, contribute to  this body of knowledge globally to understand that these are not just technological issues,  these are societal issues. You have to address the root problem. It still comes back to who  other players who can contribute to actually facilitating the spaces and need to address  these problems. Yeah. And then I think we have time to take two, max three questions. Go ahead.  So in India, a couple of years ago, we had this same issue where because of a problem with  communism, people, 50,000 people left the city of Bangalore for the Northeast, fearing that there  would be attacks on them. And this was amongst other things spreading over SMSs and a little bit on  social media as well. The government's response in India was to restrict the number of SMSs that  could be sent at that time. And I think it was absolutely the wrong response. And they also  blocked Twitter accounts, which was completely ineffectual. I've done so on the CI's website,  you can find out more about this. But just to quickly point out a contrast, the government of  Canada, we had some Canadian interns with us at that point of time, they instead of restricting  speech at that point time, they sent out SMSs to, you know, people, Canadians in India, saying,  don't believe the rumors that are circulating right now. There might be reports of violence,  but actually there aren't many instances of violence. And please don't spread these rumors  any further. Okay. And that I think is a fantastic response. And the other point is,  what happens in social media is at one level, what happens in writing, etc. In the media is one  level. When people gather together, that's the more immediate danger. And there we need much  greater amounts of policing. Yes. Hi. My name is Alicia Blasquez. I work for the one campaign,  and I'm responsible for our campaigns work in Germany. And thank you for this really interesting  panel and discussion. And Twitter is a really important tool for us to communicate about our  work, but also to ask questions to the government and different ministries, the development ministry  in Germany, but also other ministries. And very often we don't get any response, even when our  members tweet at the German ministries, also development ministry. And it's really interesting  for me to see that in the developing countries, the so-called, it seems that there is much more  progress and it's less a question, more an encouragement to the German government and the  development ministry to see whether there is something that you can learn and adapt from  our partner countries in Africa and other developing countries. Because very often when I  look at the Twitter feeds of the ministries, it looks like it's rather treating out press releases,  but not really responding to the citizens. And I think it's a really huge opportunity for citizens  to understand the value of the development politics, but also for you to explain better the  politics you're doing. So an encouragement from my end. Thank you. Let's have a second intervention.  Sorry. Thank you for the talk. What's really nice is here at the moment that we have one on the  stage and today they have the most conversational world leaders in diplomacy. And I want to ask  a little bit on the higher level when states interact, do you see that for all the participants  on the stage? How your leaders are interact on Twitter and do you think it is possible that  these interactions between politicians or world leaders are getting more transparent than it is  today or in the past? Sorry. So are you asking if Paul Kagame is DMing with Angela Merkel as we're  on the panel right now? How do leaders interact via social media? So not just politicians or  government with their citizens, but like leaders amongst each other? Well, if I really take the  run and case, it's the same way. It's not only the same way they engage with citizens for a variety  of issues, both local and global, that's exactly the same way they engage with others. So they're  able actually to discuss and to touch a variety of issues online using social media. What is it like  in the ministry? Do you use social media activity within the ministry, also with other government  ministries, also with other ministries and partner countries that you're perhaps collaborating with  to communicate? Well, that might be an idea, but thank you very much for the constructive criticism.  There's always room for improvement and certainly we can learn from our partner countries and they  can learn from us. Yes, it's a mutual thing. I'm not a subject matter expert on this. I see some  of these communications happening. I prefer things that are in the public rather than in DMs, etc.,  even if that might help because I want to be able to have right to information requests and get them  out. But there is a resource called TWIPLOMACY that some folks are running and which does analysis  on precisely this. So you might find that interesting if you haven't already heard about it.  That's great. I'm going to ask a closing question and I don't want to put any of you on the spot,  but I'd like to finish the panel by asking all of you three things. A, what would be your looking  at the future of digital media and governance? What is your, this is a little bit of a  platitude, but I thought it was going to work, your biggest hope in the way, you know, the  potentials of this and perhaps also your biggest fear, what is the risk of doing this? And since  it's about mutual learning, maybe one thing that you've learned from each other during the session  that you're going to take away or during the day that you're going to take away and think about.  I know you're good with being put on the spot because you were put on the spot to speak on  the main stage today. So I know you're always good at that. Okay, so very quickly. I just really  hope for the Kenyan context that we start practicing the theories of democracy that we say exist in  our country. So people get to finally not just say that the constitution guarantees your right to  freedom. They practice it out and it becomes a thing that goes beyond a paper. Biggest fear of  that is it's going to unify a lot of problems, a lot of deep seated historical issues and that has  been happening and there's somewhat out in the open and we don't know how to reconcile them.  On mutual learning, really, that's where the point of research and why I do the kind of  research I do comes in because then we can share these bodies of knowledge and not necessarily  in report format. It's in forums such as these that then we can talk. I have learned about  Canadian Embassy actually doing something very interesting around countering rumors,  something that we are studying right now and wondering what's the role of even foreign  presence in your country in countering rumors at a time when panics,  you know, terror threats are going around. So yeah, I've learned something from I think everybody.  It's perfect. Thank you. Do you want to go next? Sure. In terms of what I fear, one that the issue  I already mentioned about, we already discussed about digital and data divides and too much hope  being placed in technology and especially centralized technologies, things like and closed  gardens like Facebook, et cetera, which I think are tremendously bad idea yet that's where the  people are right now and so we have to create alternatives. So one is that's the fear. Okay.  