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.
  

Update - May 10, 2009

• FixOurCity for Chennai (India) was soft-launched couple of days ago. Please try it out and mail us your feedback and comments. This will be hugely helpful in eliminating any kinks in the system, before the full-blown launch later this month with media.
  
• Over the last few weeks we have entered into discussion with several individuals and organizations regarding an adaptation/implementation of VoteReport India for the upcoming elections in Lebanon. Further updates will be made public soon.
• As the Indian elections are nearing the end, discussions have started to extend the VoteReport platform to track performance/promises of elected members and other transparency initiatives. I'll be posting updates on our plans within next couple of weeks.
  

Update - April 28, 2009

• FreeFairElections.com is now VoteReport.in (actually, has been for the past 3 weeks). Couple of weeks after eMoksha launched FreeFairElections, we came to know about another team working on a similar initiative using the Ushahidi platform and decided to merged the projects (for better use of resources and reach) under VoteReport.in. In less than 3 weeks of operation, VoteReport.in has 13,000+ visits to the site from 5,000+ unique visitors. Here is an article featuring VoteReport.in in one of the popular Mumbai newspapers. 
• FixOurCity intergration with corporation is expected to be completed in another couple of days and we plan to go for a full-fledged beta by first week of May. This beta was delayed by several weeks due to additional focus on VoteReport.in recently.
• On a personal note, I attended eDemocracyCamp2 in DC last week and it was an excellent experience. This should help set the bar for our iDemocracyCamp in Chennai on June 6.

Update - April 2, 2009

Below are important updates from past week.

• Free Fair Elections was beta launched few days ago, ahead of schedule by a full 2 weeks. All the credit for this goes to Munish for implementing the SMS integration in record-time. Overall feedback for the site has been very positive, with several suggestions to adopt the framework for community policing purposes, later on. Our biggest challenge yet, is that of spreading the word. Thankfully, we've a good partner in NNFI who're helping us stress test the system and introduce it to the Election Commission and National Electional Watch. For readers of this blog - please spread the word about Free Fair Elections to your families/friends and don't forget to use it yourself :)
  
• Fix Our City beta launch is now scheduled for April 14th. Shanmugam has been making good progress with the backend corporation integration and we hope to have the beta site ready for end-to-end testing by mid next week. Data population for the remaining 7 zones are planned be completed by mid of next week as well.
  
• iDemocracyCamp has been garnering slow but steady traction with 10+ new attendees signing up past week (and there are 9 more weeks left to go). We have signed up couple of corporate sponsors for the event so far, with a potential sponsor for the meeting space as well. More details in coming weeks.
• Lastly, we're excited to announce that Srikanth Nadhamuni from eGovernments has kindly accepted to be an advisor to eMoksha. Srikanth has a wealth of experience in enabling e-governance for many corporations/municipalities in India. We're looking forward to getting his guidance and collaborating with eGovernments on new initiatives.
  

On a personal note, I'll be at the eDemocracyCamp in DC on April 19th and in India between May-June for Fix Our City public launch and iDemocracyCamp. Please ping me if you want to connect in DC or India.

Update - March 23, 2009

It's been several weeks since the last update, despite my claim to provide updates each week. This is going on my improvement-needed list. But, glad to announce that we're now working on 3 civic projects and organizing the first-ever Democracy Camp in India. More details below.

• FixOurCity is now in private beta. The only pieces left before going public beta are integration with the Corporation site and populating DB with pincodes/areanames (that are not supported by Google Maps).
• We're working with NNFI to allow people in India to voice their opinions/priorities to the new yet-to-be-formed Indian government (along the lines of ObamaCTO)
• Also, we're working on a service to allow citizens to report elections issues (e.x. machine broken, vote already cast, ...) via SMS. Later on, this service can be used to monitor issues during riots, natural disasters, ... as well.
• Lastly, eMoksha will be sponsoring an iDemocracyCamp in Chennai during early June to share/discuss ideas in the areas of online democracy and civic software.

If you need additional information on any of the above, send us a mail.

Site Launched

Below are important updates since last post.

1. The new eMoksha.org site was launched over the weekend. One pending task is to enable SEF URLs.

2. Another good week on the technology front. Resolved an elusive Apache mod_rewrite issue and got close of 75% of the functionality working on the development host.

3. Registered FixOurCity.org domain.