In July 2015, Internews launched Open Mic Nepal, a project designed to track and debunk rumors in the communities affected by the April 2015 earthquake in Nepal. Based on previous pilots of this approach in Gaza and Liberia, the project set out to assess and address information needs by using minimally structured qualitative data-gathering approaches to surface trends in community conversations, identify key concerns, misunderstandings and toxic/corrupted information, and to redress them with the provision of reliable and verified information as speedily as possible.
This report – Open Mic Nepal: Tracking Rumors in Post-Earthquake Nepal – describes how the project worked, the results, lessons learned and recommendations.