In terms of hope, I think the eventual crumbling away of the negative connotations of bureaucracy,  I think that would be a good thing if more direct interactions are possible. I work with many  bureaucrats and politicians and I have to admit I'm very impressed by most of them,  much more than the general, you know, population who think that bureaucracy is like hitting your  head up against a brick wall. I haven't found that to be my experience, but I actually take  the step to go to their offices and talk to them. Okay. If more people could actually have these  direct interactions, I think that might be a good result. Mutual learnings, I think,  Nanjir did a good answer for me. So I'll... All right. Didi, how about you? I think for the  random context, but not only for Randa, also for Africa where we have more and more people being  connected, we... I think that's something that we want to continue to emulate, not only for us,  but as I say on the continent level, having more and more engagement with the people,  allowing people actually to share their view, contribute to shaping the policies and building  our future. I think that's something that we believe should be the next and should continue.  And also being able actually to engage, to bring the contribution. So we also learning. It's not  that we've got somewhere where we cannot learn. We're still learning also from other countries,  but always improving governance. So I think digital media will really continue to be a tool.  I'd actually like to just pay a compliment to the Grandi's government as a leader in this space  that you're setting an example. So it's almost like the world is also watching. So...  What is my hope for the digital future of governments? I wish that governments  become more accountable and enhance democratic participation and become faster.  And what I've learned from this panel is that with my sister from Kenya, I can talk Kiswahili.  Beautiful. All right, everybody. I think that's a wrap for this panel. Could I get a big round of  applause for this great round of speakers? Okay. Thank you so much. Before I let you go,  I just want to make a couple of announcements. And I mean, you're free to go, but you're free to  keep company on stage too. So it's nicer when you're not alone. First of all, I'd like you to give  like a really big shout out to a fantastic Nigeria who did such a great job monitoring the stage today.  You're awesome. So as I said earlier, this was the last session of this year's Global Innovation  Gathering. And I just really want to say a very sincere thank you to all the people who made  this possible. First of all, I'd really like to say thank you to our enablers, the GICED and BMCED,  for being such great supporters and making this happen. I would specifically like to thank that  man right there, Christiane Maline, for being just the best person to work with. And Sebastian  Herod and his entire team, everybody sitting here. Jill, thank you. You were amazing. Of course,  thank you also to Hef Fisher, who's in the front row there and his team from BMCED. And thank you  to our partners who made this happen. And this is quite, I'm going to walk over here. We printed  this little logo. It's going to make my life easier. I want to say a big thank you to Afri Labs for  joining us with their entire network. I want to say thank you to FounderBus. I want to say thank you  to Africa Hacktrip. And I want to say thank you to the AfriMakers team and Icebowl House,  AfriMakers team, Rock the Innovation Maker Space this year. All great people. And I really hope I  haven't forgotten anyone who would like to thank all of our fantastic participants. You are such  great people. Throughout the whole last week, whenever there was a problem or an issue, somebody  already fixed it before I even had time to take care of it. Like, amazing. Give yourselves a big  round of applause. And I want to thank the two people without whom I could have never done any of  this. So thank you, Gary. And thank you, Max. You are just the best. And with that, I would like you  to ask you all to join us now for our closing session of Republica 2014. I really hope to see  you all back for Republica 2015. And I also really hope that we get to do a global innovation  gathering of Republica 2015 next year. And yeah, I think that's a wrap.
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A few opening words. My name is Geraldine. I'm part of the Republican program management team and also put together the Global Innovation Gathering together with the help of many great people this year. And this is the final session that we're going to have as the Global Innovation Gathering. We've been having great talks outside in the trailer for the last days where we've had a lot of micro talks from all the fantastic people who joined from all over the world this year. We've been making fantastic things at the maker space and this last day of Republica we have been fitting the stage six with a number of really great sessions and I'm very proud to be moderating the final one. We had a session this morning already which is also kindly co-organized by the Ministry for Economic Corporation and Development and this last session is also organized by the Ministry and the first session we had this morning focused on freedom of speech, the digital media being used by different activists around the world and now we're going to kind of turn that around and look at the government perspective of things. So this session has the title Hello Government, Better Governance in 140 Characters and we are going to be discussing how governments around the world are using digital media for political participation and communication with their citizens and the ups and the downsides that has. Now I'm going to sit down and introduce my wonderful panelists to you. I'm very proud to welcome from the Ministry of Economic Corporation and Development, Ms. Ozula Mula who has a background in human rights. Before she joined the BMC she was working at the Foreign Ministry and has extensive background on these topic matters and is now head of the department for basic questions and policy questions in the bilateral development communication at the Ministry. Welcome. Next to her maybe you just saw him give a great speech on our stage one. Very, very happy to have with us Pranesh Parakash who is the policy director at the Center for Internet and Society and yes we're really happy to have you here and thanks so much for doing two talks back to back. And Didier has kindly joined us. I'm so sorry I'm usually really good. I've learned a lot of really long last names. Nekuri Ifun Furah. Okay. You tried? Yes I tried. Well thank you for bearing with me and I'm really, really happy that you could join us today. Didier is the director general in charge of the ICT Ministry of Youth and ICT in Rwanda, a country that's really taking very great steps in this topic matter so I'm very glad you can be with us today. And I think as a kind of guest appearance panelist I'm going to ask the fantastic Nanjira Sambudi who's doing great research on eGovernment's matters at the IHUB to join us in the course of this discussion and kind of make a fish ball out of it. So with that I'd like to kick off in the topic matter with just a little story. So I was in Rwanda last year and I had the honor of meeting the minister of ICT and youth and I had great friends in Rwanda who helped me organize this meeting but just before the meeting I wanted to make sure this was happening and I sent him a tweet and he responded within minutes and after the interview the same thing happened. I sent a tweet saying man this was such a great interview, you're a great person and I got a response within seconds basically. I was so impressed with this. I