Ana Blidaru: Code for Romania is the first NGO started in Romania to go international

Vladimir Mitev

Ana Blidaru is the Director for Civic Infrastructure of Code for Romania – the largest civic technology organization in the world. Ana started her career in cultural management before transitioning to the NGO sector, co-founding the One World Romania IDFF Human Rights and Documentary Film Festival. Along the way, Ana’s entrepreneurial spirit led her to set up a community space in Bucharest and join a start-up – Kofi Ti. After pursuing an MBA at GBSB Global Business School, her desire to make a positive impact led her to join Code for Romania / Commit Global in the spring of 2023, further strengthening her dedication to serving the community.

Ms. Blidaru, what does Code for Romania do in terms of technology and services related to election monitoring?

Since 2016, Code for Romania has been building civic tech in Romania. The very first solutions created were around elections and, lo and behold, after eight years these solutions are still being used by civil society and citizens, and we are continuously maintaining and developing these solutions, adding new functionalities year after year. I am referring here to Vot Diaspora, the online platform where any Romanian citizen, regardless of the country they are in, can find the nearest polling station and find out how to exercise this right. In each of the elections since 2016, the platform has been used by over 300,000 Romanians in the diaspora.

Last year and at the beginning of this year, first a research was done, then the app was rewritten, we did concept testing sessions, and on all these things we worked with several organizations in Europe, which helped us to understand the local contexts in different other countries, to understand if there are different needs and what they would be, to validate what we knew about how it’s being used and to understand if and where certain changes should be made. And we worked on it to transform it from, as we say, a tailored application, that is, made specifically for a particular country, to one that can be customized to the needs of any country. An example of this is the territorial division, which differs from country to country. Initially the application was designed for Romania, where we have counties and municipalities, so two levels of territorial division. In Poland, for example, there are three levels. Now Vote Monitor can support up to five administrative levels and any alphabet. So the solution can be used by non-governmental organizations in any country for any kind of elections.

We had numerous discussions with NGOs involved in election monitoring during the research period, but the closest partners were Expert Forum from Romania, Political Accountability Foundation from Poland and Institute for the Development of the Public Environment from Bulgaria. We worked very well together, they helped us to understand local contexts and specificities, we tested functionalities together and we gathered in Bucharest for a few days in a workshop dedicated to election observation. The workshop was an interesting opportunity for all participants to look at each other’s needs. In general, these organizations work very much locally, they are aware of the context in their own country and this workshop organized by us gave them the opportunity to understand a bit more what is the context in other countries.

What is the story of the Code for Romania community?

Code for Romania started as a volunteer initiative and operated on a voluntary basis for the first three years. Over time it has grown into a community of over 3,000 people, 1,000 of which are in the diaspora, the rest in Romania. There are people who contribute according to their availability, but they are always there. This was very clear at times of crisis. Unfortunately, in the last four years, we have twice had the opportunity to see how quickly the community mobilizes. This happened both during the period of the COVID-19 pandemic and at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, when refugees started arriving in Romania overnight. At both times, the community came together very quickly, leaving other work and other priorities behind, and in record time, platforms and solutions were launched that have helped more than 20 million people in the last few years.

When war broke out in Ukraine, we built the infrastructure that every refugee crossing the border into Romania needed. An ecosystem with a single point of entry – dopomoha.ro from where any person could find access to verified information, dedicated services, integration guidance and everything they might need once they arrived. This platform was launched within 48 hours after the first refugees arrived in Romania, but in Poland, for example, there is still no similar platform.

In Romania we managed to do this because of the premises. On the one hand, there is this community of volunteers, ready to jump when needed. At the same time, over the last six years, Code for Romania has developed the largest research project since 1990, in five very important areas – environment, health, education, vulnerable groups and civil society. In this research project, 37 topics were studied, the main actors were identified, the real problems mapped and then my colleagues came up with some possible digital solutions that could solve these problems. Having this research already in place, it was very easy at the moment of exposing the war to materialize one of the identified solutions. We already had the research. We were rather preparing for an earthquake, because unfortunately we are waiting in Romania for the next big earthquake. It wasn’t an earthquake, it was a border war, but the needs of people who are left homeless, without papers, or access to other medical services are quite similar.

