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.