actually said to him in the interview he had, I really wish there was more of this kind of direct political communication culture in Germany. And usually you say that many of the governments and countries that I travel to meet have a kind of more open attitude towards this than we do in Germany. Now yesterday you sent a tweet to the head of the development group within the German parliament, Dagmar Wehr, who was supposed to meet this morning and what happened next? Yeah, I forgot for a minute that I have the mic with me. Well we just tweeted in anticipation of today's meeting and in a matter of few minutes we got also the response from her and I was actually very pleased to see also that the same trend which is happening in Rwanda is also, it's not only a Rwandan thing, it's happening everywhere. So I can provide a contrast if maybe. So recently at the World Intellectual Property Organization there were discussions going on about things that I follow and I was unhappy about the position being taken by the Kenyan government and I was having a discussion with another Kenyan scholar about it and you know we tweeted at IP Kenya and I found out within half an hour they responded to what we were saying by not only replying to us on Twitter but by actually going to a senior official who's negotiating it at the World Intellectual Property Organization, getting her response and you know pasting that on Twitter for us and I thought that was fantastic and by contrast the Indian government, the responsible organizations, the responsible departments aren't even on Twitter. Well, Pranesh and DD, I'm very honored to be here on the panel with you and I take up our moderator's question that she would like to be more in contact with the government and you might be surprised to learn that the Ministry of Economic Cooperation Development has the third strongest presence of the German government so you're welcome to follow us on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Google+. And the example of Rwanda is impressive. Why do you think that is? I mean please don't take this the wrong way but you would expect ministries who are in charge for instance of internet questions in Germany to sort of lead the way when it comes to using these media to get into a dialogue about the things they're meant to be taking care of like building up our infrastructure and making policy decisions about net political questions. So how come the DM set is the strongest one in the bunch? Well, if we work together with our developing partners we have to be a thread-sitter and I think in our cooperation with developing countries they have to find their own ways but we can certainly be of assistance and support their decisions and in the new government agreement. So the inspiration from abroad is kind of bringing the ministry to the front of the political bunch. That's an interesting take. So where does the inspiration come from? Maybe you can explain to us a little bit about the political culture in Rwanda and why the government has taken such a strong stance to use specifically Twitter also to reach out to citizens. I think from the run-in perspective the leadership, the top leadership vary from the very early stages got really engaged and even gave the direction. If I go back the last 13 years our leadership that's already back in the year 2000 had already a clear understanding, a clear vision of where they want to move Rwanda and there was a succession of investments, a succession of decisions made already during that time in terms of putting the infrastructure. That's where we made most of our investment in terms of fiber-optic connecting all the corners of the country but also a strong desire to connect to the citizens. And how come Twitter, like why is the government so strong? Maybe you want to say a little bit like I learned for instance your health ministry has like an official tweet up where they answer questions about health. There are all these stories of like well I had a problem so I just send the president a tweet and then he fixed it and it just seems a bit too good to be true. So why was specifically this social network chosen? I know it sounds too good to be true but it is true. Starting from the example you just gave from the president of the republic is among the few leaders who manage himself his own account. Normally you have politicians most of the time they have an office in charge of communication managing the account of the president but he is the one himself managing his account. So I've met a lot of people who just tried to tweet and then got excited because they realized actually the president replied to them directly. So this is a model of governance where government want to be a little bit more close to the citizens listening to the citizens and also it's the whole effort of being more transparent more open but also be more accountable to the constituents. So I kind of want to pick up on that because another thing the minister said when I was interviewing him is that the tweet is more important. It's more important maybe than a phone call or an email because it's out in the public domain. That raises a critical question though especially when we're looking at these media and developing contexts. Same I think they would apply to Germany because not all people have access to these media. So where does that leave the rest of the people who are not sending tweets? How are their voices being heard? So that's something that we have to send for Internet Society when around three years ago almost now when the Indian government was developing its social media guidelines for central government. At that point we pointed out that we have to be very careful that Twitter and social media and Facebook and all these things aren't given preference over those who are actually traveling from their villages to go see their parliamentarians or those who are actually engaging in offline protests because after all only around 10% of the Indian population has Internet access. Of course that might make us in a little bit of time the third largest Internet population in the world. But it's still not a large part of the Indian population that has good access to the Internet still. And to give one concrete example that came up recently rather than just this fear, in the US they did a big data review recently and they found that there was this app that a municipality in the US was using to detect where there were potholes in the road. So people could download that app and the municipality would appropriately respond except and this is perhaps we expected it was mainly richer people who were downloading those apps, mobile phones and what ended up happening was that the resources of the government were being diverted to the elite rather than being spent as it otherwise was. So that's an important concern that we have to keep in mind while encouraging accountability and direct communication, etc. I would be interested on your take on this too, the question of the digital divide, A, when it comes to designing partnership programs with other governments but also how you think that applies to the German context? Well, ICT has a great potential for good governance. But I agree with you that there is a danger of an increased imbalance between those who have access and those who don't have access. And to be connected is one thing but to be capable of using social media is another. So capacity building I think is at hand. And you have to take into consideration local communication and consumption habits and the cultural context, societal context. Of course there isn't