From: Uday Dandavate <u...@sonicrim.com> Friends,
Are you interested in helping with co-creating a new model of technology enabled citizens' participation in democracy for the forthcoming Parliamentary elections in India? I am writing this post to invite information or ideas from anyone who knows or is associated with Ushahidi, a non-profit tech company that specializes in developing free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping. "Ushahidi", which means "testimony" in Swahili, was a website that was initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. Since then, the name "Ushahidi" has come to represent the people behind the "Ushahidi Platform". Its roots are in the collaboration of Kenyan citizen journalists during a time of crisis. The original website was used to map incidents of violence and peace efforts throughout the country based on reports submitted via the web and mobile phones. This website had 45,000 users in Kenya, and was the catalyst for the team realizing there was a need for a platform based on it, which could be used by others around the world. Ushahidi has been used amongst other things for election monitoring in areas isolated from communication infrastructure to mapping the activities of community health workers and their mobile clinics, to speciHic analytical analysis. I hear a citizen's volunteer group used it to monitor 2009 Lok Sabha elections. The next several months are going to be very contentious for Indian democracy. The stakes are going to be high for the two major parties. A lot of malpractices are very likely to take place. A vigilant electorate will need technology tools where clandestine malpractices can be exposed through a network of mobile phones connected to a citizen's dashboard. Please checkout the web link in this post. I would appreciate if any of you can point me in the direction of anyone who is currently associated with the efforts because I am interested in helping with co-creating a new model of technology enabled dashboard for citizens' participation in democracy. http://www.ushahidi.com/about-us Thanks Uday -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu.
