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: Citizen Engagement, Development, eMoksha, Microsoft, Mobile, Netsquared, Swift, Transparency, Ushahidi, Vote Report India

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