some rural areas, maybe there is a high density of cell phones and you can send an SMS, there is a pothole and maybe it is fixed but the tool itself, I mean the social media is just a tool, it's neither good nor bad but it still depends on decisions that are taken after the message is sent on whichever way to the decision maker. I would like maybe to just to add a little bit on the Rwandan context again. Not everyone has a smartphone in Rwanda. We have people who have very basic phones, they can only send text. So on case by case and depending on the level of penetration of ICT, the level of literacy, there is always a way when there is political will to actually engage with the constituents. For our case for example we have one day by the constitution where the president with the parliament and the leaders engage with the citizen for two days. So what happens is it's live on TV, people can text, can tweet, can use Facebook, any other means to be able to engage. This meeting is chaired by the president himself and it's increased the level of accountability because any question can come anywhere and it's on the public domain. So this is, I just wanted to give an example of less sophisticated methods actually to engage with the citizen and it works. And Jera I brought you up on stage because I know you have a whole lot to say on this topic matter. And in our pre-discussion we had, I picked up this example from Kenya which I read about late last year. You had, or its ongoing process of land reform in Kenya. And cabinet secretary of Kenya said we're specifically looking at social media like Facebook and Twitter to listen to what citizens have to say and on that basis make demands based policy decisions. Now this question of land reform is one that specifically also addresses people in rural areas and so that question of the digital disconnect, I was wondering like, you know, this may sound great, you know, it's a great press release but what does that actually mean to people? Right, Kenya. So it was a nice sounding thing that did not even take off even with what is already there and what's already organized. And I tend to think of the issue of the digital divide really just as a translation of what has already been happening pre-technology in natural divides, right? So technology is not going to be the panacea. And so even if it's only certain people in certain economic, you know, sort of capabilities, spaces that have access now, it doesn't mean that they are not citizens either. And also, exactly, and also what happens is as more and more people see, and I've seen this in Kenya where a lot more people see that, you know, they're watching the news and there's this whole thing about, you know, Tweet and Facebook, they drive the demand to get access. So that also translates to political will, it translates to economic opportunities. So I tend to think of it as a way that for what is already there, we have to make it work. We're not going to get to a point where everybody, there's universal access and then it starts to make sense. So in the case of the land's policy thing, we don't know if that even happened. It's something that is not as well thought out as the random case, but we are trying to get our governments to sort of realize with the difference being in Kenya, citizen media usage has been preceded by government's will to use these spaces. And so it was really just something that sounded nice for campaigning to say, you know, this will be a digital government. And so now they have, they're now being forced to get to a point where, okay, we have to walk the talk. They have no idea yet. And I know they keep saying, you know, they'll follow the random example. So that's just a basic overview. Why don't you respond to that? No, and along with, I completely agree in Nigeria that the idea of the digital divide, it might seem like one yet another thing, but in many ways it actually mirrors the kinds of divides that already exist in terms of, you know, what languages you're comfortable with in terms of, you know, your capability of actually using the, not just the technologies and having access to technologies, but using it effectively as a form of, you know, petitioning the government, et cetera. So if you don't speak the necessary language, if you don't, you know, have the ability to crunch the big data that they're putting out in form of open data and to make effective use of it. There are all these kinds of things which mirror existing gaps and divides, and it's not just a matter of pure access or economics. And then again, to the, oh, you have, you already have a discussion. I'll take my questions. I feel our discussion focuses on the people, but how about the people in government? They have also to be able to respond to the tweets and the emails. So we have to do some capacity building and some, they have to be, how can the capacity be so much higher to use? Otherwise there is no correspondence, sir, between the government and the citizens. I totally agree. But again, then I wonder how come the, you know, the capacity seems to be so much higher to use these technologies in the run and government. If I may give an example, and I don't know if this is Trin Ronda, it tends to be an age thing as well. And that's we, so like Kenyan government. Aware of the fact that I'm known as a panel. No, no, no. And I don't mean that in that way. I've seen this flaunted as a, and I think it's not, it's not a justifiable excuse, it's a pretty good one that you can put off as a smokescreen, that it's only the young people. And so, you know, we are all in the government, and I don't mean this like in Germany, I've seen this in Kenya where they're like, give us a chance. We're dawned, you know, you young people with your, you know, your things. And so, and I'm like, no, it's not about that. It's all about communication. And it's really going back to the idea of what technology is here to do. It is not the pernicious. It is here to enhance those skills that we're supposed to really have in effect. In India, you could say that politicians are making much better use of social media slowly, and it's, you know, being ramped up. But they're doing that to a much greater extent than the government. And within the government, it's interesting to see what kinds of things are really embracing social media. So, the traffic police, they've embraced social media big time in multiple cities. And it raises some, you know, some privacy concerns. They're tweeting out the license numbers, et cetera, of, you know, people caught speeding and asking for help in, you know, catching some vehicle and all kinds of things. So some privacy concerns are raised there. But it's very interesting to see who are embracing it and who aren't within government. So do you have like terribly young or terribly capable? Like what do you do with your government leaders to make them happen? I sometimes wonder also whether it's a little bit of like, you know, after the total devastation basically of your country, the idea of having to reinvent yourself 20 years ago, pretty much the same time where the internet became mainstream and also perhaps in Africa, something that could be foreseeable, an economic force. Do you think that has anything to do with it? It's actually a mix of several things. I mentioned initially, first of all, this strong political will to be meaningful, not only to, you know, not only become a leader and forget this contact with the people. In fact, from the very beginning, Randa is always, after the 1994 genocide, our leaders have always tried to be as much as possible