First, transparency: some of us know Katrin Verclas, the author of the blog post and founder of the site, through friends and conferences. We knew she was writing this post and had a friendly conversation about Sharek961 days before it was published.

When the post came out we were a little surprised by its tone. We felt Mobile Active had not quite understood what we were trying to achieve with Sharek961. This might have been paradigmatic - the only other example of Ushahidi in elections was Vote Report India, which positioned itself as a monitoring site - and it might have been our own fault for not articulating our position clearly. So we wanted to respond in a little more details to the post, and perhaps answer or clear up some general questions about who we are and what we are trying to do.

Mobile Active: Sharek961 is another effort in Lebanon to monitor the election there today on June 7. Unlike LADE which uses more than 2,000 trained volunteer election monitors to systematically report from polling stations throughout the day, Sharek961 aims to get ordinary Lebanese citizen to text, call, and email in incidences from polling stations, crowdsourcing the conduct of the critically important election there.

Sharek961 was never intended to be another LADE. LADE is an accredited monitor with an official mission: observe and report violations of poll code. Sharek961 is a neutral platform for citizen reporting on issues happening around Lebanon.

Mobile Active: Sharek961, built on the open-source Ushahidi mapping platform, was developed by a group of volunteers, using FrontlineSMS as the SMS reception software for submissions via text. With the election nearing its end on Sunday afternoon, however, Sharek961 received only a little more than 100 citizen submissions…The few incidences reported on Sharek961 during the election from citizens are not sufficient to get an impression of the conduct of the election, unfortunately.

We posted around 140 reports on election day. 11 of those reports were LADE sourced. The other 129 were citizen reports (often with media sources). Since we launched 3 days before the election, we see this as a success, and view building audience as a long-term project. Although higher volume would be nice, we missed no major events and the substance of our reports match the election day mood.

Mobile Active: Another challenge in citizen monitoring efforts is the inability to sufficiently verify any data (to the extent that is comes in from the public in sufficient numbers) and thus the danger that especially in a highly contested and potentially fraught election, these systems can be abused in favor of one or the other political faction with so-called ‘poison data’.  While this is an issue that efforts such as Swift River are trying to address, it is currently unresolved.

We’re aware of the poison data risk and addressed our approach on our site. Our approach to the risk of poison data was as follows:

1. We publish all reports on to avoid charges of editorializing or censorship.
2. We tag by source as well as incident.
3. We did follow-up reporting and debunking, adding information to original reports.
4. We reminded users throughout the day that no data was verified.

Having said this, we’re really looking forward to a functional Swift River!

And finally, on a personal note, we were disappointed in the following comment, because we felt reinforced the very divisive presumptions we are trying to overcome.

However, both LADE and Sharek961 have the potential to be tainted as ‘partisan.”  LADE was accused of being too close to the Western-backed governing coalition, and similarly, key volunteers from Sharek961 have ties to a large Lebanese newspaper that backs the same.

We know it’s the job of bloggers to find a story behind the story. However, the heart of Sharek961 is transparency. . Our team is made up of individuals, not affiliations. Everyone on our team is listed. All our partners are listed. We receive no backing, financial or otherwise, from any organizations other than the ones listed on our partner page. Lebanon is a small country where you are born with a background, but you are free to choose how and whom you engage, and that’s the core of Sharek961.

(Finally – because we want to debunk this perpetuated myth of an unstable Lebanon: There was no curfew. People were free to move. Bars and major places for congregation were encouraged to close, but many didn’t! That’s it!)

We’re a very small team - there are two of us on holiday from ‘the real world’ to work full time on this, another three with full time jobs who can only work nights, and as of the past few days, some new friends whom we’ve convinced to donate their time and efforts. We’ve been so busy getting the site live, getting the work done, all these things - that we just haven’t had the time to record our efforts.

This is a disappointment - there’s a lot that can be learned from putting thoughts and experiences in writing. It helps clarify to us what we are doing as well as helping other people understand. In fact, it really should have been a fundamental part of our project, as it adds a level of transparency to our work and preparations. That said, we’ll be working to try and update live tomorrow and add a personal Sharek voice - to the events of the day. We’re looking forward to doing this together with you all.

Will we get the first bit of breaking news regarding electoral news from a citizen reporting to Sharek961.org? Or will it just act as a platform for political slander?

While there are many international observers that have come to monitor the elections in Lebanon, what about the 4 million Lebanese observers of this election? What is their opinion of what is happening on the ground? Well if Sharek961 gets of the ground we could soon find out…

It’s true. We’re here, we’re open, we’re ready for action. Use us - or abuse us. The choice really is up to the Lebanese.

But how does blogging in English match our mission as a project for Lebanon, an often multilingual but overwhelmingly Arabic-speaking country? The honest answer is that it doesn’t. And it’s one of the issues we’ve had to confront as we’ve developed this site: because we are working with partners inside and outside of Lebanon, and because our team is both Lebanese from Lebanon and Lebanese from the diaspora, our primary working language for this project is English.

What’s the big deal? Why does it matter if we’re in Arabic?

One: From the beginning we’ve been committed to delivering a bilingual site. Although internet access remains limited across Lebanon, and according to Meedan (via Google) only about 0.4% of the web is Arabic language content, Lebanon is an Arabic speaking country first and foremost, whereas English and French tend to reflect generational or socio-economic biases. Therefore, we feel that it is essential to make Sharek961 accessible in Arabic, in order to reach the broadest possible linguistic community.

