Tagged: Election Monitoring RSS

  • Gaurav Mishra 12:45 am on March 11, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: cause marketing, , , e-STAS Symposium, Election Monitoring, , , , , , , , ,   

    My Session at the e-STAS Symposium: Vote Report India, Ushahidi, iJanaagraha, Dell Go Green & More 

    Welcome back to Gauravonomics Blog! Subscribe to my feed now and you'll never miss a single post!

    Here’s a video of myself in conversation with Luis Galindo (@luis_galindo, who runs the WIMS 2.0 project at Telefonica) at the e-STAS Symposium on Technologies for Social Action:

    I talk about election monitoring platform Vote Report India and citizen action platform iJanaagraha and the importance of having a web-mobile-offline hybrid model to drive citizen action.

    I talk about how crisis reporting platform Ushahidi has transformed a SMS-map mashup four people hacked together in four days into a global organization and ecosystem of passionate users and volunteers like myself.

    I talk about ideation platform Dell Go Green and the importance of building a community around a social object (a lifestyle or cause) that is bigger than the brand itself.

    Finally, I talk about how businesses, civil society organizations and government agencies can learn valuable lessons from each other on how to engage their constituents using social technologies and online communities. If you want to learn more, here’s a mammoth 150+ slide deck on how social technologies are changing media, business and society:

     

  • Gaurav Mishra 2:33 am on May 26, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Election Monitoring, , , Meedan, Sharik961, , , ,   

    Why It’s Still OK to Launch Your Indian Social Web Project Only in English 

    George at the Meedan Blog explains why it is important for social web projects in the Middle East to be bi-lingual: Arabic is the language of the vast majority of the more than forty million Arab web users in the Middle East.

    That’s why Meedan is teaming up with Sharik 961 – a group of Lebanese nonprofits, development practitioners, media people, and techies – to help monitor the Lebanese elections on June 7.

    The project, which will use the Ushahidi crisis-monitoring platform, will enable Lebanese voters to collaborate with a wide network of interested communities on the web to track reports from the ballot box.

    There’s absolutely no doubt translation is key to this – which partly explains why Vote Report India struggled to draw a wider set of reports on the recent Indian elections.

    I have been almost too transparent in discussing the successes and failures of Vote Report India in public and I can assure you, George, that language wasn’t a problem for Vote Report India.

    I have written before that language (English vs. vernacular), mode of access (Internet vs. mobile) and social dynamics (global vs. Indian) will be the three dimensions of differentiation for Indian social networking sites. However, English is still the preferred language for most of India’s 50 million internet users and almost 92% of all Indian blogs we analyzed for the recent State of the Indian Blogosphere Report were in English. Clearly, it’s still OK to launch your Indian social web project only in English.

    I’m sure Middle East is different and I’m happy that Meedan and Sharik961 are working together on doing an Arabic translation of the election reporting platform. However, I can assure you that, even in Lebanon, the key to the success of Sharik961 won’t be the language options on the website.

    The key for Sharik961 will be to promote its SMS code enough to preclude the need for users to visit its website to report incidents, or failing that, to tie up with civil society organizations with on-ground presence who will use the platform to directly report irregularities.

    My biggest lesson from Vote Report India was that it’s not enough to build a great website, you also need to build offline support for digital civil society initiatives to succeed. I’m hoping that Sharek961 will focus on the right priorities so that it doesn’t have to learn the same lesson all over again.

    Update: Thank you, Meedan, for updating the original post and linking to this post in a follow-up. I agree that doing an Arabic translation for Sharik961 will help build offline support for it.

     

    • Kaushal 2:52 am on May 26, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      I have to agree with Gaurav on this. While the English/Arabic divide may or may not be a problem in Lebanon, this does not translate in India.

      The Indian deployment had many factors given the size of the country, the social and logistical nuances — but English is a still the language of choice esp. in the web media world.

      • Gaurav Mishra 5:13 am on May 28, 2009 Permalink | Reply

        @Kaushal: Thank you. It’s a little sad, though, that we still haven’t been able to develop local language internet(s) in India.

  • Gaurav Mishra 1:19 pm on May 21, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Election Monitoring, , , , , , , , , , , ,   

    My NetSquared DC Talk on Vote Report India 

    I gave a talk at NetSquared DC on Tuesday where I talked about social media and digital activism in India, digital initiatives during the 2009 Indian elections, and Vote Report India. I talked about our experience in using Ushahidi for election monitoring and our plans to integrate Swift into Ushahidi. I talked about how eMoksha is trying to become the Sunlight Foundation of India. Finally, I used my 4Cs Social Media Framework to analyze our successes and failures with Vote Report India and even plugged our Vote Report India Version 2.0 application at the NetSquared Microsoft Mobile Challenge for Development.