close to the citizen. That's quite normal, especially after what happened in 1994. But also, it's all technology, any new technology, there's always that fear. And the more, of course, you grow, the more you are more fearful to embrace technology. I think it's being bold, it's about leadership, it's about leading by example. Once for example, the president started tweeting himself, well, the prime minister realized that he has to tweet. The minister has started to tweet. The police, the... So it's leading by example, huh? It's actually leading by example. Yeah. I have a question for the other panelists, which is, when I look at how people are interacting with those in power, whether it's the government, you know, departments and officials or politicians, a lot of the comments they get are venomous, hateful, are not constructive in the least. And it's not as though these people are in a position to just keep blocking everyone who they don't want, because they have to take inputs from everyone, right? So how can we expect governments to, you know, negotiate the space where it's not polite conversation. It's not, you know, a space where people raise their hands and are called and engage in meaningful discussion necessarily. What are governments to do? What do you do with your Rwandan trolls? I think that's where actually freedom of expression is. You will not always have necessarily very good or encouraging conversation. They are good. It's actually just a translation of how this world is. So everyone is free to express what they think. And it's really up to you to take the constructive part and to build on it. And anything that is not helpful, you try to understand why. And if you find that there is no reason and there is no, you can, well, in that case, you just put it aside and you move on. So it's really about opening to everyone the opportunity to talk to the government. Actually, you are posing the question, what government does a digital society need? On one hand, it has to be open and democratic enough to respond to the citizens' rising expectations. But on the other hand, it has to be strong enough to protect the people against abuse. So I think this is a balance that has to be stroke and stricken, whatever. English is not my native language. That's why it's also important that in the countries themselves, there is some sort of a system in place, a judiciary system that sort of sets the frame to operate in. Very glad we've transitioned a little bit. And this has been very good. You've already touched on the topic of freedom. So I want to pick up on some of the topics that were raised in the panel that we had discussing that question. And yeah, so maybe just start with a Kenyan example on that when I was in Kenya last, which is, of course, one of the examples people uphold for being a strong democracy in East Africa, despite what happened in the 2007, 2008 elections, last elections, maybe you can tell that funny story too, when the world was watching for violence to break out again, like, oh, is it going to have everything went really, really well. However, there seems to be a lot of restrictions from the government when it comes to freedom of speech in many ways. And when I was there, a law was just passed where you told me it was actually passed by a parliament too, which is, for instance, restricting press freedom and the way that journalists, like really cracking down on journalists and making them personally liable for things that they wrote. So there's a bit of a, like, a vividly, perhaps, how these social media and other technologies are being pushed to be used for, like, people speaking out and sharing their voice, and then cracking down on that with policy on the other hand. And nowhere more peculiar than in Kenya for that. So just starting to what was just raised earlier about freedom of speech, we always say it also includes the right to offend, right, but then it becomes very tricky when the offense is taken personally by an individual who sits in a capacity of a government position or a political position. And in a place like Kenya, it's a democracy pretty much in transition. It's, there's a lot of pressure to flaunt it as this democracy that is strong, which is not entirely true. It's really a country that has just passed a constitution that yes has a bill of rights, but it's not been exercised yet. So you find spaces like social media are actually helping in sort of like testing out that space. But what's really interesting is as well, as governments and I mean as people attack governments, service providers and whatnot, there's over time a mechanism of self-regulation so that we have to finally move from just making noise to collectively organizing our voices towards something. So I think just to pick up on that point, I think the issue of trolls and the issue of freedom of speeches, they sometimes are, they overlap, but sometimes they're also orthogonal. So on the point of freedom of expression, in India, I think India presents a very interesting case study. The, the Center for Internet and Society have been criticizing some of the laws that have been putting put in place in India for a long while since 2008. Yet when it actually hit the, you know, mainstream media was when two girls from Mumbai, when a politician had died and the entire city was more or less shut down because of that. And, you know, one girl said, you know, we should pay our respects to him, but I don't see why threats of wildness should be used to shut down an entire city this way. And another girl, her friend, and both of them teenagers, like, you know, liked that comment. And that became a criminal case. They were arrested. And there was a national outcry about this. And that is the moment where the fact that the laws we have in India are horrific on this issue actually came to light because of Facebook. And, and so that, and since then there have been some more cases. And I think that presents an interesting fact about the, in a sense, the power of Facebook. People start asking questions about if I post something on Facebook, can I become criminally liable? Because that's not something they really have thought about. I, as a lawyer, keep thinking about these kinds of things. But I'm not like, you know, in a, in a, in a kind of exceptional position. People really feel that immediacy when it comes to social media. Right. And again, perhaps a lot to do with, you know, policy, not always being on top of the times. And, and a lot of these things still being in debate. But whilst we're on the topic of free speech and, you know, where, where does the right to hear the other opinion end? I want to bring up a specific kind of point about internet censorship, because I think it's quite an interesting round of nationalities that we have gathered on the panel to speak about this. Now, I, I sometimes get stick from like friends from America that say here in Germany, you know, their number one value freedom of speech is really not something that we consider quite so highly. But the, the right of the safety and the dignity of the individual person in Germany is rated higher. So in Germany, we censor the internet too, which has to do with our history and our political culture that we have here, which is for instance that we censor right wing, a Nazi in Holocaust related content. And, and there may still be, you know, good reasons, or there are many good reasons for doing that, that from our political perspective. Do you ever get approached with that issue that Germany is also a country censoring the internet and how we sort of argue why we get to do