In the last post of this series we published our summaries, conclusions, and recommendations for technology projects related to budget and election monitoring. Today we continue our concluding remarks and recommendations with a focus on technology initiatives related to civic complaints. You can see all of the case studies and project listings related to civic complaints platforms by clicking on the relevant filters beneath the map on the Transparency for Technology Network. Throughout our interviews with project leaders a sentiment we heard over and over again is that they are trying to transform a culture of complaining into a culture of solutions, actions, and accountability. Ory Okolloh, a longtime Kenyan blogger and the co-founder of Mzalendo, remarked in our interview: I spent a lot of my early blogging career sort of highlighting all the ills of the government in Kenya and all the corruption and problems. One day I asked myself, well you’re sitting here with this voice and this platform and all your complaining is not really doing anything to make a difference then how can you – within this space – try to have a little bit of an impact? And I think that’s what drives me. ‘Look, it’s time to stop complaining and start acting.’ In order to act on complaints, however, it is first necessary to organize and make sense of them. Several projects set out to do exactly that. In September 2008 four Jordanian technologists developed Ishki to collect and organize complaints from local citizens about the public and private sector. Their goal is to eventually expand the mission of the project so that the complaints lead to conversations, solutions, and, finally, to better policies and responsiveness by companies and government officials. Though dormant for most of last year, the site has since relaunched with new features and remains active today. So far, however, we are not aware of any examples in which a complaints listed on Ishki has been resolved, or even responded to by public officials. Similar to Ishki, Kiirti serves as a single platform to collect complaints from residents of major cities around India. Unlike Ishki, which is built on Drupal, Kiirti uses Ushahidi to accept complaints via SMS and then visualizes them on a map interface. Project founder Selvam Velmurugan of eMoksha says that the platform has led to the repair of a streetlight in Chennai and also the paving of a dirt road. In an earlier review of the project I pointed out the seeming inefficiency of submitting a complaint to a platform which then forwards it to a government agency, but, in her review of the case study, Aparna Ray suggests that “citizens may actually welcome this buffer which facilitates engagement and gives visibility and weight to their complaints and issues.” Still, she encourages Kiirti to become more transparent about its process in verifying, forwarding, and resolving complaints. Penang Watch goes one step further than Ishki and Kiirti. In addition to collecting and categorizing complaints from citizens, the volunteers behind the site harass city council officials until the complaints are at least answered, if not resolved. Their persistence has, for example, led to the shutting down of illegal shops in Georgetown's UNESCO world heritage neighborhood. Complaints submitted to PenangWatch.net are first verified by a team of volunteers, and then forwarded to the relevant authority and/or individual to answer or resolve the complaint. If there is no response within a week or two then a reminder is sent out. If the complaint is still not dealt with after two more weeks then a profile of the complaint is featured on the website and the negligent agency/individual is “named and shamed” via emails to all council departments and media organizations. Project coordinator Ong Boon Keong says that “roughly 300 complaints are submitted through Penang Watch per year” and that so far they have “been able to settle 50 percent of submitted complaints.” Unlike Penang Watch, which serves as a bridge between citizen complaints and city officials, Cidade Democratica aims to motivate citizens to come up with their own solutions to civic problems. It's important to note that online, social platforms don't only offer new ways for citizens to interact with elected and appointed officials; they can also create new frameworks to think about how citizens govern their own communities without relying on traditional government structures. Cidade Democratica is a Brazilian platform – with most activity taking place in São Paulo – where users can submit both problems and solutions to those problems.