Since Iran's Green Revolution, technology has demonstrated its power to mobilize millions of people demanding political and social change in countries where authoritarian regimes remained untouchable for decades. The same technology and open networks have also been used by oppressive governments to surveil populations and thwart these social movements. In facing these tensions, activists and hackers share a common mission of challenging the status quo to improve existing systems - whether governments or networks. How do the two communities work together to defend civil liberties online and on the ground?
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Rita Zolotova is a Director of Public Policy for Wickr Inc. and the Wickr Foundation where she leads a global effort to raise privacy awareness and provide security education to human rights activists, journalists, and policy-makers. Rita works closely with technology innovators and security experts to engage kids, particularly young girls, in learning about encryption, cyber security and white-hat hacking. Rita came to Wickr from Middlebury College's Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a policy research center focused on WMD security and terrorism issues. At CNS Rita managed online education initiatives, co-directed the development of a policy design framework for the U.S. State Department on ways to employ new media technology in addressing global arms control and nonproliferation threats. Rita has an extensive experience in political consulting and journalism in Russia. She has degrees in Political Science, Management and holds a Masters Degree in Terrorism and Nonproliferation Studies from the Graduate School of Middlebury College.
Wallenberg Theatre
450 Serra Mall #124
(The room is located in the main quad, across the road from Stanford Oval).
In July, the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) welcomed a group of 23 democracy leaders from around the developing world for a three-week training program on democracy, good governance and rule of law reform as part of the 11th annual Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program.
Selected from over 500 applicants, the fellows have diverse backgrounds across sectors and geographies, working in civil society, public service, social enterprise and technology to improve democracy and governance in their home countries.
Fellows were instructed by an all-star roster of Stanford scholars and policy experts with backgrounds in international relations, law, medicine and political science. Lecturers included Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of California Tino Cuéllar; former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; FSI Director and former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul; and CDDRL Director Francis Fukuyama.
Fellows also visited several major Bay Area technology firms and philanthropic organizations, such as Twitter and the Omidyar Network, to explore new opportunities to support their work.
New to the program this year was the incorporation of TED-style talks, which served as a platform for fellows to practice the technique of storytelling by sharing their personal stories and motivations for pursuing the work they do. Throughout the three-week program, these 9-minute talks provided fellows with a better understanding of their peers’ backgrounds and an opportunity to realize shared experiences.
From finding long-term solutions to refugee crises to the invention of new technologies that curb government corruption, fellows shared impactful stories that cut across sectors and regions, sharing common challenges and pathways to their success. You can find some of their talks below:
Karina Sarmiento (Ecuador)
Regional Director, Asylum Access Latin America
"Building up a Movement: Refugees in Latin America"
Karina Sarmiento is the regional director for Asylum Access Latin America, an international organization working to support refugee rights. Sarmiento leads the organization’s growth and implementation strategy for refugee legal aid clinics, strategic litigation, community legal empowerment and national policy advocacy across Latin America.
Teddy Warria (Kenya)
CEO, Africa 2.0 Kenya
"Connecting Africa"
Teddy Warria is a Kenyan entrepreneur and the CEO of Africa 2.0 Kenya, an action-oriented network of young and emerging leaders from Africa who share a collective vision for the future. Warria is also the director of Africa’s Talking LED, a mobile telecommunications company working to close the information poverty gap in Kenya.
Silvina Rivarola (Argentina)
Criminal Prosecutor, Office of the Attorney General, City of Buenos Aires
"Can Liberal Democracy Exist Without an Independent Justice?"
Silvina Rivarola is a criminal prosecutor with the Attorney General’s office for the City of Buenos Aires where she is in charge of the cybercrime unit. Rivarola has devoted her 25-year career to advancing the rule of law in Argentina’s judicial branch where she previously served as a criminal judge.
Sergii Golubok (Russia)
Human Rights Lawyer
"International Human Rights Courts: What do they mean for Rule of Law?"
Sergei Golubok is a human rights lawyer in Russia who specializes in international human rights law and the protection of constitutional freedoms. Golubok has defended several high profile civil society groups and activists before the United Nations treaty bodies and the European Court of Human Rights.
Oludotun Babayemi (Nigeria)
Co-Founder, Connected Development (CODE)
"Making the State Accountable: Technologies and its Inertia in Nigeria"
Oludotun Babayemi is the co-founder of Connected Development [CODE], an organization that uses online and offline tools to put pressure on governments and organizations in Nigeria to be more accountable and transparent. Their “Follow the Money” campaign has helped to monitor and track public resource allocation so marginalized communities receive government provisions and services.
Catherine Phiri (Zambia)
Public Prosecutor, Government of Zambia
"The Place of Witness in the Criminal Justice System in Zambia"
Catherine Phiri is a public prosecutor for the government of Zambia where she prosecutes cases of corrupt practices, abuse of authority and money laundering that undermine the rule of law. Through her work she has helped implement systems that enhance the efficient and effective flow of cases.
