12 tips on using ICTs for social monitoring and accountability

This blog post from Linda Raftree outlines the discussions held at a Technology Salon on the use of ICT in monitoring and evaluation of development outcomes with a particular focus on social monitoring and accountability.

Excerpt

"M&E is not only about formal data collection and indicators anymore, one discussant commented, “It’s free form, it contains sentiment.” New ICT tools can help donors and governments plan better. SMS and other social monitoring tools provide an additional element to more formal information sources and can help capture the pulse of the population. Combinations of official data sets with SMS data provide new ways of looking at cross-sections of information. Visualizations and trend analysis can offer combinations of information for decision making. Social monitoring, however, can be a scary thing for large institutions. It can seem too uncontrolled or potentially conflictive. One way to ease into it is through “bounded” crowd-sourcing (eg., working with a defined and more ‘trusted’ subset of the public) until there is comfort with these kinds of feedback mechanisms." (Raftree, 2012)

Contents

• Monitoring and evaluation is changing
• People need to be motivated to participate in social monitoring efforts
• Responsiveness to citizen/participant feedback is critical
• Privacy and protection are always a concern
• Inclusion needs to be purposeful
• Information should be useful to and used by the community
• Be sure to use the right tools for the job
• Broader evaluative questions need to be established for these initiatives
• Technology is not automatically cheaper and easier
• Solutions at huge scale are not feasible for most organizations 
• New technology is not M&E magic
• Donors need to support adaptive design