The Twitter sentiment tracker during Marko Rakar's speech
Last week I was one of the lucky ones that was attending Personal Democracy forum in Barcelona. And I am calling myself lucky not only because the location of the event (University of Barcelona) and because I was together with a great group of colleagues, but because of the experiences that were shared during this conference.
One particular speaker and his story made a lasting impression on me: leading political blogger from Croatia: Marko Rakar. He has been named “data guerrilla” and “data transparency revolutionary” (as well as many other names, I ‘m sure) and his story was about how one man can make a difference in fighting corruption and fraud.
Croatia = more voters than citizens
He started his presentation with numbers that were telling enough – Croatia is the only country in the world where you’ll find more voters than citizens, he said. And while it provoked a lot of laughter, the reality is as it is: corrupted. In many cases, there are more voters because people in neighbouring Bosnia or Serbia are taking advantage of loose procedures in border towns in order to gain social benefits, also local authorities encourage the practice because it gives them an ample pool of extra votes to keep themselves in power.
Marko Rakar’s ideas worth spreading
1) Educating people is the easiest way to double your money and get return on your investment.
2)Stimulating creative thinking is critical in order to succeed in rapidly shrinking an even faster changing world.
3) Rule of law, transparency of governance is a foundation for a prosperous society.
4) There are no boxes (or borders) large enough to contain great ideas.
In order to fight this situation, one day he spread the word in the online community: “if I would have the Croatias’ voters list, I could make a map and see where the fraud is”. And as Rakar is very well known political blogger in Croatia and has established his place in the online community, his voice was heard. In a few days he received DVDs with all the voters in Croatia. From that he made a database that put together names with addresses.
What he found out was that, according to the voters’ list, in a small countryside village in Croatia there was a “skyscraper” where a lot of people were registered with the same address. Or that there were many people that were registered in the house whose number was 0. After exposing all these inadequacies, now the problem has been solved, Rakard said, but there were still other things to attend to.
Fake war veterans
Other project that has Rakar’s name associated with it and why Rakar even got arrested (OK, it was only for 8 hours but that is still much more than any of us have experienced in our life) was a list of Balkan war veterans published online that showed that a lot of people (including prominent national figures) have lied about their participation in Balkan war in order to receive the veteran benefits (e.g. premium health care and duty-free car imports).
Staying true to yourself
Rakar’s presentation was uplifting. It was passionate and it was taking you on a journey. Conference organisers even measured (I wonder how that was done…) that during this presentation there was huge spikes in dominance (how in control people felt) and arousal (how awake/lively people felt).
For a part of the conference participants corruption and fraud is known from their own experience (Eastern Europe during Soviet Union times and just after gaining independence had a lot of cases in this field) for others it was just a story, but for sure, for everyone it was a reminder that if you believe in your goal and stay true to yourself, you can achieve all you believe in and make change happen.
More from Marko Rakar ‘s life
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