    Here are the slides (PPTX/ PDF/ SlideShare) –

    Here is the video of the talk (Vimeo) –

    Thank you to Matt and Gabriela for giving me the opportunity to talk to the great NetSquared DC community.

     

  • Gaurav Mishra 1:17 pm on May 20, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Cadalyst Magazine, Election Monitoring, GIS, , , , , , ,   

    Vote Report India in Cadalyst Magazine Story on Ushahidi 

    Vote Report India was featured today in Cadalyst Magazine story on Ushahidi.

    Here is the full text of the story –

    Indian Citizens Serve as Election Monitors
    Open-source technologies empower a geopolitical movement driven by the people.
    May 19, 2009
    By: Kenneth Wong

    In late April, ordinary Indian citizens — the tiffin wallahs, the programmers, and the civil servants — began casting their votes in the general election for the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament. But in the land of ancient gods and hereditary castes, the modern political process is fraught with mishaps.

    On May 5, because of complaints of rigging, the Election Commission ordered repolling at three locations in the state of Uttar Pradesh. On May 6, supporters of a local candidate in Jaipur were reported to be offering opium to the villagers, justifying the practice as “the strengthening of bond.” Elsewhere, reports of distributing homemade alcohol to voters (presumably as bribes) emerged. In some locations, voters reported their names were either missing or duplicated.

    The mainstream media reported many of these incidents too. But some of them were coming directly from the voters, submitted online to an interactive map posted at Vote Report India, described as “a collaborative citizen-driven election monitoring platform.” Powered by the open-source map engine Ushahidi, the Wikipedia-style election map brings citizen journalism into a whole new dimension — the geospatial dimension.

    Powered by open-source map engine Ushahidi, the Vote Report India portal lets average Indian voters expose irregularities and violations at their polling sites. The map displayed here shows the filter isolating reports of names missing in the registry.

    The People’s Voices

    Ushahidi sprung out of another election, which took place in late 2007 in Kenya. What BBC called “Kenya’s dubious election” led to a period of instability and violence. “Protests have led to some 600 deaths nationwide and 250,000 people have fled their homes,” reported BBC News (January 8, 2008).

    Ushahidi was created by a group of volunteers — software developers scattered across the world from Malawi, Ghana, and Kenya to Canada and the United States — as a technology to allow ordinary Kenyans to report what they witnessed as incidents, coded with time and location. Describing their mission, Ushahidi’s creators wrote, “Our goal is to create a platform that any person or organization can use to set up its own way to collect and visualize information … The core engine is built on the premise that gathering crisis information from the general public provides new insights into events happening in near real-time.”

    Ushahidi’s name came from the Swahili word for testimony. The initial mash-up became an online map, providing both the Kenyans and the international community a way to report and monitor the increase or decrease of protests and violence. The rival parties have since signed a power-sharing pact, putting an end (at least officially) to their dispute over the election results. The Ushahidi map now serves more as a hyperlinked historical document than a reporting mechanism.

    The initial Ushahidi project produced this online map that allowed Kenyans to report incidents of violence during the postelection fallout in 2008.

    Technical Specs

    Currently, Ushahidi supports XML and JSON (JAVA script object notation). Supporting other devices, platforms, and technologies might be beyond the scope of the small development team that launched the engine, but the open-source model is expected to attract community contributing. Currently, a mobile team is working on deploying Ushahidi on iPhones via Google Android SDK or other JAVA applications.

    The developers wrote, “We want to make sure that software applications that are already supporting aggregation of information are incorporated. However, we also want to make sure the outflow of information from Ushahidi can work with platforms that are used for other types of data visualization than what we have available.” The team’s work on this front includes sending and receiving messages to and from social networking tools such as Twitter, Skype, and Jaiku.

    Deployment

    Vote Report India uses Google Maps in conjunction with Ushahidi to display the aggregated incident reports. The deployment is made possible by the developers behind Ushahidi and Swift, an open-source crowd-sourcing toolset derived from Twitter Vote Report (also an open-source application-programming interface [API]).

    In Vote Report India, the creators allow people to fill in a form to report their experience of the election process, along with options to link and display images and video clips. The collected incident reports are displayed with a credibility rating (based on votes). Visitors have the option to subscribe to incoming incident reports as RSS feeds or e-mail alerts.

    The checkmark placed by the contributor decides which category — voting machine problem, voter bribing, and inflammatory speech are three options — an incident belongs to.

    On May 7, in the city of Hisar, someone reported, “My friend’s dad’s name was missing when he went there to vote. It was strange.” On April 16, someone else reported from Hyderabad, “Went to vote … name not on voter list despite registration.” What was arguably the most absurd case appeared as a report on May 7 in Delhi. It read, “Chief Election Officer’s name is missing from the Voter’s List.”