“I wish I had this infrastructure in Lebanon”. Those were the words of the head of the UN refugee agency when he arrived in Romania, where we already had much of all the necessary systems up and running: from outreach, critical patient management, accommodation and resource management, guidelines and more.

That was the moment when my colleagues, those who founded and grew this organization, realized that what they had built in Romania could be used internationally.
Technology is agnostic to culture, geography, or language. The same digital solution can be easily adapted, localized in another country. And there’s no point in investing in technology and building similar solutions from scratch in four corners of the world when we can focus our efforts on creating a solution that can be used anywhere in the world and maintaining that solution over time.

Commit Global is the international initiative of Code for Romania, headquartered in The Hague. Commit Global’s mission is to create the Infrastructure of Good and make it freely available to all non-governmental organizations around the world, thereby supporting those on the frontline, those who help us all.

In the last year we have started to take the solutions created in Romania abroad. Of the more than 60 solutions available in Romania, around 30 are already adapted or being adapted for international use. And one by one they are being used by non-governmental organizations around the world. Monitoring Vot has already been used by independent observers from more than 10 European countries. Website Factory, the website builder made especially for NGOs is already being used by organizations in Georgia, France, Moldova, Ghana, but we are in talks with organizations from Mexico to Armenia. Because we realized that what we had done for Romanians with Diaspora Voting is also necessary for citizens of other countries, in the context of the European Parliament elections we created a pan-European platform WeVote4EU, where any EU citizen could find all this information needed to know under what conditions, when and how they can vote, regardless of where they are on election day, their citizenship, or residence.

What kind of collaborations do you have – on the one hand with similar organizations in other countries, on the other hand with the Romanian government? I guess when it comes to platforms related to public services, you need some openness from the Romanian government?

Code4 initiatives exist in many countries. But with a few exceptions (like Code for America), many of the Code4 initiatives are quite small, precisely because we are often talking about volunteer-based organizations that are not self-sustainable over time. Code for Romania is the largest civic technology community in the world. Of course, we are in contact with all these organizations and occasionally we have joint projects.

Code for Romania has never taken any public funding from Romania, but has provided state institutions with free digital solutions. We chose not to apply for any grants or funding from the Romanian state precisely because we did not want there to be any conflict of interest. In critical moments, we created the necessary digital solutions and offered them to the state institutions to manage them, while we continue to maintain them for free. This was the case with all the solutions developed in the pandemic (stirioficiale.ro, datelazi.ro, cetrebuiesafac.ro and the rest), the dopomoha.ro platform and some internal tools, such as RVM – a dedicated volunteer and resource management system through which the Department for Emergency Situations can coordinate with all preparedness NGOs in the country to manage resources jointly.

In between crises we continue to reach out to state institutions and remind them that it is healthy to create and adopt digital solutions outside of times of emergency to be better prepared in the future.

Are there, however, more tech-savvy people in the state who can better communicate with you? I guess more technocratic politicians are closer to you?

Many people change in governments, as we know. That’s the tricky part because I’ve often been in the situation where I’ve started a discussion with a particular ministry. “Hello, we are Code for Romania and we are doing…” and three months later the minister changed and we started from scratch, saying again we are Code for Romania and we are doing this. We are happy when some strategic partnerships are signed and in this context we can go beyond the hello part and let it be known that there is this constant collaboration.

Is there another platform or another way to monitor elections other than the one provided by Code for Romania?

We work with the Fair Vote Coalition. Since 2016, we have been working with the Expert Forum Association and Maria Krause, an independent election expert, to build a digital solution that meets the needs of election observation based on the methodology used by ODIHR (the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights).

