Riga

Suddenly, the workshop on 'Interactive Tech Tools for Transparency' I'm leading in Riga in a couple of days (February 5th & 6th) has been given a sharper focus. On January 14th hundreds of demonstrators clashed with riot police in Riga after an anti-government protest. The disillusioned young people involved, fed up with what they see as arrogant and corrupt governance, are ripe for being reached by pro-transparency NGOs. This isn't just the case in Latvia but plays out in different ways across a lot of the Central and Eastern European countries where the NGOs attending our workshop are based.

We'll certainly be accelerating their pilot projects as mySociety's Tony Bowden (handily based in nearby Estonia) will be passing on his experiences of developing the definitive Freedom of Information site WhatDoTheyKnow. But as I found out at last year's Crowdsourcing for transparency launch there's an urgent need to boost the way the NGOs mobilize through social media. This time round they'll have the benefit of Nixon McInnes's Anna Carlson taking them through a buzz monitoring and network mapping bootcamp.

Personally, I'm fired up by the potential of Ushahidi-style transparency engines that can be cloned and deployed in different settings; and by engine I mean both the tech and the collaborative model that it embodies. This Latvian blogger seems to think a clampdown on free speech may follow the recent disturbances in Riga. Certainly, whatever tools & techniques the NGOs settle on will get a reality-check from experienced digital activist Sami Ben Gharbia who knows all about repressive regimes. Fascinatingly the same Latvian blogger refers to an emerging youth movement called The Penguins (Pingvini). What are we to make of the fact that their civil disobedience blog sports the Linux penguin..?