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I had mentioned yesterday that we will soon relaunch Vote Report India as a platform to crowd-source the performance monitoring of our elected members of parliament.

We have submitted Vote Report India to the Netsquared Microsoft Mobile Challenge for Development. The winners win up to $15000 and an opportunity to be showcased at the N2Y4 Mobile Conference.

I would urge you to take out five minutes from your time to have a look at the Vote Report India application and leave a positive comment that can help us win.

Here is a short summary of our Netsquared Microsoft Mobile Challenge for Development application –

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.  Read More

Here’s the introduction to my Georgetown University course on Social Media in Business, Development, and Government (PDF and PPTX) –

Social media technologies are disrupting power equations between consumers and businesses on one hand and citizens and governments on the other hand, especially in the context of emerging countries. Therefore, it is essential that thinkers and practitioners in the areas of business, development and government understand the use and impact of social media technologies.

Through readings, guest lectures, and case studies, the course will provide students the conceptual understanding of the power and philosophy of social media. The course will specifically focus on how social media is changing media, business, development, and government in fundamental ways, especially in emerging countries in Asia and Africa.

The course will also help students gain practical facility in the use of social media tools. More importantly, students will learn meta skills like how to learn to use new social media tools, how to use filters to make sense of social media, how to curate news and knowledge and how to engage in an online public debate.

Here is a detailed syllabus: Google Docs/ PDF/ DOCX.

Cross-posted at my course blog.

Gabe Riviera at Techmeme puts together a list of the 50 biggest stories of 2008 and it’s all about Google, Yahoo. Microsoft, Facebook and Apple.

I didn’t blog about even one of these stories, and, in retrospect, I would have blogged about only one story: Google indexing its one trillionth URL.

I’m not saying that these aren’t important stories, just that they are too mainstream to be of interest to me. I want a Techmeme for stories about how social media and mobile are changing media, business, government and development. Does anybody know where to look?

(Cross-posted on my official fellowship blog — How Global Values Shape Communications Technologies)

I believe that the most powerful application of social media is to help citizens self-organize themselves into virtual communities to work towards social change. In BRIC countries, where mobile penetration is much higher than PC penetration, such communities will need to be designed in an “access agnostic” manner, which means that the content/ community exists in the “cloud” and can be accessed by multiple mediums including websites, RSS feeds, voice portals and even text messages.

So, when I attend Microsoft’s ICT for Development Conference (see agenda) in Washington DC on September 22-23 2008, I’ll be interested to find out if development agency leaders, private sector practitioners, non-profits and activists share my enthusiasm for the use of social media for social change. The conference is free, but there are limited seats, so you need to register in advance at DevEx, a community for “professionals working in international development, global health, and foreign assistance”.

Incidentally, Microsoft runs some interesting initiatives under its Unlimited Potential program and James Utzschneider runs a cool blog on “Microsoft’s commitment to create sustained social and economic opportunity for the next 5 billion”.