Myat Ko (Burma)
Co-Founder, Yangon School of Political Science
"Transition and Survival of Democracy in Burma"
Myat Ko is the co-founder of the Yangon School of Political Science where he directs the school’s political education department working to train and empower citizens with knowledge to support Burma’s political development. In 2012, he participated in an election observation process held under the Yangon School.
Roukaya Kasenally (Mauritius)
Senior Advisor, African Media Initiative
"Mauritius: The Dwindling Democratic Star"
Kasenally is a senior advisor with the African Media Initiative, an organization supporting independent media on the African continent. Kasenally has served as a researcher for a number of pan-African democratic and governance institutions and co-founded an advocacy organization to engage the Mauritian public in democratic development. Kasenally also teaches at the University of Mauritius.
Bruno Defelippe (Paraguay)
Co-Founder and CEO, Koga Social Business Lab
"How Changing Businesses Can Change the World"
Bruno Defelippe is a social entrepreneur who has launched several social initiatives to engage young people to solve social and environmental challenges in Paraguay. He is the co-founder and CEO of Koga Social Business Lab, which incubates social businesses and provides a strong ecosystem for social entrepreneurs to thrive.
Over the last four decades, the United States saw an explosion of digital technologies that penetrated every corner of the country, yet during the same time span, the American rate of poverty did not decrease and inequality skyrocketed. In other words, a golden age of innovation did not lead to better lives for poor people living in the world's most technologically advanced country. This simple fact, which flies in the face of Silicon Valley triumphalism, should give pause to foreign aid and international development efforts whose primary goal is to increase technology and its use.
Bio
Kentaro Toyama is W.K. Kellogg Associate Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information and a fellow of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT. Until 2009, Toyama was assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, which he co-founded in 2005. At MSR India, he started the Technology for Emerging Markets research group, which conducts interdisciplinary research to understand how the world's poorest communities interact with electronic technology and to invent new ways for technology to support their socio-economic development. Prior to his time in India, Toyama did computer vision and machine learning research and taught mathematics at Ashesi University in Accra, Ghana. Toyama graduated from Yale with a PhD in Computer Science and from Harvard with a bachelor's degree in Physics. http://kentarotoyama.org
Wallenberg Theatre
450 Serra Mall #124
(The room is located in the main quad, across the road from Stanford Oval.)
Cellular networks are one of the most impactful technologies of the last century, with over 3.5 billion active users in just under 25 years of operation. However, over a billion people, primarily in rural areas, still live without this basic service. This is primarily because large-scale incumbent carriers cannot profitably serve these rural areas. One potential solution is "Community Cellular Networks": Small-scale, locally owned and operated cellular networks. These operate more efficiently by using local actors who know their communities. In this talk I will detail the community cellular model, its limitations, challenges, and the future through the lens of Endaga, the company we founded to commercialize the technology.
Bio
Kurtis Heimerl is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley working under Eric Brewer in EECS and Tapan Parikh in the iSchool and will be joining the Department of Computer Science at the University of Washington in 2016. He is also a co-founder and the prior CEO of Endaga. His work focuses primarily bringing telecommunications access throughout the world by empowering actors within marginalized communities to solve their own communications problems.
Wallenberg Theatre
450 Serra Mall #124
(The room is located in the main quad, across the road from Stanford Oval.)
Human rights groups have only two assets: people and information. Learn about Benetech's decade of putting information technology tools into the hands of human rights activists, with the goal of making these two assets more effective in advancing the global cause of human rights.
Bio
Jim Fruchterman is the founder and CEO of Benetech, a Silicon Valley nonprofit technology company that develops software applications to address unmet needs of users in the social sector. He is the recipient of numerous awards recognizing his work as a pioneering social entrepreneur, including the MacArthur Fellowship, Caltech's Distinguished Alumni Award, the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, and the Migel Medal - the highest honor in the blindness field - from the American Foundation for the Blind. Since its founding in 1989, Benetech has touched the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Its tools and services have transformed the ways in which people with disabilities access printed information, at-risk human rights defenders safely document abuse, and environmental practitioners succeed in their efforts to protect species and ecosystems. Through his work with Benetech and as a trailblazer in the field of social entrepreneurship, Jim continues to advance his vision of a world in which the benefits of technology reach all of humanity, not just the wealthiest and most able five percent.
Wallenberg Theatre
450 Serra Mall #124
(The room is located in the main quad, across the road from Stanford Oval.)