    Although one or two reports of “name missing” could be attributed to simple clerical error, a collection of similar reports concentrated on a map stands out. It reinforces the validity of the reports in a way text documents and statistics cannot.

    Ushahidi-powered online maps have also been used to keep track of the skirmishes in Gaza and the spread of the H1N1 virus.

    In another deployment of Ushahidi, the engine is used to track the spread of H1N1 virus across the world based on input from ordinary citizens.

    Community Support

    Born during the dark days following the 2007 Kenyan election, Ushahidi seems to have found a bright future in citizen-driven geopolitical reporting. Recently, it received a $200,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to continue developing its platform.

    On May 7, the core development team behind Ushahidi met in person for the first time in Silicon Valley. In the team’s blog, one of the developers, Ory Okolloh, wrote, “We had been building an organization and a platform — virtually via Skype, chat, e-mail, Twitter across states and continents for over a year without ever having a single sit-down to chart our path … I think it just goes to show what is at the heart of the Ushahidi community — a sense of partnership, trust, commitment, and some uber-self-starters.”

    The advance of geospatial technologies has given institutions, businesses, and government agencies a wide variety of technologies to monitor the movements and activities of employees and ordinary people. Some might say the dreaded era of Big Brother, as described in George Orwell’s novel 1984, has finally arrived. With the free, open-source Ushahidi mapping engine, the people also have a chance to return the favor.

     

  • Gaurav Mishra 4:48 am on May 14, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Election Monitoring, , , , , Lessons, , , , , , ,   

    The Report Card on Vote Report India Version 1.0 

    Vote Report India Banner

    The 2009 Indian Lok Sabha elections have come to an end and so has version 1.0 of Vote Report India.

    We have had our successes and failures and I have talked about some of them before.

    I think we did a lot of things well –

    - We were able to get the website up within a week, thank to some great work by the Ushahidi and eMoksha teams.

    - We were able to build a number of important relationship, with civil society organizations (like Jaago Re/ One Billion Voters, National Network for India,  Liberty Institute, Citizens for Justice and Peace, and Women’s Political Forum), traditional media organizations (like Al Jazeera) and new media organizations (like Global Voices, Indipepal, Desipundit, BlogAdda, NGO Post and Digital Democracy). In fact, our partnerships page looks like a literal who’s who of the important players working on the Indian elections.

    - We were able to generate a lot of buzz for Vote Report India, on blogs, on Twitter, and in mainstream media within a very short time.

    - We have been able to build a vibrant Vote Report India community that has been active in supporting us on both the technical and outreach side.

    Here are some things that have not gone well –

    - We haven’t been able to establish a relationship with any big Indian media organizations on one hand, and National election Watch and the Election Commission on the other hand, in spite of some serious discussions.

    - We haven’t been able to integrate the Swift functionality into Vote Report India (aggregating feeds from multiple sources and crowdsourcing the tagging etc.) on our original timelines.

    - We haven’t been able to get users to submit reports in large numbers. We have a little more than 200 reports in the system, which isn’t bad. However, we would have needed many more reports to capture the complexity of the 2009 Indian elections.

    - The voter turnout in all four phases has been low, putting a question mark on the effectiveness of all digital civil society campaigns like Vote Report India.

    Here are some lessons from Vote Report India version 1.0 –

    - It’s still difficult to build a grassroots movement in India exclusively on the internet. Even online campaigns need to be supported by mainstream media for reach and SMS for the feedback loop. We had SMS, but we didn’t have the resources to advertise on mainstream media.

    - In a country like India, which has a free and noisy news eco-system, transparency initiatives like Vote Report India need to not only get original reports from users but also aggregate reports from mainstream media.

    - Transparency, in terms of availability of information in a usable format, is not a big enough incentive for Indian users. Users expected Vote Report India to closeloop the issues and give them feedback, and we were not set up to do that.

    On the whole, I think that we did quite well, given our time and resource constraints.

    Our biggest achievement, I think, was being able to build a vibrant community around Vote Report India and we are grateful for your contribution to the project.

    As I said, this was only version 1.0 of Vote Report India. We will take a short break and then relaunch Vote Report India as a platform to crowd-source the performance monitoring of our elected members of parliament, using the Ushahidi/ Swift engines. We will move the present homepage to 2009.votereport.in and start new pages like 2014.votereport.in for new elections, including local assembly elections.

    Selvam and I, along with the other members of the core team, will continue to devote a substantial part of our time to Vote Report India. We are looking to expand our team, so do write to us at votereportindia@gmail.com, if you would like to become involved in a significant way.

