New technologies are giving citizens more information about their governments than ever before, and they hold the potential to create even more transparency. But the same solutions do not necessarily apply across the board, and one challenge is finding the right remedy for individual situations.

A new course that aims to help individuals around the world build and improve democracy in their own countries will soon be available online. The free course will be taught by Larry Diamond, democracy scholar and director of the Center on Democracy, Development & the Rule of Law at Stanford University.

Millions of Ghanaians voted in a close election last December that returned incumbent President John Dramani to office by a margin of less than 3 percentage points. An independent vote count by a local election monitoring organization that used SMS technology to verify returns from around the country gave many voters the confidence necessary to ensure a peaceful election process—both during the voting and in the days following.

In Liberia, where more than 40 percent of adults are illiterate and where citizens who live outside of the capital, Monrovia, have little or no access to the Internet or television, radio is often the only reliable source of news.  Traditionally, getting news to radio stations involves recording it onto CDs, which then need to be driven to the stations.  This is both expensive and time consuming, and stories are usually out of date by the time they are aired.

A bipartisan group of 21 high-level political experts has come together on behalf of continued U.S. support for democracy around the world.