Case Study, Al Jazeera Forum, and Citizen Sensing

Below are some of our key accomplishments over past several months.

• We completed a comprehensive case study of Bangalore Auto Watch based on our interactions with the citizens, media, Auto Unions, and the Transport Department. The case study will be made available on eMoksha's website in next several days and mailed out to those who have registered a complaint on Kiirti. A huge thanks to Nisha, Kiirti's online media strategist, for putting together this case study after detailed research and several long interviews and meetings.
• eMoksha was invited to participate in Al Jazeera's 6th Forum themed The Arab World in Transition: Has the Future Arrived? at Doha, Qatar between March 12-14, 2011. It was an unforgettable experience to hear first-hand accounts of unfolding of events in Tunisia and Egypt. There were some interesting discussions on the role of social media in these uprisings, using Malcolm Gladwell's article as a starting point.
  
• eMoksha and Knoesis co-presented the tutorial on Citizen Sensor Data Mining, Social Media Analytics and Development Centric Web Applications at the International WWW conference in Hyderabad, India on March 28, 2011.

There are few interesting developments under way and we will add another update very soon. Meanwhile, you can reach out to us at selvam at emoksha dot org.

Bangalore Auto Watch, IWPR, and ICA

Over the past several months we have been actively working on the following initiatives.

Bangalore Auto Watch continues to be a top forum to report, view and discuss autorickshaw related issues for bangaloreans. Sudha, our project manager, has been meeting with the Transport Department officials frequently to follow-up on issues and recommended a two-fold approach. Firstly, use the reports to identify major areas of concern and address them broadly - for example, regarding tampered meters, conduct random meter checks periodically and publish the results in the media (as this is probably the most cost-effective way to address this issue). Secondly, address serious issues that sometimes involve criminal behavior, on a case-by-case basis. So far, the Transport Department has heeded to both our recommendations and conducted a city-wide meter check and tracked a handful of serious cases. The outcome of the specific follow-ups highlighted a widespread blackmarket for auto licenses in the city, which has a direct correlation to high prices, bad behavior and tampered meters. Currently, the Transport Department is considering lifting the restriction on auto licenses along the lines of what was done in Chennai.

eMoksha has been collaborating with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting to build a portal to navigate the 2010 Iraq election results and issues. Astha Gupta will be the project manager working with IWPR and our partners in India to help build out the portal.

Last month, Indians for Collective Action (ICA) conducted a Social Innovation Panel in which eMoksha participated alongside other distinguished organizations like Avaaj Otalo, Same Language Subtitling and United Prosperity.

Bangalore Auto Watch

• Couple of weeks ago, Auto Watch was launched on Kiirti to allow commuters in Bangalore report, discuss and view issues related to autos. Since launch the instance has garnered more than 60 reports from disgruntled citizens complaining about issues ranging from faulty meters to extortion to physical assault. A good percentage of the reports - around 15% - were filed over phone using Kiirti's voice reporting feature.
• News about Auto Watch was carried on Times of India and Daily News & Analysis print and online editions.
• Last week, Bangalore Transport Commissioner Mr. Bhaskar Rao signed an MoU with Kiirti to address issues reported through the platform in a timely manner and have the respective RTO's provide updates on Kiirti regularly. Currently, we are working actively with the Transport Department personnel to implement the process specified in the MoU.
• For questions or updates, please send a mail to contact@kiirti.org

OSI, Harvard and Columbia Case Studies

Recently, a few selected eMoksha projects are being studied by organizations around the world to understand the role and impact of technology in enabling transparency and civic engagement. Below are some selected cases.

• Technology for Transparency - This co-funded project by Open Society Institute's Information Program and Omidyar Network's Media, Markets & Transparency initiative, aims to inform about future investments toward transparency, accountability, and civic engagement technology projects. Kiirti was one of the 3 projects from India that was covered in-depth during the first round of the study.
• Harvard University - A group of researchers from the Department of Government at Harvard, have selected Kiirti and VoteReport India as prime examples of how technology can enable transparency and civic engagement. In August 2010, a researcher will be traveling to India to meet with Kiirti volunteers and partners to do an in-depth study.
• Columbia Law School - An intern at the Center for Internet and Society will be studying about FixOurCity Hyderabad and Kukatpally instances on Kiirti as part of a research on Open Data Initiatives in India.

