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.