Nabila Rahhal in Citiscope (via Digg):
The Smart car was covered with images of a driver’s license, diploma, utility meter and a gavel, and embossed in Arabic, Dek kenet el balad (“The city’s store where everything is for sale”). The drivers would park the car in front of government administration offices, to shine a light on the corruption that greases almost every government transaction here.
The Kabseh car (it means “surprise visit”) was the work of a new NGO here called Sakker el Dekkene (“close the store”). Their goal was not just to shame bureaucrats. It was also to collect data. Sakker el Dekkene has launched a smartphone app, website and telephone hotline for citizens to report when they’ve needed to pay a bribe in order to conduct government business. People exiting the government offices stopped at Kabseh to report 920 bribes, including some they’d paid just moments before.
Sakker el Dekkene’s crowd-sourced platforms give Lebanese their first means of quantifying a scourge that is all around them. Citizens report the city where their bribe took place, which government office was responsible and the amount of the bribe. While the data are far from comprehensive and hard to verify — most users opt to remain anonymous — the reports paint a grim picture. In six months, nearly 1,550 reports have been filed, with the total value of bribes paid adding up to 2.1 billion Lebanese Lira ($1.4 million U. S.).
Read the rest here.