Posts Tagged ‘Swift’

Vote Report India at Netsquared Microsoft Mobile Challenge for Development

Friday, May 15th, 2009

I had mentioned yesterday that we will soon relaunch Vote Report India as a platform to crowd-source the performance monitoring of our elected members of parliament.

We have submitted Vote Report India to the Netsquared Microsoft Mobile Challenge for Development. The winners win up to $15000 and an opportunity to be showcased at the N2Y4 Mobile Conference.

I would urge you to take out five minutes from your time to have a look at the Vote Report India application and leave a positive comment that can help us win.

Here is a short summary of our Netsquared Microsoft Mobile Challenge for Development application –

WHAT: Vote Report India is a collaborative platform to enable Indian citizens to track election irregularities and monitor the performance of elected officials at national, state and local levels.

Users contribute direct SMS, email, Twitter and web reports and the Ushahidi-based platform aggregates them on an interactive map, and distributes them via RSS and email/ SMS alerts.

WHO: Vote Report India is a non-partisan all-volunteer collaboration between software developers, designers, academics, and other professionals to bring transparency to the Indian political process.

Vote Report India is built on the Ushahidi and Swift platforms and managed by eMoksha, a non-profit organization that aims to enable stronger democracies through increased citizen awareness and engagement.

WHY: With more than 700 million voters, India is the world’s largest democracy. However, it is far from being an ideal democracy.

The same controversies surround every election in India: the illegal use of government resources for campaigning, incidences of divisive and inflammatory rhetoric in campaign speeches, populist promises that are impossible to fulfill, allegations of violence and intimidation against voters, incomplete voter lists and malfunctioning voting machines. Even more seriously, more than 1000 candidates contesting in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, or 15-20% of the total number of candidates, had criminal background. To make matters worse, the urban middle class complains about corrupt politicians, but doesn’t step out to contest elections or to even cast its vote.

So, Vote Report India aims to do two things at the same time: build civic engagement amongst India’s youth and increase transparency and accountability in the Indian political process.

One way to do it is to crowd-source the monitoring of the political process in India. Given that there are more than 400 million mobile users in India, compared to 50 million internet users, SMS becomes an integral part of this crowdsourcing process.

The Ushahidi platform allows Vote Report India to have a large reach via SMS and provide a rich interactive experience to web users at the same time.

WHERE: Vote Report India aims to increase transparency in the Indian political process at national, state and local levels.

WHEN: Vote Report India was started in April 2009 to track election irregularities in the 2009 Indian Lok Sabha elections. Going forward, Vote Report India will create micro-sites to enable Indian citizens to track election irregularities for all upcoming national, state and local elections. Vote Report India will also enable Indian citizens to monitor the performance of elected officials at national, state and local levels on a regular basis.

EXPECTED IMPACT: By crowd-sourcing the monitoring of the political process in India, Vote Report India aims to build civic engagement amongst India’s youth and increase transparency and accountability in the Indian political process.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Announcements | 1 Comment »

The Report Card on Vote Report India Version 1.0

Friday, May 15th, 2009

Vote Report India Banner

The 2009 Indian Lok Sabha elections have come to an end and so has version 1.0 of Vote Report India.

We have had our successes and failures and I have talked about some of them before.

I think we did a lot of things well –

- We were able to get the website up within a week, thank to some great work by the Ushahidi and eMoksha teams.

- We were able to build a number of important relationship, with civil society organizations (like Jaago Re/ One Billion Voters, National Network for India, Liberty Institute, Citizens for Justice and Peace, and Women’s Political Forum), traditional media organizations (like Al Jazeera) and new media organizations (like Global Voices, Indipepal, Desipundit, BlogAdda, NGO Post and Digital Democracy). In fact, our partnerships page looks like a literal who’s who of the important players working on the Indian elections.

- We were able to generate a lot of buzz for Vote Report India, on blogs, on Twitter, and in mainstream media within a very short time.

- We have been able to build a vibrant Vote Report India community that has been active in supporting us on both the technical and outreach side.

Here are some things that have not gone well –

- We haven’t been able to establish a relationship with any big Indian media organizations on one hand, and National election Watch and the Election Commission on the other hand, in spite of some serious discussions.

- We haven’t been able to integrate the Swift functionality into Vote Report India (aggregating feeds from multiple sources and crowdsourcing the tagging etc.) on our original timelines.

- We haven’t been able to get users to submit reports in large numbers. We have a little more than 200 reports in the system, which isn’t bad. However, we would have needed many more reports to capture the complexity of the 2009 Indian elections.

- The voter turnout in all four phases has been low, putting a question mark on the effectiveness of all digital civil society campaigns like Vote Report India.

Here are some lessons from Vote Report India version 1.0 –

- It’s still difficult to build a grassroots movement in India exclusively on the internet. Even online campaigns need to be supported by mainstream media for reach and SMS for the feedback loop. We had SMS, but we didn’t have the resources to advertise on mainstream media.

- In a country like India, which has a free and noisy news eco-system, transparency initiatives like Vote Report India need to not only get original reports from users but also aggregate reports from mainstream media.

- Transparency, in terms of availability of information in a usable format, is not a big enough incentive for Indian users. Users expected Vote Report India to closeloop the issues and give them feedback, and we were not set up to do that.

On the whole, I think that we did quite well, given our time and resource constraints.

Our biggest achievement, I think, was being able to build a vibrant community around Vote Report India and we are grateful for your contribution to the project.

As I said, this was only version 1.0 of Vote Report India. We will take a short break and then relaunch Vote Report India as a platform to crowd-source the performance monitoring of our elected members of parliament, using the Ushahidi/ Swift engines. We will move the present homepage to 2009.votereport.in and start new pages like 2014.votereport.in for new elections, including local assembly elections.

Selvam and I, along with the other members of the core team, will continue to devote a substantial part of our time to Vote Report India. We are looking to expand our team, so do write to us at votereportindia@gmail.com, if you would like to become involved in a significant way.

Once again, thank you for helping Vote Report India make a small difference to the 2009 Indian elections.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Announcements | 3 Comments »