that for the things that we censor? No. Oh, okay. I mean, there might be historical and cultural sensitivities in different countries, but I personally was never approached with a question why you don't tolerate Nazi propaganda. I would be interested to ask you the same question. Runder also censors the internet if you want. If you read the internet freedom house report, it becomes quite clear there what kind of content you censor, which is content related to the genocide. Do you ever get asked that question why Rwanda censors the internet? Personally, no. But here maybe I can talk as a citizen of Rwanda. We have quite a particular context. What happened to Rwanda was it's still very fresh in the life of people. Twenty years ago, we had one of the worst genocide that happened in the world, and it's affected the whole tissue of the society that needed to be rebuilt from scratch. And our leaders invested a lot into reconciliation and unity. And it's a building process. We have people who still have the scars of the genocide. You can see that. They live with it. Those are people who had families completely wiped out. And I think our concession is very straightforward in terms of freedom of speech and freedom of association and freedom of information. But on the other side, and we want to have a new Rwanda which is not based on ethnicity as it used to be before the genocide that's led to the genocide, where people were promoting, first of all, what is different. The government back then, which was in power, was promoting the difference between the people as a political tool. Today, the new Rwanda is not based on ethnicity. It's not based on who is who. It's about opportunities, equal opportunities for everyone. And as for any genocide, any genocide that happened in the world, there are also, of course, genocide deniers who will say, for example, that it never happened. I'm sure in any part of the world it is the case. And as long as this freedom doesn't affect the unity, the cohesion of the people, I think that's actually, I'll say, even a dangerous fruit when people can start using this. And here I'm talking as myself. The unity for us is more important than actually the differences. So that's why, for instance, content that is very critical, oppositional, which goes against the current policies of the government on this specific topic matter, or that you said, like, genocide denying content is censored. Absolutely. I'll say it's not available, or it's not approved, but I'm not talking about any opposition, opposition against the government in terms of different policies. But for example, I take, for example, genocide ideology or denying the genocide, that's really something that's even for cities and not only the government. The way you phrase it, it's totally comparable to the situation that we have in Germany. However, I sometimes feel that this is sort of judged with two measures. You know, Western countries get to, you know, do that and get away, and a country like Rwanda would be very publicly criticized for it. I think there's a great deal of hypocrisy in reports like the Freedom House report, because for instance, on internet freedom, they don't look at private censorship at all. So the US, where there's mass surveillance, as is there in so many other countries, and the chilling effect that has, that doesn't get counted at all as part of it. The fact that intellectual property rights are being enforced by the government, and the one thing that the US government did, it has seized domain names. At least when the internet was shut down in Egypt or the Great Firewall of China, it's those citizens who are affected within those countries. When the US seizes hundreds of domain names, people all over the world are affected. So I think there's a great deal of hypocrisy in all of this, and not counting private censorship, etc. I just want to make a couple of other points on that issue. One is, I think the governments, that there is a difference between, you know, political censorship by governments, things that are written down in laws, and things that are not societally acceptable. I don't think there should be, there needs to be a one-to-one matching between these two. Okay, I think that some things might be legal even while being completely unacceptable in society, and when someone says it, everyone in society says that is completely unacceptable. We shouldn't be giving those people airtime on national media, etc. Okay, so that is one way of, you know, going about this, nudging by the government. Governments, I think, should nudge people in the right direction, not necessarily restrict people's ability to do things, but nudge them. Okay, and the second point is something I've forgotten, and we'll come back to later. Moesla, like that, judging with two different measures, like upholding ourselves as sort of the apostles of democratic values, and then looking very critically upon the countries, do you think that is something that you feel in your work at the ministry, maybe not specifically that the ministry does this, but other, that you witness other government entities sort of taking that hypocritical position? I think we should not treat digital media as an end in itself. It's a technical tool, and digital freedom is a variant of free expression. Digital participation is a variant of democracy. So, and these are political questions. So, whether you label something hypocritical, I think this is a judgment being trained as a German diplomat, I would not sort of continue the discussion on that level with labeling it. Certainly, we have to walk fine lines between censorship and the control, but certainly we all have a feeling what's right and what's should not be blown out. You're right. I don't want to, I don't want to, but this, I sometimes feel like there's a lot of scale code goating. It's like, oh, there's, oh, the Americans, they survey, boo, everybody else is surveying too, maybe on different scales, but it's very easy to point the finger sometimes, sort of rather than looking inward at your own policy decisions. Well, I see that all the time in India, for instance, where the bogey, for instance, of those American corporations like Facebook and Google and Twitter, they have different values, okay, they aren't respecting our cultural sensitivity, and they aren't, for instance, you know, engaging in the kind of censorship the government wants them to, okay, it's brought up, okay, and I think what isn't done is that they, whether these differences in value actually exist, isn't actually gone into in detail. So there are some culturally specific things. One example would be female fetuses are often aborted in India, okay, and we have regulations on advertising relating to that. I know in Brazil and in India, we have regulations about, around political content, around election time, okay, and those kinds of things, I think there isn't, those can be regulated, I agree completely, but it becomes a bogey very often in saying that they aren't, you know, somehow American free speech doesn't apply here. America has obscenity laws as well. America has all the same problems that other people do too. Election time, that's a great up-and-point. I'd like to get to like maybe some, toward the end of the session, some positive examples of how to deal with these things. Now, I think this is an interesting time, and I'm going to try to do this. So, you know, when that election violence in Kenya 2007, 2008 that we mentioned previously broke out, I heard, you know, the government then also was thinking of shutting down like mobile telephony in