Two: In Lebanon, English speakers are disproportionately concentrated in urban areas, so if we were to outreach and publish only in English, we would be consciously underserving the non-urban population. As political affiliations may fluctuate with urban versus rural settings, in addition to reinforcing socio-economic biases, we could trip over political biases too. As a project committed to neutrality, we must exist, publish, and outreach in Arabic.

Three: We want to avoid being just another project for the diaspora or the elite. Initiatives like Sharek961 have become, frankly, sexy; people like foreign countries doing neat things with technology (we’ll leave the analysis of why to the disciples of Edward Said). We agree with George’s post on the Meedan blog; too many projects are designed for an international community, rather than the local one they purport to serve. There are legitimate reasons for making your project accessible to an international audience - raising your profile, promoting your cause on a bigger stage - but for Sharek961, there is no success unless it is local success.

How should we handle content on a bilingual site?

Now that we’ve established that we need to exist as a bilingual project, what’s the best way to do this? Do we translate all content, so that it is consistent and equally accessible to both Arabic and English speakers? Or do we allow for a natural bifurcation, allowing Arabic speakers to address the issues most relevant to them, while English speakers identify their own priorities?

If we translate one-for-one, it’s labor intensive, whether by automated machine translation or human volunteers. By indiscriminately translating all content, we add a haphazard element to content that undermines context and meaning. If we selectively translate ‘good’ content, by the simple act of choosing we add subtle editorial to what we’ve pledged would be a neutral project. If we don’t translate, we risk depriving our audience of important information that might be sourced by only one of the linguistic communities.

Our initial preferred way of addressing translation was to offer all content in the original to both language groups. At first we planned to offer a fully bilingual site interface, with English and Arabic presented simultaneously, so all users would see the same thing. Posts, reports and content in Arabic and English would go up side by side. Arabic speakers could read Arabic, English speakers could read English, and our bilingual or semi-bilingual audience would have both. It wasn’t ideal, but it was egalitarian.

We discussed adding capacity for crowd-sourced translation at a later point - but we had no way of verifying the accuracy of those translations. For example - someone sends in Arabic: “Zaatar W Zeit is the best late night food!” and the translation ends up reading in English “Zaater W Zeit? You crazy? Barbar is much better!” As Sharek961 expects to handle reports a good deal more sensitive than the best late-night food spots in Beirut, we were worried about the significant potential for abuse. Without close moderation, something we are not currently equipped to provide, this could pose more problems than it solved.

Which is where Meedan comes in… but that’s a subject for the next blog post.

It’s an idea that needs you to help it happen – your emails, your SMS, your pictures and reports. We take these pictures and reports and map them anonymously online – and pass them to other organizations, news outlets, and civil monitoring groups.

This project is nothing without you. We’re counting on the fact that we as a country like to share information – with our families, our neighbors, sometimes strangers in the street! Sharek961 gives you the chance to share information on a broader scale – when you see or hear something, don’t just tell your friends, tell us! Making news public helps make sure things get verified, reported, and accounted for.

It’s worth repeating: we’re totally non-partisan: we don’t favor some reports over others, or some lists or candidates. We’ll report it all, and map it against other reports; from media, from other citizens, from organizations and citizen journalists – to help give it depth and context. We represent a cross section of Lebanese ourselves, and Sharek961 will too.

If you want to know more about us you can read the official text here: About. Or you can just shoot us an email. We’re accessible like that.

On a technical side, we owe a debt of gratitude to a number of amazing open-source and non profit technologies: the entire Ushahidi team – Erik Hersman, David Kobia, and Juliana Rotich – plus Chris Blow and Kaushal Jhalla of SwiftRiver – for building the platform we’re working with. SMS integration is courtesy of FrontlineSMS and Ken Banks.

We also have to thank our friends at Meedan – George Weyman, Ed Bice, Anas Tawileh and (again!) the versatile Chris Blow – for all their support, promotion, and outreach. Without them, a fully integrated Arabic and English site wouldn’t be possible.

And of course, Mustapha Hamoui at Zanizeal – our patient and talented designer. Without him, we’d just be another fancy map. Mustapha’s a member of the core team, but for all his work he deserves a special thanks.

The Beirut-based Social Media Exchange, and Jessica Dheere in particular – deserve big thanks for their amazing outreach to digitally-minded civic engagement groups throughout Lebanon, as well as their help in translation.

And finally, it couldn’t have been done without RootSpace, a social innovation hub in Beirut, that housed, fed, caffeinated and connected us from the first day of this project. The RootSpace projects – Sawt Ashabab in particular – gave us a model for our own work, and the camaraderie of dozens of people working to make positive change through media and open society kept us going through the late nights.

Oh, and thanks to all the countless delivery men who came with food at midnight, and café owners who tolerated our laptops. We love you guys.

So, how do you reach us? Well, you can take a look at the reporting guide for more details, but:

1) SMS us! on that **good** number: 7118 9118, which reads like 7 118 9 118. Isn’t that a good number? The guy at Class downtown had no idea what he was giving away, and it didn’t even cost us $200,000, like they were trying to sell 03 100 100 for.

2) Report on the web. We have a nice custom webform where you can find your district and tell us what happened.

3) Email us at report@sharek961.org. Tell us where, why, how, when. Send a picture if you can.

4) Tweet at us @sharek961 or #sharek961. (And while you are at it, join the @twitleb community)

We can’t wait to hear from you all. We know this blog is just getting started, and has been pretty quiet so far, but it’s not for lack of activity - it’s just that with all the work, designing, coding, calling, and outreach, we’ve barely had time to sleep, let alone tell you about all the exciting work we’ve done!

- Sharek961