Yesterday was a good day. Realizing there were only couple more weeks of summer left, I thought it was time to get serious about Bribespot’s fundraising efforts and since we saw Kickstarter growing ever bigger in the recent months, we thought of posting our project on Kickstarter and hopefully raising some money for launching iPhone app and adding more functionality to our website. 

The only problem is that Kickstarter encourages people to post videos presenting their projects and the quality of videos I saw was so good it was almost intimidating. Being a crappy film director myself, I knew I had to find some help on this one and my friend Alius (@lama1) - who is highly creative person in addition to being professional animator - seemed to be a perfect man to turn to in this situation. 

We discussed the details on the phone and one hour later we had a plan, located necessary equipment and recruited another talented friend, Martynas (@MartynasZaremba), to direct the shoot. The best part about this whole process was that there were no committees, no planning meetings, no business plans and no budget either, but in two hours we were ready to shoot a video about our project. Now this is what I call being flexible.

So I wanted to share with you what we did next. Who knows, maybe it help you shoot your own video one day.  

Ideation. We started brainstorming about the video by looking through a dozen of Kickstarter projects to understand what do people talk about in their videos. Some projects were a lot of fun to watch, we especially liked the one by Benjamin Ahr Harrison. We then proceeded to writing down our own ideas and outlining things we want to say in the video. 

A small disclaimer is in order, Kickstarter team suggests that you should be natural and just talk about your project spontaneously in the video. I guess we could do that if we were to shoot the video in our native language. Yet since we wanted to shoot the video in English, being spontaneous would probably mean that the American audience would not understand half of the things we were saying in our Baltic accents. 

So once we had an outline of the text ready, which took around of 30 minutes of vigorous editing, I sat down and – much like a child in the office of a speech therapist – proceeded to work on pronouncing the tricky phrases right. The phrase "learn about the ways bribes are extorted" was giving me a particularly hard time.  

Location scouting. With the crew and equipment assembled, it was time to find a place to shoot and this is where I realized that location scouting is much more complicated job than I ever imagined. We started off in Lukiskiu square: it has a nice backdrop of green trees and church towers, plus there were relatively few people around. Martynas, however, seemed unconvinced - the noise from the street and some construction work nearby meant that the quality of sound would be awful.

Anybody who accusses academics of being boring and grapling with esoterical problems should read the paper co-authored by Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel. The paper, entitled Cultures of Corruption: Evidence from Diplomatic Parking Tickets, offers a fresh take on efforts to rank countries on a global scale of corruption. 

Rather than conduct thorough studies of individual countries, the authors of the paper decided to take a look at parking violations committed by foreign diplomats stationed in New York City. Unlike ordinary new yorkers, foreigners working at the United Nations enjoy diplomatic immunity, which means that even if they incure a parking violation, there is nothing New York City government can do to make a diplomat pay the fine. 

Fishman and Miguel saw this situation as excellent environment for studying cultural norms and values internalized by diplomats. And since diplomants internalize these norms and values in their home country, the number of parking violations incurred by them could serve as a close proxy for the level of corruption in a specific country. Well, that was the hypothesis they started off with anyway.

The results of their research were interesting, to say the least. Top five countries with the highest number of parking violations per diplomat were Kuwait (246), Egypt (140), Chad (124), Sudan (119) and Bulgaria (117). On the other end of the spectrum one finds good ole Scandinavians, UK, Japan as well as some smaller countries Azerbaidjan, Burkina Faso, Colombia - these countries did not have any parking violations outstanding.

Naturally, it was interesting to hear whether there was any correlation between the number of parking tickets and general level of corruption within the country. The assumption that Fishman and Miguel were making was that if diplomats faced no criticism over unpaid parking violations back home, then political culture of such country might be more permissive of actual corruption. After running some formulas, researchers indeed found a statistically robust correlation between the two, which means that parking violations and domestic corruption are linked together.

To see how this correlation holds, take a look at two maps created by Jon Bruner, Forbes editor. The first map shows distribution of parking violations across the world, the second one - level of corruption within the country (as established by Transparency International). Clearly, there is a big overlap between the two. Countries like China and Russia, though, are two big exceptions: while deemed to be very corrupt, their diplomats are a rather professional and manage to stay out of trouble for the majority of time.

It's interesting what other proxies one could use to assess the level of corruption in the country in a straightforward way. Any ideas?

By pure accident, I happened to come upon this interesting story from Russia. Back in February of this year, a fatal car accident took place in one of the main motorways of Moscow.

The official version of the report claimed that the driver of Citroen car - 36-year-old obstetrician Olga Aleksandrina - swerved into the opposite lane of road and caused head on collision with chaffeur-driven Mercedes carrying LUKOil vice-president Anatoly Barkov. As a result of the accident, Olga Aleksandrina and her passenger - Vera Sidelnikova - have died, men from Mercedes sustained just minor injuries. Case closed, right?

