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Building Paths for Accountable Flows of Resources in Nepal

A concept Note

Summary

The aim of the proposed project is to enable the common citizens to effectively
demand for more accountable flows of resources that matter to their lives and
livelihood. The project will achieve such aim in two steps: First, it will equip the
citizens with credible and verifiable knowledge about existing networks of social
relations that have long shaped the material flows in their disfavour; and second, it
will enable the citizens to select public actors who are willing to be more
accountable to them than to the existing exclusionary networks of privilege and
patronage. The project will generally benefit all citizens, but will prove to be critical
for the historically excluded groups of the population in the on-going delays and
dilemmas of reconstruction and rehabilitation.

Briefly put, the project will create an accessible and participatory knowledge e-
resource amenable both to formal network analyses of public actors, and to
responses to queries about the public life of an individual actor in the network. The
resource will have publicly available information about influential public actors
reorganized along biographical sketches, thematic linkages and associations. The
information will be checked for their accuracy and edited to meet legal and ethical
standards. It will be continually updated both by collecting additional data from the
historical ethnography and by collating inputs from the citizen-users. The
organization of the knowledge resource will enable the citizens to examine the
actors in their institutional contexts and relational contacts, and enrich their
understanding about continual influence of these actors over resource flows. In
other words, the resource will have in-built links to establish connections of and
through the actors, which in turn will illuminate particular flow of resources along
the connections as meaningful. Further, it will create opportunities for public
conversations by allowing the very actors to respond to queries about their actions,
exchanges and decisions.

The knowledge resource will mirror the social network by capturing relationship
among the public actors established from the unstructured (freely written text) and
structured (tables and hierarchies) data. The tables, information-boxes (a summary
of important facts about the actors), lists and hierarchies (categories) will be the key
components of the resource that will situate the lives of the public actors along their
affiliations, relations and constituencies. Generating a network as an abstraction of
the semi-structured (freely written text and tables) knowledge base instead of
constructing a rigid database has many advantages. First, the framework provides
mechanism to integrate contributors and administrators. It provides the necessary
abstraction that ensures the technical side of the network is hidden. Second, the
content is directly human readable. Third, further abstractions such as visual
navigation of the network can be integrated in the design. In short, the network will
be friendly towards the readers, maintainers and future upgrades.

While prosopographies (collective biographies) and biographical arrays have been


used to understand the flows of privilege and patronage in the academic and
business communities, our approach enables semi-structured components (such as
freely written articles) alongside the usual structured components (biographical
database in tabular forms). Users of the resource can enquire into one of many
interconnections among discrete individuals, collective units and actions/events. In
terms of the interface, users can choose to navigate using directories, links in free-
text or text search. Furthermore, provision of contributors ensures that the network
can grow in number (new actors) and richness of information (new types of links).
The underlying editorial framework ensures that the information is presented under
appropriate headings and has been verified to meet legal and ethical standards.

Project Objectives

To help the common citizens uncover the transitive connections among the
public actors who continue to shape the resource flows in select sites.
To enable the citizens to demand a change in the existing networks of
affiliations, patronage and other undemocratic connections so as to make the
public actors more accountable.
To develop a platform that will grow into a resource to analyse collective
social dynamics in Nepal.

Proposed Activities

1. Reviews
1.1.A review of network methods in political and social sciences. The network of
actors (person, political parties and other public institutions) with directed
links signifying associations has been well developed in sociology but less so
in the political sciences. The proposed work will be useful in effectively
analyzing the interdependence and ties among individuals, groups and
institutions. The findings from the review will be used in the construction of
the ontology and templates in the research and development components.

2. Research
2.1.A study on how Nepali citizens make value-decisions (such as ethical
judgments) about their public actors. It will look into the sources of
information they find useful and how they utilize multiple types of sources. It
will be aided by public discussions on the crisis of accountability in Nepali
public sphere.
2.2.Development of the knowledge base that links public actors (political,
administrative, cultural and social elites) in select sites.
2.2.1. For the task at hand, a custom ontology/schema needs to be
designed. This has to account for the fact that both data and metadata
will evolve. The core research will be towards ontology and template
design. Output of activity 1.1 will aid the creation of the ontology.
2.2.2. Development of the knowledge base. The development part will try to
utilize open source resources as much as possible so as not to reinvent
the wheel. The platform will provide a wiki style interface and navigation
to its readers while the underlying network is an abstraction of graph
structures (with actors as nodes and associations/links as vertices).
2.2.3. Data collection, verification and population (entry in the knowledge
base). Data will be collected from newspaper, magazine, book and other
relevant archives. A preliminary survey in select sites will be conducted
to find out the actors that are perceived to be important for that locality
and political spectrum of the country.
2.3.Design and development of editorial best practices. To ensure that only
factual information is available to the public it has to be ensured the claims
and counter-claims submitted to the knowledge base is credible and
verifiable. The editorial mechanism has to account for the publication of
sensitive information. The output will be a framework that adheres to legal
and ethical standards.
2.4.Development of facilities to provide multilingual support. Simple language
specific tools have to be developed for languages other than English. The
proposed work will support creation of content in English and Nepali but it
possesses flexibility to incorporate other languages of Nepal. This will not
only improve reach and the user experience, as in partial matches during
search, but it will also reduce the burden on administrators.

3. Dissemination
3.1.A series of interactive public discussions on the crisis of accountability in
Nepali public sphere and methods to resolve it.
3.2.Three research/policy briefs (in English and Nepali) each to reflect the
findings from activities mentioned in 1.1, 2.1 and 2.2.1.
3.3.A bibliography on network methods (primarily from sociology and political
sciences), models and social network analysis.

4. Implementation Plan
4.1.

5. Results and Goals


5.1.An interactive, useful, insightful and public knowledge platform will be
provided for facilitating its users to map the networks of public actors and to
understand existing patterns of resource flows in Nepali society,
5.2.A public platform will be created and sustained for enabling the citizens to
make effective demand from public actors more accountable actions and
crucially, away from existing affiliations, patronage and connections.
5.3.Public discussions on the state of accountability and on the effectiveness of
the project developments and findings to intervene on the trend will take
place.

6. Indicators of Success
6.1.Three research/policy briefs based on the knowledge generated during the
project implementation;
6.2.Six public discussions on the crisis in existing accountability regimes; and
6.3.A test model of an accessible and participatory knowledge e-resource on the
networks of public actors in select sites.

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