Mi Panama Transparente launched

• Last week Mi Panama Transparente was launched in collaboration with the International Center for Journalists. Jorge Luis Sierra, a Mexican journalist and Knight International Journalism Fellow, is leading the efforts in Panama to drive adoption and make the initiative a success. The team at eMoksha is quite excited as this new venture will help us understand how to engage and motivate citizens to participate on civic issues, on an on-going basis.
• We have several new partners in the pipeline for Kiirti, on issues ranging from child labor, women harassment, anti-corruption, basic eye care, etc. More about them on the next post.
• Kiirti is now a registered trust (thanks to Sudha, Shanmugam and Elango for making this happen) and we're currently working towards obtaining 80G status.
• Thanks to all our supporters and volunteers who have helped eMoksha launch projects in 5 countries - Afghanistan, Lebanon, India, Panama and Sudan - over the past 18 months. And, in our opinion, we have just barely scratched the surface of what can be achieved using technology to foster civic engagement and transparency.

Kiirti Beta and Sudan VoteMonitor

Kiirti was soft-launched to a handful of partners - including, Janaagraha, 5th Pillar, CHIRAG, etc - in late March 2010 and soon after used for tracking issues during the recent Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike elections. We are continuing to work with other partners to start using their respective instances actively for civic and volunteer engagement.

Sudan VoteMonitor is now being used for tracking election issues in Sudan. Over the past 2 days around 125+ reports and 200+ SMS messages have been registered on the site.

Thanks to Sudha, we're making enormous progress towards registering Kiirti as a trust in India. Barring unexpected issues, Kiirti is all set to be registered over next couple of weeks.

Kiirti, Mi Panama Transparente and more...

Kiirti's new layout design is now available on the development host. Please bear in mind that the site and its content are still under development. Below are few interesting updates since last post.

• SMS integration setup in progress. Messages sent to shortcode 56677 with the prefix kiirti {instance-id} will be routed to the right instance in the backend.
• Reliance Communications has offered to provide a nation-wide 860 at considerable discount to support voice-based reporting.
• Simmortel has helped setup automatic IVR-based callflows in 7 languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati, Marathi and English. This functionality is truly a one-of-a-kind feature for a civic management website in India.
• Few early adopters of the Kiirti platform include, ESG (Environment Support Group), CHIRAG (Central Himalayan Rural Action Group), TIIGS (Indian Institute of Geographical Studies), NNFI (National Network for Indians), etc.

Below are updates on eMoksha's international projects.

• Mi Panama Transparente is getting re-designed with help from a native Panamanian web designer and is planned for public launch (in collaboration with ICFJ and several Panama media outlets) later this month.
• Sudan VoteMonitor was chosen as the official election observation portal at the Sudan Civil Society Organizations meet in Nairobi last month. Work is in progress to setup an Arabic version and SMS integration.
  

Sudan VoteMonitor, Panama CrimeTracker and Kiirti

Below are some important updates since our last post.

• Sudan election monitoring platform is planned to be launched in February in collaboration with the Sudan Institute. The polls mark Sudan's first democratic elections in more than two decades.
• Panama crime tracker platform, an initiative by the International Center for Journalists, will be launched with help from eMoksha and managed by a Knight Fellow on the ground. The proposed timeline is end of February.
• Kiirti development has been gaining great momentum with help from unexpected quarters. Simmortel helped put together a simple call-flow in Hindi to accept citizen reports via phone and route them to Kiirti. By Jan 31st, call-flows will be enabled in Tamil, Marathi, Telugu, Kannada and English. MORE+1 has been helping us with a much-needed site design (a.k.a facelift) which should be completed by Feb 1st. Soon after, with help from couple of Microsoft volunteers, the design changes will be applied to the production site. Meanwhile, our Project Manager in Bangalore, has begun reaching out to interested NGOs/organizations to get them on-board the Kiirti platform. More updates about partners in a separate post later.
• On the administration front, early this month, we began the process to register eMoksha as 501(c)(3) in the United States and as Section 25 in India.

Vision for Kiirti

Kiirti is a one-stop governance portal for India aiming to provide the following functionalities in 2010.

• Citizens should be able to report, view and discuss any civic or governance related issues - ranging from dangerous potholes to absent teachers in public schools to domestic violence, etc - through telephone (voice), mobile (sms), and the internet (email, web, twitter).
• NGOs should be able to setup subdomains to engage volunteers and citizens to report, view, discuss and route issues appropriately. For example, NGOs focusing on child education can create a subdomain to allow volunteers and citizens to report, view and discuss issues related to public school education quality (including teacher attendance, state of school library, school maintenance, etc). The reported issues will be aggregated and routed to the appropriate government authorities for action; the same issues can be followed up using Right To Information (RTI) act when met with lack of response. Overall, a one-stop shop for enabling better governance.
  