Well, not quiet. Despite the official verdict passed on by the police and court, many witnesses came forward claiming that accident was caused not by the woman driving Citroen car on an empty side of the road, but rather Barkov's driver, who tried to avoid the traffic jam by driving in the wrong lane. As one would predict, closed circuit video footage of the accident has gone missing and police is not very cooperative on this matter. 

Radio Free Europe journalists summarized the case as typical of Russia, where "members of the Russian elite routinely violate traffic laws and disregard the safety of other motorists and pedestrians with impunity, usually with the tacit acquiescence -- or in some cases, active assistance -- of the police." And in this situation, it is difficult to see how one could stand up to the rot corrupting the system using the regular levers of influence such as media, citizen petitions or legal action.

That is where Noize MC, a young hip hop artist hailing from Smolensk region, decided that if official authorities were not ready to listen to formal complains, they would have to endure his critical rhymes set to some hip hop music. As BBC reporter Anya Dorodenko notes in her commentary on Noize MC, such degree of outspokenness was jaw-dropping for many Russian people, which made the hip hop artist very dear to hearts of many fans. For the members of elite driving Mercedes, however, these words should bring a good dose of discomfort. Here are a few lines translated by Noize MC fans into English:

In a Hell I will be boiled next to Evsukov* 
But now I am OK and wrapped up with everything
I am insured 100% from any troubles
By the way I am in touch with Vova (V.Putin)
I have an ability to change even time and space
Suddenly all the video cameras are off
If they content some proofs of my crime
And just put meaning of people deep in your..  

* (a policeman who shot and killed innocent people in a supermarket in Moscow in April 2009)

And so it goes, corruption can silence some people for some time, but it cannot silence all people all the time. Sooner or later, some of them will start rapping and singing and that is the problem that cannot be simply "solved" by giving a bribe or two.

First of all, sorry for the delayed blog post, we probably should have written this post a long time ago - just as we got back home from Garage48 event, where the app was created - but somehow circumstances conspired against us. So finally, after cool tech blogs here, here, here and here wrote about us, we wanted to take few minutes and explain the motivation behind creating Bribespot app.

As a formed UNDP employee, I can assure you that the world is full of well-meaning initiatives that are aimed at fighting corruption. However, the problem with majority of them is that such initiatives are concerned with some long-term goals and address abstract audiences rather than focus on helping people directly affected by corruption and doing that today. So when I came to Garage48 event in Estonia this April, I thought to myself: "and what if we try to use all this cool technology that is available to us at the beginning of 21st century, to visualize all the corruption going on..."

Few nervous hours later we had assembled a team and were busy brainstorming about how service like Foursquare could be transformed into a tool for fighting corruption. It took some coding and several sleepless nights, but in the end we had made a simple smartphone app that allows people to do just one thing - anonymously report incidences of bribery and later see the data visualized on an interactive map.

We wanted people to be as specific as possible in reporting these cases, which is why our app automatically finds user's location and allows him/her to specify branch of the Government implicated as well as add a short comment about the incident. Once these isolated encounters are plotted on a map, we can suddenly see a bigger picture at a play. The more check-ins are made at a certain location, the more visible are corruption hotspots on the map and that sends the signal to the head of particular institution implicated as well as society at large. That is where the real change starts.

The question that sits on many people's mind is how do we ensure that submitted information is truthful, how do we guard from scenarios where one political group takes revenge on another by using Bribespot in a smear campaign? Or to think about anothe rscenario - how do we ensure that Bribespot becomes reliable source of information for journalists, NGOs, anti-corruption agencies and orginary people themselves? To achieve such level of trust, we have to put up some checks and balances preventing abusive behavior among our users.

So far, we have came up with two strategies to eliminate fake reports: first of all, we will limit the number of check-ins any given phone user can make in a day (as well as add some time-outs between reporting bribes) thus making it difficult for any one user to manipulate the map with targeted check-ins. On the other hand, we added Facebook comment functionality and will add bribe flagging to create the social filter for identifying fake check-ins. This way, people would be able to discuss individual bribes and in the course of discussion reaffirm or disprove things claimed by anonymous user.

Having said that, we still think that the best way to use our app is to look at macro-trends - that is, at hotspots emerging over extended period of time - rather than focus on specific individuals or try to draw conclusions from couple-days-and-few-checkins-worth of data. So if you are curious about information generated with the help of Bribespot, make a habbit of monitoring it on continous basis. Of course, we are always open to feedback and would be happy to hear from you how could we improve Bribespot, so if you have an idea or two, drop us an email at the following address: info at bribespot dot com. 

At the moment you can use Bribespot on Android, but we are also puting finishing touches on the iPhone app and should release it soon. 

Just few more minutes to get things done.