While social media pervades many aspects of our lives, it has not yet proved to be an effective tool for large scale decision making: crowds of hundreds, perhaps millions, of individuals collaborating together to come to consensus on difficult societal issues. The objective of this research is to develop an algorithmic and empirical understanding of large scale decision making, and experiment with real-life deployments of our algorithms. In this talk, he will first present his platform for voting in participatory budgeting elections, which has been used in over a dozen different elections. He will then describe the related algorithmic problem of knapsack voting, where voters have to allocate a fixed amount of funds among multiple projects. He will conclude by analyzing opinion formation processes in terms of their effect on polarization, and relate this to the design of recommendation systems for friends and contents.
Bio
Ashish Goel is a Professor of Management Science and Engineering and (by courtesy) Computer Science at Stanford University, and a member of Stanford's Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford in 1999, and was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California from 1999 to 2002. His research interests lie in the design, analysis, and applications of algorithms. Current application areas of interest include social networks, participatory democracy, Internet commerce, and large scale data processing. Professor Goel is a recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan faculty fellowship, a Terman faculty fellowship from Stanford, an NSF Career Award, and a Rajeev Motwani mentorship award. He was a coauthor on the paper that won the best paper award at WWW 2009, and an Edelman Laureate in 2014. Professor Goel was a research fellow and technical advisor at Twitter, Inc. from July 2009 to Aug 2014.
India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi has almost 15 million followers on Twitter and over almost 30 million “likes” on Facebook, making him among the most followed politicians on social media. With a mix of ‘feel good’ messages, shout-outs to other celebrities, well-timed ritualized responses, as well as a careful strategy of ‘followbacks’ for a small selection of his most active followers, Modi grew his following dramatically since 2013. This talk looks at ways in which Twitter is used as part of a larger brand management exercise through which Modi has emphasized different issues at various phases of his political evolution.
Joyojeet examines four specific phases, during each of which, the focus of his social media message evolved based on electoral or post-election needs. While Twitter helped Modi circumvent the mainstream media and directly reach a significant constituency of listeners, he also examines how social media was central to Modi's image shaping as a technology-savvy leader who represents pan-Indian aspirations of modernity, away from Modi’s own past image in the popular media as a divisive communal politician.
Bio
Joyojeet Pal is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan's School of Information where his work focuses on user experience and accessibility in low and middle-income countries. His recent research looks at the use of social media in political communication in India, specifically on the role of political branding online in India. He is one of the technical collaborators on the Unfinished Sentences project examining oral histories of the El Salvador civil war, and leads the Colombia Digital Culture project at the University of Michigan. He researched and produced the award-winning documentary, "For the Love of a Man" based on the fan following of South Indian film star Rajnikanth.
Note: Those of you attending this talk may be interested in a related event, "Why India Matters", a talk by Richard Verma, 25th US Ambassador to India.
Wallenberg Theatre
450 Serra Mall #124
(The room is located in the main quad, across the road from Stanford Oval).
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Please RSVP. We will close registration once the attendance list reaches 250 people.
Abstract:
On September 24, Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law in partnership with The Atlantic Council will present a public address by President Toomas Ilves of Estonia on the future of technology in elections. Elections are set to take center stage in the coming year, in this country and abroad. As technology plays an increasingly large role in people’s lives, the discussion—moderated by CDDRL Director Francis Fukuyama— will explore its role in elections worldwide. President Ilves of Estonia—the only country in the world to use Internet voting for national elections— will discuss how technology can promote transparency, inclusion, and stronger democracies.
This event is a partnership between Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and The Atlantic Council, a DC-based think-tank committed to promoting constructive leadership and engagement in international affairs.
Bio:
Toomas Hendrik Ilves was elected President of the Republic of Estonia in 2006 and re-elected in 2011. He served as Chairman of the EU Task Force on eHealth from 2011 to 2012, and since November 2012 he became Chairman of the European Cloud Partnership Steering Board. His interest in computers stems from an early age – he learned to program at the age of 13 - and he has been promoting Estonia’s IT-development since the country restored its independence. Prior to his presidency, he served as Ambassador of Estonia to the United States of America and Canada (1993 -1996). In this position, he initiated the Tiger Leap initiative to computerize and connect all Estonian schools online. He also served as Minister of Foreign Affairs (1996-1998; 1998-2002) and Member of the Estonian Parliament (2002-2004). In recent years, President Ilves has spoken and written extensively on integration, transatlantic relations, e-government, and cyber security. He graduated from Columbia University in 1976 and received his Master’s degree in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978.
President Toomas Hendrik Ilves
President
Republic of Estonia
The Program on Liberation Technology (LibTech) at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law together with the National Democratic Institute (NDI) are proud to launch a free massive open online course dubbed "Technology for Accountability Lab.”
Sweeping reforms of Indian government institutions created space for women’s political inclusion at an unprecedented scale. As of 1993, one-third of all positions in Panchayats (local government councils) are reserved for women, and in some states as much as half the positions are reserved for women. Evidence shows that women’s presence in local government improves women’s access to justice and public goods and reduces corruption.