    Once again, thank you for helping Vote Report India make a small difference to the 2009 Indian elections.

    Cross-posted at Vote Report India, Digiactive, and Global Voices Advocacy.

     

    • Paul 6:13 pm on May 14, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Appreciate the candor, Guarav. Looking forward to your talk at Affinity next week.

  • Gaurav Mishra 2:19 pm on May 11, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Election Monitoring, , , , , Kenya, , , ,   

    Vote Report India Featured on America.gov 

    Vote Report India and Ushahidi were recently featured on America.gov on a story on the use of mapping mashups for citizen journalism.

    08 May 2009
    Online Maps Enable Citizens to Report, Track Events

    Internet tool being used to monitor India elections

    By Michelle Austein Brooks
    Staff Writer

    Washington — Online mapping tools like MapQuest and Google Maps are known for helping people get from Point A to B. With the help of some technical experts, these maps can also be used to track and monitor critical events in real time.

    As violence broke out following Kenya’s December 2007 presidential elections, Erik Hersman, who grew up in Kenya and Sudan but was in the United States at the time, realized how difficult it was to get specific information about where violence was occurring. With the help of friends — some in Kenya, others in the United States — he built a simple mapping Web site named Ushahidi (which means “testimony” in Swahili) that tracked the violence.

    In a country where traveling and getting information was difficult, Ushahidi enabled anyone with a mobile phone to report an incident and “say where they are and what’s going on, so we could have some record of what was happening around Kenya,” Hersman told America.gov. The best way to get information “was to go straight to the people, start gauging what was going on in their lives by SMS messages.”

    “We provide a way to source information from areas that aren’t capable of doing it any other way,” he said.

    The information people submitted was displayed on a map, highlighting incident locations and allowing users to click on points to gain more details. Ushahidi’s mapping program, known by technical experts as a crowd sourcing tool, enables users to gather and document a great deal of information gathered from a community on a specific topic.

    Creating such a tool did not require knowledge of cutting-edge technology, Hersman said, noting that the technology had been available for years and it took just two days to build the site.

    SHARING TOOLS

    “Technologists are good at what they do and can create interesting things. And by and large, technologists make a pretty healthy salary, so we don’t have to worry about a lot,” Hersman said. “But we look around the world, and we’re from parts of the world oftentimes that do have struggles. So you look at ways you can use the gifts and talents you have to effect change in those areas.”

    So when Ushahidi’s tracking of the Kenyan elections drew attention from humanitarian groups eager to use a similar platform, Hersman created an open-source tool allowing anyone to take the code and develop their own mapping and tracking tools, “without starting from scratch,” he said. While the Ushahidi team has worked directly with organizations to help them set up their own maps on Web sites, anyone can take Ushahidi’s code and build their own page.

    “There’s real power in creating platforms,” Hersman said. “Here is a basic tool set that allows you to do a number of different things. … We can’t come up with all the instances you might use it for, so let’s just give you something to play with and go from there.”

    Among those who have used the Ushahidi platform is Gaurav Mishra. Mishra, a Yahoo Fellow in Residence at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University in Washington, had long been thinking about how technology could be used to promote social change in his home country of India. He saw the value of online tools such as Twitter for reporting the latest information during ongoing events like the November 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai. But there was a need to find a way to better track events over a sustained period of time, Mishra told America.gov.

    Using Ushahidi’s basic mapping tool and with the help of about 35 volunteers scattered across the globe, Vote Report India was built in a week. A Web site featuring a map enabling average people to report and track election-related events, Vote Report India provides real-time information about the elections. India’s national elections are held over five phases which began April 16 and conclude May 13.

    Visitors to the Vote Report India site can see where incidents of violence, voter bribery, voting machine malfunctions or other problems have occurred. The Web site provides instructions for those who want to report their own event: They can do so via Internet form, Twitter tweet, e-mail or text message. The site also aggregates video and photos of the elections.

    “It’s not that we’re doing something new here. We’re just aggregating everything together,” so all the information is available in one place, Mishra said.

    In the case of Vote Report India, efforts are made to ensure the reported information is accurate; reports are verified and moderated by volunteers. This means that some citizen observations may not make it online. But how much editorial control is exercised is up to the user. In the case of Ushahidi’s map tracking H1N1 influenza, unverified accounts from citizens are included.

    With a number of elections coming up this year, groups in other countries are considering similar voting-report Web sites. Ushahidi is helping a group in Lebanon use the tool to monitor and track its June elections.

    More information about Ushahidi and its code is available on the organization’s Web site. See also Vote Report India.