different media because they were thinking of the Rwandan example and how the media also contributed to not stopping the genocide, but rather like pushing people toward violence, but it didn't. And one of the reasons was because you guys invented Ushahidi and came in and actually spoke to the government and said, no, we can do something positive with these media instead. And I'm sure all of you know about Ushahidi already, so we're not going to talk about that. But coming back to the example of hate speech and limitations perhaps to freedom of speech, I know that you ran a project in the last elections called Ushagoozie, and maybe you want to talk a little bit and share what that was like. Yeah, sure. So, we have a lot of named types of projects, so everyone has to learn about them, but they're going global, so that's our contribution. So, again, in 2007, 2008 was the first time Kenya was confronted with the fact that there were all these tensions that had been suppressed. And so different players or contributors to this place were identified, but very little was known of the role that new media played. And so when the media was sort of shut down and the mobile telephony was shut down, Ushahidi came up because then they figured there's a way you can connect individuals to tell the story if you map it. And so over time, then again, we reached the 2013 elections or it was oncoming, and no one was still addressing the fact that a lot more people have gotten access to new media. There's a lot of unresolved issues. So we ended up just thinking, okay, let's set up a research monitoring project to better understand what this issue of hateful speech is. And well, acknowledging that technology is just helping people express it. And so, you know, running the project one and a half years on in Kenya, having done pilots in Ethiopia, looking in South Sudan, Myanmar, all over the world right now, what we're finding is in the Kenyan context, for instance, self-regulation is something that is becoming the next stage with freedom of speech or freedom of, you know, whether it was given or you demanded it, you know. So what we found is the government also has realized that this is a value so that they cannot legislate in any way because there are times, like with the ICC case, the citizens actually called up the hypocrisies of any government that was trying to say, you know, if we elect these people, you know, there'll be consequences. And like you said, the journalists who came in waiting for doom and gloom were put in a space squarely by Kenyans, citizens, by the way. But at the same time, citizens are regulating themselves in terms of we cannot go there because we know this is bad. So, you know, it'll be something like, I say something hateful online and other people in the panel me and actually insult me to a point of ridicule or they'll just counter that and drown it. So there's value in actually observing these things. And what we're hoping actually from the Omati project really is to give, contribute to this body of knowledge globally to understand that these are not just technological issues, these are societal issues. You have to address the root problem. It still comes back to who other players who can contribute to actually facilitating the spaces and need to address these problems. Yeah. And then I think we have time to take two, max three questions. Go ahead. So in India, a couple of years ago, we had this same issue where because of a problem with communism, people, 50,000 people left the city of Bangalore for the Northeast, fearing that there would be attacks on them. And this was amongst other things spreading over SMSs and a little bit on social media as well. The government's response in India was to restrict the number of SMSs that could be sent at that time. And I think it was absolutely the wrong response. And they also blocked Twitter accounts, which was completely ineffectual. I've done so on the CI's website, you can find out more about this. But just to quickly point out a contrast, the government of Canada, we had some Canadian interns with us at that point of time, they instead of restricting speech at that point time, they sent out SMSs to, you know, people, Canadians in India, saying, don't believe the rumors that are circulating right now. There might be reports of violence, but actually there aren't many instances of violence. And please don't spread these rumors any further. Okay. And that I think is a fantastic response. And the other point is, what happens in social media is at one level, what happens in writing, etc. In the media is one level. When people gather together, that's the more immediate danger. And there we need much greater amounts of policing. Yes. Hi. My name is Alicia Blasquez. I work for the one campaign, and I'm responsible for our campaigns work in Germany. And thank you for this really interesting panel and discussion. And Twitter is a really important tool for us to communicate about our work, but also to ask questions to the government and different ministries, the development ministry in Germany, but also other ministries. And very often we don't get any response, even when our members tweet at the German ministries, also development ministry. And it's really interesting for me to see that in the developing countries, the so-called, it seems that there is much more progress and it's less a question, more an encouragement to the German government and the development ministry to see whether there is something that you can learn and adapt from our partner countries in Africa and other developing countries. Because very often when I look at the Twitter feeds of the ministries, it looks like it's rather treating out press releases, but not really responding to the citizens. And I think it's a really huge opportunity for citizens to understand the value of the development politics, but also for you to explain better the politics you're doing. So an encouragement from my end. Thank you. Let's have a second intervention. Sorry. Thank you for the talk. What's really nice is here at the moment that we have one on the stage and today they have the most conversational world leaders in diplomacy. And I want to ask a little bit on the higher level when states interact, do you see that for all the participants on the stage? How your leaders are interact on Twitter and do you think it is possible that these interactions between politicians or world leaders are getting more transparent than it is today or in the past? Sorry. So are you asking if Paul Kagame is DMing with Angela Merkel as we're on the panel right now? How do leaders interact via social media? So not just politicians or government with their citizens, but like leaders amongst each other? Well, if I really take the run and case, it's the same way. It's not only the same way they engage with citizens for a variety of issues, both local and global, that's exactly the same way they engage with others. So they're able actually to discuss and to touch a variety of issues online using social media. What is it like in the ministry? Do you use social media activity within the ministry, also with other government ministries, also with other ministries and partner countries that you're perhaps collaborating with to communicate? Well, that might be an idea, but thank you very much for the constructive criticism. There's always room for improvement and certainly we can learn from our partner countries and they can learn from us. Yes, it's a mutual thing. I'm not a subject matter expert on this. I see some of these communications happening. I prefer things