Build Mobile&Pad apps for Citizen Reporting +Train students how to add Corruption Related News to the European Anti-Corruption Centre search portal +How to find it with hand held devices -even across languages. Investigative & Citizen Journalism gets ‘lost’ in zettabytes on the Net. Major search engines are not interested. Cross language searches are nearly impossible. Hidden corruption +crime cross borders, bankrupt firms, destroy jobs & families, everywhere. The EurACC (online>Beta) helps solve this. Multilingual, indicative translations +later tools. ‘Key'=Mobile apps +Training Students.
Topical focus:
Country:
What locality or neighborhood will your project focus on?
Prague
Describe the specific population with whom you will be working.
The EurACC addresses young people in Europe because they're among the most socially conscious observers, see+understand corruption & ethics violations, are enthusiastic, skilled Internet & Social Media users, use mobile media devices heavily & are among the best sources of corruption URLs. Yet, their feedback to policy making is minimal, at best. Citizen media disappears on the Net. Corruption costs the EU over 120 Billion Euro/year, severely damaging free society. We have heard for years of the ‘language problem,’ have seen crime cross borders & become ‘local.’ Multilingual young adult feedback led to our R&D in behavioral sciences & advanced linguistics, & that led to a new way to crawl the Net +Social Media more effectively to uncover +make readable +'transparent’ lost & hidden crimes.
Who else will be on your team to help implement the project?
Our EurACC development team is made of volunteer native speakers / gifted linguists, programmers +others from several countries, mostly from Central, Eastern, Western Europe, USA+Canada, often working via secure computing clouds. Core development is led from Prague. Advisors come from several int’l. communities. Among the men+women on team are the following: Charles A. Ross -System Designer, team leader, linguistics & programing, Tomáš Jungman -Chief Technology Officer, Viljar Roosimaa -programing, Charlotte Thornton -advisor, Mark Vessa -communications, Vladislav Vasek -economics, Jana Sterbova -accounting. Additionally, there is a small native languages speakers’ team of seasoned polyglot linguists responsible for key sections of the EurACC Matrix Core. http://www.twitter.com/euracc
What kinds of news, stories and other content will be created?
EurACC development focuses on making it realistically possible to easily find Investigative Journalism & Citizen Journalism online & in Social Media – that are often nearly ‘lost’ as 1-time or fragmentary reports & online comments in social media, in many languages, re corruption, fraud, ethics violations, etc. This tech makes it possible to search easily both across borders +from one’s preferred 1st language, & to search in whatever language the reports or comments were originally written – even if you do not speak that language well (or at all). The EurACC must be easily usable by normal citizens, of nearly any cultural background +in major 1st languages, & is designed to provide Consistently Clean Results in a dedicated search portal with indicative translations +report building tools.
What technologies and digital tools do you plan to use in the trainings?
Describe the connections that you or your organization have already established or plan to establish that will contribute to the success of the project.
We work with a core small team of int’l volunteers, +external senior consulting experts from different disciplines in faculties & IT centres in several countries, whom we know well (and in some cases for many years), who jointly & together contributed to creating the matrix ‘language crossing solution set’ that we are implementing in the Beta. The EurACC is based on proven Open Source Software (OSS) +recognized reliable Commercial Off The Shelf Technology (COTS) notably for network infrastructure and online security tools to protect the EurACC & end-user searchers. Though a ‘grass roots’ international effort of concerned volunteers to date, you can see the initial results of the teamwork, Test & Help Train +Grow EurACC Beta service with every search, Free & Anonymously @ http://EurACC.eu
How many participants do you think will be trained in your project?
We conservatively anticipate 250-350 students & faculty will be trained in 10 EurACC demonstration+training sessions, which will be scheduled in the autumn of 2014 in educational institutions in the Czech Republic. We will video sessions and edit the trainings down to create short online “How To” videos that will be mobile phone & pad compatible, even at slow network speeds. With Social Media promotions, we anticipate the resulting user base will grow to ~3,500 early mobile & pad application users of the EurACC in the Czech Republic within 6 months (spring 2015).
The EurACC is Open Source Software based and code will be publically contributed as Open Source Free Tools & Apps for Developers + End Users, In the Public Service. http://sourceforge.net/projects/europeananticorruptionctremob/
Describe which technologies, tools, and media you will focus on when training participants.
Concerned students +hence potentially young citizen journalists in the Czech Republic +Europe heavily use smart phones, pads & tablets, and are increasingly concerned about endemic corruption around them. More small online publishing sites are emerging, yet they ‘disappear’ in commercial search engines. It is increasingly difficult to find corruption reports published online other than those in the leading major media. Commercial search engines distort their results. The EurACC team will show its new method of both publicizing rare but important reports & comments newly online +a simpler, more effective way to reliably better uncover ‘hard-to-find’ reports in Consistently Clean Search Results with indicative language translation tools, +later secure online storage +report making tools.
Describe the facilities where you will hold the workshops.