    Vote Report India is a collaborative citizen-driven election monitoring platform for the 2009 Indian Lok Sabha elections. For more, see a brief description of the project, the story behind the project and reflections on how well the project has worked.

     

  • Gaurav Mishra 1:45 pm on May 11, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Election Monitoring, , , , , , , , , ,   

    Vote Report India Featured in Indian Magazine Man’s World 

    Vote Report India was recently featured in Indian magazine Man’s World in a story on transparency initiatives related to the 2009 Indian elections.’The Watchdogs of Democracy’ is a great headline.

    Vote Report India Featured in Indian Magazine Man's World

    The story isn’t online yet, so I’ll post the text as an update. In the meanwhile, you can read high resolution scans of the story (page 1, page 2, page 3), thanks to Varun Bubber of Indipepal who has earlier written about political activism and the top ten citizen activism campaigns in the 2009 Indian elections.

    Vote Report India is a collaborative citizen-driven election monitoring platform for the 2009 Indian Lok Sabha elections. For more, see a brief description of the project, the story behind the project and reflections on how well the project has worked.

    Cross-posted at Vote Report India.

     

  • Gaurav Mishra 12:43 pm on May 9, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Election Monitoring, , , , , ,   

    Vote Report India Featured in Business Standard Story on the 2009 Indian Elections 

    Devangshu Datta at Business Standard had some nice things to say about Vote Report India in a story on online initiatives related to the 2009 Indian elections –

    One of the few exceptions to generally poor cyber-coverage is Vote Report India (http://votereport.in/). This uses an open-source platform and a collaborative model to aggregate information. It’s run by eMoksha and backed by a rainbow coalition of organisations like the Liberty Institute, National Network for India, Citizens for Justice and Peace, and Women’s Political Forum. The intention is to provide a platform for citizens to monitor and report news about elections and irregularities. It’s quite impressive in its use of communication channels, social networks, blogger tools, etc.

    Vote Report India is a collaborative citizen-driven election monitoring platform for the 2009 Indian Lok Sabha elections. For more, see a brief description of the project, the story behind the project and reflections on how well the project has worked.

    Here is the full text of the story –

    Devangshu Datta: Out of step with the times

    Devangshu Datta / New Delhi May 9, 2009, 0:35 IST

    Obama’s leverage of technology was key to his bagging the Democratic nomination and the presidency. His campaign coordinated ward-by-ward efforts of volunteers to reach millions of first-time voters. Both the 2000 and 2004 US elections generated terabytes of cyber coverage. But the quality of new media coverage improved in US-2008.

    Especially impressive was fivethirtyeight.com, a site devoted to statistical analysis of electoral trends. Fivethirtyeight (the number of votes in the US electoral college) accessed every opinion poll, linked to every major news report, modelled hundreds of alternative scenarios. It delivered predictions eerily close to the actual results.

    Given that, one hoped the 15th Lok Sabha Elections would spark critical mass in Indian new media. India has enormous numbers of first-time voters. Many, especially in urban constituencies, are cyber-savvy, bloggers and users of social networks. India has over 350 million cellphone users, who can hit the mobile net or send/ receive SMS/MMS.

    Unfortunately, none of the political parties has a clue about the utilisation of cyberspace and its strengths as a medium. Except for a handful of independents, no political entity put together a social network worth mentioning.

    Search engine exploitation was pathetic. The BJP shot-gunned LK Advani into “contextual” ads for all India-specific content. It didn’t matter if you were looking for Yusuf Pathan, DV Paluskar, beef bhuna, rhino poaching, or kundalini yoga. You got LK Advani duly bundled with search results.

    Every major political party put up a website of course. Most are designed by chaps who have just discovered flash and not yet learnt about the existence of site architecture. None are mobile-friendly. The standard-issue party site includes many mugshots of the supremo and other ranks, thumbnails of late icons, a manifesto and some quotes. The CPI-M is out of step; the website is sternly textual in its approach.

    In contrast, the Election Commission website is as good as ever. There’s detailed data and statistics about candidates, constituencies, schedules, archives of previous results, FAQs, feedback mechanisms, etc. It’s also a very robust site mirrored solidly to handle massive traffic surges.

    A review of citizen media is equally depressing. There are lots of rants and counter-rants. There’s little useful information and no coherent scenario-building whatsoever. This latter is understandably hobbled by restrictions on opinion polls.

    One of the few exceptions to generally poor cyber-coverage is Vote Report India (http://votereport.in/). This uses an open-source platform and a collaborative model to aggregate information. It’s run by eMoksha and backed by a rainbow coalition of organisations like the Liberty Institute, National Network for India, Citizens for Justice and Peace, and Women’s Political Forum. The intention is to provide a platform for citizens to monitor and report news about elections and irregularities. It’s quite impressive in its use of communication channels, social networks, blogger tools, etc.

