Transcript for [Civic Engagement] Jordan: Ishki.com

♫♫♫ The complaints in Jordan are really a tradition. So each Jordanian guy has his own complaints every day. What matters is if this complaint is really useful for the community so that others can benefit from this complaint or from the solution of this complaint. I am Waheed Barghouthi from Jordan. I am a Ruby on Rails developer. I founded Ishki with Wael Atilli, Mohamad Razan, and Ahmad [?] Ishki is a platform about complaints and it helps people to complain about anything they want. They can express themselves on the website. And they can interact with each other. They can write some petitions. The complaints were not really reaching anywhere. There were only some radio stations that have some complaints programs. And that's it. So there was no media about complaints. Nothing on TV. Nothing in the newspapers. So we just created it so that people can express themselves on this website and make their complaints public and anyone can access it. Some users were posting really private and personal kinds of complaints. And some users were really talking about general subjects like taking care of the streets, or university or bank issues. Some of the guys were complaining about some bank in Jordan that was not giving him back his money. David: Did any of the complaints published on Ishki.com lead to any concrete, offline change? Waheed: No. It's not our mission to ... it wasn't our mission to deliver it to offline change ... but we were aiming that way. We were aiming to deliver it to offline change. But we didn't do that. David: How would you have planned on doing that? Waheed: So, it might be something between us and the government or something between us and a third party. We could just contact somebody in the government and tell them about the governmental issues and the municipality issues and that kind of thing. ♫♫ Transparency and Technology Network ♫♫