• Citizens should be able to register to create and manage an online profile tracking their civic engagement activities. They can form and become part of existing groups to collaborate on larger issues and policies.
  
• Government can pro-actively engage with citizen groups via online townhall meetings at different levels - e.x. ward, city, district, state, national, etc.

Kiirti soft launch

Kiirti, a one-stop citizen reporting and tracking platform to enable awareness and citizen engagement in India, was soft-launched on Dec 5, 2009.

It was made possible by extending Ushahidi to support Multiple Hosted Instances. A huge thanks to Ian Pye, the key architect behind Ushahidi MHI and to the Ushahidi team including Erik, Brian and David.

SMS shortcode support will be added by next week. The shortcode will be carrier-agnostic and hence make it possible for citizens to report about issues, from anywhere in India.

Next steps for Kiirti, include setting up a toll-free number and integration with FreedomFone to accept IVR-based reports and auto-classification of issues via integration with Weka or Swift.

Please send a mail to contact@kiirti.org if you're interested in volunteering or donating for Kiirti.

Kiirti, TEDIndia and Aazis

• Kiirti, our one-stop citizen reporting and petitioning platform for India, is planned for launch in December 2009. Backend infrastructure work was completed last week enabling multiple instance hosting for Ushahidi.
• The TEDIndia trip, made possible by CIS India grant, provided enormous opportunities to network with many interesting people and organizations. Looking forward to tie-ups with global aid agencies - who can find good use in eMoksha's citizen monitoring platforms for assessing aid impact - and other socially-conscious organizations.
• Finally, our novel (or crazy - depending on who you ask :) idea about democratization of money, tagged Aazis, is ready for prototyping after we finished hashing out the functionalities and user scenarios. If anyone is interested in volunteering towards this effort, please mail me.

Updates - October 30, 2009

• Launched newly re-designed eMoksha.org website on Oct 29th. Please check it out and let us know your comments/feedbacks.
• Ushahidi Multiple Instances (UMI) support work is nearing completion with help from Ian Pye and our friends at Ushahidi. The current plan is to have a demo instance for UMI setup under Kiirti, just in time for the TEDIndia conference.
  
• Work on FixOurCity Mumbai for Flood and Disaster Management started several weeks ago. Volunteers from NMIMS and HHI began working with eMoksha on requirements, design and implementation of the platform.
  
• Last week, we successfully hired our first full-time Social Entrepreneurship Intern + Project Manager in Bangalore to help with eMoksha's projects, specifically Kiirti. Thanks to Shekhar Mittal from Praja for the timely help.
  
• VoteReport Sudan project proposal was accepted by SIRP board and work is planned to begin early next week to setup a prototype instance.
• CrimeReport Panama is pending grant approval at ICFJ end. Most likely, a decision will be made before end of December.
  

Updates - October 7, 2009

• eMoksha and Ushahidi to work together on enabling Multiple Hosted Instances support for the versatile Ushahidi reporting platform.
• Requirements discussion started for Kiirti, a one-stop citizen reporting and petitioning platform for India. More details to follow soon.
• Mumbai Disaster Management system implementation to start next week in co-ordination with HHI and NMIMS.

Updates - September 16, 2009

• Working with International Center For Journalists on a citizen-driven crime and corruption tracking platform for Panama City.
• Completed first-round of talks with Sudan Institute, a think-tank based in US, to help monitor Sudanese elections next year using the VoteReport platform.
• FixOurCity Hyderabad coding has been completed and currently under testing. Tentative launch before end of September.
• FixOurCity Delhi, which will be using Ushahidi framework, is under design.
• Design in progress for a uber-reporting platform in India that can auto-classify reports/SMS/tweets and generate reports to the appropriate government authorities/officials.
• Design in progress for a platform to ease creation and management of local complementary currencies using mobiles/cells in developing countries.

VoteReport Afghanistan Coverage Update

Yesterday saw VoteReport Afghanistan (a.k.a AliveInAfghanistan) featured in Top News Items on BBC Tech and covered by MSNBC's Rachel Maddow show. The sudden spike in traffic brought down the site for a few minutes. Later, we were able to bring it back by doing the equivalent of an open-heart surgery on the production hosts to split the DB and the webserver. Thanks to Ian Pye from the VoteReport Lebanon (a.k.a Sharek961) team for his timely help.