    Why is the political establishment so determined to under-utilise new media? Part of the problem is that political decisions are made by the geriatric who simply don’t understand a key chunk of potential voters is comfortable with cyberspace.

    Most dismiss new media as a fad that doesn’t affect the aam aadmi. The runaway success of Jaagore (http://jaagore.com/), which helped many voters to sign up and understand the processes of voting, suggests otherwise. So does the mass success of e-ticketing platforms, e-choupals and computerised municipal systems. But never mind.

    The other problem is, cyberspace is cheap. Parties are structured in concentric circles around the feeding trough. A new media focus means lower spends. Hence, there’s little enthusiasm on the part of party workers who benefit from higher spends. So the new media disconnect may be just another disfunctionality arising from a generally disfunctional political system.

    Cross-posted at Vote Report India.

     

  • Gaurav Mishra 5:58 pm on May 8, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Election Monitoring, , , , , , , ,   

    Vote Report India Featured in BBC Story on the 2009 Indian Elections 

    Vote Report India was recently featured on a BBC story on the 2009 Indian elections.

    India has taken to the polls. The online reaction this time is revealing how the nation is developing digitally as well as making political choices. Gaurav Mishra joins us to look at the future for India online and what the electronic reaction to these elections can show us.

    We talk about the challenges of running an online election monitoring campaign in India and how the 2009 Indian elections are like the 2004 US elections.

    Here is the podcast. My interview is from 5:45 to 10:45.

    Vote Report India is a collaborative citizen-driven election monitoring platform for the 2009 Indian Lok Sabha elections. For more, see a brief description of the project, the story behind the project and reflections on how well the project has worked.

    Cross-posted at Vote Report India.

     

  • Gaurav Mishra 5:24 pm on May 8, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Election Monitoring, , , , ,   

    Vote Report India Featured in CNN-IBN Story on the 2009 Indian Elections 

    Vote Report India was recently featured on CNN-IBN in a story on the use of internet and mobile technologies in the 2009 Indian elections –

    Apart from Vote Report India, the story talks about Manoj Kewalramani’s journey through 11 states in 45 days to cover the ‘real’ elections and also about the election posters designed by The Comic Project.

    Vote Report India is a collaborative citizen-driven election monitoring platform for the 2009 Indian Lok Sabha elections. For more, see a brief description of the project, the story behind the project and reflections on how well the project has worked.

    Cross-posted at Vote Report India

     

  • Gaurav Mishra 10:25 am on April 23, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Election Monitoring, , , , , ,   

    Vote Report India Featured in Indian Daily Mid Day 

    Vote Report India Mid Day

    Indian daily Mid Day did a nice story on Vote Report India today, and even put up my Introduction to Vote Report India video on their website.

    Here is the full text of the story –

    Don’t just be a voter Now, You Can Also Monitor the Poll Process.

    Votereport.in, a first-of-its-kind citizenpowered platform, allows you to highlight irregularities via SMS, email, or even a Tweet
    Bhairavi Jhaveri bhairavi.jhaveri@mid-day.com

    What could the 26/11 terror attacks, a Kenyan post-election violence blog and one more avid blogger possibly have in common? The mix, as this correspondent discovered, is more potent than you might imagine at first.

    Gaurav Mishra (29) was only a Yahoo! Fellow in International Values, Communications, Technology, and Global Internet in Washington until the Mumbai terror attacks. But the tragedy got him toying with the idea of forming a network for the Indian elections along the lines of the Kenyan post-election violence blogger network, Ushahidi.

    The aim was to increase transparency and accountability, instill a participatory mindset among citizens and provide a complete picture of public opinion during the 2009 polls.

    Armed with these goals and the aid of Internet technologist Selvam Velmurugam (35), Mishra converted his idea into reality on April 6 with the website Vote Report India (VRI). MiD DAY explores the site…
    How VRI works?

    VRI allows users to report violations of the election code of conduct via SMS, e-mail and online complaints. The platform will compile these with news reports, blog posts, photos, videos and Tweets from all relevant sources on an interactive map.

    This means, when you click a point on the VRI map, a timeline of all the incidents related to that location would be displayed.
    “We will eventually do an analysis of incidents to present trends as well,” said Gaurav.

    The dual approach will up transparency levels in the election process, the founders believe.

    A hit already

    The duo believes VRI has managed to throw up great numbers since its launch, as it gives the youth the sense that they have the power to create positive change by making the election process transparent. Over 100 blog posts have been linked to the site and it is receiving 1,000+ page views per day. “We hit 60 reports on April 16. The most popular categories are Election Commission Interventions, Voter Bribing and Violence. As of now, most of the stories are based on stories already reported in the media,” says Gaurav.

