We were volunteers for six months for a political party for a particular AC, in recently held Karnataka Assembly election.

Whatever we Observed and learnt as a volunteer, based on that We are trying to build a tool that can help real stake holders of public governance.

Department

Water

Electricity

Sewage & Sanitation

Roads

Transportation

Law & Order

Education

HealthCare

Junta

Public Administration

Elected Leader

Needs

24x7 Water

24X7 Electricity

Sewage & Sanitation

Good Roads

Transportation

Law & Order

Education

HealthCare

Local level politics is all about civic amenities.

Water , electricity ,sewage & sanitation , roads , public transportation , Law &order.

Most people are affected by poor qualities of these things.

Not everybody is aware of full extent of the problem

How many people are affected , what all areas of constituency we have these problems etc.

Data collection is a very big challenge.

Political parties, party workers do the jobs of problem collection.

But still, majority don’t get to participate.

Reason, raising issue is not very simple, tracking them and coordinating affected people 10x harder.

Many people raise the same issue in different manner.

So, we decided to develop Mobile app & web Interface to standardize the problem collection.

So that later political parties , RTI activist , press have the same data to evaluate governance.

Data generation is crowd sourced.

Few Details

It allows user to raise complaint under following civic amenities: Water Electricity Roads Sewage & Sanitation Transportation Law & Order

Future things Food ( hoarding , affordability ) Home ( high rents , illegal construction , encroachment) Health ( not availability of near by hospital , pre-birth gender

detection , illegal organ trade , unhygienic , high charges )

All complaints are classified under following system level categories

Deduction

Lack of Infra Mostly corruption

Lack of Maintain Poor governance

Lack of Quality staff

Staff not uptodate

Exorbitant pricing Government need to price control

Lack of Awareness Government need to make people aware // Run awareness TV ADs

Example for water:System Sys_cOde Sys_issue_tmpl_rnage

Lack of infrastructure "00" (1,9)

Lack of maintainance "01" (11,19)

Lack of Quality of staff "02" (21,29)

Poor Pricing "03" (31,39)

Awareness "04" (41,49)

tmpl_id water

1 1)No municipality water in this area.

2 2) we have to heavily rely on tankers for water supply ,,, please look into it.

11 3) water pipes leaking all over the place , water contamination dangers.

12 4) Municipality water tastes bad/oily.

21 5) Water department staff very rude .

22 6) Water department staff totally outdated .. Stoneage

31 7) water bills are too high.

32 8) water becoming totally inaffordable.

41 9) Don't know how water comes to the city , please launch a water awareness day.

Many people do not know the internal working of department .

They are reluctant to report a problem Problem bothers public as whole, individuals do not want

to lead , and be focus of attention. Citizens talks among themselves , but as a whole at

constituency level problems are not highlighted. This app helps them to raise issue at their time , just one

constraint raise the issue from where problem exists.

How It Works Citizens when finds a problem , raise via app Data goes to central server . Data is sorted based on constituency , Issue_category ,

Issue_tmpld_id .

Line chart , bar chart , graph charts are made out of Data , publishing the health of constituency .

List of non-performing departments . Based on analysis tool suggests measure required to

improve governance.

Model of problem Addressing:

Our problem solving heavily relies on pressure building in short term , developing performance oriented mindset for electing leaders In long term .

There is no case open/close business , since we are targeting public problems , case open/close model does not make sense.

Model of problem Addressing: Less cumbersome for citizen to raise problem in their

neighborhood or elsewhere related to civic amenity.

Introducing a case , open & close system will lead to too much of hassle for citizen , red-tapism will be involved , individual may be targeted to close the case , so on so forth.

Moreover keeping track of things put onus on citizens that can lead to less participation.

Support arguments

Our model is just like news world

Raise it till it is not solved.

Generated Data will be used to measure the health of that amenity .

Overall the performance of elected representative.

Checks & Balances Message limit || Data pollution Control 10 tweets a day limit. Captcha on after 5 tweets. App disabled for the day after 10 tweets.

Moreover Data is tied to location , or will be visualized on map along with number , not easy to pollute without Distributed attack .

That means one need to have an army of dedicated 10,000 people , to turn data into garbage , that’s close to impossible on sustained basis.

Future measures , to introduce Login & Registration System,Tweets/message generated can be easily tied to a users .

Platform Benefits Lets citizens point out , systems fault without any hassle

, will increase citizens participation. All real stake holder has access to same information . Removes information gap , brings transparency. Brings leader close to it’s people . Real time performance of constituency . Area of improvements are clearly pointed out , should

speed up the local–level administrative reforms.

Now when a citizen , have to complaint about the quality of any of the civic amenity ,

He/she does via app .

Data generated goes to the server.

Based on Lat/long we put it under correct constituency.

Thus issue or problem are out in open.

Opposition parties , RTI activist , press have the access to same information.

Now we have high level of transparency , in term of work done by current government.

And also where people want them to improve .

Thus easing the jobs of everybody involved.

What impact it will have ???

You be the judge

Backend Analytics ( Recap) Assume that we have such data available from all parts of the city .

We can publish Real-time relative performance of MLA’s.

Also, Now its easy for RTI activist to file RTI to bring out corruption in areas of civic amenities ( roads/electricity/water/sewage & sanitation/transportation) Thus effective use of Citizen Charter and RTI Act.

To an extent , App does the job of an party workers , not only party worker , all citizens are empowered to participate in highlighting mis-governance.

If such an app has user base in all metro , then we can do Real-time , factual evaluation of governance by Ruling Party , bypassing pseudo image building.. Making it easy to validate claims

For e.g sitting in Bangalore you know civic amenities/citizen satisfaction for each every constituency of Delhi

Making it hard , to say anything but the truth.

No Glorious claims without real work

If we put it together with GIS /Maps technology, what we get a very powerful feedback tool.

This can be very useful to all real stake holders in public governance ( citizens , people representatives , RTIActivists , Press).

We have covered few used cases in following document: http://www.slideshare.net/rakeshpsingh7/micro-news-usedcases

Such Visual/Map based Analytics is made available to all.

To students , grooming them for future way of local governance.

To Citizen , RTI Activists / NGO’s.

To struggling political parties, trying to connect with people .

Platform Benefit for Students/NGO’s Students : there are close to 8 Crore students in class 6 to 12th

, with social science (civics) as one of the subjects , some way this platform can be treated as live lab for the subject.

NGO’s: there are close to 33lakh of them, one per 400 ppl. , most of them are active in areas, traditionally associated with government. In total they receive around 40-80k crore of donation annually, to do the same work , which govt. tries to do with amount at least 10 times of that , what we thought instead of patch work , if we bridge the gap , thus making traditional governance more efficient and accountable , we will make more impact.

Data-Set Requirement ( for 6 metros) Political boundary Data-set Ward boundaries

Assembly constituency Boundary

Parliamentary Constituency boundary

Elected Representatives Database All corporators

All MLA

ALL MP’s