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knight news challenge:
application for a good governance project,
total transparency tools, TTT
november 2008
avaiki nius agency
Project Title: total transparency tools, TTT
Requested amount from Knight News Challenge: 500,000
Expected amount of time to complete project: 2/3 years
Total cost of project including all sources of funding: 500,000
Describe your project:
TTT, total transparency tools, offer global transformation simply by extending everyday email skills.
TTT takes an open-source approach to a gender-balanced, ethics-based training model, promoting participation in real-time, real-world information for and by ‘real’ people.
This project takes three years of conceptualisation and a draft working model to the next phase, seeding a pilot project across 26 territories and states of the world’s most widespread and vulnerable region, the Pacific Islands.
From Hawaii in the north, Aotearoa to the South and Rapa Nui westwards, imploding timeframes for global warming add urgency to calls for effective networking of communities facing climate adaptation, and, in some cases, sovereign extinction. Related issues exist for Oceanic partners, Australia and New Zealand.
How will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities?
Total transparency tools, TTT offer potential for broad scalability using mainstream web2 tools as an open gateway to “golden mile” transformation of good governance globally, starting with bottom up advocacy among communities.
At people level, email users avoid having to learn complicated (and usually male dominated) content management systems, like Joomla for example, a favourite among toys-for-boys IT sections!
Instead, even a remote user can extend an email account to update and interact with social networks, like Blogger, Facebook and Ning – all via email.
Remote media centres limited only to UHF email, for example, might partner with urban media centres with better internet links to enable web-based registrations.
What experience do you or your organisation have to successfully develop this project?
Living on a small island since 1977, I remember wind-up phones, morse code and telex, the excitement in 1981 of phone and fax, space-age reality of a satellite dish, gleaming stark white among glossy green banana leaves and coconut trees.
Suitably impressed, us islanders grabbed hold of email to avoid ruinously expensive toll calls, us$3 a minute at one stage.
Similar patterns are emerging for adoption of web2 approaches to all sorts of
social issues, including corruption and mismanagement.
Going online with my news agency from 2004, I learnt how to work around internet access issues with a third-world approach to www wonderful-whatever- works!
Early web2 advocacy helped plant seeds that emerged this year as the region’s first successful media forums, the Pacific Freedom Forum and Pacific Islands Journalism Online, assisting also with similar efforts for a public news blog from PIMA, an Auckland-based NGO, the Pacific Islands Media Association (New Zealand).
How is your idea innovative; new or different from what already exists?
Not just innovative, globally transformative, always, by favouring low-tech information over high-tech processes. Every time an information-first approach; technology a distant second.
By getting back-to-basics with mainstream webmail, TTT establishes an ethics2 administrative overlay, offering immediate scalability. In the same way online networks now refer to the need for cloud or even swarm computing, TTT provides ‘virtual’ capacity, on whatever scale, when and where needed.
TTT also:
- serves as a back-up for existing good governance approaches, providing raw
RSS feeds for monthly accounts and annual audits. - user friendly, promoting awareness that anyone can freely create their
own transparency tools.
Another innovation takes TTT advocates through next phase certification processes, the first free, the second and third outlining techniques and transformations required to gain a full TTT credit.
An early example of these tools in action can be found at my agency’s transparency blog, avaiki nius featuring email alerts auto-published from my own personal bank account.
Another draft ethics2 example, updates traditional curriculum vitae concepts, founding as curriculum veritas.
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