    Mishra and Selvam are confident that VRI will be around for future elections. Meanwhile, they are working on another platform for elections around the world, starting with Lebanon in June.

    The team

    While Mishra is involved in research on how Internet and mobile technologies transform society, Selvam has founded eMoksha.org, a non-profit organisation aimed at enabling stronger democracies through increased citizen awareness and engagement.

    “When I was in India, by elections were being held in parts of Tamil Nadu. I heard friends and relatives complain about not finding their names on the electoral roll, or their vote being cast by someone else. I wondered who they would approach,” says Selvam.

    They were supported by 35 other volunteers — with the core team in the US and a handful of partners and local promoters helping them reach out to organisations in India.

    The service is powered by Ushahidi and SwiftRiver, and managed by eMoksha. Ushahidi is an award-winning platform that sources citizen reporting. SwiftRiver is a platform that makes sense of multiple sources of information in a fast-changing crisis situation.

    VRI has also partnered with the Arabic news network Al Jazeera.
    Citizens can send reports via SMS with VoteReport to 5676785, e-mail to report@votereport.in, tweet with the Hastag (#Votereport) or by logging on to http://www.votereport.in. You can even join the group’s communities on Facebook, Orkut, Twitter (@votereportindia), SMS GupShup or Google Groups.

    Vote Report India is a collaborative citizen-driven election monitoring platform for the 2009 Indian Lok Sabha elections. Here’s a brief description of Vote Report India and here’s the story behind the project.

     

  • Gaurav Mishra 12:04 am on April 23, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Comic Project, , Election Monitoring, , , , Poster, ,   

    Breaking News: The Comic Project Creates a Poster for Vote Report India 

    I am delighted that the wonderfully talented folks at The Comic Project have designed a poster for Vote Report India –

    Vote Report India Poster by The Comic project

    I absolutely love the tag line: “Vote Ki Vaat Mat Lagne Do” (Mumbai-speak for “Don’t Let Them Screw Around With the Vote”).

    Please feel free to share the poster on blogs and social networks.

    Here are some other election-related posters you must check out at The Comic Project — Shoe Dodging, Congress Poster, BJP Poster, Third Front Poster.

    Vote Report India is a collaborative citizen-driven election monitoring platform for the 2009 Indian Lok Sabha elections. Here’s a brief description of Vote Report India and here’s the story behind the project.

     

  • Gaurav Mishra 12:37 pm on April 15, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Election Monitoring, , , , mashup, , , , ,   

    Action Alert: Citizen-Powered Election Monitoring With Vote Report India 

    Vote Report India Banner What: Vote Report India is a collaborative citizen-driven election monitoring platform for the 2009 Indian Lok Sabha elections. Users contribute direct SMS, email, Twitter and web reports on violations of the Election Commission’s Model Code of Conduct. The platform aggregates these direct reports with news reports, blog posts, photos, videos and tweets related to the elections from all relevant sources, in one place, on an interactive map.

    Vote Report India aims to not only increase transparency and accountability in the Indian election process, but also provide the most complete picture of public opinion in India during the month long elections.

    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.

    When: The month-long Indian Lok Sabha elections will be held in five phases on April 16, April 22/ 23, April 30, May 7 and May 13, and the results will be announced on May 16.

    Why: This is an important election for India, in the context of a series of terrorist attacks last year that shook up the country, and a worldwide financial crisis that threatens to derail its strong economic growth.

    However, as India’s 714 million voters elect their 543 representatives, we are sure to see the usual controversies that surround general elections in India: the illegal use of government resources for campaigning, incidences of divisive and inflammatory rhetoric in campaign speeches, and allegations of violence, intimidation and other irregularities during the elections.

    Vote Report India will provide a platform to report and track these irregularities, and help to increase transparency and accountability in the Indian election process.

    How: You can help Vote Report India in three ways.

    Step 1: Evangelize It

    We would encourage you to spend some time at our website and project wiki to get a sense of what we are doing. If you like what we are doing, please join the Vote Report India community at Twitter (@votereportindia), Facebook, Orkut, SMSGupShup or Google Groups and subscribe to our blog. If you have a blog or a website, please consider writing about Vote Report India and displaying our banners (200X200 and 150X150) on your blog or website.

    Step 2: Use It

    The next step is to actually use the Vote Report India platform and encourage others to use it.

    Incidents can be reported in four ways –

    - By sending a message starting with VoteReport to 5676785
    - By sending an email to report@votereport.in
    - By filling a form on the Vote Report India website.
    - By sending a tweet with the hashtag #votereport

    Step 3: Volunteer

    We can use all the help we can get. Volunteer opportunities are available in many areas, especially for software developers, designers and journalists. Please email us at votereportindia@gmail.com to explore these opportunities.