Below are links to few more articles covering VoteReport Afghanistan.

• Great Afghan Election Resource : Alive in Afghanistan
• Afghanistan Presidential Election
• Historic elections continued, despite threats of violence
• Mapping the Afghan Elections
• Polls slightly extended in Afghan election
  
• Voter Fraud or Self-preservation step ?
  

VoteReport Afghanistan launched

Last weekend, eMoksha launched VoteReport Afghanistan in collaboration with Small World News. This is the 3rd country in which we have launched the VoteReport platform, which was originally built for the 2009 Indian Elections.

CIS Grant - July 29, 2009

Last week, the Center for Internet and Society (CIS) in India granted eMoksha Rs 300,000 (approximately $6200) to support our work in the areas of enabling transparency and good governance. Besides monetary support, CIS has also kindly offered us office space for interns and part-time employees at their Bangalore office.

On behalf of eMoksha's volunteers, I sincerely thank CIS and Sunil for their support and belief in our initiatives. The funds will help strengthen eMoksha's VoteReport and FixOurCity platforms, and hire a Social Entrepreneur Intern to spearhead the Open Data Initiative to digitize and share government data in public domain via standard webservices/APIs.

Update - July 15, 2009

Interesting updates since last post.

• FixOurCity Chennai resolved more than 25 issues in its first month after launch with a resolution rate greater than 50%. Midway through talks with one of the top radio channels in Chennai to spread awareness. Launched the FixOurCityChennai social network to get discuss/brainstorm ideas with committed citizens.
• Working with a regional partner to launch FixOurCity Hyderabad within next couple of months.
• VoteReport Maharashtra is getting off the ground a bit slower than expected and hoping to get it up and running before end of August. More update on this later.
• Working on an idea to help localities and communities that have the required resources and werewithal to make lives better, but waiting for government or private funding. Planning to launch first version by end of August.
  

Democracy Camp Update - June 23, 2009

The first democracy camp in Chennai was held on June 6th. The focus of the camp was discussing and analyzing the impact of technology on governance and other citizen-centered initiatives. Below are some key updates.

• Around 25 participants from Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Mumbai took part in the camp.
• I gave a brief presentation outlining the technology + governance landscape in India. This will be posted online at idemocracy.ning.com
  
• The camp was extended for 2 additional hours than planned, owing to participants enthusiasm. Overall, the camp was successful.
  
• To continue the conversations that were started at the camp, a micro-social network was formed at idemocracy.ning.com - feel free to join and contribute.
  

India Trip Update - June 3, 2009

• Met with the Election Commissioner and Deputy Election Commissioner of India to discuss VoteReport India's role in 2009 general elections. The feedback was positive and the EC was interested in adapting VRI for the upcoming Maharashtra state elections. This is fantastic, since despite being a relatively new NGO eMoksha has been able to garner the trust of one of the most progressive governmental organizations in India. More details on this to follow soon.
• In Delhi, met with several leaders from NNFI including Anant and Promod, Dr. Jagdeep Chhokar from ADR and Barun Mitra from Liberty Institute. It was an invaluable experience to discuss existing initiatives and brainstorming new ones with these leaders.
• In Bangalore, met with Srikanth and Aveejeet from eGovernments (Srikanth is an advisor to eMoksha), Indira and Rajesh from Janaagraha and Sunil Abraham from Center for Internet and Society. Laid the foundation for a collaborative effort between eGovernments and eMoksha as part of the Rural eGovernance initiative. More details on this to follow later.
• Shekhar Mittal joined as a new volunteer for eMoksha, to drive the Open Data Initiative (need to find a better name :) to help digitize and expose all government data using web standards like DCMI/XML/KML/etc.
• Uma Babu joined as a franchiser for FixOurCity Chennai, to help promote the platform and spread the word.
• 44 people have signed up for the iDemocracyCamp to be held at Cognizant's office on OMR in Chennai. At least couple of participants are flying from Hyderabad and Bangalore to attend the camp.
• Finally, VoteReport Lebanon (aka Sharek961.org) was successfully launched yesterday. This was made possible by a team that was spread between Seattle, New York, Beirut, Nairobi and Chennai. Welcome to the new age in global civic software development.