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Vote Report India Version 2.0
Challenges:
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.
FIT WITH UN MILLENIAL DEVELOPMENT GOALS: As a collaboration between stakeholders spread across three continents -- eMoksha (India), Ushahidi (Kenya) and Swift (United States) -- Vote Report India is a good example of Goal 8 of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals: develop a global partnership for development.
Excellent initiative
I believe that votereport.in and fixourcity.org will fundamentally change the dynamics of citizen empowerment and involvement. Kodos to the team. Keep it going, It is only a matter of time, the net-savvy Indian citizens will embrace this new channel of government interaction.
Best wishes,
Kiran Indukuri
"Ask not what your country
"Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country. "- John Kennedy
This is a cool platform to enable people participation in democaricies. Provides an easy way for the common man to participate and make his voice heard to effect change.
Awesome project
This project is on the forefront of finding ways to use existing innovative platforms to aggregate data and more importantly to 'filter' the crowdsourced data (SwiftRiver). Supporting this project will contribute to ongoing innovation in the field of mobile data gathering, aggregation and advocacy.
VoteReport.in FTW!
http://blog.ushahidi.com
Citizen Driven...
I have been able to follow news and other developments related to 2009 elections very closely at this site.
I would like to congratulate the entire team for this effort and intiative. This is true citizen driven platform for providing transparancy during the elections.
Very nice initiative, would
Very nice initiative, would help the common man take part in bringing issues to the fore front. Great work !
this is an interesting idea
this is an interesting idea and i think it makes a lot of sense,
it can improve the vote process and show the latest status of the election, which is good for the whole public
A solid team and strong community
The Vote Report India team has been one of the most dynamic groups to ever use the Ushahidi platform. They have worked to not only make the monitoring of the general election in India a success, but have set up a community and platform that can be used for many other political monitoring efforts in the future.
In fact, as one of the founders of Ushahidi, I'm quite interested in seeing what happens when a monitoring community uses a tool like Ushahidi when put into place for a long-term monitoring effort of localized elections as well as the nationa-level.
I must admit this is a
I must admit this is a wonderful initiative to try and streamline the democratic practices in India.
Keep up the great work!
Open platform and great community effort
Ushahidi, Swiftare great platform; and VoteReport team has done a great job to combine efforts of various like minded individuals to improve democracies around the world. I'm also happy that the Swift team is especially putting effort to make the data available to various other applications. Kudos to open minded collaboration!