that are in the public rather than in DMs, etc., even if that might help because I want to be able to have right to information requests and get them out. But there is a resource called TWIPLOMACY that some folks are running and which does analysis on precisely this. So you might find that interesting if you haven't already heard about it. That's great. I'm going to ask a closing question and I don't want to put any of you on the spot, but I'd like to finish the panel by asking all of you three things. A, what would be your looking at the future of digital media and governance? What is your, this is a little bit of a platitude, but I thought it was going to work, your biggest hope in the way, you know, the potentials of this and perhaps also your biggest fear, what is the risk of doing this? And since it's about mutual learning, maybe one thing that you've learned from each other during the session that you're going to take away or during the day that you're going to take away and think about. I know you're good with being put on the spot because you were put on the spot to speak on the main stage today. So I know you're always good at that. Okay, so very quickly. I just really hope for the Kenyan context that we start practicing the theories of democracy that we say exist in our country. So people get to finally not just say that the constitution guarantees your right to freedom. They practice it out and it becomes a thing that goes beyond a paper. Biggest fear of that is it's going to unify a lot of problems, a lot of deep seated historical issues and that has been happening and there's somewhat out in the open and we don't know how to reconcile them. On mutual learning, really, that's where the point of research and why I do the kind of research I do comes in because then we can share these bodies of knowledge and not necessarily in report format. It's in forums such as these that then we can talk. I have learned about Canadian Embassy actually doing something very interesting around countering rumors, something that we are studying right now and wondering what's the role of even foreign presence in your country in countering rumors at a time when panics, you know, terror threats are going around. So yeah, I've learned something from I think everybody. It's perfect. Thank you. Do you want to go next? Sure. In terms of what I fear, one that the issue I already mentioned about, we already discussed about digital and data divides and too much hope being placed in technology and especially centralized technologies, things like and closed gardens like Facebook, et cetera, which I think are tremendously bad idea yet that's where the people are right now and so we have to create alternatives. So one is that's the fear. Okay. In terms of hope, I think the eventual crumbling away of the negative connotations of bureaucracy, I think that would be a good thing if more direct interactions are possible. I work with many bureaucrats and politicians and I have to admit I'm very impressed by most of them, much more than the general, you know, population who think that bureaucracy is like hitting your head up against a brick wall. I haven't found that to be my experience, but I actually take the step to go to their offices and talk to them. Okay. If more people could actually have these direct interactions, I think that might be a good result. Mutual learnings, I think, Nanjir did a good answer for me. So I'll... All right. Didi, how about you? I think for the random context, but not only for Randa, also for Africa where we have more and more people being connected, we... I think that's something that we want to continue to emulate, not only for us, but as I say on the continent level, having more and more engagement with the people, allowing people actually to share their view, contribute to shaping the policies and building our future. I think that's something that we believe should be the next and should continue. And also being able actually to engage, to bring the contribution. So we also learning. It's not that we've got somewhere where we cannot learn. We're still learning also from other countries, but always improving governance. So I think digital media will really continue to be a tool. I'd actually like to just pay a compliment to the Grandi's government as a leader in this space that you're setting an example. So it's almost like the world is also watching. So... What is my hope for the digital future of governments? I wish that governments become more accountable and enhance democratic participation and become faster. And what I've learned from this panel is that with my sister from Kenya, I can talk Kiswahili. Beautiful. All right, everybody. I think that's a wrap for this panel. Could I get a big round of applause for this great round of speakers? Okay. Thank you so much. Before I let you go, I just want to make a couple of announcements. And I mean, you're free to go, but you're free to keep company on stage too. So it's nicer when you're not alone. First of all, I'd like you to give like a really big shout out to a fantastic Nigeria who did such a great job monitoring the stage today. You're awesome. So as I said earlier, this was the last session of this year's Global Innovation Gathering. And I just really want to say a very sincere thank you to all the people who made this possible. First of all, I'd really like to say thank you to our enablers, the GICED and BMCED, for being such great supporters and making this happen. I would specifically like to thank that man right there, Christiane Maline, for being just the best person to work with. And Sebastian Herod and his entire team, everybody sitting here. Jill, thank you. You were amazing. Of course, thank you also to Hef Fisher, who's in the front row there and his team from BMCED. And thank you to our partners who made this happen. And this is quite, I'm going to walk over here. We printed this little logo. It's going to make my life easier. I want to say a big thank you to Afri Labs for joining us with their entire network. I want to say thank you to FounderBus. I want to say thank you to Africa Hacktrip. And I want to say thank you to the AfriMakers team and Icebowl House, AfriMakers team, Rock the Innovation Maker Space this year. All great people. And I really hope I haven't forgotten anyone who would like to thank all of our fantastic participants. You are such great people. Throughout the whole last week, whenever there was a problem or an issue, somebody already fixed it before I even had time to take care of it. Like, amazing. Give yourselves a big round of applause. And I want to thank the two people without whom I could have never done any of this. So thank you, Gary. And thank you, Max. You are just the best. And with that, I would like you to ask you all to join us now for our closing session of Republica 2014. I really hope to see you all back for Republica 2015. And I also really hope that we get to do a global innovation gathering of Republica 2015 next year. And yeah, I think that's a wrap.
using digital media for political participation and communication with their citizens and the ups communication culture in Germany. And usually you say that many of the governments and countries Rwanda and why the government has taken such a Facebook, any other means to be able to engage. media like Facebook and Twitter to listen to what usage has been preceded by government's will to between the government and the citizens. I effect. In India, you could say that politicians really embracing social media. So, the traffic compliment to the Grandi's government as a leader