    Cross-posted at DigiActive.

     

  • Gaurav Mishra 9:41 pm on April 7, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Election Monitoring, , , , , , SwiftRiver, , , VoteReport   

    The Story Behind Vote Report India: Citizen-Powered Election Monitoring 

    Vote Report India

    This is a long and winding story, so let me first give you the quick short version.

    I’m honored to be part of the wonderful team that launched Vote Report India yesterday.

    Vote Report India is a collaborative citizen-powered election monitoring platform for the 2009 Indian Lok Sabha elections.

    Basically, users contribute direct SMS, email, and web reports on violations of the Election Commission’s Model Code of Conduct (PDF). The platform will then aggregate these direct reports with news reports, blog posts, photos, videos and tweets related to the elections from all relevant sources, in one place, on an interactive map.

    We are hoping that Vote Report India will not only increase transparency and accountability in the Indian election process, but also provide the most complete picture of public opinion in India during the elections.

    So, that was the short version of what Vote Report India does. Here is the long story behind how Vote Report India came into being.

    Ushahidi, as many of you know, was started last year by a group of Kenyan bloggers led by Erik Hersman, to track post election violence in Kenya. Over time, it has become a robust crisis reporting platform, with a vibrant ecosystem around it, and partnerships like the one with Al Jazeera during the Gaza conflict.

    After the November 26 Mumbai terrorist attack, two members of the Ushahidi ecosystem, Chris Blow and Kaushal Jhalla, started thinking about building a platform called SwiftRiver, which would manage much higher volumes of data than Ushahidi, by partly automating and partly crowd-sourcing the filter.

    As some of you know, I have been thinking about how to use a Ushahidi-like tool in the Indian elections. What you might not know is that Kaushal and I have been in touch with each other, on an on-and-off basis, ever since the Mumbai terrorist attack.

    It all came together last week in a series of happy coincidences.

    First, Ushahidi’s strategy meeting on March 21 led to the decision to build SwiftReport by combining features from Ushahidi and VoteReport, with the help of Andrew Turner.

    On March 29, I asked the Ushahidi folks if they would be interested in doing an Ushaidi/ SwiftRiver installation for the Indian elections, and fresh off the meeting, they not only agreed but put all their energy into customizing the platform for Vote Report India.

    On April 4, we realized that Selvam Velmurugan and Munish Sivagurunath had put together another installation of Ushahidi at Free Fair Elections. We decided to pool our resources together and launched Vote Report India on April 6, within 10 days of the first email.

    So, an idea that started off with the Mumbai terrorist attack has come full circle to be realized during the Lok Sabha elections.

    We are far from done, however. On the technical side, there is some serious work to be done on integrating the SwiftRiver functionality into Ushahidi, and Andrew and Selvam are hard at work on it. On the deployment side, Anant Trivedi, Gautam John and Satchit Balsari are reaching out to media and civil society organizations in India. I’m somewhere in the middle, trying to put it all together, on time, and wondering how I ended up working with such super-smart rockstars.

    We need another series of happy coincidences to make Vote Report India work, and we can use all the help we can get.

    I would encourage you to spend some time at our website and project wiki to get a sense of what we are doing. If you like what we are doing, please join the Vote Report India community at Twitter (@votereportindia), Facebook, Orkut, SMSGupShup or Google Groups and subscribe to our blog. If you have a blog or a website, please consider writing about Vote Report India and displaying our banners (200X200 and 150X150).

    Vote Report India Banner

    If possible, consider volunteering for one of our open work streams. But, most importantly, do use and encourage others to use the Vote Report India platform, and help us make the election process more transparent.

    You’ll be hearing more from Vote Report India soon.

    Also see: Great posts by Erik Hersman and Nancy Scola on how Vote Report India came together. Plus, my earlier posts on how political parties, civil society organizations and corporates are using digital media in the 2009 Indian Lok Sabha elections.

    An edited version of this post was published in the Pop!Tech blog.

     

    • sonny kapur 2:45 am on April 13, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      would like to source informatio about interior of uttar pradesh …..

    • OxjdlkTaylor 5:45 am on September 28, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Great Work !

      Regards

    • free online movie 9:26 pm on November 1, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      thanks for sharing the information, great site, will revisit again.

    • rizs 2:26 am on November 6, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      the site is a Web GIS. I'm studying web GIS. I am very concerned about what has happened in india. I hope everything will be better.

      PLC

    • Laptop Battery 1:46 am on November 17, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      look forward to it :) If ya run outta stuff

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