Training workshops for young citizen journalists will be done in conference rooms & lecture halls of leading university & technical school campuses in the Czech Republic, starting in Prague +later other cities of Pilsen/Plzen, Brno, Olomouc & Ostrava. They will be organized in cooperation with faculties, interested professors & civic oriented student campus organizations. All planned sites have high speed WiFi +GSM mobile phone signals of excellent data speed (3+G & 4G). Based on BYOD-Bring Your Own Device, no extra computer equipment will be needed in addition to the personal smart phones & pads students bring. We will use our own personal equipment for demonstrations and in explaining to students the development and testing of the European Anti-Corruption Centre search engine portal.
What is your current relationship with the community with whom you plan to work? What makes you the most appropriate individual or organization to implement this project?
Most of our programming, linguistics and other volunteers are or have been based in Prague during EurACC development, are young, university & graduate school ages & are or were connected with the same Czech educational institutions -as students or as instructors, where we will do many early trainings. Coming from these leading universities/engineering faculties & seminaries, understandably we have very close continuing contacts with those same educational institutions. As our team developed both the concept & the actual EurACC service that is now in Beta -of a language crossing, international search engine uncovering corruption stories, logically we are qualified to develop the mobile & pad aps and do the tri-lingual training demos of our own new service for young citizen journalists.
What specific challenges do you expect to face when planning and implementing your project?
Substantial & growing layers of ‘Best of Breed,’ recognized ‘industrial strength’ online network security tools are being implemented, protecting both the EurACC +searchers. With no single point of failure, the EurACC can be fully & quickly ‘restored.’ Due to personal safety issues re this work, to help ‘other people’ uncover corruption +related crimes & ethics violations in their own ‘local’ communities, +due to many ‘friendly warnings’ we have received, we normally don’t put all team member names online. Their safety +that of their families is #1 for us. Thanks for understanding. Work is typically done remotely ‘in the clouds’ & can be done from nearly any Net connected location, with https:// windows inside multiple secure cloud workspaces, VoIP, PC video, screensharing, texts+email.
How will you measure and evaluate the project’s impact, specifically: your primary participants, the wider regional community, or the global digital community?
The EurACC Mobile & Pad Access project's impact & success are easily measured by examining rate of growth of both 1) URLs & social media links re corruption +ethics violations’ stories being contributed by young people with the new mobile & pad apps, when measured in the context of the dates+locations of the training sessions, and in the context with 2) the overall rise & rate of rise in numbers of raw searches made overall on the EurACC. While maintaining a strict “no tracking” policy, hence no tracking of individual users is ever made, it is technically designed for search anonymity -to protect searchers in what they may consider to be “dangerous locations.” Raw numbers of searches by secure mobile & pad app vs simple https web interface, and their ‘geo’ origin city & country are known.
If your project were to be selected as a Rising Voices grantee, what would be the general timeline of project activities in 2014?
If Selected as a Rising Voices grantee, EurACC development work on its multilingual & multi-platform mobile & pad apps will be accelerated to the summer of 2014. The grant will be added to our own resources & allow us 1) to advance the development earlier than would be otherwise possible, and 2) will support key campus training sessions in the autumn of 2014. Late summer is planned for field testing the apps, with a pilot rollout in September. Training sessions on Czech campuses will be scheduled for October, November and the 1st week of December 2014. The applications will be online for free download from October 2014. We will provide our own laptops and hand held devices for trainings. Parts of sessions will be recorded and short “How To” Videos will be created with voiceovers in Czech, English, & Russian – as that is the mix of core languages spoken by young people in the Czech Republic. Edited, they will be online as ‘mobile+pad’ ready short training videos for future users.
Detail a specific budget of up to $2,500 USD for operating costs.
Category, Item, Quantity, Cost per unit, Units, Cost per item, Total (USD), =$2300,
1. Labour, programming, 50, 19, manhours, 950,,,
2. Workshop, projector rental, 10, 25, days, 250,, Subcat sum, % of Total
3. Labour, worshop organisers, 50, 8, manhours, 400, labour, 1350, 58.70%
4. Promotion, youtube In Stream, 1000, 0.1, full views, 100, workshop, 250, 10.87%
5. Promotion, handouts A5 color, 3000, 0.06, piece, 180, promotion, 280, 12.17%
6. IT, hosting of project, 12, 35, months, 420, IT, 420, 18.26%
Besides the microgrant funding, what other support can Rising Voices provide for your project to ensure its success?
The #1 thing Rising Voices can also do supporting our crime fighting work is Help Make The European Anti-Corruption Centre ‘More Visible’ Online +Encourage People to Download the Free Apps developed with support of this grant. While the EurACC is usable with https browsers, dedicated easy-to-use apps are enjoyed by users, worldwide. Citizen media frequently has a major focus on corruption +related crimes & ethics violations, & corruption is seldom a ‘stand alone’ crime. Many Rising Voices citizen media grants address problems of democracy, good government, citizen awareness of corruption & fraud, discrimination +human rights abuses. Corruption often includes other crimes. The EurACC is building a global multilingual corruption search engine to find rare docs more easily +basic translations
Contact name
Charles A. Ross
Organization
European Anti-Corruption Centre development has been sponsored by Tesbern Development
1 comment
HI
i appreciate you ideas related in this project. Would like you to share with us your experience in this scope of work.
Thank you.