Have you thought about linguistic modeling or artificial intelligence for Romanians in Romanian language and with Romanian data?

At the moment we don’t have that in the pipeline because we are focusing on other topics. Following extensive research in recent years, we have identified about 400 digital solutions that can solve real societal problems, solutions that once built can change people’s lives and help civil society. More than 60 of them are already built and the others are waiting to become reality in the coming period.

And of these 60, which are perhaps the most useful for social change?

Hard to say. The solutions created are in very different areas – from a support platform for the LGBTQ+ community, to a mental health informational platform, to a website builder specifically designed for NGOs, to a mobile app for volunteers, Vote Monitor…

And I said so very randomly, from different areas. I couldn’t prioritize. They’re all important and each addresses a specific need. Of course there are certain solutions that are for the general population like Voting Results. Here, every year, more than a million Romanians log in to find out the election results. But we also have platforms or applications, digital solutions that help certain people or certain organizations that have certain activities, such as a case manager for community assistants or a platform of activities for early intervention for children with severe disabilities.
There are few cases where that saying “one size fits all” applies. Obviously, there are such cases. Perhaps the best example of this is Website Factory the website builder, which can just as well be used by an organization with 5 members, a budget of €1,000 and community activations, or an international organization with teams of thousands of people doing events on a different scale.

You mentioned that you already have collaboration with an NGO in Bulgaria. What does this collaboration consist of?

We were very happy to find in the Institute for the Development of the Public Environment a partner who, like us and like Expert Forum, wants to be in a close relationship and build something together. This feature is essential in any international partnership, precisely because in the process of adapting solutions we rely on the expertise of specialized organizations in the country in question, which know the local context and needs much better. That is why we were very happy to find such a partner in Bulgaria, which has supported us during the research and development of the new version of Vote Monitor. Now the Vote Monitor platform will be used for the first time in Bulgaria and we are waiting to see the feedback from the observers in the polling stations. We are curious to know how they found the change; because until now they had to fill in some forms by hand, while this app allows them to answer some direct questions on their mobile phone. The answers arrive in real time to the organization, which can then come out with press releases, or present graphs and statistics, automatically generated directly in the platform.

Some organizations prefer to say nothing on election day, others give hourly updates – and both approaches are possible with Vote Monitor. But regardless of when they communicate the observation results, this app greatly simplifies the work of NGO representatives, who until now had to collect the papers, transcribe them one by one, analyze the responses manually, and create graphs.

You mentioned that you have a community of over 3000 volunteers. This large number of members suggests that there is a cause behind the organization. What ambitions do you have for the coming years?

Code for Romania functioned in the first three years only on a voluntary basis and we still have today a community of over 3300 volunteers which, as I mentioned earlier, in times of crisis has been on the barricades. For the rest, we organize a hack day every month (the next Hack Day is on June 29), both online and in some cities around the country, and on those days we meet to work together on the solutions in development.
The volunteer community is close to us, and we know we can rely on everyone in an emergency. But in order to take it to the next level, to take the solutions created in Romania out of the country and develop Commit Global and build new solutions and international partnerships, we need a team that is totally dedicated to this project.

The June 2024 elections have created scandals and allegations of fraud. Can VoteWatch help to highlight possible abuses? How quickly are electoral authorities notified in order to take appropriate decisions? And to what extent does Vote Monitor succeed in facilitating a transparent and honest electoral process?

All independent observers who have used the Vote Monitor application have attended training sessions organized by accredited NGOs and received resource materials – guides and explanatory videos.These steps are necessary to ensure that election observers know the law and can identify possible misconduct.

The Vote Monitor solution allows each organization to create their own forms, so they can get the information they need from observers. In addition to the standard forms, the mobile app allows observers to send in complaints, photos, videos or other notes. In this way, observers can report irregularities they witness in real time. In serious cases, observers can of course call 112 directly.

Photo: Ana Blidaru (source: The Bridge of Friendship)

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